Joshua the War-Leader

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.

Last week we began to introduce the book of Joshua. This is Season 2 of the podcast and today we’re going to talk more about the person Joshua, but not about his book because he has a whole career before he writes his book. In fact, we have five occasions to talk about, and these five occasions that we see written for us in Exodus and Numbers happen to correspond to the five points of the covenant. It sounds like, Greg, that was not intentional but it’s just so embedded in your psyche that when you’re writing you naturally come to five points and they’re the five points of the covenant.

Or it’s become so completely embedded in your thinking that you see the five points behind every tree.

Or if we want to channel some Jung, it’s so embedded in the general human consciousness that when we write anything it comes through as an embedded version of the general human consciousness.

One of those. Take your pick.

Or the Spirit really likes five and likes showing covenants everywhere.

So how did you choose these five occasions to write about in the article which is the basis for this episode?

I would like to – well, no, that’s a complete lie, I would not like to claim complete credit for this because I can’t. Largely this is called ripping off another book. The basis for this, at least in its broad outline, is Francis Schaeffer’s book, Joshua and the Flow of Biblical History. Schaeffer fastens on Joshua, out of all the books he could have written about, because it’s the transition between the Torah, which we all know was inspired, because plagues on Egypt, Shekinah glory on the mountain, bread from heaven, water from rocks, the earth opening its mouth and swallowing people. Joshua who?

So it’s very important in that crucial moment of covenant transition that the next generation say, “Oh, that Joshua – Joshua the son of Nun, yeah him. Sun stands still in the sky, Jordan River parts, Jericho’s walls fall, and black spirituals are written.”

Joshua fit the what now?

The rest of the Bible hinges on this hand-off. If God can’t successfully hand off from Moses to Joshua, then the books that follow lack credibility. So Schaeffer picked Joshua particularly for that reason, to show that God did successfully do the hand-off and, having said that, then who is this Joshua guy? How did God prepare him? What does a godly leader look like?

So I picked these points largely by skimming through Schaeffer’s book yet again and grabbing what was on the surface, which are basically the times when Joshua shows up before the book of Joshua. There are some things that you could break into more appearances, but these tend to be the type of appearances.

The first one stands apart. Some of the later appearances are like, “…and Moses did stuff and Joshua was there. Moses did more stuff, and Joshua was there. And Moses did more stuff, and Joshua was there.”

He’s the “…and Robin.”

Yeah, he’s the “…and Robin” of the team oftentimes. So that’s why I picked him, without any reference to whatever outline God or Dr. Schaeffer or the collective human unconscious may have supplied here, but this is a good starting point as we come to the former prophets.

We don’t have Moses. We have Joshua. We have “..and Robin,” so what happens when God goes to “…and Robin.” What if he goes to people who don’t at first seem all that great or all that spectacular, who we don’t know that much about? Can God use such a person? Don’t we need multiplied frogs and blood and babies dying before we really can be sure this is the Word of God? God didn’t think so.

Joshua is just fun to talk about because we do see his character develop in scripture over a very long period of time, over 40 years in fact, so that’s what we’re going to do, I guess. We’re going to look at Joshua as he appears in scripture, beginning with the Exodus.

The children of Israel have successfully escaped the clutches of Pharaoh. The Red Sea has destroyed Pharaoh’s army. They’ve sung the Song of Moses, the Song of the Lamb, the Song of the Sea. They’ve got their manna from heaven, and as they’re going on through Rephidim we’re told that the people called Amalek attack them from the rear.

Amalek seems to be descended from Esau, so they carry on the theme of the alienated older brother, the jealous older brother who wants to come and create trouble, stir up things, and make a mess for God’s people, a theme that goes all the way through the New Testament with the Herods, who are also Edomites.

Amalekites are a particularly vicious version of this. They come and they strike the stragglers, and God has Moses call out Joshua. We find out later that Joshua was not his real name. It was Hosea, which means ‘salvation,’ but Moses called him Yehoshua, ‘Jehovah is salvation,’ thus giving him the name Yeshua/Jesus, the first person in scripture to bear that name, so that bodes interesting things for him.

And Moses said unto Joshua, Choose us out men, and go out, fight with Amalek. Tomorrow I will stand on the top of the hill with the rod of God in mine hand. So Joshua did as Moses had said to him, and fought with Amalek, and Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill. And it came to pass, when Moses held up his hand, that Israel prevailed, and when he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed.

But Moses’ hands were heavy; and they took a stone, and put it under him, and he sat thereon, and Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands, the one on the one side, and the other on the other side, and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun. And Joshua discomfited Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword.

There’s a little bit more, but that will do for a start. Joshua comes out of nowhere. He’s called a ‘young man,’ but the word itself is a little ambiguous in Hebrew. It may be a retainer or deacon or servant or lackey or something, or he may have been relatively young.

Is this the same word that shows up with the lads who were calling out to Elisha?

That’s an excellent question to which I do not know the answer without looking, but if anybody wants to check on the Hebrew while we’re doing this, that would be great.

The thing is, Joshua, being Hebrew, has been a slave. Where did he learn strategy and tactics? Why does Moses turn to him? Why do people say, “Oh, obviously we’re going to follow this guy into battle”? Best guess is that he was the slave of some Egyptian general.

Secular history says that Moses himself was something of a general in his day, and that he had served in the Egyptian army and led a successful campaign against Ethiopia, for whatever the historians are worth. Perhaps something similar is true of Joshua. Perhaps he worked for a general, who realized that this young man had promise and taught him how to use the sword – not the thing you’d normally do with slaves.

You don’t want an uprising on your hands.

“Let me teach you how to use a sword just for future reference.” A little odd, but apparently it happened. So Joshua comes on the scene already a trained military commander, a leader of men, and apparently rather fearless in battle. I think this is important because when we get to Joshua itself, the one thing that Joshua is told over and over again by God, by the elders, by the people – do you remember?

“Do not be afraid.”

“Do not be afraid,” and I’ve wondered at that often because he does not seem like a fearful sort of man. He charged into battle when he was very young, and yet 40 years later people are telling him, “Don’t be afraid.”

It’s possible he had some kind of life incident and that made warfare more difficult for him – lost his sight, his hearing, the use of a hand – but I suspect that’s not it. I suspect that what frightened Joshua is the kind of thing that frightens me, which is, “You mean I have to deal with people? Give me a sword, tell me to run it through them, I’m good. Tell me I have to make peace between them and get them to go along with the plan – I’ve watched Moses for 40 years. I don’t want this job.”

Anyway, from his earliest days as he appears in scripture, he’s a war leader, a general, but he learns some lessons that day. He learns that however good he is and however good his troops are, and they weren’t necessarily all that good, their success depends upon God’s providence, God’s blessing, which in turn depends upon prayer. God ordains that his people should pray and, when they pray, God turns those prayers into action. So God does these things, and yet God wants to be asked. Until that happens, there’s no assurance of victory.

Now, there’s a whole bunch of imagery going on here. We have the two witnesses, the priest and king holding up the hands of the prophet, the gospel ministry and all that. But the practical lesson for Joshua is, “You’re going to win a battle?”

First of all, God’s people have enemies and some of them come at you with swords. People like that need to be met with swords. There are some people in this world who need to be fought with swords, with deadly force. That’s not the general calling of most of God’s people at most times, but it’s a thing. For Joshua it was very much a thing.

Secondly, when you do this, you need to pray. You need to trust God and you need to ask God specifically for victory.

Third, this is not magic. You’re not manipulating God, but God, liking to be asked, likes also to answer on his terms. As long as Israel expressed their dependence upon God by holding Moses’ hands, Israel won, and when the hands went down Israel lost. In the end, Joshua wins. He discomfits Amalek, and then God says something interesting to Moses.

And the Lord said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua: for I will utterly put out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven. And Moses built an altar and called the name of it Jehovah Nissi. [The Lord My Banner]

When my parents were young camp counselors, there was a rule at camp that you weren’t going to tell jokes about ethnicities, for obvious reasons. It would be very cruel and unkind. But if the ethnicity were entirely wiped out, like for instance the Amalekites and the Philistines, you could tell all sorts of jokes. So you’ve got all these jokes about an Amalekite and a Philistine walk into a – well, you wouldn’t say they walk into a bar because it was a Christian camp, but they were walking down the street.

They walk into a teahouse? In a Christian camp what do you walk into? I’m not sure.

A VBS.

There you go, they walk into a VBS.

I don’t know, is it okay to slander a people if they don’t exist anymore, given that they have immortal souls?

That’s a good question.

I’m not sure about that one.

Anyway, the interesting thing here is not so much that God told Moses to write this down, but he said to rehearse it in the ears of Joshua. “I want a witness to what I’m swearing here. I’m going to swear that I am going to completely wipe Amalek out,” and it will take a long time. The last Amalekite that we know of died in the book of Esther – Haman the Agagite, a descendant of Agag.

But Joshua is told, “Hey, God’s putting your name in his book. I’m collecting, collating, and writing a five-fold book that’s going to be the Word of God for all people and all time. Your name is going in the book.”

I don’t know, how does one deal with that? “Yay?”

Fear and trepidation.

Yeah, that might be where the fear comes in.

“Do we really have to, master? I don’t know that I want my name in there,” but he’s not given a choice. He doesn’t get a vote on this. His name is in the book, so God has some kind of purpose for this young man. This much we can see right away.

The next time we run into him is the whole incident with the golden calf. This is a few chapters later, Chapter 32. You know the story. Moses is up on the mountain, but what we often forget is that Joshua, being his minister/deacon/gopher/and Robin, stayed with him throughout all of this, so he’s not in the camp when the children of Israel decide after 40 days that they’ve given up on Moses. They don’t know what’s become of him and they want some thing to lead them, to be their cell phone to God, and they create this golden calf and they start throwing a party.

God breaks off his discussion with Moses and says, “Your people, which you brought out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves.” Moses replies with, “Wait. Why are you angry? Your people that you brought up out of the land of Egypt…I don’t want these people. Don’t shove them on me.” But God sends him down, and along the way he finds Joshua who’s dutifully waiting for him there.

Moses has the two tables of stone that God has written upon. Moses catches up to him and Joshua hears the noise and says, “There’s a noise of war in the camp,” because he’s a military guy. He hears a loud noise and he thinks the people are being attacked. There’s war going on. Moses’ response is interesting.

And he said, It is not the voice of them that shout for mastery, neither is it the voice of them that cry for being overcome: but the noise of them that sing do I hear.

“Sorry, Joshua. You just failed your observation role. You completely missed this one. Quit thinking like a soldier. This is not a military attack. They’re having a party, and I have good intel from God that we were deliberately not invited, so we better get down there and see what’s going on there,” and you know the story. They come down and see the calf and Moses does what Moses does. It ends up with 3,000 dead, executed by the Levites who step forward when Moses says, “Who is on the Lord’s side?”

We’re not told what Joshua was doing during all this, but he’s watching most certainly, and he’s learning that idolatry has consequences – mortal consequences. You can get yourself and your friends and family killed by worshiping idols.

Again, we need to remember that the Israelites were not replacing Jehovah with some kind of Egyptian deity, which is how it’s often presented. They said, “This is your God. This is Yahweh, who brought you out of the land of Egypt,” not that they thought that God looked like a cow, but that this is a representation of that power that we know to be Yahweh, of what God has done for us and how he reaches out to us.

The calf or young bull was the chief of the sacrifices. If they had made a golden lamb and worshiped it, we would have figured it out. We think of Jesus as the Lamb of God. We forget he’s also the bull of God and the goat of God and the dove of God because they were all sacrificial animals, but bulls were the sacrifices of rich people. So they had their picture of God, their picture of how God reaches out to his people. Joshua learns, “No. No. This is not how this works.”

Whereas normally we would think of swinging a sword as being the military kind of thing that Joshua would be given charge of, but it’s not. The Levites are appointed as guardians of the future tabernacle, the guardians of worship. Swords are put in their hands and they’re told, “Go kill the idolators.” This is the holiness of God. The holiness of worship is at stake here.

This is an important lesson for Joshua to learn, but more than that, when they’re still working all of this out, Moses pitches a tent outside the camp. The camp itself was laid out in a cruciform shape – 3 in one way, 3 in another direction, 3 in another, 3 in another, one of the three being longer because the tribe of Judah was particularly large, so from Sinai it looked like a cross.

The point is, to go out from that – to go from the center out – all you have to do is go to the nearest internal corner of the cross and you could be not that far from the center of everything. So before there is a tabernacle as we think of it, Moses is told to go pitch a tent out there where God will come and meet with his people.

In Chapter 33 of Exodus, God comes to talk to Moses about all of these things. And while he’s talking to him about all this, starting in verse 11 –

And the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend. And he turned again into the camp, but his servant Joshua, the son of Nun, a young man, departed not out of the tabernacle.

Okay, if things were kind of scary before, here you are with Moses – la la la la – going into this tent, and “What’s going on here, master? What are we doing?”

“This is where God is going to come and meet with us.”

“What? God’s going to show up here? I was on Sinai. That was kind of cool and scary and awesome and all. Maybe I should leave before…oh no, here he comes. I’ll go stand in this corner and…shutting up.”

And God comes and talks to Moses. Then the glory cloud lifts and Moses goes back, and Joshua is peeking out of the corner saying, “Um, why me?”

That’s got to be the question, doesn’t it? “What in the world is God doing? I’m just this guy, ya know? I’m pretty good with swords and maybe some strategy and tactics, but this has nothing to do with what I do. I love Moses, love the Word of God, love hanging out and hearing the Word of God, but why is God honoring me with all of these – I mean, he’s not talking to me. I’m just over here in the corner, but I’m over here in the corner. What in the world is going on? What does God have in mind?” I can see him going home to his wife saying, “I don’t get this.”

There are times I think in all of our lives when God does something and uses us in a particular way and we stand back and say, “Why was that me? There were other people who could have done that better. There are other people who are ordained to office who should have done that better. Why did I do that, and why does God seem to be blessing it?” And depending on who we are, “Oh, I hope I get to do more of that,” or more likely, “I hope I don’t have to do that again.”

So that’s the second time. “What is God up to? And why me?”

The next encounter is in Numbers 11.

And when the people complained, it displeased the Lord, and the Lord heard it and his anger was kindled.

There was judgment for that, so things are already not going well, and yet when that’s done the mixed multitude falls to lusting and weeping and saying, “Who will give us flesh? We remember the fish and the cucumbers and the leeks and the garlic and all that.”

Then Moses heard the people weep throughout their families, every man in the door of his tent.

It was a very public kind of weeping and carrying on.

A public protest.

Yes.

And the anger of the Lord was kindled greatly; Moses also was displeased.

Generally, it is Moses’ role to play mediator. God gets angry and God has ordained that Moses on those occasions will step between him and play the role of Messiah, of mediator, and call upon God to honor his covenant, remember his name and all those things. That’s how it’s supposed to go. What happens when your mediator says, “Kill them. Kill them all. I’m so done with this.”

And Moses said unto the Lord, Wherefore hast thou afflicted thy servant? and wherefore have I not found favour in thy sight, that thou layest the burden of all this people upon me? Have I conceived all this people? Have I begotten them, that thou shouldest say unto me, Carry them in thy bosom, as a nursing father beareth the sucking child, unto the land which thou swarest unto their fathers?

Whence should I have flesh to give unto all this people? For they weep unto me, saying, Give us flesh, that we may eat. I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me. And if thou deal thus with me, kill me, I pray thee,

At which point God says, “Um, yeah. Let’s fix this.” God calls 70 men who are already acting elders among the tribes. “We’re going to make them senators” is what we would probably call them, “and they’re going to help you. You’re not going to have to do it all by yourself again,” because he remembers our frame and he knoweth that we are but dust. So that’s going on. Moses has the tribes select these elders, 70 of them, and they come out and the glory cloud descends.

God takes the spirit from Moses, like when we’re lighting a candle from another candle, and places it on each of the elders so that they too will be prophets. They will declare the word of God. They will be able to rule and judge in terms of God’s word. But it turns out there are a couple people who aren’t there.

The names of these men were Eldad and Medad. They didn’t make the ordination ceremony in time. They were back in the camp doing something, and yet the spirit of God fell upon them too. They were of the number written; that is, they had met all the qualifications. They had been chosen, but they hadn’t gotten out there where they needed to be, for whatever reason. No blame is attached to them. They just weren’t there.

A young man comes running out of the camp to Moses and says, “Eldad and Medad do prophesy in the camp,” and here’s Joshua –

And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of Moses, one of his young men…

There were a number of young men about Moses. He had a number of servants and apprentices and hangers-on and gophers, so Joshua at this point is only one of them, yet he’s had some very special privileges so he feels it incumbent upon himself to protect the honor of Moses. He says to Moses –

My lord Moses, forbid them. And Moses said unto him, Enviest thou for my sake? Would God that all the Lord's people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them!

So that’s our next encounter with Joshua. He is very jealous for the gospel ministry, for the office of prophet, and particularly for Moses’ leadership. He says, “But this is not the due order. We haven’t crossed all our t’s and dotted all our i’s. We haven’t signed the form in triplicate in the places indicated, and initialed all of the proper spots, so this shouldn’t be happening.” And Moses says in so many words, “Get over it.”

I have a tangent. Isn’t there a parallel here with the Spirit in the New Testament, when the gospel is going out into the wider world and the gifts of the Spirit are being manifest to show that even though you’re not the 12 apostles, you still have the authority given from God to preach and declare his word of peace.

The thing that comes to mind, first of all, is the day of Pentecost. Here we’ve got 120 people and we don’t know if any of them were among the 70 that Jesus ordained. Certainly the 12 are there. And yet the Holy Spirit comes upon them and they start prophesying and speaking in foreign languages. That’s kind of out of nowhere.

And of course the Pharisees and Sadducees give them a hard time. “Where are your certificates? Where are your degrees? Which theological seminary did you graduate from? What rabbis have you sat under? Let’s see the documentation and the forms filled out in triplicate.”

But then when the gospel goes to the Samaritans and then to the Gentiles under Peter’s preaching, something similar happens. The gifts of the Spirit manifest themselves and, particularly with the Gentiles, the reaction of the Jews back in Jerusalem is, “Peter, what are you doing? How come you’re going to Gentiles and eating with them and doing all this stuff? We hear you even baptize them. What were you thinking? They haven’t been circumcised yet.”

Peter has to say, “The Spirit fell on them as on us at the beginning. What did you expect me to do? If they’ve received the Spirit, baptism seems kind of a late afterthought, but we should probably do it anyway because they have the reality. They’ve been baptized into the body of Christ on equal terms without the circumcision, so they should have been baptized as well.” These things do set the pattern.

Moses’ wish was that all of God’s people should be prophets and that they would all have God’s Spirit. That’s the wonder of the new covenant, when he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than the greatest of the old covenant prophets, because we have the complete Word of God and we have an unction and an anointing from God, from the Holy Spirit, and we know all that God has revealed to us.

God has fully revealed himself in the Son. We have that revelation in scripture. We are prophets. We have the Word and we can say, “Thus saith the Lord” and it doesn’t even depend upon what we’ve heard or seen. We can hold up the Bible and say, “Read it for yourself. It’s right here,” so this thing continues.

Moses wanted the manifestation of the Spirit centering around the Word of God to multiply throughout God’s people. He was glad to get two more, so this is the next lesson that Joshua has to learn. We don’t need fewer people who have the Spirit, we need more people who have the Spirit, and we need not be jealous of the particular forms of ordination. Yes, God has set orders and they should be observed as we’re able, but that’s for order and form and such. The reality is something else.

We should be recognizing what God has done. It’s not the thing that you do that makes it.

Exactly, and Joshua has to learn that.

In Bible study we’re going through the book of Amos, and Amos is going to say at some point, “I was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, and God came to me. I was a herdsman, a follower of the flocks and gatherer of sycamore fruit, and God came to me and said, ‘Go prophesize to my people,’ so I did. You may not like the message, but it’s from God.”

It behooves us as God’s people when someone comes to us, be it some old man of a different ethnicity and a different social status sitting in a bus terminal who says, “Son, let me tell you what God says about that.” If what he says is actually the Word of God, we should listen.

If may be a 5-year-old child who says, “Daddy, shouldn’t we pray now?”

“Yes, we should.”

We listen for the Word of God in whatever context it comes up. Yes, it would be nice if everybody were ordained on time and everything was set in order and everyone passed their theology exams and all that stuff, but particularly in times of ecclesiastical crisis, in times when there’s persecution, in times when faith is running low, in times when apostasy is running high and there are false prophets and false teachers everywhere, sometimes you go with the guy who’s got the Word of God.

This is something Joshua has to learn, that the Spirit of God is known by the Word of God. You want a spiritual experience? Don’t go for the signs and wonders. Go for the people who have the Word of God and who declare it boldly. That’s where you’re going to find God. This is the next of his things.

Leadership musn’t be self-aggrandizing. Spirit-filled leaders serve God and his people, not themselves, and leaders don’t always show up the way we expect. God can work in surprising ways. We can’t bind God’s Spirit with our rules or protocols, but those who lead in God’s kingdom do have one thing in common. They speak the Word of God in the power of God’s Spirit.

Another thing that Joshua had to learn with a view to how God will use him ultimately – Joshua still doesn’t know, “What is this all about? Oh look, I got my name in the Bible again, yay, because I said something stupid.”

Another way he’s like Peter.

Yeah. So the next time we run into Joshua, and this is where most people actually think of Joshua, is when the children of Israel come to the borders of the Promised Land. Moses picks a spy from each of the 12 tribes to go in and spy out the land, so then every tribe has a voice in what they see and what they say and how they’re going to support what God has said they should do.

They wander through the land for 40 days, and of these we mostly think of Caleb, who is a representative of the tribe of Judah, but we also are told yet again that there is this guy named Oshea the son of Nun. This is Numbers 13:8. But in verse 16 we’re told –

These are the names of the men which Moses sent to spy out the land. And Moses called Oshea the son of Nun Jehoshua [Jehovah Saves].

So they go into the land and spy it out, and after 40 days they come back, and on the one hand the report is very good. “It’s a beautiful land, wonderful land. Here’s some of the produce. Look at these enormous grapes. That’s all good and well; however, there are huge cities and they’re walled up to heaven, and there are giants in the land,” and there were. They were probably around 8-9’ tall, give or take, maybe larger, big, bulky, frightening.

The children of Israel say, “From our point, we look like grasshoppers to them, and we saw ourselves through our eyes and we look like grasshoppers, so there is absolutely no way that we can win this battle. This is a dead end.”

And all the congregation lifted up their voice and cried, and the people wept that night. And all the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron, and the whole congregation said unto them, “Would God that we had died in the land of Egypt! Or would God we had died in this wilderness! Wherefore hath the Lord brought us unto this land to fall by the sword, that our wives and our children should be a prey? Were it not better for us to return into Egypt?” And they said one to another, “Let us make a captain and let us return into Egypt.”

Would that the cicadas in Maryland were so timid.

This is a complete tangent but my girls were saying that cicadas are native only to the East coast. Is there any truth in this?

I have no idea. I know that they are currently in their once-every-17-years swarm, where they are just absolutely everywhere and it’s disgusting and I don’t like to take walks anymore.

I know there are different species of cicada, and I know that there were cicadas screaming their little lungs out in Colorado a couple years ago.

We’ve heard things around here that we called cicadas, and they come for a while and they go, and yes, they make lots of noise. My girls were saying, “But they don’t exist on the West coast,” according to omniscient Google, at which point I questioned omniscient Google and it was not plain that I was believed.

Anyhow, that’s a side issue, but it did allow me time to let my eyes roam over the text of scripture and notice back in Chapter 13 that when this issue began, when the children of Israel first heard the report and was willing to believe it, Caleb stood up and said, “No, no, no, no.”

And Caleb stilled the people before Moses, and said, Let us go up at once, and possess it; for we are well able to overcome it.

But the people don’t want to listen to him, so we go into the night and you know what happens. People sit around their campfires and they go from tent to tent and they gossip and they complain and they vent – a nice unbiblical word for unbiblical things – so in the morning they’re willing to talk about making a captain and going back to Egypt, because that’s going to fix things.

Everything is scarier around the campfire at night, too.

It is, and obviously going back and being slaves in an Egypt that is now desolate would somehow fix this. “The Egyptians, the Gentiles, the unbelievers, the humanists are so much better at running civil government than we are. Let’s just let them do it. In fact, let’s form a political party to enable them to take back over again so that we Christians don’t have to have a hand in it, because we’d just screw things up. We don’t know anything about this.” Side issue.

Joshua hadn’t said anything the first day. This time Joshua and Caleb jump in, tearing their clothes as a sign of mourning and fear, and they say –

And Joshua the son of Nun, and Caleb the son of Jephunneh, which were of them that searched the land, rent their clothes, and they spake unto all the company of the children of Israel saying, The land, which we passed through to search it, is an exceeding good land.

If the Lord delight in us, then he will bring us into this land and give it us; a land which floweth with milk and honey. Only rebel not ye against the Lord, neither fear ye the people of the land; for they are bread for us. Their defence is departed from them, and the Lord is with us: fear them not. But all the congregation bade stone them with stones.

The logic seems to be that attempted murder, particularly if you lie in court and commit perjury to get somebody killed, then you should be executed. These men are calling upon God to try to get Israel to do something that will get them killed, so obviously they ought to be stoned for this perjury, calling upon God to say we should do what God says, when it’s obviously deadly.

God intervenes, as is his way.

And the glory of the Lord appeared in the tabernacle of the congregation before all the children of Israel. And the Lord said unto Moses, How long will this people provoke me? And how long will it be ere they believe me, for all the signs which I have shewed among them? I will smite them with the pestilence, and disinherit them, and will make of thee a greater nation and mightier than they.

Moses is back into goodly form. “The Egyptians will hear of it! In other words, Lord, your name is at stake here, so this is not the thing you really should be doing.”

By the time God is done with his final sentence, he says this whole generation from age 20 and up is going to die in the wilderness. They don’t want the Promised Land? They’re not going to get the Promised Land. They’re going to wander until their carcasses fall in the wilderness, and their children, 20 years and down, will inherit. So no one’s going in except Caleb the son of Jephunneh and Joshua the son of Nun.

He actually had said this before. The first time it was just Caleb. Joshua was probably sitting there going, “Wait, I was with him. Okay, the first day I didn’t say anything but I thought he had it covered. Oh, okay, I’m in, I’m in.”

The question might be what Moses and Aaron were thinking at this point. “Wait, we’re grandfathered in, we’re included, right?”

“Yeah, I’m sure we are. We get to see the Promised Land. Why wouldn’t we?”

Well, they obviously don’t in the end, and there’s something there, too. Moses, who represents the law, does not bring the people into the land, but the one whose name is Jesus does.

Again here Joshua, for the last couple things, has been more or less an observer, passive, sitting, learning the lessons, but now the lesson, sort of like Queen Esther, is “You must witness or perish. You must stand up and be a public witness to what you have seen and, more important, to the Word of God.”

They all saw the same thing. The evidence, the facts were the same thing. The interpretation of those facts were very different, and Joshua was called to publicly put God’s interpretation on them and make it a matter of a public oath, a public witness, that this is the way it is. And had he not, then he probably would not have entered the Promised Land, let alone become the leader of God’s people and the one who writes the sixth book of the Bible.

And you know what? There were no warnings. There’s no record that a voice came to him in the middle of the night and said, “Joshua? Joshua! Wake up, Joshua. Tomorrow a big test is coming. It’s going to stretch you. It’s going to be hard. People are going to be looking at you. Hundreds, in fact thousands of people are going to hang on your word, and you better be ready to say the right thing.”

“What’s the right thing? What’s the right thing! Hello? What am I supposed to say tomorrow? What?”

That never happened. He went into this thinking, “Caleb was so great yesterday, and there’s Moses, the man of God and friend of God. I’ll just sit here in the corner like I have so many times. What? I have to say something? Oh boy.”

I remember one of the first times I was in a situation like this. I’m saying to myself and those around me in whispers, “I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do this.” I come to my feet and my knees are shaking. “Uhhh, okay. I need to say something here.” I was fairly young, but I should have been readier than I was.

It can be scary, and again I suspect that one of Joshua’s fears probably is the fear that we all struggle with so much, the fear of man. What are people going to think? What are they going to say? The great line from the Jimmy Stewart film, Rear Window, is the nurse is told, “Wait, they’ll see you!”

“Well, I’ve been looked at before.”

The number one fear, even over fear of dying, is fear of public speaking, and in a way that’s nothing. It’s not simply speaking in front of people, it’s taking a stand. But for a lot of people it’s not so much what they have to say, they just don’t want to say anything. They’re terrified.

On more than one occasion I’ve had to stand in our poetry contest and look little girls in the eyes as they’ve stood on the stage – “Look at me, look at me. Don’t look at the audience. Don’t look at the audience. Look at me, look at me. Keep going. You can finish this” – and try to get them through that poem before they think, because that by itself is a fearful thing.

But standing for God when the whole world is against you? This was a new sort of lesson that Joshua had to learn, and he does, thankfully.

Before we get to the book of Joshua, the last reference in the Torah begins in Numbers 27, around verse 15. We’re getting to the end, and Moses by now understands that he’s not going to go into the Promised Land because of his sin of striking the rock rather than speaking to it.

He and Aaron are not going to inherit the land, but Moses does not at that point give up on the vision. He doesn’t say, “Well then, fine! Find someone else to take care of them. I’m so outta here. I’ve had it. I’m done with these people.” He's still wrapped up in the vision. He’s still pursuing the heavenly city.

And Moses spake unto the Lord, saying, Let the Lord, the God of the spirits of all flesh, set a man over the congregation which may go out before them, and which may go in before them, and which may lead them out, and which may bring them in; that the congregation of the Lord be not as sheep which have no shepherd.

We’re not told that Moses knew who that man was. Caleb would have been a great choice. Caleb had a track record, and later on when they come to the Promised Land and they’ve entered Canaan, Caleb goes up to Joshua and says, “Give me a mountain full of giants. Let me at them. Give me Mt. Hebron.” So in some ways he would have been a great choice.

We’re not told that Moses specifically said, “Well, it’s obvious you’ve been preparing Joshua, so can we go ahead and do the transition thing here,” or “God, you haven’t exactly asked for my vote, but Joshua has really been coming along. It’s been 40 years since that whole standing up and being a witness thing. I think he’s grown a lot in 40 years. Maybe we should use him.”

There was none of that. It was just, “God, you know. We need somebody here. We need a shepherd. We need another Messiah. We need a prophet, so please?”

You also see an echo of the continuing younger son motif, where it’s always the second-born who takes the position. Typologically speaking anyway, Caleb is sort of an older son. He’s the one who goes out and wants to fight things, and he’s probably a little bit older and Joshua is the younger one. He’s the one in the corner. He’s the one who’s been learning by osmosis, so God chooses again to put someone whose name is Jesus into the second son position.

And that’s what he says.

And the Lord said unto Moses, Take thee Joshua the son of Nun, a man in whom is the spirit, and lay thine hand upon him and set him before Eleazar the priest, and before all the congregation; and give him a charge in their sight. And thou shalt put some of thine honour upon him, that all the congregation of the children of Israel may be obedient.

And he shall stand before Eleazar the priest, who shall ask counsel for him after the judgment of Urim before the Lord. At his word shall they go out, and at his word they shall come in, both he and all the children of Israel with him, even all the congregation.

And Moses did as the Lord commanded him and he took Joshua, and set him before Eleazar the priest, and before all the congregation. And he laid his hands upon him and gave him a charge, as the Lord commanded by the hand of Moses.

Then Joshua drops out of the account again for a while.

Notice a couple things. The primary one I guess is he’s going to stand before the High Priest, and the High Priest is going to ask counsel after the Urim and Thummim. That is, “Although, Moses, I have spoken to you face to face on a regular basis, it’s not going to be that way with Joshua. I’m giving him some of your honor, but not all of it.”

In Deuteronomy we’re going to find out that God promises to raise up a prophet like Moses one day, but Joshua is not that prophet. In fact, as Joshua finishes off the book of Deuteronomy, wrapping up what Moses had written, recording his death and burial, he says, “And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.”

Joshua knows he’s not it, and he probably doesn’t want to be it, either. He knows his limitations. So when he needs direct counsel from God he has to go to the High Priest, who has the Urim and Thummim, whatever they were, which give yes/no answers. If he wants divine revelation, unless God overrides it or intervenes personally, which he does on occasion, he’s working with the High Priest now. He has to go work with him, so he’s not going to be a second Moses. And yet, given what he is, he’s still going to do what Moses could not do, which is bring the children of Israel into the inheritance that God swore to their fathers, into the Promised Land. This is finished out in Deuteronomy 31.

Numbers comes to an end with the children standing on Jordan’s stormy banks, casting wistful eyes into the Promised Land, but there’s a few minor things that have to be worked out, some matters of inheritance and some other details. Then we have the book of Deuteronomy, which although it’s a long book, is actually a collection of four sermons and some related material that happen in a very quick time, so it’s not like years and years were passing. A few weeks were passing. We’ve worked through Deuteronomy before when we talked about covenant continuity, covenant inheritance, and Christian education and such.

There comes a point where it’s time for Moses to formally pass the baton. In a sense he’s already done that, but he does it again. This is Chapter 31 of Deuteronomy.

And he gave Joshua the son of Nun a charge and said, Be strong and of a good courage, for thou shalt bring the children of Israel into the land which I sware unto them, and I will be with thee.

So the transfer happens. It’s reaffirmed. There’s a little bit more, backing up to verse 14.

And the Lord said unto Moses, Behold, the days approach that thou must die. Call Joshua and present yourselves in the tabernacle of the congregation, that I may give him a charge. And Moses and Joshua went and presented themselves in the tabernacle of the congregation. And the Lord appeared in the tabernacle in a pillar of a cloud, and the pillar of the cloud stood over the door of the tabernacle.

He prophesies the future history and he’s going to put that in a song. The song is Chapter 32. But before that we have the formal charge to Joshua. So Moses gives him the charge, God gives him the charge, Moses does the final steps of pronouncing blessing, and then he goes up to Mt. Nebo and views from afar the Promised Land. Then the angel of the Lord takes him home and buries the body. It ends, as I said, with the children of Israel weeping. Then chapter 34:9 –

And Joshua the son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom, for Moses had laid his hands upon him, and the children of Israel hearkened unto him and did as the Lord commanded Moses. And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.

That’s the end of Deuteronomy and the Torah ends. So Joshua has taken command, and he’s wonderful and God is going to use him, but he’s not The Prophet. In some ways he excels Moses and in some ways he doesn’t live up to what Moses was, but he’s going to do what Moses couldn’t do, and his name is Jesus [Yeshua]. Then that introduces the book of Joshua.

So we come to Joshua and we’re going to be spending some time here for the next few weeks looking at the conquest of the land and considering it from a number of angles. I forget what’s next, but I think we’re going to talk about what does God tell Joshua to do?

“See this book that Moses has been writing, and your name is in? Start reading. It’s your instruction manual. I’m not going to be talking to you constantly like I talked to Moses. I don’t need to. You’ve got a book. Start studying the book and meditating on the book. Read the book. Memorize the book.”

“I already told you…”

It’s also interesting to look at the foreshadowing, the typology again. That’s the drum that I hit every time, is typology apparently. You have Moses. He’s the prophet. He is the prophet of law and, like you mentioned before, and this is what got me on this train of thought again, is that the one who brings the law doesn’t get to go to the Promised Land.

If we’re looking at these actors typologically then there’s Moses, who represents the Law, there is Joshua, who represents Jesus and the covenant of grace that brings salvation, there is Israel representing God’s chosen people, the Church, and there is the Promised Land representing salvation.

When you plug those pieces in it becomes a little obvious the message why Galatians is so strong about the relationship between faith and works, and why Paul in general is very strong on the difference between salvation by faith alone and salvation by faith plus something else.

Yeah. Look at the first few chapters of Hebrews.

That’s where I was going to go.

For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God's rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.

Then the writer commends to us the Word of God which is quick and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword. So here you are. You have a new Joshua to lead you into the Promised Land of salvation, and here’s the sword of the Spirit. Joshua used an iron sword. We’re going to use a different kind of sword, but the success, the victory is just the same.

That’s a good place to wrap up for the evening. Do you have any recommendations for us? Bryan has a list, right?

While he’s doing that, I’m going to go ahead and recommend Dr. Schaeffer’s book, Joshua and the Flow of Biblical History, published originally by InterVarsity. It’s probably been republished. There are some premillennial elements in it, I will warn you up front. They’re not very explicit, but at points I think they get in the way of developing his argument. If he’d been a little better with his biblical theology and post-mil it would have been a stronger book, but there’s still a lot of good material in there. It’s an easy book. It’s a book that teenagers and pre-teens can read without trouble.

It’s in the green volume if you have the rainbow set of Schaeffer, which I don’t have but wish I had – one day, one day.

I’m going to go ahead and recommend Rod Dreher’s Live Not by Lies, which everyone and their pastor has been talking about for the past year.

I just ordered it. I’m very glad to hear you recommend it.

Thank you for recommending it.

It’s quite good. And this is a complete tangent from the issues and the content of the book – it’s more about Rod Dreher himself. I find it really interesting how people react to Rod Dreher and talk about him, because it’s like Rod just publishes all of his thoughts. He’s just like, “I had a thought today so I’m going to write an article.” It could contradict something he said last year. It doesn’t matter. He’s like, “This is what I think today.” It’s really weird to see people who I don’t think have ever read anything he’s written to criticize him for being effeminate for some reason. That’s the thing that people throw darts at. As Nazi is to leftist, so effeminacy is to these kinds of individuals.

I find it really interesting because he writes very lucidly in this particular book and draws from the historical examples and from particular Christians’ examples as they lived under very, very harsh communist and socialist regimes that explicitly outlawed and castigated Christians and the Christian faith. I think part of it has to do with the fact that he’s Eastern Orthodox now. They’re just a bit jealous.

That could have something to do with it. Emily, do you have one?

I do. I’m going to recommend slow-roasted salmon.

Is this a cookbook?

No, it’s a YouTube video actually. It’s a food. There are 1-1/2 cooking channels on YouTube that I like and this one is called Internet Shaquille and it’s just so no-nonsense and so simple and to the point that I really appreciate it.

It’s one of these recipes where it’s like “That sounds way too complicated. I don’t want to do that,” and then it’s like, “Well, I’ll just get it started” and then I’m done because it’s very straightforward. So that’s slow-roasted salmon. I’ll link the YouTube video because you don’t want to hear me describe how to make it, because Internet Shaquille does it so much better.

Okay. I’m all for roasting salmon.

I have also from David a couple housekeeping details before we wrap up. We do have a website now, which is new to Season 2. You can find us at haltingtowardzion.com, which is pretty neat. Apparently it’s a bit prettier than our anchor.fm website, which is not super well-designed. We didn’t get to design that. It’s just kind of what Anchor gave us, so now we have haltingtowardzion.com. It’s better. You can go there if you want to go to our website.

Another thing is that we are on Rumble, which is very exciting. If you’ve not heard of Rumble, it’s a video hosting website kind of similar to YouTube, except now that we have an alternative to YouTube where we can say whatever we want about how evil communist China is, and YouTube won’t be able to do anything about it because we’ll be on Rumble. We’re also still on YouTube until they find out that we think communist China is evil.

Thank you, guys, for this conversation. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thanks to our financial supporters. We appreciate you helping us keep the show going. If you’d like to join their number, you can visit our website at haltingtowardzion.com. Actually, you might still have to go to Anchor for that. I’m not sure. We’ll let you know next week.

Send us an email at [email protected]. Let us know if you want a Discord server. See you next week.