Sermon transcription (may be edited for clarity)

Opening prayer: Gracious and forgiving heavenly father, this morning we enter into your presence, not by any righteousness that we have, but by the precious blood that is Jesus Christ. We pray during this service God, that you will open our eyes, and our ears, and our hearts to your truth, to your word. We pray that you will help us to lay aside the many cares that we have. Cares about our world, cares about our nation, cares about the election, cares about our everyday lives with work and with familial relationships, with friends, with financial challenges, with work issues, there are so many burdens we bare and carry. We pray you will help us to lay those aside that we might hear your word and your truth and walk in it. We pray that your Spirit will enlighten the eyes of our understanding so that as we go through your word you will enliven it to us so that we will see the things that you desire us to change, adjustments we can make, areas in which we can forgive, ways in which we can become more like you. We thank you God for your guidance during this time by your Spirit and pray that you will continue to be with us. For it is your presence that gives us rest and that gives us all blessings. We thank you for all of these things in the name of Jesus Christ, your son, our Lord. Amen.

Sermon

Now at this point in Joshua the Israelites have destroyed two Amorite kings, they’ve crossed the river Jordan, and they have entered into the promised land which God swore to give to Abraham and to his descendants. After doing this, they struck down two very important cities in the promised land, one of which is Jericho, you’ve heard of this, most of you, the other city was Ai in which 12,000 people were killed.

After doing these things, the Israelites went to Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim and fulfilled the law of the Lord, splitting in half and pronouncing the blessings and cursings which God commanded Moses and Joshua also inscribed the words of the law upon the stones that were there. So this was a religious ceremony. Joshua had built an altar. They offered burnt offerings and sacrifices. All of these things commemorating the law of God, doing what the Lord commanded them.

In response, a couple of things happened. A group of five kings that were further along in the promised land, that didn’t want to have to meet the Israelites banded together. They formed a group saying we’re going to fight the Israelites. The second group is the Gibeonites, these are actually a group of Hivites that lived in Gibeon. Just to make it easy to follow, we’ll just call them the Gibeonites. They came up with a different plan, deciding instead to send ambassadors to the Israelites to try to make peace with them.

Now there are a couple of different ways that we can look at this story, a lot in fact, just a couple of examples of things we could look at. We could look at how in this promised land, this land that God promised Abraham and his descendants, there are Canaanites who believe in the Lord.  We’d seen this earlier in the book of Joshua with Rahab the harlot. Those of you who’ve heard of her know that she was a prostitute who lived in the city of Jericho and when the Israelites came to spy out the city before attacking it, she took the spies in and hid them, and sent them out a different way so that they would be safe. As a result, she and her family were spared when the city of Jericho was completely destroyed.

Another way that we can look at this story is to look at the fact that there were-there were Canaanites, these were gentiles, these were people who were not of the covenant with Abraham who nevertheless believed in the Lord, right? But whom God had the intention of sparing. We have Rahab as an example and now we’ll see that of all the people groups that were in the promised land, every single one was destroyed except the Gibeonites. So here we have an example of God deciding to spare a specific people.

The third way that we could look at this is to see that God pardons and spares people as he sees fit. For all are His creation. He chooses that the Gibeonites will be saved, or spared, but that all of these other nations will ultimately be destroyed. He chooses that Jericho will be destroyed yet Rahab and her family are spared.

So these are all ways that we could look at the scriptures today, but, we’re going to look at this from a fourth perspective, and we’re going to look at the Gibeonites as a representation of how our sins remain active in our lives even when we seek to destroy them. Now the first question you would have is, why do we want to look at people as a metaphor for sin, or frankly, why do we want to talk about sin at all, right? Why not just talk about the mercy of God or the forgiveness of God?

But there’s something important about sin that I want you to leave with today. The reason we need to understand it is because sin is what separates us from God. Now many of you have heard of this scripture (if we could show this slide) this is from the book of Romans and it talks about the fact that nothing can separate us from the love of God. Nothing. Nothing. Paul says “for I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come,  nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord.” Now we take comfort in this scripture because we know that in Christ God is always with us. That we never have to worry about being alone no matter what our circumstances. No matter what we’ve done. We can rely on God being with us.

But that’s not all that the Scripture says. For the prophet Isaiah says, “Behold, the Lord’s hand is not so short that it cannot save. Nor is his ear so dull that it cannot hear. But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you that he does not hear.” Now the prophet Isaiah was speaking to the Israelites. He wasn’t speaking to people who had no knowledge of God. So what we understand is that though we have the love of God in Christ, it is possible that our sins can break our fellowship with God. So it’s important that we understand something about sin, its nature, how it works, how we can deal with it, so that it doesn’t impact our relationship with God.

But there remains yet another reason that we need to understand sin and that is because of how the Scripture shows us that God hates it. You have heard of the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were given every tree of the garden to eat of, even the tree of life. The one tree they were commanded not to eat of was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And which tree did they eat of? The one they were told not to.

What was the result of that? Yes, God made animal coverings for them–animal skins coverings for them, but they were kicked out of paradise. Gone. Yes, they were still in touch with God, still in prayer and still having some form of fellowship, although, shedding of blood had to take place for that to happen. Nevertheless, they were kicked out of paradise.

What about the old world? Noah, and his family? The scripture describes the heart of humanity this way during that time.  That the heart of humanity was “all evil, all the time.” How did God respond? Wiped out the earth with a flood, saved eight people, Noah and his family, and certain animals. Took it all out.

That’s not all. The scripture tells us about Lucifer.  We know him as the devil, or Satan. Prior to his fall, the scripture describes him as the son of the morning. It says that he walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. This is one who was well acquainted with God. But he thought to set his thrown among the stars, among the heavens and said, “I will be like the Most High.” What did God do? Cast him out of heaven and all of the angels who followed him. So quickly was it done that Jesus said, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.” That fast, they were gone!

So part of the reason we want to understand sin and its nature is because God hates it. And because of God’s response when people persist in it. Now, we think of Jesus as our Saviour, but what did he come to save us from? The Scripture says that Jesus, the son of God, was manifested to destroy the works of the devil. Yes, it says that, but what else does it say? What does Jesus’ name mean? What does it signify? The angels said that Jesus would receive that name because He would save His people from their sins. Not to leave us in them. Not for us to remain in them.  But that he would deliver us. And so much did Jesus hate sin that he would rather die, rather die, than sin against God. And the Scripture says that we have not resisted yet unto blood, those of us that are Christians striving against sin. This, Christ alone has done.

So the point of the sermon today, when we talk about sin, so often people think, well, “Are you trying to make me feel guilty?” No. People say, “Are you trying to scare me?” No. But hearing about God’s response to sin is a bit frightening, frankly. But it’s not intended to do those things.

The reason you need to understand this is because God wants to fellowship with you. You know that God created you because He wanted you to exist. Someone with your thoughts, your personality, your style, your hair and skin color, and texture, your physical makeup. God wanted you to exist and He wants to live in fellowship with you. You saw from the scriptures before that sin is what prevents that. So our reason for understanding this is to get those things out of our lives that we might maintain unified, unbroken, fellowship with the Father. 

So with that in mind, we turn to the text of today’s reading, which is Joshua 9 um, and Hebrews 3. And the first thing we have to think about when we talk about, Joshua is that this is the land of fulfillment of God’s promise. Did you notice at the beginning of Joshua, when Pastor Chris was reading all of those different names of lands, that they were talking about, the Canaanite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, Jebusite, and so forth? The reason for that is because those were the lands that were promised to Abraham.

God said to Abraham, on that day, the Scripture says, the Lord made a covenant with Abram saying, to your descendants I have given this land. “From the river of Egypt as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, the Kenite and the Kenezzite, and the Kadmonite, and the Hittite, and Perizzite, and the Rephaim and the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Girgashite, and the Jebusite.” Now those names don’t exactly match up. The focus really should be more on the land. There were other issues around the people groups, but the point of this is that this is a fulfillment of God’s promise. The Issraelites weren’t just going in the land and having these victories in and of themselves. They were winning these victories because God wanted to give them that land as he had promised their ancestors.

But the fulfillment of that promise requires obedience. After Abraham died, God went to Isaac and he said to him that He would fulfill the promise that He made to Abraham to Isaac. He said this because “Abraham obeyed me and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes and my laws.” See Abraham’s obedience was central to the fulfillment of God’s promise and just as I mentioned to you earlier, the Israelites obeyed the law after their victories in Jericho and Ai. Remember I told you they inscribed the law on stones–Joshua did. They had the burnt offerings and the altar of the Lord. They pronounced the blessings and the cursings in accordance with the law. They did all of these things after their victory because central to the Israelites’ victories in the promised land is there will be obedience to the Law of God.

Now of all the commands that God gave them, one of them involved what to do when they entered the land (if we could see the slide). “Watch yourself, the Lord said to Israel. That you make no covenant with the inhabitants of the land into which you are going or it will be a snare in your midst.” So God specifically told them not to do the very thing that they are ultimately going to do. The other thing that we notice here in the text as we go through Joshua 9 is we find that some people are rebelling against God while others are obedient and this is very important. There is a close relationship between sin and the Law and the apostle Paul talks about it in Romans 7, but here’s a way to understand it.

The kings–these five kings that I mentioned to you in the Canaanite area, decided that they were going to fight the Israelites. Not just because the Israelites had destroyed Jericho and Ai. Part of the reason they wanted to fight the Israelites is because the Israelites were obedient to God’s Law. The Scripture doesn’t include that bit of information for no reason; the kings weren’t just angry. They weren’t just upset or worried because of the Israelite’s destruction of the cities, but also because suddenly, the people were being obedient to the Law of God.

Now this relationship, as I mentioned to you, between sin and the Law that Paul talked about–Paul said that the law aggravates sin and makes it exceedingly sinful. This is a very obscure text. It’s a challenge to understand but here’s an easy way for us to understand it. Once we know that God commands us to do something, what is our first instinct? Is it not to do the opposite? What about parents and children? If you tell your children, don’t touch that light switch, what is the first thing they’re going to do? You’ll see a finger reach right over there and you know they’re going to touch it.

Now that’s just what we are as human beings. Our nature as human beings is to do the opposite of what we’re told. With respect to God, that goes even further. So that once people are being obedient to God it brings about rebellion and rejection of God’s law in others. The example of this would be Cain and Abel. They bring offerings to the Lord uh, Abel, the younger brother brings a sheep, that was an acceptable offering unto God.

Cain, the older brother, brought the first fruits of the ground which the Lord had previously cursed. That offering was not accepted. Cain did what was wrong. Abel did what was right, and what was the end result? Cain killed Abel. Notice how Abel did the right thing, and what did Cain do? Rebelled against God’s law. We will see that happen throughout Scripture but what we understand from this text is as soon as we see the Israelites obeying God’s Law, you know rebellion is coming from somewhere. You know somewhere someone is going to be rejecting God’s commands.

Let’s talk briefly about the Gibeonite deception. They were shrewd, weren’t they? I’m not sure if you all understand, sort of all of the geography of this. But, essentially, the Gibeonites lived in an area where the Israelites were going to come and destroy them. And they said well, you know we either have the choice to fight against them, and we’ll probably lose, so we’ll go ahead and send some ambassadors and try to make a treaty or a covenant with them. So the Gibeonites dwelled, really just a couple days journey from where the Israelites were–but they pretended as if they were from far away and it’s interesting.

The phrase “worn out” is repeated in this section because what they did is, they took everything that they could that was worn out. Worn out clothing. Worn out shoes. Worn out wineskins. Worn out sacks for their donkeys. Everything was worn out. They took old moldy bread and they basically said we’re going to convince the Israelites that we are from far away. So instead of just telling them the story, they presented visual evidence of it. They referred only to Israel’s early victories–the ones which happened before they crossed the Jordan. Back in those days, there wouldn’t have been enough time for them to hear about the cities of Ai and Jericho unless they lived nearby. There wouldn’t have been enough time. So they said we’re not going to talk about those–tell them about the old victories so that they’ll think that we’re from really, really far away.

And then they responded to Israel’s skepticism with flattery. When Joshua said who are you, they said we are your servants. Really? (chuckles) Of course not, but that flatters Joshua. They said, we’ve come because of the fame of the Lord your God. So Joshua and the Israelites did not ask the Lord for counsel, which is another contribution to their own deception.

Ultimately, what happens is Joshua and the Israelites made a covenant and an agreement with them and they don’t waste any time. They do it hastily. They didn’t wait even overnight. They didn’t wait a day. Pretty much on the spot at that time they made a covenant and an agreement and then of course, not three days later they found out that the people actually lived where they were. So, they ended up in this situation, finding out that they’ve been deceived and then wanted to then kill the Gibeonites. But the leaders said no, we’ve made a covenant with them, we’ve sworn an oath, we can’t do it. The other thing that Joshua did is he asked the Gibeonites why. He said, “Well, why did you deceive us?” Isn’t that obvious? It’s obvious why they deceived them. They didn’t want to be killed. They didn’t want to be completely destroyed. But, Joshua was fighting one kind of battle. The Gibeonites were fighting a completely different one and he wasn’t aware of it.

So, what we want to think about, or talk about, how sin in our lives presents itself. As a practical matter, there are some different things and some different ways that it does. The first is that sin may present itself as an obvious threat, like the five kings who came up with the plan, right? We may find ourselves, as soon as we set our hearts to obey God, to do what God has commanded us and to be obedient in any particular area of our lives, what happens? Immediately, here come some temptations. You will often hear people who are Christian say, “As soon as I got serious about God…” or “As soon as I focused on cleaning up a particular area of my life, all of these temptations, all of these trials, all of these challenges came my way.” So sometimes the things that we face come obviously.

Other times, our sins pretend as if they’re far away. Here’s an interesting example. Sometimes in life we do something that we’re not proud of. Something that could be classified as a sin. We do something and we wish we hadn’t done it. What do we say? “Ah, that’s so unlike me.” We say, “oh that’s really out of character for me. Gosh that’s, that wasn’t me, I don’t know who that was.” Right? We come up with a million excuses and reasons why a particular behavior that we’ve engaged in doesn’t really have anything to do with us. But this is where sin acts just like the Gibeonites. It’s pretending. It’s pretending like it’s from far away but really it dwells among us and with us. The things that we don’t want to see about ourselves we hide, even from ourselves.

The other thing that sin may do is present itself as righteous acts. This happens quite often. The Gibeonites came to Israel claiming to be awed by the works of God and by the fame of the Lord their God. But, really they were just in disguise masquerading, trying to save their own skin. It maybe that some of the things we do that we view as righteous acts are actually unacceptable. And there are many examples in scriptures of people thinking that they were doing the right thing, for example the scribes and Pharisees, who were actually doing the wrong things. So that even sometimes when we think that our conduct is upright, it may not be.

Now, do you see how difficult it is to recognize sin? (If we could see this verse here from the Psalms.) It says, “who can discern their own errors? Forgive my hidden faults.” This is really important. Knowledge of ones own sins is very difficult to acquire. Very difficult to comprehend. Why? Because we don’t like to think of ourselves in negative lights. We prefer to see ourselves through the positive lenses. In fact, as human beings, everything we do, we view through a favorable light. If we allow that we have any flaws–notice I’m saying we here. It’s not only you, it’s me, it’s everyone! We look at our own conduct very favorably. If we committed a fault, it’s (whispers]) this big. It’s very small. We’ve done almost nothing wrong. That is not how God sees us, but as a result, we don’t deal with sins in our lives because we don’t think we actually have them, or we think worse, comparing ourselves to other people. Well, I’m not so bad as the other person, right? But, we find a million ways, the mind is very creative at finding out how to avoid dealing with the realities of sin.

So, it’s very important for us not to deceive ourselves, nor to help sin deceive us by not dealing realistically with where we are spiritually. There’s another verse coming up from Jeremiah. The scripture says the heart is more deceitful than all else. Well now that’s saying something, isn’t it? Above all things, the Scripture says, the heart is more deceitful and desperately wicked, who can understand it? Are you beginning to comprehend why it took Christ dying to redeem us? These are hard, hard lessons but true.

Okay, the last few things. When in doubt, seek God’s counsel. Especially when you think you have everything under control. The Israelites felt that they knew what they were dealing with and what they were up against and that’s the very thing they did not know. The consequences of our sin don’t end with us. A few hundred years later, King David is experiencing a famine and he doesn’t understand why, and finds out that Saul had broken the covenant with the Gibeonites. This is a covenant that was never supposed to be made, but a few hundred years later, the Israelites have a famine because someone had broken that covenant. Our sins, the consequences of them, don’t end with us.

Unbelief is what opens the door to other sins and the scripture talks about how we believe in God and it talks about how we trust in him for the things we cannot see but this is not what the Israelites did. In fact, they didn’t worry about what they couldn’t see at all, they didn’t think it mattered at all. Hebrews says, “But encourage one another day after day as long as it is still called today, so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” See, unbelief is the reason that the first set of Israelites, the first generation, never entered the promised land. Because they refused to believe in the things that God had told them and here, now the Israelites have entered in, they believe in God and they are still not asking for his counsel when they ought to.

Another lesson is that even after sinning, we must behave honorably. The Israelites made the covenant with the Gibeonites and they kept it. It would have been far worse if, after having made this covenant, that they broke the oath they swore to the Lord. But, the good news of these scriptures is that God is able to bring good out of our sins and out of our mistakes. God used the Israelites’ sin to spare the Gibeonites and to bring them into his service. So thus, a people previously devoted to destruction became servants of the Lord. This is not meant to be an encouragement to sin but for us to understand that God is glorified in these things.

And finally, the final lesson is that the fulfillment of God’s promises, as I indicated earlier, requires obedience. We discussed how the Israelites had to be obedient, previously, to God’s commands in order to be victorious in battle. The same thing applies to us as Christians. It’s impossible for us to be victorious in this life if we walk contrary to Christ’s commands. We are instructed to love one another as he has loved us. We are instructed to put the needs of others ahead of ourselves, not in a foolish way. But in as much as we can with love. We are instructed to choose the things that God desires that we do. If we choose to walk contrary to Him, then we find ourselves in sin, self-deception and defeat just like the Israelites did. But, the good news is that Jesus died and rose again to give us power over sin. So, that if we abide in Christ, we are able to live in his victory.

Now the one last thing I will say about this. Often when you hear about these stories of the Israelites’ battles, people wonder if it’s okay to go to war and what the significance is of that. That is a very complicated question; it’s very involved. For purposes of this sermon, we’re not viewing it that way, we’re looking at the Old Testament from our perspective as an example. In some cases, of things to do and what not to do, but the fights and the battles for us are against our sin, sins against our own flesh, against spiritual forces, they are not physical battles against other human beings. So, it’s important to understand that. I hope you’ve enjoyed this sermon and that it’s been beneficial to you. Let’s just close out with a word of prayer.