Faith is stronger than ethnicity, gender, social class, all the things that can divide us in this life. as we unite together in Christ. Today, on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah presents a powerful example of this principle. with profiles of two people mentioned side by side in the Bible's Hall of Faith.
Joshua and Rahab. From his series in Hebrews, here's David to introduce his message, the courage of faith.
Well, thank you so much for joining us. We are coming to the end of our series. Which we have called Ordinary People, Extraordinary Faith. It is an exposition of the TRUTH OF HeBREWS CHAPTER eleven And as you heard our announcer say, we're going to talk about Joshua and Rahab, a man and a woman who expressed faith in totally different ways, yet remarkable in the sense of their courage. We'll get to that in just a moment, but we need to let you know that we are here every day.
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Now, let's open our Bibles to the courage of faith. Hebrews chapter 11, verses 30 and 31. Um I want to talk with you about the courage of faith, and I want you to read with me from your Bible. Hebrews 11 verses 30. And thirty-one.
By faith. The walls of Jericho fell down. after they were encircled for seven days. By faith The harlot Rahab did not perish with those who did not believe. when she had received the spies with peace.
As I read the accounts of the New Testament, And especially the New Testament church. One characteristic stands out Perhaps more sharply than any other, and that is in the early church. There was diversity. Beginning with the day of Pentecost, the Christian church dismantled all the barriers of gender. and race and social class.
So that when the church gathered in Jerusalem in those early days, it was made up of people from just about every tongue and language. And of course, as you know, on the day of Pentecost, they were all able to hear the gospel in their own language. But when they became Christians, they didn't end up with ethnic churches. They came together, and it was the church of Jesus Christ. And I believe that is true today wherever the grace of God is taught and wherever the gospel is set forward.
And it's a wonderful thing to see how the gospel of Jesus Christ breaks down all these barriers. And the only thing that really matters is not whether you're white or black, whether you speak Spanish or English, whether you're from the Middle East or from the Far East. If you're in Christ, you're in the church, you're a part of the body. You were one. And there's no passage that I know of.
In the book of Hebrews, and especially in the 11th chapter, But Provides a picture of the diversity of the way God works than these two verses in Hebrews 11. Here we are introduced to two characters: Joshua. and Rahab Joshua was a Jewish general. Rahab was a Gentile prostitute. Joshua was a member of the covenant nation.
Rahab was a foreigner. Joshua was a conqueror and Rahab was among the conquered. But as different as they were and as diverse as they look in our understanding, the one thing that causes them to show up together in the 11th chapter of Hebrews is they both are rewarded for their faith. Remember, Hebrews 11 is the faith chapter. Where people are put into the hall of faith because they believed God.
And both Joshua and Rahab believed God. and they were rewarded for their faith.
Now, although we basically know the story of Joshua, And we know a little bit about the story of Rahab. We can't really understand Hebrews 11:30 and 31 unless we go back. And review The steps of faith that they are honored for in this reference in the 11th chapter.
So, today we're going to look at the sixth chapter of Joshua a little bit and review what happened to Joshua and how Rahab got into the Hall of Faith. Let's begin first of all with Joshua surrounding the walls of Jericho. Hebrews 11, 30 says, by faith these walls came down. And if you go back to Joshua and the sixth chapter, You will discover in the second verse the promise of faith. that was made to Joshua.
And the LORD said to Joshua C I have given Jericho into your hand, its king and the mighty men of valor. Just as God had told Abel about his sacrifice and Noah about the ark. and Abraham and Sarah about their son. and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph about the future, and Moses about the Exodus, so God told Joshua about the walls of Jericho. He said, I have given Jericho into your hand.
That's a promise from God. God told the general that he was going to win even before the war started. It was going to be up to Joshua just to believe God and do what God told him to do, and victory was already in his hands. How many of you know we've been given a similar promise as God's people? The Bible says, yea, in all these things, we are more than conquerors through Him.
Who loved us? Which tells us that if we live by faith, as Joshua did, we win. We are conquerors. If we do what God tells us to do, the victory is already in our hands. And we should have confidence in the promise of this Almighty God that we serve.
Let me remind you again that all faith is based on a promise. From God. Faith is a nebulous thought to most people, but it is a very simple concept. God said it. You believe it and you act upon it.
When you do that, you are exercising your faith. It's not anything more than that. It's not anything less than that. Faith is believing and acting upon God's word. And God has given us many promises upon which we may act.
I have in my library some books written by a man named Herbert Lockyer. Herbert Lockyer is one of these guys who likes to find all the things that are alike.
So he's got a book called All the Women in the Bible, and he's done a study on every woman's name who's in all the Bible. He's got another one called All the Men of the Bible. And then he's got this very interesting book called All the Promises of the Bible. In this book, he tells about a school teacher by the name of Everett Storms. Who tried to tally up all the promises in the Bible, a task which took him a year and a half.
And he came up with the following statistics. There are 7,487 promises by God to man. There are two by God the Father to God the Son. There are 991 by one man to another. There are 290 by man to God.
There are 21 promises made by the angels. One promise by a man to an angel. There's two made by an evil spirit to the Lord, and Satan made nine for a grand total of 8,810 promises in the Bible.
Now, here's the interesting thing. Of the 8,810 promises, 7,487 of them are promises that God has made. to man.
Now, that would be a good lifetime study, wouldn't it? Just go into the Bible and find all the promises God has made. But the point isn't that you count the promises. The point is that you trust them and you follow them and you believe them. You're almost better not to know God's promises unless you've already determined that you're going to do what He promises He will do for you.
In the instruction in the Word of God.
Now the promise of faith to Joshua was Joshua I'm going to give Jericho into your hand. Notice at this point, God doesn't explain how He's going to do it, and that's going to get very interesting. Here is the promise of faith.
Now, here's the plan of faith. In verses 3 through 5 of Joshua 6, we read these words. You shall march around the city, all you men of war, and you shall go all around the city once. And this you shall do for six days. And seven priests shall bear seven trumpets of rams' horns before the ark.
But the seventh day you shall march around the city seven times, and the priests shall blow the trumpets. And it shall come to pass, when they make a long blast with the ram's horn, and when you hear the sound of the trumpet, that all the people shall shout with a great shout, and the wall of the city will fall down flat, and the people shall go up, every man straight before him.
Now, I would love to have been with Joshua when he explained this military strategy to his leaders. I can hear them saying. We're gonna do what? He must have swallowed hard before that speech. And of course, if you had just finished crossing a river on dry ground, In a miraculous way, maybe this wouldn't be such a stretch as we think.
But God gave to Joshua a plan for the realization of the promise.
Now notice, it's God's promise, but there's a plan that needs to be put into place for you to recognize that promise, and here's the plan. God loves to turn things upside down. He likes to tell us to do things that don't necessarily always make sense, so that when we do them, we are not doing them because we have figured out how rational they are. We are doing them because we just know God has told us to do it primarily from His Word, and we do it. That's the way he planned things for Joshua and his troops.
Now, if you study this carefully, you will notice there are some principles of faith in this instruction. There are actually four of them that I've discovered. Let me give them to you. First of all, there's the principle of silence. In Joshua 6.10.
Now Joshua commanded the people, saying, You shall not shout or make any noise with your voice, nor shall a word proceed out of your mouth until the day I say to you, shout, then you shall shout. God was telling his people through Joshua that they were to march around the city walls once a day for six days, seven times on the seventh day, while keeping completely silent. How many of you know that silence is loud? Have you ever noticed that? And the longer the silence goes, the louder it is.
Now, here, I'm going to dig in a little bit here. Have you ever. Had a misunderstanding with your wife. And you're in the car? Maybe you're on a long trip.
And all of a sudden, you realize you've just gone 500 miles and you haven't said a word to each other?
Now, I wouldn't know anything about that, but I hear that happens. Yeah. Can you imagine an army marching silently for seven days? They couldn't talk to each other. They couldn't make any sounds.
they just marched silently around the city. God wanted to teach his people that they should obey his commands even when they made no sense. What is it that the Word of God says? Be still. And no.
That I am God. F.B. Meyer calls silence the hardest of all the commands in the Bible. He says, these days in this noisy world, we have to work very hard at silence. Getting truly quiet time with the Lord to hear his voice is very tough indeed.
That is an important principle of victory in the Christian life, shutting out the noise of the world to be alone with God, just to be with him, hearing his voice. There was much for Israel to think about as they silently marched around Jericho. And there is much for us to think about as we hear the still small voice of our God. Boy, isn't it hard to find silence in our world? What do we do when we get in the car?
What's the first thing we do? We turn on the radio. You get in an elevator, and you can't even have any peace if you're the only one there because they pump music into that thing when you're going up and down. There's music everywhere, there's sound everywhere. True silence is a gift whenever you can find it, even if it's late at night when everything is done and you have a little silence.
special quiet time, that's why we call it quiet time with God. God was teaching his people the principle of silence. Can you imagine the thoughts that were going through their minds? I mean, the first day maybe wasn't quite so bad, but the second day, then the third, and every time they would come back home at night, they would look up, and there were the walls still there. And so, isn't it interesting?
They didn't have a chance to share their anxieties with each other on the march. They had to keep all this inside and deal with it individually before God. as God was working in their hearts and preparing them for what he was about to do. the principle of silence. Then there's the principle of submission.
Versus 13 through 15 in Joshua 5 give us some basic information we need to comprehend what's going on here. It says, And it came to pass when Joshua was by Jericho. That he lifted his eyes and looked, and behold, a man stood opposite him with his sword drawn in his hand. And Joshua went to him and he said to him, Are you for us? Are you for our adversaries?
And he said, No, but as commander of the army of the Lord, I have now come. And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and worshipped, and said to him, What does my Lord say to his servant? And the commander of the Lord's army said to Joshua, Take your sandals off your foot, for the place where you stand is holy. And Joshua did so.
Now we often don't remember this part of the story. Before Joshua ever gave orders to his people, he got orders from his commander, didn't he? The captain of the Lord's army met Joshua in chapter 5 so that Joshua, who was the captain of the Israeli army, would know what to do. And just as Joshua had submitted to his captain, now the people of God are going to submit to Joshua. There's a chain of command here, and there always is.
I dare not tell you to do what God has not told me to tell you to do. And it better come from the Word of God if you're going to be sure. There's a chain of command in our walk with the Lord. And verse 8 of Joshua 6 says, So it was when Joshua had spoken to the people. That the seven priests bearing the seven trumpets of rams' horns before the Lord advanced and blew the trumpets, and the ark of the covenant of the Lord followed them.
There's a chain of command working. God speaks to Joshua. Joshua speaks to the people, and then the people obey. And Joshua never told the people exactly how many days they would have to silently circle Jericho. or even what would happen on the seventh day.
They got their instructions one day at a time. Each day they were told to march, and each day they returned to camp. And the city of Jericho is still standing, and they're still obeying God, even though they have no idea what God is up to. Most of us want it the other way around, don't we? We want God to tell us exactly what's going to happen and then we'll submit to it.
But God doesn't usually work that way, and if He did, you couldn't call it faith, and they wouldn't be in the 11th chapter. Faith is believing what God says, even when you don't have all the information you wish you had, so that it would make it easier for you to believe. Joshua submitted first, totally committed to do God's will before he knew all the details. And here's the question we ask ourselves as we talk about the will of God today in our own lives. Have I ever submitted to God's will even before I have known what it was?
We often say, what's the key? To the will of God. How can I know the will of God?
Well, the first thing you have to do is be willing to do it before you know what it is.
Well, you say, Pastor, that's not rational. Exactly. It's spiritual. That's the way God works. God says, I want you to follow me.
Here's our contract between you and me. Sign it at the bottom, but Lord, there's no words on the page. Sign it at the bottom. and I'll fill it in later. Whoa, nobody would ever do that in the world today.
I mean, we get in enough trouble signing it when we know what's on the page. But God says, no, I want you to trust me. I want you to sign this document, and I'll fill in the details in due time. But it's important for me to know that you are willing to do what I have called you to do. before I give you the content.
But I want to tell you something. You can trust God. with your life. You can trust God. with his will for you.
And let me tell you something else. God's will for your life is better than anything you could dream up on your most creative day. God's will will bring more joy to you than you could ever find if you spent the rest of your life searching for it like it was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. When you give God permission to take your life in control, He will give you the desires of your heart. That's what the Word of God says.
And when Joshua committed to do the will of God, he had no idea how they would ever stand against the most important city in Canaan, right in the center of Canaan. They had to take Jericho out in order to divide the Canaanite forces. If Joshua didn't take out Jericho, then the Canaanites would have been united against their entry into the land. Jericho stood right in the center of the land. If they took Jericho out, the forces of Canaan were divided, and then the people of Israel could go in and take them out one by one.
But the people of Israel were not fighting people. They had come on a long journey through the wilderness. They'd been captive in Egypt for 400 years. God had to come up with an unconventional way for them. to win the battle, and indeed he did.
The principle of silence, the principle of submission. Notice, thirdly, the principle of strategy. I want you to get a mental picture with me of how the Israelites were lining up around the city. First of all, there's no way that almost two and a half to three million people could march around the city at once. I mean, there was a representative group of the Israelites.
We're told it was first of all the soldiers, and probably there was a representation from each of the 12 tribes. Out in front of this march were the soldiers, then the priests with the horns, and then the Ark of the Covenant in the middle, and then more soldiers, and then some more people. And there was a definite purpose for this order as they walked around the city. The formation was designed to strike terror into the hearts of the people in Jericho. We know that the city was locked up tight and that the people in Jericho were already afraid of the Israelites because of what they had heard.
And then one day, this guy's walking on the wall of Jericho and he looks out and he sees this group marching toward the city. It didn't look like much, and they were carrying this big old odd box right in the middle of their parade on the shoulders of some of the. Paraders. And they march around the city once and they leave. And they come back the next day at the same time.
And they march around and go home. And you can't hear a word except the footfall of them marching. No sound from their mouth. No words between them. And then the seventh day comes and they show up early.
And on this day, they marched not once but seven times around the wall. I gotta tell you, folks, this was psychological warfare. And they were talking to each other, what are these crazy Jews doing? They're marching around our city, they're not saying a word. What are they up to?
And already the battle was falling into the hands of the Israelites because they had brought such terror into the hearts. of the inhabitants of Jericho. And finally, there's the principle of spirituality. Don't miss this. In the middle of this parade, the people saw this huge box being carried on the shoulders of the priests.
They didn't know that God was teaching his people the mighty lesson that at the center of every victory is the Lord God Himself. Because you see, the Ark of the Covenant was placed at the very center of the parade to show everyone that God was in the midst of his people. The Ark of the Covenant was the one piece of furniture from the tabernacle and the temple that, more than any other piece of furniture, represented the presence of Almighty God. The Ark of the Covenant was a holy piece of furniture. You can read the story of what happened when it was mistreated.
So right in the middle of the march, the soldiers, a few people from the priest and the horns, and then this big ark of the covenant on the shoulders of the people as they marched around, followed by some more soldiers and more people. And what this said to the Israelites was: make sure you keep God in the center of your parade. Make sure you keep the presence of God focused in your thinking. God will give you victory if you keep Him in the place of honor. If you keep him in the place where he belongs.
We must never forget, men and women, that our only hope for power in our church is wrapped up in the presence of the Almighty among us. Boy, is that ever true? After 50 years of pastoring, I can tell you that is true. If God isn't with us, we have nothing to offer. And it's a wonderful thing to know that when you hold in your hand the word of the living God and you teach that every day, that you go to church.
People are going to be blessed, not because of you, not because of your church, but because of the Word of God and the promise that God gives us that His Word will never return unto Him void, but will accomplish everything for which He sends it. What a great encouragement that is to people who do what I do. and I hope that you're being blessed on the other end of that discussion. Tomorrow, we will conclude our discussion of Joshua and Rahab, and then two more lessons at the end of the week on just what we've called ordinary heroes, the passage at the end of Hebrews that just lists a whole bunch of people at once. What does that mean?
And we'll talk about that then. In the meantime, I hope you're having a great day. Be sure and look for our magazine when you go to our website. It will tell you how to get that magazine every month. It's a great thing.
We'll see you next time right here. For more information on Dr. Jeremiah's series, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Faith, visit our website where we also offer two free ways to help you stay connected, our monthly Turning Points magazine and our daily email devotional. Sign up today at davidjeremiah.org slash radio. That's davidjeremiah.org slash radio.
Or call us at 800-947-1993. Ask for your copy of David's newly updated scripture reference guide, Where to Go in the Bible When. It's packed with biblical answers and it's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also purchase the Jeremiah Study Bible in the English Standard New International and New King James Versions, available in a variety of handsome and resilient cover options. Get all the details when you visit our website, davidjeremiah.org slash radio.
This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow as we continue the series Ordinary People: Extraordinary Faith on Turning Point.
