God’s People Are of Worth

12Joshua captured all the cities of those kings, with their kings, and he struck them with the edge of the sword, and utterly destroyed them; as Moses the servant of Yahweh commanded. 13But as for the cities that stood on their mounds, Israel burned none of them, except Hazor only. Joshua burned that. 14The children of Israel took all the plunder of these cities, with the livestock, as plunder for themselves; but every man they struck with the edge of the sword, until they had destroyed them. They didn’t leave any who breathed. 15As Yahweh commanded Moses his servant, so Moses commanded Joshua. Joshua did so. He left nothing undone of all that Yahweh commanded Moses.

When we love God, our spirit grows bright. Remarkably, the face of someone filled with the Holy Spirit shines, and because of that, without even realizing it, they win the love of those around them. They have only honored God’s word, trusted it, and depended on it, yet one day they look back and find that they have become a person of worth. No one attains this simply by wanting it. Only by being clothed in God’s grace can a person be glorified. So we must keep ourselves honest and clean, so that the light of Christ can pass through us freely.

When we hold Christ in our hearts, that in itself makes us happy. Holding Christ is itself growth in faith, which is what makes us wise. Filled with the Holy Spirit, we come to see that the world is vanity of vanities and that it is dark, and those who carry the light have no fear of it. When the wisdom God gives brings us understanding, we can carry out our calling in full, as Joshua did. But if we harbor the ambition to exalt ourselves, we will be caught in Satan’s snare before we know it.

In a book called God’s Proposal there is a story about two girls who were close friends. They were gathering shells on the beach when they spotted a large one, reached for it at the same moment, and both grabbed hold of it. They had never had a falling-out before, but now each insisted the shell was hers because she had seen it first, and in the end the stronger, more stubborn girl took it. Robbed of the biggest shell she had ever seen, the other girl was hurt and decided to go on gathering by herself.

Walking along the beach, she happened upon a shell with a pearl inside. Her heart leapt so high with joy that she felt she could fly. And the remarkable thing was that her hurt over the friend who had taken her shell vanished in an instant. She even found she could go back to her friend and smile. Once again the two walked together and picked up a large shell, but this time there was no quarrel, because the girl with the pearl gladly gave way. She could not show anyone the pearl, but the story ends by saying that the girl who owned it had such joy that she no longer cared about small things. While both girls were equally greedy, tempers could only run high; but once one of them owned a pearl beyond price, she became generous.

The heart of the girl with the pearl is the way believers see the world. Those who have met God own the pearl that is Christ, and so they do not squabble over the things of the world, which are like the shells scattered along the beach. When we hold Christ close, the world’s splendor looks shabby; when we exalt Christ, the world’s glory loses its appeal. When believers treasure Christ as their pearl, they can judge the world soberly and without greed, and that is how they win their war against the world.

Deuteronomy 20:1

1When you go out to battle against your enemies, and see horses, chariots, and a people more than you, you shall not be afraid of them; for Yahweh your God is with you, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.

Because God fought alongside Israel, Joshua won a great victory. A war in which God is at work is no merely human war, and it can only end in victory.

In Deuteronomy 1:42, Yahweh told Moses to tell the people not to go up and not to fight, because he was not among them, and he was concerned that they would be struck down before their enemies. When God does not go with them, even Israel is defeated. That is why it matters so much to make ourselves holy, so that God can go with us. Yet although God had said plainly that they would be defeated if he did not go with them, Israel attacked the enemy as they pleased and suffered a heavy defeat.

When God blesses his people, he always names a condition: only if you do this will I give you that. His meaning is this: if you listen to my word and obey it, I will bless you, not because you wanted it but because your obedience is precious to me.

Deuteronomy 4:40 says that if they kept the statutes and commandments of Yahweh that were being commanded them, they and their descendants would be blessed, and God would cause them to live long in the land he was giving them. Here he spoke of the blessing of descendants and of long life.

Then there is Deuteronomy 5:33: if they walked in all the way Yahweh their God had commanded them, they would be blessed and would live, and would prolong their days in the land they possessed. The blessing God gives can never be taken away.

Deuteronomy 6:3 adds that if they heard God’s commandments and did them, they would be blessed and would increase mightily in the land Yahweh had promised them, and through this he made known what blessings their descendants would inherit.

Besides these verses, a great many more words of blessing are written, and the single condition for receiving all these blessings is to walk in the way of Yahweh and keep his commandments and statutes. In other words, when we become a holy people who carry out God’s commandments and statutes, we can take hold of the blessings he has prepared. He has promised that if we believe in him and become holy, he will give us the blessing of many descendants, the blessing of wealth, and the blessing of long life.

We are people who already live under the blessing of the almighty God. If only we obey his word, we will be given power to overcome the world, wealth enough to give freely without ever borrowing, and even the blessing of a long life in which to enjoy all we have been given. To those who live holy lives, God has promised blessings that no human effort could ever gain.

The condition God gave Israel for victory was that when they entered Canaan they were to destroy everyone, leaving no one alive. The command to destroy them all may sound cruel. Destroying men and women, young and old alike, is no easy thing. But if God has commanded it, we must obey without passing judgment on it. Were Israel to spare the Canaanites out of pity, they would sin again. They would forget the God who had freed them from four hundred years of slavery, intermarry with those prosperous peoples, and serve their foreign gods. Then Israel’s faith would collapse at once.

If God is now commanding you to destroy every last trace of worldly greed, lust, and pride within you, you must cast them all out of your heart without the slightest excuse, compromise, or doubt, because he has spoken for the sake of your salvation, just as his command to Israel was for the sake of theirs. Only by obeying the word are we clothed with God’s power, and this is how we make room for God to fight in our place the hard battles we meet in this life.

When the king of Hazor heard that the Amorite kings had been killed and their land taken, he gathered all the peoples of northern Palestine to attack Israel. The Canaanite peoples heard the news and rallied in alarm: if the north fell too, all of Canaan would inevitably be conquered by Israel. Scripture records that so many soldiers were mustered that they were as numerous as the sand on the seashore, with very many horses and chariots.

These peoples must have thought that the five Amorite kings had lost to Israel because they were not prepared well enough, and so they would have readied even more soldiers, war horses, and chariots. They worked hard at it, thinking that if they only prepared thoroughly, they could stand against God, Joshua, and Israel. But there was something they did not know: no matter how great the world’s power, wealth, pride, or numbers, it cannot stand against God. If they had heard the reports of the almighty God, as Gibeon had, they would have done better to surrender at once. That is wisdom, and the way to save one’s life.

If believers today feel unhappy even after meeting God, it is because they have the same heart as the king of Hazor. God gave them the blessing of salvation, and every blessing is contained in that salvation. Yet they complain that they cannot see it and have nothing in their hands, and in the end even their salvation is taken from them. So we must learn to be content, and have the faith to give thanks in everything.

Do not tell God you will believe once he gives first. Believe that you have received, and the blessing will truly be yours to enjoy. You will have done nothing more than try to live by faith, and one day it will dawn on you, to your astonishment, that you are enjoying every blessing.

So God’s people need not fear, even if the Canaanites gather like the sand of the seashore, because the horses and chariots the world relies on, fearsome as they are, can never attack those whom God protects. The king of Hazor proved able to gather horses, chariots, and soldiers in great numbers, but he was utterly destroyed because he used them against God. In attacking Israel, held in God’s arms, he had attacked God himself. But here is what we must not misunderstand: the real reason God struck Canaan was not that they attacked Israel, but that they lived lives without God.

Until then the Canaanites had lived with nothing to do with God. In the same way, the people of the world do well enough without him. Nor, for all that, are they persecuting the church and its members or keeping them from serving God. Even so, God will judge the world. Why? Because they do not have Jesus Christ.

A world without Jesus Christ will, by that very fact, not be forgiven its sins. Since God cannot bring into heaven those whose sins have not been forgiven through the blood of Christ, he can do nothing but judge them. People without Jesus Christ live without knowing how precious they are. As a result, they spend their whole lives suffering, wandering in a darkness without light. They are afraid because they cannot know the future, and afraid because they do not know what comes after death. The holy God cannot take to himself sinners who have not received eternal life.

Because those who have found their worth in God live in obedience to his word, they walk in light as bright as noon even in a dark world. God has said that faith which trusts in him decides the outcome of the battle. To depend on him entirely is therefore what matters. Someone fighting in darkness so thick they cannot see a step ahead is no match for someone who fights in broad daylight with the enemy in plain view. Not knowing this, Canaan trusted in its numbers, its horses, and its chariots, and for that reason it fell to Israel.

Joshua 11:6

6Yahweh said to Joshua, “Don’t be afraid because of them; for tomorrow at this time, I will deliver them up all slain before Israel. You shall hamstring their horses and burn their chariots with fire.”

God’s strategy, to strike suddenly while the Canaanites were not yet properly organized, was a great success. A world without wisdom can never prevail against God, however many soldiers and weapons it has. Because the world lacks the wisdom to see ahead, it tries to win by imitating God’s ways, but it will never succeed.

Heresies work in much the same way the church does, and their founders claim to be Jesus, twisting the truth and preaching a false gospel. Think of poisonous mushrooms. A poisonous mushroom looks exactly like an edible one, and is often more brightly colored, so that ordinary people find it hard to tell them apart. The point is that it never comes as something completely different. Though it carries a deadly poison, it looks so much like the real thing that people cannot tell the difference, and some eat it without a thought and lose their lives. Satan is like that poisonous mushroom: if he can obstruct the work of God, he hinders salvation by any means at all.

Just as we preach the gospel, Satan dresses up a false gospel to look like the real one, and that makes evangelism hard for us. We are to proclaim the end of the age and the judgment, but Satan has been planting false ideas about them to confuse people, with the result that we cannot proclaim the true judgment. Even so, we must proclaim God’s judgment, the end of the age, and the fullness of the Holy Spirit, for even when Satan preaches a false gospel, those who have ears for the truth will hear it and receive God.

God comforted Joshua, telling him not to be afraid of them, and promised that tomorrow at this time he would deliver them up all slain before Israel. Although God himself had spoken it, this promise was hard to grasp by human common sense. Canaanites dozens of times more numerous than Israel stood before Joshua’s eyes, with horses and chariots ranged in rows. Yet it was to Joshua, looking at all this, that God was saying Israel would be victorious by this time tomorrow. The battles of God’s people are decided by God’s own working, and people’s plans and abilities have no bearing on the outcome. Knowing this, and trusting God, Joshua waited for the next day with bold faith.

Is there someone you fear right now? Then I hope you will look to the God of Joshua and of Israel, who is your God too. He will help you as he helped Israel.

God told Joshua that once he had won the battle, he was to hamstring the captured horses and burn all their chariots with fire. Had Israel kept the Canaanites’ horses and chariots, they would have been a great help in conquering Canaan. But God commanded that they all be destroyed, because with them Israel’s faith in him would not stand firm.

David sang of this heart of God in these words:

Psalms 33:16-17

16There is no king saved by the multitude of an army. A mighty man is not delivered by great strength. 17A horse is a vain thing for safety, neither does he deliver any by his great power.

David confesses that the salvation God gives cannot be gained by any power or authority in the world. A king with many horses and chariots cannot save himself, nor can a mighty man with wisdom and strength deliver himself. Because salvation belongs to Yahweh alone, we must give him our thanks and our obedience. Like David, even if we have no possessions in this world now, we must have the faith that we can receive them whenever God wills, since it is God who created the world by his word and who can judge a world full of sin.

Sometimes we say that once we earn a great deal of money, we will do great things for God. What we are really saying is that because we have nothing now, we can do nothing for God. It is a complaint against a God who does not bless us.

But I would ask you to think of it this way. People with disabilities can fulfill their calling through prayer, yet one of them says that being unable to see, they can do nothing, and that if their eyes are opened, they will serve God. Another says that if they can get up and run, they will give themselves to him. God hears their earnest longing and makes the one see and the other walk and run. Then they say that they have nothing, so they will first make money and serve him after that. And when God, as they asked, pours out abundant possessions on them, they now say they have possessions to look after and no time for God’s work. That is what our words amount to. If we realize what we are really saying, we must repent at once.

This is the evil nature of humankind. If God gives us many possessions and we still do not give ourselves to him but live only for ourselves, we will face God’s wrath. Devotion does not come from having much. Only when we live by a faith that keeps returning to its first love will God look on our hearts and fill our need. Lacking what others have is not what keeps us from serving him. What comes first is that you understand God’s will. Only when you know what God is working for does sight become precious, and walking and running become a blessing.

Because God was at work, Israel won. Should Israel disobey, leaving the horses unhamstrung and keeping all the chariots, they would gain formidable power in the world, and no nation would dare to oppose Joshua and Israel with so many weapons. But if they disobeyed God’s command, they would no longer see hail pour from heaven or the Jordan part, nor would they be given the wisdom of God, because being cut off from God is in itself judgment and failure.

Joshua 11:9

9Joshua did to them as Yahweh told him. He hamstrung their horses and burned their chariots with fire.

By faith Joshua hamstrung the horses and burned the chariots. He obeyed God’s command without adding any thoughts of his own. A child of God is one who, when God speaks, obeys without judging by human reasoning. So when you preach the word, you must lay aside all human thoughts, feelings, methods, and reasoning, and proclaim the word of truth just as it is.

If you were God, would you not help Joshua, who obeyed exactly as he was told? What would you withhold from a man who obeyed instantly, without a second thought, whenever you gave a command? God must have been well pleased with Joshua, who clung to his word alone in a Canaan full of enemies. When we simply live by the word, God steps in and helps us, in his own way.

By contrast, a life that disobeys the word cannot escape suffering, as the king of Hazor shows. He had many soldiers and weapons, but for the sin of defiling God’s name he was judged by fire. Because he lived without God, he fell into eternal death, and just so, a fearful judgment will surely come on the last day of the world.

I hope you will not take comfort merely in going to church. I say this because, when the wheat is separated from the weeds in the church, we see how much it matters to have true faith. May each of you examine your faith and see whether you have the shell that holds the pearl of Jesus Christ, or whether you are collecting large shells that are only for show. On the day of final judgment, those who did not walk with God will be judged together with the world. If people turn from God, serve money and pleasure as idols, and accept Satan’s protection in order to possess much, they cannot escape judgment. However secretly they act in the dark, God will bring what was done in darkness into the light and call them to account for their sin. When Christ, who is the light, comes, all the evil of the world will be exposed in full view, and a world without God’s name will perish on the last day.

May you become people of worth in God and enjoy his blessing. When we walk in God’s way and keep his statutes and commandments, he will give his people the blessing of long life, the blessing of wealth, and the blessing of children who flourish. When we show him our faith, God will recognize its worth and do many things to protect his children. Blessing is not far away; it is in the two hands of the God who walks with you. One thing is clear: if you live as a child of God who gives yourself to the cause of salvation, your life will be filled with blessing, as Joshua’s was.

May you always live as people of worth in the great name of God. I bless you in the name of Jesus Christ.