Joshua Introduction (Part 2)

Joshua — Steve Gregg

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Joshua Introduction (Part 2)

JoshuaSteve Gregg

As Christians, we must trust in God's prerogatives in executing judgment on sinners, even if we struggle to comprehend His actions. Joshua's conquest of the Canaanites serves as an example of the principles of righteousness and ungodliness that define God's judgment and blessing. While there are varying views on war among Christians, the concept of spiritual warfare involves Christians spreading the gospel and eliminating demonic influence to conquer the world for Christ.

Transcript

We were talking about the sort of the ethics behind the warfare in Joshua because of course we have in Joshua the, there's no nicer way to put it, the use of genocide, wiping out a whole race of people. In modern times, the cases of genocide we know of are cases which we would all agree are criminal behavior, war crimes. I mean, Hitler attempted the genocide of the Jews and even if it hadn't been the Jews, it would have been a crime.

You know, I mean Christians are especially offended that the Jews were under attack, but even if it was anyone else, it would be equally bad. Try to wipe out a whole population and yet God commands Joshua to do just that with the Canaanites. And I was saying that this is not the same kind of thing as the idea of jihad.

To the Muslim, jihad is, you know, world Islam is spread by one of two options, you convert or you die. And so it's conversion by the edge of the sword. God never gave any kind of assignment like that to the Jews.

Israel was never told to go out and convert people or kill them. Only one geographical area was targeted for destruction and that was the area that God had promised Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And the people that were there, we find scripture saying very clearly, they were exceedingly wicked.

If you look at Deuteronomy chapter 9 verses 4 and 5, it says, Do not think in your heart, God is speaking to Israel, Do not think in your heart after the Lord your God has cast them out before you, saying because of my righteousness the Lord has brought me into possession of this land. But it is because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is driving them out from before you. So, you know, some people think that the Israelites, you know, weren't really guided by God.

Of course, people who are atheists and so forth, they still have to interpret this history. They say, well, the Israelites, they just pretended that God was sanctioning them because they were just, you know, like any other bloodthirsty tribal group wanting to take territory from another tribe. And, you know, God had nothing to do with it.

And yet, if they were making this up, they wouldn't be so insulting to themselves. I mean, usually, when you read American history and how we came and took things from the American Indians, our white European settlers are always glorified as, you know, freedom loving peoples, pioneering a new era of democracy and liberty and so forth eventually. You know, the American Indians, we don't really portray them as particularly wicked.

It's just that we were so great that we deserved the land. We came over and we were good folks. We were on a mission from God and we're the good guys.

The Native Americans, in some conflicts, we kind of portray them as the bad guys, especially against the cowboys. But the fact is that the way that most histories are written, including the way American history is written, it's like our glorious ancestors, you know, came and kind of got what we deserved as we took land because we deserved it and we're great people. And the Israelites didn't, their documents don't say that.

They say they aren't righteous. They're wicked. But they're just not as wicked as the people that they were sent in to destroy.

The whole reason for destroying the Canaanites was not just that God's favorites were the Jews and therefore, you know, the Canaanites stood in their way and so they had to go. It's because the Canaanites were so wicked, God had to get rid of them one way or another. Now, in the days of Abraham, he had done the same thing to Sodom and Gomorrah, but he didn't give the land of Sodom and Gomorrah to Abraham.

It wasn't a matter of taking territory from them. It was a matter of judging them because they were wicked. And that's similar to what was true of the Canaanites.

The difference is the Canaanites were not destroyed by fire and brimstone from heaven, but by war. And while this makes it a little bit more objectionable from the standpoint of the people who have to perform the work, especially for killing women and children, the outcome is the same. I mean, if it was fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah, it took out the women and children too.

We just don't think about it as much because we don't picture a man with a sword actually killing an innocent baby. We see God killing babies and women and children and animals in Sodom and Gomorrah, but when you get a human agency doing it, then of course you've got the ethics of the person that come into our figuring and our sentiments. So I think, well, how could a soldier actually kill a baby or kill a woman or just commit this mayhem? It is weird, and I'm actually glad that God doesn't do that anymore.

I'm glad there aren't any populations that he's going to send the church out to annihilate because I would have a very hard time doing it. But one reason I'd have a hard time doing it, and one reason we find it objectionable, is because we were born and raised in a Christian culture. It's not the Enlightenment that gave us these enlightened ideas, it's Christianity.

It's because the same God who had this done on this occasion has given further revelation of himself in Christ, and Christ has influenced Western civilization that now we look on this kind of behavior as unacceptable. And it is unacceptable now, because God's not doing that now. But if God wanted to judge whole nations, today he has every right to do it, whether it's by fire and brimstone from heaven or by war or by the earth opening and swallowing them up or by a flood that wipes them all out.

All of these situations take out people wholesale, men, women, and children. Or for that matter, even in things that aren't necessarily direct judgments from God, tsunamis and earthquakes and things like that take out whole populations sometimes. This is not something that God has to explain himself.

God has the right to take us out any time he wants to, including us who are not guilty. If there was a tsunami that wiped out my home and my children and me, I wouldn't stand before God and say, God, how do you justify this? What I'd say is, oh, so that's how it's going to happen to me. I knew I was going to die.

I didn't know the day, I didn't know the matter, but I knew I was going to die because sinners die. There's a death sentence on every human being who is born. The soul that sins, it will die.

We're born sinners and therefore we're born with the death sentence. Now whether we die in a few days after birth or a few years or a few decades, we think that's important because from our perspective, this life is all that we know and value. But the Bible teaches us a different perspective and that is that the ultimate tragedy is not that a person dies, but that they die unprepared to meet God because everyone is going to meet God.

As far as I'm concerned, a baby who dies, as I understand scripture, he meets God on good terms. If somebody is innocent, they have nothing to fear from facing God. That doesn't mean they won't die young.

They might die young in a natural disaster or from criminal behavior or from a direct judgment that God has on their society. God has the right to take out people whenever he wants and if he takes them out when they're one day old or a hundred years old, in eternity it won't make a whole lot of difference. Except that the child who dies at a day old is fairly guaranteed heaven, where the same child who lives to be a hundred years old, chances are he won't be there, especially the Canaanites.

If those children had lived and grown up in the Canaanite culture, they'd still die some day. They'd be dead now, but they wouldn't be with God now and in all likelihood they are the ones who died in infancy. The ones who are wicked, we can't really make any appeals on their behalf.

What seems unfair is that it seems unfair for God to take out someone young because we're not young and he hasn't taken us out. From our perspective, it's not really right for God to take out young people. But the real marvel is why he doesn't take us all out sooner.

It's not really how does God justify killing people, it's how does he justify not killing people for so long. The Canaanites were endured by God for a much longer time than any of us could really imagine because they were an exceedingly demonic culture. Archaeologists have unearthed monuments and fragments of their society that tell us how they worshipped their Molech and how they worshipped Baal.

As they say, they burned their children alive on a bronze statue with a fire built in it so it was red hot. It had a bull's head and a man's body and its arms were out like this with its hands up and they put a live baby in a red hot bronze statue until it burned alive. And lest they should be regretful about it by hearing the baby scream, the moment they did so they struck up the band and had loud musical instruments playing music to drown out the baby's screams while they had an orgy in front of the idol.

That's how Canaanite worship went. Now why God endured that for hundreds of years is harder to understand than why he had it wiped out. In Abraham's time, God said, after 400 years I'm going to bring your people back here, after 430 years I'm going to bring them back here to conquer this land.

He says, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full. That is to say, they're not really quite ready for me to judge them. That's Genesis 15-16.

These people in the days of Joshua, their iniquity was full. It was time for them to be judged. But several hundred years later in the time of Abraham, it wasn't yet time.

Although they were already doing these things. God tolerated them for hundreds of years before he sent judgment upon them. We just read about the judgment and we don't really read about all their history that God saw of what they were doing.

If you look at Leviticus chapter 18, we get a sense of this. In Leviticus 18 verses 24 and 25, Moses says to Israel, do not defile yourselves with any of these things. We can look at the kind of things he's talking about in that chapter.

He says, don't sleep with your mother, don't sleep with your wife's mother, don't sleep with your neighbor's wife. Look at verse 21, you shall not let any of your descendants pass through the fire to Molech, nor shall you profane the name of your God, I am the Lord. You shall not lie with a male as with a woman, it's an abomination.

You shall not mate with any beast. I mean, these are pretty disgusting things here. And then he says, do not defile yourselves, verse 24, with any of these things, for by all these things the nations are defiled which I am casting out before you.

He means the Canaanites. These are the things they did. They slept with, they had sex with animals.

They practiced homosexuality. They burned their children in fire to Molech. This is what they were doing.

And God says, I'm casting it out because they did this. And he says in verse 25, for the land is defiled, therefore I visit the punishment of its iniquity upon it, and the land vomits them out. It's like everything they're doing is so disgusting, it's as if the land itself can't bear them.

It's nauseated by their behavior. Now, we don't read Canaanite history in the Bible. We read Jewish history in the Bible, Israelite history.

And so all this time we're reading about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Israel in Egypt, and Moses' time. The Canaanites are doing all these things, but it's just not on record. And so when we see the Israelites coming in and why are they attacking these poor innocent people here? These are not enemies of theirs.

Why are they picking on them? Well, it's not Israel picking on them, it's God picking on them. It's God had a complaint against them, and it was their time to go. Hard as it is for us sometimes to be sympathetic to it.

But when we think about genocide in this case, we have to remember several things. We look at it from a Christian perspective in a way that a non-Christian can't look at it. And for that reason, we can't really expect to convince a non-Christian that this is okay.

You almost have to be on God's side to start with before you can see it from His way. If you're a humanist, you're going to take man's side, and God's going to have to explain His actions. See, there's a complaint between God and sinful man.

We're either going to stand on God's side in the matter or on sinful man's side. Because we are sinful people, we tend by default to stand on the side of man and say, how dare God treat people this way? But Christians, those people who have made a transfer of loyalty, we're on God's side now. We're not on the side of God's enemies.

We're on the side of God. And therefore, we recognize that God has prerogatives to do what He wants to, especially since all people have sinned and there's a death sentence, He can execute whenever He wishes. What's amazing is He doesn't do it any sooner than He does.

But if you look at Jeremiah 18, this is said in connection with Israel, but it certainly is applicable to any nation. In Jeremiah 18, verse 1, it says, The word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying, Arise and go down to the potter's house, and there I will cause you to hear my words. Then I went down to the potter's house, and there he was making something on the wheel.

And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in his hand. So he made it again into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to make. Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying, O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter, says the Lord? Look, as the clay is in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.

The instant I speak concerning a nation or concerning a kingdom, to pluck it up, pull it down, or destroy it, if that nation against whom I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I have thought to bring against it. And the instant I speak concerning a nation or concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it, if it does evil in my sight, so that it does not obey my voice, then I will relent concerning the good which I said I would benefit it. Now notice, he's actually talking about Israel here, but he says any nation.

I can do with any nation as I wish, like a potter can do what he wants with the pots. But he said, I actually don't act capriciously or arbitrarily. I sometimes will pronounce judgment on a nation, but if they turn around, I won't judge them.

I sometimes pronounce blessing on a nation, but if they turn around from their good, I won't bless them. In other words, there's a method to this behavior of God. It's not unpredictable, it's not capricious.

It's just that he acts upon principle. And a righteous nation will ultimately be blessed. An ungodly nation will someday have to be judged unless it turns from its evil.

Nineveh was very evil. Within 40 days of its destruction, God sent Jonah, but they repented. And so it says God repented of the evil that he said to do it.

He didn't bring disaster on Nineveh, not for another hundred years. So God is very patient, more than reasonable. And so when he finally does wipe people out, it's after he's put up with an awful lot of gun.

And Christians are supposed to take God's side in these matters. Look at Psalm 139. Some people don't like some of the Psalms that talk about David's anger toward the wicked and wishing evil upon them.

Those Psalms that do that are called the imprecatory Psalms. And this is one of them. In Psalm 139, verses 19-22, David says, Now I especially appreciate that last line because he's indicating he's not talking about people who are his enemies.

He's talking about people who are God's enemies. He says, I count them my enemies. Why? Because they hate you.

Because they're bloodthirsty. They curse you. They do wickedly.

These are wicked people. They're not David's personal foes. He hates them not because they're doing something wrong to him, but because he's on God's side.

He says, I can see that these people are at war with you, God, and I'm standing with you. Therefore, I make them my enemies. Not because I would otherwise, but because I'm on God's side.

I take God's enemies to be my enemies. I count them to be my enemies, and I'll hate them. Now, hate them, of course, we have to understand means that he takes the hard line against them.

In the New Testament, we know we're supposed to even love our enemies, but that doesn't mean we don't take a hard line against evil. So, when we say, okay, God said this is the right thing to do, wipe out these Canaanites. If I don't see why it is, I'm just going to take God's side in this and say, God knows more about what's going on than I do.

He certainly is a better judge of what's justice than I am. He certainly knows more of what is deserved by any given individual or society than I know. He takes everything into consideration.

He never acts unjustly. If we believe that about God, we just take his side in cases like this. The unbeliever is not going to sympathize with us in that.

If we always want to have the unbeliever's approval, we're going to have to sometimes not take God's side because unbelievers don't. But we're going to have to be willing to experience the disapproval of unbelievers sometimes. Jesus said, Woe unto you when all men speak well of you.

We want them to. We want them to all speak well of us. But sometimes we have to say, you know, I know you can't sympathize with this, but God's right.

This is the right thing to do. How do I know it? Well, I can see some of the reasons why it's right, but even if I couldn't, I know that God only does right things. And therefore, it's right because God did it.

And that will sound very naive to anyone who isn't already on God's side. But, you know, we're fools for Christ, Paul said. Sometimes we don't like to be.

We like to be apologists. We like to be able to give reasonable answers so that it's the person who's not the believer who looks stupid. Sometimes we're going to look stupid just because of our presuppositions, one of which is God's right.

I'm on his side. That's not a shared presupposition with most of the people in our society. You know, some people think, well, couldn't have Israel have just killed the adults and spared the children? What, the children to wander around the desert and fend for themselves without parents? Or Israel become an adoption agency for Canaanite children? Is that what God called Israel to be? God didn't call Israel to be, you know, an orphanage for Canaanites.

He called them to be his own special people. And so it might seem harsh to go ahead and kill the children. But as I said, if those children died and went to heaven, they're better off than if they lived and became Canaanite pagans.

And they'd die anyway and wouldn't be so well off as a result. Anyway, this is not an easy thing. There's no easy way to make this feel good to us.

But one thing we have to note, too, about the wars in Joshua is since the experiences of the children of Israel are a type of our experience, according to Paul in 1 Corinthians 10, verse 6 and verse 11, we can see these wars of Israel as types of the warfare we do, which is of a spiritual type. Of course, we're not sent to go and wage physical war against any society or any people. Paul said the weapons of our warfare, meaning us Christians, our warfare, our weapons are not carnal, but they're mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds.

2 Corinthians 10, 4 and 5 say, casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God. We have spiritual strongholds, spiritual territory to conquer, and there's resistance, there's demonic powers. Paul said we don't wrestle against flesh and blood, but we do wrestle against principalities and powers and rulers of the darkness of this age and spiritual wickedness in the high places.

This is Ephesians 6, I think it's verse 12. So, the idea is we're not fighting a physical warfare, we don't wrestle against flesh and blood, our weapons are not physical weapons, but we do have a warfare, and it is typified that the conquest of the land of Canaan is a type of the Christians fighting the battles of the Lord in the spiritual realm and conquering his enemies who are under his judgment at that time, too. In fact, look at Psalm 149.

I really wonder sometimes what the writer of this psalm had in mind when he wrote the words he did, but they sure speak to the Christian in a certain way, and I wonder maybe if the Holy Spirit just didn't, you know, if this is one of those passages where the writer didn't know what he was talking about, but the Holy Spirit gave him words that a later generation would find useful. But, it says in Psalm 149, beginning at verse 5, Now, the reason I don't know what this writer had in mind is because I don't know who the writer was. It doesn't say it was David, and some of the psalms were, and some of them were not written by David.

Of the 150 psalms, there were 75 of them have David's name on them. The other 75, some of them have people's names on them, some have none. This one's anonymous.

So, it could have been written at any time in Israel's history, but not as early as Joshua's time, probably. However, when it talks about the saints taking a two-edged sword in their hand and executing vengeance on the nations, actually, Israel through most of its history didn't have the role of going out and attacking the nations and being God's agents of vengeance on the nations. And, I wonder sometimes if this is the Holy Spirit's message to the church about our spiritual warfare.

We are sent to the nations. Jesus said, go and make disciples of all nations. And, we are to conquer their rulers, not their physical rulers, the spiritual rulers, the heavenly wickedness in spiritual places that Paul talks about.

Those are the nobles in terms of that we are to bind and to conquer. And, it says, this honor has all of his saints. But, in verse 9 it says, the saints execute on them the written judgment.

In other words, there is a judgment that God has handed down from his bar of justice on these nations or on their rulers. And, the saints go out and they execute the sentence. Now, like I said, Joshua was doing that, but this psalm was probably written a long time after Joshua.

Almost everyone would agree with that. So, there is no time in Israel's history when that really would have been applicable to Israel that I can know of. And, certainly God has never authorized the church to go out and fight in physical wars.

So, I've always thought this must be a reference to spiritual warfare. And, certainly a two-edged sword in the hand of the believer. Paul said that the word of God is like a two-edged sword.

We go out to the nations and we strike down the demonic overlords of those nations through the preaching of the gospel and through the warfare we are involved in. But, there is a judgment written against the demonic powers. When Jesus died, they were condemned.

Jesus said in John 12, 31, now is the judgment of this world. Now shall the ruler of this world be judged or cast out. He said, the Holy Spirit will speak of the judgment of the world because the prince of this world is judged.

God has judged Satan at the cross. And, we are enforcing that judgment by the warfare of going to the nations and basically destroying the devil's influence there. That's what we are called to do.

That's what our warfare is. It's like the conquest of the world for Christ through the preaching of the gospel. In a sense, it's parallel to the conquest of Canaan by Joshua and the children of Israel.

They have a physical warfare. It corresponds to our spiritual warfare. And, that I believe is intentional.

I believe that there are many things in the Old Testament that are intentional types of New Testament realities. Now, there is another aspect that doesn't have to do with Jihad particularly or genocide even. But, still where Christians become divided.

And, that is over the whole issue of Christians and war or God's attitude toward war in general. Because, none of us today would approve of a Jihad or of genocide if we were asked to go out and commit such. I mean, if you were a Christian in the military and you were told to go wipe out all the women and children in a village in Vietnam or something.

As a Christian, you would never be able to do that. You would say, we can never approve of that. That's wrong.

But, many Christians do approve of other kinds of fighting in war. Certainly, many godly people went to World War II to fight the Japanese and the Nazis in Germany. There are very few Christians that would disapprove of that.

But, there are some who do. There are some who say that Christians shouldn't fight in war at all. In fact, that was the position of the early church for the first three centuries.

There were really no Christian spokesmen who ever spoke favorably toward Christians fighting in war until probably Augustine. And, Augustine advocated a theory called the Just War Theory. Until Augustine, around 400 AD, all the church fathers who spoke on the subject said that Christians are not called to fight in wars.

They fight a spiritual warfare on behalf of their society and on behalf of God. And, they don't need to take up physical weapons like Paul said. The weapons of all warfare are not physical.

We don't wrestle against flesh and blood. And so, the church fathers took that very literally and didn't believe that Christians should ever fight in wars. But, Augustine brought into the church something Plato had come up with called the Just War Theory.

And, that was that Christians should not fight in every war. But, it is moral and right for Christians to fight in some wars. Of course, by Augustine's time, the church had become melded with the Roman state.

Because, Constantine wrote this about 75 years after Constantine the Emperor had become a Christian. And, Rome became essentially, you know, intermixed with the church. And so, of course, if Rome was going to fight wars, its soldiers were all part of the church.

You know, all the Romans were becoming Christians, so called, at least during the church. So, either Rome was not going to be able to defend itself from the barbarians at all, or else they're going to have to have some kind of ethic where Christians could fight the barbarians. So, Augustine came up with, borrowing from Plato, the Just War Ethic.

And, he said, you know, it is wrong for Christians to fight in a lot of wars. A lot of wars are just bad, just immoral. But, some wars are not immoral.

Some wars are just. And, Christians should be in favor of justice and should be willing to fight for justice. And so, he put out guidelines, which Augustine called the Just War Guidelines.

And, basically, there were a whole bunch of guidelines, but a few of them that would be real easy to remember would be, a just war would have to be entirely defensive. You could not, in other words, initiate an attack against somebody else. You had to just defend your own nation.

A just war would be fought with proportionate means, not excessive means. That is, you would use only as many weapons and means and forces as are necessary to repel the aggression of your enemy, rather than going and bombing and destroying their whole cities unnecessarily. The Just War Guidelines suggest that your army would have to guarantee immunity of non-combatants on the enemy side.

So, you would not kill anyone except their soldiers. And, these were some of the guidelines. There's a long list of guidelines.

And, most Christian philosophers, at least of the Reformed persuasion, would say that Just War Guidelines are good and biblical. And, they might be. It's hard to say.

It's controversial. Some Christians say we shouldn't fight in any wars, because the wars of this world are not our warfare. We're citizens of heaven.

We're ambassadors here. We're not really citizens in the sense that the welfare of an earthly nation in any way impacts the welfare of the kingdom of God. Which is our citizenship.

So, I mean, there's different views on this. But, we can affirm some things about some wars. One thing the Bible teaches is that war is used by God as a divine judgment.

Not only in the Old Testament, but in New Testament times as well. We see it all the time in the Old Testament. God used the war of Joshua to destroy the Canaanites.

It was a judgment of God on them. God used the Babylonians and the Assyrians to bring judgment on Israel and on Judah when they needed to be judged. We continually have the prophets speaking of God's judgment on certain nations being carried out through ordinary wars.

Cyrus coming against Babylon was God's judgment on Babylon. Babylon coming against Egypt was God coming to Egypt in Isaiah 19 to destroy Egypt. When God wants to judge a nation, He often, usually does it through war.

And so, even though the people who are conducting the aggressive war against that nation are not godly people, they are nonetheless seen as God's instruments. For example, in Isaiah 10, God is talking about how the Assyrians are going to be used to destroy the northern kingdom of Israel. And they did.

But, in Isaiah 10, God says, but the Assyrians don't see it that way. The Assyrians don't see themselves as the agents of God's righteous judgment. He says, they're just aggressive territory monitors.

They're just people who want to swallow up as much land as they can. They're not seeing themselves as agents of God. They're just seeing themselves as, you know, aggressive warriors taking territory for their country.

But He's saying, they are inadvertently God's agents. And they boast about their exploits. And in that chapter, He says, can the axe boast against the one who cuts with it? Can the saw boast against the one who's cutting with it? In other words, He's saying, Assyria is just like a tool in God's hand.

The tool doesn't know about the one who's wielding it. The tool is only conscious of itself doing what it's doing, but God is the one moving it. And that's the theology of war in the Bible, that war is actually used by God.

He's always on the side of the people who win. The people who actually come as the agents of judgment are sometimes worse than the people they're judging. In fact, that was part of the message of Habakkuk.

Because God told Habakkuk that Judah was going to be destroyed by the Babylonians. And Habakkuk's reaction was, well, wait a minute. I mean, we're bad, but we're not as bad as the Babylonians.

How can you use these pagan Babylonians who worship demons as an agent of judgment against us, your people who just happen to be in rebellion and apostasy? We're not as bad as they are. And God's answer to Habakkuk was, well, that may be true. I am going to judge you by them, and they'll judge them by someone else.

They'll get theirs. In other words, the fact that God's using Babylon doesn't mean He approves of Babylon. It just means that they're a tool He uses.

Now, if that's the way God views war, how do we see that in modern-day wars? I would have to say that just by the outcome, we could say that the allied forces in World War II were God's tool to judge Hitler and the corrupt allies that he had. But what if it had turned out otherwise? Could we have judged that Hitler, evil as he was, might have been God's agent of judgment to destroy us? I'm not sure we were bad enough yet to come out of that judgment. So God spared us and took him out.

What about in a future war, though? What if the communist Chinese would invade us here? Whose side would God be on? Would we know? You see, one thing that's very different about modern wars than biblical wars is you always knew whose side God was on because the prophets told you. You see? God's prophet Moses told Joshua, you go and kill the Canaanites. So you know whose side God's on here.

In Jeremiah's day, when Jerusalem was under judgment, Babylon had hemmed the Jerusalemites in their city. It was besieged. And, of course, the people of Jerusalem were wanting to fight.

Jeremiah, the prophet, was saying, no, surrender. This is God's judgment against us. If you fight against them, you'll die.

If you surrender, you'll live. And he was put in jail as a traitor because he's telling the armies to surrender to the enemy. You know, it does sound like you're kind of undermining your country to say, go surrender to the enemy.

But he was the prophet of God. He knew what was going on. This is God's judgment.

Don't think that God's going to spare you here. And what if there was a modern war? Take, for example, like I said. We could say the jihadists.

What if it was radical Islam at war with us? Or what if it was the Chinese invaders? Certainly every Christian you know in America would say, God is on our side. We're not exactly a Christian country anymore, but we're not commies and we're not Muslims. We're the good guys.

They're the bad guys. Well, that may even be true. They may be worse than we are.

But how could we know if God's judging us? You know, when we're not at war, preachers have no trouble saying, oh, America's ripe for judgment. But let it come. And suddenly they're going to fight against it, you know.

It's interesting, you know. I mean, they say, you know, if God doesn't judge America, he's going to have to resurrect Sodom and Gomorrah and apologize because we're getting as bad as them and he didn't let them get away with it. Preachers are fond of saying how overdue judgment is and how much we're scorning God.

But just let God try to bring it. And we'll send our sons off to fight it off and maybe kill fighting God. This is a complex ethical question.

And when people just assume that any time there's a war, you should fight on the side of your country, and when they defend that by saying, look at the wars in the Old Testament. God sent Joshua, God sent David, God sent the Israelites to fight wars, so, of course, he's for it. Well, he was for them.

That's true. And he was against their enemies. And if he's for us, he'll preserve us, too, I suppose.

The question is how do we know? We don't have prophets informing our president when and when not to go to war. In fact, nowadays we don't even have Congress informing him. He just goes when he wants to.

But at least if Congress informed him, it would be a legal war, but it might not be ethical. But anyway, the truth is, the wars that God sanctioned, he let his prophets know so they could tell the people of God whether they're to fight or not to fight. I don't know of any military force on the planet today who's getting their orders from prophets of God.

I think they just act in their national best interest. And if the national best interest happens to be under the judgment of God, then you may be fighting God, for all you know. That's the problem we have.

Who does God want to judge in our modern-day wars? There are no countries today that are God's people. Israel is the only country in the world that was ever a political nation that God identified as his people. America has had a lot of Christians in it, but there was never a time that God identified America as, this is my chosen people, this country, here's my nation, nor any other nation.

There is no nation on the planet that can be said to be God's nation because the church is God's people, and they're not associated with any one country. The church is international. The church is global.

The kingdom of God is made up of every kingdom, tribe, and nation and tongue. And we live in separate countries under their governments as ambassadors. We're pilgrims here, but we're ambassadors for God in a domicile nation, and we happen to be lucky to be in a comfortable one because if you happen to be domiciled in Saudi Arabia as a member of the kingdom of God, it wouldn't be very fun, or in China or North Korea.

But America is a nice place to be domiciled. Nice enough that we might even be willing to kill someone to keep them from taking it from us. But is that really what God has given the church to do, and is it really parallel in any way to the wars in the Old Testament? I don't think it's parallel.

We don't know in a war today who God is judging. You find that out by who loses. God does use war, but that doesn't mean he approves of the people he uses.

And here's the other thing that makes it very difficult to know about fighting in war. Actually, I'm ambivalent on it. I really can see more than one possible side of this.

I have wrestled with it for many, many years. When you are fighting in a war, let's say when Israel was fighting against the Canaanites, it was very clear that Israel was God's people. The Canaanites were the bad guys.

And when you're fighting with a national force, you're identifying with the people you're fighting in the foxholes alongside. You've got their back, they've got your back. You're in solidarity with the guys in the foxhole with you against the guys in the foxhole on the other side of the field.

And so you're identified with these guys, not with those guys. In fact, so much so that you'll kill those guys for the sake of these guys. That's identification.

However, the church, Christians are identified with what? With Christians. What if there was a war between us and Russia? Well, there's as many Christians in Russia as there are in America. The guy I'm shooting at might be my brother, and the guy next to me in the foxhole might be a Satanist.

You know, is my solidarity with my countrymen, even if they hate God, against my national enemy who may love God. That is, a Christian happens to have been born in Russia, or even in Germany. I actually stayed in the home in 1934 of a German man who had been in the German army in World War II.

One of the guys that my dad would have been shooting at if they had met each other on the field. They're both Christians, Baptists. And it begins to look really strange when you think, okay, in a war today, my identity is as a believer.

These guys are my brothers. The other believers are my brothers. Didn't Jesus pray that my oneness with that person would be the way the world would know that he was sent from God? Didn't Jesus pray for me to be one with these brothers? Not with these guys in the foxhole who are atheists and perverts, and some of them are Christians.

I mean, obviously, there's some Christians on my side too. But what solidarity do I belong to? It was right for the Israelites to identify with fellow Israelites. The whole country was God's people, and all their enemies were not.

There are no wars like that today anymore. There's no country whose national interest can be said, we are God's people, and the bad guys, I mean our enemies, they're all bad guys, none of them are God's people. Well, what if there's as many Christians on that side as there is on this side? You say, God let my bullet only hit non-Christians.

This is an ethical dilemma that Christians face. And I'm not going to solve it for you, because it's very difficult to solve. The reason I bring it up now is because it is often the case that people take an overly simplistic approach to the ethics of Christians fighting in war, and they simply justify it by saying, well, look at the Old Testament.

God approved of war in the Old Testament, so case closed. God doesn't change. No, he doesn't change, but things have changed.

He had a people in those days that was a political nation, threatened by other political nations. They also had in Israel courts and prisons and things like that, which the church doesn't run any of those. The church doesn't run courts and prisons, we don't have a criminal justice system in the body of Christ.

We don't have that kind of stuff. We're not a political entity in the body of Christ. But Israel was.

Israel was a nation and a worship community. The church is a worship community that lives in secular nations. And therefore war, since it's part of a national concern, the ethics of it has got to be judged really carefully before we just decide, well, I got drafted, I guess I'll go.

And even Augustine, who made war acceptable and respectable for Christians to participate in, by coming up with the just war theory, his just war guidelines wouldn't have applied to very many of the wars we've ever fought, even in our country. Dropping a nuclear bomb on a Japanese city and annihilating everyone in that city, that doesn't fit the just war guidelines. It didn't guarantee civilian immunity.

It was use of excessive force. And I'm not here to argue the politics of the Good Rider, I'm just saying technically we did not follow the just war guidelines in any of our wars I know of, except maybe the American Revolutionary War, but I'm not sure that was ethical because we're supposed to submit to kings. The things that we take for granted, when we look approvingly at our own history, if we judge them from a biblical standpoint, we say, well, you know, these things that are all considered to be so great, sometimes Christians might not have been always doing the right thing.

But on the other hand, there's sufficient confusion about it that I can't judge harshly a Christian who did the wrong thing because I stand here in a time of peace where I can think about it calmly, and I've studied the Bible on it extensively, and I still can see both sides. I can still see two ways. So what are you going to think about a 21-year-old guy who's got a draft nose and he hasn't thought it through and his country's being threatened and stuff, and he's going to just jump and go and do it.

I'm saying that Christians, we need to be careful not to judge people who take the opposite view. I have a friend, he's dead now, he died in his 80s during World War I and World War II, he was a Baptist minister, he was a conscientious objector, but because he wouldn't fight in the war, for reasons such as I've been talking about here, he was put in a prison. And a lot of Mennonites and Amish and other Anabaptist types, because they don't believe in war, and Quakers don't believe in fighting in war, they went to state penitentiaries because they wouldn't go to war in World War I. Now World War II, they allowed conscientious objector status so that you didn't have to go to jail if you were conscientious, but in World War I they didn't have that option.

So a lot of Christians went to jail and were tortured. There's interesting stories in the Mennonite literature of some of the guys they mentioned by name who were tortured to death in American prisons, in Leavenworth and places like that, Mennonite boys were tortured to death because they wouldn't put on uniforms and stuff. That was their Christian conviction.

So this is more of a tricky issue than most Christians bother to think about. And while I'm not going to solve it here, I just want to let you know it's not easily solved by simply saying, look, these wars in Joshua prove that God's in favor of his people fighting in war. One thing we can say, he approved of it on this occasion.

But you almost have to take it case by case. It's one of the most prickly things that Christians have to deal with as ethical questions. So we've talked about the issue of jihad, we've talked about the issue of war.

What are the lessons of the book? Well, Joshua is no doubt intended to be seen as a type of Christ in many respects. And we'll try to find those as we go through. Canaan, what is it a type of? Now it is referred to as rest.

In Deuteronomy and in Joshua, even some of the verses we already read, it says that God gave rest to the people from the war. And that before the children of Israel conquered Canaan, they wandered in the desert. First of all, they had slavery.

That was not restful. Then they wandered endlessly. That was not restful.

And then they made war. That was not restful. Finally, they conquered the land and were able to settle down and sit every man under his own fig tree and his own vine and live in a house and live peaceably as long as the nation remained godly.

They entered into rest from all the previous centuries, really, of unrest that they had had since they had left Canaan and gone into Egypt. Or maybe even Abraham's time. He wasn't really at rest.

He moved around too. When they settled into houses permanently in Canaan, that was the first time that Israel experienced a rest from war or wandering or slavery or something that was not restful. They finally came into rest, and the Bible often refers to it as rest.

Now, the writer of Hebrews talks about this, and he talks about a spiritual application of it, which is, as with most things, can be taken one or two ways. There are two different opinions, as about everything else, about the rest and what it represents. But if you look at Hebrews chapter 4, or even initially at chapter 3 and into chapter 4, in chapter 3, verse 7, there's a lengthy quote.

This is Hebrews 3, 7. It begins a lengthy quote of Psalm 95, verses 7 through 11. It goes like this. It says, Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, so he identifies this psalm as written through the Holy Spirit, Today, if you will hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, in the day of trial in the wilderness, where your fathers tested me, proved me, and saw my works forty years.

Therefore I was angry with that generation, and said, They always go astray in their heart, and they have not known my ways. So I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest. He means Canaan.

He's talking about that generation that sent the spies into Canaan, and got the bad report back, and refused to go in. And they provoked God to wrath by not believing him. And so that generation would not enter his wrath, as they wouldn't get to go into Canaan.

They would die in the wilderness. It would be their offspring that would inherit the land. Now, so he quotes this verse from the psalm, and then the writer says in verse 12, Beware brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God.

But exhort one another daily while it is called today, lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. For we have become partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to the end. While it is said today, if you will hear his voice, do not harden your hearts, He says in the rebellion, he's quoting again from Psalm 95.

He says in verse 16, For who, having heard, rebelled? Indeed, was it not all those who came out of Egypt, led by Moses? Now with whom was he angry forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose corpses fell in the wilderness? And to whom did he swear that they should not enter into his wrath, but to those who did not obey? So we see they could not enter in because of unbelief. Next verse, chapter 4, verse 1. Therefore, since a promise remains of entering his wrath, let us fear lest any of you seem to have come short of it. Now wait a minute.

Where does he get this idea that there remains a promise to come into his wrath? The Psalm he quoted was talking about the wrath coming into Canaan. And how God had said to those who didn't believe, they will never enter my wrath. So where does he get the idea that there is still a promise? Well, he sees it in the word in chapter 3, verse 7. Today, if you will hear his voice, don't be like them.

He sees that as an invitation. They were not able to enter the wrath, but that invitation is held out to you today. If you do not do what they did, if you do not rebel as they did, if you will hear his voice as they failed to do, if you will hearken to him, then you can enter that wrath.

Now the Psalm doesn't say that you can. The writer of Hebrews is reading that into it. And so that's where he's getting it.

It says there remains therefore a promise. This today business. Today, if you will hear his voice, it's an invitation.

Therefore, since a promise remains of entering his rest, let us fear lest any of you seem to have come short of it. For indeed, the gospel was preached to us as well as to them. But the word which they heard did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in those who heard it.

That is, they didn't go into the promised land or the rest because they didn't have faith. Let's not make the same mistake. For we who have believed do enter that rest, he has said.

And so I swore my wrath, they shall not enter my rest. Look a little further down. Verse 9. Chapter 4, verse 9 of Hebrews.

There remains therefore a rest for the people of God. For he who has entered his rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from his. Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest.

Lest anyone fall after the same example of disobedience. Now one thing we can see here is the writer of Hebrews sees the Israelites and their opportunity to enter into Canaan as an opportunity that corresponds to our own opportunity to enter into something that Canaan represents. What Canaan was to them, rest, represents something restful for us.

There remains a rest for the people of God to enter into. And he says, let's be diligent to enter into it. Let's be diligent not to fail to enter into it.

Well what is that rest then? What does Canaan represent? It's very common in much hymnody and much literature of the Christians to say Canaan is heaven. So when you cross over the Jordan you die. Crossing over Jordan is death and you enter into Canaan, the promised land, heaven.

But that doesn't seem to be right. It doesn't seem to be true to the facts and it doesn't also seem to be agreeable to what the writer of Hebrews is saying. For one thing, Canaan can't really be a type of heaven.

Because once they came into Canaan then they fought wars. Heaven is not a place where we are going to be fighting wars. Coming into Canaan was a warfare.

It was not a place of ultimate eradication of evil. Because even after wars were won there were still Canaanite cities among them and there were later conquests to be made later on. It was not the final disposition of the people of God.

It was not an unconditionally secure venue. When we go to heaven we are not going to be thrown out. But these people were told they could be thrown out of the land if they didn't behave any better than the Canaanites did.

But more than that, in chapter 4 verse 3 of Hebrews it says, We who have believed do, present tense, do enter that rest. So not will when we die, we do when we believe. And in verse 9 or 10 it says, He who has entered his rest, which is past tense.

Some of us have already done so. Has ceased also from his own works as God did from his. What does that mean? It seems to mean that there is a mentality of legalism that Christians sometimes have that they are not supposed to have.

That was the problem. These people were Christians who were going back to adopt Jewish laws. That is why the book of Hebrews was written to stop them from doing that.

But even if it is not Jewish laws, it could be other laws. It could be any kind of legalism. We can begin to feel that we are going to measure up to something and acquire our salvation, earn it, somehow make God happy with us by keeping a code, by fulfilling certain requirements.

It is by our own performance. By our own works. And the writer says, the man who enters into God's rest has stopped.

He has given up on his own works. And he is resting in God's rest. Now what is God's rest? Well, later in Hebrews chapter 10, he talks about how Jesus is sort of like and sort of unlike the high priests in the Old Testament.

The high priest entered the holy of holies and offered sacrifices. Christ is like that. But unlike that, it says in Hebrews 10, Christ does not have to do it every year.

He said in the temple, the priests are continually standing daily offering again the same sacrifices that cannot take away sin. But Jesus, it says by contrast, offered once and for all the sacrifice of himself and then he sat down. See, it is a contrast between standing and sitting.

He says the priests in the temple, they stand daily. They never can sit down, so to speak. They can never finish.

Why? Because their job is never done. There is always another sacrifice that has to be offered. And so you never see them resting.

One piece of furniture that was not in the temple was a chair. There was a table, a lamp, no chair. They never sat down in there.

It was work, work, work. And there is always more work to be done, so they are standing continually. But the contrast is Jesus offered one sacrifice and then he sat down.

Why did he sit down? Because there is no more work to be done. He offered one sacrifice once for all, for sins, and then he rested. Unlike the priests under the old law, you could never rest.

There is always more work to be done. Always another sacrifice. Always another thing to measure up to.

Another requirement. But Jesus fulfilled all the requirements one time. Then he rested.

He entered into his rest. He is seated at the right hand of God. Yes, he is making an intercession and so forth, but he is resting from his work.

And we enter into his rest by counting on the adequacy of the work he did once. And we cease from our own works. He that has entered into God's rest has ceased from his own works.

You see, as long as you are legalistic in any sense of your mentality, you think, well, God will accept me better if I am a better person, if I do more of this kind of thing. If I read the Bible more, if I fast more, if I do more good deeds, then God will love me more. Well, no, he is not going to love you more.

He might be more pleased, but that is not going to have any impact on you being acceptable. You are accepted in the Beloved. You are accepted in Jesus, or not at all.

It is in what Christ has done. It is in his work. It is finished.

And so, because he is resting, he sat down because the job was done. Well, then it is ours in him to be seated in heavenly places in Christ for us to be entering into that rest too. He that has entered into his rest, it says in Hebrews 4.10, has himself ceased from his works as God did from his.

So we are to be diligent to enter that rest. So this is not something that speaks of going to heaven. This speaks of getting to the place where we have a complete appreciation for and dependency on the grace of God.

Now, do we do any more works? Yes, but not our own works. We do the works of God that he gives us to do. He works through us.

It is God who works in you to will and to do of his good pleasure. Those are not nervous works trying to become acceptable. Those are the works of gratitude.

Those are the works of love. Those are the works that are the fruit of being acceptable to God. When you know you are acceptable to God because of Christ, then whatever works you do are just as a love gift to God, without strings attached.

But if you are not sure you are acceptable, then all the works you do, there are strings attached. I hope that God is paying attention to this so I get a reward for this. Maybe this will count a gold sticky star for me, so that maybe when I get to heaven and we stand in the judgment, there will be enough gold sticky stars on my card to get me in.

That mentality exists among Christians. But it is not the rest that God has in mind. We enter into God's rest.

Really, it is the rest of faith. He says the reason the Hebrews didn't enter into it is because they didn't have faith. They had a promise made to them like we do, but they didn't benefit from it because they didn't mix it with faith.

It is as you trust in the finished work of Christ that you enter into that rest of which Canaan is a type. The demonic powers are there to resist you coming to that place. Our warfare against these powers is necessary in order to fight off this temptation to always be making it about us, about what we do and what we accomplish and how much we measure up.

It is very common for preachers, even for New Testament writers, to speak of Canaan or the conquest of Canaan as something that has a parallel in the Christian life. It is just that not everyone has the same thing they see it as. Some see it just as going to heaven.

But a lot of preachers and teachers recognize that this is really not talking about something that is later. It is something that is in this life. We who believe do enter into that rest.

That is how we are going to be looking at Canaan as we go through the book of Joshua. We are going to see the lessons have to do with us entering into the full appreciation of the blessing of what Christ has accomplished.