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.
All right, let's pray.
Heavenly Father, we just we just give you glory here tonight, Lord.
And we welcome you here, Lord.
We are grateful that we can be here, Lord, and we just pray, Lord, that your
spirit would make this place come alive, Lord, and just open up our hearts and our
minds, God, to your word, to your scripture.
Give us a better understanding of who you are and draw us closer to you, Lord,
through your word, Lord.
We thank you, Lord, for the kingdom that surrounds us, Lord.
We thank you, Lord, for the opportunity that you give us every day, Lord, to
sow seeds in that kingdom, Lord, and to cultivate and to harvest that which you have prepared
for us, Lord.
We give you all the glory here tonight and all the praise, and we thank you.
And we pray for those who couldn't be here tonight, Lord.
And we lift up all the needs within this body to you right now.
They are many, and we know that you are going to answer them, Lord, and minister to
your body in your time.
We give you all the glory and thanks in Jesus' name.
Amen.
All right.
So we are on Joshua 17.
So coming out of 16, Ephraim received its inheritance, and now Joshua 17 continues
with the tribe of Manasseh.
And this tractor is going to highlight a bunch of things.
Mostly, we're going to spend a lot of time talking about Zeliphiad's daughters who
came to make their claim for their land.
And we're going to talk about Ephraim and Manasseh who are struggling here to fulfill
and own their land.
And we got a little out of order.
John did 18 last week because I had business travel that came up, and he was
already working on 18.
So we already saw in Chapter 18 where the remaining tribes got their allotment
of the Promised Land and were challenged for delaying and the taking of their
inheritance.
And there's this theme that's kind of emerging through this Promised Land
that they've been so waiting to get into.
So let's start at we're going to go through verses 1 through 6.
So this was the allotment of the tribe of Manasseh as Joseph's
firstborn, that is, for Makir, Manasseh's firstborn.
Makir was the ancestor of the Gilediites who had received Gilead and
Basham because the Makirites were great soldiers.
They were warriors.
So this allotment was for the rest of the people of Manasseh, the
Assyriel, Shachem, Hefer, and Shemitah.
These are the other male descendants of Manasseh's son of Joseph by
their clans.
So now, Lizafed, son of Hefer, son of Gilead, son of Makir, son of
Manasseh, had no sons but only daughters whose names were Maliah,
Noah, Hagla, Nakala, and Tirza.
They went to Eleazar, the priest, Joshua, son of Nun, and leaders
and said, the Lord commanded Moses to give us an inheritance
among our relatives.
So Joshua gave them the inheritance along with the brothers of
their father, according to the Lord's command.
Manasseh's share consisted of 10 tracts of land besides Gilead
and Basham, east of the Jordan, because the daughters of the
tribe of Manasseh have received an inheritance among the sons,
the land of Gilead belong to the rest of the descendants.
So I have a little map we're going to look at in a little
bit, gets a little confusing looking at the genealogy here.
So just so we understand all of this, we have, you know,
Joseph, his firstborn, Manasseh, his firstborn, Makir, his
firstborn, Gilead, and then here's kind of where it just
kind of goes awry and I don't quite understand it.
I tried to study and figure it out and I couldn't quite
get to the wise, but Hefir is clearly not the firstborn of
Gilead.
So how I understood it is that this is just kind of the
breakdown of who got these allotted pieces of land.
So it just so happened that Hefir didn't have any sons.
So my suspicion is and what makes sense to me is that
that this was extracted out so that so that God could
make some points, which I'm going to try to to get to
here.
So these were these were the various clans in this
particular scripture focuses in on the daughters.
So the daughters are first introduced in Numbers 26,
and then they make their claim to the land in in 27.
This is all the way back in Numbers that we studied.
I didn't remember it until I kind of backtracked.
It probably wasn't one of my weeks to teach that time.
So now they're coming forward as the land is being
being divided because Moses had promised it to them all
the way back in Numbers and God actually will read in
a little bit.
God actually ruled that they should inherit the portion.
So Joshua, Joshua's not making this decision on his
own. He's simply faithfully honoring the decision that
both Moses and and God made.
So I think it's, you know, it's being highlighted
because the inheritance here, it demonstrates God's
faithfulness to his covenant and to the land.
And this really becomes the focus of this chapter.
There's some other parts we're going to key in on.
But, you know, understanding it back in this day and
age, the land was always, always, always inherited
by the males.
So that's just how it was.
It was just a cultural thing and, you know, families,
I mean, as we can see here, families had their identity
in the land that they owned and women didn't typically
own the land, but a woman's future and security was
really dependent on, you know, the males and their
relatives and the land, the land that they had.
So this ruling here that God and Moses did with
Zephila had daughters was really remarkable for its
time for a number of reasons.
It protected the family name and inheritance and it
also demonstrated, you know, that God is not locked
into, you know, cultural norms.
You know, he can look at this situation and say,
yeah, I know as a society you don't let women do
much, but guess what, we're going to make a little
shift in that right now.
So I found that just fascinating.
If we go back to Numbers, Numbers 27, it said the
daughters of Zephila had sons of Heifer, the son of
Gilead, the son of Mercur, the son of Manasseh, belonged
to the clans of Manasseh, son of Joseph.
The names of the daughters were Mala, Noah, Hagla,
Micah, and Tirzah.
They came forward and stood before Moses, Eleazar
the priest, and the leaders of the whole assembly
at the entrance of the tent of meetings, and they
said, our father died in the wilderness.
He was not among the chorus followers who banded
together against the Lord, but he died for his
own sin and left no sons.
Why should our father's name disappear from his
clan because he has no son?
Give us the property among our father's relatives.
So Moses brought their case before the Lord and the
Lord said to him, what Zevahalah's daughters are
saying is right.
You must certainly give them the property as an
inheritance among their father's relatives and give
their father's inheritance to them.
That's a powerful, I mean, these ladies had some
courage, or as the Jews like to say, they had
some chutzpah, right?
I mean, they went in there and they didn't shy
back.
So they weren't begging for charity from Joseph at
this time or from Moses when they went before
Moses and the priest.
I mean, they went boldly before them.
These are leaders of millions of people, leaders,
and we all know what a leader Moses was.
But they went boldly before him and claimed this
land knowing full well that women didn't own land
back then.
So it's a powerful, powerful state and again,
they're not asking for charity here.
They're asking for a promise that was already
giving.
They're saying, give us what God already said belongs
to us.
Powerful, powerful.
We're going to later see the contrast of this when
we look at look at Manasseh later, you know, the
daughters were bold and confident, you know, and
later the men of Manasseh later became fearful
and hesitant.
So they were bold pushing forward and then some
of the men in the clan were basically fearful
and pulling back.
There's a great progression here that that you
should look up on your own.
I'm not going to take the time to do this.
But in Numbers 27, what we just read, the promise
is given to the daughters.
In Numbers 36, we're not going to read that now.
The promise is protected.
In Joshua 17, where we are tonight, the promise
is fulfilled and then later in 1 Chronicles, the
promise is remembered.
So this was a big deal to them.
And I think God was making it a big deal, which
is why he didn't emphasize these other clans.
So let's keep going here into 7 through 13.
So says the territory of Manasseh extended from
Asher to Milcath east of Shechem.
The boundary ran southward from there to include
the people living at En Tapu.
Manasseh had the land of Tapu, but Tapu itself
on the boundary of Manasseh belong to Ephraimonites.
Then the boundary continued south to Cana Ravine.
There were towns belonging to Ephraim lying among
the towns of Manasseh.
But the boundary of Manasseh was the northern
side of the Raven and ended at the Mediterranean Sea.
On the south, the land belonged to Ephraim on
the north to Manasseh.
The territory Manasseh reached to the Mediterranean
Sea and bordered Asher on the north and Issachar on
the east. Within Issachar and Asher, Manasseh also
had Beth Shein, Iblim, and the people of Dour-Endour,
Tanakh, and Medayo.
Together with their surrounding settlements, the
third in the list of Nepath.
Yet the Manassites were not able to occupy these
towns for the Canaanites were determined to live in
the region. However, when the Israelites grew stronger,
they subjected the Canaanites to forced labor, but
did not drive them out completely.
So really hard to follow when you're just kind of
seeing it like that. And I don't have a laser pointer,
sorry, but you can see here the two parts on either
side of the Jordan River that were the Manasseh clan.
So if you look at the red and purple areas, right
underneath those areas were all of these Canaanite
towns or Canaanite strongholds that they mentioned
in this verse. And I think one of the important
things to point out here was it follows a path all
the way across to the Mediterranean, the Mediterranean
Sea, which is really, really important.
We're going to get to that in just a second.
But the problem as scripture outlines here is that
it was not an unwillingness. In other words,
they weren't, it wasn't an inability of Manasseh
to kind of take possession of it. They were given
this land and they could have gone in and take it.
It was an unwillingness. So verse 12 kind of makes
it sound like weakness to a point. But verse 13
reveals that they eventually became strong enough
to, they just weren't doing it. So really what
that boils down to is the Canaanites to them represented
economic opportunity. This pathway, as you can see
here, which goes to the Mediterranean where all
the trade was happening. It really consisted
of, you know, there was a labor force in place
so that they could work with the Canaanites.
There was pre-existing trade routes where they
could take goods out there and there was trade
relationships that the Canaanites had. So they
chose to kind of manage the situation over removal.
So we've run into this quite a bit in the last
last few books where, you know, God gives the
Israelites very specific directives to deal with
people who are unclean, unsavory, and just bad
people. Don't tolerate them. We've got to eradicate
this. And time and time again, the Israelites
kind of just do this part way. And, you know,
they did not drive them out. And this is something
that we see in Joshua. We saw it in Judges. We've
seen it all the way through this journey of
theirs. And it becomes this pattern that they've
followed that what they tolerate as a society,
what they allow to kind of infiltrate their
community of God and the holiness and the society
that God is building, what they're allowing to
come in, eventually begins to influence from the
inside what God is doing there. So we've seen
that countless times again, and we've talked,
you know, we've talked a lot about it. So they
were, again, choosing to manage this instead of
removing it and eliminating it. They were,
this was going to lead to compromise. They
had seen it time and time again. They cannot
coexist with evil. God does not want them. He
does not want us to coexist with evil. But this
becomes the foundation for future failures.
Matthew 5, 29, 30, where Jesus says,
if your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it
out and throw it away, it is better for you to
lose one part of your body than for your whole
body to be thrown into hell. And if your right
hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and
throw it away. It is better for you to lose a
part of your body than for your whole body to
thrown into inhale. So what Jesus is trying to
communicate here, and again, this is not a
literal thing. Jesus is 100% not saying to cut
limbs off, just to be perfectly clear. He's
basically saying, deal decisively, definitively
with anything that leads us away from Him. If
there are things in our lives that pull us away
from Him, deal with them decisively and
definitively. No matter how valuable it is to
us, no matter how important it is to us, we
have to get rid of it. And this is what He was
saying to the Israelites, get rid of the
Canaanites. It's just not going to lead. So
the lesson is that, you know, our relationship
with God, our relationship with Jesus is
worth more than any type of comfort that these
things might bring, any type of convenience,
anything that hinders us from being in a
relationship with Jesus, you know, has got to
go. And the partial measure just doesn't
cut it. We've seen this time and time again
with the Israelites, that they kind of go
three-quarters of the way, and then they
refuse to deal with this one particular
piece. And it always, always comes back to
get them. And many of us as believers, we
do this same thing. We have a tendency to
want to manage issues or manage sin or
manage things rather than completely
eradicating it. We want to hang on to
maybe just a little bit, just like, just
like, what if? You know, like I remember,
I was a little bit heavier in my, when we
were raising our kids. So, I mean, I was,
you know, wasn't eating right, wasn't
working out, and I was probably at my
heaviest, probably about 210 pounds. So,
my waistline on my jeans were about
30, 38 inches. So, you know, when I got
into my 40s, I started, you know, working
out and getting back in shape. But I
packed away my fat jeans just in case,
you know? I put them, you know, I put
them in my chest and said, well, you know,
you know, just in case I ever, you know,
put on weight again, I'll have these just,
you know, well, you know, I hung on to
them probably for about 10 years, and I
said, you know what? I'm throwing these
things out because I don't really want to
ever go back, go back to that. But we
have a tendency to do that, don't we?
Is to hang on to things that we don't
want to completely get rid of all
together just in case. So, that's what
Manasseh, the tribe of Manasseh was doing
is they were hanging on to these things
that the Canaanites had because it
brought them benefit and made things a
little bit easier for them in their
journey. And it's just not what God
calls us to do. Verses 14 through 18
So, the people of Joseph said to
Joshua, why have you given us only one
allotment and one portion of an
inheritance? We are numerous people and
the Lord has blessed us abundantly. If
you are so numerous, Joshua answered, and
if the hill country of Ephraim
is too small for you, go up into the
forest and clear the land for yourselves.
They're in the land of the Parisites
and Raphites. The people of Joseph
replied, the hill country is not enough
for us and all the Canaanites who live
in the plain have chariots fitted with
iron, both those of Beth Shean and its
settlements and those of the Valley of
Jezreel. But Joshua said to the tribes
of Joseph, to Ephraim and Manasseh, you
are numerous and powerful. You will
have not only one allotment, but the
forested hills in the country as well.
Clear it and its farthest limits will
be yours. Though the Canaanites have
chariots fitted with iron and though
they are strong, you can drive them out.
So the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh
are essentially saying, we are great
people and there's a lot of us, but
there's not enough land and we need
more territory. And the irony is, you
know, they're saying we are numerous
that God has blessed us with many, but
in the same conversation they're saying
okay, we don't have the manpower to do
this. And Joshua basically doubles down
on that and says, go clear the forest,
go take the hill country, drive out the
Canaanites. In other words, use what
God's already given you. Take the
land, you know, that God has given you.
And Joshua repeatedly uses these action
oriented words, go up, clear it,
possess it. And what Joshua is saying
in essence is faith requires action.
It just simply does. So this is just
a very, very practical lesson that
Joshua is trying to teach the tribes.
You know, easier land, additional
blessing, you know, fewer obstacles.
And Joshua tells him, your problem isn't
lack of opportunity. Your problem is lack
of faith and not wanting to put the
work in. And the people then respond in
fear. Well, the Canaanites have iron
chariots and, you know, this was the
equivalent of ancient technology.
So, you know, basically they're saying
that, hey, our enemies have superior
weapons, even though God has shown his
ability time and time and time again to
them in their ability to put, you know,
God, when you put God first, he's going
to deliver you from these. So this
was just, Joseph is trying to, Joshua
is trying to instill wisdom and they're
coming back with excuses and with
fear. And I think, you know, again,
this is so relatable to us, you know,
as believers, you know, how many times,
you know, do we say, you know, if
only I had more resources to do the
work God is calling me. More time,
more opportunity, more money, more
support, more talent. Meanwhile, God
is saying to us, you know, you haven't
fully used the portion that I've
given you, that I've entrusted. You
haven't, in other words, you haven't
fully possessed the land that I've
given you. When, you know, when we
think about possessing the land,
it's not necessarily physical land like
God was talking about with the
Israelites here, but it's the land
that he's entrusted to us and that
land might be in our homes, in our
neighborhood, in our workplace, in our
ministry, wherever it is. This is what
the, this is the promised land that
God has given us to work within, the
context of what he's given us to work
within. And oftentimes we're saying,
well, we can't do it because we don't
have this and God's saying, you need
to just fulfill this here. So it
becomes a lack of possession, you know,
and you can see here that the tribes,
their focus shifted from what God
had promised them to the enemy's
resources. So they were kind of
blame shifting here. And, you know,
I immediately thought of, you know,
you know, Peter's story, you know,
of, of walking, you know, on the
water, you know, when Pete, when
Peter was focusing on Jesus and
focusing on the promise and
believing when God, when Jesus
said, Hey, come to me, he was
moving. But when he focused on
the wind and when he focused on
the things that were around him,
and when he focused on, on all
of this stuff that was going on,
he began to sink. And it's the
same thing with the tribes there,
you know, instead of looking to
God and saying, Lord, we trust
that you are going to make a
way here because you've made a
way all the way from out of
Egypt for us, instead of looking
at that, they looked at the
chariots and they really, they
really missed out on, on what
God had for him. So when you
look at, look at the basic
themes throughout, out this
chapter here, we've got, you
know, faith, faith claims what
God has promised. So the
daughters Zephiel had
demonstrate their faith. They
were bold. They had that
chutzpah where they just kind
of came forward and said, you
know, this is what God has
for us and we need it. And
they weren't afraid to stand
up and say it to Moses and
to the priest and then to
claim it, you know, from,
from Joshua. And it was
just, that was just an
amazing story. Partial
obedience creates future
problems. How many times have
we used that analogy here as
we're studying these Old
Testament Israelite? The
Israel allowed the Canites
to influence them. Convenience,
you know, today becomes
compromise of tomorrow.
Absolutely. God's people
often underestimate what
God has given. So we don't
see the big picture and
they most definitely didn't
see the big picture. Ephraim
and Manasseh believed they
lacked land. He thought they
didn't have enough. And
Joshua believed they just
lacked courage and lacked
faith to possess the whole
of what they had. Obstacles
are often opportunities in
disguise. And I know this
is true in my life.
Sometimes when I get to
an obstacle, I can't see a
way over. Can't see a way
around that. I can't see
what God has for us and for
me until he opens my eyes
until I allow him to open
my eyes and see what's
there. They saw the hill
country that looked
impossible. They saw the
iron chariots that looked
intimidating. But those
obstacles were exactly
what God wanted them to
see so that they could
trust in him and not in
their own ability. And
Joshua simply said, you
already have, you have
enough. Go and possess
it. Possess it fully.
Oops. So, you know,
Joshua 17, I mean, the
chapter was just loaded
with great stuff. I mean,
my favorite, my favorite
portion is the daughter.
So I just, I just love that.
I loved how God just used
that story to just break
down the stereotypes of
culture of the time. You
know, I think it reminded
me, the chapter as a whole
reminded me that the
blessings that God has for
me are there. And sometimes
I've just got to get
beyond the obstacles and
the things that are in
front of me and the
temptations that are there
to avoid them. You know,
there's plenty of forests
that need to be cleared in
the land that he's
promised you. You guys
can relate to this, right?
You got a lot of woods
around where you're at
that the clearing never
ends, right? So, you
know, we don't
necessarily need to spend
our time praying for
more inheritance. We need
just pray for wisdom and
faith to use what God has
blessed us with. So I
think since we have such
a small group tonight,
we'll just maybe gather
all together around up
here and just chat about
the chapter. All right.
Thanks for joining us
at Lansdale Life Church
as we praise God and
discuss His Word. Don't
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blessed and have a great
day.