The conquest of Canaan, as depicted in the book of Joshua, is presented not as a war against people but as a spiritual battle against satanic powers controlling the land, requiring spiritual weapons like the armor of God and the Word of God. This is illustrated by Jesus' temptation in Matthew 4, where He combatted Satan's attacks by quoting scripture, demonstrating the power of God's Word as the only offensive weapon in spiritual warfare. The sermon emphasizes that personal purity and forsaking sin are crucial for continued spiritual victory, as seen in the Israelites' defeat at Ai after Achan's sin, which halted God's blessing for the entire community. Ultimately, the message calls for self-judgment, confession of sin, and reliance on God's Word to maintain spiritual effectiveness and allow blessing to return.
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Morinite, I would like to take up this subject that I promised last night or probably tomorrow night. That is what's the conquest of Canaan justified. God ordered Joshua and his armies to go in and to destroy every living soul in some of those cities. Not a very nice thing. Was there a justification for it? Does the Bible tell us why that was the right of God to do that. Of course, it was the right of God, but I mean, is it consistent with God's righteousness and love as we know it? And I would also like to try to answer, at least briefly, tomorrow night, the question, does the conquest of Canaan in Joshua's day, and does the book of Joshua justify the present Israeli occupation of all of the Holy Land, including the occupied territories, the building of settlements in the Arab lands and the holding of the Arab population in suppression.
Is that justified from the book of Joshua? And we'll take that up tomorrow night and talk about that at that time. Last night we talked about the second of the three miracles in the book. One more to go for Friday night. But the second one was the conquest of Jericho and the walls falling down flat just came tumbling down. This morning in the session when not as many of you are able to attend, this morning we talked a bit about the relationship of the Old Testament book of Joshua to the New Testament epistle to the Ephesians. We noted they both start out with a statement of possession. In Joshua chapter one I've given you all the land.
Go in and take possession of it. In Ephesians one, verse three, God has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ. And in verses eighteen and nineteen, the Apostle Paul prays that they will be able to comprehend and apprehend those blessings. Joshua one, verses six, seven, and nine say three times be strong and of good courage. Ephesians six ten says finally my brethren be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might Joshua describes a conquest of the Holy Land that was essentially not a war against the people there but a war against the satanic powers that controlled that land hence an invisible enemy that had to be fought with spiritual weapons and while they did fight battles with swords and bows later on the Battle of Jericho was not fought with the weapons of earthly warfare.
The book of Ephesians says that we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. And then we went on to talk about the armor that is given to us, because just as the armies of Joshua did not use battering rams and catapults and siege towers, to take the city of Jericho so we do not fight our spiritual battles with guns and grenades with bombs that sort of thing but rather we take on the armor of God our loins gird about with truth breastplate of righteousness and our feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace truth righteousness and peace this is the Christian armament now that's defensive that's protective armament taking the shield of faith wherewith you're able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked and the helmet of salvation, and those are protective items too.
And then taking the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. And that was the only attack weapon in the armor that we find in Ephesians chapter six. The Word of God. From there we went to the temptation of Christ in Matthew four. And we saw that when Jesus was attacked by Satan, He responded to the devil by quoting scripture. We talked this morning about how he credits the authority of the word of God. If we call ourselves disciples of Jesus Christ, we have to take the same attitude toward the scripture that he took. And he put himself in submission to it. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.
Now granted, he didn't have to do that. He could have claimed the authorship of the scriptures. He could have said, that's my book and when the word speaks I'm speaking but that's not what he did in Matthew four in Matthew four he said I am in subjection to the word of my father in heaven and I'll obey him and he didn't quote the promises of the Old Testament he quoted the commands of the Old Testament thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and him only shalt thou serve thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God and so forth now I want to give a little illustration from my own family experience on this question of whether you can win a battle with the Word of God, with the Scripture, before we go on into Joshua chapter seven.
I haven't said much about my own family, but I know some of you are interested and I might mention before I start telling this story that Betty and I have four children. They're all married. We have a girl, a boy named James, Jim Jr. Jimmy, we call him, but he's old enough now to be called James. It's his wife that has the cancer now, thirty-two years old, and they have two children. And then we have three girls, and their names all start with the letter R, all in biblical order, Rebecca, Rachel, and Ruth. We skipped over Rahab. We weren't reading the book of Joshua when we did that naming process or else we thought that had some implications we didn't care to bring into the family.
So we have a Rebecca, Rachel, and Ruth. And about a year and a half ago, well, a year ago, six months ago, six months ago, if I was standing here, I would tell you that all four of our children lived within seven miles of our home in Wheaton or in one of the nearby communities. And they all went to local assemblies. four families in four different assemblies, one of them the one we're in in Wheaton, one in Glenella next to town, and one in Carroll Street, the next town north, and one in Warrenville, the next town to the southwest. So that hadn't existed very long, two of the families were at quite some distance, and they moved back to the Wheaton area. It was rather interesting for that period of a year or so to have four children and four assemblies all within six miles of our home.
That condition does not exist now, and in a minute I'll tell you why. But the story goes back to in the middle of winter. When we were living in Prince Edward Island, we spent four years in Newfoundland and then thirteen years in the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island, serving the Lord in those places. And on a Saturday afternoon in February, I was in my study in my home in Charlottetown, and I was working with my twelve-year-old boy, and I was explaining to him how to do the billing on his newspaper route. And Betty was standing in the doorway, and she noticed Rachel out in the hall with tears in her eyes. Rachel was seven at this time.
And she says, or I said to Rachel, have you been crying? She said, yes. And I said, why? She said, the devil keeps telling me I don't want to go to church. This is Saturday afternoon. This is a seven-year-old girl. Later, Betty told me that... She had some similar experiences. Rachel had been crying several times recently, both on Saturday and on Wednesday. Wednesday was prayer meeting night. So I didn't know about this at the time, but it had been going on, and she'd been giving the same reason for this. The devil keeps telling me, I don't want to go to church. Betty looked at me, and I sent Jimmy and Becky out of the study and brought Rachel in.
I said, how did he tell you? in my mind she says now there's a spiritual battle you see that's the work of Satan in her mind putting that thought in her mind spiritual warfare going on there now at that point I could have made a rather bad mistake I could have said oh the devil's not going to pay any attention to you he's too busy to bother with a seven-year-old girl I might have been wrong in saying that and You know, we don't want to make light of the fears of our children concerned about the dark. They're concerned about the dark and tell them about the angels that are assigned to watch over children or leave a nightlight on or leave the door open a bit or whatever.
But treat these things seriously because it may be the Spirit of God is working or it may be the devil is working. At any rate, Rachel said, in my mind, and I turn to Matthew four. And I went through the story of Jesus' temptations in Matthew four, and I showed how he quoted scripture every time the devil attacked him. And I held up the Bible and I said, that's a sword. The devil is afraid of it. And Rachel said, how can he be afraid of a book? And I said, he is. See how he left Jesus? And I showed her how the devil left Jesus when the Lord kept quoting scripture and went away from him. And then I told her how to quote Matthew four ten when thoughts came into her mind Matthew four ten thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and him only shalt thou serve devil tells you you don't want to go to church you quote the scripture thou shalt worship the Lord thy God that's what the church service is all about and that's why we should be there because we're commanded to worship the Lord and so that's a good reason for being there and then I wrote this down on a three-by-five card.
I wrote it all in capital letters. Matthew four, ten, and the scripture, thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. And I turned the card over, and I drew a picture of a sword. And then I turned it back to the side with the writing, and I said, can you read my writing? Only seven, you know. And in typical childish, childish fashion, she said, your deeds look like hoes, but I guess it doesn't matter. Later she came back to me and she said it really helps. She was learning the lesson about quoting scripture to win spiritual battles, quoting the word of God.
In times of temptation, quoting scripture. Now you don't have to quote just the scripture about flee from me Satan or something like that. You can quote whatever is appropriate. One of the verses I've often recommended to people is the one in Matthew, the Christmas verse. Thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins. You're tempted. Satan's tempting you in your mind, or the world or the flesh is tempting you. It doesn't matter where the temptation is coming from. Quoting the scripture is helpful. Thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people. Well, I'm one of his people, and I'm tempted to sin.
And I'm claiming the scripture because his name is Jesus because he's here to save me from that sin. And so there are many other scriptures that can be quoted. Using the word of God to win the spiritual battle. Now do you suppose that the devil really was telling a seven-year-old girl that she didn't want to go to church? I have thought, I thought all through the years from that point I'm glad I wrote that thing down because my mind doesn't remember conversations very well. And I wrote that down at the time so that when I've told you the story, it's fairly accurately quoted. But I have thought ever since that time, I think I have seen the evidences of Satan's effort to disrupt that young lady as she grew up.
And I have thought in my own mind for many years that God must have a special purpose for her. I saw her as going up through the teenage years and the college years and she became a registered nurse, that she had a much greater gift of discipling people than I had, a greater gift of soul winning than I had, but especially she seemed to have a knack of meeting people about two days after they got saved and then just picking them up on the people of the letter of the Lord and maybe didn't know how to go on and discipling them, showing them how to have their daily devotions, to read the scriptures, to pray. guys finding one day she went over in the park and there was a young woman there just been saved two days before and she started meeting with her over in the park regularly showing how showing her how to come on and work and then she got into a nursing became a registered nurse and she got into a place where there was a lot of a hospice type of thing where people would live out there last years and come to the point of death and the hospital administration was very helpful and she used to bring her guitar and sing quietly in the room to people who were breathing their last, sort of usher them out into eternity with gentle hymns
about the Savior, and the family would be there sometimes and appreciate that and keep in contact with her later. There were just little evidences of the working of the Spirit of God. She married a young man that had been converted in Southern Illinois University, became a veterinarian, and they went to Northern Wisconsin. He got a job with a Christian vet who was an elder in a local assembly there, and they plunged in to help that assembly way out in the country, worked with them several years, helped them to move into the town on a main highway, build a new building, and they saw a lot of fruit and blessing. That's the assembly in Luxembourg, Wisconsin, near Green Bay.
About two years ago, three years ago, they moved back to the Wheaton area because they wanted to be close to the flow of missionaries. and missionary information because they felt that God was calling them, but they didn't know where. And they came to have a burden for unreached people or for language groups that didn't have the Bible. And little by little, God set their sights on a people called the Kurdish people, the Kurds, K-U-R-D-S. The Kurds are a people without a homeland of their own. The place they live is called Kurdistan, but it's spread over several countries. About the eastern third of Turkey, the northeastern corners of Syria and Iraq, the northwestern corner of Iran, and part of the Soviet Union, the part where the Armenians are.
The Armenians also were spread much over that general area, and it was in Turkey that the Armenians suffered such a terrible extermination. back around nineteen hundred the Kurds haven't been through that but the Kurds would like to have a homeland of their own and they are sort of a nationalist threat to the countries in which they dwell in Turkey it is illegal to use the Kurdish language but then the Turks call them mountain Turks instead of Kurds in Iraq The Iraqis are hostile toward them because the Kurds were somewhat favorable to Iran in that war, at least some of them were.
And when the truce came between Iraq and Iran, the Kurds finally got some publicity because the Iraqis pulled back their troops from the Iranian border. Now there was a truce and sent a lot of them up into the northern part of the country and began exterminating some of these Kurds. Our government says they used poison gas on their villages. Many of them fled across into Turkey, and for a week or two they were on the front page of the newspaper most every day. The Turks accepted many of them, moved some of them over into Iran. They are a people, a Muslim people, who are more open, maybe, I shouldn't say are, because I don't think anybody's, as far as I know, reaching them at this point, may be more open to the gospel than other Muslim groups by virtue of the fact that they are persecuted by all of their Muslim neighbors.
And so Rachel and Mike had a burden to go to minister to these people. At the end of September, first of October, they flew to England, commended by the Assembly in Luxembourg and the Assembly in Glen Ellen, Illinois. They took a course from an organization called People International in going into Muslim countries and cultures and reaching unreached people, about a three or four week course. And then on the first of November, they went on to Turkey. They're now in Istanbul. Been there just a little less than two months, new on the field, just gone through their first Christmas away from everybody at home. They have two little children, Hannah and Peter, three and two, I think it is, something like that.
I can never remember those numbers right. But there they are over in Istanbul and learning the Turkish language. and telling people don't post their letters on any bulletin boards the way all those missionaries in turkey do you know because there are folks traveling around in this country that try to pick up the names of folks that go into turkey and send them back home and get them persecuted or expelled so it's a very sensitive area but you pray for mike and rachel because they are not only wanting to go into Turkey, which is hard enough for our missionaries to stay in, but they propose to go on to the eastern part of the country and work among the people that are one of the last major unreached people groups in the world today.
Now they have a very good preparation for that. In Turkey you go in as a tourist and you have to go out every three months, but Mike is a veterinarian. And there's a university in eastern Turkey that has predominantly Kurdish students. And about twenty percent of them are veterinary students because they have so many animals, they're farmers, animal herders. And he's already had a contact in that university asking them to join the faculty to teach English as a second language. And if that can be transported into a teaching of veterinary subjects, he will have a means of staying there without having to leave the country every three months. So they're well prepared and see how God has prepared them. But it's a risky thing.
Already we've had indications from Rachel that their mail may be being checked. So pray for Mike and Rachel that the Lord will bless them. But remember this is all a spiritual battle. We mustn't forget that missions is a spiritual battle, especially when you go out and confront that enemy on the field. This is one of the areas where Christian prayer is so important. When you pray for missionaries, especially frontline missionaries, you are helping them because while you can't go to that field, you can enter into the spiritual warfare, the challenge to the enemy that's involved that you participate in when you pray for the protection of missionaries and the success of their outreach and the opening of doors.
God wants us to pray that there'll be peace, that the gospel may go to all people. Now let's go to Joshua chapter seven. And here we have the defeat at AI. In verses one to five, they have just had an amazing conquest of the city of Jericho. Joshua sends out scouts in verse two. They come back and they say, oh, AI is only a small city. Two or three thousand soldiers will be enough and you can take the city. In verses four and five, the two or three thousand men go up there and they end up running. from the soldiers of A.I.
and thirty-six of them die. A very serious thing when they didn't lose any in the conquest of Jericho. Thirty-six coffins now. The first thirty-six soldiers to die in the Holy Land as they try to conquer the city. Not only that, but they were running from them when it happened. They were being chased away from the gate. And the turmoil in the hearts of the Jewish people at this time must have been something. have such a victory turned into such a humiliating defeat. Overconfidence, probably. And when we have a great spiritual victory, we do face dangers of temptation. Maybe there are two times when we are especially vulnerable to being defeated by Satan.
One is when we're really down in the dumps, totally discouraged. It just seems like we're so vulnerable. But another time is when we're walking on the clouds because we want a great victory. That's the time, one of the times when Satan can slip in there and catch us off our guard. So be careful when you get a great spiritual victory. And then remember that we've got to get back to Gilgal, the place of self-judgment. In verse two it says, Joshua sent men from Jericho. Later on he goes back to Gilgal where they'd done the circumcising, where the reproach of Egypt had been rolled away. And if they had gone back there, God probably would have revealed to them that there was sin in the camp, that his orders respecting Jericho had been disobeyed by one family and that God was not about to bless them.
But they didn't go back there. and they didn't get that revelation from God, that they would have got if they'd given the Spirit of God opportunity to expose the sin. Now I believe one of the needs in assemblies and churches today is to create atmospheres that allow God to speak. And I've been analyzing in my own mind prayer meetings for some time, watching the way we conduct our prayer meetings, and our usual prayer meeting is filled with prayer requests, a whole bunch of things, and we start asking God to heal this person and help that person and relieve the unemployment situation in this family and bless our Sunday school teachers and bless our missionaries.
We do much asking but very little listening. In our typical prayer meetings we do not give God a chance to talk to us about anything he's interested in. We talk to him about the things we're interested in and we do a little humbling of ourselves to wait before God. I've watched this in workers' conferences, and ever since I've been editor of interest, I've gone to these preachers' conferences. And one of the things I notice in so many of the workers' conferences, they start out with prayer. It's a wonderful time of prayer. But before the first sermon is given, they're listing all the problems of who's sick back home and what illnesses and what problems to pray for and this and that. And the thing that I've noticed that's absent in those introductory prayer meetings is earnest prayer for what God wants to say to them during that conference.
What does God want to say to us? As you go into the winter months here and have these week-long conferences, does God want to speak to your assembly? Does God have something that he wants to say? Keep those things foremost in prayer. Waiting on God, asking him to speak to you. Remember in Acts chapter thirteen, When they were, as they ministered to the Lord, the Spirit said, Separate me, Barnabas, and Saul for the work to which I had called them. Now the Spirit was able to get a request in there. They must have been waiting on the Lord. There was probably some exercise, some sense in the assembly that God wanted something done and that nothing was getting done.
No, I shouldn't say that. God wanted something done and they didn't know what it was. They probably were concerned about a sense that the Lord was trying to tell them something and then somewhere along the line, maybe some individual, some man or some woman, said, you know, I just wonder whether these two fellows have been preaching here. I wonder if God wants them to be missionaries or I wonder if God's trying to tell us we should be sending out some workers or somebody might have just sort of popped this idea off the top of their head and somebody else said, you know, I was thinking the same thing and It could have been one of the preachers sort of spoken out like a prophecy, or it could have just a spontaneous reaction from many hearts as the Lord made it clear that he was, and got his message through.
God can speak to a congregation like that. And when there's a sinful condition, you know, maybe there's sin in the assembly, and God wants to say, look, there's something wrong. We don't know what's wrong, but we're not getting soul saved. We're not seeing the blessing we ought. and there's some unrevealed sin and people get aware of that and they begin to pray, Lord, if there's something in our lives that's not right, bring it out in the open and let us deal with it and show it forth so that we can confess it and get rid of it. Can God make your assembly aware of sin in its midst? Now in verses six to fifteen we have Joshua and God.
Joshua tore his clothes and fell to the earth Upon his face before the ark of the Lord until even died. He and the elders of Israel, they really started praying. He and the elders, the leaders, the congregation got down before God and started praying. Humility. But when you read the prayer, verses seven to nine, it's more like a complaint than it is a confession. So there's still something lacking in the humility there. And Joshua says, oh, we'd have been better off if we stayed on the other side of Jordan and didn't come over here. Well, that's the human side of Joshua. That's one of his dark points here. He's not usually like that.
But sometimes you see Christians that are like that, and they make a little effort for God and get a little defeat, and then they quit. You try to do something for the Lord. You try to help out in your local congregation, and you really are well-intentioned, and then some buddy with careless words criticizes you and I'll admit to silence I was doing that whoever pointed at her and then you get offended and then you don't do anything anymore you quit because your feelings are hurt you know isn't that human nature we we love to nurse grievances like that you know I I cut my hands badly on Thanksgiving Day and I'm still rubbing that place you know and and it's healing up but Sometimes we get those little spiritual hurts and we just sort of love to tend them and maybe keep them from healing up too quick.
Some people can keep the wounds open because it's so much fun to nurse grievances. That's not a spiritual type of fun. But we're like that. And we quit because something doesn't go right. No, let's go on for the Lord and let's not... worry about little offenses like that. Forget about that. Why did you suffer yourself to be defrauded? The apostle says, and he's talking about a lot more serious things than somebody saying a little unkind thing about you. So Joshua complains, but he gets over it here. And then in verse ten, God rebukes him. Get up. Why are you lying on your face? Well, the Bible tells us to pray, but sometimes the Bible says stop praying, and this is one of those times.
God says to Joshua, stop praying. This is not the time to pray. This is a time for action. And then he explains what action is needed in verse eleven. Israel has sinned and somebody has stolen the accursed thing from the city of Jericho. And I want you to get up and I want you to clean house on this thing and Work this out. Get rid of it here. The accursed thing in verse eleven. Joshua or God had rather had devoted the city of Jericho to himself. It was a curse or devoted. That city was to be completely destroyed and nobody was to loot it.
Nobody was to plunder it. Nobody was to carry anything home. Later on in the conquest they could take home whatever they found in these cities. But they weren't to take the animals or anything. And they weren't even going to take things out for God, except the gold and the silver were to be brought to the temple. But everything else was to be destroyed. The furniture, the food stocks, the buildings, all of it. It was the first fruits of the land. And like tie that we give to the Lord, God wanted the first part. That runs all through the Bible. Old Testament anew. God wants the first part of things, not the last part. He wants the first part of our income, not the last part and so forth. He wants the first part of the harvest, not the last part. And so they weren't to take any of this.
And someone had, well, it says in verse eleven, stolen. Stolen. It was devoted to God, whatever they'd taken. It wasn't for them. They'd stolen it from God. And God was angry about this. And he says in verses thirteen to fifteen, sanctify the people, get rid of this thing, set them apart for the Lord. And whoever's found with the accursed thing is to be burned with fire because he is transgressed. the covenant of the Lord. The action here is not so much a punishment of guilt as a purging out of sin. There's no issue of forgiveness in this chapter. The guilty party has not offered a chance to repent and be forgiven. He's told to confess.
But there's no discussion about whether he found personal salvation and forgiveness. This is an issue of the congregation. They had to purge out the sins in the congregation and straighten things out. So they begin the process of searching it out. And the second part of the chapter is dealing with sin, verses sixteen to twenty-six. And we don't know how God revealed this. They started out with the twelve tribes. Maybe they got a big bowl with... white marbles in it and one black marble or something like that. And each representative of the tribe came and pulled out a marble and the one that got the black marble was Judah. Or maybe they use some other method like casting lots. This type of leading from the Lord often occurred in the Old Testament.
It also occurs in the New Testament in Acts chapter one. But after the day of Pentecost, you never find it anymore. It seems like that with the indwelling Holy Spirit, we have better ways of determining the will of the Lord. Anyway, they selected the tribe of Judah, and then the family of Zerah, and then his son Zabdi, one of his five sons. These men were probably all dead by now, but the families. And then Karmie, and then the household of Achan. A little interesting insight into Bible words here. If you notice in verse seventeen, he took the family. He brought the family of Judah. And out of the family of Judah, the family of the Zerarite, that is Judah's son Zerah. And then the word family drops out, and by the time you get down to Aiken, you're down to household.
Now, the Old Testament uses the word family in a very wide sense. It uses the word house or household for what we call the family today. Now, that's the English translation. So if you want to translate the book of Joshua into modern English, you will quote Joshua saying, not as for me and my house we will serve the Lord, but as for me and my family we will serve the Lord. and Acts chapter sixteen. What must they do to be saved? Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and now shall be saved in thy family. Because the word family, the way we use it, does not appear in the King James Version. Probably very much of it all. And in the New Testament it only appears once, and it's talking about all the families of earth.
And so when you look to study families in the New Testament, you don't look for that word. All right, when they pick, finally they get down to Achan. In verse nineteen, Joshua says, My son, give, I pray, thee glory to the Lord God of Israel, and make confession unto him, and tell me now what thou hast done. Hide it not from me. And Achan said, I have sinned against the Lord God of Israel, and thus and thus have I done. And he tells how, in verse twenty-one, he saw among the spoils of Jericho a beautiful Babylonish garment. Now Babylon was the... cheek city of the day and so a Babylonian garment would be like saying I saw one of the latest Paris fashions and it didn't get dirty or anything and all the rubble and I took it home and then I saw two hundred shekels of silver and a wedge of gold and I took them home too and I buried them in the floor of my tent notice in verse twenty one the progress of temptation in his life I saw I coveted and I took them He saw them, He set His heart on them, and He took them.
The eyes, the heart, and the hands. That's something of the progress of sin, of temptation in your life. And if you find that, you know, you haven't got the temptation, the power to resist the temptation to sin with your hands, and yet the Bible says God has given us, there's no temptation that's too big for us, but He's given us power over all the temptations. Then you have to say, well, maybe God gave me the power back at the stage of the eyes or the heart. That you do have the power to resist using your eyes to look at that thing that you then covet and then take with your hands. But if you play along with the temptation through the first two stages, by the time you get to the third stage, you're already beaten.
Remember that. The eyes, the heart, the hand. You have the same thing with Eve in the Garden of Eden, don't you? While she saw that the tree was a good tree and desirable. The heart gets fixed on it, desirable to make one wise, and then she reaches out with her hands and takes the fruit of the tree. So it starts in the eyes. He looked at the tree. Devil had been tempting her. Wouldn't that be a nice tree, you know? And then the heart, it was a desirable tree, and then she reaches out with her hands. The eyes, the heart, the hands. And so sin makes its progress in the human life. Joshua tells this man to confess it, but they went farther than that.
They brought, they sent messengers back to the tent. Verse twenty-two, ran into the tent, and sure enough, all this stuff was hidden under the floor of the tent. And the ground there, right in the middle, implicating the whole family. Evidently, the whole family was involved in the thing. And then in verse twenty-five, Joshua says, Why have you troubled us? The Lord will trouble you this day. And they took them out to the valley of Acre and they stoned the whole family with stones. They burned up all their possessions, even their animals, and raised over the bodies a great heap of stones. Even put the gold and the silver and the Babylonish garment out there.
And so they put away sin from their community. Now there's a great lesson in that. And briefly I'll close with this. First of all, as to the flow of history in the book of Joshua, this teaches us that winning victories over a satanic foe, while we learned that it does not depend on weapons of human warfare, we learned that in chapter six, we learned in chapter seven that it does depend on personal purity, forsaking sin, and walking with God. Chapter seven is as much a lesson in the spiritual victory as is chapter six.
In chapter six, we sang last night that beautiful song, Faith is the victory that overcomes the world. In chapter seven, we learned that faith does not overcome the world if you're harboring personal sin in your life. And second, there is a sequence of factors relevant to the people of God in all ages. And this comes from Francis Schaefer's little book, Joshua and the Flow of Biblical History. He says, first of all, Aiken steals from God. Second, though only one man's sin, the blessing is stopped for the people of God corporately. And third, when the judgment is applied, the victory comes back because in chapter eight they go and they defeat the city of Ahai.
And so you have a sort of a sequence, a blessing, time of blessing, and then sin enters, and then there's confession and judgment, and then the blessing returns. You see that sequence all through the book of Judges and through the Old Testament and that's something that we need today I believe in many of our local churches you know a lot of our churches have reacted against the harsh disciplinary procedures of the past and we've reached the opposite extreme now where anything goes in many assemblies today and nobody judges anybody else and and instead of over discipline now we don't have any most of the time and somebody does a wrong thing in one place and just goes to another church and is accepted in the other church without any questions being asked see a man walk out on his wife and children desert them marry somebody else in complete disobedience to the scripture committing adultery by by deserting his wife without any sense of biblical cause goes and joins another church no questions asked welcome come on in and that's just one example we've seen that type of thing but it's the opposite extreme Now, in the past, sometimes these
disciplinary procedures were characterized by a legalism without mercy, sometimes by hypocrisy. Discipline was meted out by elders who themselves did not have the respect of the congregation because their own lives were not such that they had the right to meet out discipline. Sometimes it was arbitrary and autocratic. We don't need to return to that sort of thing, but what we do need to return to is assemblies getting down before God where the people can listen to God and sense his revelation when there is sin in our midst that it can be dealt with and purged away. If it's sin in your individual life, you deal with it too. Even before it gets to the assembly, remember if we judge ourselves, we're not going to be judged.
So let's judge ourselves. Let's confess sin and forsake sin. If you don't, you'll not prosper. But he that confesses his sin and forsakes it will have mercy, the Bible says. And then the power and blessing can come back into the assembly. May God bless his word to us. Closing prayer. Father, we thank you for the lessons of the book of Joshua. Thank you for the lesson of victory by faith and the power of the Spirit of God. Lord, thank you also for the lesson that oftentimes we stand in the way of that victory by our own sinfulness. And may we confess to you, Lord, our sin and deal with it and put it away. walk before you in the power of the Holy Spirit, not grieving of walking in truth and blessing.