The Book of Joshua • Beyond The Sermon

Well, hello and welcome to beyond the Sermon, a Bethany podcast, where we have the privilege of digging deeper into our Sunday messages. I am Tammy Delau, and today I'm joined with Pastor Chase Beetart and Pastor Steve Musto. And, guys, I'm hoping there's some muscle memory left, because it's been a while since we've done this, since we did a podcast. I think we need to just jump in because I'm not even sure we know what we're doing. So let's do it.

That sounds good. Okay. All right. Yes.

I loved the sermon on Sunday. And so I think my favorite part is, because I know the. The Bible is a whole unified story, was when you slowed down and brought us through Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, numbers, and the questions that were being asked. So that was really good. Awesome.

Yeah, it always helpful when we see how it ties together. But I told you guys that was. I almost cut that part. I just thought it was too inside baseball. I thought it would be, I don't know, just too much information.

So praise God that he was like, nah, leave it in. And I'm glad you didn't cut the progressive commercial either, because the question then from the progressive commercial is, I want to know how many pillows you and Elise have on your couch. You know, we do a pretty good job. I feel like we've got some. But my mom came and replaced our guest room bed about three months ago.

She brought seven pillows onto our bed. Bed. That's too many pillows. Oh, my. It's too many pillows.

Where do I lay? Yeah. You reach an age. Yeah. Where the pillows just increase.

She does that. So I didn't know. This is a thing. A sham. I'm sure you know what a sham is.

I didn't know what a sham was. Every bed, she. She's got pillowcases that just sit on top of the pillowcases, right? Yes. And then she got mad at me one time because one of them got into my suitcase, and I was like, what do you want me to do?

You can't sleep on the shank. I can't. So I don't understand. Why do I need a second pillowcase? This one doesn't even go around.

The first pillowcase goes on top of the pillowcase. Drives me n. It's the pillow that you're not allowed to put your head on. No, it's decoration. Why does it exist? I don't understand.

So there really is a point. Laughing about all of this is. We have seen a generation that their parents were given a promise and they didn't really believe God, didn't trust God. And so there was punishment that happened. They wandered for 40 years.

And now we have a new generation that the same promise is made. And are they gonna behave like their parents? Are they gonna make different choices? So this morning I woke up, and I'm thinking, and I'm like, well, I know for me to be relentless, I need to remember what God has done in my past. So I'm obedient in walking forward.

And I'm like, well, these people didn't see the parting of the Red Sea, but they did have manna. God was still faithful to them. I would love for you to share what you shared with me when I asked that question earlier. Cause I'm like, were they dumb? Like, they could trust me, could trust God.

They had mana. Yeah, they had mana every day. And they had the. The pillar. The pillar, Yep.

Fire in the cloud to. To guide them. And so they would have had a remembrance of who God was and his faithfulness, which surely, if we were them, we wouldn't have made that mistake. Yeah, I mean. I mean, we're better than that.

I mean, maybe mana tasted like chocolate. I don't know. But so. So, yeah, Help me. Why were they having a hard time?

Why would they have had a hard time? How could they have not trusted it? Right. Yeah. Well, part of it is, we have to understand in the span of a year or several months that the plagues happened on Egypt.

You're watching one thing after. It would be one thing if there's an eclipse. And the eclipse lasted for a long time. Okay, well, that was weird. Then suddenly the whole world that you know of is covered in frogs.

And then you're like, all right, bizarre. Then you go down into the water, and it's blood. And everything you pour out of a pitcher turns to blood. And every. You know, you're like, okay, bizarre.

And you're seeing this one after the other after the other. And this is all Yahweh. So this. The plagues were the beginning of the wonder of God doing all these things and the hail and all of that. So that.

And the parting of the Red Sea, and then watching the Egyptians, the most powerful army on earth wiped out within seconds in the water is remarkable in and of itself. So, yeah, so the second generation, yes, they had seen God's wonder, but they had been born into that. This was not something that they learned in their 20s or 30s. So it's sort of like. So the example I use with you is iPhones or Cell phones.

Why is it that on the Titanic, Why didn't people on the Titanic just call for help from their cell phones? Well, because they didn't have cell phones. Right. But we live in an era where there's a generation right now, like in high school, who has never not lived in a world without the Internet and cell phones. To them, you can say, well, there was a time before this, but they can't really picture it.

This is just normative. So it makes it not special then. Yeah. What was the world like in the 1950s before there was color in the world, when the whole world was black and white? In my mind, I picture the 1950s like black and white because those are the only pictures I'd ever seen growing up.

And I think that's pretty much this. They had never lived in a world without manna. They had never lived in a world without a pillar guiding them. It was not a big deal to them. They didn't see it as remarkable.

So I know you said there is four kind of. I don't want to say chapters, but four events that happen. So they cross. Not the Red Sea, the Jordan. They did do that.

They did do that, too. That did happen. They don't even understand about it. So they're. And then they're told to take the land, and then they're going to divide the land, which, you know, those chapters always feel a little bit boring, if I'm honest.

They can. Yes. So. And then they need to serve and be obedient. The taking of the land is not a pretty thing if you think about what that really looked like, because they were supposed to go in and annihilate whoever was there.

That's hard for people to understand. That's hard to. I know people question how can God even be a good God when he's telling them to do that. Can we speak to that a little bit? Well, Chase is taking Hebrew, so we'll let him tell us the Hebrew word for this.

Join us next time. No, our camera. Don't look at him while he iPhone. That's hilarious. No, actually, I just dropped Hebrew because it's been kicking my tail, but I know this word.

Yeah, this is. Which meant devoted to destruction. There was also this, like, concept of, like, God's ownership over the Yahweh's ownership over this. I think, like, an important detail underneath herem, which gets hit on over and over throughout Joshua, is that Yahweh is the Lord over the whole Earth. He's not like this relegated tribal God that just travels Around.

That's just pro Israel. That is. Sorry, that feels political. That is exclusively like at the behest of Israel or anything like that. No, he is Lord over all of creation.

There's. I can't remember what chapter is in where. Where Joshua comes up to the commander of the Lord's army and is like, well, are you. Are you for us or for them? And do you remember his response?

Yeah. No. Oh, like he's. He's above that and so asking the wrong question. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. So I. Even though obviously he is utterly committed to Joshua and his people, yet he's not beholden to them. And so I think that's an underlying detail that we need to remember when it comes to haram. Because this isn't like God is invading over somebody else's territory and is like conquering what isn't already his.

No, He. He is the ruler. He. He is the. The Adonai, the master over the entire earth, all of creation.

And so it's not like he's imposing unjust realities on these other people. There's. There's a few other things that I think we're going to come across as we go through Joshua that will help us to understand some of herem. And yet still, this is one of the most controversial hard to swallow pills, not just in Joshua, but in all the Old Testament. And for good reason.

It's. It's messy. And you already mentioned, Tammy, it's. It's ugly when you really start thinking about it. And Joshua doesn't spare us.

He doesn't like, shield our eyes from what's actually going on. He's going to show us. Actually, the book is going to show us in pretty vivid imagery exactly what's happening in each of these cities where God has been rejected and idolatry has been prized. So why do you think God has decided we need to see it so. So vividly?

Is it because we don't understand the ugliness of sin? Like, what is the. I mean, I know we can't know God's heart that way, but I'm so curious. Why those verses? I just.

I mean, you think of women and children and kill everything, demolish everything feels. It's so hard to wrap your brain around. No, you're right. I mean, I think you make a pretty compelling case there. I think there is something to be said about when we're.

It's almost like when you force a child to look at the consequences of their actions. Or like my daughter doesn't realize what she's doing to her brother. All she can see is what she desires and her own selfishness. And it's not until finally, like, you guys can call me out as a parent on this if you want to. I'm going to tell you a story.

My kids were in the bathtub. My kids were in the bathtub. This is, like, two weeks ago. And we let him play with, like, these little cups and Tupperware pieces, and they like to, like, dump it on each other's backs, and it's kind of fun most of the time, but every now and then, Fletcher or Evangeline will take it, and they'll dump it on the other kid's head. And you can imagine the indignity.

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Of course. And so Elise and I come fly into the bathroom, assuming somebody's drowning, and it's just a kid drenched in warm water. And so this was, again, like, two weeks ago, and Fletcher had been just a menace all night long for us.

This was not his first offense. And so he had done it to Evangeline once already, and I had reprimanded him for it, and I comforted her. And then right in front of me, he does it a second time after I'd reprimanded him. So without even. I was just like, he needs to understand what.

He doesn't have any idea what he's doing to Evangeline. So I. Before anything else could happen, I grabbed the cup out of his hand, take a cup full of water, and dump it on his head. You should have seen the screams out of this. I mean, he was very, very upset.

And yet, again, I think there's something to. We can do a lot of damage when we don't understand what the cost is being paid by the people around us as we reign in the way that we want to, that brings us the most gain, the most satisfaction. And so I think that's part. You could make the argument that's part of why the book of Joshua is forcing us to confront this is the dire consequences of when we reject Yahweh and his leadership and what he's called us to and instead pursue our own desires. I mean, some of the things that are happening in these cities we're going to find are just heinous.

Heinous acts like things that all of us, even in our culture today, which isn't a perfect culture, but almost all cultures would agree this is really bad stuff that should be judged, that should be exterminated. And I think that's how it's been Explained to me in the past. But at the same time, it's so easy to think, well, they were really bad and the Israelites were better, right? Yeah, as if the Israelites weren't. And the Israelites weren't good either.

Chase, will you look up Deuteronomy 9, 4. And so herem is the idea that God wages war via the Israelite people and he tells them to destroy everything. So, yes, destroy the army, yes, destroy the city, but also destroy everyone in it. Women, children, cattle, livestock, everything. They don't take any plunder.

Well. Well, they do. But that's a story for another day. This feels like. What's the kids show?

Is it Odyssey? What's the shoot? There's Adventures in Odyssey. Yeah, Adventures in Odyssey. That's a story for another day.

Tammy, I feel like this is like Adventures in Odyssey. Yeah, they. Because it's a hard lesson to learn even for them. But this is one of the reasons why people reject the Bible or reject Christianity because they read these stories in the Old Testament, they say, well, this is an unloving God who wipes out innocent people. Look, these are just people at home.

These are nursing mothers, couldn't have known any better. And they suddenly a three year old, who could hurt a three year old, right, kicks in the door and destroys these people. And this is not right. And we are expected to grapple with this. So this is not the answer.

But let's remember when we say things like, these are innocent people that we need to stop for a moment, a Bible scholar would stop us and go, what was that word you used, innocent people? Here's Deuteronomy 7. And then I'll have. Yeah, I can jump in there. Jace, read nine.

So remember what Deuteronomy is a big part of Deuteronomy is Moses's sermon to the people, to the second generation, know that Yahweh, your God is God, the faithful God, who keeps his gracious covenant loyalty for a thousand generations with those who love him and keep his commands. But he. This is verse 10. He directly pays back and destroys those who hate him. He will not hesitate to pay back directly the one who hates him.

So keep the commands, the statutes and ordinances that I'm giving you to follow today. These are not innocent people going about their lives. They are at war with Yahweh and what he stands for. They hate God. They hate the Torah, the law.

They hate what he is bringing. He has given them the opportunity. It's not indifference. Oh, surely not. Absolutely not.

This is not God. Randomly choosing some family, some group. Yeah. Throwing a dart at a dartboard and picking one group to save and everybody else is outside. That is not what is happening.

And then if I could really quick on that, go for it. We're going to see, once we get into chapter seven and eight, there are going to be a number of occasions where we're going to see, we're going to find out, oh, these people already knew about Yahweh. They, they were aware of what he required. They were aware of his power. And we're going to see various responses.

We're going to see Rahab's response which is the best possible one. We're going to see the Gibeonites have a very similar goal but a different way of getting it a little more deceptive. But we're also going to see just outright defiance. And that's again, that's going to be a really important thing I think for us to understand Harem when we get to those spots. Here's you suggested chapter nine, verse four.

If I could read to six, I think that's actually going to be helpful for some questions Tammy was asking here. Deuteronomy 9. 4. When Yahweh, your God drives them out before you, do not say to yourself, yahweh brought me in to take possession of this land because of my righteousness. Instead, Yahweh will drive up these nations before you because of their wickedness.

You are not going to take possession of their land because of your righteousness and your integrity. Instead of Yahweh, your God will drive out these nations before you because of their wickedness. In order to fulfill the promises that he swore or sorry, promised, singular that he swore to your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Understand that Yahweh, your God is not giving you this good land to possess because of your righteousness. For you are a stiff necked people.

God is not by any stretch of the imagination trying to get the Israelites to believe, you know, this isn't Joel Osteen trying to pump him up with self affirmations of you can do this, just no, no. God is extremely realistic about their stiff necked stubbornness to refuse to obey him. And yet because of his commitments, I mean we mentioned earlier, this is all about in the first five, the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, God has made many, many promises. Especially we hear about the Abrahamic promises, the Mosaic promises, these are really, really important ones. And the question going to Joshua is will God actually keep these promises?

Is he going to Follow up on this. And of course, Joshua gives a very resolute answer to that question. So by the time we get to the end of the book, we know that God has kept every single promise that he made. Every promise that he is conquered the land if you go back to the Abrahamic covenant. That's right.

He is the anti Michael Scott. There's the episode in the office where Michael Scott promises tuition to a bunch of inner city kids and when they finally get to graduation, he has to come and tell them he's not paying for any of them and it just devastates them. This is the anti that God makes way better promises than tens of thousands of dollars in tuition. And what we find by the end of the book is he is absolutely worthy of our trust. He, in a way that nobody else in our lives possibly can, he extends these phenomenal guarantees to us and then without fail, brings us to their inevitable conclusion, which is going to strengthen the Israelite people back then.

And also it's going to strengthen the heart of every New Testament believer today who studies this book. So the book of Joshua isn't about a guy named Joshua. He just happened to be the leader of the time where we're seeing God's faithfulness and he's keeping his promises. Yeah. And yet Joshua is also one thing commentators on this book say often is we can't shy away from.

Joshua is really great. He's a phenomenal leader. The book goes to great lengths to express how wonderful of a leader he is. In fact, there's even we mentioned earlier, the Israelites make a lot of mistakes in the Pentateuch, but also in this book, interestingly, when that happens, almost always it's the nation of Israel that gets credited with their disobedience. But when they do something good, it's Joshua who.

Who gets credited with their obedience. Joshua who shares a name with the Savior who would come in the New Testament. Interestingly. Yeah. Yeah.

The Bible does not shy away from pointing out flaws in our biblical heroes. Moses, David, Solomon, Samson, people that we have tended to elevate and say all of them have flaws. Joshua has one misstep that is a. That is corrected. And it's with the Gibeonites and their deception should have done this.

Or he is fooled. That's right. He didn't ask God about it. But it's not. It's not a direct sin in terms of he's gone against the Lord or something like that.

It is not Moses striking the rock. Even Moses we see on a couple different Occasions messes something up and God corrects him. Moses, the great leader, the one who sees God face to face. And so, so what I love about this is that it's got to be so hard to be Joshua and take over from Moses. Moses was the guy.

He was the guy. Moses. Abraham Lincoln. If I'm correct. Our Jewish friends speak way more of Moses than they ever do Joshua.

Moses is like the greatest. He's the Joe Montana. And Steve Young is Joshua. Yeah, sorry, Brett Favre Rogers. That's probably a better one for our context.

But Joshua really gets this, really gets it. All right. And even his sermon at the end of Joshua, where he addresses everybody for the last time because he gets his Moses moment. Moses has his moment. He gets a whole book pretty much devoted to his sermon.

But Joshua gets this little bit at the end devoted to his, where he addresses the people and he has that moment. And it's a powerful moment of, I know you guys are not going to do it right? I just know. And God has, let me see you've been obedient while I'm here. But I know it's going to be hard going forward.

And so can I just plead with you? I'm just pleading with you, please don't. Please don't mess this up. Please don't. We've worked so hard knowing full well that they're probably going to mess it up.

Sure are. And. But Moses did the same thing. Moses said, now when you guys mess this up, here's what's going to happen. We're not going to mess up.

Yes, you are. We will not go this way. And then you read the Lord. No, you absolutely will. So yeah, he just is such a hero.

It's also interesting that comes at the end of this book and we mentioned earlier we have a friend who had this great point. You look at Joshua and Judges next to each other and it's really interesting how the compiler of our text has put these together, the similarities and the distinctions. But one major one here in Joshua, we're going to see over and over God. The book says God. The book screams of God's faithfulness.

It screams over and over of this promise keeping, covenant abiding God. But it whispers quietly underneath the people's unfaithfulness, their inability to keep what they're promising they're going to do. And then Joshua makes all those exhortations, the pleadings, and then we get to judges. And for anybody who studied judges, we know how that goes. It's the inverse of Joshua.

Now the book Screams of the unfaithfulness of Yahweh's people. I mean, horrible, heinous. Some of the most despicable things in all the Bible happen in Judges. And yet underneath the shouts of unfaithfulness, Judges even whispers of the faithfulness of God. And so funny how these two books play together.

God is central in Joshua, and the people of Israel play a very minor role. Yeah, he's just bringing them along. Yeah. The analogy that we probably can use in the series is like a gift card. It's just like, hey, look, this gift card exists.

It's right here. All you have to do is go and use it. Just go and take it, use it. That's it. And it doesn't even expire after a year.

They don't even. I want to do that. They just have a hard time with that. And in Judges, what we have then is the people taking steps out on their own when the gift card still exists. It's still there.

It's right there for them. No, no, no. We're going to buy this on our own for some reason. And you get whispers of that even towards the. I think of the allotments, I think it's in chapter 19, where we read about.

I can't remember which tribe it is that's given their allotment and they end up impeding on another tribe's allotment. And it's just ridiculous taking it over. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Because not big enough.

Right. Well, that. And then also there's the episode where they can't. They can't rule over the people that are already there. And so instead of doing what Yahweh has called them to do and trusting in his covenant faithfulness, which by chapter 19, we've got a lot of material to conclude.

Oh, yeah, God is. God is fully capable of doing what he sets out to do. And instead they go and trespass and steal from one of the other fellow tribes because it's easier. When we started a few minutes ago and we were walking through Joshua, you mentioned the name Rahab. And so we talk about annihilating and killing everyone, but then there's this woman that gets to live, and she is pretty significant in the story of Jesus.

I'd love to spend some time talking about that because that's encouraging so much. So Rahab is remarkable. She really is a remarkable woman. And this is what Chase was alluding to earlier. Earlier, we think that because of ancient culture and no telephone, no Internet, nothing like that, people didn't know who Yahweh was.

Rahab tells the story of God in Joshua to the people of Israel better than they know it. It wasn't like a bad game of telephone. She preached and did this in Incredible Story of God. That is one of the best summaries of the people being called out of Egypt. In the whole, it might be second only to Joshua in this book.

It's so incredible. And for it to come not only from an outsider to Israel, but even an outsider within her own culture. This is a prostitute who's like, it's incredible. She's an outsider times, too. Oh, my gosh.

Yes, she gets it. She does. And she believes in who God is. And she's a little astounded that the people of Israel don't necessarily believe that God is who he says he is. And she puts her neck on the line and lies for the people of Israel, for Yahweh, and trusts in God's faithfulness that God will be faithful to her through his people and to her family.

And she says, will you save us? And the spies say, yeah, we'll save you. You got to abide by these very specific restrictions, but we'll watch out for you. And Joshua makes sure that the army is instructed. Everybody is instructed, do not touch this woman or her family.

When you come to this, here's what you do. Praise the Lord for that existing here early in the Old Testament, when, again, a lot of times I think the thoughts that we have are such a distinct Old Testament God from a New Testament God. New Testament God is cool with Gentiles and people outside of this ethnic race, but Old Testament God, he hated other. No, no. Here's him rescuing and saving.

And this isn't the only time in the book of Joshua, or especially if we go outside of the book of Joshua, that God is happy to bring other people into the fold and graft them in already. So there are some listening watching that didn't grow up in Sunday schools. And so let's talk about who Rahab is in the lineage of Jesus, why her being saved is so important. She is the grandmother. Well, she's in the Davidic line.

She's in the Davidic line. So we're going to meet Ruth and who marries Boaz, which is, you know, this remarkable story in and of itself. But, yeah, she is. She is in the Davidic line, which means she's in the line of Jesus because she gets married. Married into the Judah tribe.

Yeah, married into the tribe of Judah. Oh, my gosh. So not just. She doesn't just get grafted in to the nation of Israel. She gets grafted into the tribe of Judah.

The lion of the tribe of Judah, you know. Yeah. Is the king, the king of the nation. And so she gets grafted into that family, becomes part of that line. And so, yes, she is connected.

So why. I mean, that's encouraging. But why does that encourage us the way that it does? Yeah. I think the thing that impacts me the most is that I heard this explained when I was growing up.

So the word, it says that Rahab was a prostitute. And there was at one point a movement to say, well, really all that means is innkeeper. She was someone who had a look, trying to make it pretty. Not true. She probably really was a prostitute.

Which tells you there's a degree of wickedness happening in this city that that would be allowed. And in Israel, that kind of thing would not have been allowed. God had forbade his people from prostituting themselves. But in the city of Jericho and other cities, this was a normal part of life. And so here's a woman who is a wicked woman, an ungodly woman.

But what do we see with the woman at the well with Jesus, he meets this woman who has by no rights does she have access to the Messiah, to the Savior. And yet she gets access to the Savior because she's willing to admit I'm not worthy. I'm not someone who should even be talking to. But here I am. I believe that Yahweh is really God.

I think this is right. And I'm willing to go out on a limb and do what is right to honor God. And so we have this, the history of the Bible, in the history of the Old Testament and the New Testament is we see especially these remarkable women who are no account women who have this immense impact for the kingdom of God, who by all rights should not. Mary Magdalene should not. Mary, the mother of Jesus should not.

Rahab should not. Ruth should not. The woman at the well should not. The woman caught in adultery should not. She should not be in the Bible.

Here's this story of this violating the law and is caught in the act. So all of these stories are for those of us who have ever felt unworthy of our Savior, ever felt like I don't belong. I'm not a good person. I haven't done good things. I have wicked heart.

I've done wicked actions. And Rahab just is such an encouragement to me and her telling her story to her grandkids. Oh, my God. It's like, well, Grandma, what did you do before? Well, I don't know.

How do we tell this story? My goodness, just what a beautiful picture of God's grace. I've learned to trust my intuition more than I should, certainly. And so there are plenty of people who I dismiss as I think this person seems really close to accepting Jesus. I'm going to really pray hard for them and I'm going to go out of my way to have conversations with them.

But this guy, my neighbor here. Yeah, I've had enough conversations with him. I know he's not interested. And what a phenomenal. There are a few of these stories throughout the Bible.

You articulated some of them already. Steve, of there's nobody too far gone for a God like he is fully capable of taking the people that seem the absolute furthest. This is a woman in a male dominated culture. It's a prostitute in the midst of a culture that wouldn't have thought highly of them. It's somebody who's not an Israelite who is being invaded in by the Israelites.

And yet she's the one who. The book in retrospect now is prizing as this heroine. It's extraordinary. It's very encouraging. I got to be so careful not to preach the whole Rahab message.

But here's my. You think about it this way. You're right, Chase. This is a woman who's not even in her own culture, is at the bottom of the totem pole of her culture. And what could she do if she turns in the spies?

The spies come to her home, she hides them. If she turns them in, she's a hero in her culture. She can use it to get ahead in her city and she doesn't. So there's a patriotism part of this. You should be loyal to her people.

Right? Of course. But because she believes that Yahweh is God, she turns against her own people, hides these spies from this foreign place, this enemy nation, when she is the one in control. And she has this choice and all they're doing is just like, man, I hope this woman doesn't. They're hiding under these flax things on her roof.

She's like. And they're saying, I hope she doesn't turn us in. I don't know. She doesn't have any credibility. She's a prostitute.

What kind of credibility does she have? I don't know what we're going to do. We're probably going to die. She makes the decision to honor Yahweh because she believes that he is who he says he is. Wow.

A little bit of A spoiler alert on that story. But just to come back to Hiram, another thing that I think is going to be helpful for us to understand.

At the end of the Jericho conquering, we get to chapter six, verses 21 and 22. Verse 21 tells us they, being Israel, completely destroyed everything in the city with the sword. Every man, every woman, both young and old, every ox, sheep and donkey. Total destruction wiped out. And then verse 22.

So everybody's killed. So that's what I'm picturing. Every single person's dead. That's what we were just told. Joshua said to the two men who were scouted the land, go to the prostitute's house and bring the woman out there and all who are with her, just as you swear her.

You just said everyone was dead. This is actually not the only time this is going to happen in Joshua where we're told everybody was slaughtered and then the remnant moved to this other place over there. And so another important piece for us, which we'll dig into more as we get there in the series, is that ancient Near Eastern rhetoric uses hyperbole, uses wartime language differently than our empirical minds, because we are facts and we are counting the numbers and all means all. That's exactly right. That's what this means.

And yet, no, it turns out whoever compiled Joshua, that's not what's being said here, actually. This is a rhetorical tactic intended to show us, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the Israelites completely. They demolished. This was what the Bears did to the Panthers last Sunday, Steve. This was 59 to whatever.

It was just a slaughtering. It's the opposite of what the packers did to the Vikings last week. It's rather than. But that's a good example, Chase, because this is language that we use culturally, that we understand. We destroyed the.

When you say to a high school kid, how'd you do in the soccer game last night? We destroyed them. We killed them. Yeah. We killed what?

Literally killed the. Well, no, we know what this means culturally. We understand this, and we do it in our minds. They're doing the same thing. Yeah, that's right.

But when we translate it, it comes across as the Bible's lying. Yeah. And this is war language. This is not just in the Bible, by the way. This is all of the writing of the ancient world.

When it recounts, Batt uses this language, extreme language. And sometimes there will even be a revision of history by some of the kings in various places in the ancient near east in an effort to do this, to, like, really boast of. Look I really destroyed them when in reality they didn't do that. That's not particularly what's in mind here. But, yes, that's definitely.

It's a tactic that's used all across the region. It would not have been for a number of reasons. We are going to balk at Joshua in a way that people reading it 100 years later, the grandchildren of the grandchildren of the author of this book would not have balked at it for a lot. That's big one is that particular rhetorical tactic, but also the realities of conquering other tribes and nations around them. That's just.

That's something that we are really offended by. It was normative for them. Right. Okay. This is going to be quite a long series.

And so we care about our groups. We care about the people that are sitting in church with us on Sunday. What are you hoping for our takeaway to be? What are you hoping we come away with at the end of this? One of the things I want us to do, I want Joshua to be a struggle.

Oh, I don't like that answer. Yeah, I want us to struggle with some of it a little bit, because I think that's how it's written. I think we're supposed to read a paragraph of it and go, well, I don't know if I like that. I don't know how I feel about that. I don't know what that means.

I don't know. I want to. To wrestle. To wrestle with that. And that's okay.

This is what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to engage our brains in scripture and not just walk away from it going, no, I have no questions. And I feel perfectly about everything I've read here. We're supposed to go, ugh, Ooh. How do I feel about that?

I'm not sure I like that. I want us to do that in Joshua because that's a part of the. The book and it's honest. And I want our grow groups to. When I hear this from time to time, I always smile when somebody comes up and goes, boy, did we have a discussion in our grow group this week about.

You're like, yes. Something you said? I'm like, good. I don't even care if you got it right. I just want you to have the conversation.

I'm so glad that you engaged on it. Anybody throw any fists? Did you guys hit each other? Anger.

But I like hearing that there were people who are like, yeah, I really struggled with this. I don't really like we do this in our grow Group where it's like, I don't think I like this. So we know what you want, but why do you want that? Anytime we deal with the Old Testament, it's so outside of our culture, as far from our culture as the time of Jesus is, the Old Testament is even farther because it's a different covenant. So we're not only going to a different culture, we're going to a whole new covenant that has to also explain Jesus and bring Jesus in before it even gets to our application.

Joshua is a thinking person's book. It is part narrative. So there's a huge part of it that's narrative. It's part map. 13 to 19.

Yeah, 13 to 19 is just a map. It's just a big map. And they're not drawing a picture, but they're drawing a picture with words. So we'll talk about that. You have to engage your brain in that.

And then part of it is, how do I feel? There's an emotional capacity that we have to have to engage with this too. On some of these things that we're talking about. Hedem, the story of Rahab, Joshua, Caleb is going to come up again. And just what he does and how, how he enters the story, he's the other spy that had gone into the land.

There's also all these little ethical, in line with what you're saying, ethical dilemmas everywhere. What do we do with the Gibeonites now? What do we do with the fact, oh, the nine and a half tribes marched up to meet the two and a half tribes in war because there was a misunderstanding who got this right and who got this wrong? And oh, Rahab lied. Rahab lied on behalf of Yahweh, but she lied so didn't she.

There's all sorts of little things that we're going to have to wrestle through that Joshua presents to them. The people who are reading this book that I think are really important for us and that Joshua gives unique vignettes into that. The rest of the Old Testament doesn't do as much. Yeah, I think if we were to say, well, we're seeing Jesus, we don't even understand then the cost of what it is and what we've been saved from. We make our faith maybe two dimensional as opposed to three dimensional.

It's important that we do this. There's something in this for me that Yahweh could have given Jesus any name, could have named him after Moses or David. He named him Yeshua, Joshua. And there's a beauty in that for me. And I think we should pay attention to that.

I'm not saying it's everything, but we should pay attention to it. And Joshua is a good man and a good leader, and we chose to name sons Joshua. Sons Joshua. Yeah. Because of that.

Yeah. Just mean that I have to force Elise to name our next son Joshua. Well, if you want to be like us. Okay, well, even if it's a daughter, whatever, you know, just Joshua. How would you femininize Joshua?

Yeah, work on that. Figure it out. Yeah. This has been so fun. Josie.

Yeah. Joshanna. Sorry. Okay, I'm stopping you guys. This has been super fun.

I've missed doing this. So thank you guys, and thank you for joining us. Have a great week. Bye. Bye.