When we start entering into that place where we know, in my life, I know where I belong.
I belong right where I'm standing right now. And everything else I do leads up to this moment. This is serving the Lord.
I can do this without neglecting my other responsibilities, neglecting my home. It is love-based. It is worth it, although I won't miss it when I get to heaven. Because I won't miss anything here when I get to heaven.
And neither will you. 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. Today Pastor Rick will begin a brand new message called Heavy Things in Joshua chapter 4. The good stuff is not on the surface in chapter 4.
It's there, but you're going to have to work for it a little bit. Heavy things is what we're going to consider, things that are not casual and rather serious as a matter of fact. They demand attention. Chapter 4 continues to describe Israel's crossing from the wilderness into the promised land across the Jordan River. And the memorial that they were commanded to set up in the river, one of them, and another one will be at Gilgal with the stones that come out of the river.
Permanent memorial for those Israelites. And the parallel illustrations that have something to do with our lives, they are in this chapter. It's a chapter that has much instruction for us if we can pick up on the hints and the types. Now some of the biblical types are reinforced by other scriptures so that we can know that's the speaking of something in the future and there is a great lesson there. But then there are other parallels that may not be backed up by a scripture verse and yet you cannot mistake, once pointed out, the value of the lesson from one area of scripture to another and hopefully we'll get to some of these tonight. So we look at verse 1, and it came to pass when all the people had completely crossed over the Jordan that Yahweh spoke to Joshua. Now before we get to what he said, the mention of God speaking to Joshua here is almost just a matter of fact and God spoke to Joshua. It's taken for granted that God can speak to his people and he does not always speak to us today as he spoke so clearly to the patriarchs of scripture. One reason why is because we have the word and it's really nothing to add. It's there. I mean, do you have to say, Lord, I'm really thinking about robbing a bank.
What should I do? Well, we know those kinds of things are prohibited and so we're not going to hear the voice of God. Other times, God just, you just have to wait. It's part of, you know, suppressing the flesh and going through everything and he does not always speak to his people on demand.
A matter of fact, in my own life, I think now, not a boast, I'm just saying, I think now I speak more to God than I do to human beings. I'm always, sometimes driving down the road, they probably think I'm a kook. I'm just having this conversation. It's kind of one-sided though, just a little disconcerting. But what is wrong with that?
What is, I mean, I just have so much to talk to him about and it's usually the same thing. So that stands out to me and it came to pass when all the people completely crossed over the Jordan that the Lord spoke to Joshua. No surprise there.
Now they're realizing this blessing that they've been waiting for for four decades. The Jordan River, where Joshua crossed it. To see the Jordan, you go, huh?
That's it? I mean, there are a lot more exciting rivers than the Jordan. But it is also that river where Elijah, that great fiery prophet, and Elisha, who succeeded him, where they crossed the Jordan and Elijah was taken up soon after in a chariot of fire. It is where Naaman was told to dip, that the leprosy would be removed.
And it is also where Elisha floated the iron ax head that plopped into the water. It is where, of course, John the Baptist was baptizing people until finally the Christ came. And when he looked into the eyes of Jesus, he said, I need to be baptized by you.
You're coming to me. And of course, the Lord said, let the scripture be fulfilled. And John said he saw the Spirit descend like a dove on the Lord Jesus Christ. And so we come to this Jordan River, and we don't know where the specific places were, these events, but we know it was this river. And that is enough for the believer to take delight and to pay attention when we come across the Jordan River in our reading. In verse 2, he says, take for yourselves 12 men from the people, one man from every tribe, and command them saying, take for yourselves 12 stones from here, out of the midst of the Jordan, from the place where the priest's feet stood firm.
You shall carry them over with you and leave them in the lodging place where you lodge tonight. These are trophies, you could say, not in a boastful way, but of course, in a way that would remind them of what God had accomplished, his promises now fulfilled on this point crossing into this inheritance, this great inheritance known today as Israel. And so he says, take for yourselves 12 stones from here. And where he continues, from the place where the priest's feet stood firm, that verse stands out to me, that to me is the verse of the chapter.
I'm struck by that verse when I read it, because I want to be that kind of a servant for God. Where I stand, I stand firm. And where I stand is where he told me to stand. You remember from chapter 3, the Lord said to have the priest step into the water, and the water at that point was overflowing its banks. It was not a little puddle or a gentle stream, and they stood out by faith, and God rolled back the waters.
And there they stood till the people crossed over. And so it's revisited again here in verse 3. It will be again in this chapter, and I think it struck the scribe, the person who wrote these words, likely Joshua, others coming along and maybe contributing at some point. But again, from the place where the priest's feet stood firm, that emphasis on the priest, these godly representatives. And again, the priests were to represent man to God, and the prophets represented God to man. And here, of course, they bore on their shoulders the Ark of the Covenant, the presence of God, the visible, the point of contact with God. It was not a theophany like the burning bush where God sort of puts his presence into a created object. It was symbolic in the Ark, the mercy seat, great lessons.
They abound in just the Ark of the Covenant as they do even in this chapter. It's a beautiful picture of appointed servants standing where they belong, where they have been told to serve. And I think any believer who is serving the Lord where they know he has appointed them should be able to identify with just that snapshot of verse 3. And where he talks about this firmness, of course, well, in life where we're assaulted, our faith is, by these unseen forces often trying to lure us away from obedience and from doing what we know is best as believers. So there is honor in having a firm heart. There is delight in knowing where to stand with that firm heart. And there is great delight in standing upright in God's will. Still, we understand all of the forces of hell that is assigned to us will try to get us from doing this very thing, to stand as royal priests, because we are a royal priesthood. We serve our king who is our God, and yet we face these things in service that remind us of how fragile and how weak we are, that we can have these high and noble ambitions, and yet we can't get to them because of our own sinful ways, our own flesh, our own shortcomings. That balance helps us constantly reach for more and yet find grace and mercy for not reaching the levels that we want to reach in Christ. Jesus said, watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.
I need to hear my God tell me I understand your predicament. I'm not excusing you. I understand, though. That creates a relationship.
If he was just, well, I understand, but I don't care. Now that creates a problem. But he says, I understand.
I'm not excusing it, but I'm going to work through this with you if you stay to work through it with me. And that can be quite difficult because we get tired. We want holiness. We want purity. We want to always get it right without being proud, remaining humble, mindful of who we are in the presence of God, this speck upon a speck in the universe and creation that has been elevated to a loved one by this pure God. And so Paul could say, Paul, instead of saying, you know, I believe in God, but I was in on the murder of Stephen and I was in on the persecution of the other Christians.
I just have too much guilt. I can't be used. That was not Paul's response. Paul's response was he tried to, he was like the Pac-Man of the apostles, just gobbling up everything he could get gobbled or that could be gobbled. What is the proper grammar for that? Anyway, 2 Corinthians, he writes in a more tender tone in that second letter.
He had to take out the belt a few times even in the second letter. So much in that I don't like as a pastor reading the Corinthian letters anymore. As a believer, I enjoyed them, but as a pastor, it's too close to home. No, I know the life, Paul.
I don't, but I do read them nonetheless because there's such gems in there. But here's one, therefore I take pleasure in infirmities. He's not saying I'm glad that I'm weak, but he is saying I can't help that I have these weaknesses. Therefore, I'm going to make those weaknesses chop wood and fetch water for the worship of God. And so he says, I take pleasure in infirmities and reproaches and needs and persecutions and distress for Christ's sake, for when I am weak, then I am strong. Because he's dependent upon God. Now you may have depended upon God and crumbled in the process.
The only thing I can say to that is take it. That does not mean that God has turned his back and forsaken you. It does not mean that God is not getting his will done.
It means that that was part of the assignment for whatever reasons. And in the end, in the end it will add up and it will make sense and you will look back if you stick in there long enough and you will say, blessed be the name of the Lord. The Lord gives, the Lord takes away, blessed be his name.
That's this life. Otherwise we'd be in heaven when having problems. We're not here to sit God on our problems. We are here to be his servants as best we can under the terms that we've been given. And when we start entering into that place where we know, in my life, I know where I belong.
I belong right where I'm standing right now. And everything else I do leads up to this moment. This is serving the Lord.
I can do this without neglecting my other responsibilities, neglecting my home. It is love based. It is worth it. Although I won't miss it when I get to heaven because I won't miss anything here when I get to heaven.
And neither will you. And so we read verses like this from the Bible and we grow strong. He has shown you, oh man, what is good and what Yahweh requires of you. I love the wording that you do justly, that you love mercy, that you walk humbly with your God. How many of us love mercy?
We love to receive it. What is mercy? Mercy is not getting the punishment you deserve. So if you are a child and you disobey your parent, a little smart aleck, wise guy that we can be, and they confront us and you can see it coming, they're going to really lay it on us and they don't. I'm not going to give this to you this time. Some of you parents might be saying, I've never done that.
I catch them. I'm going upside their head because they need it. But God is merciful and it's not a pass for evil. It is not that. It is mercy.
It is quarter. God's saying, let's move forward and let's just leave that there. This on the other hand is God giving us what we don't deserve.
God, you know, catching us doing something wrong and blessing us nonetheless without approving of the wrong. And He can do that. He does that. He knows how to do that. And He wins us that way. The next thing you know, we just want to serve Him more because He's been so gracious to us, so merciful.
Those two go together. We, as I mentioned, these high priests, we have, these priests, they are not said to be high priests. There's only one at the time. That was Aaron. Well, Aaron's not here now. His son is now Eliezar's high priest. I don't remember who the high priest is.
Let me Google it. Anyway, doing all the math and figuring. You shall carry them over with you and leave them in the lodging place where you lodge tonight. Well, they're headed towards a place called Gilgal, but this is the evening camp. And so they pull these stones out of the Jordan as it's rolled back there at the riverbed. They pull out the stones and they walk them over and Joshua says leave them there for now and they'll take them to Gilgal.
We get that in verse 20. Verse 4 now, then Joshua called the twelve men whom he had appointed from the children of Israel, one man from every tribe. And Joshua said to them, cross over before the ark of Yahweh your God into the midst of the Jordan and each one of you take up a stone on his shoulder according to the number of the tribes of the children of Israel. And so again, just so we don't get lost in this, if I don't take the time to specify because I'm focused on other points, they're going to take stones from the Jordan, 12 stones, and then they're going to take 12 stones from the land and put them in the Jordan.
It's an exchange. They're not going to take the same stones out of the Jordan and then back into the Jordan, but they're two different sets. And so here and Joshua said, come before the ark of Yahweh your God, verse 5, into the midst of the Jordan and each of you take up a stone on his shoulder. Now that tells us that these are, they're able to lift these stones, of course, but this speaks of ownership. It's theirs now. God has given this to them. They don't have to wait for some, you know, Canaanite to come out with a deed.
That won't happen. They're going to take this by force, but the right to take it is given by God, just like we have the right to preach the gospel in the world when we are allowed to preach the gospel by the Lord. And I think that, you know, if they're going to stand around the water cooler and tell dirty jokes and all sorts of other cultural sick things, especially in the age we live in, well, then that gives me the right and I can tell them to their face to also speak about the righteous things if I so choose to say. Why do you get to say what you want to say?
And I can't get what I want to say. Fortunately in this country, most places, I've been out of the workplace for a while, but I always had this attitude in preaching Christ that I was ready to fistfight the guy. And I wasn't, but I had it in my head nonetheless. I knew it was wrong.
It's not a confession. I never had never came to that and I wouldn't have let it. I would have just suffered, you know. I don't know what I would have done, but I don't think I would have done that.
I don't even know why I told you this. I think I just had this attitude. I wasn't going to take their nonsense. And when I worked in the construction industry, if I did, they would never have listened to me. I would have been the, you know, spineless one.
And they knew that if they pulled on my cape, they were going to get it. And I would humiliate some of them. What do you know about the Bible?
The only thing you know about the Bible is you don't have one. I'd say things like that. And then they'd shut up. And later on they'd come over wanting to be my buddy.
So what church do you go to? Now I wouldn't get fresh after that. You know, what do you care? I'd go with it. But there were many times like that because, you know, you go to different jobs. You meet new people all the time and you'd have these opportunities. But, you know, I'd have this chip on my shoulder, a righteous chip. It was a righteous chip. I wasn't looking for trouble, but I wasn't going to put up with nonsense. And I didn't even have it that well thought out.
I just look back and I see it. Boy, arrogant little thing, weren't you? No, I was not.
I was just firm. Anyway, this ownership that we're looking at to put underwater one of them and one outside where everyone could see in the land that they were to till and they were to sow and they were to harvest and they were to enjoy. The Christian life should be that way.
It's not going to go uncontested of course. And to this day, Israel's presence there in the land is still contested and we move forward. Verse six, that this may be a sign among you when your children ask in time to come saying, what do these stones mean to you? Well, put a pile of stones up like this in an odd way and it appeals to the curiosity of a child and they're going to ask. And we ought to be ready with the who, what, where, why and how is very important. Our pulpit curriculum here in this church, it is set up on such a teaching as this.
We are in Sundays, we are a chapter ahead or a space ahead, a paragraph ahead of where the kids will be next week. So the parents have a head start. So if the child, they pick the child up and on the way home they say, what did you study today? Well, it will be what the parent got last week, so it will be fresh in their head and they could more easily dialogue.
I don't know of another place that does this. I know that when we established our children's ministry here, God put this on my heart to do it this way and it seems to be working. On topical messages, the teachers are free to go. Now this is not the little ones. These are the ones that are a little older, older classes.
But on topicals, the teachers are free to come up with something else if they'd like and they're free to come up to me also and ask for suggestions and ideas. That's just how it should be, I think. Anyway, in these stones, these unseen stones, I see other things than just putting them there. This does announce the inheritance, but I see the church in the ones that they're putting into the riverbed that will be covered over when the waters are released by the hand of the Lord. Well, 12 stones, 12 apostles. We catch that connection. It's followed through all the way until the book of Revelation and the gates of New Jerusalem, for example, the foundations, the names of the apostles.
It's carried over. So when you come to that number 12, when it's in association with the 12 tribes, we begin to look for what's the New Testament value to this? Well, when those waters flood over those stones, you won't be able to see them. The Jews couldn't see the church coming. There's nothing in the Old Testament that announces the church.
There was no need to tell them. And when it was time for the church, it was not an easy fit. Paul was, of course, the trailblazer, and he had to fight for it. And he would go into synagogues. He would announce Messiah, and they would kick him out and reject him. He'd go off and preach to Gentiles until finally the Gentiles began to outnumber the Jews in Christianity and establish their own places of worship. They were not permitted to have church buildings in those early days, so they had to meet in people's homes.
That's a tough way to go. If you've ever had Bible study in your home and it begins to grow, you realize it's very difficult and sort of counterproductive at a certain point, because no one can concentrate with people tearing your house apart or going into your refrigerator, things like that. So an assembly hall is a good idea, and that's why Paul spent almost two years in the School of Tyrannus, because it worked out well.
He was able to effectively teach with reduced distractions. Well, this crossing into their inheritance, well, that's what believers do. The Gentiles, when they come to Christ, they crossed over into an inheritance that was prepared for them. God did mention the salvation of Gentiles in the Old Testament, but not the church, not the assembly under the crucified, risen and present Messiah, as we know, as the Son of God, Jesus Christ. These things were veiled.
They were veiled because collectively, people couldn't handle it. And we learned that when in the days of Christ, they had a very difficult time making that transition from Old Testament to New Testament, which is why Paul had to grapple with them in Romans and Corinthians and Galatians and every letter. He said, listen, there's no problem eating a burger that was dedicated to an idol.
An idol is nothing. The burger, the burger, think of the burger. And that's how he overcame it. And then he put, but, but if you get around Christians that just can't handle this, you're going to have to skip the burger. 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.
Whisper: medium.en / 2024-03-01 03:55:30 / 2024-03-01 04:05:02 / 10