Joshua

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. So today, we get to a new character, Joshua. He's the heir apparent to Moses. He leads God's people into the Promised Land, but before he does so, I think, though the whole book is about Joshua, the book of Joshua, before he even starts the first battle, there is an encounter in Joshua chapter 5 that really sets the entire scene for the rest of the book and sets up the premise of how things are to be. So we are going to be reading in Joshua chapter 5. So let's read Joshua 5, 13 to 15. When Joshua was by Jericho, he lifted up his eyes and looked. And behold, a man was standing before him with his drawn sword in his hand. And Joshua went to him and said to him, Are you for us or for our enemies? And he said, No, but I am the commander of the army of the Lord. Now I have come. And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and worshiped and said to him, What does my Lord say to his servant? And the commander of the Lord's army said to Joshua, Take off your sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy. And Joshua did so. Have you ever noticed that the Bible has a lot of weird stories? It is a strange book. It's ancient Near Eastern literature in the Old Testament. And here this story is kind of enigmatic. It might make you puzzle. It's actually meant to make you puzzle and to think and to meditate and try to connect the dots with other stories, some which we have already covered, like the encounter with Abraham that we talked about in Genesis chapter 15 a couple of weeks ago. But to connect with all of these other stories of how God encounters human beings in a very personal, holy, complete way. So who is this guy that Joshua meets? Why in this way? We're going to answer these questions from this strange story with these three different points today. First of all, the wrong question. Yeah, that's what Joshua asks. Secondly, the righteous answer that this holy one gives, and then the proper response that Joshua shows. The wrong question. Yeah, Joshua asks the wrong questions, but you can kind of understand why. You see, this is before any battle has taken place in the Promised Land, but he knows. Boy, does he know. You know, 40 years ago, he and Caleb, along with 10 other spies, went into the land and saw and did, and spied on the land to see the battlements, the walled cities, the fruitfulness of the land, the giants who were in the land. He knew the opposition. He knew it well. And in the ensuing 40 years, because of the disobedience of Israel, Joshua was able to gain a lot of wisdom, I think, and a bit more humility, and a deeper understanding of the brokenness and fallenness and faithlessness of God's own people. And now he is on his own before the battle of Jericho, wondering what to do, because this will be the first time they face a new technology called the walled city, a thick, high, impregnable wall. How is this going to work? He doesn't have a clue. He doesn't have a plan. He doesn't know how. You can almost hear the worry in his mind. You can almost see him pacing back and forth, and then in the distance he sees this man coming with a drawn sword by his side, and he asks, are you for us or for our adversaries? And I say that's the wrong question. Too often that's the questions we ask, you know, are you for us or against us? Either or. And we often have asserted, just like most of the nations have asserted, that God is on our side. We have the righteous cause. We are the ones who are in charge. The real issue is not, are you for us or against us? That's the wrong question. Abraham Lincoln was asked in what I think we would consider the righteous cause of the Civil War, where the North was trying to abolish and eliminate the slavery that was happening in the South, whether God was on the side of Lincoln. And he responded, sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side. My greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right. And Lincoln astutely observed that both North and South had used God, had claimed to read their Bibles, had prayed to the same God for victory. But the real question is not, is God on my side? Am I on his? Be wary of anyone, anyone who claims that God is on my side. We often don't realize the presumptions we're making when we say things like that, and all too often I've heard preachers divvy things up. And what happens is like those people out there, they're the enemy. Look at us. We're so great. We're on God's side. And yet what that does is it creates a self-righteousness in us and it will justify violence and it will justify ungodly practices against other people, just because God is on our side and we have to win. History is filled with the shrapnel and bomb blasts where God was used as their divine rubber stamp and approval for bigotry, for greed, for hatred, for violence. That might be easy for us to see...