lE2gEzPOqrU

Cool. Well, when I was first approached by Brother Tom to for the Bible study, he came to me and he goes, Hey, are you ready for sermon jerkies on Monday? And I go, Yeah, totally ready. I'm sure, I'm fine. He goes, Do you have your sermon prepare already?

And I was like, No, I do not. And that was, at the time, I thought I was two weeks away. And then I got home and I figured out I was only one week away. And so at that point, I started to feel really scared, a lot of fear, because I was like, I can't get that prepared in one week.

There's no way. There's no possible way that I can do this. And I felt very, you know, put on the spot in a very uncomfortable position. So I think it's kind of ironic how this verse that I've been asked to preach on, Joshua 1, talks a little bit about fear and how Joshua is supposed to be trusting the Lord, because he says it a lot as we'll get into the message.

But anyways, it's going to be in Joshua 1, 1 through 9. It's going to be the whole section. And I'm going to read all of it. It's going to be a little long, but we're going to talk about all of it. So let me go ahead and read it for you.

After the death of Moses, the servant of the Lord, the Lord said to Joshua, the son of Nun, Moses' assistant, Moses, my servant, is dead. Now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I am giving to them, to the people of Israel.

Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon, I have given to you, just as I promised to Moses. From the wilderness and this Lebanon as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, to the great sea, toward the going down of the sun shall be your territory.

No man shall be able to stand before you all the days of your life, just as I was with Moses, so I will be with you. I will not leave you or forsake you. Verse six, be strong and courageous, for you shall cause this people to inherit the land that I swore to their fathers to give them.

Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to do according to all the law that Moses my servant commanded you. Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, that you may have good success wherever you go. This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it.

For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success. Have I not commanded you, be strong and courageous, do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. So starting off in verse one, we have a really big development in Joshua's life, and that is the fact that Moses is now dead.

So this is a big deal with a lot of implications for multiple reasons. First off being that Moses is the man who's led Israel for forty years through the wilderness, through the story with the Israelites and the Red Sea, through the scouting out the land, and then the forty years after that.

So he's been Israel's leader for a long time. Time, and he's also the man who spoke to God face to face. There's not many people in history who have done that. And now Joshua is asked to kind of take his place. He's actually commanded to take his place.

And I imagine that would produce a lot of fear in Joshua. Probably, it's a really intimidating task, filling Moses' shoes. I mean, the closest thing I can think of to filling Moses' shoes in our position would maybe be being the president or maybe a king of a country.

If the president died and you were said, hey, you're the next one to lead, you're on the spot, it's your turn. It would be kind of scary, a little bit, right? So, Joshua is kind of in that position now. Moses' death has left a giant hole that needs to be filled, and Joshua is called to fill it.

So, all of a sudden, Joshua's on the spot, and he's called to fill this role. I want you to feel what he feels. He's got to be really scared here because he's one of the only people in his generation at this point in time. There's him and Caleb.

He's, you know, the only one who's kind of survived past the age of however old he was when he went to go scatter the land. But he is alone in his generation, and he's called to lead Israel. Pretty scary. I think Joshua had a little bit of reason to be scared because Israel's track record isn't the best.

Sometimes they wanted to follow Moses, sometimes they wanted to stone him and go back to Egypt. So, he's probably a little scared. But, as you see in the text, God reassured him multiple times. He said, be strong and courageous, over and over and over. Now, why does he say it?

Three times. I think maybe it's potentially to do with the fact that when you repeat something a few times in the Old Testament, it's a way of emphasizing weight or significance. God is described as holy, holy, holy in the Old Testament and the New Testament, implying that he is the holiest of holies, he's the most holy.

So it can be used for emphasis, but I think here it's different. I think that Joshua is just super scared, and God feels the need to kind of reassure him multiple times because he's probably really, really intimidated by taking Moses' spot. So that's kind of the same thing, sorry, that's kind of the theme of this text.

You, Joshua, be strong and courageous, for I am with you, I will be with you wherever you go. So as we get into it, there's four commands that God has for Joshua, and they're mixed in with a couple promises here and there, as we'll see as we go into it.

So the first one is going to be in verse 2, where he says to Joshua, Moses, my servant, is dead. Now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I am giving to them, to the people of Israel. So the first command is really simple.

He's just telling him to go over to the Jordan. Get up from where he is and go. Right now, he's on the east side of the Jordan, and he's got to go over it to get to the west side where he's going to conquer all this land. But it starts with simple obedience.

He has to get out of his, I say, comfort zone. He's probably not comfortable. Moses is dead and he's trying to take his spot. But either way, he has to go over, and that's where this starts. If he doesn't do this, he doesn't. He's not going to be able to conquer the land, he's not going to be able to obey God, and he will live in fear of man rather than God, and be disobedient.

And the rest of the book of Joshua would have been completely different. So, that's the first command, is going over the Jordan. And with that command, we get a promise in verse 3 and 4. He says in verse 3: Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon, I have given to you, just as I promised to Moses, from the wilderness and this Lebanon, as far as the Great River, the river of the Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, to the Great Sea, toward the going down of the sun, shall be your territory.

So he's promised a lot of land. I looked it up, a little portion of it to the west of Jordan. There's a small chunk, it's about 2,000 square miles. And he conquered that, a little bit south of that, and a lot north of that. So he conquered a lot of land.

And it's interesting that he's been promised this already. It's a promise that he's been given by God in Deuteronomy 1:38. If you go read that, this is God speaking to Moses before he has died. He says, Joshua, the son of Nun, who stands before you, he shall enter, talking about the promised land.

Encourage him, for he shall cause Israel to inherit it. So it's been promised to him before, even before he's taken Moses' spot, that he's going to be able to get this land. And also, when we go down to verse 6, it also says that you shall cause this people to inherit the land that I swore to their fathers to give them.

So he's sworn to their fathers Abraham and Isaac, and then to Joshua before Moses is dead, and now, again, it's promising him he. He's going to get this land. But still, he has to get up and go over to get it. So that's the first promise, just the promise of land.

The second promise we have is going to be in verse 5, where he says, No man shall be able to stand before you all the days of your life. This one's kind of a big deal because he's literally saying to Joshua, no man will be able to stop him or come against him in military conquest for his whole life.

And right now, at this time, he's about 90 years old, and he's going to die at around age 111. So he's got around 20 years of just conquest. God's saying, no one's going to be able to stop you. I'm with you. You're going to be able to conquer everything.

Big promise, a big deal. And the second promise is also in verse 5. He says, the last half, just as I was with Moses, so I will be with you. I will not leave you or forsake you. And this is the promise of faithfulness from God to Joshua, saying, I'm not going to leave you no matter what you do, no matter where you go.

Everywhere you're going, I'm going with you. This is probably a major, major comfort to Joshua, because Joshua knows how powerful God is and his faithfulness through Israel. He's probably been there through the Red Sea incident, through the wilderness wanderings with the manna, and through skylight of the land.

So he's been there for all of it. He knows God's power, and knowing that God's going to be with him and having that truth just embedded in him, it's going to give him a lot of comfort, a lot of peace to be able to go out and do this mission.

But again, all these promises, the land, the power, and the faith. Faithfulness, they're not given to Joshua unless he goes over the Jordan with that first step of simple obedience with the first command. So that's all summed up in the first command. The second command is in verse 7, where he's got to follow and keep the law.

It says, only be strong and very courageous, being careful to do according to all the law that Moses my servant commanded you. Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, that you may have good success wherever you go. So he's saying here, he needs to keep the law and not turn from it to the right hand or to the left.

And this turning from the right hand to the left gives me the kind of idea of swerving on a road. If you think about the analogy of driving on a highway and you're in your lane, driving where you need to go, not going to the right or left, following the law, making road signs, most of the time you're probably going to get to where you're going successfully, to where you want to go.

That's what the road's there for. That's kind of the purpose of it. But if you take the opposite idea of kind of swerving off or, you know, not following the law, that can have consequences that range from anywhere from inconvenient to deadly. On the inconvenient side, you have swerving off a little bit on the highway, getting into those bumps, getting a little uncomfortable, encourages you to get back into your lane, or potentially even taking a wrong turn, getting lost in the woods, losing time, losing gas.

Not painful, but just really inconvenient. Rather would not go there. And then on the other side, the deadly side, can have major consequences. Anywhere from running someone off the road. Or hitting a bystander on the street. It's really bad, really painful. I have a little story because of this.

Back when I was working at Chick-fil-A a few years ago, I got off late, super late, one day, and I was driving home, and it was about 11:30, and I had six blocks to my house. I was super close. I wanted to get to bed so bad I was really tired.

So I'm driving, and I got this intersection in front of me, and it's green for me, and there's another person on the other side of the road who has a yield light. He needs to yield to oncoming traffic, which is me. And I'm going, I'm going straight in my lane, not swerving to the right or left.

And then he decided that he was going to try to beat me, beat the light, and go faster than I could catch up. And what ended up happening was a little bit of a collision, which resulted in two destroyed vehicles, but oddly enough, four people who were uninjured completely.

So even with that kind of disregard of the law, a lot of damage, God's so protected, that's super cool. But you can tell, you can see how detrimental not following the law is. There was a lot of time spent, a lot of money spent repairing both those vehicles, a record on, you know, his driving record.

And again, just a lot of heartache, a lot of pain, things that didn't need to happen if both people were following the law. And this applies spiritually, too, when we stray from God. Or if we actively run away from God, there's major spiritual consequences. Straying from God, you get lost.

You're not going to figure out where you are eventually. And running away from God, that's just basically self-destructive. So it has major consequences for not, this idea of not staying on the path, swerving to the right or to the left of the law. So we got the first commands.

First and second commands is go over the Jordan, and the second command was to follow and keep the law. This third command we have is going to be in verse eight. It says, This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it.

For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success. So in verse eight, the command here is, he has a book of the law that he needs to meditate on. And the cool thing about this command is that he gives them the reason that he's giving this command.

So he tells them the command and why he's doing it. The purpose of him doing it is so that he can better understand the law, so that he can know how to do it, why to do it, when to do it, and all aspects of following the law.

This is kind of the heart of this whole chunk, 1 through 9. This is the part that leads to, if he meditates on this, it'll lead to obedience, which will lead to all these promises, which will lead to sorry, which will lead to the courage, which will let him go over the Jordan and then conquer it and getting all these promises, all this land, you know, the power to conquer Canaan.

But again, this is the heart. Meditating on the law leads to all these benefits. If he doesn't do this, again, like I said earlier, he's going to end up being disobedient and not following through with what God has commanded him to do, and he will be paralyzed by fear and not going out and conquering like God is wanting him to do.

But the meditation will lead to the obedience, which will lead to the promises. And that's, again, the main point of this whole section here. And if you think about it, I want to just think about meditating for a little bit. Meditating is rolling something around in your head, trying to understand it again and again and again, just chewing on it, trying to figure out the best way to do it.

And if you more meditate on it, sorry, the more you meditate on something, the more you will remember it and the more you know how to do it. I think it's kind of interesting how he says also, this book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, implying he's going to be speaking it or teaching it.

One of the best ways to learn something is to teach it. And I was very, very blessed to have a father who kept instilling that truth in me over and over and over. But he's right. The more you teach something, the more you have to learn it. History professors at Blenn know very well what they're teaching because they teach it on a daily basis.

It's really hard for them to miss or forget facts about what they're teaching. And so the more you teach something, the more you have to learn it. I had to learn Joshua 1, 1 through 9 very well to teach it on Monday and again to teach it to you.

All tonight. So teaching it. It's another aspect of learning it and trying to remember it. And again, this command comes with another promise. He already said it in verse 8: do this, yeah, so that you may be able to be careful to do according to all that is written in it, for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have a good success.

Have I not commanded you? Or sorry, that's verse 9, my bad. But again, this is the promise of prosperity here. He says you will make your way prosperous, and you'll have a good success. Now, I want to clarify something real quick, because I don't want people to get the wrong idea of this prosperity being an earthly, you know, kind of context prosperity.

You will be prosperous in God's eyes and God's economy by following His commands and obeying what He's commanded you, not necessarily in an earthly way. You might be able to not make a dime doing what God wants you to do. That's, you know, it's potential that could happen.

But you will be successful and you will succeed in what God wants you to do. In His ways, in His eyes, not necessarily in man. So I just want to make it clear, it's not a prosperity gospel. You're not going to get rich, you know, it's not our guarantee.

Joshua did, but that's just a byproduct. So, anyways, but this last promise here, the promise of prosperity, is similar to verse 5, where he was saying, no man's going to be able to stop you. No man can come against you. It's a negative. No one can touch you.

No one can halt your progress. This one's a positive. Saying, you can do this, I'm going to push you along, give you more success, give you more prosperity. But again, the conditional is that he has to do according to the law, he has to keep it, he has to follow it, and meditating on it is going to be the best way that he will do that.

So, this final command we have is going to be in verse 9. It says, Have I not commanded you? Implying, again, that it's a command: Be strong and courageous, do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.

So, the word strong here is the Hebrew word Hazak, which is not, he's not telling him to go invest in some weights or some strength training program to get stronger to beat his enemies. That's going to be important to a conquest, but that's not what he's commanding here.

The word Hazak has more to do with the idea of having a confidence or security more than it does with physical strength. So, he's literally commanding Joshua here to have faith in him, have confidence in God's power and God's strength. That's what he's commanding Joshua to do. And the way he does this is, again, by meditating on the law.

Because the more he meditates, the more he's going to fully understand the power of God and the faithfulness of God. And the more he knows that, it'll give him peace and it'll encourage him to go out and fight because he knows God's with him already. That's what's going to be the end product of this meditation that he's been commanded to do.

But again, it's not a physical strength, it's confidence in him. Don't fear is what God's telling him. Why? Because God's already with him. He's going to take care of him. Everything that he's going to do, God's going to bless that effort. But it still flows down meditation. I want to kind of jump ahead through Joshua a little bit to show you kind of some inner results of what happened.

If you look at the promises that he's gotten here, the promise of power, land, prosperity, faithfulness, and the commands of going over the Jordan, following the law, meditating on the law, and being strong and courageous, and you look at the end of the book, God really kept his promises.

If we go over to Joshua 12, in verse 7 through 24, there's a long chunk of all these kings that Joshua has defeated. I'm probably not going to read all of them because there's a lot of them. But it says in verse 7, and these are the kings of the land whom Joshua and the people of Israel defeated on the west side of the Jordan, from Balgad in the valley of Lebanon to Mount Halak, that rises towards Sir.

And Joshua gave their land to the tribes of Israel as a possession according to their allotments. So if you jump down, there's kings such as the king of Jerusalem, the king of Hebron, the king of Eglon, Geder, Horma, Libna, Aphek. And at the bottom, you go all the way down these lists of kings, you get to the bottom one, last one's Terzah, and in all, thirty-one kings.

So in this short segment right here, he's listing off all the kings that Joshua has defeated. Why? Because he meditated on the law. Which let him have courage to go out and fight these enemies that God has already given to his hand. And again, if we go a little further, you don't have to turn it if you want to, but if we go a little further, in Joshua 21, the very end of that chapter, 21, verse 43, you get this.

Thus the Lord gave to Israel all the land that he swore to give to their fathers. And they took possession of it, and they settled there. And the Lord gave them rest on every side, just as he had sworn to their fathers. Not one of their enemies had withstood them, for the Lord had given all their enemies into their hands.

Not one word of all the good promises that the Lord had made to the house of Israel had failed. All came to pass. So all of them came to pass. Every single promise that was promised to Joshua, all of them had come to pass, which is really impressive if you think about it.

Because he had a lot of adversaries and a lot of things where stuff could go wrong, but nothing did. So, I want to jump into the last part, which is the application. How does this apply to us? How do we take this command to Joshua and these blessings to him?

How do we apply these to our lives? Well, it's the same way. We need to meditate on law and follow what we get from it. Because meditating on law, like I already said, will lead to a better understanding of it and a better understanding of when to do it and how to do it.

And then, again, it will lead to the success in God's eyes doing what He wants us to do, when He wants to do it, how He wants us to do it. Necessarily in the world's way, but definitely in the way God wants us to do it. So I want to make another point.

God's not going to most likely speak to us audibly like he did to Joshua here. I'm assuming that he's spoken to him audibly because he had a book that was the first five books of the Bible, but that's not where Joshua got this command from God. So he's not going to speak to us most likely that way.

But we still have the Word of God with us. It's called the Bible. That's why it's called His Word. And our book of the law, Word of God, is a little bit bigger than Joshua's. Joshua's was five books. Ours is 66 now. It's a lot bigger. But still, the same applies.

Meditating on this book will lead to obedience, which will lead to the promises that God promised Joshua. Maybe not necessarily like divine power to conquer all the enemies that we have, but definitely will provide success in God's economy. I want to bring your attention to verse 8 again, where it says, This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night.

Now, this meditating on it day and night reminds me of a verse in Psalm 1. And if I read it, you know, I'll turn there. It says, Blessed is the man, this is Psalm 1:1. Blessed is the man who walks not in the councils of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers.

But, this is a cool part, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and it's Leaf does not wither, in all that he does, he prospers.

That sounds a lot like what God just told Joshua. When he meditates on this book, he's going to be prosperous, right? It's the exact same thing, almost. And again, in verse 9, this sounds a lot like Jesus' last words to the disciples. In verse 9, it says, Be strong and courageous, do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.

And then, if we turn to Jesus' last words to the disciples in Matthew 28, verse 20, we see, Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you, and behold, I am with you always to the end of the age.

Again, God's promising Joshua that he's going to be with him forever, and then Jesus is commanding the disciples that he's going to be with them as long as, you know, the end of the age. That's a long time, most likely. So, again, there's different scriptures that point back to the scripture being true, and they have the same themes.

It's super cool. I like it a lot. I don't know why. But the end result, the final application, meditate on the law, follow it, speak it, teach it. That will lead to the obedience, which will lead to not having fear, like Joshua. He went over the Jordan, he conquered his fear.

Why? Because he meditated on the law, which led to obedience, which led to courage. So we need to do that too. And this will apply to us if we're believers, because if we're meditating on the law, we will be successful in God's eyes. But how does practically. How do we practically take courage and not be afraid like Joshua did?

The same way, by meditating on his law, which again I've said it like 16 times or more. Meditating on the law will lead to courage, and we can do what God wants us to do. But a question that I want to kind of address is how does this apply to unbelievers?

Or does it apply to unbelievers? And that's it doesn't. It doesn't apply to unbelievers in the sense that how can you get the benefits of God if you're not meditating on his law, if you're not one of his children, if you're not following the law, if you're not keeping the law?

It doesn't apply to you in that way. So what should their response be? What should the unbeliever's response be? The same. Meditating on the law so that you can better learn it. And the more you learn it, the more you'll understand the Christ who's in it and why he came.

And the more you understand the Christ who's in the Word and why he came, hopefully, the more the end result will be that you will love him more and trust him more and eventually, Lord willing, make him the Lord of your life and he will be your Savior.

But the result should be, or sorry, the application is the same. Meditate on the law if you're a believer, if you're an unbeliever. But don't assume, don't get out of this, don't take away from this that if you're an unbeliever, you can just do whatever you want because God's with you.

He's not if you're not meditating on the law and obeying what he has for you. So quick recap. Four commands, go over the Jordan. You know, follow the law, meditate on the law, be strong and courageous, which will lead to obedience, which will lead to the promises and the courage that Joshua needs for his conquest.

So, finished that a little quicker than I thought. But let's pray, and we'll get to the rest of the night. Dear God, thank you so much for this opportunity that you've given to me to preach your word. I pray that you would just bless us this night, help us to get home safely and to just enjoy the rest of our week, help us keep our eyes focused on you, help us to just take this knowledge that you have for us in the book of Joshua to be able to apply it to our lives, help us to remember and to have the discipline to meditate on your scripture, and help us to just live our lives with a love for you, a greater love for you every day that we live.

And God, I just pray that everything we do and say would be honoring to you. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen.