Joshua Part 2

Let's continue with our story of Joshua.  This has been very interesting for me so far because I started out thinking we would talk about Joshua and the wall of Jericho.  We will get to that in time but I am really learning a lot about his character as we go.  Joshua was constantly around Moses.  He was learning everything he could about how the Lord, through Moses, led the children of Israel.  Joshua seemed to be the type of guy who would do anything that Moses told him to do.

Now we know that the children of Israel left Egypt and they were headed for what the Lord called the Promise land.  That land was a good land and it is actually where the children of Israel came from before they went to Egypt.  But it had been about 400 years since they had been to their homeland and they were on their way back to it.

Now when they got to the edge of the Promised land (also called Canaan) Moses sent people to go check out the land.  He sent one man from each of the twelve different tribes of Israel.  Guess who was one of the twelve?  Yup, it was Joshua.  So these twelve guys head out to check the place out.  Moses knows they will have to invade the place so he wants to know stuff like whether the people live in tents or in forts, if there is a lot of wood and if there is any food.  These guys come into the land and they find a ton of food.  As a matter of fact, they cut down this big cluster of grapes that is so big it takes two of them to carry it.  That's a lot of grapes.  They also brought back pomegranates and figs.  The guys came back to Moses after they searched the whole country for 40 days.

Everyone of the twelve said it was a really cool place with plenty of food and that it would be a great place to live.  But here is where things get a little interesting.  Ten of the twelve guys came back and said, "Dude, there are giants living in that place.  These are the biggest dudes we have ever seen.  Some of them are really famous and there is no way on earth we could ever beat them.  We can't make them leave our land.  We aren't good enough to do it.  We even saw these giants called the sons of Anak.  After seeing them we looked at ourselves and we thought we were just little grasshoppers.  Also, they thought we were grasshoppers too and they know that beat us up."  This is the Minion translation of what the bible says.

So everyone in the whole nation of Israel freaks out.  They get all worked up and then they get mad at God.  They say, "God should have just let us die in Egypt or in the wilderness.  The Lord just brought here so these people could kill us with a sword and take our kids captive.  Maybe we should get rid of Moses and Aaron and find someone who will lead us back to Egypt."  Now God told these people that they were supposed to go and take this land back for them to live in.  He even gave them several things that he wanted them to do when they lived there.  But they were so afraid because of what ten of the men said about the land that they trusted these men's words much more than they trusted God's word.  That doesn't make a lot of sense does it?  If God tells us to do something, even if it seems impossible, He will make it happen because He says he will.

Now Moses and Aaron are pretty upset so they fell down on their faces before the nation.  It would probably be a good thing if our top politicians and our top Christian leaders got on their face to pray to God about what to do with our nation.  Notice I said that only ten of the twelve had bad stuff to say about the Promised land.  By the way, the Promised land is the country that we call Israel today.  Anyway, there were two guys who had something different to say.  One was Caleb.  Guess who the other was?  Yup, it was Joshua.  They stood up before all the people and said, "This is a great place to live.  If God told us to go take this land then He will make sure we do it regardless of the giants that live there.  It's a good land.  But we need to be careful now.  We can't rebel against what God said to us.  Dudes, don't be afraid of these wimps.  It doesn't matter how big they are.  They can't defend themselves against us because God is going to kick them out.  God is with us."

But these folks wouldn't listen and they wanted to stone Joshua and Caleb to death.  The Israelites were kind of mean weren't they.  We will hear more about the children of Israel and Joshua next week but for now I want to leave you with a few things we have learned about Joshua in this post.

First of all, Joshua did what his leader Moses told him to do.  Think about it for a minute.  If the land was like they described it, there were only twelve scouts and if they got into a fight, they could have been whipped pretty bad.  Second, Joshua knew what the Lord said about the promised land.  He knew that God told them to go into that land and live there.  When he was faced with a situation that looked different that what God told them about it, he didn't get upset.  He just expected God to do something about the situation.  He knew that God would fix it.  Let me stop here for a minute and ask, what situations are you facing in your life right now?  Are there things in your life that seem like they don't line up with what God has to say?  Maybe you need healing in your body or your spirit.  Well Jesus said in 1 Peter 2:24 that his body was broken and because it was, we were healed.  Start setting your heart and mind on what God said and don't let what your situation looks like scare you.  It cannot stand up to the word of God.

Lastly, Joshua was so passionate about what he believed God said that he was willing to stand up for what he believed the Lord wanted.  Like the country music song says, you have to stand for something or you will fall for anything.

Well it's happened again.  I have blogged myself happy and that's another of the Minion's bible stories.

Gideon Part 2

OK let's recap what we learned about Gideon from the last blog and then we will finish the story.  Last time, we learned that Gideon was the wimpiest guy.  The bible says he was from the smallest house of the smallest tribe of Israel.  If you think of US Navy Seals, he was the exact opposite, or at least he thought he was.  But God saw something different in him.  See Israel was being raided and beaten up a lot and God was going to use this sniveling, weak, wimpy guy to deliver the whole nation of Israel.  Gideon wasn't sure about this whole thing so he decided to test God.

Now let's pick up the story there.  Before he tested God with the fleece, something really cool happened.  He trusted God.  Now trust is a hard thing for most of us but he trusted God completely.  He decided that he would do whatever God told him to do.  So before God could use him to deliver Israel, He had to build Gideon's confidence.

Well they started with something right inside Gideon's own family that was really hacking God off.  It was a common practice to set up alters in those days.  Now unfortunately, Gideon's town worshipped the devil because they had an alter set up to Baal (or the Devil).  This kind of stuff makes God mad.  Just think about it for a minute, if your friend really needed lunch money and you constantly gave it to him and this same friend went around telling everyone that someone else was giving it to him, it would make you mad right?  God is the same way.  So God tells Gideon to go brake that alter to pieces.  There was also a grove of trees near the Devils alter that God tells Gideon to chop down and use to sacrifice offerings to God.

Now even though Gideon was gong to do what God told him to do, he was still a little scared of his family.   He knew they were going to be really mad when they found out so he did it at night.  Now when the folks that lived in the town got up the next morning and found their alter to the Devil cut down they were plenty mad and they found out Gideon had done it.  They went up to Gideon's dad and told him to hand over Gideon so they could kill him for breaking their alter.  I love what his dad said.  He said, "Well, if you think your god is such a big shot, let your god kill Gideon himself.  If he's such a big deal, he doesn't need you to kill Gideon."  This caused the folks from the town to leave Gideon alone and guess what, the devil couldn't kill Gideon.

So then all the bad guys gathered together and pitched their tents in this place called the valley of Jezreel.  When that happened, God's spirit came on Gideon and he was ready to take on a couple of whole countries not just a family.  This is where the whole fleece thing comes in.  This is where Gideon tests God like we talked about in the last blog.

Well, Gideon got a group of people together and they camped out too.  So the Lord said, Gideon has too many people with him.  I want to show everyone what I can do so I need to shrink the number of people in Gideon's army.  So God told Gideon to have all his men drink water from a stream or pond or something like that.  Some people got down on their knees and just used their tongue like a dog to lap up the water.  Some people scooped up the water in their hands and drank it.  Well it turns out that after using that test, God kept about 300 dudes to go after these other armies.

So God tells Gideon one night to sneak up to the camp of the bad guys to listen to what they are saying.  Gideon takes his servant Phurah to go check things out.  Now God has just told him not to fear and that God has given this army into Gideon's hands for him to destroy.  This army that these 300 people were about to attack was so high that the bible says that the whole valley looked like it was covered with grasshoppers and that they had so many camels that they couldn't count them all.  That doesn't look like good odds right?  I mean 300 dudes against this whole big army.  Have you ever seen the movie, 300.  It's a little like that but the results will be a lot different than the 300 men in that movie.

So after Gideon knew what God wanted him to do and he had reconned the other army, he split his group into three groups of 100 men.  They had trumpets and lamps inside these pitchers.  So these guys snuck up on the bad guys in the middle of the night.  Then Gideon blew his trumpet and everyone else did too.  The broke the pitchers and said, "The sword of the Lord, and of Gideon."  When the other army heard this, it scared them so bad that they took off running.  Gideon's army started killing the bad guys as they whole army ran off.  After that, some other families from Israel helped him wipe the bad guys out.

That's another of the Minion's Bible Stories.