Well do take a Bible in hand please and turn with me, if you’re using one of our church Bibles, to page 187 as we continue to examine the message of the book of Joshua. In a moment we are going to read chapter 11, although we’ll be thinking about both 11 and 12. Before we do that, let me remind you a little of the story so far.
Joshua has led the Israelites over the Jordan River into Canaan. He has defeated Jericho and Ai, they have made peace with the Gibeonites, and last week we noticed how they defeated an alliance of five Canaanite tribes and they then conquered most of southern Canaan. This week, the narrative turns to focus on the war in the north of the land. So we dealt with the southern campaign. Now it’s the northern campaign. And given the detailed account of the story so far, it’s taken ten chapters to this point to talk about the war in the south, it’s not really that surprising that these two chapters only offer us a sweeping summary of the, frankly, very similar military actions in which Israel was engaged in the northern campaign. It is more of the same, and so we have here in these two chapters a summary.
That doesn’t mean, however, that they do not have an important message to teach us. In fact, I want you to consider with me five exhortations, five exhortations that rise from these two chapters. Let me list them for you now and then we’ll pray and read the passage and unpack them together. Exhortation number one – see the scale of God’s sufficiency. We need to see the scale of God’s sufficiency. Exhortation number two – trust the promise of God’s power. See the scale of God’s sufficiency. Now, trust the promise of God’s power. Exhortation number three – obey the commands of God’s law. See the scale of God’s sufficiency. Trust the promise of God’s power. Obey the commands of God’s law. Number four – understand the gravity of God’s wrath. See the scale of God’s sufficiency. Trust the promise of God’s power. Obey the commands of God’s law. Understand the gravity of God’s wrath. And then exhortation number five – remember the fullness of God’s blessing. See the scale of God’s sufficiency. Trust the promise of God’s power. Obey the commands of God’s law. Understand the gravity of God’s wrath. And remember the fullness of God’s blessing.
Before we consider each of those, let’s pause and pray and then we’ll read Joshua chapter 11 together. Let us pray.
O the depths of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God. We bless You that You are the only wise God. So grant to us now we pray, wisdom. James urges us if we lack wisdom to pray and to ask it of You and You will give it to us. So we pray for the wisdom of the Word by the power of Your Spirit to instruct our hearts and our minds and to shape our lives to the glory and praise of the name of Jesus, in whose name we now ask it. Amen.
Joshua chapter 11. This is the Word of Almighty God:
“When Jabin, king of Hazor, heard of this, he sent to Jobab king of Madon, and to the king of Shimron, and to the king of Achshaph, and to the kings who were in the northern hill country, and in the Arabah south of Chinneroth, and in the lowland, and in Naphoth-dor on the west, to the Canaanites in the east and the west, the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, and the Jebusites in the hill country, and the Hivites under Hermon in the land of Mizpah. And they came out with all their troops, a great horde, in number like the sand that is on the seashore, with very many horses and chariots. And all these kings joined their forces and came and encamped together at the waters of Merom to fight against Israel.
And the Lord said to Joshua, ‘Do not be afraid of them, for tomorrow at this time I will give over all of them, slain, to Israel. You shall hamstring their horses and burn their chariots with fire.’ So Joshua and all his warriors came suddenly against them by the waters of Merom and fell upon them. And the Lord gave them into the hand of Israel, who struck them and chased them as far as Great Sidon and Misrephoth-maim, and eastward as far as the Valley of Mizpeh. And they struck them until he left none remaining. And Joshua did to them just as the Lord said to him: he hamstrung their horses and burned their chariots with fire.
And Joshua turned back at that time and captured Hazor and struck its king with the sword, for Hazor formerly was the head of all those kingdoms. And they struck with the sword all who were in it, devoting them to destruction; there was none left that breathed. And he burned Hazor with fire. And all the cities of those kings, and all their kings, Joshua captured, and struck them with the edge of the sword, devoting them to destruction, just as Moses the servant of the Lord had commanded. But none of the cities that stood on mounds did Israel burn, except Hazor alone; that Joshua burned. And all the spoil of these cities and the livestock, the people of Israel took for their plunder. But every person they struck with the edge of the sword until they had destroyed them, and they did not leave any who breathed. Just as the Lord had commanded Moses his servant, so Moses commanded Joshua, and so Joshua did. He left nothing undone of all that the Lord had commanded Moses.
So Joshua took all that land, the hill country and all the Negeb and all the land of Goshen and the lowland and the Arabah and the hill country of Israel and its lowland from Mount Halak, which rises toward Seir, as far as Baal-gad in the Valley of Lebanon below Mount Hermon. And he captured all their kings and struck them and put them to death. Joshua made war a long time with all those kings. There was not a city that made peace with the people of Israel except the Hivites, the inhabitants of Gibeon. They took them all in battle. For it was the Lord’s doing to harden their hearts that they should come against Israel in battle, in order that they should be devoted to destruction and should receive no mercy but be destroyed, just as the Lord commanded Moses.
And Joshua came at that time and cut off the Anakim from the hill country, from Hebron, from Debir, from Anab, and from all the hill country of Judah, and from all the hill country of Israel. Joshua devoted them to destruction with their cities. There was none of the Anakim left in the land of the people of Israel. Only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod did some remain. So Joshua took the whole land, according to all that the Lord had spoken to Moses. And Joshua gave it for an inheritance to Israel according to their tribal allotments. And the land had rest from war.”
Amen.
See the Scale of God’s Sufficiency
Well temperamentally, it may not surprise you to learn that I am generally a pessimist. And as you know, pessimists are “glass half empty” people. Optimists, on the other hand, they say, are “glass half full” people. Engineers, I am told, say the glass is two times larger than it needs to be. A realist would say the glass is always full – half with water and half with air. The IT support person would say that no matter what your problem is with the glass, you should try emptying it first and then refilling it. And politicians say that whatever the current state of things in the glass, it would be much emptier if the opposition were in charge! Whichever at best describes you, when I read the first five verses of Joshua chapter 11 I couldn’t help wondering if I hadn’t found in the author something of a kindred spirit; a glass half empty pessimist. That is, I did think that until I got to verse 6 and realized what he’s really doing here. You see, he spends the opening five verses of the chapter detailing for us the enormity of the challenge facing Israel at this point in the conquest. It looks bleak, to be frank. He piles up problems in these opening verses, doesn’t he.
Jabin, king of Hazor, is the ring leader in yet another Canaanite alliance opposing Israel’s advance. Hazor was a significant city in late bronze-age Canaan, sprawling, we are told, over 200 acres with a population of more than 40,000 people. And it naturally commanded a dominant place in this confederation of northern tribes. And just so we really feel the scale of the problem, the author takes his time – did you notice this – to list out for us each king and every town and every nation involved in this anti-Israel league. And with each name, we are meant to picture in our minds another element of this growing army of opposition, each with their regimental banners flying in the breeze, proudly gathered to fight Israel. Verse 4 says they comprised “a great horde, in number like the sand on the seashore, with very many horses and chariots.” The chariots in particular must have been worrisome to Joshua and his commanders. This was, at the time, state of the art military technology. Fast and maneuverable, they carried archers or javelin throwers. These things were the ancient equivalent of an armored Humvee, you know, with a turret mounted 50 cal on the roof. That’s the kind of thing that we’re talking about. And Israel could field nothing close to that kind of firepower.
And so you can imagine Joshua in the situation room getting his daily briefing from the joint chiefs of staff and the blood just draining from his face at the scale and the power of the enemy forces arrayed against them. Verses 1 through 5 look very much like the definition of a glass half empty scenario. Israel did well in the south, and now they’ve crossed the Mason Dixon Line and they’re suddenly in trouble. But it’s at this point, once the enemy horde has been fully cataloged, in all its intimidating vastness, it’s at this point that we read verse 6. “And the Lord said to Joshua, ‘Do not be afraid of them. For tomorrow at this time I will give over all of them slain to Israel. You shall hamstring their horses and burn their chariots with fire.’” Joshua 11:1-5 is like a newsreel. Do you remember these – maybe you’ve seen them if it’s before your time – of Soviet era military parades. You see them on television. Regiments of soldiers and tanks and cannon and rocket launchers and missiles and they all process past to patriotic music showing off just what a threat they pose. That’s what we’re meant to see in verses 1 through 5.
And then God looks at them and almost with a shrug, as it were, says, “I’ve got this. This time tomorrow I’m going to hand them all over to you slain, Joshua.” It’s Psalm 2, isn’t it? “The one who sits enthroned in the heavens laughs when he sees the kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against His anointed, saying, ‘As for me, I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill.’” These opening verses are meant to help us see once again not so much the dimensions of the spiritual opposition as the scale of God’s sufficiency in answering it. God is not intimidated by the enemy. He is not daunted by the difficulty facing the church as it seeks to advance His kingdom in the world. You can itemize the fearful powers of evil in all their malice, and were we to face them in our own strength, to be sure, we would rightfully tremble. But the Lord is sufficient in His abundant grace for the fight ahead. That’s the message. The Lord has set His king on Zion, His anointed one. Joshua II, the Lord Jesus Christ, reigns, and all the petty rulers of the earth and all the supernatural forces of evil in the heavenly places are no match for Him. They are no match for Him. We are meant to read the bright promise of verse 6 against the dark backdrop of verses 1 through 5, but only so that we may see more clearly the scale and grandeur of the sufficiency of our God who equips His people for the work to which He has called them.
Joshua 11:1-6 is the Old Testament equivalent of John 16:33 where Jesus says to us, “In this world you will have tribulation” – that’s the bad news. Like the first five verses of Joshua 11, tribulation is coming. Look at that army! Chariots and horses and nation after nation. “In this world you will have tribulation, but,” Jesus says, “I have overcome the world. I have overcome the world.” See the scale of God’s sufficiency. Fill your eyes with it. Never take them from this great reality that your faith may stand firm, and having done all, in the evil day, you might stand. See the scale of God’s sufficiency.
Trust the Promise of God’s Power
Secondly, look at verses 7 through 9 and trust the promise of God’s power. Trust the promise of God’s power. Verses 7 and 8 tell us that of course the battle goes exactly as the Lord had promised that it would. “He gave them into the hand of Israel who struck them and chased them as far as Great Sidon and Misrephoth-maim, and eastward as far as the Valley of Mizpeh.” Did you notice though, in the promise of verse 6 and in the fulfillment of that promise in verse 9 in Joshua’s obedience, did you notice the odd little note about hamstringing the horses and burning the chariots with fire? It seems a bit excessive. Why in the world would they do that? I mean, it sure sounds like Israel could have used a few armored Humvees to help them in their ongoing fight. Why would they burn these chariots instead of using them? Why would they put the horses out of action? Well here is the reason. The Lord wants His people to be able to sing Psalm 20 verse 7 with all their hearts. “Now I know that the Lord saves His anointed. He will answer him from His holy heaven with the saving might of His right hand. Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we will trust in the name of the Lord our God.”
I was talking to an elder who serves in a congregation of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of England and Wales about a church plant that they have begun in one of the great beauty spots in northern England. It’s the only Gospel church in that little town, and it has just been really hard going to get this church plant established. Really slow, really difficult work, mainly because, he said, this is a very well-to-do community. Everyone has everything they could need. There are no vulnerabilities, no weaknesses. They are well educated, well resourced, affluent, self-sufficient. And so they think to themselves, this brother remarked, “What use do I have for Jesus? What use do I have for Jesus?”
Do you see here how wise God is in giving this instruction to Joshua? How careful Joshua is faithful to obey it in verse 9, hamstringing the horses, burning the chariots with fire? Because it puts beyond all possibility the temptation for His people to rest in their own strength, in their own sufficiency, in their own resources, and say, “We are competent for every challenge. Why would we need the Lord?” He is making sure, He is making certain that they trust Him and cling not in their own strength but to His power promised to them in His great faithfulness. Sometimes, you know, God strips us of otherwise lawful resources. He even weakens us, leave us less able, not to hurt us but to keep us resting on Him and not on ourselves so that we can say with each new challenge, “Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but here today in the midst of this challenge, I will trust in the name of the Lord my God.” See the scale of God’s sufficiency. Learn to trust the promise of God’s power.
Obey the Commands of God’s Law
Now thirdly, obey the commands of God’s law. Look at verses 10 through 15. It’s a simple summary account of Israel’s conquering of the great city of Hazor. They burn it to the ground, they kill Jabin the king, and they conquer every other major city and each of their kings. But over and over again, as we read through the account, our attention is directed actually to the careful obedience of Joshua. Do you see that, for example, in verse 12? “And all the cities of those kings, and all their kings, Joshua captured, and struck them with the edge of the sword, devoting them to destruction, just as Moses the servant of the Lord had commanded.” Or verse 15, “Just as the Lord had commanded Moses his servant, so Moses commanded Joshua, and so Joshua did. He left nothing undone of all that the Lord had commanded Moses.” Or at the end of the passage in verse 23, “So Joshua took the whole land, according to all that the Lord had spoken to Moses.”
We tend to focus on the violence and the slaughter and the total-war paradigm that marks Joshua’s conquest, don’t we? But the author of this passage wants us to focus instead on Joshua’s obedience. Joshua is being presented to us here at God’s obedient servant, through whose obedience Israel conquers. And Joshua’s example is certainly a call to us to do likewise. The commands of God, we must understand, are not the suggestions of God. They are not the proposals of God. They are not the best advice of God.
During my pastorate in a previous congregation, one of our members there served on the staff of a local pro-life ministry and she relayed the story of a mom from another prominent local church in the area who wanted her pregnant teenage daughter to have an abortion. And her argument was, “God will understand.” But that’s not how the commands of God work, is it? They are not to be obeyed on a sliding scale based on our convenience or comfort or change in convictions. They are simply and always to be obeyed.
But of course, obedient Joshua is much more here than simply an example, isn’t he? Joshua here is a type, a picture, of one to come, who, unlike us, will be perfect and exhaustive in His obedience to the commands of God, beneath whose perfect obedience all our failures to obey are hidden and cleansed and pardoned. The Lord Jesus Christ makes conquest of sin and death and hell and secures the victory by becoming obedient for us, even unto death, even unto the death of a cross. “And in the obedience of that one man,” Paul writes, “the many are constituted righteous.” We praise God for the obedience of Jesus and hide our imperfect obedience beneath His perfect obedience. For in His obedience, just like in Joshua’s obedience, the people of God triumph.
Understand the Gravity of God’s Wrath
See the scale of God’s sufficiency. Trust the promise of God’s power. Obey the commands of God’s law. And then fourthly, understand the gravity of God’s wrath. Understand the gravity of God’s wrath. Look at verses 16 through 20. Sixteen to 18 list the victories of Joshua and his army summed up in the opening line of verse 16 and the last clause of verse 17. Do you see this phrase? “So Joshua took all that land, he captured all their kings and struck them and put them to death.” There’s the summary. The whole northern campaign has taken seventeen verses to recount and two verses to summarize. And that might give us the faulty impression that Joshua pulled all of this off in one overwhelming blitzkrieg one sunny afternoon. But verse 18, look at verse 18 – it’s very sobering. “Joshua made war a long time with all those kings.” This is months of hard fighting compressed into just a handful of verses.
And that’s a helpful reminder to us that God’s combat against sin, even in our own hearts, is long and slow and hard. Max Weber said that, “Politics is the slow, boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective.” The slow boring of hard boards. And Joshua, I think, would say the same about the conquest of Canaan, and we need to acknowledge the same about the conquest of remaining sin in our own souls. It is the slow boring of hard boards. Joshua made war a long time, and so must we. But the key to understanding the reason why it took such a long time is not to be looked for in the stubbornness of the Canaanite opposition, although as verse 19 makes plain, stubborn is an appropriate word to use for the Canaanites. You see it in verse 19? None of them, we are told, attempted, even so much as tried to make peace with the Israelites, all except for the people of Gibeon. The implication seems to be, had these pagan Canaanites truly repented and cast themselves on the mercy of the Lord, they may well have been spared, but none of them did it. And the reason that they didn’t do so finds its ultimate explanation not in some quirk of Canaanite temperament that makes them unusually recalcitrant and stubborn as a people. The real reason they did not repent lies in the gravity of God’s wrath working itself out in their midst. And when we see it, it really ought to make us all tremble.
Look at verse 20 carefully. What’s the explanation Joshua gives us for why it took so very long for the conquest of Canaan? “It was the Lord’s doing to harden their hearts that they should come against Israel in battle in order that they should be devoted to destruction and should receive no mercy but be destroyed just as the Lord commanded Moses.” That is a very sobering picture, isn’t it? God hardened their hearts so that they would not repent but remain recalcitrant and obstinate in their sin and so therefore oppose the advancing kingdom of God and thereby be destroyed. That’s what the text says!
And just so we are clear, that is often the wrath of God works itself out even among us even today. It’s not usually in cataclysms, you know, and fire falling from heaven that we see His judgment, but in the heart that rejects His mercy quietly being hardened and rendered impervious to all overtures and entreaties to change course and to repent while there is still time. Think, for example, about the refrain that runs through Romans chapter 1. People exchanged the truth of God for the lie, “therefore,” Paul says, “God gave them up in the lusts of their heart to impurity. God gave them up,” he says, “to dishonorable passions. God gave them up to a debased mind.” God gives us up to the wickedness our hearts choose. And immersed in our own depravity, our hearts freeze hard in their settled opposition to Him. That is the gravity of the wrath of God at work. Do you see it here in the text? He gives the rebellious over to their sin and then in due course He treats them as their sins deserve.
Friends, if today you are living in conscious rebellion against Jesus Christ, do not think that because it has not rained fire down from heaven upon your head that you’ve gotten away with your sin and that God has not seen it! That’s not how His wrath typically works, you know! No, what is going to happen is that soon, if you do not repent, your conscience will stop bothering you. You will cease to care that you were brought up to know the commandments. You will no longer even try to nod at religion. You’ve chosen your sin above everything and now your sin has blinded your eyes and stoppered your ears and fossilized your heart. Joshua 11:20 makes it clear, you know, that if you would just repent, if you would just turn and seek mercy from Jesus, you would find it. You will find it! But if you will not, one day you won’t care to. It will cease to occur to you that maybe you should. Those pangs of guilt that you feel right now, they’re going to dwindle to a whisper if you don’t listen to them, all too easily ignored until they are silenced completely and God will give you over to the lusts of your heart, your dishonorable passions and your debased mind, and so my dear friend, I am praying for you today that you might hear this warning, that your heart might awaken and stir and tremble, that your conscience might wake up and that you might flee for pardon. Forgiveness is what you need. You can get it from Jesus! Turn to Him before it’s too late and the Lord hardens your heart. What a fearful thing. The gravity of the wrath of God.
Remember the Fullness of God’s Blessing
And then finally, beginning in chapter 11 verse 20 and really running through the rest of chapter 12, the last exhortation is – remember the fullness of God’s blessing. Remember the fullness of God’s blessing. In 11:20-23, this closing paragraph in the chapter that we read together, the author pauses just for a moment to linger over these unusually large ferocious warriors known as the Anakim. “Of course the very mention of the Anakim probably doesn’t send chills up your spine,” writes Ralph Davis, “because you’ve never seen any of them. Who were they?” He says they were, “the Incredible Hulks of the land of Canaan.” You may remember they were mentioned in Numbers 13:28 back when Moses sent Joshua and Caleb and the other spies across the Jordan to check out the land of promise. And one of the things that had the spies quaking in their boots was the presence in the land of the Anakim. Only Joshua and Caleb had the faith to face them, but it was too much for the rest of the people of Israel who refused to enter the land at that time. “Forty years before,” says Ralph Davis, “Israel was sure that even God’s help was of no avail against these big bruisers. In Israel’s dictionary, Anakim spelled terror.”
But now, Joshua 11:21 says almost casually as a footnote, “Oh, and by the way, the giants in the land that keep Israelites up at night, Joshua cut off from the hill country, from Hebron, from Debir, from Anab, from all the hill country of Judah and from all the hill country of Israel,” which, by the way, is the first time so far that the land of Canaan has been named, the geography has been named for the Israelites who have come to dwell there. Because it belongs to them now, but it belongs to them now only because our God is a giant slayer. Our God kills the Anakim. And if you glance down for a moment over chapter 12, you’ll see the whole chapter continues very much in that same vein. It is a rapid fire recap, actually of the whole conquest of the land, north and south, listing one victory after another, each of the conquered kings, all of the cities Israel has defeated, beginning on the other side of the Jordan with Sihon and Og and then piling up the rest in a long list of names that look not unlike a phonebook in verses 7 through 24.
Now why do you suppose it was important that all these little details be recorded in a list like this? Why do we need to hear about the Anakim or be reminded about Sihon and Og? Why is it work writing down the fact that Israel defeated the kings of Jarmuth and Debir and Eglon and Lachish and Tappuah and Shimron-meron. I mean in some cases, we don’t even know where these cities were. They’re lost to history; no one remembers them. They’re forgotten, except here, in Joshua 11 and 12. They are remembered here – why? Because it matters that the people of God recognize and remember the victories of the Lord, the blessings of God in their color and variegation and specificity and detail. The words of Joshua 11:20 through 12:24 may not look much like it to you, but in reality they are a doxology. They are glory words intended to magnify the greatness of the grace of God. Every name on the list says, “Look here, do you see? Do you remember what God did? And over here and over here! Now do you believe that God is good all the time? No? How about this place and that place and this place!” Every street name, every zip code in Canaan was a monument to the triumph of the God who keeps His promises. And Israel was meant to read these names and places and hear in them a relentless accumulation of recorded blessing so that they might say once again with new joy, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me. Bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits. Remember them, pile them up, name them one by one!”
And as we gather now around the Lord’s Table, isn’t that still His message to us as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ? We look at the bread and the cup and we see, don’t we, our Savior’s costly conquest of the powers of darkness. Here are the emblems of His body, emulated and torn, His life blood poured out for the remission of sins. Here is covenant love demonstrated in that, “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Here are promises kept, redemption accomplished and applied. Here are God’s riches at Christ’s expense. And so as we listen to the Word now, as we watch the minister’s actions at the Table, as we handle and taste and swallow the bread and the cup by faith here, we are taking hold of Christ anew, feasting on Christ, drinking Him in who gave Himself for us, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God. Remember, the Lord’s Table is often called a Eucharist because on the night when He was betrayed, Jesus took bread and He gave thanks. The verb is “eucharisteo,” a thanksgiving. That’s what we are meant to do here. We are meant to see in the Table the same thing Israel was meant to see in Joshua 11 and 12 – a record and a remembrance and a proclamation of the success and victory of the living God by the Lord Jesus Christ, so that we say as we sit here, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me. Bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits. Who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s. For in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord Himself has loved me and given Himself for me.” And so we say, “Bless the Lord, O my soul.”
See the scale of God’s sufficiency. Trust the promises of God’s power. Obey the commands of God’s law. Understand the gravity of God’s wrath. And as we gather around His Table, remember the fullness of God’s blessing and give thanks. Let us pray.
Lord, we bow before You with gratitude, with gratitude. We’re thankful because the battle belongs to the Lord. Because Jesus has triumphed, because He obeyed and bled and died and rose and reigns we are saved. So all glory is Yours. Help us to stir up to remembrance all Your tender mercies and all Your covenant love. And how we pray for any here who are yet strangers to it. Help them to tremble at the prospect of Your wrath and run for refuge to Christ who offers them mercy. For we ask it in Jesus’ name, amen.