More War (Part C)

God is said to harden a heart by not doing anything to it, just leaving it to itself.

And this is part of the explanation for what was happening. At some point, God says to the wicked, okay, I can't reach you now. Now I'm going to just turn you over to yourself.

You want that, you got it. Isaiah 63, verses 3 and 4, I believe, where God says, I'll choose their delusions. They are free to reject me.

They are not free to choose the outcome of that rejection. 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. But for now, let's join Pastor Rick in the book of Joshua, chapter 7. Now here's Pastor Rick in Joshua, chapter 12, with his continuing study called, Unwanted but Needed. I like a lot more the way I think now, but I like a lot better the way I looked then.

So does my wife. So, but such is life. So you have to do with what you have. What am I going to do with time? What am I going to do when I stand before the Lord? What am I going to say?

I've got a few speeches ready to try this one. Okay, how about this one? But I think we should from time to time ponder that. Always there is something for the believer to do, if nothing else, prayer. The prayer of Jabaz, just consider the man's life as the shortcomings he had, but how articulate his prayer was. Verse 18, Joshua made war a long time with all those kings. Verse 19, there was not a city that made peace with the children of Israel except the Hivites, the inhabitants of Gibeon.

All others they took in battle. Well, he mentions that to say that they were compliant, they were obedient to what God had said, and it also would have lended opportunity for the historian to say, well, there were cities that did ask for peace, but they did not. And God will always be justified in his judgments.

For centuries, the Canaanites got away with their sin and avoided annihilation. God was giving them time, but the time has now run out and the time has arrived for judgment and the list is in again, Leviticus 18 for example. And they did what they did, they behaved the way they behaved because of the gods they believed in.

You want to change how someone behaves, you have to start working on how that person believes, what they believe. Now, they can believe in God and his behavior still be not anywhere near where it should be, but without that change, a society cannot gain altitude. And that's what we're seeing in these lands. Everyone has sinned in some way of course, but here in the land of Canaan, their sin was just grotesque. It had become so bad that as with the antediluvians who were known for their violence, the Sodomites who were known for their impurity, now the Canaanites for their impurity and violence, they were being dealt with.

It was a base society hostile to God's ways. The great tribulation will make all of this look very small. The great tribulation will be global and it will bear many of the same marks. Jesus said in Matthew 24, for then there will be great tribulation such as has not been since the beginning of the world until this time, no, nor ever shall be.

How much is in those words? There's not been anything like that. Wait a minute, what are you talking about? The war in Europe, there are two of them, and then the Pacific, and you know, what do you mean? All the terrible atrocities through the ages and you're telling me that there's this coming of war on earth, a time period on earth unmatched in its horror. And Jesus is saying just that. And then in Matthew 25, he goes on to say, the day is going to come when he will judge the wicked nations, that people. Judgments against the Canaanites is just one instance of his judgment on the wicked. As I mentioned, there were those before the flood that were lost in the flood, the antediluvians that perished. There were those of Sodom and Gomorrah. They are great instances of his mercy that everybody likes to pass over.

Rahab did not. You and I have not, and many others. Genesis chapter 15, when God is saying to Abraham, I'm going to give you all this land. You won't own it in your lifetime on paper, but it's yours. The people that are here now, they're not as vile as they're going to be. They're going to be much worse.

But I'm going to let it run until it gets to be much worse. Genesis 15, 16. But in the fourth generation, they shall return here, the descendants of Abraham. For the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. They've not gotten so bad, God is saying, that swift judgment is justifiable. But it is now in Joshua's day. That's what Joshua is doing.

It is complete. God has had it, you could say. So they did not merit judgment. Daniel says, and in the latter time of their kingdom, when the transgressions have reached their fullness, a king shall arise, having fierce features, who understands sinister schemes. You catch that when the transgressions have reached their fullness. Now, some of that applies to Antiochus Epiphanes, but the bulk of it goes to Antichrist, the times we live in now. And so God is saying to mankind through the prophet Daniel, I'm letting the clock tick. I'm judging individuals one at a time, but as a race of people, not individual races, the human race, I'm letting it run till the fullness of the Gentiles. So God has got his eyes on the clock.

There is a clock, we just can't see it. And we can, well, Romans chapter 11, Paul speaking about the state of the Jews, his heart ached, why they couldn't believe more. I mean, he's watching these Gentiles get saved, and it's like, why aren't the Jewish people getting saved?

They're the ones that held the oracles, they carried the documents from them come Moses, Elijah, you know, all the prophets. What is going on? Well, that's a serious thing with sin. You know, why do we get sick? Sin. There's no other reason. Sin has happened to everyone.

Why does anything go wrong? Sin. Why don't you love all my sermons? Sin. I want the record to show that he was one arrogant pastor. No, I don't. God forbid.

That's not even funny. Romans 11 verse 25, for I do not desire brethren, that's Paul for you, not backing down but full of love, that you should be, I do not decide that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion that blindness, in part, has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come. And so he's saying to the Gentiles, don't go looking down at the Jews because they can't believe, because you'll get big-headed and puffed up thinking you're better and you're not. God is doing his work, and it's going to happen that the Gentiles will become so rank that God will deal with them also. Then all Israel will be saved, but it was going to be, of course, through great tribulation, and much of Israel will be lost.

The people, that is. Verse 20, for it was of Yahweh to harden their hearts that they should come against Israel in battle, that he might utterly destroy them, and that they might receive no mercy, but that he might destroy them as Yahweh had commanded Moses. An unbeliever will stumble all over this. What? Oh, God is so mean, and that's why I don't, yeah, okay, that works. You go run with that. You go shake your fist at God, that puny little thing at the end of your wrist.

You go ahead and see how far they cut your nose off to spite your face. You better think about maybe trying to line up with God's logic, because we do not have enough information to say we know it all, but we have enough information to know, to make the right decisions. As I mentioned, they were incurably wicked, and God boxed them in according to their own ways. He turned them over to their own ways, as he will do in the days of Antichrist, because they did not have the love for the truth. He gave them over to strong, he will give them over to strong delusion. And when he says that the Lord has hardened their hearts, how does he do that? Does he have a heart hardening machine?

And we use this device. Man is clay, made out of clay. If you take clay and you do nothing with it but leave it in the sun, it hardens. God is said to harden a heart by not doing anything to it, just leaving it to itself.

And this is part of the explanation for what was happening. At some point, God says to the wicked, okay, I can't reach you now. Now I'm going to just turn you over to yourself. You want that?

You got it. Isaiah 63, verses 3 and 4, I believe, where God says, I'll choose their delusions. They are free to reject me, they are not free to choose the outcome of that rejection. And God, I should add, never forces anyone to resist him. What did God, what is the last thing that Jesus called, the last title of Jesus called Judas Iscariot? Friend. He said to friend, he's saying to him, are you my friend? Judas, you would think, wouldn't we think if it was us, we'd say, I can't do this, it's my friend. He doesn't. And so God is often blamed, especially in the Old Testament, God is accused of what he allows to happen.

We do the same. When some tragedy happens, we say, God, why did you, why did you let that happen? And it is a veiled way of saying, it's your fault. And God says, if you understood everything that is, you would understand it is my fault, but you would also understand it is the best choice.

Things as they are. There are no gotcha moments on God. You're not going to come to your Bible and say, how we got him, he is mean, he is this.

It's not going to, you're going to be wrong every time. And so these are, and Joshua and the Jews, they understood this in their days. They knew what would happen if these people were allowed to continue to grow to the point where another flood would have been, would have had to take. Anyway, he hunted them down, left none to rise up.

That was his goal. And had Israel not waged much war, then Israel would have been hunted down. And again, never a peep from the peeps, from the people, never a peep about what must we do to be saved. Verse 21, and at that time, Joshua came and cut off the Anakin from the mountains, from Hebron, from Deber, those places, mountains of Judah, and from the mountains of Israel. Joshua utterly destroyed them with their cities.

Now we come to the Anakin. They were door-to-door salesmen. No, they weren't. They were kind of funny, selling stuff.

This vacuum cleaner, anyhow, the clan of tall people is what these are. And this had to have had a special satisfaction for not only Caleb, but for Joshua also, because both of those men had to restrain themselves and suffer the loss because of other people's unbelief. So Joshua could have said, if I were in Joshua's place, wait a minute, you mean I got to suffer 40 years in the desert because of them? That's what I would have felt. Well, oh, you would have felt what you would have been. Well, I'll just start a church in the wilderness, brother.

So holy two-shoes you are. Anyway, so now Caleb and Joshua are turned loose. Now they are taking out the giants, which at that time were the Canaanite giants. Later they became the New York giants. Then they moved to San Francisco.

Willie Mays would have had a lot more home runs in any of the parks than Candlestick. Anyhow, and if you attend this church and you don't know what a grand slam is, a triple play, you have, you got to go on the Internet and Google those things or else you're going to be a pastoral visit. Anyway, the giants, the Jews feared them, and now the Jews are vanquishing them. And Joshua and Caleb get the last word in. Tohiah wasn't a grasshopper. Verse 22, we'll come back to the giants in a moment. And how can you not talk about the giants and not talk baseball?

I mean, it's just you can't, it's not American. Anyway, verse 22, none of the Anakim were left in the land of the children of Israel. They remained only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod. Those are going to be, those are Philistine cities. They will be strongholds of the Philistines. Goliath was from Gath, had like leather vest and had, you know, giants. Gath chapter and a little wheel with wings on it.

Anyway, okay, biker jokes are frowned on a pound here. They might come and get us. Verse 23, so Joshua took the whole land according to all that Yahweh had said to Moses, and Joshua gave it as an inheritance to Israel according to their divisions by their tribes. Then the land had wrest from war.

Well, there were still people to put out, but they were no longer a threat, a major threat, a visible threat as far as amassing armies and chasing the Jews out of the land. But here's Joshua, the man of honor. He honored his word to Rahab. He honored his word to the Gibeonites, and he is a man who honored the promises made to God as a servant of the Lord.

And of course, these wars that we read about and all that goes with them illustrate the Christian conquest in our own lives over the unseen works of evils, the principalities, powers, spiritual wickedness in high places, Satan's determination to resist and to hinder us from obeying God. Just a simple one. You shall love your neighbor.

Just that. If I don't have love, regardless of how much I know or think I know, anybody here would dare walk around with a placard that said, I am a know-it-all. No, we don't do that because we know better, but we still behave, well, you might behave that way.

You still behave that way. But love that covers a multitude of sins. I'm always fighting to love.

Why doesn't it come natural, like my love for goodies? There's nothing like putting camouflage on and your face all dark and sneaking downstairs in the kitchen and getting cookies. All right, we got some other stuff here. We're almost done. We're going to come back to the giants. Joshua chapter 12 now. This will be a relatively fast one. This distribution of the land east of Jordan, because the two and a half tribes already have it west of Jordan, that will come.

We're going towards that now. But this chapter summarizes the kings that were defeated. Verse 1, these are the kings of the land whom the children of Israel defeated and those whose land they possessed on the other side of the Jordan toward the rising of the sun from the river Arnon to Mount Hermon and all the eastern Jordan plain. Mount Hermon today is a resort for the Jews.

They go skiing up there. I mean, it's, you know, on the Syrian-Lebanese-Jewish border, and it's a snow-capped mountain. I wonder how many people, you know, going down the slope saying, you know, this is in the book of Joshua, and it's in, you know, we don't have that here. You can't, like, go to the Grand Canyon and say, you know, Joshua wiped out a chariot right here. All right, let's see. Verse, going down to verse 3, it says, Kenaroth is as far as the sea of Arabah, the salt sea, below the slopes of Pisgah.

Now, of course, I've skipped a lot of words. Those are the ones that stand out. Arabah is the sea of Aqaba down at the Red Sea. So that tells you how far south he dealt with some of the enemies who he felt were a threat. The slopes, well, Kenaroth, that's the Sea of Galilee. The slopes of Pisgah, that's Mount Nebo from where, that area, where Moses got to look at the Promised Land and had to wait 1,600 years, I believe it is, before he got into the Promised Land, sandals on the ground.

And he wasn't really too impressed with the surroundings. He had been to better places and he was just like, focused on Jesus is what he was, he and Elijah. Verse 4, the other king was Og, king of Bashan.

How come some of you that like the Old Testament names don't use Og? King of Bashan and his territory, who was of the remnant of the giants who dwelt in Ashtaroth. Verse 6, then Moses the servant of Yahweh and the children of Israel had conquered and Moses the servant of Yahweh had given it a possession to the Reubenites, the Gadites and half the tribe of Manasseh. So he's talking about the people under Og who was a giant, who was of the remnant of the giants. Now let's talk about these giants a moment. A few different tribes, different names, the Anakim, the Emond, the, my favorite, the Zimin, because they sound scary. I mean, what's that under the bed? The Zimin.

And then shortened to Zimin. So the various giant peoples. 1 Samuel 17, and a champion went out from the camp of the Philistines named Goliath from Gath, whose height was six cubits and a span. Well he is anywhere from six foot nine to nine foot nine. The discrepancy is in how many cubits it was he really.

And there are two sources, or three, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint, which may have been kind of in cahoots. They have it at the six foot nine. The Masoretic text, which we use and most Bibles use for the Old Testament, the scribe, scribal material there has nine foot nine and how many cubits he was. Well, some of you might think he's like the fifty foot giant. Well, when David cut the head off of Goliath, he was able to carry it around with him. So that kind of brings the scale down, does it not?

I mean the head wasn't, you know, he was a big head, no question, but it wasn't like the Michelin Man. I mean, so when we talk about giants in the Bible, I know there are some that always think that there are these super beings that had relationships with demons, fallen angels. You know you mess up the virgin birth if you start injecting that into the scriptures. Scripture does not support that.

Many good Bible commentators have gone that route and many others have not. I do not believe the giants were these fifteen foot tall people going around. But I do not dispute that they could have been as tall as ten foot tall. I mean, just the height of a regulation basketball rim is at ten feet.

Some of you can't jump, you have no vertical, so you would have a hard time taking a piece of lint out of their hair. Deuteronomy tells us about Og. For only Og king of Basham remained of the remnant of the giants. Indeed, his bedstead was an iron bedstead. Is it not in Rabbah of the people of Ammon, which is modern day Jordan, nine cubits is its length and four cubits it's width according to the standard cubit. So his bed was thirteen and a half feet long and six feet wide. That's not a California king size.

That is the Arabian king size or the Bashan king size. So you say well if his bed was that big, I'm sure he had some pillow space there, entertainment center at the foot. So he's probably almost ten foot tall himself. So I go with Goliath being about nine foot tall. Now what if Goliath brought a sling shot? He still would have lost, that's what. But anyhow, just incidentally, if you have this theory about twenty feet giants, fifty feet giants running around the descendants of demonic activity, I dispute that vigorously. I would dispute that.

Sometimes too hard. So, and I don't want to wait to get to heaven to be right. I want to be right right now. So verse eight now. In the mountain country, in the lowlands, in the Jordan plain, in the slopes, in the wilderness, and in the south.

And we stop there. You know the Marine Corps hymn, we have fought in every climb and place where we could take a gun. This is what the Jews were saying here, that they fought in the mountains, the lowlands, the plains, the slopes, the wilderness. Every compartment of our life has to be addressed. You cannot say about a part of your life, well that's the valley, I leave that alone.

Or that's the slopes, or the wilderness, every part of ourselves. That is the spiritual lesson extracted from that, an application taken from a real event. The facts are, that is where they fought. It's historical.

Nothing about that is magical. What is beneficial is to look at something like that and say there are every area of my life I want to bring under the authority of the God of Moses, who is the God of Peter, who is my God also. Verse 24, the king of Tizra, Tizra later became the first capital city when the kingdom of Israel split. It became a nice, well-to-do town under Rehoboam, but they were pagan as they come.

And of course it was then moved away from there. At the end of verse 24 it says, 31 kings. So here in chapter 12, Joshua has recorded 31 kings that have been defeated on the east side of Jordan in the promised land, it's the main body of land, and then across Jordan in the west where the two and a half tribes received their territory under Moses. 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.