Date: January 8, 2023
Preacher: Matthew Millen
Topic: Joshua 9 Deception and Discernment
Notes:
We just had New Year’s Day and one of the things many of us like to do at this time is downsize. My wife is a purger. She likes to do that. I, however, am a collector. I like to collect things—and my wife likes to throw them all out. She likes to go on Facebook Marketplace and sell all my stuff and it’s a problem. Here’s the thing about Facebook Marketplace: it’s full of scammers! How many of you know what I’m talking about? You have to watch out because there are folks on there who will scam you without you even realizing it. My wife has had this light she has listed to sell for over a year and it’s a pricier item because she’d like to get some value for it and finally someone showed interest. They messaged her and asked for her phone number to prove that she was a real person and not a fake scam and so she thought that was a reasonable request and gave it. Within seconds she got a text with a six-digit code that the person requested and thankfully, at this point, she wised up and cut off all communication.
With the proliferation of social media, scamming is at an all time high. Why? Because generally as human beings we like to give people the benefit of the doubt. We generally tend to trust people first. According to a study by Stanford, FINRA, and the Better Business Bureau, of those approached on social media 91% of people engaged with scammers. Of that 91%, 53% lost money. So from fake emails requesting money to fake phone calls posing as law enforcement or credit cards to that long lost Nigerian prince who needs money there are scams all over the place and scammers are going to try to pull the wool over your eyes and take what you value, usually your money. Listen, if you just send me a gift card, I’m going to send you this check for $500. It’s so easy to be fooled sometimes because it looks real, legit, like it’s an actual exchange that someone is going to make.
Today in Joshua we’re going to learn how the Israelites were scammed.
Joshua 9:1-2 – As soon as all the kings who were beyond the Jordan in the hill country and in the lowland all along the coast of the Great Sea toward Lebanon, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, heard of this, 2 they gathered together as one to fight against Joshua and Israel.
The people “heard of this.” What did they hear of? The initial conquest of the Promised Land. They wander in the desert for 40 years. They come up to the edge of the Jordan River and there are five chapters about crossing the Jordan and preparation which was a big deal and then more preparation, more consecration, before chapter 6 when they attack Jericho. They march around, the walls come down, Rahab is spared because of her faith. There is victory. They immediately go and attack Ai and they lose. Why do they lose? They didn’t consult the Lord and there was also someone who stole some things from the battlefield so the Lord helps them figure that out when they consult Him and then He gives them a direct battle plan to attack Ai and conquer them. So they have two very strategic points in the Promised Land and the Lord sends them up to Mounts Ebol and Gerizim. Right around SHiloh, and they renew the covenant, which is what the Lord instructed them to do once they had entered the Promised Land and now they’re back at their staging area at Gilgal which is east of Jericho, but on the western side of the Jordan. All the people around them have heard that they wrecked Jericho, they wrecked Ai, they wiped all the people out and Israel is coming for them. This God of theirs has given them victory. He even parted the Jordan River, just like He parted the Red Sea and He is wiping out people just like the Egyptians 40+ years ago.
Joshua 9:3-6 – But when the inhabitants of Gibeon heard what Joshua had done to Jericho and to Ai, 4 they on their part acted with cunning and went and made ready provisions and took worn-out sacks for their donkeys, and wineskins, worn-out and torn and mended, 5 with worn-out, patched sandals on their feet, and worn-out clothes. And all their provisions were dry and crumbly. 6 And they went to Joshua in the camp at Gilgal and said to him and to the men of Israel, “We have come from a distant country, so now make a covenant with us.”
These Gibeonites went into full-blown scam mode. We can’t beat them on the battlefield so we need to trick them, con them. A little bit of background on Gibeon. It was 6 miles NW of Jerusalem. To the east was Jericho, which was wiped out, and to the north of Jericho is where Gilgal was, where the Israelites were encamped. Shiloh is almost directly north where they did the covenant renewal.
You can see that the Israelites were working all around the central area and they were prepared to launch into the north and south which is what we’ll see in the next couple of chapters where they’ll begin to conquer. All of these cities come together and battle as one. Gibeon says, “We’re not fighting them, we’re tricking them.” Gibeon was on a major trade route and they were a well-developed and fortified city. To get a sense of the distance, from Liberty High School, if you go north about 25 miles you’ll hit Jim Thorpe & Stroudsburg, to the east you’ll hit Clinton, NJ, and to the west you’ll hit Kutztown, south is Lansdale. It’s a distance, but not real far. The Gibeonites were descendants of the Hivites, part of this group of people who the Lord had said wipe them out and take no quarter. What was interesting about this group was that it was not ruled by a king. As best we know, it was a republic that had five elders/rulers. This was unique and many surmise (and it’s just speculation) that this was why they were craftier to engage the way they did instead of on the battlefield with all the testosterone fueled kings in the area. So that is just speculation, but that’s your fun fact.
Where did the Lord say to not make any deals with these people? Deuteronomy as well as Exodus and Numbers, the Lord repeats over and over again, don’t make deals with the people in the Promised Land.
Deuteronomy 20:10-18 – 10 “When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. 11 And if it responds to you peaceably and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. 12 But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. 13 And when the Lord your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword, 14 but the women and the little ones, the livestock, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as plunder for yourselves. And you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. 15 Thus you shall do to all the cities that are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here. 16 But in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, 17 but you shall devote them to complete destruction, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites [Gibeonites] and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded, 18 that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices that they have done for their gods, and so you sin against the Lord your God.
It sounds wicked and brutal, but remember, these were wicked and brutal people, practicing child sacrifice and all manner of abominations before the Lord. They were due to receive the justice that the Lord was bringing. Even for these people the Lord would have mercy for a repentant heart. That’s what we’re going to see here in a roundabout way.
How many of you know that as we go through this walk in this world very regularly we will come up against our enemy, Satan, and he’ll try to intimidate us and put us in a place of fear. That’s usually the way the enemy works first. It’s the person who is insulting you, mocking you for your faith, putting you in that impossible situation where you’re going to lose and you cannot overcome, where you’ll fail, be broken, or become destitute, or you will not come out of the situation well. This is the typical first play of our enemy. 1 Peter 5 tells us that Satan prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. We’re to be sober-minded, watchful, and aware. Sober-minded basically means that I’m not ruled by my emotions. I’m guided by truth when the enemy comes against me.
Failing that first approach, and when a believer stands firm in truth, the enemy changes up his tactics—and the enemy really only has two tactics—he’s going to be a lion or he’s going to be a snake. Here, we see he turns into the snake, the Genesis 3 deceiver, the speaker of half-truths and all lies. In fact, in the text that we just heard from in Joshua, what does it say in verse 4? The Gibeonites acted cunningly. The enemy will act wily and it’s derived from the same Hebrew word that describes Satan in the garden in Genesis 3. In the Greek/Septuagint, the same word can be used in the positive sense of shrewdness or prudence. Jesus told his disciples that he was sending them out in the midst of wolves and they needed to be shrewd as serpents and gentle as doves. It’s the same concept.
Satan is the father of lies and will often take something that seems good and we don’t recognize the consequences of it until it actually gets there. How many of you know your history? In 313 A.D., Emperor Constantine issues the Edict of Milan which is an edict of toleration for the Christians which the Christians welcomed with open arms because that meant no more persecution from Rome. It allowed for the institutionalization of Christianity. It killed all the house churches seemingly overnight because everyone wanted to create their parishes and it institutionalized the leadership and created a highly toxic and corruptible environment and over time, slowly but surely, the Christian church went off track to the point where it was no longer educating the people in the pews, it was simply seeking to control them. Now, I’m not saying that the Lord didn’t move in that time. Praise God, that He moves with His remnant in all times and all seasons, but the enemy craftily utilized the Edict of Milan to absolutely transform the way that people approached the throne of God for many, many years. Praise God, that there was still sincere faith in many of those people. It was just attacked by the enemy through what looked like a seemingly good thing. That’s how the enemy often operates in all kinds of ways.
Here are some more scam statistics for you. In the United States, according to those same organizations, 1 in 10 adults will fall victim to a scam every year. Around 50% of people contacted by scammers, engage with them. As I just said, 91% of people contacted by scammers on social media will engage with them. 1.3 million children have their identities stolen every year. With the continued lowering of the age when children obtain cell phones the amount of identity theft is skyrocketing. 83 million Facebook accounts are fake. 1 in 10 dating site profiles are fake. Older American lose an estimated 3 billion dollars a year from scamming. How many of you know about Chat GPT? This is ELon Musk’s open AI platform that came out a couple of weeks ago. I asked it to write a sermon on Joshua 9 for me. Everything I’m reading is from that AI, it’s amazing! (Just kidding!) It spits something out in like 20 seconds that was halfway decent! It’s crazy that someone can go ask for truth from a robot and it gives you something that if you don’t know better, you will think it is truth. We need to be shrewd as serpents and match the wiles of the enemy by knowing truth. How do they teach the FBI to spot the counterfeit dollars? They teach people to know the real thing so indefinitely, indelibly that they will know what doesn’t match it. Same thing with us we need to be in tune with the Spirit of God.
The people of Gibeon come to the Israelites don’t just ask to pass through the land, they ask to make a covenant. That’s like meeting someone on the first date and then saying, “Will you marry me?” Please understand they are making a major, major request by the people of Israel. If you break this down in the Hebrew, the word for “make” means to “cut a covenant.” In the ancient practice, the way they would affirm this practice would be to take an animal and cut it in half and they’d separate it on two sides, with the entrails in the middle and they would walk through the center of the animal reciting the terms of the covenant and they would say, “If either of us breaks this covenant, let what has been done to this animal be done to me.” It was a very serious thing to enter into covenant. God take covenant exceedingly seriously. He is a covenant God making promises to us over and over again. We have the Adamic covenant which is where the seed of woman shall crush the head of the serpent and the serpent shall bite his heel. We have the Noahic covenant, rainbow, never again flooding the earth. We have the Mosaic covenant with the giving of the Law. We have the Davidic covenant with the king of kings coming from David’s line. Then we have the covenant of grace through the blood of Christ which is the new covenant that we are now walking in the freedom of by grace through faith. He has promised that he is coming again and that there will be a new heaven and a new earth which implies another covenant although that’s speculated to be.
There are still two covenants that we enter into under God as a new covenant Christian. If you are married, you have entered into a covenant. That is a covenant under the covenant of grace. Most people don’t think about it this way, but I’m an attorney, it’s how I think, but salvation is a covenant as well. This is why adoption is an irrevocable covenant. You were bought by the blood of Jesus. You are the possession of Christ. That is covenantal language. When you submit to him by faith, when you bow the knee to him as king of kings and lord of lords, it is a covenant and contract that cannot be revoked. Now some of us can fake it real good, but your fruit will find you out. That’s all I’m going to say about covenant. So the Gbeonites realized this importance and them came seeking a covenant even though the Lord said specifically NOT to make covenant.
Joshua 9:7-13 – But the men of Israel said to the Hivites, “Perhaps you live among us; then how can we make a covenant with you?” 8 They said to Joshua, “We are your servants.” And Joshua said to them, “Who are you? And where do you come from?” 9 They said to him, “From a very distant country your servants have come, because of the name of the Lord your God. For we have heard a report of him, and all that he did in Egypt, 10 and all that he did to the two kings of the Amorites who were beyond the Jordan, to Sihon the king of Heshbon, and to Og king of Bashan, who lived in Ashtaroth. 11 So our elders and all the inhabitants of our country said to us, ‘Take provisions in your hand for the journey and go to meet them and say to them, “We are your servants. Come now, make a covenant with us.”’ 12 Here is our bread. It was still warm when we took it from our houses as our food for the journey on the day we set out to come to you, but now, behold, it is dry and crumbly. 13 These wineskins were new when we filled them, and behold, they have burst. And these garments and sandals of ours are worn out from the very long journey.”
It’s ironic isn’t it that when the Israelites wandered for 40 years in the wilderness, the Lord preserved everything from wearing out. I wonder if this new generation even had any idea of what a worn out shoe looked like? To the Israelites’ credit, they immediately ask them where they come from. The Gibeonites don’t even answer the question! They turn to flattery and present themselves as servants to the Israelites. The Gibeonites perhaps appeal to their sense of sympathy or perhaps appealing to their pride or ego after two major victories in the region. For whatever reason, there’s no more questioning after the initial line. They don’t dive into anything and take the Gibeonites at their word and in fact they glorify Yahweh. Our enemy has no qualms recognizing our God. The enemy will tell us all day long that Yahweh is the God of all gods, that Jesus dies on the cross for our salvation, and that Jesus is the only way. What the enemy will not do is bow his knee in submission. He will not operate in the name of the Lord, but in his own name for his own sake and glory. Discernment will recognize that when we come across it. They heard the praise of Yahweh, they saw the humility, feigned or otherwise. In fact, the Gibeonites wisely don’t even mention any of the recent victories over Jericho ir Ai because if they did that would have given away the fact that they were close by. They only reference stuff that happened years and years ago.
Joshua 9:14-16 – So the men took some of their provisions, but did not ask counsel from the Lord. And Joshua made peace with them and made a covenant with them, to let them live, and the leaders of the congregation swore to them. At the end of three days after they had made a covenant with them, they heard that they were their neighbors and that they lived among them.
How many of you have been scammed? How did you feel when you realized it? It’s an extreme feeling of violation. Now put yourselves in the Israelites shoes after your God just told you multiple times not to do the thing you just did. Can you imagine the sense of dread, when your stomach drops and you don’t know what to do?
Joshua 9:17-21 – And the people of Israel set out and reached their cities on the third day. Now their cities were Gibeon, Chephirah, Beeroth, and Kiriath-jearim. But the people of Israel did not attack them, because the leaders of the congregation had sworn to them by the Lord, the God of Israel. Then all the congregation murmured against the leaders. 19 But all the leaders said to all the congregation, “We have sworn to them by the Lord, the God of Israel, and now we may not touch them. 20 This we will do to them: let them live, lest wrath be upon us, because of the oath that we swore to them.” 21 And the leaders said to them, “Let them live.” So they became cutters of wood and drawers of water for all the congregation, just as the leaders had said of them.
I don’t need to go too deeply into this. Verse 14 is what it’s all about. They did not seek counsel from the Lord. Literally, in the Hebrew it says, “They did not ask the mouth of the Lord.” You’d think after losing at Ai when they didn’t inquire of the Lord that they would have become prayer warriors, seeking the Lord for every step of the way. This was different because it wasn’t a battle. These were people coming to them asking to make a sweet deal – a once in a lifetime opportunity. They fell for it because they did not ask counsel from the Lord. They leaned on their own understanding. Proverbs 3 is the exact opposite: Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.
In fact, when God gave His charge to Moses to prepare Joshua for leadership in Numbers 27:21 He says – “And he shall stand before Eleazar the priest, who shall inquire for him by the judgment of the Urim before the Lord. At his word they shall go out, and at his word they shall come in, both he and all the people of Israel with him, the whole congregation.” It was Joshua’s responsibility to seek the Lord, and he didn’t. We have to be so wary of decision making that doesn’t include seeking the Lord. It’s something we know, but it’s easy to fall into a bad pattern, especially if you are a capable, intelligent, experienced, mature person. Even just one of the above will suffice. And you may not be any one of those things, but Satan will tell you you are to try to get that pride and ego going and then all of a sudden we’re faced with a decision and we just make it. It feels right. I’ve got so much peace about this. Now I don’t want to make a mockery of this because I do it. It’s just so easy in life, with your kids, your business, whatever it is you’re doing. Especially if you’ve made this type of decision a hundred times or more. If the word of the Lord is black or white in an area, we don’t need to hem and haw, it’s clear, so do that thing. I’m not talking about the stuff where we know clearly what the Lord would have us do because of His word. I’m talking about the other stuff where we don’t have clear instruction or direction, but we can confidently make decisions on if we’re not careful to seek the mouth of the Lord.
Paul tells us we can learn from those in the Old Testament who made mistakes, 1 Corinthians 10 has a few verses to this effect.
Joshua 9: 22-23 – Joshua summoned them, and he said to them, “Why did you deceive us, saying, ‘We are very far from you,’ when you dwell among us? 23 Now therefore you are cursed, and some of you shall never be anything but servants, cutters of wood and drawers of water for the house of my God.”
The lies of the enemy always end in curses. It’s what the enemy is seeking to do in your life, the opposite of blessing. What is blessing? The presence and power of God in your life. That is ultimately what blessing is. Curse is the opposite of that. You are separated from God and not walking in his power. You are walking in weakness and impotence. Your mind is clouded and deceived. In the Garden, it led literally to the curse of all mankind. Genesis 3 lays out those curses. Here in Joshua, the Gibeonites are cursed to be slaves.
Joshua 9: 24-27 – They answered Joshua, “Because it was told to your servants for a certainty that the Lord your God had commanded his servant Moses to give you all the land and to destroy all the inhabitants of the land from before you—so we feared greatly for our lives because of you and did this thing.25 And now, behold, we are in your hand. Whatever seems good and right in your sight to do to us, do it.” 26 So he did this to them and delivered them out of the hand of the people of Israel, and they did not kill them. 27 But Joshua made them that day cutters of wood and drawers of water for the congregation and for the altar of the Lord, to this day, in the place that he should choose.
A couple of final points. I love this story because it is yet one more example of what the enemy means for evil, God bringing to good. Amen? This was no simple deception, even though the enemy was seeking to upend and thwart the clear direction of the Lord. There was, right here in the text, there was a fear that caused these people to lie in order to be spared by the Lord. They were seeking mercy through deceptive means, but the intention of their hearts was to seek mercy from God. The Lord honored that. What’s super neat here is that they were made slaves which is brutal, but what kind of slaves were they? They were bondservants, which wasn’t full-blown slavery. They would have been set free in the seventh year. They were servants in the worship of the king. They were to get water and cut wood to get the means of sacrifice for the tabernacle. They were essentially the assistants to the Levites, who were the priests. As so, I love, that even when the enemy seeks to deceive and we fall victim to it we can find a thread of redemption in that the Lord will work from it.
But, we have to recognize that we are called to exercise biblical discernment. We are so easily deceived. Biblical discernment is the ability to know truth from deception, to rightly determine between godly wisdom and foolishness, the path of life or the path of death. The enemy hides truth or masking his lies. An old preacher, George Bush, said “This pretense was one well calculated to prevail with the Israelites for those who are guileless themselves are least suspicious of guile in others. And nothing wins more upon the simple-heartedness of good men than the appearance of piety and devotion where it was little or not at all expected.” Church, let me just be real with you. Christians are really gullible people. Very regularly, I come across brothers and sisters whom I love, who are wonderful people, so many gifts, but they just take what they’re told without really engaging with it, and questioning it and working it though, especially folks who are gifted in mercy, and service, and generosity. Those gifts who just want to help other people. It’s so easy for the enemy to take advantage of that.
The opposite is also true. Some of you hard-hearted discerners, truth-speakers, who have no mercy and grace whatsoever, you just see the worst in everybody, that’s not biblical either. I’m not espousing that virtue. There needs to be balance. Usually that balance is found through community, through family, through a body of believers that can come together and balance each other. That’s why we have on our leadership team, ombudsmen, a man and a woman who are in every single one of our elder meetings who have the gifts of discernment. They help bring balance. They ask questions like, “Did you ever think about this?” There needs to be balance and we need to learn this balance ourselves as we rely on the Spirit of God to lead us into truth. As we seek counsel from God Himself in prayer, as we go to His word which is a light unto our path and a light unto our feet. He will direct our steps. As we spend time with godly people who have wisdom from above. And by regularly praying and asking the Lord to give you wisdom from above. I hope that in our prayer lives we are regularly asking the Lord to give us wisdom.
We can’t be like the Israelites, who don’t ask for direction, especially when we think we’ve got it all figured out. Prayerlessness destroys godly discernment and pride will always lead to prayerlessness. If you are someone who does not have a robust prayer life that does not seek the Lord, that is an evidence of pride. That will always lead to a breakdown in godly discernment. So we need to ask the Lord to break down our pride and go to Him for wisdom and direction. Amen?
This text has a fun, little thread through it as well. In the Hebrew, four times the word “to hear” is used (1, 3, 9, 16). Each of those times someone hears something and responds.
1 – The Kings hear and respond in attack
3 – The Gibeonites hear and respond in deception
16 – The Israelites hear and respond with humility
The Hebrew word for “hear” is shama. It’s a great word because it’s a word of action. It means I’ve heard and now I’m going to do something about it. Every single one of us here is responsible to hear/shama and respond properly to truth or deception. If you are here and you have not submitted to Jesus. You have heard the gospel, the truth, God loves you, He has sent His son for you, you’re broken, you’re messed up. You will not be able to withstand the destruction that is coming. The Gibeonites recognized it. They had the humility to seek a way to avoid that judgment and the Lord had mercy on them even though they were wicked people. If you are here today and you are like the Gibeonites, do what the Gibeonites did, hear and respond by going to the Lord in submission, and ultimately service, bowing their knee to Him in faith. How do I know that happened? If you go through the rest of Scripture you will see all kinds of examples of Gibeon popping up after this point and every single instance is positive. Never once do they try to rebel or go against Israel. They are taken into the family. One of David’s mighty men is a Gibeonite. David erects the tabernacle at Gibeon as a place to worship. When King Saul breaks this treaty and attacks the Gibeonites, the Lord punishes Saul by almost wiping out Saul’s line, killing several of his sons because of the attack on the Gibeonites. After the exile to Babylon, in the book of Ezra in multiple places there’s a description of people returning to rebuild the temple and in four places where this description is given it always references what in the Hebrew are called the Nephranim, in English translated the temple servants, these are the Gibeonites. For hundreds of years they served in the temple, assisting in the temple worship, and even after the exile when they’re brought back from Babylon, 500 of them return to resume their duties serving in the temple. If you are here today, please respond with submission to a God who loves you. If you are here today, and you have submitted to the Lord, you’re going to mess up sometimes and so rather than being obstinate in persisting in your being right. Own your mistake, have some humility, be like Joshua, who at least owned it and admitted he was tricked. Find the way that the Lord can change an evil intention from the enemy to a redeemed purpose for the Lord. Trust Him through it! The Lord will turn even our sinful moments into purposes for redemption for Him. It’s what our God does. It requires us to hear it, recognize it, repent and humbly turn to Him in worship and submission. Pray that we would be humble and hear and respond in faith. Amen?
Lots of scammers are out there, Church! Chances are you’re going to fall for one of them. It’s alright, the Lord will work it through. It’s not the end of the world. Because when the end of the world does come, it’s all going to burn anyway, but we’ll have the Lord and He will never be taken from us.