“Moshe had given orders to Y’hoshua, just as Adonai had given orders to Moshe his servant, and Y’hoshua acted accordingly — he did everything Adonai had ordered Moshe.”-Joshua 11:15
Yesterday, I talked about what seemed to be a contradiction in the Scriptures concerning the acts of Joshua.
The Scriptures testify that Joshua did “everything Adonai had ordered Moshe”.
Yet we know for a fact that he didn’t.
Joshua did NOT actually destroy all of the Canaanite cities and their inhabitants as he was supposed to.
In fact, we wouldn’t even have a Middle Eastern crisis today if he had.
The conclusion I came to was that when the Scripture says Joshua did everything God commanded Moses to do, we have to take it as sort of an over-generalization.
However, there is another way to look at it and I received this insight from a fellow Jewish believer in Messiah last night (Thanks Steven!).
He said (and I’m directly quoting)…
“I think the bottom line with God isn’t so much what we have been able to do, what we tried to do, meaning the intention of our hearts to be obedient is more important than whether or not we actually succeed. No one wants to sin but no one can be truly sinless, so how does that sit with God? Well, King David answered that question in Psalm 51, when he told us that a contrite spirit and a broken heart God will not turn away. God tells us he doesn’t care for the blood of bulls or the fat of lambs, but what our heart attitude is. So for me, when we read that Joshua “did all that God commanded Moshe, it means that his intention was always to be obedient and he succeeded in trying his best to be so.”-Steven Bruck
This makes darn good sense especially when we consider the life of King David.
Because the truth is King David did some of the most wicked things in his lifetime including committing both adultery and murder.
Yet we’re also told he was a man after God’s own heart.
And that is the exact point my brother Steven was making.
The Lord is concerned with our heart attitude.
This also supports what I said earlier about why it’s so ridiculous to play the “my-verse-is-better-than-your-verse” game.
There’s no such thing as one standalone verse that can override everything else that exists in Scripture.
It simply doesn’t exist.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
There is nothing more retarded than to pluck one singular verse out of its context from one chapter or book (especially from the New Testament) and hold that verse up as the end all be all on the subject at hand…
…ESPECIALLY when we consider the fact that verse and chapter divisions were applied to the Scriptures in an arbitrary fashion anyway.
Instead of looking at just one bone of the whole skeleton of Scripture, we have to consider the whole body of Scripture.
And when I say the “whole body”, I’m not just talking about the complete skeleton but the whole body including the muscles, veins, the flowing blood, the sinews and joints, the heart and all the other organs…in other words the whole and complete picture.
And as I’ve said many times before, the best way to get the complete picture is to look at the established God patterns that repeat themselves throughout the Scriptures.
To close, having said all that, understand that Joshua’s mission was to conquer the whole land of Canaan, lay to waste all of the cities and utterly exterminate all of the Canaanites including every man, woman and child.
If a Canaanite living in the land wanted to leave, he only had two choices: pack up his bags and leave OR give up his allegiance to his false gods and worship the one true God of Israel just like Rahab did.
Rahab chose to give up her false gods and was saved.
And this same option was open to ALL of the Canaanites in the land.
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