Reading from Joshua 4, beginning at verse 15, Then the Lord spoke to Joshua, saying, Command the priests who bear the ark of the testimony to come up from the Jordan. Joshua therefore commanded the priests, saying, Come up from the Jordan. And it came to pass, when the priests who bore the ark of the covenant of the Lord had come from the midst of the Jordan, and the soles of the priests' feet touched the dry land, that the waters of the Jordan returned to their place, and overflowed all its banks as before. Now the people came up from the Jordan on the tenth day of the first month, and they camped in Gilgal on the east border of Jericho. And those 12 stones which they took out of the Jordan, Joshua set up in Gilgal. Then he spoke to the children of Israel, saying, when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, what are these stones? Then you shall let your children know, saying, Israel crossed over this Jordan on dry land. For the Lord your God dried up the waters of the Jordan before you until you had crossed over, as the Lord your God did to the Red Sea, which He dried up before us until we had crossed over, that all the peoples of the earth may know the hand of the Lord, that it is mighty, that you may fear the Lord your God forever. Amen. Father, I thank you for your word, and I pray that as we continue to dig into it, that you would enable me to faithfully give exposition in each one of us, to faithfully receive it and live it. And we pray this in Jesus' name, amen. Well, we spent a long time in these first four chapters, and I plan to finish off chapter four today. But before I do so, I want to give a little bit of review. We saw in chapter 3 how to tell the difference between genuine faith, and that is God-given faith, and counterfeit faith. And then we looked at 10 factors that act sort of as fertilizer for faith, or you can think of it as an atmosphere in which faith can grow. And we saw that any community that has those 10 factors present is going to be very strong in their faith. And then the next sermon, we looked at some of the ways in which we can walk by faith in the nitty gritty of real life. In chapter four, we saw a connection with memorials. and how narrating a history of faith can stir up faith in ourselves. Memorials actually can be faith builders. How many Christians have gotten faith to really attempt great things for God after they have read a Christian missionary biography? It's happened many a time, and so memorials can be connected to strengthening faith. Last week we saw how genuine faith inevitably moves us to more and more faithfulness, and we saw what some of the specifics of what faithfulness looks like. You can distinguish faith from faithfulness, but you certainly cannot separate the two. The one flows from the other. Now today we're going to be seeing how faith lets us close doors to stages in our life, however remarkable and wonderful those stages may be, and to go through new doors of opportunity to test our faith. New beginnings often start by closing doors to something, and nostalgia can make people feel bad about that. Nostalgia can actually kill a person's faith to expect new things from God. A lot of people don't realize that. They think they're honoring the past, but strong nostalgia is not just learning from the past. That's a good thing. We saw there's many ways in which we can learn from the past in the issue of memorials, but strong nostalgia tends to make people camp in their past and not move on. And the older we get, the easier it is for nostalgia to drag us away from a life of faith. And in later chapters, we're gonna see how Joshua and Caleb fought against that tendency. Now in these verses, God was closing the door to retreat as they went through a new door that would soon force them out onto the battlefield. And this was a miracle. That was never going to be repeated in later generations, and that's okay. Every generation sees its own new miracles from the Lord. But even this closing of the door was clearly God's will. It wasn't like they're trying to escape from something. Sometimes we justify our inaction by taking difficulties as closed doors. No, this was clearly a door that the Lord himself was closing. And in the first point, I want to demonstrate that because this is a contested point. Some people try to explain everything in chapters three and four in terms of scientific processes, and I think they're not glorifying God when they do that. We can see some evidences that this miracle came at God's command, not simply naturalistic causes, which, by the way, if you have commentaries on Joshua, you're going to see the majority of them tend to explain this in terms of a landslide 18 miles north, you know, that filled in the river and kept it from flowing for a day. But we saw overwhelming evidence previously, exegetical evidence, that this cannot be explained in terms of naturalistic causes. It was a miracle. And the reflowing of the water was a miracle as well. Verse 15 says, then the Lord spoke to Joshua, saying, this... Okay, and we'll just stop there. So it's the Lord speaking. This was not just going to be Joshua speaking. The miracle was in God's timing, by God's leading, it was caused by God. And then it goes on to say that Joshua communicates exactly what God said. It's mediated through the prophet. And that way there would be no mistaking what was happening when they could hear with their own ears what God was saying through Joshua. What God said, Joshua said. Now, while there are differing views on this, I believe that this fits the true definition of prophecy. Prophecy was not simply revelation going from God's mind into a prophet's mind and then leaving it up to the prophet to put it into his own words. That's kind of a neo-Orthodox view that the Bible, you know, it contains God's word, but not the very words themselves are God's word. And there are hundreds of scriptures that show that the very words that were uttered by Moses, Joshua, David, you name it, are ascribed to God as if they are God's word. And there's dozens of scriptures that speak of God's word being put into the mouth of a prophet, not simply into the mind, but into the mouth of a prophet. And we'll probably look at that at some point in the book of Joshua. to counter the new orthodox views of scripture, but right now I just want to focus on the miraculous nature of the return of the water. It returned at the command of Joshua the prophet. The flowing of the river as before was as much of a miracle as the water standing up in a heap. You know, this invisible dam was a miracle previously. And to make it crystal clear that it was God himself who was holding the water back, it was visually represented by the Ark of the Covenant being held by those four priests standing right there next to that wall of water, and the fact that the reflowing of the water was a direct result of God, It was made clear by the fact that when the priests who were carrying that ark, the moment their feet got on the other side, the water started flowing again. And so if this was just a natural occurring dam 18 miles north, it'd take a while for that water to get down there. And it would be flowing much more strongly than it had previously been flowing because just natural principles of engineering of hydraulics would say that there would be a massive extra amount of water that would be flowing through. So the flooding would be much wider. And yet God made it very clear it came back exactly as it had been flowing before. And it's hard to explain that from any other vantage point than of a miracle. The third clue that this was a miracle is that it all happened instantaneously. They didn't have to wait for the water to come from Adam. Verse 18. Now, some of the commentaries that I've looked at said, ah, see, they stepped onto dry land. That proves that there must have been pools of water. And as one commentary said, it was very muddy when they were crossing this water. Well, they're ignoring so many clues that we've already gone over in the context. I'll just read you one. Joshua 3.17. uses exactly the same Hebrew word for dry land two times, and let me read that for you. It says, then the priests who bore the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord stood firm on dry ground, same Hebrew word, in the midst of the Jordan, and all Israel crossed over on dry ground, same Hebrew word again, until all the people had crossed completely over the Jordan. And I won't repeat some of the other clues, But the point is, the ground in the middle of the Jordan was just as dry as the ground that was outside of the riverbed. That's a miracle. It was instantaneously dried up. And the wording of chapter 4, verse 18 is emphasizing the fact that the moment the priest carrying the ark stepped out of the former dry ground riverbed, The riverbed was no longer dry land, and only where they were now stepping was dry land. It was an instantaneous difference between dry and wet, okay? In the literal rendering, the Hebrews says the waters returned to the place where they had previously walked and overflowed its banks as before. Okay, enough said on the miraculous nature of that. I think we dealt with this enough previously, but why did God do it this way? Why did God have them cross during the time when it was the most flooded? And why did he miraculously close the door? And I've suggested some other reasons in previous sermons, but let me suggest one more possible reason. I believe God did this miracle to close the door to going back. Until the waters abated in a few weeks, There was no going back for at least the cattle and the carts and the equipment and the children. They were committed to staying on the dangerous side of the Jordan River. They were committed to the conquest. And God often does this with us. We sometimes don't recognize the closed doors until we've stepped out in obedience of faith and we're following the Lord and we look back and we go, wow, okay, there's no going back. I'm committed to where I have started walking. In hindsight, you can see the truth of Revelation 3, verse 7, where God gave encouragement to the struggling church of Philadelphia, saying this, These things says he who is holy, he who is true, he who has the key of David, he who opens and no one shuts, and shuts and no one opens. And I love that expression. We do not need to get stressed out by closed doors, by locked doors. It's because the God who loves us dearly is the one who has shut those doors that we can just say with confidence, okay, what's God's next step in my life? God closed the door to ministry in Paul's life when he had him thrown into prison. And Paul knew if God's closing the doors to the ministry I was engaging in, he's opening up some door, and later he realizes exactly what that door was. He was chained to these guards, and they were special guards who had access to the Caesar's household, they were a captive audience. You know, people think he's the captive, but they were a captive audience to the preaching of the gospel. They get saved. They win other guards to Christ. And before you know it, there are members of Caesar's household who have expressed faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. If that door had not been closed for Paul's ministry and a new door opened, Many of those people probably would never have heard the gospel. And so Paul said that he was a prisoner of the Lord. It wasn't Rome alone who closed the door. No, he was a prisoner of the Lord. And so we can trust that God has something good when he either miraculously or providentially closes doors. But this section also encourages us to not get slowed down by nostalgia. Last week, Kathy and I were looking through some old pictures of some of the amazing things that God had done in our lives in the Davenport property. And some of, we were just remembering some of the very unique miracles that the Lord had done. And in some ways, we miss the 14 years of having international students live with us. It was a blessed time of giving. and seeing God's grace at work, seeing miracles happen. But when God closed those doors after 14 years of ministry, he instantly opened up some new avenues of ministry. And when he completely closed the door to Davenport, he's opened up other opportunities for ministry. In other words, you just go with the flow of where the Lord is providentially guiding and directing. It's easy to be so nostalgic about the cool things of the past that we wish we could go back. We dwell on it too much. But faithfulness calls each of us to press into the new that God has open for us. And let me just from this passage explain how nostalgia could grab their hearts. David alluded, not David, Gary alluded to it earlier. You know, these people wanted Jesus to provide manna for them, just like in Israel. Well, they had been experiencing the provision of God's manna for 40 years on a daily basis. How cool is that? And yet in Joshua 5, verse 12, it says, in four days, on the first time that they had Passover, manna stops, okay? So no looking back, they're gonna be going on to new ventures with the Lord. They could look back with nostalgia on this parting of the river and say, man, I wish God would part the rivers for us regularly when we need to cross over the Jordan. And he would give new miracles to them But even though we need to appreciate the past and we can learn from the past, one of the purposes of memorials, we should not camp out forever around the past, but be willing to press into the new open doors that God has given. So the point is, don't miss the lesson of closed doors. God closes doors for a good reason. But in verses 19 through 24, we have the opening of the door through which the text clearly styles it as a new Exodus. He explicitly compares it to the Red Sea Crossing and the Exodus out of Egypt. First of all, we have the timing given to us in verse 19. Now, the people came up from the Jordan on the 10th day of the first month, and they camped in Gilgal on the east border of Jericho. Now, according to Exodus 12, verse 3, the 10th day of the first month was the day that a lamb was selected for each household, and they would prepare for the Passover, which would occur four days later. And so it's anticipating the future Passover. But this is also one of several hints that he's comparing this to their leaving Egypt and the exodus. The next hint is given in verse 20. And those 12 stones which they took out of the Jordan, Joshua set up in Gilgal. Gilgal was a religious site to which Joshua returned several times during his ministry. There were two other sites as well, chapter 18, begins mentioning another site by the name of Shiloh, and then the third site was Shechem in chapter 24, verse 1. But Gilgal is the place where the entire nation is going to become circumcised, enter into covenant with God. They're going to participate in the Passover. And by using the term Gilgal here, he's looking forward to anticipating that time. In chapter 9, a sanctuary and an altar would be built here by the Lord. But the name is explained in chapter 5, verse 9. Once Israel was circumcised, Joshua says, this day I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt from you. And the text goes on to explain, therefore, the name of the place is called Gilgal to this day. Okay, so he hadn't explained it yet, but by using the term Gilgal, he's anticipating that theology. Gilgal meant rolling away. The fact that they were uncircumcised meant that they were very similar to Egypt, and the previous generation was considered unbelievers, right? Similar to Egypt, and when the connection to Egypt had been completely rolled away, they were ready to do what an Israel should do. Previous exodus was incomplete since the people lacked faith and they were constantly wanting to go back to Egypt. But with that door closed and a new door of opportunity opened, Egypt had been rolled away. And in the same way, most of us have had one or more times in our lives when there's been a major break with the past. Certainly conversion can be that. a later commitment of our life to the Lord, maybe some traumatic event that's forced us to trust God. But learn to rejoice in those closed doors and those new beginnings. Don't get bitter over closed doors. But even the instructions that are given here show that this was a time of new beginnings, not a repeat of the miracles of the past. Verse 21 affirms that they aren't the last generation, for example. Then he spoke to the children of Israel, saying, when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, what are these stones? OK, these questions imply the need for doctrine. We'll look at that in a bit. But they also imply that there will be a new generation. He's focusing on new beginnings, and the next two verses indicate the responsibility to pass on redemptive history to them. For the Lord your God dried up the waters of the Jordan before you until you had crossed over, as the Lord your God did to the Red Sea, which He dried up before us until we had crossed over. And I want you to notice in that last verse the explicit comparison to the crossing of the Red Sea, as the Lord your God did to the Red Sea, which He dried up before us until we had crossed over. So all of this is showing new beginnings That Israel had they had left their old life behind had been resurrected to a new life and they now had new purposes So in the remainder of this sermon what I want to do is I want to look at those new purposes That God had for them. He had purposes for that generation. He had purposes for future generations he had purposes for the world as a whole and And let me back up to the verses we just went over and give six purposes for that generation of Jews. And we can see this in verses 21 through 23. First, these verses call upon Israel to instruct their children in the faith. Verse 22 says, You shall let your children know, saying, and he gives a sample recitation of redemptive history. So the parents are called upon to teach their children. Now that's nothing new. They've been admonished to do this earlier, and we see this all the way back in Deuteronomy 4 and Deuteronomy 6 and quite a number of other passages where parents are tasked with passing on the faith to their children, instructing, discipling them. Homeschooling is one of the marvelous ways of passing on a heritage in covenant succession. It's not the only way, but it is a very helpful tool. But we are motivated to pass on the faith when we realize that God has promised that it is possible to have covenant succession. The ideal of covenant succession is given in Deuteronomy 7, 9 and Psalm 105, verse 8, where it talks about God's faithfulness to a thousand generations of those who love him. That's astounding. I mean, we tend to look around us and we see this judge's cycle and we think that's all that's going to ever happen. But he has said, no, this is really going to be the norm, a thousand generations of those who love him. That's miraculous. But hey, we serve a God of miracles, right? And so this is something that we can expect, but it's not gonna happen automatically. It will happen to a people of faith who faithfully pass on through discipleship and training the faith to their children. A second purpose of these memorial stones was to alert the Jews to the danger of forgetting what God had done in their lives. We tend to be a forgetful people. And we talked about that two weeks ago when we looked at memorials, so I'm not going to dive into it right now. But we do need to jog our memories from time to time, and that's the purpose of memorials, so that we can remember how God has done awesome things in our lives. And there are various ways. I'm thankful that some of the families have been reporting ways that they have been implementing that sermon on memorials in their families. Third, these verses warn us to not get so busy in our important endeavors of conquest that we become spiritually myopic. Myopia is nearsightedness. These memorial stones called upon the Israelites to not just get caught up in what their generation is doing, but to look beyond that to future generations. And it's calling future generations to look at what God has done in past generations. And it's calling both to look at what God is doing and seek to lift up the glory of God in the world. And so the memorial was a call to stop being short-sighted or self-absorbed, to have a vision that's much a bigger kingdom vision than we tend to have. Fourth, these verses call that generation to already be preparing for future generations before those children even come. And it's not just calling us to pray for our future children, that's a good thing to do. I started praying for our children long before I was married, and my father modeled that to us. But I think we need to be anticipating what kinds of tools, what kinds of heritage to be passing on. There need to be multi-generational strategies that we begin to develop. So don't be caught off guard when the children come. Prepare yourselves to be ready. Fifth, our generation needs to know covenant history or it will be lost by the next generation. Now I know some people don't like history. I didn't used to like history until I stumbled upon covenant history and providential history. I began to see connections and see meaning in history. It's not meaningless at all. And I praise God there's good books that make it a whole lot easier for us to pass that on to our kids. Sixth, since Israel would regather at Gilgal for religious festivals from time to time, these stones were a call to plan for times of refreshing, to anticipate them. And modern equivalents to this would be going to conferences, or going on vacation, or prayer and planning retreats, or continuing education times like the Duffs and the Foxes are gonna be going on, or family reunions like our family is gonna be going on. It's good to get away from the rat race of what we are doing and to regroup and to have times of refreshing. So these purposes help us to step into our new beginnings with energy and enthusiasm and purpose. Now just from what I've already said, I think you can see you're gonna have some of the same purposes for future generations. But let me list three additional purposes for future generations that, at least for me, jump out of the text. First, verse 21 indicates that each generation needs to ask previous generations for wisdom. They need to be hungry for learning. God is assuming the children will want to know. He says, when your children ask their fathers in time to come. Civilization is not built in one generation. It builds upon the wisdom inherited from multiple generations of the past. And when we cut ourselves off from the past, we cut ourselves off from sustained growth. And that's true whether it's technology or anything else. We cut ourselves off from growth. Learn to ask questions of the aged. learn from the previous generations, learn from their mistakes, learn from their successes, build upon what they have already built. Second, each generation should have a sense of curiosity. They ask, what are these stones? Now it's true, curiosity can get us into trouble. Gary and I disciple the mentor of the young men on how to tame their curiosity. You know, don't just click on clickbait because it looks like something that, you know, scratches an itch or something like that. No, you have to tame your curiosity, but I believe that curiosity is a very powerful tool for scientific discovery and for other aspects of dominion if it is channeled properly. Third, there are a number of indications in the whole chapter that each generation is supposed to have a vision for the unity of God's people or what the confessions call the Holy Catholic Church. Now, let me clarify. People get all bent out of shape when we use the term Holy Catholic Church. We're not Catholics. Yes, we are. Romanists have abandoned the Catholic faith. If you look at the Church Fathers, which I have read ravenously for decades, you discover they are Protestant. They are not Roman Catholic at all. They are a rebuke to the Roman Catholic Church. And the Reformers absolutely refused to call them Roman Catholics. They called them Papists or Romanists, but anything but Catholic. They're certainly not the holy Catholic church. And so they were just trying to restore the church back to the the Catholic faith, and what do they mean by that? What do we mean by the Holy Catholic Church? We mean the true church of the past, present, and future, wherever it is found anywhere in the world. That's all that the term means. Okay, so why am I bringing that up? Well, these verses have concern about the Israel of the past, the Israel of the present, the Israel of the future. There are 12 stones, but one memorial, just like there are 12 tribes, and yet there is only one body. And even the singular Hebrew word goi that is used in verse 1 to describe the nation of Israel shows that unity. Now sadly, modern Protestants have lost this sense of continuity with the past, and I think that is one of the reasons why there are so many Protestants that are leaking into the Roman Catholic Church or into Eastern Orthodoxy. They long for continuity in the past, they don't think the Protestants have it. No, it's the Protestant, the Reformation at least, I think Protestants have abandoned this as well, but the Reformation had continuity with the past par excellence. And I think we can develop a better sense of our Catholicity in several ways. One way is to read church history, good church history books. Another way is to read about what's happening in missions all over the world. We have a connection with the church everywhere. It's one of the reasons why Gary and I bring up these missions prayer requests from various organizations. We go to conferences at which many good denominations attend. We can pray for reformation of the whole church. So these 12 stones were a reminder that tribalism or denominationalism shouldn't be taken too far. And we'll end with verse 24, which shows God's purposes for the world. It says that all the peoples of the earth may know the hand of the Lord, that it is mighty, that you may fear the Lord your God forever. So the immediate purpose was that all the nations of that time would know that God was the Almighty. But several commentaries point out that because of the covenant language and the absolute nature of the language, it appears that this may be a part of the topology of the whole book that points forward to Jesus and His kingdom. And the analogy, I think, is just as Canaan would recognize they're defeated, all the Canaanites are gonna be defeated by this sword, a physical sword. It is symbolized, according to Hebrews 4, of the Great Commission. and Jesus being the greater Joshua with his double-edged sword of the Spirit conquering all of the nations with the gospel. So there may be a prophetic symbolism of the evangelization of the earth, which in turn results in Israel itself coming to faith and fearing God. Now, whether that's true or not, and there could be debate on that, there's two purposes that are clear. First, let the world see the hand of the Lord at work in your life. don't hide his light under a bushel, okay? If the world can go month after month and year after year without seeing any difference in your life and life of any pagan that is out there, you are living way, way, way below the incredible privileges that you have in Christ Jesus. After all, Romans 8, 11 says that the same Holy Spirit who raised up Jesus from the dead is at work in your mortal bodies right now, is at work in you. Are you availing yourself of that almighty power? This book will speak of incredible, miraculous power that was at the disposal of weak people like these Israelites when they would approach God in faith. And then they would be absent of that power when they would not approach God in faith, as in the case of Ai. And so the first purpose is to let the world see the hand of the Lord at work in their lives. Can the world see God's work, God's hand at work in your life? James says you have not because you ask not, or at least you're asking for selfish purposes rather than for kingdom purposes. So second purpose was to develop fear within God's people, something Gary alluded to earlier, that you may fear the Lord your God forever. Now the next verse, chapter five, verse one, contrast their fear with a different kind of fear. It says the hearts of the Canaanites melted, but that was because Israel itself feared and reverenced the Lord and desired God's mission statement to be their own. When you are sold out to the Lord and you fear God more than man, God delights in using you. Gordon Matthews says this, The fact that the fear of the Lord belongs in a covenantal context here suggests that the desired response and the meaning of to fear is complete allegiance or single-minded and exclusive loyalty to the Lord of all the earth. And in the same paragraph he says that the loyalty that Israel had to fear the Lord will eventually result in the nations fearing God like Rahab did. So it almost sounds like conversion, and this is why some commentators say there's probably, even though these Canaanites die, other than the Gibeonites, they're conquered by the sword, that this may typologically be foreshadowing the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, where the fear of the Lord in the church produces fear of the Lord in the nations, which in turn strengthens the fear of the Lord within the church. It's at least worth considering. But in conclusion, I would say that each of us should try to recognize God's work in closing doors and in opening doors. Realize God is always providentially leading you. Respond to that leading with excitement and faith, knowing that if God is for you, who can be against you? Amen. Father, we thank you for all of the lessons that we have been learning from these first four chapters, and I pray that you would help us to remember them and to implement them and to grow in grace. May we be a testimony to the a church at large that we can have a faith that if God is for us, who can be against us? Father, may we step into and through the open doors that you lead us into and not have fear, and not have fear of the future, but trust that you care for your own, you provide for your own, and that if your almighty hand is with us, there is nothing that Satan can do to oppose us. Thank you for this, your people. I pray that you would bless them, encourage them, strengthen their faith. In Jesus' name, amen.