It's God's Victory

Welcome to God's Word for You, a ministry of Sharon R.P. Church in Morning Sun, Iowa. Check us out online at www.sharonrpc.org. We pray that this message will be a blessing to you and that the Lord will use it to transform your faith and your life. Well, I remember hearing a story or saying a while back, when J.I. Packer was the one who wrote it. And he was saying, an Arminian is somebody who thinks that they believe that they have the choice to choose God. But J.I. Packer, in his book, The Sovereignty and Evangelism of God, he says, but no real Arminian prays like an Arminian, because they always pray, God, please change this person's heart. God, please save this person.

They recognize that it's in God's hand. But I'd like to suggest to you that oftentimes people like us who are Calvinist by persuasion, convinced of a higher view of God's sovereignty, have you noticed that in some Calvinists it leads to such a high view that they end up stopping? It's like they don't pray anymore. It's almost like this high view of sovereignty that exists in churches like ours can lead to a prayerless life, acting as if we don't do anything. But we know that a prayerless life is a powerless life. So what's going on here in Joshua chapter 10? Who's doing the work? How is the Lord delivering his people? What does this interchange look like between God fighting for his people and his people fighting?

Well, when we come to this passage, first let's just look at the breakdown of the passage. Verses one through five, this is the five kings going up against Gibeon. These are the five kings who are led by Adonai Tzadek, the king of Jerusalem. He sees, oh man, hold on, what happened?

The Gibeonites, these were fighting men. These were men that were big and strong, valiant men. But they've made a treaty. They've made a treaty with the Israelites. And they feared greatly, verse 2, they feared greatly because Gibeon was a great city, like one of the royal cities. And because it was greater than I, and all its men were mighty. And so what does he do? He calls together all these different kings. Now something we need to recognize is who were these kings? What's going on here?

These are the kings that in the book of Numbers, the 10 unbelieving spies didn't want to fight against. These were the cities listed where the Anakim lived, where the giants lived. And these are the cities that now Gibeon is saying to the Israelites, the ones that were afraid to go into the land before because of these giants. Now Gibeon is saying, come and help us.

How will God's people respond? Will they respond in fear? Or will they respond with faith? Will they go and will they fight? Or will they just say, well, we got Ai, we got Jericho, we got Gilgal, we're good. We're scared of those guys, no. No, in verse six, what happens is the Gibeonites go and they ask for help. The men of Gibeon sent to Joshua at the camp of Gil saying, do not forsake your servants. We remember last week as the Gibeonites were these people who made this ruse, this lie, this farce about having come away from a long country and they made the covenant with them.

Josh was like, dude, what did you guys do? Why did you do this? Why did you lie to us? Oh, we just knew that you were going to annihilate us. Well, here the lesser kingdom says, hey, you know what? You say that you made this covenant with us. We said that you were the ones over us. Now we are your servants.

Now you need to come and live up to that covenant. And the people of God understood this. When God made a promise to his people, he was going to fulfill those promises. And we, as God's people, when we make promises, we've got to live up to those promises. And that's what's going on here.

Even though the Gibeonites had tricked them, even though the Gibeonites were the ones who had weaseled their way into being able to keep their land and steal it from the inheritance of the Israelites, it didn't matter. Once there was a covenant made, once there was a promise that had been given, they must keep that promise.

And so what does Joshua do? Well, verses 7-11 tells us what Joshua does, but more accurately it tells us what the Lord does. So Joshua ascended from Gilgal, he and all the people of war with him, and all the mighty men of valor. Joshua doesn't just take a few guys.

He doesn't just take the special forces. He doesn't just take a small remnant. No, he takes all the mighty men of valor. He takes a whole army, and he goes. 21-mile hike from Gilgal up into the mountains, past Ai and over to Gibeon. All through the night, they march. They go, why? What was the confidence behind why they would march to Gibeon against these five nations? Hear this. Five nations against one. What confidence do they have? I think the heart of the passage really gets here at verse 8.

And the Lord said to Joshua, do not fear them, for I have delivered them into your hand. Not a man of them shall stand before you. It's only after the Lord says this. Remember when they had made this treaty with Gibeon, what had they not done? They didn't wait to hear from the Lord. They just did it. But here now, the Lord is the one giving the shots. The Lord is the commander of his people. The Lord is the one saying, I'm going to go.

Don't be afraid. None of them are going to stand before you. All of them are going to be delivered into your hand. Go now. And how does Joshua respond as you go? Well, God's given us a promise, so we'll wait for the morning. Guys, get a good night's sleep, and we'll take care of this tomorrow. No, he acts quickly on the promise. He acts quickly on the command. The Lord says, they're in your hand. And so Joshua says, men, get dressed, get your swords, put on your shields, let's go now. We've got a march to do tonight. We need to go save Gibeon today.

How often do we, though, when we hear the promises of God, put the things that we know we ought to do on the back burner of our lives. When the Lord tells us, hey, do something about your marriage. Here's the promises I've made about this covenant between you and your wife. And we go, OK, I'll take care of that later. There's pressing needs right now. No, when the commander of the army of the Lord says something, when Yahweh himself opens his mouth, when Jehovah says, do not fear them, you go.

You run, you get ready for battle and you march. And this is what they do, they go and they march and they catch them by surprise. Verse nine, Joshua therefore came upon them suddenly, having marched all night from Gilgal. So again, notice verse 10. The people are the one marching. The people are the ones fighting. The people are the ones exerting their energy. But what does verse 10 say?

So the Lord routed them before Israel, killed them with a great slaughter at Gibeon, chased them along the road that goes to Beth Horon, and struck them down as far as Azekah and Makeda. It's the Lord who does it. Yeah, they might be swinging their swords, they might be deflecting the blows, they might be doing the fighting, but who is the one who's having the victory? Who is the one guaranteeing that they're going to win.

It's the Lord. It's the Lord. It's the Lord. It's the Lord. Brothers and sisters, in our lives, we have to wrestle with this in our lives. God tells us to be holy as he is holy. Okay, so we need to be holy. Who makes you holy? Who makes you holy? Are you making yourself holy when you repent of your sins when you, you know, maybe you were a violent person and you put on peace. Maybe you were a liar and you put on truth. Maybe you stole things instead. Now you're going to say, okay, I'm going to work. I'm going to get a job and I'm going to work hard. Who's making you holy? Is it you? Or is it the Lord?

Brothers and sisters, it is the Lord, but we are also by His Spirit filled with the Spirit of Christ to do the good works which He has prepared in advance for us to do. We truly do do the good works, but all the credit and all the motivation and all the glory go to the Lord. We pray, not because we think that we're going to earn favor with God, or somehow arm wrestle God into doing things, but we pray knowing that the Lord works through prayer. We know that there is this beautiful thing that happens between the Lord routing the army before Israel and Israel actually fighting the war. All the glory goes to God. All the glory goes to the commander. All the glory goes to the Lord. And just to prove that it was the Lord who was fighting this battle, I love verse 10, or verse 11, verse 11.

And it happened as they fled before Israel and were on the descent of Bethhoron, that the Lord cast down large hailstones from heaven on them as far as Azekah, and they died. Just to make sure that the Israelites knew that they weren't gonna get the credit here. How does the Lord show that he's for his people? At just the right time, and at just the moment they needed it.

It's not Baal, who the Canaanites would have thought was the God of thunder and lightning and hail, but it's the Lord who opens up the heavens, who controls the storehouses of the sky, and who sends down great hailstones and destroys God's enemies. And the concluding part of that verse, there were more who died from the hailstones than the children of Israel killed with a sword.

If it was, you can imagine, have you ever played games like this before where one person gets a point and you make attack? Have you ever seen that scene in the Lord of the Rings before where there's the elf and there's, what are those guys called? Not trolls, they're little short guys. Not hobbits, there's another guy. What's this? The dwarf, there you go, the dwarf and the elf are fighting with, and they start keeping track of who's got the most kills. And they sit there and they're trying to keep track and trying to keep track. You can imagine the Israelites going and saying, well, there's 65 people dead here, but there's 125 over here that died from the hailstones.

Who's winning the battle? Who's the greater victor? Who's the one who's doing this? It's not the Israelites, but it's the Lord. It's the Lord who's fighting for his people. It's the Lord who's going before his people. It's the Lord who's doing this for his people.

Because He's made them promises. He would never leave them nor forsake them. He was going to drive out the people from the land. He was going to give them the promised inheritance. He was going to fulfill the promises that He made. And so the Lord does this.

And then in verse 12 through 14 we have the incredible story, So the sun stood still and the moon stopped, till the people had revenge upon their enemies. Now, I'm just gonna say that if you read very erudite learned men, you'll find that there are very different ideas of what happens here. First option number one. Okay, the sun and the moon, they just, it seems like they're longer days in the psyche of the people. Option number two, maybe Joshua is asking God for a sign from heaven, like a solar eclipse or something. Maybe that's what's going on here. Option number three, maybe this is, maybe we can explain this as just, this is just kind of one of these stories in the Old Testament that maybe it's just more myth than truth.

Oh, your country bumpkin pastor thinks that I actually believe the word of God. And that the God who's able to create everything out of nothing is able to stop the earth in its tracks, withhold the laws of gravity, able to keep everything together in its right time, and is able to produce everything. He's the God who's able to, out of nowhere, bring a hailstorm and kill the armies of his enemies, and is then somehow able to stop the sun and the moon at the same time. Brothers and sisters, we can come to this passage and bring with it all of our naturalistic, trying to explain it away, or we could humbly say, you know, the Lord did something amazing that day.

The problem is, often we can come to these passages and if we have a hard time wrestling with what seems to be the phenomenal here, what seems to be like the absolute, how could this ever happen? If we have a problem with that, brothers and sisters, I'm telling you, we must have more faith. Because something more radical than this happened. Jesus Christ rose from the grave and bodily ascended up into heaven. If we have a problem with this miracle here, we have a problem with every miracle in the Bible.

Because a miracle, by definition, is saying we believe in a God who is sovereign over everything. It's not that we need to reinterpret the passages of the Bible to fit with our naturalistic understanding of the cosmos, but it's that we need to have a bigger view of who God is as the order and creator of the cosmos.

It's the Lord who put the sun in its place. It's God who each morning says, rise, and it comes up in the east. It's the Lord who set the Milky Way galaxy to spin on its circle, on its axes. It's the Lord who put Orion in its place. It's the Lord who brings the hail. It's the Lord who paints the sky with a beautiful sunset. This is what God does.

And the amazing part here is the conclusion of what it says in verse 14. Now, I'm just going to say in verse 13, we don't know what the book of Jasher is. It's a lost book. It's only mentioned three times in the Bible. Each time it's associated with a war victory. So it's probably a book that had different songs or stories about different war victories in Israel. So you'd find it. We'll talk more about it during Chalk and Talk.

But that's not where to get hung up on. Verse 14, though, specifically says, Not even Moses prayed that the sun would stop, and it did. And so many people, when they come to the scriptures, they wanna come and they wanna, it's as if, well, if I didn't see this miracle, I can't trust that it happens. That's not how miracles work.

It only needed to happen once. God doesn't have to prove himself to every single generation with his miracles. No, he proved it at just the right time and just the right way with power. The Lord did this work. Now, some of you might think, well, hold on here. The Lord heeded the voice of a man, for the Lord fought for Israel.

Does this show that maybe Joshua is able to arm wrestle God, force God into doing things? No, let me ask you this. The tenor of this whole passage, has it been Joshua's strength? Has it been Joshua's military prowess that's been the focus? Has it been Joshua commanding God to send down hailstones?

No. No, but we might get squeamish about this a little bit. Because maybe we don't actually believe that God listens to our prayers. Maybe we become so hard-headed in our Calvinist theology that we think because God is sovereign, he doesn't listen to our prayers. No, theologians and philosophers, when they talk about prayer, they talk about primary and secondary causes.

The primary cause, God decides to do something, and so he does it directly. God decides that he's going to send down hail, and so he sends down hail. Secondary cause, God wants to defeat the Amorites, so he puts it in Joshua's heart to pray, and he hears his prayer. This is exactly what Jesus tells us in John chapter 14, as well as the Apostle John in 1 John chapter 5, verses 13 through 15.

If you ask of anything, according to his will, he hears us. If you ask anything in my name, it'll be done for you. Do you actually believe that? Do you actually believe that God hears your prayers and that he powerfully works through them? Just as an anecdotal story, I've been praying up here for months that God would give us more and more evangelistic encounters. I know that the ladies in their prayer meeting downstairs have been praying that the Lord would give more evangelistic encounters. And I don't know, maybe the Lord actually does listen to prayers.

Because in the last two weeks, I have had more evangelistic encounters Just yesterday I was sitting on a plane and I had my book and I was so excited. I'd get a nap and I'd get to work on this sermon and I'd get to read a book. And here's this lady next to me who wants to talk for two and a half hours on the way to St. Louis. I thought, all right, here we go. So I think, okay, that's fine.

When I'm on the plane from St. Louis to Burlington, I'll have some time to sit down and read and pray and think. And then my flight is canceled from St. Louis to Burlington. So they put me in a car with three other guys and the driver is sitting there And he wants to get every one story, and he finds out I'm a pastor. And he asked me, well, what made you want to be a pastor?

Okay, so there's no sleep for the weary. Hold on, just, okay, we got, okay, you give an opportunity, Lord. You sit there at the coffee shop, and someone that you've been friends with for a couple months, couple years, comes in and sits down for 45 minutes, and you've never had an opportunity to talk with them about anything serious. And they say, where's your church? So I don't know, maybe you guys actually do believe in prayer. Please keep praying. Please keep praying. The Lord works through prayer.

This is one of the weapons. See, we do not war against the rulers and principalities of this world with weapons of flesh. 2 Corinthians 10.14 says, For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds. The Lord has given, I'm going to suggest to you, seven different weapons for your warfare. The first is His Word. When we go to war, not against flesh, not carnally like they did in Joshua, thank the Lord I don't actually have to pick up a sword and go kill someone.

I'm glad we're in the newer covenant and this isn't what's going on. but we do still go to battle and the sword of the word is our weapon. Secondly, your second weapon of spiritual warfare is prayer. Pray, pray, pray, pray, pray without ceasing at all times and every circumstance. And let me tell you that not every prayer is going to end this way. Sometimes Paul would say, Lord, I've got this thorn in my side, it's hindering me, it's hard for me, there's pain involved in this, it's a pain to me. And the Lord says, no, my grace is sufficient for you. No, I got that in your life for a reason.

And he'll teach us to be more dependent on him. Worship. One of the spiritual battles or elements of warfare that we have, a weapon of warfare is worship. When we come to worship, our minds are sharpened, our hearts are strengthened, we're encouraging one another to continue on in the fight. Fasting? Jesus himself, when his disciples couldn't cast out a demon, they were doing spiritual warfare with the powers and the principalities of darkness, and they said, why can't we cast out this demon? Jesus said, this is only the type that can come by prayer and fasting. Sometimes fasting can be used by the Lord for spiritual warfare, thanksgiving.

Another weapon for you to use is your thanksgiving. Be thankful unto the Lord always. Thanks in all seasons, in all times, for all sorts of circumstances. The name of Jesus Christ himself is a high tower, a strength for us, a weapon that we use. We don't use Jesus's name as like some type of incantation or something like that, but in the name of Jesus Christ, there is strength. And lastly, your own testimony. You know what the Lord's done in your own heart. You know the Lord's word that's buried in your heart. Cling to the hope that you once received.

So we must be those. We must be those Christians who recognize that the victory is the Lord's, but he has called us to battle. That he's given us his armor. He's given us all the implements of war that are necessary to go to war with our own hearts, with our own minds, and with the culture around us. But we do it knowing that any single little victory we have is ultimately the Lord's. It's for His glory.

So Christian, do you believe God's promises? Do you actually believe that you don't have to fear Do you believe that he's never gonna leave you nor forsake you? Do you believe that you're no longer a slave to sin but to righteousness? Do you believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ? Do you believe that you do not have to fear as you walk in this life, but you can have joy in Jesus Christ? Right now we march as a church militant, but someday Jesus Christ is going to come back and we're gonna be the church triumphant.

Closing Prayer

So until he returns, brothers and sisters, fight the good fight, run the good race, do so with perseverance. Don't grow weary of doing good. Let's bring our father glory and enjoy him forever. Let's pray. Oh father, we thank you that you remember your promises and that your spirit's at work in our hearts.

Lord, Father, I pray for each one of these members. Lord, I pray that you would give them the strength, a supernatural strength that could only come by your spirit, to believe and to live out the gospel. Lord, we thank you that your promises are true and that you indeed are the master and the maker of the universe. So Lord, we pray that in our times of disbelief, that you would care for us and give us more faith. Build us up, Lord. Give us victory. In Jesus' name, amen.

Thanks for listening to this week's message from God's Word for You, a ministry of Sharon R.P. Church in rural southeast Iowa. We pray that the message would be used by God to transform your faith in your life this week. If you'd like to get more information about us, feel free to go to the website, SharonRPC.org. We'd love to invite you to worship with us. Our worship time is 10 a.m. every Sunday at 25204 160th Avenue, Morning Sun, Iowa, 52640. May God richly bless you this week.