Grace Church
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Burlington, WI 53105

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Come backers Joshua 8 Promised Land Living in Problematic World Sermon #12 Are you a loser? Nobody wants to be a loser. One of the biggest putdowns is to be called a “loser,” to have others give you the big “L” symbol. To be called a loser for a kid is almost a fate worse than death. Yet everybody loses from time to time. Just because you lose though, you don’t have to be a loser. Just because you have been defeated, you don’t have to live as a defeatist. Unfortunately, many Christians have not only lost but they are living as losers.   A company called Successories has developed various tools and programs to promote team and personal excellence. You’ve probably seen some of their posters with their motivational slogans. If we’re going to live as losers, perhaps we need some De-motivational slogans (Slides). For example; Defeat-For every winner, there are dozens of losers. Odds are you’re one of them. Stupidity-Quitters never win, Winners never quit, but those who never win and never quit are idiots. Futility-You’ll always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, and, statistically, 99% of the shots you do. Ineptitude-If you can’t learn to do something well, learn to enjoy doing it poorly. Losing-If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style. Pessimism-Every dark cloud has a silver lining, and lightning kills hundreds of people each year who are trying to find it. Agony-Not all pain is gain. Despair-It’s always darkest just before it goes pitch black. Idiocy-Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.    Obviously, all of these are said tongue in cheek. Yet all of us lose from time to time. All of us have experienced the devastating results of disobedience to God: personal setbacks, broken relationships, ruined reputations. What should we do when our own sin has defeated us? How should we respond when we have been humbled by our own mistakes, when our own doing has undone us? Does God bench us for the season? Does he put us on the injured reserve list indefinitely? Should we move to another state and make a fresh start? Is life as we knew it over?   In our last study in the book of Joshua, Joshua 7, we saw the terrible defeat suffered by Israel as a result of Achan's sin. The sin of this one man affected the entire nation, bringing the conquest of the land to a dead halt. Following this setback, Israel accepted corporate responsibility and made corporate consecration. After a gut‑wrenching process, Achan made a full confession of his sin, and he and all his family and their possessions were judged quickly and decisively. A memorial was even built to remind the nation of the consequences of failing to follow God. The way the leaders of Israel dealt with the sin in the camp was very different from how contemporary politicians deal with their failures. For Israel, there were no spin doctors, no cover‑ups, no denials, no drawn‑out court battles, no talk shows. The nation responded with honesty, truth and unity. And the most powerful man in the world, Joshua, humbled himself before God.   But now that the sin and the defeat has been dealt with, where do they go from here? The story of Ai in Joshua 7 is a message of warning. It reminds us that sin cannot be tolerated in the Christian life. It hinders the blessing of God from the standpoint of productive Christian living. Sin grieves and quenches the Spirit. But the story of Ai in Joshua 8 is a proclamation of hope. It reminds us that blessing and productivity can come when sin is confessed and dealt with. Leaving Joshua 7 and entering Joshua 8 is like leaving a pitch black cave and going outside into the bright sunlight.   The following quotation runs contrary to what most people today think about life, including those in the Church of Jesus Christ. It was said in a sermon preached on August 12, 1849 by the famous British preacher, F. W. Robertson. “Life, like war, is a series of mistakes, and he is not the best Christian nor the best general who makes the fewest false steps. Poor mediocrity may secure that; but he is the best who wins the most splendid victories by the retrieval of mistakes. Forget mistakes; organize victories out of mistakes.”  American auto tycoon, Henry Ford, would have agreed with Robertson, because Ford defined a mistake as “an opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.”   God knows that we are going to be defeated periodically, but He does not want us to be losers, to settle for de-motivational slogans. Joshua was a Come backer and God wants all of us to be Come backers. This victory in Joshua 8 is described in more detail than any other battle in the book. Obviously, the Holy Spirit is emphasizing something for us. God can take the results of human weakness and failure and, if we let Him, make them work together for good and for victory. God loves to make us into Come backers. All of us have scars from old wounds. Joshua 8 is a Come backer perspective of the horrible wounds of Joshua 7. Wounds were transformed to wonder. How can we transform our spiritual wounds to miraculous wonder? How can we turn our defeats into spiritual gains?   1. To make a spiritual comeback, we must remember that God corrects but never forsakes His children, vss. 1-2. During the early days of World War I, Germany’s Kaiser, Kaiser Wilhelm the II and his generals adopted the motto, “GOTT MIT UNS” or “God with us.” The northern preachers who visited President Lincoln, when the American Civil War hung in the balance, also affirmed that God was on their side. But Abraham Lincoln wisely replied, “No, friends, rather pray that we may be found on God’s side.”   Though the sin in the camp had been dealt with, after the stunning defeat at Ai, don’t you think that Joshua wondered if Israel was on God’s side? But though God corrected His people, He never forsook them. Now that the nation has been restored, God does three wonderful things for Joshua.   A. God encourages Joshua, “Then the LORD said to Joshua, ‘Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged’.” God knew that Joshua was afraid and discouraged. This is normal. Great failure is usually accompanied by discouragement about the past and fear of the future. Often we multiply the damage of the defeat by allowing past failure to demoralize us for the future.   These were familiar words. Moses had spoken them to Joshua when he had turned the reigns of leadership over to him and God Himself had spoken them to Joshua just after the death of Moses. At this crucial juncture of his life, they were a wonderful reminder and reassurance that God had not forsaken him.   The cure for fear and discouragement is taking God at His Word. Let me challenge you to take a Bible concordance and study the “do not be afraid” passages. There are nearly 70 of them. You’ll find that God speaks these words to different individuals in various circumstances and His Word always met their need, just like it will our’s. Fear is not from God and He does not want us to live in a state of anxiety.   B. God instructs Joshua, “Take the whole army with you, and go up and attack Ai...Set an ambush behind the city.” God always has a plan for His people to follow. You have His plan in your hands this morning. The only way that we will be Come backers, the only way we will be victorious Christians, is that we must follow God’s instructions. Joshua lost the first battle of Ai because he followed human advice and sent up a small force. This time God tells him to take the whole army, set an ambush and use Ai’s overconfidence against them.   What army would win if they didn’t obey headquarters? What team would win if they didn’t follow the coach’s instructions? Why do so many believers lose? They don’t follow the Father’s instructions? Many don’t even know the Father’s instructions. Friend, you will be a loser if you are not in God’s Word. And you must not just be in It, It must also be in you!   C. God promises Joshua, “For I have delivered into your hands the king of Ai, his people, his city and his land. You shall do to Ai and its king as you did to Jericho and its king, except that you may carry off their plunder and livestock for yourselves.” The NASV renders this, “I have given into your hand...” The victory was a gift from God. Joshua understood exactly how it was going to come about because it was going to duplicate the victory over Jericho and its king.   D. L. Moody used to say, “God never made a promise that was too good to be true.” Every promise though must be claimed by faith. It is not enough to have the promises of God, we must claim them. Many live impoverished spiritual lives, not for lack of God’s promises but lack of faith and failing to take God at His Word.   God’s promises are more “solid than the Rock of Gibraltar.” Gibraltar is that small peninsula off the southern coast of Spain near the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. Covering most of this peninsula is an enormous mass of limestone nearly 1400 feet high that we know as the Rock of Gibraltar. This huge, rocky mass has become the symbol of stability and certainty. But God’s Word is more solid. One day the Rock of Gibraltar will crumble but God’s Word never will. Jesus promised, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away” (Mt. 24:35). In a day of instability and change, when life goes up and down like the stock market, God’s promises are certain. We can be confident in the eternal rock of God’s Word and promises.   This promise also underlines the generosity of God. Notice that phrase, “you may carry off their plunder and livestock for yourselves.” How needless Achan’s covetousness was! God had to be first. Worship had to have precedence but God never seeks to impoverish His people. Everything belonged to God but now He gives a portion back to them...because they waited on His timing. Achan lost and the nation lost because he lost sight of God’s generosity and succumbed to the cancer of covetousness. Achan fell for “serpent theology.” Satan always focuses on the restriction that God has imposed rather than on the riches of God’s generosity. Have you fallen for “serpent theology?” Do you focus on God’s restrictions or His generosity? Adam and Eve could eat of every tree...except one. Satan got them to focus on the one, rather than all of the others. How about you? What do you focus on?   It’s apparent that American Christianity has succumbed too often to “serpent theology.” That’s why our churches and ministries limp along.   Can I get personal? If every believer in our church would just give 10%, our giving would double, if not triple. Grace Church limps because of “serpent theology.” We think that our wants are more important than worshiping God. We’re not talking about sacrifice, we’re just talking about faithful stewardship and giving. 2. To make a spiritual comeback, we may need to return to the scene of an earlier defeat, vss. 3-29. Many of you know that my mother was killed in a car accident. At the time my oldest sister, Ina, was fifteen and about eight months later, she got her driver’s license. To help with the family transportation needs, my father bought her a car, a Toyota. Ina was driving back from downtown Atlanta with my other sister in the car. She changed lanes on the Interstate, and like many inexperienced drivers, she did not see another car in her blind spot. She collided with another car and the car flipped several times. Miraculously, neither of my sisters were seriously hurt. My brother, Mark, went to pick them up from the hospital. As they got in the car, he did a strange thing. He made my sister who had just been involved in a terrible collision drive home.   The wisdom of the world quite rightly says that if you fall off a horse the best thing to do is to get straight back on. In His grace God said to Joshua, “You made a mess of Ai; now go back there and do it my way.” We must learn from our defeats and the prime lesson we must learn is that sin never pays. The failure is always our fault but once the sin is dealt with, we can resume the struggle with confidence. Oftentimes God asks us to get back on the same place we got off. It would have been all too easy, after such a devastating defeat to have gone the long way around just to bypass Ai. God will not allow that. “Face the failure,” He says, “but this time do it right.” God loves to turn defeats into victories. But turning this defeat into a victory wasn’t going to just happen, it had some requirements.   A. It required a plan. The work of God requires a plan. It is imperative that spiritual leaders seek the mind of God in their planning. Like Joshua, we must get the facts and carefully weigh them out as we seek to do the will of God. God’s work or, as in this case, His warfare, is not to be haphazard. Joshua had a carefully detailed plan for attacking Ai. Our English word strategy comes from two Greek words that together mean “to lead an army.” To do God’s work and accomplish His will, we must plan. Some wag said, “Plan ahead, it wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark.”   B. It required a new strategy. Notice what Joshua does not say, “OK, Lord, I’ll get the priests and the trumpets and the Ark and we’ll march around the city for seven days.” Joshua was not a traditionalist. He didn’t say, “Lord, that’s not the way we used to do it.”   An old Scottish preacher used to tell the story of the imagined meeting of the two men Christ had cured of blindness. They spoke enthusiastically of what the Lord had done for them and shared their experiences. One said, “How did you feel when Jesus put that mud on your eyes?” His new friend was puzzled.  “He never put mud on my eyes,” he replied. “Yes, He must have done that if you were cured of your blindness. Don’t you remember how He spat on the ground and made some mud and put it on your eyes?” said the man whose story is told in John 9. “I tell you,” said the man that we read about in Mark 8, “He never put mud on my eyes.” “If that is the case,” he was told, “you were never really healed. You must still be blind.” And then the Scottish preacher would say, “Immediately there were born two new denominations, the Mudites and the Anti-Mudites!”   God as Creator is continually changing and varying His plan. He changed His plan of warfare in Joshua 8, and He is still changing things today. Joshua would have missed out on the victory if he had insisted on the old plan. Too often we miss out on God’s blessing in the present because we are stuck in the past. The late Francis Schaeffer said, “We Christians should not be surprised when the Holy Spirit leads us in different ways at different times. He will not contradict His own principles or character as set forth in the Scripture, but He will not act like a machine, always responding to similar situations in exactly the same ways. When a Christian falls into the idea that because Jericho was taken one way Ai must be taken the same way, he has stopped thinking of God as personal.” The strategy for conquering Ai was based on Israel’s previous defeat. God was creating a magnificent victory out of Joshua’s mistakes.   C. It required total commitment. While Jericho was conquered by a miracle and Ai by military tactics, there is a commonality in both attacks – it required the involvement of all of the people, not just a select few. The Children of Israel as God’s people were called upon to act together. While each one did not have the same function in the battle, all were needed. All were essential and supplemented each other.   God’s plan has not changed in the New Testament. The local church is called a Body. That’s because each part must be involved and is essential. They may not have the same function or ministry but each is to have his/her part. God has gifted each believer and has brought each of us to this local church. Each of us needs to have a place of service to use our gifts in this ministry.   A few years ago I joined Rotary. I’d never been part of a service club before and it’s given me a lot of opportunities for outreach. The motto of Rotary though is “service above self.” And they are serious. If you don’t participate in a function, they put the screws in. If a secular organization that is primarily concerned with temporal humanitarian efforts is concerned about “all of the people being involved,” shouldn’t we in this church jump to the task? What we do here makes an eternal difference. Every believer is to have a ministry. A believer without a ministry is a mystery. Child of God you have been gifted by your Heavenly Father, how are you using that gift? What’s your ministry in this local church? All of the people were necessary for victory over Ai; all of the people in this church are necessary if we are going to reach our community for Christ!   3. To make a spiritual comeback, we must always remember that God is the ultimate source of all of our blessings, vss. 30-35. The significance of this cannot be overestimated. After this great victory, it was now Israel’s responsibility to recognize the source of the victory and again renew her covenant with Yahweh.   This priority of worship should catch our attention. It doesn’t fit with the script, at least from our perspective. Just after the king of Ai has been given the last rites, we are moved from the war movie to the worship service. We are wrenched from conquest to covenant. The situation is like a television program being interrupted by a special news bulletin. What we have here is literary violence because the Holy Spirit does not want us to miss the point – heeding God’s Word is more important than fighting God’s war. Israel’s success does not come from knocking off Canaanites but by submitting to God’s Word. It’s as if the writer is saying, “Stop the war and listen to the Word of God!”   Following this victory at Ai, Joshua does something that seems militarily foolish. Instead of securing the central sector of the land with further victories, he stops the war and leads Israel on a spiritual pilgrimage. This had been commanded by Moses before they entered the land (Deut. 27).   Without further delay Joshua led the men, women, children, and cattle from Gilgal northward up the Jordan Valley to the place specified, the mountains of Ebal and Gerizim which were at Shechem. It was a march of about 30 miles. This was the same place Abraham had worshiped many years before. These mountains are located in the geographic center of the land and from either peak a great deal of the Promised Land can be seen. This was a place that represented all of the land. The solemn and significant religious ceremonies at this location involved five separate activities: 1) Joshua built an altar; 2) The people offered burnt offerings; 3) The people offered peace offerings; 4) Joshua wrote the words of the Law on stones. Archaeologists have discovered similarly inscribed pillars of stone from six to eight feet high in other Middle East locations. While most kings wrote of their exploits and victories, Joshua writes down the Law of God, signifying that the key to Israel’s victory was not their military genius, but their obedience to God; and 5) Joshua read the words of the Law in public before all of the people. And all of the people affirmed that they were committed to obeying all of the Law by their chorus of Amens as each part of the Law was read. As the curses of the Law were read one by one, the tribes on Mt. Ebal responded, “Amen!” As the blessings were read, the tribes on Mt. Gerizim responded, “Amen!” With complete sincerity Israel affirmed that the Law of the Lord was indeed to be the law of the land.   What’s going on here? God was giving the people a huge object lesson; what happened to them in the land was going to depend on whether they were living on Mt. Gerizim or Mt. Ebal. The people were to hear from Mt. Gerizim the blessings which would come to them if they kept God’s Law and from Mt. Ebal the curses which would fall upon them, if they did not obey. And the history of the Jewish people from that time has been determined by their attitude toward the Law. When they were obedient, they experienced the blessings of God but when they were disobedient, they experienced judgement.   This was the first altar built in the Promised Land and was the first public reading of the Law. After the sin of Achan, they needed a public renewal. It was also a vivid reminder that the future Ai’s would not be conquered by their might or craftiness but by God and their dependence on Him. It was a scene of total commitment and an acknowledgment of total dependence.   Today, we too, need to travel to Mount Ebal, we just don’t know it. Apart from God we can do nothing. We need to acknowledge our total dependence and surrender in complete commitment. Without Him we can do nothing! Conc: What can we learn? What are the take home truths from Joshua 8?   1. A life of triumph can be ours once more when we turn from sin and walk in obedience. Just because we were defeated at Ai yesterday does not mean we cannot take another city tomorrow. As we have already learned, God brings us into the land, into our life in Christ as a gift. But there are enemies inhabiting the land, and God commands us to put to death these enemies of sin and evil, to sever our dependence on the world and place our trust in Him. He wants to use our mortal bodies as instruments of righteousness. And He promises to be with us in this battle; that some day we will be completely free from these things; that we will completely shed the shame and the guilt of the past and the need for anybody or anything other than God. However, God knows that we will fail. But even then He reaches out to us, promises to be with us, and encourages us to get back in the fight. Our failure does not change His opinion of us, His love or His plan for us. He still wants us to be glorified with His Son. Victory will come if we turn from our sin and start obeying Him. This is the conclusion to the Achan story. If we don't move from chapter 7 to chapter 8, we will miss the whole point. God is a God of redemption, a God of infinite chances who is committed to making us His holy possession.   2. God can take the mistakes His children make and can turn them into positive results. That’s exactly what God did with Israel’s mistake in trying to attack Ai when they were unprepared both spiritually and militarily. He used the very strategy that had originally brought defeat to Israel in order to eventually deceive and trap the men of Ai.   Only God can take our mistakes and the results of those mistakes and make them “work together for good” (Rom. 8:28). This does not mean that we will not experience the negative effects of our failures, just as Israel did. Thirty‑six choice men lost their lives because they walked out of the will of God. Furthermore, fear and anxiety gripped their hearts. Morale was at a low ebb. They doubted God’s love and forgot His promises.   But God changed all that for Israel. And He can do it for us, too! If we let Him, He can turn our blunders into blessings. God wants us to be Come backers but we first must come back to Him. Friend, do you need to come back to God today?