Welcome to the Lansdale Life Church podcast.
If you're seeking a closer relationship with Jesus Christ, this podcast is for you.
Thank you for joining us today.
Let's open with a word of prayer.
Heavenly Father, we just give this time over to you, Lord, and we pray that your
spirit would be here amongst us, Lord, that you would open our minds and our
word to discern your word, God.
We pray, God, that we would learn from amongst each other, Lord, and we pray, God,
that you just guide the teaching, Lord, and the path that you would want it to go.
We give you praise and honor, God, in your name, amen.
All right, so we are up to Joshua 7, and just as a 30-second recap, so Chapter 1
basically covered the commissioning of Joshua.
He was taking over for Moses as the new leader.
Chapter 2, they were scouting into Jericho.
They were looking to make their move on Jericho, and Rahab, who was in Jericho,
hid the spies and showed herself to be faithful, and she was spared from all that.
That's a great story.
Chapter 3, God parts the Jordan River, much like he did as they were coming out of
Israel, and they enter into the long-awaited Promised Land.
Chapter 4 talked about memorial stones that they set for future generations to show
God's faithfulness, and I love that.
That's something we should all put into practice at some point, some ways that we
can recognize and remember God's faithfulness in our lives.
Chapter 5, Israel renews their covenant in preparation for battle into Jericho,
and last week, Chapter 6 was the victory.
Jericho is destroyed and devoted to the Lord, which we're going to talk a bit about tonight.
So, Chapter 7 is a bit of a turn of event, so after the miraculous victory in Chapter 6,
Chapter 7 shows, you know, unconfessed, hidden sin turns triumph into defeat,
so they go into another, yet another slump, so to speak.
So, let's start out, verse 1.
But the Israelites were unfaithful in regard to the devoted things.
Achan, son of Carmi, the son of Zimrai, son of Zera, of the tribe of Judah, took some of them.
So, the Lord's anger burned against him.
So, there's a big contrast here from Chapter 6.
Chapter 6, we had obedience, which led to victory, and here this chapter starts out
right away in verse 1 with the sin.
The devoted things was something that immediately caught my attention.
I mean, as you know, when something stands out and seems kind of devoted, that seems a little odd,
there's always something there.
So, devoted things, the Hebrew word hiram refers to the irrevocable giving over
of something or a person to the Lord, and it can often mean the total destruction of those things.
So, the devoted things, we're talking about some of the very specific things,
we're going to talk more about them as this chapter evolves.
But, referring back to Chapter 6 in verse 17, it says,
the city shall be devoted, same word, same Hebrew word, hiram, to the Lord for destruction.
So, the whole thing was to be given over to the Lord.
So, everything in Jericho belonged to God.
But apparently, that wasn't clear to everyone.
So, most of it was to be destroyed.
Certain items such as the silver, gold, bronze, iron would be placed in the Lord's treasury,
as it said in Joshua 6 and 19.
So, at Jericho, everything was considered God's portion there,
more or less a first fruit that was given.
So, Israel wasn't really allowed to take any of the plunder or anything for itself.
So, Aitkin's sin that he did, and again, we're going to,
that's going to unfold a little bit more as the chapter unfolds,
wasn't just stealing, it wasn't just a, hey, this looks kind of cool,
I'm going to take this for myself.
He was taking something that very, very specifically belonged to God
and he was treating it as his own.
So, it says that God's anger burned against that, his wrath, his righteousness,
and God's anger, as we've learned.
We've talked a lot about this on Wednesday nights,
that God's anger isn't like our anger.
It's not like an emotional anger or an anger where we're taking revenge on someone.
It's his holiness responding to something that is sinful.
So, the phrase that they were unfaithful, when you read a phrase like unfaithful,
sometimes we don't understand the severity of that.
It doesn't sound as serious as what it is.
But again, the word for that in here really implies there was a treachery to it.
So, it wasn't just this flippant thing that Aiken did.
There wasn't just a little mistake or a little error in judgment.
There was a level of treachery to it that should have come through,
should have a stronger word, could have been used.
And we also have learned that these types of sins aren't just an individual thing,
that it really is a corporate thing.
It impacts the whole group, which we're going to, again, talk a little bit more about.
And that's not just true of this situation.
That can be true with us.
1 Corinthians 12, 26, if one member suffers, all suffer together.
1 Corinthians 5, 6 reminds us that sin affects the entire body at certain levels.
So, it's never just an individual thing, it's a corporate thing.
But especially with what they were undertaking,
we'll talk a little bit about that, how it really impacted the entire group.
So, verses 2 through 5, now Joshua sent men from Jericho to Ai, not A-I-A.
Yeah, right.
That's pretty up the date, that's right.
Which is near Beth-Avan to the east of Bethel and told them,
go up and spy out the region.
So, the men went up and they spied out A.
When they returned to Joshua, they said,
not all the army will have to go up against Ai.
Send two or three thousand men to take it and do not worry the whole army.
For only a few people lived there, so about three thousand went up.
But they were routed by the men of A, who killed about 36 of them.
They chased the Israelites from the city gate as far as the stone quarries
and struck them down on the slopes.
At this, the hearts of the people melted in fear and became like water.
So, they sent these spies out and it said, they recommended the small force.
So, it doesn't say anything about, God said, take a small force.
It doesn't say anything about the fact that they consulted with God on this.
So, there was this level of overconfidence.
There was this level of relying on themselves and this led to the death of 36 men.
So, this is very much in contrast to when they went into Jericho,
where they were fully dependent and reliant on God.
And one of the key verses in here is, the hearts of the people melted and became like water.
And again, this is the polar opposite of what happened when they went in
and faced the Canaanites.
And Joshua 2, 11, it said, the Canaanites hearts melted.
So, you have this flipping of the story here and now Israel is experiencing this fear.
And we know from scripture, John 15 tells us apart from God, we can do nothing.
And we know when this level of fear arises in us, it's not a fear.
It's not something that manifests from God.
The fear of man is never from God.
So, they were experiencing a fear that was not from God and not a healthy fear at all.
So, moving on 6 through 12, then Joshua tore his clothes and fell face down to the ground
before the Ark of the Lord, remaining there till evening.
The elders of Israel did the same and sprinkled dust on their hairs, hands, heads.
And Joshua said, alas, sovereign Lord, why did you ever bring this people across the Jordan
to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites to destroy us?
If only we had been content to stay on the other side of the Jordan,
pardon your servant, Lord, what can I do now that Israel has been routed by its enemies,
the Canaanites and the other people of the country will hear about this
and they will surround us and wipe out our name from the earth.
What, then, will you do for your own great name?
The Lord said to Joshua, stand up.
What are you doing down on your face?
Israel has sinned.
They have violated my covenant, which I commanded them to keep.
They have taken some of the devoted things.
That is why the Israelites cannot stand against their enemies.
They turn their backs and run because they have been made liable to destruction.
I will not be with you anymore unless you destroy whatever among you is devoted to destruction.
So, wow, there's a lot in that section.
So, Joshua is lamenting.
He's tearing his clothes.
He's falling before the Ark.
He's questioning God.
Why have you brought us here?
Why did you bring us across?
Maybe he's blaming God in his heart, but he's clearly misdiagnosing the situation.
So, he's clearly misdiagnosed.
He assumes the problem is God's faithfulness in this situation,
and God immediately responds.
Says, get up.
It's Israel.
They've sinned.
They've sinned against me.
God reveals the disobedience, and God says,
I will be with you no more unless this happens.
So, he's not talking about a loss of covenant or anything like that,
but he's talking about a loss of blessing, a loss of favor.
He's saying, my presence won't go with you,
and they had just experienced the power of his presence in battle,
and now they just experienced the lack of his presence in battle.
Isaiah 59, 1 through 2 says,
Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save,
nor his ear too dull to hear,
but your iniquities have separated you from God.
Your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.
And the message here is loud and clear that sin hinders fellowship with God.
Sin hinders the favor of God.
Has nothing to do with what we would consider today,
you know, salvation, but it hinders that fellowship,
and for them it hindered that favor.
It inhibits us from fulfilling the kingdom work,
the work that he has called us to do.
It hinders, sin hinders that.
And it took me many, many, many, many years
to learn, you know, when, you know, when I feel distant from God
because of sin in my life, it's not God being absent,
it's me choosing to live the way, the way that I'm living.
So it's not, he, you know, in this situation, you know,
God can't be in the same camp as sin.
He can't.
He's holy.
He's pure.
And it's the same, the same with us.
Thankfully, you know, he sees us through the blood of Jesus,
but sin still hinders us.
Verses 13 through 18.
God is saying, go, consecrate the people.
Tell them, consecrate yourselves in preparation for tomorrow.
For this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says.
There are devoted things among you, Israel.
You cannot stand against your enemies until you remove them.
In the morning, present yourselves, tribe by tribe.
The tribe the Lord chooses shall come forward, clan by clan.
The clan the Lord chooses shall come forward, family by family.
The family the Lord chooses shall come forward, man by man.
Whoever is caught with the devoted things
shall be destroyed by fire along with all that belongs to him.
He has violated the covenant of the Lord
and has done an outrageous thing in Israel.
Early in the morning, Joshua had Israel come forward by tribes
and Judah was chosen.
The clan of Judah came forward and the Zarenites were chosen.
He had the clan of Zarenites come forward by the families.
Zimrai was chosen.
Joshua had his family come forward man by man
and Achan son of Karmic, son of Zimrai,
the son of Zera of the tribe of Judah was chosen.
So there was a call for consecration.
Remember, setting apart.
There was an exposure of the sin.
This is the same thing was echoed earlier in Joshua 3
where God had them prepare and consecrate themselves.
But God systematically reveals the guilty party.
Tribe, clan, household, individual.
So God exposes the sin thoroughly.
But we'll see that he also provides a way forward
from judgment to sin will not remain hidden.
He's providing mercy and an opportunity to repent.
Numbers 32, 23 says,
but if you fail to do this, you will be sinning against the Lord
and you may be sure that your sin will be found out.
Luke 8, 17 says, nothing is hidden that will not make manifest.
So God brings the hidden things to light, not for the sake of exposing,
not for the sake of this aha moment of pointing the finger,
but he brings them the light for the sake of restoration.
Sin is darkness.
God is light.
And there is a natural process there.
John 3, 19 through 21.
This is the verdict.
Light has come into the world,
but people love the darkness instead of light
because their deeds were evil.
Everyone who does evil hates the light
and will not come into the light for fear of their deeds will be exposed.
But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light
so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done
has been done in the sight of the Lord.
God is light and he sheds light on these things.
And one of the things that I love about light is
when light comes, darkness doesn't struggle to leave.
It just leaves.
When you turn a light on,
there's no struggle between the light and the dark.
The dark is just gone.
It just is, right?
And that's how God is.
God will not be in the presence of sin.
He's light.
And when he comes, when his light is there,
the darkness is just gone.
We can choose to hide from the light if we want to,
but his light just shines on us
and that's where he wants us to be.
And that's what he was doing here.
19 through 21.
Then Joshua said to Achan,
my son, give glory to the Lord for the God of Israel
and honor him.
Tell me what you have done.
Do not hide it from me.
Achan replied, it is true.
I have sinned against the Lord, the God of Israel.
This is what I have done.
When I saw in the plunder a beautiful robe
from Babylonia, 200 shekels of silver
and a bar of gold weighing 50 shekels,
I coveted them and took them.
They are hidden in the ground inside my tent
with the silver underneath.
This is a very, very familiar progression, right?
He saw, he desired it or coveted it.
He took it and he hid it.
How many times have we seen this play out in scripture?
It's the very thing that happened in the fall
at the garden.
How many times has that been true in our lives
when we coveted something or wanted something?
We saw it, we desired it, we took it and we hid it.
James 1, 14 through 15 says,
but each person is tempted when they are dragged away
by their own evil desire and enticed.
Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin
and sin, when it is full grown, gives birth to death.
So this idea of desiring sin and death.
It's a familiar, familiar, familiar story for all of us.
Aiken confesses only after being exposed
and not from this level of conviction.
In other words, he wasn't listening to the Spirit of God
saying, hey, convicting his heart.
He was exposed and oftentimes that magnifies
the consequences of things.
For 22 through 26, so Joshua sent messengers
and they ran to the tent, and there it was,
hidden in his tent with the silver underneath.
They took the things from the tent,
brought them to Joshua and all the Israelites
and spread them out before the Lord.
Then Joshua, together with all of Israel,
took Aiken, the son of Zera, the silver, the robe,
the gold bar, sons and daughters, his cattle,
donkeys, sheep, his tent, and all he had to the Valley of Acore.
Joshua said, why have you brought this trouble on us?
The Lord will bring trouble on you today.
Then all of Israel stoned him,
and after they had stoned the rest,
they burned them.
Over Aiken, they had heaped up a large pile of rocks
which remains to this day.
Then the Lord turned from his fierce anger.
Therefore, that place has been called the Valley of Acore
ever since.
So the stolen items were found.
Aiken and all that were connected
were judged and stoned to death.
And this is a challenging passage for us to read
and to understand and to say, boy, it seems very severe.
The judgment seems very, very severe.
And did it really need to come to that?
Couldn't he have just said, hey, I'm sorry.
And I don't know.
Stood outside the camp for, I don't know, seven days.
I don't know.
Just seems severe to me.
But when you really examine it deeper,
this idea of these devoted things,
the severity behind that and the treachery behind it,
it was a sin that involved much more than just this.
The severity of judgment really matched
the severity of the crime given the description in Scripture.
The verses that we read.
So as you read the stories, it outlines it.
When you read it in context and really understand it,
it was a severe judgment, but it was a very severe,
severe crime that happened.
And we've seen severe things like that in Scripture before.
Ananias and Sapphira in the book of Acts.
The other aspect of this is when you think back earlier
when those 36 died and this all fits together,
this happened at a very critical time for Israel.
So it really threatened this one act
had infected the whole camp and it threatened
the entire mission that they were on and what God was doing.
So I mean, think about the impact of this.
When you read back as to how the Israelites felt
when they were in battle,
they were relying more so on themselves.
They became consumed with fear through this.
And think about how this can impact them as they go forward.
So it wasn't this simple, isolated incident.
It was a big, big thing.
And that's why God acted the way that he did.
But we're thankful that our God is a God of restoration, right?
You know, the Valley of Acor was named
after the trouble caused by sin as a reminder to those around.
But God later transforms even that place into a symbol of hope.
So what began as judgment and a reminder of this sin
turns into future restoration.
Hosea 215 says,
there I will give her, meaning Israel,
back her vineyards and will make the Valley of Acor a door of hope.
There she will respond as in the days of her youth,
as in the day she came out, up out of Egypt.
Isaiah 65.10 says Sharon will become a pastor of flocks
and the Valley of Acor a resting place for herds,
for people who seek me.
So this is God's message of restoration
where he is providing hope for it.
So when we feel hopeless,
restoration is always a part of the equation for God.
Even though we don't see it, God sees that plan of restoration.
He is the restorer of those things that are lost.
God can restore time and years that have been lost.
God can restore blessing in our lives and favor in our lives.
God can restore health from sickness.
He can restore joy from mourning.
He can restore brokenness into fullness.
Jesus did all of this and more on the cross.
So Achan was judged harshly for his sin,
but Jesus bared the judgment that we deserve.
He bore it for us.
So in looking at this chapter in entirety,
you've got hidden sin.
You've got unexpected defeat.
You have a misunderstanding or a misdiagnosis of the problem.
And then God reveals the issue.
Sin is exposed and there's confession and consequences for it.
It's kind of this great story arc, isn't it?
Sin matters and it should matter to us.
Not for condemnation.
We shouldn't look at our, we shouldn't look at,
center our lives and feel condemnation over Romans.
Romans clearly says there is no condemnations,
but understanding that there is a pathway forward for us,
restoration, restoring fellowship,
restoring spiritual health,
a call to walk in the light and not in the darkness.
This was a great chapter for teaching the power of God in victory,
but it's his holiness and his presence that governs that.
And when there's hidden sin,
our fellowship with God is hindered.
And when it's brought to light, restoration can begin.
You know, God's presence and his blessings are part of his holiness,
but they're tied to obedience that we have seen time and time again
as we've gone through the Old Testament.
And that obedience applies to us today.
So after the victory at Jericho, Israel's defeated and it reveals this
and it shows how they go hand in hand.
And I think for us today as believers,
Joshua 7 reminds us that we're not judged as Achan was judged
because Christ already bore our sins and he bore our judgment on our behalf.
But instead, when sin is revealed in our lives,
we're called to respond with repentance and confession
and trusting in God's mercy.
And, you know, the lesson becomes not fear of punishment
or fear of the consequences of the sin,
but a call to walk with God in his light.
And again, that light, it's not a struggle for that darkness to leave.
It's only a struggle when we choose to continue to hide that.
And that light can come on and we can choose to hide, you know,
in a corner of a room where we can choose to just allow God
to consume all of that and restore us.
So the key takeaways.
You guys know I'm a key takeaway person.
God's holiness is non-negotiable.
Right?
We like to negotiate things.
His holiness is non-negotiable.
His presence requires purity among us, among his people.
Sin is deceptive and it's progressive.
So we might think a little isolated thing means nothing,
but it begins small, begins with a thought,
just like it did with Aiken and it manifests into something bigger.
Always.
It always does.
Community matters.
So as a family, as a people, you know,
faith is personal, but it's not private.
Here at Lansdale Life, we're a family
and what we do impacts our family, not just us.
God exposes things to restore, okay?
It's not just punishment.
It's his grace that he wants for us.
He wants us to walk fully in that grace.
And victory requires alignment with God.
We have to be aligned if we're going to fulfill his kingdom work with him.
We have to be fully aligned with him.
God's power brings victory,
but unaddressed sin breaks fellowship with him
and what is hidden will eventually affect everything.
Lot to talk about, right?
Good chapter.
Thanks for joining us at Lansdale Life Church as we praise God and discuss his word.
Don't forget to join us for Worship Lives Sunday mornings at 10 a.m. Eastern on YouTube.
Be blessed and have a great day!