Joshua No.6 The Biggest Decision of your life

I thank God for the Bible. I was saying to friends who were here at the tab on Sunday that the past weekend, the previous weekend was a remarkable day in the history of Wycliffe Bible Translators because they were able to place the full scriptures, Old and New Testament, in the hands of the people once called Alca Indians. 36 years elapsed since the death of five brethren missionaries, and during that time, many people in that area of Latin America have been one for the Lord, and these folk no longer call themselves Alca, which has got the connotation of savage.

They call themselves wholesome because of what the word of God and the gospel has done in their community. So whatever you may hear about anthropologists shooting off their mouths on the BBC, as they frequently do, you thank God for the scriptures and the way that it preserves the best in culture and changes the hearts of men and women. Why am I saying that? Because man, because the man Joshua was a man of the book.

He was someone who would have loved to have supported the work of the Wycliffe Bible Translators had they been in operation in his day, and he was used by the Lord actually to add to the canon of scripture, the book that bears his name. The end of the book of Joshua, you celebrate, if that's the right word, three funerals. There is Joshua's own funeral, Joshua means the Lord is salvation.

There is reference to the interment of the bones of Joseph, Joseph means the Lord who adds, and there's also reference to the eldest son of Aaron, verse 33, who went to be with the Lord, Eliezer, and that means God who helps. Well it's from the first one, Joshua, that we read of in the 23rd and the 24th chapters, and we'll read just a little selection of scriptures from the final chapters of this book. The first verse is very important to the 23rd chapter.

After a long time had passed and the Lord had given Israel rest from all their enemies around them, Joshua by then old and well advanced in years summoned all Israel, their elders, leaders, judges, and officials and said to them, I am old and well advanced in years, you yourselves have seen everything the Lord your God has done to all these nations for your sake. It was the Lord your God who fought for you. Remember how I have allotted as an inheritance for your tribes all the land of the nations that remain, the nations I conquered between the Jordan and the great sea in the west.

The Lord your God himself will drive them out of your way. Verse six, be very strong, be careful to obey all that is written in the book of the law of Moses without turning aside to the right or to the left. Do not associate with these nations that remain among you.

Do not invoke the names of their gods or swear by them. You must not serve them or bow down to them, but you are to hold fast to the Lord your God as you have until now. The Lord has driven out before you great and powerful nations to this day.

No one has been able to withstand you. One of you routes a thousand because the Lord your God fights for you just as he promised. So be very careful to love the Lord your God.

Verse 14, now I'm about to go the way of all the earth. You know with all your heart and soul that not one of all the good promises the Lord your God gave you has failed. Every promise has been fulfilled, not one has failed.

But just as every good promise of the Lord your God has come true, so the Lord will bring on you all the evil he has threatened until he has destroyed you from this good land he has given you if you violate the covenant of the Lord your God. Chapter 24, Joshua is at Shechem. The congregation has swelled to include not only the leaders and judges of Israel, but a good complement of all the tribes.

If you wonder how he managed to speak to so many, well Shechem in its topography, that is the lie of the land, develops into a natural amphitheater. It was said during the ministry of George Whitefield by Benjamin Franklin, who often heard him, that sometimes the crowds that gathered numbered as many as 30 or 40,000. It is possible for the human voice in the right amphitheater to be carried even without the blessings of microphones and loudspeakers and what have you, a considerable way.

While Joshua has the people in front of him, verse 2, this is what the Lord the God of Israel says, and he takes them on a little historical tour of God's blessings to Israel through Abraham, 2 through to 4, Moses, 5 through to 7, and then a neat synopsis of more recent history. Verse 8, I brought you to the land of the Amorites who lived east of the Jordan. They fought against you, but I gave them into your hands.

I destroyed them from before you, and you took possession of their land. Verse 11, then you crossed the Jordan and came to Jericho. The citizens of Jericho fought against you, as also did the Amorites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hittites, Girgashites, Hivites, and Jebusites.

I was looking forward to reading that, but I gave them into your hands. Verse 14, now fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your forefathers worshipped beyond the river and in Egypt, and serve the Lord.

But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the river or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord. Verse 38, then Joshua sent the people away, each to his own inheritance.

After these things, Joshua, son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of a hundred and ten, and they buried him in the land of his inheritance at Timnath Sira, in the hill country of Ephraim, north of Mount Gaash. Father, we thank you for your holy word. We delight in reading it, in ruminating in its teaching, in turning from one page to another.

Sometimes its meaning leaps out at us, and we grasp the simplicity of the truth. At other times we're perplexed, and we come before you, and we ask for additional light, and you grant it. We praise you that there is sufficient understanding in your sovereignty granted to each of your children to be able to grasp what he or she requires each day from this word.

We sometimes go on the downs, see the fields around this beautiful part of Sussex, watch the sheep graze, watch the cows take their grass, and your faithfulness is even greater to us as you feed us with your word. What fools we are sometimes when you stretch such nourishing fare before us, and we are reluctant, negligent, spasmodic in coming to take of your wholesome word. Oh God, this night as we have the choice privilege of again looking into it together, give us eyes solved that we may see, minds that we may understand, and perhaps even more most important of all, give us wills that are prepared to buckle under the authority of the holy scriptures.

Bless this dear friends, bless the work of Wycliffe Bible Translators around the world. We thank you for hundreds of keenly educated men and women gifted in the reduction of sounds to a written form in order to bring the word of the living God in the sight of those whose ancestors never had it. Lord, bless the distribution of your word around the globe.

In Jesus' precious name. Amen. Well, you can't go through life without making choices, can you? Some choices, sure enough, have foisted on you, but like it's quipped, though you're saddled with your relatives, thank God you can choose your friends.

That was a disastrous choice that Adam made. The day when Eve came and was used as a tempting instrument, having fallen foul herself to the trap, to the snare laid by the evil one, so Adam fell with her. A choice to do what was against the express will of God.

Moses is a happier example. He deliberately chose, says the writer to the Hebrews, to reject all the advantages of being the adopted son of Pharaoh's daughter in order to identify himself with the slave population in that land of bondage. Daniel deliberately chose to engage in prayer, knowing full well that what he had done would merit the wrath of the civil authorities in Babylon, where he found himself.

When the New Testament preachers are released, having received the baptism of the Spirit and they commence proclaiming the message of the gospel, they not only explain about God, they assault the wills of the people who listen, because what they want is for them to bow their knee to the Lord Jesus, who they believe is the name given by God under heaven, the only name amongst men, whereby the hearers can be saved. And so those early gifted evangelists assaulted the will and endeavored to persuade men and women to become servants of the living God. And when the will capitulates and the heart opens to the love of God, then comes that choice discovery that actually it was as a result of the Holy Spirit playing upon the mental faculties, playing upon the will, for salvation is entirely of the Lord.

Well, this book of Joshua is a book that has decisions almost written into every page. I mean, for instance, Joshua right in the commencement of the book is given his own copy of the law of Moses. Verse 6 of chapter 1, be strong and courageous because you will lead these people to inherit the land.

Verse 7, be strong and very courageous. Verse 8, do not let this book of the law depart from your mouth. And Joshua decides to take the scriptures and to live his life under the authority of scripture.

When you move into the second chapter, you discover that Joshua decides to send spies into the land of promise. And as a result of the reconnaissance, Jericho, the chapter 3 is stormed as the decision is made to, or sorry, I said chapter 3, it's into 4, isn't it? As the decision is made to send the army into Jericho. And so you go on throughout the whole of this book, you find that it revolves around choices, decisions taken by Joshua and executed bravely by the people.

And now we come to the concluding moments of Joshua's life. We discover him to be an old man. It's interesting, isn't it? I just throw this out by way of an aside, how Joshua's contemporary Caleb seems to fare physically better than Joshua.

I mean by that, if you remember the story of him saying to the Lord, give me this mountain. You remember that earlier on in the book as he leads just a group of Hebrews and storms a particular tract of land and takes it for himself. One of his arguments is, well, I'm as good as I was when I was a 20-year-old or whatever.

But it seems as though the years have plowed their furrows across the face and the body of Joshua. Twice we're told he's old, well-advanced in years. I wonder sometimes if leading a congregation of people like Joshua did puts such a strain upon the men, upon the men who are like Joshua in church history, that as a result they age and sometimes prematurely.

Paul, for example, when he was writing to Philemon, says in that lovely little epistle, I, Paul the Aged, am appealing to you. But probably he was no more than 60 years of age, old as far as manner is concerned. But as far as most of you are concerned, just in the prime of life, was it that Paul too, like Joshua, knew something of the strains of the ministry of endeavoring to guide people, encouraging and correcting, cajoling, and taking the responsibilities of leadership? Well, like Moses from whom Joshua took the bat on, you remember, he now has in front of him representatives of the whole nation.

And then in the 24th chapter, as I indicated in our reading, the congregation swells and the large proportion of the Hebrew people are assembled before Joshua. And one of the things that he does, which you perhaps have come to expect as you've read carefully through the chapters of this book, is once more assault the wills of the people as he asks them to make definite and specific choices, that as for them, they will serve the Lord. And Joshua determines, speaking on behalf of his own household, the 15th verse of the 24th chapter, as for me and my family, that's the way that we are going to go.

So here, as I indicate in your notes, in the 23rd and 24th chapters of this book, you've got the nunc dimittis, you've got the prayer of departure of Joshua as he prepares to take his leave from the Hebrew community and passes beyond the spiritual Jordan into the immediate presence of the Lord. I said that Joshua is a man of the book, and that is very much the case. For in his closing moments, he gives to the people the same advice, verse 6, chapter 23, as he received earlier on from Moses, be very strong, be careful to obey all that is written in the book of the law of Moses without turning aside to the right or to the left.

You see, this Bible that we have in front of us contains, as you know, 66 books, but it did not always exist like that. The Bible grew. There were the books of Moses, and Joshua took the book of Moses, you remember, or the books of Moses, and he was very careful to have each of those books read publicly before the people in the course of his ministry.

When you go to the eighth chapter in the 34th verse, Joshua again, much younger, has the people assembled in front of him, and we read, Joshua read all the words of the law, the blessings and the curses, just as it is written in the book of the law. There was not a word of all that Moses had commanded that Joshua did not read to the whole assembly of Israel, including the women and children and the aliens who lived among them. You see how I've substantiated my point that Joshua was a man of the book, and the book at that point in history was just the first five books of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch, and Joshua was concerned to educate the Hebrew community in what is written there, because, you see, the religion of the Old Testament, as also the religion of the New, because the two are one, is what I have called in our notes a propositional faith.

What do we mean by that? Why do we use these words? Well, proposition means the laying down of certain set requirements. Christianity has a mysticism about it, but it's not just a religion of experience. It's a religion in which the experiences that people claim are to be checked by the written propositions that God has allowed to be encapsulated, put together in a book.

It was most important for the people of God in those days to be the people of the book, and when Joshua is on his deathbed, he emphasizes that the ministry he has exercised in his life is to be continued when he is gone. Be people of the book. And Joshua is a man who is going to add to the written record.

Look at verse 29 of the 24th chapter. After these things Joshua, son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, I'm sorry, verse 25, on that day Joshua made a covenant for the people, and there at Shechem he drew up for them decrees and laws, and Joshua recorded these things in the book of the law of God. Then he took a large stone and set it up there under the oak, under the holy place, near the holy place of the Lord.

You see again the point. I'm one of these old-fashioned preachers, as you've probably gathered. It distinguishes me from some of the younger occupants of our pulpit, and I use this pulpit Bible.

I use the pulpit Bible for one reason. No, I must be absolutely honest. These days I use the pulpit Bible for two reasons.

The second is a little unkind, so I won't go into it. The first is because I want people to see that this church stands for the Bible, and anything that is proclaimed or said or done in this church that does not measure up to the Bible, well, it has no right to take part at all, to be part of our lives. The authority of the church is not embedded in the elderate.

The authority of the church, the direction that it is to proceed along is from the Word of God, this propositional revelation. This is the reason why no man has a right or woman has a right to stand in our pulpit and say anything that is not in accord with this book, and Joshua would have agreed to that, and that's the reason why I say almost in his closing moments he emphasizes that the book that he has lived his life by, that he has had preached before the congregation, is the book that he advises the Hebrews to take up and live their lives under its authority. Why? Well, the hymn writer puts it, when we walk with the Lord in the light of his Word, let's say it together, what a glory he sheds on our way.

You see, Joshua didn't really have any special power, did he? Not at the human level. I think it's utterly extraordinary when the Hebrews, under the leadership of Joshua, passed through the waters of the Jordan. When he got them to the other side, not only did they celebrate the Passover, which had fallen into abeyance for years, but he also had all the males circumcised.

Now, just up the road is Jericho, and Jericho is inhabited by some of the fierce tribe's people. How easy it would have been for Joshua to have rationalized, all right, circumcision is part of the covenant. We're back in the land that God gave to Abraham, but let's put off this surgical operation for a while.

Let's get the job done first, the physical encounter, the subjugation of our enemies. We are not to weaken ourselves and make us an easy target for these fierce tribe's people. Now, that would have been reasonable logic, but you see, it would have fallen foul against the propositional faith, as Joshua understood it, received from the Lord, in which the Hebrews had been told that the mark of them being the special people of God was circumcision.

So, Joshua will put the word before his reason. That is not a blind thing to do. I mean by that, it does not require you to commit intellectual suicide.

For if you believe as I believe that this book, the Bible, has been given to us by God, then it stands to reason that there will be wisdom and truth in this book that is beyond our own reasoning powers. And the evangelical church is marked off from liberals by saying that this word of God is infallible, is inerrant, is true, not just in what it teaches, but also in the areas on which it touches, from Genesis to Revelation, the propositions of God crammed into the book and we are to live by this book. And it's always been the people of the book who have done exploits for God.

Show me a liberal theologian who has gone into the heart of India or Africa and been used to bring hundreds of people from their paganism into a dynamic experience of God's grace. Joshua was never more strong than when he made the book the authority by which his life was to be controlled. And so he passes on the secret of his success to the children of Israel.

And we today are wise if we accept what he has to declare. How does he esteem the tremendous victories? How does he understand them that the Israelites have known since they crossed the river Jordan and after the subjugation of Jericho? Verse 9 of the 23rd chapter, the Lord has driven out before you great and powerful nations. To this day no one has been able to withstand you.

One of you routes a thousand because the Lord your God fights for you. Here's the punchline, just as he promised. Now where are the promises? They're in the book.

Every promise has been fulfilled. Not one has failed. Verse 14, the latter part.

You see, you get a very excellent definition of the doctrine of Scripture in the early books of the Bible. It claims to be what indeed it is, the inspired Word of God to the people of every generation. Now something that marks Joshua out not only as a spectacular military leader, but as a good preacher, is this.

He not only preaches the Word of God, he preaches all the Word of God. What do I mean by that? Well, let's go back to the 8th chapter once again. In the final verses, at least the penultimate verse, 34.

Afterwards Joshua read all the words of the law, the blessings, and the curses. Curses in Scripture? Oh yes, Scripture does define the character of God as a God of love. There are great and exceedingly precious promises in the Word of God.

Forty years ago, the promises were ransacked and put in little promise boxes that looked like a box of Roundtree's chocolates, or if you like, the honeycomb of a bee's nest. And as you picked out the promises, so you got a Scripture to do you good that day. Marvelous, precious promises.

I will never leave you nor forsake you. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. Casting all your cares upon him, for he cares for you, and so on and so forth.

But in my granny's promise box, I never did find. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Our God is a consuming fire.

You see, the difficulty with promise boxes and the difficulty with some preaching that picks and chooses is, it goes for the blessings, but not for the curses. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian, once wrote, we always read the Bible for ourselves, but not against ourselves. He was exaggerating in degree, but the point remains.

We can be warm to the blessings, but ignorant of the curses. But here is Joshua, and he'll tell the people good and strong. Yes, a hundred of you will be able to rout.

One of you will be able to rout a thousand. Verse 14, you know with all your heart and soul, not one of all the good promises the Lord your God gave you has failed. Verse 15, but just as every good promise of the Lord your God has come true, so the Lord will bring on you all the evil he has threatened, until he has destroyed you from this good land he has given you.

If you violate the covenant of the Lord your God, which he commanded you, and go and serve other gods, and bow down to them, the Lord's anger will burn against you, and you will come quickly and perish from the good land he has given you. You see, there are certain parts of Scripture that we don't like. No preacher wants to expound the doctrine of hell.

Before I go to Japan, and heaven alone knows how I'm going to find time, I have to write an article for a fairly influential mission magazine on the doctrine of eternal punishment. I strain over backwards to try to find some scriptures that lessens the impact of that doctrine. I want to be annihilationist.

I didn't say I want to be annihilated. I want to be an annihilationist, to believe that if a person rejects Christ, then they don't go into an eternity without God. But ultimately, sooner or later, they will be snuffed out.

I would prefer to believe that. But you see, our Lord talked about the worm that never dies, the fires that never go out. Metaphor, yes.

But when the Bible refers to the everlasting nature of God and uses exactly the same word to speak about the everlasting nature of life without God in the world to come, then I find it illogical to presume that God lasts forever and ever. But when the word everlasting is used in Scripture to define the state of those who rejected Christ, it doesn't quite mean that. I'm in difficulty.

I don't like what I preach, but then I'm not the author of the Bible. God is. It would have been easier for Joshua in his dying moments just to have talked in terms of the blessings.

Now, he does refer to the blessings, but he's also an honest preacher. He refers as well to the curses. I was studying a Puritan theologian in the States that is a man who lived in Puritan times, but he himself, his ministry was in North America.

Actually, it was just a little later than the Puritan times. His name was Cotton Mather, and he said this about his preaching. First of all, I preach the terrors, and then I preach the comforts.

What did he mean? Well, he meant simply this, that he reminded people how fearful a thing it would be to fall into the hands of the living God, unpardoned, unforgiven. He preached the terrors, and then he preached the comforts. You've no need to look forward.

In fact, you wouldn't be looking forward with great anticipation. You've no need to dread the day of standing before God. Here are the comforts.

What are they? Well, Christ Jesus, Him, the Son of God, born into this earth as a small child, preserving His sinlessness intact, dying on the cross for the sins of believing mankind, making it possible for His righteousness to be credited to your account, filling you with the Holy Spirit, making you to be a child of the living God so that you're poised ultimately to go into heaven. The terrors and then the comforts. Well, here it is with Joshua, I say.

He warns the people as well as consoles the people about the future and how God will continue to bless them if they live their lives in accordance with the truths of this Word. You see, again, as I bring out in these notes, our God is an awesome God. He is a God for whom we should have great respect.

Fear Him, ye saints, and you will have nothing else to fear. Wasn't that Joseph Hart's great hymn? So Joshua has all the people in front of him, and he puts to them the options. He says, if you want to serve the Lord, then choose this way for yourselves.

Otherwise, well, go back to the gods that your forefathers served beyond the river. He refers to Abraham, and he will remind us in the second verse and onwards how Abraham, who lived east of the Euphrates, used to be a sun and a moon worshipper. At least he came from that particular environment.

But God took Abraham out of all the paganism, and He brought him into the land of Canaan. Then He reminds them of the gods of Egypt and the hold that these gods had on Pharaoh, the plagues that God had to send on Pharaoh and the Egyptians so that the Egyptians would be discomforted and the Hebrews would come out of Egypt. Do they really want to go back to those gods, or the gods of the Amorites who live east of the Jordan? Choose, says Joshua, whether you're going to go to these gods, inverted commas, because they don't really exist, although Satan can use the figment of the imagination and pour an awful amount of demonism and evil into the concept, so that the gods seem to have a reality that is not theirs.

They are but a manifestation of the power of evil. Choose that, says Joshua, or choose the Lord your God. And he homes in on the thought, as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.

Why does Joshua determine that he's going to serve the Lord? Well, because as he indicates in these two chapters and in the previous part of the book, there is every intimation, there is every evidence that the Lord God of Abraham is the God who acts in history. He has come and delivered the Israelites time and time again. Look at the eighth verse of the 24th chapter, I brought you to the land of the Amorites.

I gave them into your hands. I destroyed them. And so it goes on, the concept of this God moving on behalf of his people.

You see, the God that we believe in, in Judeo-Christianity, is a God who has moved in history. That doesn't mean to say that we see him at every end and turn, but there are great movements in the story of mankind when it is obvious that God has, in a spectacular fashion, laid bare his arm and brought about events in the human story. I make reference in my final page of notes to the way Lloyd-Jones made a distinction between history in terms of the things that God permits and the things that God promotes.

And I say that the permissions are more frequent than the promotions. And here in the book of Joshua, you've got God's promotions so many times exampled. But the greatest promotion of God in history was the day when the Lord Jesus came into the world.

God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. Why does Luke, the doctor, the scientist, why does he take great care, as he tells us in the opening verses of the Acts of the Apostles, to write a record of the life of Jesus? Why does John, the evangelist, tell us that he has taken a selection of events and extracts of the teaching of Jesus and got them into a book and goes on to say that if everything that Jesus had done and everything he taught was written down, then there wouldn't be a book big enough to contain it. Why are they concerned to have these extracts of the teaching of Jesus, accounts of the miracles of Jesus? Well, you see, it has all to do with this propositional faith.

Years after the death of Joshua, the people will have the book that records the promotions of God. Centuries after the birth and death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus, we have the book that tells us about the promotions of God. The Bible does ask us to lift its authority at a level that is above our own reason, but it doesn't say that the biblical faith is an unreasonable faith.

We are to reason things out. If God has moved in history, if he has shown his compassion and his concern, if he did it in the greater than Joshua, even our Lord Jesus Christ, if he has revealed himself as a God who wants to help sinful people like us, then isn't it reasonable, isn't it logical to respond to what God has to say and to offer our lives in his service as Joshua did? Francis Schaeffer, as I say in my concluding note, remarks of Joshua, he chose and he chose and he kept on choosing, and I add Joshua got it right, and we have to choose. Choose whom we will serve.

Choose the level of dedication that we're prepared to offer this God who has moved in history towards us. The choice is ours. We're not puppets on a string.

God is sovereign, and though philosophically I cannot work this out, despite the overarching sovereignty of God, he gives us an ability to make decisions. The book of Joshua, I say, is replete with an account of choices. The whole Bible is a book that speaks of choices.

From the voice of Elijah on Carmel comes the challenge, choose you this day whom you will serve. If Baal is God, then serve him. If God the Lord is God, then serve him.

But whatever you do, choose, and indeed you must, for if someone confronted with the gospel remains in a spirit of indecision, that is credited by God as a negative choice. The one who is not with me, says Joshua Jesus, is against me. So brothers and sisters, it's my privilege to wind up this little series of addresses from this remarkable book of Joshua, a historical account in the Old Testament of the people of God taking the land that God has promised them, claiming it for themselves.

We are the New Testament people of God, so much land for us to possess, so many conquests for us in which to engage. Let's choose wholeheartedly to stand alongside Joshua and to say ask for us, ask for our pastoral groups, ask for Fettleworth and Maybridge fellowships, ask for Worthing Tabernacle. We will serve the Lord and we will submit ourselves to the authority of the book of the Lord.

Amen.