HIGHLIGHTS IN JOSHUA
Number 10
THE DANGER OF SPIRITUAL SELF-CONFIDENCE
Joshua chapter 9
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"The men of Israel sampled their provisions but failed to enquire of the Lord.
Joshua 9:14
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THERE IS not doubt that verse 14 is the key verse in this chapter and the one which we need to consider. It reveals the danger of spiritual self-confidence. This is an area which is quite subtle. There is no desire on the part of the Lord that Christains should be wimps, not able to come to decisions, and always going about complaining of their weakness. The point that is here illustrated is that we must be decisive in the Lord and not in the flesh. This moment of fleshly self-confidence sowed for the Israelites difficulties for years to come.

THE STORY

It is important to get the history firmly in our minds, and also remind ourselves of something of the background of the advance of Israel into the promised land. All along so far God has been so clear in telling the Israelites that at each stage of the advance they needed to remove entirely all the people who had been living in the land, so that nothing of their culture and habits could corrupt the pure religion of the people of God. God knows the proneness of our sinful natures to be corrupted by the world around us, and how easily we allow the standards of the world, and philosophy of life of the world to influence us, and how difficult we find it not only to know truly the Bible way of life, but also how difficult we find it to be faithful to the Bible way of life when we do understand it. It is because of this, God had impressed on the Israelites that they should not let remain in the land any heathen influences that may corrupt their faith and life. The history of Israel is a dismal testimony to the fact that they were easily led astray from God by the culture of the heathen all around them.

The story is basically as follows. The Gibeonites had caught the fear of Israel that was prevalent in the land. They saw that as Israel advanced they removed completely from the land all the people who dwelt their. They saw the power of God that made Israel victorious. Because of this they sought a ploy by which they could save themselves from the annihilation which would inevitably engulf them. Their ploy was rather clever. They depended on the ignorance of the land which Israel necessarily had. They pretended to come from an area so far away, that where they dwelt could not be any part of the inheritance God was giving to the people of Israel. To make it seem that they had come a very long way to visit Israel, they wore worn out clothes, and their food was made mouldy and stale. Their ploy was to make Israel believe by their clothes and food that they had come a very long way, when really they had come from just around the corner.

The Israelites from Joshua downwards fell for this deception. They tasted the food, and saw that it was old and stale, and immediately believed the false story the Gibeonites had told. Without consulting God, and depending on their own wisdom, in self-confidence they made a treaty of peace with the Gibeonites, and bound themselves by it. So the Gibeonites saved themselves from destruction and death, and their presence with all their heathen culture remained as a influence it the land. It is true they became servants to Israel, but they were there, and that presented an enduring problem and danger.

The result of their self-confidence was that Israel made a bad mistake, its consequence never left them, making their future life for God so much more difficult.

A POWERFUL LESSON

There are four things we may learn from this incident which will be important for our own spiritual growth and progress.

1. God's plans are not thwarted.

We must realise that God was not caught out by this failure of Israel so that his plans were upset and he had to make contingency plans in order to compensate. There are some who would seem to suggest this, but such an idea would be completely dishonouring to God, and tarnishing his glory. Any such idea would suggest that God is not sovereign and that he does not know the future, as the Bible clear tells us he does. God does not just know the future he controls the future and all history. This must be, for otherwise his plan of redemption in Jesus would have never been able to take place as it did. It may have eventually taken place, but there could have been no definitive prophetic utterance such as we have in Isaiah 53. How could there have been if God could have been overtaken by some historical event and failure in his people which would then cause him to revise all his plans.

God knew all about this failure. Indeed his permissive will ordained that it should happen. This does not mean that God was responsible for the failure. God never manipulates things to cause people to fail or sin. Human beings sin and fail by their own volition and desire or folly. Human being are thus completely responsible for their actions. God who ordains that we should in our folly fail, thus knows all about them and his plans of redemption for us are in no way upset. He has purposed to bring us to glory in Christ, and all our failures and sins can't hinder his purpose, because he has taken them all into account in his overall plan.

Though this is true we must never suppose our failures do not matter, or that they are not our fault, or that they had to happen. God did not directly ordain them in the sense that he ordered us and compelled us into them. God simply left us to our own devices in his good wisdom, and our weakness and corruption we allowed to get the better of us. However we are secure in the truth that although sorrow and repentance is demanded when we do sin and fail and the consequences can't be avoided in the immediate present, yet our security in Christ is not effected because our acceptance before God is on the basis of Christ's perfect work for us, and our perseverance is secure because God can not allow to be lost those who have fulfilled the whole of his law perfectly in their surety, Jesus Christ.

2. God has a purpose in our failures.

It is so very true that we can be told time and time a again some important fact of truth, but until we have experienced the truth of it for ourselves, it never sinks in. A child can be told time and time again not to touch an electric fire because it will burn them, but the child does not really believe it until by touching the child is burnt and hurt. The child then will have learnt the truth and will never do it again.

The Israelites had been told to rely on the Lord and not on themselves, yet they soon were trusting in their own strength and wisdom, and feeling that they were quite able to deal with the everyday problems of life without consulting the Lord. The big decisions, yes, they would go to the Lord, but why worry him about the everyday things. Anyway they felt they were able. There was carelessness here too. The situation came upon them and so they dealt with it themselves without thinking. God left them to themselves so that they may have impressed upon them how much they needed to consult the Lord in everything, and to convince them of their weakness and inability, without God, to run their lives. They learnt to rely on the Lord, and not to omit to consult the Lord in all things.

Nor was Israel permitted to go forward in their own wisdom and so fail just for their own learning, but for us and the people of God in every period of history. We have had recorded for us the pilgrimage of the children of Israel so that we may learn from their history, about God and about the spiritual pilgrimage, so that we may be able to avoid the same pitfalls that they succumbed to. So Israel's failure becomes not only a blessing to them, but to the church down the ages.

3. Failures can have lasting consequences.

What we learn from this mistake of Joshua and Israel is that the Gibeonites, though becoming servants to Israel, and socially of a lower order, still they remained living in the land, and their presence and their culture was there to influence the life and ways of Israel. This meant that for Israel to keep themselves from impurities and godless ideas was made that much more difficult, and because of the permanent presence of the Gibeonites among them, this problem would be ever present making godly living that much more difficult.

It is a sad fact that it is all too easy for Christians to be influenced by the world. It is much more easy for this to happen than for the person of the world to be influenced for good by the Gospel. The reason is very simple. There is nothing in the heart and spirit of the one who is not a Christian that attracts to the Gospel of Jesus. Before we become a Christian our natures are wholly worldly. We have to receive a direct work of the Holy Spirit within us showing us our need for forgiveness, and causing us to earnestly look for the way of forgiveness in Christ. Although there may be some attraction in the person of the world to works of charity, and some attempt to emulate such behaviour, the spiritual life is totally alien to them, and the way of Christ totally unknown.

With the Christian things are different. Although we have become a new creation so the real new person we are inside is created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness, our flesh and our bodies are the same as they have always been and have all the sinful and godless desires of the world that they have always had. Thus there is in our flesh that which is attracted to the ways of the world. We find ourselves attracted to the worldly philosophies, which have much to commend them, and unless we are careful, and are well taught and nurtured in the Word of God, and we understand it and have our living formed by it, it is any easy matter for us to find our faith and beliefs corrupted by the world. Further the sad truth in the history of Israel is that the idols of the people around, and the Gibeonites would have been no exception, were found to be attractive, and people found that they forsook Jehovah for the gods of the heathen.

Thus this failure brought about an almost permanent situation where the Israelites were under the influence of heathen religion and heathen ways, and this would have made it much more difficult to remain faithful to Jehovah. This is a very serious lesson for us to learn. We live in an society where we cannot avoid contact with the world. We can't separate ourselves from the world as God was seeking to make possible for Israel in the promised land. It would not be possible for us and would not be right. We have to live in the world as we find it. Our work and daily living, our listening to the media, and seeking education, all demands that the world's learning and values impinge upon us. The value of this failure and its consequences for us is to warn us of the situation we are facing, and so cause us to spend as much time as possible in soaking in the Word of God, and daily, even hourly, casting ourselves on the Lord for his wisdom and strength, so that we are kept in the way of the Lord. This is very subtle, because the danger can work in both directions. We may escape direct accepting of the worlds ways, but in our desire for moral purity, we may become worldly as we become like the Pharisees who were self-righteous and judgemental, and had nothing of the love and mercy and grace of Christ in them.

We must remember there were blessings that God allowed in their failure. The Israelites did have the services of the Gibeonites. Further, as we have already learned, the Lord who has saved us, will not allow us to be lost, and will bring us through the difficulties that the world presents, and our journey to glory, though made that much more difficult sometimes by our failures, will be successful through the power of God working in us and for us.

4. The need to be watchful.

The Israelites failed to be watchful, and so they succumbed to the devils ploy. The devil is always on the watch for some new way to trip the Christian up. He never rests and is always active. Being of angelic origin he is extremely clever and subtle and watches us to exploit every weakness. How we need to be watchful and not forget to consult the Lord in everything.

The subtlety of the devil is seen here. He did not just plan to trip the Israelites up in this one issue, but chose something that would enable him to sow a 5th column in the ranks of the people of God, which he could exploit for their undoing for years to come. Sometimes when temptation comes our way, we need to remember that Satan will be likely to have planned in the temptation, not just the immediate failure, but the means to cause further temptation and difficulty in the future.

As the Apostle Paul tells us in Ephesians 6 we can only be strong in the face of the devil in the Lord and in the power of his might. We shall only be able to stand in the day of temptation when the armour of the gospel is guarding us. It will only be guarding us when we have it on by knowledge of it in all its depth, and faith in it as our only strength and salvation.

The failures of the Old Testament are never meant to be just for interest, nor must we ever read them with a proud spirit feeling that we have not fallen like that, but as lesson to us to cause us to be humble, and to understand that the people of God of old were just the same as we are, and if they could fail, we are liable to fail also, unless we are watchful.

CONSULTING THE LORD

We are told in our text that the Israelites did not consult the Lord. The question arises in the mind as to how we do this today. It is not so easy as we may at first imagine. Daily and hourly we need to be consulting the Lord, so that in day to day living we do not fall into the traps of the devil. Then there are the bigger decisions in life. How do we consult the Lord. We know we can pray, and this we will do. We know the Bible is our guide, but the Bible does not give answers to particular situations, but simple opens up to us the way of the Lord and principles which cover that way. I doubt that there is any Christian that has not found the matter of guidance difficult.

As to our daily consulting of the Lord so that our daily lives might be in his way, we shall find ourselves more and more living in his way as we are more and more living in his Word and in his presence. Then the life of God will so permeate our souls and minds that we will find we have a divine perspective on life.

With regard to more individual and difficult situations or decisions, we need to be waiting on God in real sincerity for his guidance, with deep faith that God will never let us go astray, looking to him never to let us go astray or make the wrong choices. The Bible constantly assures us that when we have this true earnest spirit towards God, God will not let us down, and when we have to make a decision he will cause it to be the right one.

We must never be in too much of a hurry. There will be times when an immediate decision needs to be made, but when this is not so, we must be ready to be patient and wait until we are sure of the will of the Lord.

Where the right way seems to be obscure and we just do not seem to have any real light, then the only way forward is to make a decision in dependence on God. We will then find that if the decision is the wrong one, God will hinder its execution in some way, until we find his will. We have an example of this in the life of Paul in Acts. Before God guided him by a vision to go into Macedonia, he tried twice to continue his labours in two other directions. In both cases he found the way blocked.

The sincere waiting on the Lord for his guidance will always be honoured by God, and he will keep us in his way.