Spies and Allies (Part A)

I can't use you, hand-to-hand, face-to-face, if you can only be sent to people you like because you don't like the other ones because they're in the darkness that they need to be brought out of and I need you to do it. So to learn to love people without letting our biases blind us, it is going to take work.

It's not going to come easy because, again, the flesh is not subservient to the spirit if it doesn't have to be. This is Cross Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the Book of Joshua. Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. And for now, let's turn to the Book of Joshua chapter 2 for a brand new message called Spies and Allies. Spies and Allies. That's an original.

You cannot use it. Subjugation of the flesh, the sinful nature, that is of course the application that we are concentrating on in this study of Joshua's book. Of course, our flesh, that sinful side of us, does not respect the spirit, does not respect the rights of Jesus Christ in us. We'll defy it every chance it gets, just mostly through an impulse or just some craving.

And Scripture, of course, is filled with helpful information, with illustrations, straight out words of wisdom, all sorts of assistance is gathered from the Scriptures to fight this flesh of ours, and yet it still doesn't die. And I believe that it does great honor to Jesus Christ in the life of a Christian who struggles to get the upper hand and does not, but goes to their grave struggling because of their love for Him. And that is also brought out throughout Scripture, and say in the heart of Peter, the man like Peter, he was so in love with the Christ. And so we take courage from these lessons that are here.

They are very meaningful. What would happen to Christianity and to Christians if we did not have these lessons? Well, God saves the souls of the spies in the sense of their lives in going into Jericho by using, of course, Rahab.

I'm thinking most of us know the story. So God saves the lives, the souls, not the spiritual in the spiritual context, but the lives of those spies. And yet He then saves the soul, the spiritual part of Rahab herself. And so they find this friend in an unsuspecting places. And so we look at verse two.

There's a lot here to go through. Now, Joshua, the son of Nun, sent out two men from Acacia Grove to spy secretly, saying, Go view the land, especially Jericho. So they went and came to the house of a harlot named Rahab and lodged there. Well, I believe this account of the spies is a parenthesis to the command that Joshua was going, that he gave the people, chronic logically will give the people, when he said, three days we cross Jordan. So they're not yet in the promised land.

They're outside. And the sending of the spies happens earlier. And when the spies come back, and then the story resumes. The Bible is so typical of the writers of the scripture to really not care for chronology. They knew what was happening, but they weren't thinking, Well, you know what? Several thousand years from now, others might not know what we're talking about. They don't seem to be moved by that.

You have to do the detective work. It's probably, it's really a little thing, except for me. I just have to have it fit as best as I can see, so I can see what's happening and there learn things about myself and about God and about other people and what to do with it in response. So, I've taken more time on that than I should have. So, well, I also should add, most other commentators are wrong. Because when Joshua says, three days we cross Jordan, that's the anchor. That doesn't move. There's no indication that that is adjusted. So everything has to now fit around that. What most commentators then do is they start adding the days on.

Well, it really wasn't three days. It ends up by the time they, and I reject that approach. And I say that because you probably listen, go to your study Bibles, and there's a lot of good information there.

But when I usually point out they're wrong, they're wrong. Anyway, so God sends these two spies, and really they're not spies, cloak and dagger. This is a reconnaissance mission. They're gathering military info to take back so that Joshua will have better information, not going blind for the invasion.

Really, God is above all of it and say, yeah, you won't need too much of that. I'm going to interfere with this battle in an extraordinary way, which he does not do in all of the other battles that are coming up. Jericho has to fall, no question. The Jews cannot go into the promised land and begin the conquest against all the other Canaanites and peoples of the land with Jericho intact, because they would then be ambushed from the rear, and they would have a force that would really be bad.

So it has to go down. Joshua doesn't know how it's going to happen yet, and even when he finds out, unless he is told right out by God, which in this case I don't believe he is, he doesn't know how many troops he's going to lose. So he's not reckless because God's given him a promise. Well, then I can just go watching in. It doesn't matter that all these men get killed.

We're going to take Jericho. That would be a lousy approach, and I think there's a great lesson in that alone. As Christians, when we go forward, we don't just assume, well, God's with me. I do whatever I want to do.

I can be reckless and sloppy. I don't have a responsibility except to just believe. That's not always the case. Well, God sent two angels into Sodom and Gomorrah to rescue souls before judgment fell. He is sending two spies.

We'll refer to them as such throughout. It's the easier route into Jericho. And of course, there will be souls rescued there, too, before the judgment falls on this walled city. In the great tribulation period to come, before the judgment really intensifies, God will send his two witnesses, and because of their work, there will be many souls saved during that judgment period. The Jews were not to make treaties with any of the people in the Promised Land. They were to evict them by sword, and that is it. However, they were not prohibited from making converts. And Rahab is going to, of course, be a convert to Judaism. And of course, she shows up in the line of Messiah by the time we come to the book of Matthew. And as with Sodom and Gomorrah, it is a story of judgment, but not without mercy.

And such is the way our God conducts business. There is a lesson, one of many from just the second chapter in the first verse. The Acacia Grove, of course, is the base camp east of Jordan. When you stand on the Promised Land side, the west side of Jordan, you can look. The river is not that big. It's big enough to be a river. It's not a puddle, but you can look over and you see Jordan. And as you move to the south, in the desert area, you can see that high table plain.

It's like a mountain, but it's flat, and it's on the other side. That's where Lot pitched his tent and faced it toward Sodom. The Jews were to move out of that land, and as we discussed last session, there were those who wanted the unpromised lands.

And may we not forget that lesson. It says here in verse one to spy. Again, military scouting, a reconnaissance mission is closer to it. But because they were amongst the people, it's kind of a mixture of things. Rahab and her family being saved is the product of Joshua sending out spies and not taking his mission lightly.

He's not sending out a fact-finding committee. As Moses sent the twelve, incidentally, those twelve were not supposed to give their opinion of what they could and could not do. Their assignment was to come back and verify that the soil was rich, the land was wonderful, and they came back and they did say that. They even brought fruit, evidence of it. And yet they added, but forget about it. We can never take it.

And that was a tragedy that brought so much grief to so many, but that is not the case this time. Joshua is not asking their opinion about if or if not, he's gathering, as I mentioned, military information. And he will do the analyzing and what to do with it. We're going to find Joshua concerned about this Jericho even through chapter five.

He's still going to be, how am I going to take this? How are we going to do this and not suffer catastrophic losses? That's what generals do. I guess when the invasion of Kuwait, they were braced for over 20,000 dead troops on our side and allies. And that didn't happen.

More like a hundred. The invasions of Normandy, for example, the thousands that were killed there. So any commander with a soul is concerned about this. And we should be mindful in the study of it because you can come under hardship in life and get the impression God doesn't care. Jacob had a lot of hardship. I don't want to beat up on him. And he cried out. He said, all these things work against me.

And Job, of course, Job walked up to the line, right? One step further, he would have been in blasphemy, but he does not cross the line. But he says, God, he hates me. He runs at me like a warrior.

He just won't let up his arrows. And he just let them have it because this is the suffering and the misery that he was going through. So when we we come to our scripture, we want to say, I don't want to ever think like that when I go through hardship. I want to understand that there are things that are bigger than my understanding, but the things I do understand. That's where I will, that's where I will set up my my camp and trust that God knows and he cares. Joshua does care and our Jesus cares even more.

So he says, go view the land, especially Jericho. As I mentioned, it could not. It was a high value objective. It had to go down. So they went and came to the house of a harlot named Rahab and lodge there. Well, evidently, her residence was also a lodge, an inn. And where else would they go? To the mayor's house?

Everybody knew they weren't from around those parts. And so they go to the public place, which is this sort of hotel restaurant that they find themselves. The most logical stop to make and the story supports this, of course. Rahab, one of the heroines of scripture. She, of the Old Testament in particular, she had a diversified, she diversified her income.

She was an innkeeper and she was also in the textiles, linen and to be specific through flax. And then, of course, she had this immoral side job that, of course, we don't need to make much comment on except may it not be among us. And all of us, we don't share each other's sin necessarily, but we have enough of our own sin to damn our souls. And that always causes us to pause before being self-righteous, pointing at other people and not ourselves. We all know that you point at someone else. You've got three fingers pointing back at you.

So I always use all my fingers when I'm pointing. Matthew 9, verse 13. For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. Jesus died only for one kind of person, the bad ones, because there are no other kind. He died for the sinner. And not only do we see our righteousness, our good deeds like filthy rags, very filthy rags before God, but our bad deeds are even, of course, worse.

And yet he doesn't give up on us. In Zechariah, we see the high priest in the vision of the prophet Zechariah, and he's clothed in filthy rags. And the Lord, you know, he deals with Satan, who's accusing Zechariah of his filth. And the Lord says he's a brand plucked from the fire, from the burning. And then, of course, he says take off those filthy garments and clothe him with the righteous garments.

And so throughout Scripture, we are reminded constantly of God's goodness. Sort of like when you're traveling on a long road somewhere and you're not sure if you're going in the right direction or even if you're on the wrong road or not. I GPS kind of making that outdated, but in the days of paper maps, you could go and say, are we on the right road? And then you see a marker or something. Okay, we're going good.

What a relief. Well, God gives us those kind of things in life to reassure us that we are going the right way with him. And with these two men coming into her lodge, she probably never really had good boys come in like them, which would have contributed to her being drawn to their faith. I mean, if they had come in and said, hey, we're in a place of immorality, let's join it, she might not have had the reaction that she did to their arrival.

The fact that these men were focused on what they were called to do no doubt appealed to her. Verse 2, and it was told the king of Jericho saying, Behold, men have come here tonight from the children of Israel to search out the country. Jericho is a type in scripture of a doomed world, a world under destruction and judgment from God because of its iniquity. Let's not forget, the people in this land were not good people mining their own business, living peacefully amongst each other.

That is not the case. They were violent, they were immoral. What they did to little babies when they didn't want them is unspeakable. Of course, historians would be quick to cover that up if they could, because it would put the Jews in a righteous light and these people cast a true shadow that they cast, and that was one of iniquity. So Jericho, a type of the world under destruction that is coming, Rahab is a type of the soul delivered from the midst of that world, of that judgment, the coming destruction. She is the sinner in type, saved by faith. And so everybody that I think is saved becomes endeared to Rahab if they're honest, unless they're, again, self-righteous, if they think they're better than everybody else and Jesus couldn't wait to save them, then that kind of person is going to have problems all the way through. Listen, there's a lot of bad Christianity out there. There's a lot of people convinced that their wrong is right, but the facts, the facts will, you know, just, wisdom is justified by her children, Jesus said, the facts will prove, disprove all these nonsensical approaches to Christianity and what people can come away with from the Bible. It's very easy to twist the Scripture. Satan did it there in the wilderness with Christ.

Of course, the cults, they do it. We come across the false teachers in Peter, and then again in 1 John, and then the Pharisees and the Judaizers in the days of Paul, and we find out they're all twisting Scripture to their own satisfaction. Jesus said, for what righteous works are you trying to stone me?

Look at what I'm doing and listen to what the prophets are saying. You're asking me if I'm the Christ, I've told you I'm the Christ, and you still don't receive it. You've made up your mind, I can't be the Christ because you don't like me.

And that can be a ticket to hell, an eternal hell. There are a lot of people outside these walls, they don't like Jesus. A great many of them have never met the real Jesus. They're reacting to some heretics presentation or some overzealous yet wrong presentation of Christ. How many people have been raised in Christian homes?

Some in solid homes and still they depart, but then there are others that were raised in wacky homes and they depart. It is up to us to bring the light. Maybe, maybe, listen to this, maybe there's some backslidden Christian out there and their parents are praying that God would bring a righteous soul into their child's life.

Maybe you or I can be that person. Maybe you or I can be dispatched like an angel from heaven into the life of some apostate or backslidden child and win them out of darkness. That is a prayer, God make me a messenger to extract from the jaws of hell some child that's landed in the snare of the devil. What a glorious, imagine entering heaven with that, with that ribbon on your chest. You know the song Ballad of the Green Beret, put silver wings on my son's chest, make him one of America's best. I shouldn't be singing army songs. It's a beautiful song, I think, and it excites patriotism, of course, but it also, it excites a noble spirit. There's nothing wrong with that as long as it's not against Christ, but how much better to say to the Lord, put the messenger of God, that ribbon on my chest, you can send me out on a noble work, or sit around criticizing the pastor. Verse 4, or some other Christian, did you see the way they were dressed today?

I mean, there's bigger things to do than that. Then the woman took the two men and hid them, so she said, yes, the men came to me, but I did not know where they were from. Now, she's risking everything on the basis of this spiritual discovery she has made. She's put the information together. She has the same information everybody else in Jericho has, but what she does with it is entirely different, and she brings her whole family into this. Believers, we often, through history and scripture and to this day, often we benefit from some unbeliever helping us, putting themselves at risk for us. Moses, of course, floated on water to Pharaoh's daughter, and she fished him out of the Nile. Esther, of course, her husband, and how he was very much a part of the defense of the Jews. As we listen to Rahab, we get the feeling that she didn't care too much for the people of Jericho. Maybe she was mistreated enough that she was ready, she was ripe.

Well, are there not people in the world that have been treated by the world so poorly? Enough times they're ready to come out of it, but they don't know how. There's no light. Jesus said, you are the light.

You go get them out. Our mission here is not to seek and destroy. It is to seek and rescue. That is very at the top.

Without love, you can't do it. So I was making a hospital call once. I made quite a few of them. I walk around the hospital. I said, I've been in that room, I've been in that room, I've been in that room. Anyway, I'm making a hospital call, and I see a Muslim working there, a woman.

She's got the headscarf on. Now, do you think my first feeling was that of love? I'm not telling you.

But it should have been if it wasn't. That's what Jesus means when he says, love your enemies. I can't use you hand to hand, face to face, if you can only be sent to people you like, because you don't like the other ones because they're in the darkness that they need to be brought out of, and I need you to do it. And so to learn to love people without letting our biases blind us, it is going to take work. It's not going to come easy because, again, the flesh is not subservient to the spirit if it doesn't have to be.

It can force it to be. Well, Rahab, we get the feeling, as I mentioned, she wasn't fond of the place, the people there. But salvation is now knocking on her door, and the spies knew God's hand was in this. I don't know that they knew it right away, but by the time this is over and they report to Joshua in verse 24, they're going to say, God was all over this.

They knew they should have been caught and executed if not tortured first, verse 5. And it happened as the gate was being shut when it was dark, but the men went out. Where the men went, I do not know.

Pursue them quickly, for you may overtake them. So she's lying to them, of course, and it is nighttime. And she's saying, of course, when they come, they're looking for the men.

She said, they're not here, but they went out the gate of the city. Thanks for tuning in to Cross Reference Radio for this study in the book of Joshua. Cross Reference is the teaching ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia. If you're interested in more information about this ministry, please visit our website, crossreferenceradio.com.

You'll find additional teachings from Pastor Rick available there. We also encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. By doing so, you'll be notified of each new edition of Cross Reference Radio. Just search for Cross Reference Radio in iTunes, Google Play Music, or your favorite podcast app. You can also follow the links at crossreferenceradio.com. We're glad we were able to spend time with you today. Tune in next time to continue learning from the book of Joshua right here on Cross Reference Radio.