Joshua chapter 5 beginning at verse 1. So it was when all the kings of the Amorites who were on the west side of the Jordan and all the kings of the Canaanites who were by the sea heard that the Lord had dried up the waters of the Jordan from before the children of Israel until we had crossed over that their heart melted and there was no spirit in them any longer because of the children of Israel. At that time the Lord said to Joshua, make flint knives for yourself and circumcise the sons of Israel again the second time. So Joshua made flint knives for himself and circumcised the sons of Israel at the hill of the foreskins and this is the reason why Joshua circumcised them. All the people who came out of Egypt who were males All the men of war had died in the wilderness on the way after they had come out of Egypt. For all the people who came out had been circumcised, but all the people born in the wilderness on the way as they came out of Egypt had not been circumcised. For the children of Israel walked 40 years in the wilderness till all the people who were men of war who came out of Egypt were consumed. Because they did not obey the voice of the Lord, to whom the Lord swore that he would not show them the land which the Lord had sworn to their fathers that he would give us, a land flowing with milk and honey. Then Joshua circumcised their sons, whom he raised up in their place, for they were uncircumcised. because they had not been circumcised on the way. So it was, when they had finished circumcising all the people, that they stayed in their places in the camp till they were healed. Then the Lord said to Joshua, this day I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt from you. Therefore the name of the place is called Gilgal to this day. Father, I pray that as we dig into this scripture, that may seem strange to some, that it would become a very precious scripture to us and a foundation, really, for modern missions. I pray that you would bless the preaching of your Word, enable me to faithfully deliver it, and Father, would you accompany this Word with your grace and with your power. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Well, I'll be honest with you that I really puzzled over how to preach on this grisly passage where 1.4 million foreskins were heaped up in a giant pile in front of them. It was not a pretty sight. Not at all. And yet God seems to delight in highlighting this event, giving eight verses to describing this. And God never wastes space in the Bible. This is important. He wants us to understand it. And in verse three, he even names the place, Gibeath HaAraloth, which means Hill of Foreskins. And by naming it, he wanted Israel to never forget this event. It's a very important event. But to us individualistic Westerners, there is so much about this passage that seems odd that I thought what I would do is start by disposing of four very bad presuppositions that people have tended to bring to this passage. And if you have one or more of these presuppositions in your mind, it's gonna make you either misunderstand it or scratch your head and wonder what in the world is going on here. And then I'm going to give a very important presupposition that it's true that we'll make this whole passage come to life. And then with that background material, it's going to be a long introduction, but with that background material firmly in our minds, I'll try to exegete it and apply it. It's going to be a little bit more of a didactic sermon, so you're going to have to put your thinking caps on, but I think you're going to find it worthwhile. It has some very profound and practical implications for modern missions. The first bad presupposition that some people have is that mass conversions cannot be genuine. These people know that Romans 4, verse 11 clearly defines circumcision as, in the Old Testament anyway, a sign and seal of justification by faith, and that it could only be applied to believers and to their seed. And so they ask, why in the world would everybody here be circumcised? Did Joshua make a mistake? Surely you can't assume that this entire generation of three to four million people are all believers, can you? These same people are skeptical of the mass baptisms that have taken place in ancient history, like the mass conversion of ancient Armenia as one example, and then at the end of the first millennium, the conversion and the mass baptism of Russia. And then 400 years later, there's the remarkable conversion of the Viking tribes. And of course, I've left out a whole bunch of mass conversions and baptisms that have occurred between those three examples. These are well-documented in history, and they actually resulted in a very vibrant and enduring Christianity. We have lost something in modern America. We have. But the people who hold to this presupposition are probably not that familiar with church history. Most of their complaints result in looking at these reports of the mass conversions, what people call people movements, that have been happening today, like so many Dalits becoming Christian. And they claim, this has to be a sociological or just a political movement. There's no way that this could be a genuine time of conversion. But as clans and tribes have been coming to Christ en masse in the last few years, it is becoming harder and harder to discount. I'm just going to name a few of these remarkable conversions and mass baptisms that have happened. You may not have heard of these. There are several tribes in Brazil, Irian Jaya, there's the Batak people of North Sumatra, the entire island of Neos where 102,000 people became Christians in a remarkably short period of time. How many people here have read the book or listened to the movie Peace Child? It's a wonderful book. If you want an exciting, this is one of the most exciting mission stories ever for your family, but that shows some tribes simultaneously coming to Christ in a, again, very, very short period of time. The only instance Of the entire world, in the entire world of a hundred thousand Muslims being one to Christ, almost overnight happened in Indonesia, where we have a lot of persecution of Christians. Likewise, Koh Tha Biu, a remarkable Burmese evangelist, was instrumental in discipling whole Karen communities and villages to Christ. And then there are the Minnehasa, the Celebes. Entire tribal movements have occurred in the Malucas, Songhe, and Talaud Islands. And other islands of the Pacific have been largely and very unexpectedly discipled very suddenly as people movements. That includes the Malas, Madagascar, Nagas, Garas, Mahars, Beals, and others. Actually, I won't take time to list all of them. If you read Donald McGavern's book, you will see that he claims that there are hundreds, not just a hundred, there are hundreds of people movements that have been coming to Christ in the last few years. And this gives heartburn to Baptistic missionaries. They think that just can't be. And there have been some missionaries who actually were there when the people are coming to Christ and they're trying to talk them out of it, thinking this can't be sincere. And eventually they're forced to concede. These are people who are genuinely on fire for the Lord. And so I would ask, why do people have this idea that this can't be true? Can God not convert a million people just as easily as He converts one individual? It's a miracle that any one individual comes to Christ. He can. So we really shouldn't be surprised. Acts 3.25 quotes the repeated promise to Abraham. It's a promise I think we must claim when it says, in your seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed. So that's a corporate coming to Christ of at least the nuclear family, but it's probably more likely referring to clans, bigger units. It's just one of the ways that God works. Psalm 22 verse 27 says, So the family is the smallest corporate unit, and reaching families rather than individuals has been the most effective means of reaching tribes. But Galatians 3.8 quotes the promise that is repeated three times in Genesis, in you all nations shall be blessed. And so the nation is the largest corporate unit that is prophesied to come to Christ. And if you start reading in the ancient prophets, you will see prophecies that this is going to become more and more common as history develops until finally all nations are converted, and that's exactly what we're commanded to do in the Great Commission. We're commanded to disciple all nations. Our vision many times is way too small in terms of what God wants us to do. There are examples in the Old Testament as well, like the multitudes of Persians who became Jews in Esther 8, verse 17, which would be another mass circumcision. Or you can think of the entire city of Nineveh being converted on one day. And Jesus said that was a genuine conversion. Or you can think of the Gibeonite tribe in Joshua 9. I think we need to dispose of this bad individualistic presupposition that there can't be genuine large-scale conversions of tribes and nations. There most certainly can, and history documents hundreds of examples. So that's a thoroughly Arminian presupposition. A second bad presupposition that has made people completely misunderstand the nature of circumcision is the thought that circumcision was just a sign of your citizenship in Israel, instead of being the sign of entrance into the synagogues of Israel, which were the churches. of Israel. Very typical Baptist interpretation. But there are several problems with that theory, and the first problem is that this passage right here shows the exact opposite. It shows that a minimum of 1.4 million uncircumcised males had been excluded from the Passover for many decades, but they had not been excluded from the nation. It shows that they had been barred from the sign of admission to the church, but they are still treated as Israelites with all of the privileges of Israelite citizenship. You didn't have to be circumcised to be an Israelite citizen, but you sure did have to be circumcised to be able to partake of the Passover or any of the other church benefits. There was a clear church-state distinction throughout Israel's history, as Greg Bonson and many other people have pointed out. The second problem with this theory is that they were an Israelite nation long before they were circumcised under Moses 40 years earlier. And that may seem like a strange statement because circumcision was started with Abraham, right? But let me explain. During the years of bondage in Egypt, God still spoke of them as being a nation. He still spoke of there being civil elders of Israel and citizens of Israel, and yet most of them had not been circumcised during that period of time, which it depends on your theory. It goes from 200 to 430 years. I tend to believe in the shorter one, but there are differences of view there. But it was not until they were circumcised and partook of Passover in Exodus 12 that God speaks of them as a congregation. There is a difference between the nation and the congregation, and many examples could be given. I'll just give you one. Anytime a person became ceremonially unclean, he was cut off from the congregation, but he was still a citizen of Israel. okay, of the nation. And so he would have to get baptized in order to come back into the congregation, but it was clear that there was a distinction between church and state. Third, when you study it out, their objection doesn't even fit the earlier evidence under Abraham. Long before there ever was a nation, Circumcision was given as a religious covenantal sign to Abraham. With Abraham it wasn't a sign of citizenship, it was a sign of church membership. And then fourth, they were certainly one nation under God during the 40 years of wandering that had occurred just prior to Joshua. Circumcision had nothing to do with there being a nation. We've already read in Exodus 12 that foreigners could get circumcised and enter the church, and they could partake of Passover, even if they weren't part of the nation. And Israelites, by the way, who were part of the synagogue system, they could be in synagogues in another nation and not have citizenship here in this nation. They would have citizenship in a foreign nation. And again, these are all illustrations that circumcision was purely a sign of membership in the spiritual Israel, the church. And so there is no way that Baptists can get around the evidence for infant baptism through this presupposition. If, as many of them admit, I think it's pretty hard to refute this, but if baptism replaces circumcision, and there are more and more Baptists who are recognizing this is irrefutable in the New Testament, if baptism replaces circumcision, then without a divine warrant we may not exclude the children of believers from the church. Okay, the third bad presupposition is the belief that no one but Caleb and Joshua had previously been circumcised. But that is not true either. Caleb and Joshua's male children were circumcised. Exodus 32 indicates that a large number of Levites, if not all the Levites, I happen to think it was all the Levites, remained very faithful to the Lord and to Moses. And as a result, they were not excommunicated. Numbers 25 indicates that Phinehas was not excommunicated. And there are other hints that God had raised up a remnant within Israel who continued to be faithful to the Lord, who was not excommunicated, who partook of Passover, partook of other communion meals, and had circumcised their children during that 40-year period. But the nation as a whole had not. Now you can find the fourth bad presupposition in many paid-to-communion books. It's not an essential argument to paid-to-communion at all, but it is one that's unfortunately been mentioned in a number of books. These books presuppose that Israel had been having communion all through the previous 40 years, but Exodus 12, verse 48, and many other passages affirm You cannot partake of Passover or any other communion meal unless you were circumcised back then, which means that for the previous 38 years, the manna that most of Israel ate was just food. It was not communion. Now, there were a remnant who used the manna as bread for communion and partook of communion under the authority of the Levites, but the rest were barred. Deuteronomy, Hebrews 3-4, 1 Corinthians 10, all make it crystal clear that the bulk of a nation did not partake of communion for 38 years, could not partake of communion during those 38 years because God had excommunicated them from the Lord's table at Kadesh Barnea 38 years before this chapter. Being excommunicated, they weren't allowed to apply the sacrament of circumcision to their children either. It was only during the first two years after leaving Egypt that they partook, and all of the textual data indicates that most of them partook unworthily during those two years and found judgment after judgment falling on them as the Pentateuch and 1 Corinthians 10 narrate. As time went on, there were more and more individuals who had been excommunicated from the synagogues, and therefore from the sacraments. But two years into the wilderness wanderings, God eventually excommunicated the entire nation as a covenantal unit, and only the individuals and families who remained faithful to the Lord were admitted, or some say readmitted. And by the way, this has also happened in the last 2,000 years, where entire nations were excommunicated. I won't get into that. But anyway, Deuteronomy 2, 14 through 17 says this. And the time we took to come from Kadesh Barnea until we crossed over the Valley of Zerud was 38 years, until all the generation of the men of war was consumed from the midst of the camp, just as the Lord had sworn to them. For indeed, the hand of the Lord was against them to destroy them from the midst of the camp until they were consumed. So it was when all the men of war had finally perished from among the people that the Lord spoke to me. And then God called his people to once again demonstrate their faith as a nation. So the circumcision of a nation actually was much more involved than the circumcision of an individual who had professed faith in Christ. Just like the baptism of nations today, well, people groups, is much more involved than just the baptism of an individual. So the whole nation was circumcised, many were not circumcised previously, but many of the families were. Now this brings us to a necessary good presupposition. Almost every confusion on this passage evaporates when one interprets it just by reading what happened in the previous 30 days. Approximately a month ago, from chapter 5, verse 2, every person in that nation had to read aloud and affirm for themselves the covenant curses and the covenant blessings of Deuteronomy 27 through 28. They got detailed instructions on the covenant in chapters 29 through 30. They made covenant affirmations in chapter 30. They received more instruction in chapter 31. They memorized a song in chapter 32. They received the blessings of the covenant in chapter 33. In chapter 34, they mourn over the death of Moses, and there's a transition of leadership to Joshua, and so there's mourning for 30 days. And then in the first chapters of Joshua, there were tests of the genuineness of their faith before they get circumcised in this chapter. The point is that there is much more needed in order to prove the nation's readiness for mass circumcision and coming into the covenant than for an individual. And for the most part, I think the church has followed these precautions before nations were baptized, starting with Armenia. They were allowed by the church to become baptized nations after they went through some preliminary vetting, basically. Now, because I'm not preaching on the last chapters of Deuteronomy, I can't get into all of that, but all of Deuteronomy 27 through 34 happened right before the crossing of the river into Canaan to get circumcised. And this last covenantal commitment, circumcision, had to happen before they could partake of Passover, which is the next passage, verses 10, you know, chapter 5, verses 10 through 12. And so there really is a beautiful logic to all of these chapters, and we've been seeing that God had raised up an entire generation of believers who had a vibrant faith in God. It wasn't necessarily absolutely every individual who had a genuine faith, but they all professed faith, and the vast majority of this next generation truly possessed it. And the remainder of this chapter will tell us about things that really need to be in place if we're going to Turn the world upside down so to speak. So let's start our exposition of these verses Verse 1 gets the readers juices flowing and we looked at that last week Finally they get to have the conquest of Canaan and the Canaanites are terrified and so in verse 2 God's very next words are make flint knives for yourself and Okay, we can understand knives in the hands of soldiers. Maybe these could be backup weapons, you know, if their sword falls out of their hands, they can whip out this knife. No, they're not going to use this knife against the Canaanites. This is going to be used on them. Yikes. Yeah, it's going to be surgery. Nor were these ordinary knives. Most knives of that period were made from bronze. These were explicitly said to have to be made from flint. That was very unusual. The only two places in the Bible that it mentions flint knives, it's for the ceremonial ritual of circumcision. ceremonial knives for a covenantal ritual. Now just imagine in your minds approximately, I think the figure is approximately 65,000 Levites who are the faithful pastors of that day performing surgery on 1.4 million male adults, children who are males and babies who are males. So what in the world is going on? Well, first I want to emphasize this was being done at God's command. This was not some strange idea that Joshua came up with. Verse 2 says, the Lord said, dot, dot, dot, circumcise. It's a command. God required this mass circumcision, and he recorded it in Scripture so that all generations, including our generation, could benefit from it. And by the way, the older literature, they understood these kinds of passages when they would apply passages like this to the conversion of nations in New Testament times. You don't see very modern missionary, very many modern missionaries doing this. But that has begun to change. Donald McGavern and quite a number of other missionaries have been writing on this, and the people movements have been forcing people to begin to recognize this is God's normal way of working. It has been in the past, and it will continue to in the future. The second thing I want you to notice is that God's covenant required it. Now this is implied by three hints. The covenant name, Yehoah, points back to God's covenant with Moses. The phrase children of Israel points them back to God's covenant with Jacob because Israel is Jacob's covenant name. And then the third hint is the word circumcision itself. Genesis 17 had established the covenant by making the ceremony of circumcision imperative before people would be able to enter into covenant with God. It indicates that the ideal age for circumcision was eight days old. It says this. For the generations to come, every male among you who is eight days old must be circumcised. So that passage is implying that God's ordinary means of spreading the faith is for there to be generation after generation of God's grace capturing our children. Now obviously this chapter shows that this principle can be interrupted. and has been interrupted, and probably will from time to time continue to be interrupted by unbelief. But right from the beginning, covenant succession was implied as the norm. Interruptions to covenant succession are not the norm. They are abnormal, okay? Belief from generation to generation should be the norm. Now why eight days old or older? Science tells us why. The human body has two blood clotting elements, vitamin K and prothrombin. Vitamin K is not formed in the body until somewhere between day two and day seven. Prothrombin is only at 30% on day three, but it ratchets up to 110% of normal on day eight, and then it settles down to 100% of normal. So God designed our bodies to handle circumcision best at day eight after birth or later. The designer of vitamin K and prothrombin knew best when he gave the norm of circumcision at day eight. Now, the next phrase has the words the second time in it. So circumcise the sons of Israel again for the second time. Now, that does not mean that all of these individuals are getting a second circumcision. That's not even possible. It means that this is the second time that the nation as a whole would be circumcised. First time that they were circumcised as a whole is when they left Egypt. That mass circumcision, by the way, shows that not all people movements are genuine. Because here's a whole bunch of people come out of Egypt, they profess faith, they get circumcised, and then most of them fall away. And so it does show, 1 Corinthians 10 and other passages show, that there can be fake believers. And that does occasionally happen even today. Well, in this text, it's now 40 years later. So why aren't all the men 40 and under circumcised? The short answer is that God had excommunicated most of the older generation. They were part of the nation, but not part of the synagogue system. And therefore, they were not heirs to the promises being signed and sealed by circumcision. It wasn't Israel as a nation that was an heir to those promises, it was Israel as a congregation. And there's many scriptures I won't go into, but Paul said that all the promises, without exception, all the promises are yea and amen in Christ, and they can only be received by faith. The long answer is given by Moses at the end of the 40-year period, and he gives that history in all of Deuteronomy 1 through 2 and shows that because the 20-year-olds and above had repeatedly rebelled against God and shown their unbelief, God swore in His wrath that they would not enter into Canaan. He calls them an evil and an unbelieving generation. So you cannot be a genuine believer if you are called by God an evil and an unbelieving generation. Hebrews 3.19 says simply, so we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief. As the expositor's Bible commentary words it, the sign of the covenant had been suspended while a whole generation rejected the covenant in disobedience and unbelief. Where there is no faith on the part of the parents, they're excluded from the sacraments and so are their children. because they're a covenantal unit, right? So for the remainder of those 38 years, the vast majority of the nation had not had communion and none of the unbelieving parents were allowed to circumcise their children. It's not an issue of neglect. Some people think, oh, they just didn't want to do it. No, had nothing to do with neglect. They were not allowed by God's law to circumcise their children because they were not part of the church. And this is why we do not allow unbelievers. I've had many unbelievers say, hey, can I, Can you baptize my children? You know, unbelievers cannot have the sign of the covenant applied to their children. By the way, circumcision, baptism, on many, many levels they are completely parallel. I mentioned earlier that the Levites for the most part remained faithful and there were some other faithful families who had access to the sacraments. But most of the synagogue system of Exodus 18 had pretty much closed down because of lack of believing families. It was a time of decline for the church. Since only believers could circumcise their children, none of the children born during the wilderness wanderings to unbelievers have been circumcised. So this is the second mass circumcision. And I know it just sometimes may seem strange, but let me give you three practical applications just from this point. And this is really important for some pastors who always are trying to read people's hearts. First, no one but God can know with absolute certainty whether a profession of faith is genuine or not. Okay, we're not asked to know with certainty. We don't need to know with certainty. Deuteronomy gives some tests before adults are circumcised, but even though some of those same tests were applied and were passed by the Israelites who came out of Egypt, Okay, before the first Passover, we later discover it wasn't genuine faith. But the second application flows from the first. Just because we don't know for sure whether a profession of faith is genuine or not is irrelevant to whether or not we should accept that profession of faith. We should. We must take professions of faith at their word unless their behavior dictates otherwise. God himself didn't wait for years after a profession of faith before he applied circumcision and exodus. And you read through the New Testament, they believe, they get baptized. He doesn't wait for years like some people, you know, make people wait. There are perfectionists out there who are so afraid of getting tears into the church they will wait for years after a profession of faith make people prove that they really are Christians before they will baptize them. That is not biblical. And by the way, those perfectionists still find some tears in their church. Okay, it's better to use God's means of purification, which is church discipline, rather than to unnecessarily exclude people, which is the third application. Jesus said we shouldn't be surprised that there will be tears in the church. He said that uprooting tears prematurely can do great damage to the good wheat. And so despite the first bad start 40 years earlier, God repeats his command for yet another mass circumcision. We cannot question God's wisdom. You know, some people would say, you know, you should have figured out the first time didn't work out, let's not do it again. But no, we cannot question God's wisdom. And most of the hundreds of people, modern people movements have proven to be rather sincere and powerful conversions. There are some that have not, but most have stayed true to the Lord. Verse 3 shows that the circumcision was done under authority and not by individuals within their own families. This is a very important point that is being violated left and right in America. We do not recognize the baptisms performed by unordained parents. A baptism must be performed by an ordained pastor for it to be legitimate. And that was a pattern that was already set in the Old Testament. If a circumcision was performed outside of the synagogue system in the Old Testament, what they did is they required a baptism. by Levites before they would acknowledge that circumcision. And likewise, if a Jew apostatized and then later repented and came back to the faith, he'd be baptized. And the baptism was counted as a circumcision. I'm not gonna get into that today, but let's go through the phrases of verse three. It says, so Joshua made flint knives for himself and circumcised the sons of Israel at the hill of the four skins. How did he make those knives? Did he personally make thousands of knives? Well, I guess it's possible. Very, very unlikely. Did he all by himself circumcise 1.4 million males in one day? There is no way he could have done that, even if he was Superman. OK, that would have been dangerous, actually. So why does it say he made the knives, he circumcised the people? He's the one in authority, that's why. If he delegated the task, it was still Joshua who was responsible to make sure that it was done. And by the way, all of this was worded this way because Joshua is typological of the Lord Jesus Christ who baptizes the nations. Jesus does not himself individually baptize all of the people. He does it through his delegated representatives. And by the way, the name Joshua, I think I mentioned this last time, in Hebrews is the same spelling as Jesus, okay? He is a type of Jesus. His conquest of Canaan is a type of Jesus taking the conquest of the world through the gospel, right? And you can see that especially in Hebrews 3-4. Indeed Jesus is said to circumcise us without hands in baptism. Colossians 2, 11 and 12. So as I said earlier, baptism replaces circumcision. Maybe a better way of saying it is that the bloody rite of circumcision passed away with the death of Christ. No more bloody rites any longer allowed. But the baptism that always accompanied circumcision and was treated as being a part of that continues, takes its place. In any case, Joshua is the authority who represents Jesus typologically. But it wasn't just that it wasn't just Joshua who did the circumcising could be seen in verse eight, which says, so it was when they had finished circumcising all the people. Notice that they, there were a lot more people than just Joshua who were circumcising. Who were the they? Well, I believe it was the faithful Levites who were already circumcised, who had remained faithful to the Lord, who had themselves been partaking of both sacraments for the faithful remnant. And so Joshua had a lot of help with the religious leaders who served under him. But all of this was done at one place, a hill named after this act of covenanting. Verse three goes on to say, so Joshua made flint knives for himself and circumcised the sons of Israel at the hill of the foreskins. Now, there is debate whether the hill is just this huge mound of foreskins or whether it was a natural hill. Most people favor the latter view. It doesn't matter which interpretation you take, though. It was all done at one place, not at hundreds of thousands of places. So, why do I emphasize this, that it was at one place? It's because this was a public sign, not something done in the privacy of the home. Now, I know it would have been embarrassing, but it was being performed publicly before God and before the Levites. And this, too, speaks against private baptism and shows that the sacraments were done under authority. What did it symbolize? Verse 9 tells us, says, Then the Lord said to Joshua, This day I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt from you. Therefore, the name of the place is called Gilgal to this day. Gilgal means roll away. Even though they had been called a nation by Israel, their unbelief and rebellion showed they were more like Egypt than like the spiritual Israel God had intended them to be. And Revelation chapter 11 calls apostate Israel of the first century, Sodom and Egypt. Now, though there are liberals who deny this, Jeremiah 9 verses 25 through 26 makes it crystal clear that the Egyptians of that day were uncircumcised in their flesh. Some liberals say, oh yeah, everybody got circumcised back then. That's not true. So circumcision is a symbol of no longer identifying with Egypt or the world, putting off everything of Egypt that had clung to them and by faith following God. It's just like the sign of baptism that symbolizes the washing away of our old identity, giving us a new identity. And all of this pointed to the need to have inward regeneration if we are to be pleasing to God. Now, in the Old Testament, they spoke of that as the circumcision of the heart. In the New Testament, it corresponds to the baptism of the Holy Spirit or what some call the washing of regeneration. Though Deuteronomy 10.16 says that all were accountable to have their hearts circumcised, And though Jeremiah 4.4 describes God's judgments to the foreskins of our hearts which keep us clothed in worldly thinking, many scriptures show this inward circumcision is absolutely impossible apart from an outside helper, the Holy Spirit, His work of grace. So Deuteronomy 30 verse six gives the remedy. It says the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul that you may live. Now the reason for their uncircumcised state is explained in verses 4 through 6, totally consistent with what I explained in the introduction, so I don't need to spend a lot of time on it. Let me read it though, beginning at verse 4. And this is the reason why Joshua circumcised them. All the people who came out of Egypt who were males, all the men of war, had died in the wilderness on the way after they came out of Egypt. For all the people who came out had been circumcised, but all the people born in the wilderness on the way as they came out of Egypt had not been circumcised. For the children of Israel walked 40 years in the wilderness till all the people who were men of war who came out of Egypt were consumed because they did not obey the voice of the Lord, to whom the Lord swore that He would not show them the land which the Lord had sworn to their fathers that He would give us, a land flowing with milk and honey. Just to summarize very briefly, verse 4 explains there had been a mass circumcision when they came out of Egypt, Verse 5 explains that none of their children born after Kadesh Barnea had been circumcised. Verses 5 through 6 explains why they were under God's judgment for rebellion and unbelief. They didn't believe God's promise, even though God had given that promise with an oath. Okay? And by the way, this is an interesting thought here. For every soldier to have died, means that many of these people never reached an age much above age 60, which for that time period was actually a remarkably low average age of death. God's covenant promises of long life were annulled, His protections and His blessings were cut short, and longer life is one of the blessings that flows out of the corporate faith where the curses of God are removed. And I think it ties in with Ray's book very, very well. We'll maybe mention that in a bit. But let's look at the exegetical reasons why we can conclude that these men had faith. I see four evidences. First, verse seven says, then Joshua circumcised their sons, whom he, it's capital H, that is God, whom he raised up in their place. So this is a God thing, not just a Joshua thing. God was at work in their hearts. Second, even though this would have incapacitated them for war, they submitted to circumcision in faith. Verses seven through eight shows this incapacitation. Then Joshua circumcised their sons whom he raised up in their place, for they were uncircumcised, because they had not been circumcised on the way. So it was, when they had finished circumcising all the people, that they stayed in their places in the camp till they were healed." Now, we looked at this call to faith extensively under verse 1, and I mentioned just an example in Genesis 34, the entire city of Shechem was circumcised. And while they're healing, all it took is two men, Simeon and Levi, to kill off the entire city. That shows how incapacitated you are when you're in that situation, especially with stone knives, I guess, without hospitals. Yet despite the cost of the pain, despite the risk that would make them vulnerable to Canaanite attack, they trusted God implicitly and got circumcised on the dangerous side of the river, the Canaanite side. So that took faith. And you know what? In countries of Africa and Asia, when a person gets baptized, the people see that as the dividing line. That's when persecution starts setting in. Getting a public baptism takes faith. It shows a definitive break with their pagan roots, and it publicly declares that separation. Another evidence of faith is in verse 9. God says, this day I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt from you. Now repentance and faith are flip sides of the same coin. Where you have one, you're always going to have the other. So If the rolling away of the reproach of Egypt shows God's affirmation of their repentance that it was genuine, if you've got genuine repentance, you've got genuine faith. The fourth evidence of faith is that God admitted them to the Passover in verses 10 through 12. It's a sacrament of faith. I already dealt with some of the typological significance of this event earlier, but let me make a few more points. Hebrews 3 through 4 makes the book of Joshua a type of the Great Commission where Jesus uses his invisible double-edged sword of the scripture to advance his kingdom, but there's a granular application that Hebrews makes as well. Let me just give five quick points. First, the crossing of the Red Sea 40 years earlier represents the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. Second, the 40 years of wandering represents the 40 years of patience that Jesus had on Israel from AD 30 to AD 70. Now there were victories made during that period. There was a remnant of Jews who were being saved. Third, AD 70 represents God's disposing of the reproach of Egypt from Israel as the bulk of the generation passes away in unbelief and judgment. Fourth, the reconstitution of a new Israel is made up of 144,000 Jews from all 12 tribes into which other believers are grafted. And that's represented here by the formation of a new Israel out of people who had previously been identified as Egypt. Fifth, the conquest of Canaan in the next chapters under Joshua represents the new covenant advance of the gospel. But Hebrews points out Joshua did not finish that task. There was more work to be done by the judges, by David, and by Solomon, the last type of Jesus in his universal kingdom of peace. And the more you dig into it, the more beautifully calibrated you see the typology to be. Well, I'm going to end by making 10 additional applications to people movements today. First, we shouldn't be surprised by the hundreds of examples of people groups who have come to Christ in recent history or by the nations in the past, in Europe. in Africa, in the Middle East, who became Christian. The focus of the Great Commission is not on individuals. It is on discipling nations. Our job is not done until there are covenantal units of families, clans, cities, counties, states, and nations that have embraced Christ and put off the world's way of doing things. We need to press for this. But second, we shouldn't bypass the tough requirements that God laid down for this nation before they received the sign of initiation. These requirements are beautifully laid out in Deuteronomy 27 through 34 and the first chapters of Joshua. And if God has given a people group genuine faith, they're not going to balk at these requirements. You know, the cost of discipleship, they're not going to balk at it at all. And even though I don't want to blame any deficiencies in my preaching this morning on Ray, because he wrote his book completely independently, I really think he does a fantastic job of showing the costs that must be counted for a county to have Egypt rolled away and God's curse removed from the land. And we are seeing some beautiful examples of God's curses removed in some of these tribes that are coming to Christ. Third, we shouldn't be disheartened by the abandonment of the faith that previous Christian nations have made. God's Word anticipates that such is possible, even though His goal is for there to be generation after generation of faithfulness. Even the apostles had a Simon Magus who proved to be a fake believer in Acts chapter 8, even though he was baptized. But those rare examples of bad people movements don't nullify the principle. But fourth, this means that no Christian clan, tribe, or nation can ever be lax in their pursuit of God. Just as individuals need to constantly be pressing into God, pursuing Him more and more, the same is true, there cannot be any neutrality of corporate groups. You're either going forward or you're going to be backsliding. So we need to be on guard against nominalism. Fifth, Deuteronomy and Joshua highlight the critical importance of church discipline in the health of a church. Some think the only way to maintain purity in the church is by having a believers-only church and exclude all children. But biblical purity is found in discipleship and discipline, not in excluding our children. I think it's so ironic that these so-called believers-only churches are so antinomian. and do not discipline people who violate God's laws left and right. I hate to pick on other churches, but there's a church right here in town that has a lady who continues year after year, even though she's living in adultery and sin, continues to lead the worship music. Okay? So discipline is almost non-existent in many churches. And I don't care how much you talk about profession of faith, which we do believe in. We believe in a profession of faith. But if you don't believe in discipline, you will not have a pure and healthy church, period. That's God's authorized means. Now, obviously, when discipline is imposed on adults, the children sometimes suffer. That was certainly the case here. Verses 2 through 9 show that the children of these adults no longer had the privilege of circumcision. In verse 9, God was treating the children as Egyptians, even though they were believers. But they were not yet part of the church. They had not yet been circumcised. And so the children of apostates are excluded from the church until they make profession of faith. Sixth, this chapter calls us to antithesis and to counting the cost. Out in Ethiopia, when people would come to Christ, they could sometimes skate by without getting a lot of persecution after they made profession of faith. But the moment they got baptized, oh wow, the ostracism and the persecution really began. It was a dividing point between Egypt and Israel, between the world and the church. Seventh, the shorter lifespan of Israel in the wilderness is just one symptom of God's covenantal curses being experienced in tangible ways. And the covenant reverses that. Some of the people groups that have been on fire for the Lord have not only seen their lifespans increase and diseases decreasing, but they have seen massive blessings in crops, reduction of crime, increase of finances, education, business, weather patterns, relationships. other areas. I keep getting newsletters from Reformed missionaries that testify to this happening. Let me read you just one I received this past week. I've shared some of these in the past, but this just came into my mailbox this past week. There was a Reformed missionary who invited Gary DeMar and Andrew Sandlin, Ron Smith, a whole bunch of Reconstructionists down to Mexico to train one of these people movements, of tribes that are coming to Christ. When the missionary Glenn Dunn was describing the work, and I don't know how to pronounce this, I should have looked it up. Ixtzalacahuaca, whatever. There's some town in Mexico. I should have looked up the pronunciation. Partway through the letter, he said this, after graduating, Tomas returned to Isla Cajuca, and in short order, he built a church with over 1,000 congregants. How did he do it? The answer seemed so easy and obvious to him. At that time, 50 years ago, everyone eked out an impoverished living from their small government allotted tract of land in their own mule or oxen. Thomas prayed over each believer's plot of land. He asked God to make an obvious distinction between those who belonged to the kingdom of Satan and the kingdom of God. I was there. I saw it. I walked the fields. The unbelievers' cornfields were yellowish about waist high. The believers' cornfields were dark green over my head, field after field, side by side, same old-fashioned farming methods, one blessed, one not. Church growth was explosive. Some of you have seen the Transformations videos. Though I cannot in any way endorse the New Apostolic Reformation group, since they have major doctrinal flaws and extreme practices, they have been documenting some of these social and physical blessings that flow from God's curses being removed from the land. It's real. And if you want to think locally, I think Pastor Raymond Simmons' book does a much better job of introducing at least some of the ideas of the blessings that can flow locally when God's curse is removed from the land or from the people. We definitely need to be praying these blessings on each other in this congregation. Eighth, the individual is not lost in the corporate. It is not either or, as some people try to make it out to be. Verse 2 and verse 3 show each male getting circumcised. You can't get more individual than that, right? There is individualism. It wasn't enough for the tribal chief to make profession of faith and get circumcised on behalf of everybody. No, each family had to make its own painful step of faith. People movements are not like Islamic countries in North Africa where everybody is forced to embrace Islam, or where tribal chief makes a decision and everybody just goes along with it. No, we're talking about God sovereignly moving and bringing genuine conversion to what? To a mass of individuals. It's a mass of individuals, corporate and individual together. Ninth, people movements find it just as painful to join the covenant as individuals do. The pain of Israel in these verses is obvious, but there are other forms of persecution and pain that people movements have had to face when they embrace Christ. Tenth, Verse 7 shows that people movements are not merely sociological movements. They are a work of God's sovereign grace. It says God raised them up. No individual human can produce a people movement. It's a mysterious moving of God's Spirit. Donald McGavern says, we dare not think of people movements to Christ as merely social phenomenon. True, we can account for some of the contributing factors which have brought them about, but there is so much that is mysterious and beyond anything we can ask or think, so much that is a product of religious faith and so much evident working of divine power that we must confess that people movements are gifts of God. And I say amen. Now, this has been a rather odd pericope that we have looked through, but I hope that you have not only understood it, but that this passage here will challenge your faith to believe that God does indeed continue to work in families, clans, and nations in remarkable ways. Amen. Father, we thank you for your Word, and we thank you that it applies to all of life. Every bit of your Word was intended for us, and we're grateful for it as a gift from your hand. And I pray that as our worldview has expanded just looking at this particular passage, that our faith would expand as well. Do bless this your people, in Jesus' name, amen.