As I looked at the last few chapters of Exodus, I didn’t think it would too profitable for us to look at the intricate details of how everything was made in the tabernacle. But I did want to finish our journey with the Israelites through the desert to the Promised Land, so we are going to beam forward to the book of Joshua. The younger generation with Joshua and Caleb made it to the land that was Promised and Joshua is about to die, and we will look at how this whole journey comes to an end in Joshua 24.
Joshua spends chapter 23 and half of chapter 24 summarizing all the wonderful and miraculous things God has done for them before he tells them to fear and obey the Lord. This is just like when Moses delivered the 10 commandments, he reminded them of the past and looked to the future promises God gave them. He is not just slamming down laws for them to follow because he is a dictator God.
All of God’s commands are if … then…. Or do this, don’t do this, so that you may…. Obey my commands that you may be my treasured possession and a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, and dwell in this Promised Land forever.
Don’t have other gods before me so that you may not be deceived into wasting your allegiance on something that isn’t real. Don’t work on the Sabbath so that you may rest and have fellowship with me. Don’t commit adultery so that you may have a happy and blessed marriage. All the commands are for our good.
God has never done anything that isn’t intended for the good of humanity. We may not always agree, we may not see the good in it from our perspective, but God is good, he is love, and can only do good things. It is because of our blindness, pride, stubbornness and lack of trust that he has had to take drastic measures at times.
Look at 2 Cor 1:19-20. “In Jesus Christ it is always yes. For all the promises of God find their yes in Him”. Therefore if we are in Him, if we serve Jesus, we claim all the promises of God. God wants to bless us, he wants to give us all he has promised us, he wants to say yes to us all the time. That is why we say yes or “Amen” to Him for his glory. Then he establishes us, anoints us, puts his seal on us, and gives the Spirit as a guarantee or down payment on future promises.
Notice the context of this in 2 Corinthians, is when Paul was going to come to them with some harsh words, and God redirected him to Macedonia. God redirected Paul to spare the Corinthians another rebuke and painful visit, and give them a chance to turn around before Paul got there. God doesn’t want to punish, he wants us to repent.
Back to Joshua 24 verse 14, “Now therefore, because of all he has done for us, serve Him with sincerity and in faithfulness, wholeheartedly. Put away forever the idols and gods that your ancestors served, and serve the Lord alone”. Now is this just because of what he has done? Do we now serve Jesus just because of what he has done in the past? That’s not a motivator that lasts very long.
People need something to strive for in the future as well. The past is our confirmation that he is trustworthy to serve, and that if we continue to serve him, he has even greater promises in store for us. That is the covenant that we are entered into with him, and remember a covenant has two sides. God is making a deal with us. Can you believe that? He doesn’t have to do that. He has all authority, he could make us do what he wants.
Joshua’s famous words in verse 15 basically say in my paraphrase, “you all go ahead and worship those other useless gods if you think they have or can do anything for you, but after all I’ve seen, me and my house are going to serve the Lord, how could you come to any other conclusion.”
God says we must completely remove idols and temptations to sin from our lives. Anything that we do not have power over that draws us away from God must be completely put away forever. This is why God said to completely annihilate all signs of foreign gods and people that worship them. He knows that if there is any temptation, we will not have the strength to overcome it. The result is our world today with more choices of idols than ever. That is why now we have the Spirit of God to give us the power. But don’t play with the power because most of us haven’t learned to be completely surrendered to the Spirit, so we are still very vulnerable to all the other choices.
So the people again say, absolutely we will never abandon the Lord and serve other gods. They confirm all that God has done for them. But notice that they didn’t say they would get rid of their idols. In fact if we read ahead in the book of Judges we see that for one generation they did stay true to God, but because they did not do the one thing that God instructed them to do, get rid of all their idols and those who worshipped them, the next generation went right back to serving the foreign gods worse than ever.
In Judges 2, we see that every generation that did not experience the Lord, turned to other gods that were available. What did they experience with other gods that they did not get from worshipping their God? An emotional and sensual experience. The stories of the true God were not good enough, when they could scream and shout and have sex, and drink and party worshipping the other gods. They didn’t get anything from those gods, but they did get some carnal enjoyment while worshipping them.
Now it’s Ok to enjoy and have emotional experiences in church. But does our relationship with God revolve around the emotional gratification of our worship services. We need to be careful about that. And let’s face it, most of our idols give us more immediate satisfaction than God does.
So how did Joshua get a whole generation to stay faithful to God? Simply by reminding them of what they had already witnessed God do, but the next generation only had their stories and one has to wonder how well they transmitted those stories. How they helped their children experience God like they did? I think it’s difficult for generations coming up in the church who have never really seen God, all they have are the stories in the bible, but no real experience of Him, probably because the generation before them has had very little experience of God.
In the early church we see the power of the Holy Spirit all the time. But in the Jewish synagogues, church had become just an intellectual education system about God, and a bunch of rituals and rules that the people had to keep in order to be on God’s good side. I believe the church today at least in western culture needs the same kind of revival that the Jewish religion needed in the first century.
And how do people experience God no matter what period of history it is? By obedience to His will, which includes Holy living, but is not restricted to that. And by depending solely on Him and not the things of the world. Have you ever noticed that we are the only thing God created that doesn’t perfectly obey all that he has commanded us?
Everything else in nature experiences the wonders of God every day simply because it does only what God made it to do. Have you ever wondered if a flower or tree, or the ocean gets bored because it does the same thing all the time? It all works perfectly if man does not interfere. To me that is the curse of the human mind and original sin, we now know that we can disobey, we can see alternatives to God’s plan.
Again in Judges 2, failure to completely get rid of sin and temptation according to God’s will (remember Jesus words about plucking out your eye etc.). When we don’t do this it causes the Lord to give us over to fend for ourselves, so we don’t see him act in our lives. The next generation is left to deal with the results. If there is only one choice, that is the choice that will be made. But if we offer many choices of gods, we will choose what appears most attractive based on what others tell us and what we see the rest of the people doing.
The nation (culture) and the family are the primary influences on the next generation, not the church anymore, if it ever was. The church is just a piece and not a very influential piece anymore. Why, because when people look at the church, they see flawed people and buildings rather than Jesus acting in the world.
This is so key folks. Do we in Christianity ever say we serve the Lord and yet do not get rid of our idols and live in total obedience to Him, and God becomes just one of the things we worship and serve in our lives? Are we not guilty also of saying we will serve him, but let’s just overlook that part about getting rid of everything else we like that takes us away from Him.
Joshua knows this. He knows these people have been very good through their history at giving lip service to God, but rarely following through in the long run. So we in read Josh 24:19, a very odd statement, “You are not able to serve (not worship but serve) God”. The word serve has the idea of tilling the land as a bond servant. Basically to serve is to obey. Why does he say that they’re not able?
First of all, it’s only with the Spirit of God that you can serve God, not by human will. But the real point is that he just heard them neglect to say that they would destroy all their idols (I think that is the key aspect of repentance). He is saying, you cannot serve the Lord if you hang on to those other gods.
We see in Lk 14 Jesus making a very similar statement, “If you do not forsake everything, every person, everything you own, even your own life, you cannot be my disciple”. Here he puts it on a level that we can understand better. We don’t serve idols and other gods like the ancient people did. But he acknowledges that other people and things, and money can be those idols that make it impossible to really follow and serve Him.
In fact it was only after Pentecost that people were truly able to serve God. Even Peter failed before he received the Holy Spirit. That is why Jesus said he must go so that the helper can be sent. We’ll see this in detail when we study the book of Acts starting in September.
Back in Joshua 24 he says, “OK, you say you will serve him, you are now a witness against yourselves. If you make a covenant with God and promise to serve/follow Him, you will be held accountable”. As Jesus says, you are better off not starting if you don’t count the cost. Peter (2Pe 2:20-22) says you are better off never having known about Jesus that to know Him and his commands and then reject Him and what he says.
If you break this covenant again, you have no excuse and you will bring destruction upon yourselves. Are you absolutely sure you are ready and willing to serve God, don’t play with this. You’ve had enough opportunities, that if you blow it this time, there is no more mercy”. You can just feel Joshua’s doubt in their words. “Here’s a stone that will be a witness against us, it will never forget what you just said”. I wonder if that Rock represents Jesus.
That’s why we must experience God and be surrendered to the Spirit living in us. Otherwise we can worship God but we cannot serve Him. I wonder how many Christians are worshippers but not servers/obeyers of God?
So how do we get there? How do we really, honestly, and completely be ready to make that huge commitment to God, to be real disciples, baptized and obeying everything he commanded. The Bible is very clear on this. First of all you have to know him, you have to really believe that he is who he says he is and that he has done all that he says he has.
But that’s not even enough. I think even though these are old stories, most of us believe the Bible, maybe the immensity of what God did has become less intense for us, but we believe it. But the whole Christian life was meant to continue the adventure with Him. Most of us in this generation have not experienced much of that.
So the other, most important part of being ready to really serve God, is to die to self and be reborn in the Spirit. The Israelites are to remember that they were brought out of slavery and are now free to live for God. In the same way we have been freed from slavery to the Law and the power of sin in order that we may live for Christ. Living in obedience to Christ is actually freedom from slavery to things that offer nothing.
This is put well in Romans 8:1-17 . It says we were slaves, now we are children, both are commanded to obey in the bible by the way, but for different reasons. We get the inheritance that is even received by Jesus himself. But there are a few if’s in that passage? If the Spirit of God lives in you, if you put to death the deeds of the flesh or sinful nature, and if you suffer like Jesus suffered.
Let me briefly address all of those. First the Bible says the Spirit comes to live in us when? When we are born again. What has to happen? The old person has to die so the New Person can be born. Peter says in the first church sermon, repent and be baptised everyone of you for the forgiveness of your sins, then you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Repent simply means turning from your ways to God’s ways.
“Do you have to give up everything?” If it keeps you from obeying Jesus commands then yes. If you can find a way to keep those things that are not sinful, and use them to fulfill God’s will, then that’s fine. Otherwise yes you need to get rid of it. And obviously if it causes you to sin, you need to get rid of it. This includes your job by the way. You were given that job by God, to use for his purposes.
Thirdly, how did Jesus suffer? Well aside from the crucifixion and torture, he suffered by being hated by more people than he was loved by. He told his disciples plainly that we will be hated too for his sake. But even more than that, his greatest suffering was to be completely selfless. Is there anything harder that you can imagine, that human nature fights against more strongly, than to be constantly willing to put your comfort and desires aside to do God’s will and serve and love others?
Jesus prayer in the Garden before he was arrested shows his suffering. He essentially says, “Daddy, I don’t want to do this, is there any other possible way we could accomplish this?” This is the last thing he wants to do. Being homeless and so on was not such a big deal compared to this whole torture and gruelling, slow, painful death thing, being separated from His Father for even a minute. “I don’t want to do this, but nevertheless, I will do what you say”.
The truth is that his commands are the purest form of his desire to love and save us, and provide what he has promised. What if we neglected the command to repent and be baptized? What if we neglected the command to confess with our mouths that Jesus is Lord and believe in our hearts that he rose from the dead? Those are commands in order to receive salvation from sin. All the other commands are meant to improve our lives on earth and help others achieve salvation. Can we pick and choose which ones to obey? If we don’t desire to obey them, are we saved? Do we have the Spirit living in us?
Do you ever hear yourself say, “Did God really say… or Did God really mean… Who does that sound like? Satan. Yes, if he said don’t eat from that one tree when you have been given the freedom to have everything else he created for you, he meant it. If he said forgive your enemy, he meant it. If he said don’t worship other things, he meant it. We ought not respond to God’s commands with questions.
Clean your room. Is that a difficult command? Do I have to clean all of it? Can I do it after I go to my friends? What about Johnny, his room is dirtier than mine? Do you see what questions are when you receive a command? Delays, and excuses to get out of doing it. What does every parent want to hear? Ok mom, OK dad, and off they go to clean their room, knowing full well what that means.
Does it benefit you to have a clean room? Well, I suppose that’s debatable. Does it benefit you to have eternal life, to experience the blessings of God who has everything to give you? Not much to debate there if you believe it.
God’s commands are not given to enslave and prohibit people. He has released his people from slavery. They are meant to open us up to all that God has to give us, which is so much more than we are experiencing. But we have to have faith, real faith is believing beyond any doubt, and that belief translates into action, and I think that’s the rub.
Most of us don’t really believe that if we give it all up to follow Him, that it will be better than what we have now. That’s the bottom line isn’t it? It is for me. We are afraid that God won’t come through, won’t keep his promises. Does that sound like faith? So we know that we have done what the church told us to do so that we don’t go to hell, and we hope that’s true. That’s often as far as we want to go. But if it isn’t true, then we really haven’t lost anything, and that’s down the road anyway. But to obey now, that could cost us.
You realize that these Israelites that we travelled with through the desert for 40 years, never really got what God promised them. Yes they got to the Promised Land, but very soon it all fell apart. The true permanent Promised Land is still future and the way to get there hasn’t changed.
So near his death at the end of chapter 23, Joshua says, “every promise of the Lord has come true. But as surely as the Lord your God has given you the good things he promised, he will also bring disaster on you if you disobey Him. He will completely destroy you from this land he has given you, if you break the covenant with Him”.
Have we learned from these people? These are God’s chosen people like us. I know we’re under a new covenant, and it begins with agreeing that Jesus is Lord. In Revelation, Jesus continually says that those who conquer or prevail in their faith will receive my eternal promises. Those who have washed their robes, or put on Christ are blessed and will be able to enter the city through the gates and eat from the tree of life. But still today, especially if you know Jesus, if you are a sorcerer, sexually immoral, a murderer, an idol worshipper, or (pay special attention to this one) love to live a lie, you don’t get in. But you’re all invited and there’s still time.
God wants to say yes to us, but we have to say yes to Him. He probably won’t ask you to give up everything. But what we must all ask ourselves is where in my life have I been saying no to God, how you dress, what you watch on TV, how you treat others, that job that forces me to act without integrity. Do you hear God telling you in that little voice, you need to stop that, or get that out of your life, and you’re saying no? And are you going to turn that into a yes, so that he can say yes to you. He wants to, and He will if you do your part in this living covenant.
