Thoughts on Joshua 15 & Acts 4

Today’s reading: Joshua 15; Acts 4

Thoughts on Joshua 15

These few chapters we are in right now in Joshua are maybe the most tedious chapters to read in the Bible in my opinion. They are basically just seemingly endless lists of cities and landmarks allotted to each tribe, but they are cities and landmarks we aren’t familiar with as we read them. Worse than that, I can’t even pull up a map and see where they all are because many of these cities we simply have no idea where they were. Some we know for sure or have found evidence for the location, and others we can conjecture based on various clues, but some we just don’t know. It can all leave you wondering, “Why did God include this? How is this even useful to me?”

So I have a few things I want to point out about these chapters to help reorient our thinking about them.

First of all, I am from Ohio, which is not all that large of a state, but Ohio is almost four times the size of Israel. So the first thing to realize is that these chapters don’t list out some far-flung set of cities, but cover a relatively small area, meaning it is entirely reasonable to think that the original readers would have been familiar with at least the general locations of most of these cities.

Second of all, the cities in these chapters are nothing like the cities we likely think of today. This was a farming/shepherding community so they needed land, but they didn’t live alone in the middle of a large plot of land. People lived in small cities or villages surrounded by their farm land, but close enough that they could walk to their land, work for the day, and walk home that evening. If your land took too long to walk to then you wouldn’t have time to farm it and/or eat/live when you got home at night. Instead of people walking too far, there would be another village a little further up the road central to a different area of land. Rather than a few large, sprawling cities or suburbs like we have in America that kind of bleed one into the next, you had many small, well-defined cities or villages dotting the landscape. So when we read the list of dozens of cities allotted to Judah today, the scope and arrangement of these cities may be very different than what we picture on our minds.

The third thing to note is that while these lists of cities may not seem all that helpful or useful to us, these chapters would have been hugely important to people in Joshua’s day. These chapters represent the fulfillment of the promise of God to give Israel the promised land. This promise was originally made to Abraham, then to Isaac and Jacob, then was reiterated to Moses over forty-five years before these events, and it is now coming to fruition in a very tangible way. There is no longer a question of if God can deliver on His promise, and the promise is no longer a vague idea of land somewhere, but is now a concrete list of borders and cities that God has gifted to each tribe. I don’t think we have a category for just how important this would have been for them. Ever since God called Abram out of Ur, His chosen people have been sojourners or slaves in a land not their own, but now they have a land to call their own, given to them by the covenant God of Abraham. And being able to point to a border or name a city… I can’t honestly imagine how meaningful that would have been to them.

And that brings me to my last point: Not everything in the Bible needs to be useful to you. The Bible isn’t about you. The Bible is about God, His world, how the world got to the state it’s in, and what God has done and is doing about that. And in that sense, these chapters are very important as they reveal to us the very tangible ways that God is keeping His promises in history as He moves forward, working out the plan of salvation that He had prepared before the world began. Bringing Israel out of slavery, giving them a land of their own, and forming them into a secure nation was an important part of His plan to bring about the Messiah who would rescue the world from sin and death out of that nation. So if we stop looking at the Bible for what we deem personally useful, we might start to find in some of these boring or tedious chapters new reasons to praise and glorify the God who saved us.

Thoughts on Acts 4

I wrote a lot more than I intended to about Joshua today, so I will try to keep this short.

The thing I want to call our attention to this morning is what the Jewish leaders say after they put Peter and John out of the room:

“What shall we do with these men? For that a notable sign has been performed through them is evident to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and we cannot deny it. But in order that it may spread no further among the people, let us warn them to speak no more to anyone in this name.”

What is amazing to me about this is that, even in the privacy of their own like-minded conversation, they don’t try to deny this miracle or write it off. They fully admit that Jesus’ disciples performed an absolute miracle in the name of Jesus, but they don’t care. No where in there does their conversation turn to questioning whether they maybe got it wrong, or if they should pay attention to the miracle. They fully recognize and accept it as miraculous, but their sole concern is how to stop the spread of people believing in Jesus because of it.

This is what a hardened heart looks like. When someone has hardened their heart to the Lord it is not a matter of evidence or persuasion. Just like we see here, those will have no effect, because they don’t even bother denying the evidence, but recognizing or accepting it will not change their pre-drawn conclusions.

But I also want to reiterate, like I mentioned a couple days ago, that this does not mean evidence and persuasion are worthless. Many people believed because of the miracle and because of the testimony of Peter and John, so the evidence and persuasion were incredibly valuable, just not to those who had already decided they would not be swayed by them.