By this all will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another. This is what makes it so incredible when Christians behave so ridiculously loveless. I mean, we have times when we're moody and such.
Well, you are. But I don't think any born-again Christian puts a stamp of approval on their moods. And we don't like to see them in our children. Sometimes God says, you're just looking in the mirror.
Go picking on them because you can't bounce the ball. 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 now here's Pastor Rick with his continuing study in Joshua chapter 5 called To-Do List for War. Before attacking the enemy, God called for His people to turn the knives upon themselves.
What kind of lesson is there for me? What do I as a Christian get out of reading that God's army, before engaging the enemy, before being His instruments in His hands, they were to turn sharp knives upon themselves. We look at that and we say the sharp knife of self-judgment. That's what I turn on myself before I can be used by God. Jesus said it this way, Or how can you say to your brother, Brother, let me remove the speck that is in your eye when you yourself do not see the plank that is in your own eye? Hypocrite!
First remove the plank from your own eye and then you will see clearly to remove the speck that is in your brother's eye. Let a man examine himself. Consider who you are in the presence of Christ, that you deal with the things that God tells you to deal with. Say you're struggling with some sin, you're struggling with it, you're fighting it, but that's what you're doing, you're fighting it in Christ as opposed to dismissing it and encouraging it. Fundamental secret of Israel's success was Israel's God. And this right could no longer be neglected. It was neglected in the wilderness, but in the promised land, it had to be addressed. Today, of course, we Christians are not obligated to follow this right at all. It characterized Judaism.
It was a big thing for the Jew. Paul received stoning, they were out, they hated him for preaching against the rights of Judaism and replacing it with the fulfillment of Messiah. And in his Galatian letter, he pointed out, said that system is dead. He did it in Romans, he did it, if you believe he wrote the Hebrew letter and he does it in, as I mentioned Galatians and Ephesians, he addresses this very thing. He says God has set that on the side. Our relationship with him does not or is not established by this right of circumcision.
It's established by faith, by believing everything Jesus said about himself and about us and about his father. And if you engage in circumcision to gain favor with God, you fall from grace. Galatians 5, you have become estranged from Christ, you who attempt to be justified by law, you have fallen from grace, end quote. What does that mean?
Who wants to find out? Raise your hand. Who wants to find out what it means to fall from grace because grace saves me? Plunging into low-level attempts to gain salvation by human effort, that's the law. And the Christian is warned against that. So we move on to the bottom of verse 2, he says again the second time. Now this does not mean that it was repeated on those who had already gone through it. This means the generation that had come out of Egypt were not circumcised, the males of course, and those who were born in Egypt, they were.
And this is that second generation that is now having to face this. Verse 3, so Joshua made flint knives for himself and circumcised the sons of Israel at the hill of the four skins. Now this again is teaching us that worship comes before warfare. If you're out of fellowship with Christ, if you've not been worshiping Christ, why would you be expected to be used by him in a positive way?
He can use you in a negative way. We know that from Caiaphas. I quoted him a few weeks back. Caiaphas prophesied, it's expedient that one should die for the nation. He did not know what he was talking about, but John says, you know what? You just spoke a prophecy and you're too wicked to know you did it.
God overruled your folly. Who wants to be Caiaphas? I'd rather be a prophet of God. And by that I mean a child of God that speaks God's word. We all prophesy when we speak God's word. That's one element of prophecy.
There are several. This predictive prophecy, of course, you sing songs, it's considered in scripture prophetic in that God is very much involved and a part of it and you can't do it without him. You cannot genuinely worship God in song without God.
You can fake it, you can be an imposter, but you cannot be received in your worship without the Holy Spirit. A man must be born again, mankind that is. But this lesson here, so he made flint knives. Now, of course, he's not carrying out the circumcisions any more than Solomon.
Solomon built the temple, yet while Solomon wasn't out there with a hard hat and gloves, putting the stones in place, of course, it doesn't mean that. But this was physically painful. It would be more painful to sidestep what God is telling him. His troops, before they could be used as warriors, had to turn these knives upon themselves.
They had to submit to this. None of them were going to go kicking and screaming and still be part of this army. And while they healed, while they recovered, they would be mindful of the will of God that this was, that they were in pain in God's will. They could have escaped the pain by staying outside of his will. Are there not lessons in that for all of us? Verse 4, and this is the reason why Joshua circumcised them.
I pause there. It's worded in an unabashed way. Here's why.
There's no walking this back. This is God's word. He says, and this is the reason why Joshua circumcised them. All the people who came out of Egypt who were males, all the men of war, had died in the wilderness on the way after they had come out of Egypt. Moses was the leader in the wilderness. He's a type of the law who could not bring the people into the Promised Land. Yeshua had to do that.
Joshua, he was, of course, representing Jesus as our Savior, taking us out of the law and into the land, the inheritance of God's people, people that fuller inheritance. Well, Moses, this leader of the wilderness, he was negligent on this right. Were it not for his wife, God would have killed him.
How many of you men are like that? He's so reluctant to listen. Your wife's got to save you from God. That's the story of Moses, the shameful moment in his life. He wrote that. He put it into the record. He did no trying to cover himself.
He writes down in his own way, I was a fool, and I had a good wife, and God preserved the record for us to see it. Israel is now becoming a nation of soldiers. Is not the church supposed to be a royal priesthood? Paul said to Timothy, no soldier gets entangled in these things. Be careful.
May none of us be entangled in the affairs of the world. Carry out the work of judgment on a corrupt and depraved people. That was their mission.
Our mission is to carry out a work on a depraved people, not to destroy them with the sword, but to save them with the sword, to use the word of God to preach to them the truth of God. And I'm telling you, it works best face to face. It doesn't work instantly as a rule. If you're going to be used to win souls, and Christians should be wanting this, it takes time. As I mentioned, it takes a relationship.
It takes them seeing you amongst the others in the office, in the school, in the neighborhood, wherever you find yourself. Verse 5, for all the people who came out had been circumcised, but all the people born in the wilderness on the way as they came out of Egypt had not been circumcised. This coming out of the wilderness. Remember the stones we read about? They put 12 stones in the Jordan River.
They took 12 other stones out of the Jordan River, and they piled them up ultimately at Gilgal as a monument symbolizing ownership, that they owned the land and they could do with it as they please now as the owners. Circumcision by the Flintstones, and I don't mean anything humorous in that, Betty. Some of you may not have ever seen the Flintstones.
It's a cultural thing. The circumcision with the Flint, okay, I got to say it a different way. The circumcision with the stones of Flint symbolized God's ownership of the people. That's what the process was all about. What about the church?
What signs of ownership do we have? Because it's not circumcision. It is love. Agape love. Sometimes it's heavier than the stones.
Sometimes it's more painful than those knives of Flint. That's love. Love by the disciples of Christ symbolizes God's ownership, that they're born again, that we are born again. John's Gospel, chapter 13, by all, by this all will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another. This is what makes it so incredible when Christians behave so ridiculously loveless. I mean, we have times when we're moody and such.
Well, you are. But I don't think any born-again Christian puts a stamp of approval on their moods. And we don't like to see them in our children. Sometimes God says, you're just looking in the mirror.
Go picking on them, because you can't bounce the ball. Ishmael is a type of the flesh in the scripture. His hand was against every man, and every man's hand was against him. That's the flesh, that's the carnal nature. God says, deal with it.
He says to Joshua, you need to cut that. He says to the New Testament church, you need to be in the Spirit. You need to be people of the Spirit who walk in the Spirit. And you say, I've tried my entire Christian life to walk in the Spirit that I do not give in to the flesh. And I fail, I fail, I fail, and people see me fail. Yes, but God sees you trying. Don't you count that short. Don't you dare count that short. God said to David, you wanted to build a temple, you can't. But I'm writing it down.
You wanted to do that for me. I love you, man. I love you, David. King David, what a character.
All of his mess-ups. And God holds him up in front of us and says Messiah comes from the line of David. He sits on David's throne into the millennial kingdom, he's mentioning David.
What a mighty God, full of mercy and forgiveness. Verse 6, for the children of Israel walked 40 years in the wilderness till all the people who were men of war who came out of Egypt were consumed because they did not obey the voice of Yahweh to whom Yahweh swore that he would not show them the land which Yahweh had sworn to their fathers that he would give us, a land flowing with milk and honey. Then Joshua circumcised the sons whom he had raised up in their place, for they were circumcised because they had not been circumcised on the way. So there's the answer to verse 2 where he mentions circumcision for the second time, those who had not experienced it. They were disobedient. The Bible never lets us be comfortable with disobedience even though you become a Christian and soon after you find out, hey, I'm being disobedient. I don't like this.
And there I did it again. And yet the mercy of God comes to life and so it was important and then you begin to be more merciful with other people, more kind towards other people because you're conscious of your own ability or inability to honor the Lord. But in spite of all of that, God never makes us comfortable. He never goes and tells the pastor, make them comfortable in their sin and quite the opposite.
Make them comfortable in my mercy which has blood all over it and that hopefully would sober up anyone. And so the first circumcision of the people out of Egypt takes place in the promised land, the land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and it should have been very meaningful to them and a little bit they're going to have the Passover. Well, they can't have the Passover without that right being complied with. Not in God's promised land, he says to them. But anyway, verse 8, so it was when they had finished circumcising all the people that they stayed in their places in the camp till they were healed. Again, drastically reducing their fighting ability, their ability to protect themselves. I mean, an invasion force when it goes into an occupied area, but there go invasion. The first military tactics you set a perimeter up.
This is not, this is a pretty shabby perimeter. They're incapacitated. Genesis chapter 34, now it came to pass on the third day when they were in pain.
Well, let me set that up first. Remember the 12 sons of Jacob had a sister, Dinah, and she was violated and they were unforgiving about this. They were going to take revenge. Sadly, they were going to use a holy rite as a screen, a smokescreen for their revenge.
A symbol of their holy faith as a cover-up. So they say to Shechem, okay, we'll let you marry our daughter, but you're going to have to become one of us and undergo this rite. And he wants Dinah so much, he says, okay, I'll do it. And they said, well, all the men in your village are going to have to do it.
And they all do it to demonstrate their sincerity. Well, it was a plan. Levi and Simeon leading the plan. All the time we're going to kill these guys. We're going to incapacitate them. They're going to be in so much pain they can't fight. We're going to go kill them all and take what we want. And that's precisely what they did. Genesis 34, now it came to pass on the third day and what I'm bringing is the painfulness, the incapacitation that was suffered by the men.
It came to pass the third day when they were in pain that the two sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah's brothers, each took his sword and came boldly upon the city and killed all the males. So the point is, God, are you serious? You want me to incapacitate my army to satisfy some ritual? Well, if God says yes, that's what I want you to do. It's no longer a ritual.
It's a command. Faith in action. Faith can hurt. Another lesson that comes out, obeying God hurts sometimes. Sometimes it's quite wonderful. I would like a little more consistency with this. I would like it to be wonderful all the time. And I'm still not adjusting when God calls me to do things I don't like.
I have long conversations about it. He just like, he closes the window of something. But he never chases me out. At least I've never felt God chase Paul out, chase Moses out. He says, enough of this. He told Moses, I don't hear about this promised land anymore.
Paul saw him three times. Okay, that's enough. Anyway, coming back to this, 2 Timothy chapter 2, you therefore must endure hardship as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. You see, I understood that verse as a Christian, just when it came to Christ.
Okay, there's hardship. But I forgot somewhere along the calling that this was to a pastor. I just, I don't adjust well. I find my groove and I want to stay there. And God is masterful at getting us out of our groove. Because God sees a groove as a rut.
As A.W. Tozier said, a rut's a long grave. Anyway, verse 9. Then Yahweh said to Joshua, this day I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt from you, therefore the name of the place is called Gilgal to this day.
So Gilgal gets its name rolled away, the shame. Because the world watched the Jews come out of Egypt. Word traveled fast by camel in those days. What had happened to the Pharaoh and his army. And then these people stalled, right in the wilderness. They just stopped. And they wandered around in circles like it is no home, nowhere that was there.
Wherever they went it was somebody else's land. Gilgal, the place of self-judgment, let's not lose sight of that, with the circumcision, the painful act took place. That's where the shame rolled away, where the pain took place. Maybe you have experienced a personal Gilgal. Maybe you've gone through something in this life that has brought shame to you, in the eyes of others.
You could be totally innocent. Joshua and Caleb were in this number, they were innocent, yet they bore the shame. That's why it's so meaningful to Joshua, the shame is gone. So you have this experience in your life, it lasts a long time when you live under shame. But God rolls away the shame. When he is ready, when it has served its purpose, Gilgal becomes a place of restoration. Where God says, I never lost sight of it, I never lost sight of you. I never stopped caring for you.
I have my Gilgals, I have some that will be future ones. I don't know if I said that right, but I think you understood what I meant. Well, again, from this place where they turn the knives on themselves, they would go out to conquer, and the first battle will be an impregnable fortress. I mean, Jericho was not this, you know, wasn't, you know, kind of plank boards up and we're just going to huff and puff and blow this thing down. This was going to be a serious first fight. And Joshua doesn't know at what cost, how many of my braves will I lose?
It wasn't something that he took lightly at all. Well, verse 10, we continue, Now the children of Israel camped in Gilgal and kept the Passover on the fourteenth day of the month at twilight on the plains of Jericho. Well, you can bet at twilight when the campfires were going, Jericho, they were shaking in their sandals, seeing the armies and armies of people camped out.
I mean, this is, again, not just an army, this is a nation of over two million people. But the laws required from Exodus that the Passover the participants, the men be circumcised, and so we come to another verse from Corinthians because it has something to do with the New Testament. We're going to come to a section later in Joshua where he divides the land to the tribes by lot. This is your lot, this is your lot, and sometimes you go out and you see signs that say lots for sale and there's nothing there.
If there's lots for sale, how come there's nothing there? All right, anyway, ah, got it. They're going to divide the land and Joshua is going to assign boundaries. That's life.
I don't like it either. But there are things that restrict us. God says, this is your border.
You go no further than this. You operate behind these lines and those who go over the line are trespassers and the world is full of them. Who has God to say? I think God is. When you say, I think God is, you're committing idolatry. It is the first commandment you have violated. It is the worst one to violate of all because you have told God you are not who you say you are. You will be who I say you are because I think God is.
That's your opinion, not his, and you're wrong. Christian hopefully says, I believe God is as he has revealed himself in his word and through his son. He who has seen the son has seen the father. Let's just pause here from my own devotion time in John. It used to be, I used to be able to fly through my devotions, you know, three or four chapters a morning. Now I get a paragraph, maybe. I think that's good, but I'm still not comfortable with it. Why am I telling you this?
Point. So I'm reading in John's gospel, I don't know, yesterday or today, maybe I read it, reread it again today, but John's gospel chapter 14, considering the love that God has for us, John's gospel 15. And there in that beautiful section of scripture he says, as the father loved me, I also have loved you. I can't love you with the same love that the father loved the son.
In other words, the love God has for Jesus Christ is the love that Jesus Christ has for us. You and I can't produce that kind of love. We cannot say with the same love that the father has for me, I can love you. We don't have that much love.
We can try, we ought to go after it. My point is, you will never love your children, your spouse, your parents or anything else as much as God loves them. And there it is in scripture, with the same love that the father loved me, I love you. He did not say with the same love you have for me, I love you.
That would have messed up everything. And that doesn't have very much to do with what I'm talking about, but I wanted to share it. 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 / 2024-02-27 15:08:47 / 2024-02-27 15:18:23 / 10