2012-04-20
Good Morning Dear Ones,
Last week, we continued looking at examples of how a covenant before God is unbreakable once it is made. You’ll remember that Joshua and the Israelites had begun the take over of Canaanite territory in accordance with God’s command. Along with that came God’s promise they would eventually succeed, but the Jews had some lessons to learn first. With Achan, a Jewish soldier who didn’t fulfill his orders to leave loot and kill off all of the enemy, they learned that God demanded obedience [JS 7: 1-26]. God’s reason for this seemingly bloodthirsty command was that He was establishing a place where there would be no idolatry, and the Jews needed to understand how important to God that was. Then came another lesson when the Gibeonites [a tribe of the Hivites] tried a ruse on the Jews, by hiding their real identity and telling the Jews they were from afar, so the Jews would enter into a covenant with them to protect their lives [JS 9: 3]. JS 9: 7, “The men of Israel said to the Hivites, ‘But perhaps you live near us. How then can we make a treaty with you?’” The Jews, certainly Joshua, knew DT 7: 1-2, “When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations-the Hitties, Girgashites, Ammorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you—and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.” But this covenantal treaty had already been made with the Gibeonites, and that is how the latter became the servants of the Israelites, a source of displeasure for God.
We can consider this disobedience to God as having far-reaching effects. To begin, it put Jews and Hivites in close contact with one another, thus giving rise to the potential for future intermarriage and even more seriously, for mixing monotheism with the impurity of polytheism. God had commanded the Jews, in DT 6: 4-5, “Here O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. Love the Lord your god with all your heart , with all your soul, and with all your might.” This is known as the Shema. Even more illumination on it can be found in GN 15: 18-21, which delineates the land God intended for the Jews as a part of the Abrahamic Covenant. “On the day the Lord make a covenant with Abram and said, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates—the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hitties, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and Jebusties.” In modern terms, this would cover the portion of Egypt from the Nile River to Israel’s southern boarder, all of Israel, Lebanon, the southern portion of Syria, Jordan, all the way to the Euphrates River in Iraq. Today, Israel is the about the size of New Jersey, a measure of the degree of disobedience to God there has been over the years from the time Joshua and his Israelite men first conquered the Canaanites.
God’s great and sovereign use of His power can be seen throughout mankind’s history. Even with the measure of disobedience shown by the Jews, they were still His covenant people, and He gave them enough victories to establish and keep His Abrahamic covenant promise about giving them the land. JS 9: 8-9, 11, “After an all night march from Gilgal, Joshua took the Gibeonites by surprise. The Lord threw them into confusion before Israel, who defeated them in a great victory at Gibeon… As they fled before Israel on the road down from Beth Horon to Azekah, the Lord hurled large hailstones down on them from the sky, and more of them died from the hailstones than were killed by the swords of the Israelites.” There is an intriguing aspect to this whole incident, which comes up in JS 9: 12-14, “On the day the Lord gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the Lord in the presence of Israel; ‘O Sun, stand still over Gibeon, O moon, over the Valley of Aijalon. So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped till the nation avenged itself on its enemies,’ as it is written in the Book of Jashar [an early account of Israel’s wars perhaps all in poetic form, but never accepted as canon]. The sun stopped in the middle of the day and delayed going down about a full day. There has never been a day like before or since, a day when the Lord listened to a man. Surely the Lord was fighting for Israel!” Some believe that God extended the hours of daylight to allow the Israelites to defeat the Gibeonites; others believe the sun remained cool [probably due to an overcast sky] for the entire day. All we know is that the Lord intervened in favor of the Jewish people.
There are lessons to mine from these historical events. 1) There are great negative consequences over time for breaking a covenant promise with God. That is why much later in time, Christ spoke about being careful about what you vow before God [MT 5: 33-37]. 2) God, in the Abrahamic Covenant, promised Abram’s descendants a land of their own, and kept that promise [DT 7: 1-2]. He keeps His promises [PS 138: 8]. 3) God has the sovereign power to intervene for His people. 4) God will sometimes use others we encounter to teach us lessons we need to learn, just as He did by using the Gibeonites to teach Israel a lesson. 5) God’s power is so great that He might choose to use it, even transcending the laws of Newtonian physics to work a miracle. 5) In the case of Joshua’s request, God listened to a man to bring about His will. [I would think this can only happen when the man’s will conforms with God’s].
PRAYER: O Lord, You command us to read the Scriptures daily, to meditate upon them, and to listen to You in prayer, praying often. All these commands are solely for our benefit. We must see them not only as a part of our covenant relationship with You, but also as what they are, an expression of Your great love of us. PS 33: 22, “Yes, Lord, let your constant love surround us, for our hopes are in You alone.” PS 146: 5, “But happy are those who have the God of Israel as their Helper, whose hope is in the Lord their God.” Over the course of human history, we can now understand Your command to Joshua that every Canaanite man, women, child, even animal be killed in order to stamp out the practice of idolatry in Israel. You wanted one nation to be called out to believe in You alone, the One and only God—not in many gods, a belief which You find abhorrent. We are indeed poor in spirit, and thus, are unable to live righteously without Your presence and intervention in our lives [MT 5: 3]. As time went on, Israel rejected You as their political King and took on human kings [1 SAM 8: 6-7]. Still You loved her. Then, their disobedience grew to the combining of idolatry with Judaism, particularly after Israel in the north split from Judah in the south. Still You loved her, but she needed punishment. Dearest Father, how painful it was to You, when Israel was placed in captivity to the Assyrians in 722 BC and Judah in captivity to Babylonia [in 586 BC]! You showed Ezekiel, then a captive in the Chabar canal in Babylonia, in a vision in EZK 8: 7-10, the practice of idolatry in Your holy temple in Jerusalem. In the face of this disobedience, You decided to leave the temple [EZK 10: 18-19]. For Israel, it was 160 years and for Judah, it was 70 years of dyaspora [scattering and loss of nationhood] before the first punishment was over. It would not to be the last dyaspora, as Israel has more lessons to learn. So, do we, Dearest Father, and we open ourselves to them. We thank and praise You for Your compassion, patience, and wisdom toward us, even though we don’t deserve it. All these prayers we offer in the holy/mighty name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
NEXT WEEK: We will continue looking at covenant obligations using the story of the Israelites and the Gibeonites to see some of the immediate and far-reaching consequences of this faulty covenant disobedience. The issue of obedience is the “elephant on the table” in these stories from the Bible and even now, in our own lives. PS 111: 10, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all who follow his precepts have good understanding. To Him belongs eternal praise.” Reverence for the Lord is a feature of a wise person, as we learn from PR 9: 10. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” We must look at these two verses together to have a complete understanding of the Lord’s will for us, as dedicated believers. This means we must often make decisions and take actions which aren’t taking the easy road. We must encounter opposition and go against society’s trends to live righteously. In the movie “Courageous,” a hard-working employee of a thread factory is called into his employer’s office. He is told he can have a promotion to be a manager if he is willing to report fewer boxes of product than are actually made on his monthly reports. He is given overnight to decide his answer and sent out. This man had a history of losing jobs and a wife and family to support. What would he say? In the end after praying first, he told the employer he would not take the promotion and felt he would lose this job too. What would each of us do in the same kind of circumstances? He made the righteous choice, to remain obedient to his Covenant of Grace promises to God. It was the right answer, and he was given the promotion. His employer was looking for a righteous man he could trust. What a great God we have! His will is made clear. Praise and thanks be to Him forever!
Grace Be With You Always,
Lynn
JS 24: 15