Joshua Introduction • Path of Promise

Welcome to our Women of the Word Bible Study. My name is Sue Laboutier, and today we're going to begin the book of Joshua. It is the sixth book of the Old Testament, but it's not just another book. Actually, none of them are just another book. Each one shares intriguing parts of the unfolding story of God's plan. And so I'm really excited about this. The beauty of women's Bible study is that it doesn't matter if you have been saved for one week and you don't know a thing about your Bible, or if you've been saved for 90 years and you've even taught Bible study. The Holy Spirit comes here to teach each one of us exactly what we need to have, what we need to know right now. And so this is a no-fail Bible study, no-pressure Bible study, and I love it. I hope you've picked up a study guide. If you're local, they're here, they're at the bookstore. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can go to our website, www.ccantera.com, go to Women's Studies, and you will find where you can download these study guides, or you can order a copy to be sent to you as well. So with that out of the way, let's get started. The Bible explains to us the unfolding story of God's plan, God's plan to create people and a place for those people to be, people to have fellowship with Him. And we say that it's unfolding because each book, each part of Scripture unfolds more information for us so that we understand. There's a verse that I decided should be really a theme verse for Women of the Word, and I want to show it to you. It is Psalm 119, 130. Look at this. It says, The unfolding of your words gives light. It imparts understanding to the simple. The unfolding of your words gives light and imparts understanding to the simple, of which I am one. I am a very simple-minded girl, and I need things spelled out for me. And that is the beauty of the Bible, is that it does spell out things for us. The book of Joshua is going to provide for us the history of the nation of Israel entering into the land of promise, all right? That's basically what the book is all about. But I want to pretend for a moment that we don't really know who Israel is, and we don't really know where the land of promise is, the land of Canaan, and we're not sure why people have to move around from one place to another anyway. In other words, I want to start at the beginning. And that's what we've done in these Bible studies. This is the fourth in our Old Testament study. The first of our Old Testament study, we called it Divine Design. It was the book of Genesis, and it explained how God created a place, and then he created people to fill that place. And places and people are really important to God. Look at Genesis chapter 1. God creates a place, goes to great detail, and then he creates people for that place, and he tells them, I want you to fill up this place. And he put those people, Genesis tells us the history, from Eden to Egypt, because that is where he placed his first people, but they didn't last long, because by chapter 3, sin had entered the world and they were removed from that perfect place that God had created for them. So how did they get to Egypt? Well, it went like this. God reached out to a man named Abram, and he says, Abram, I want you to leave the place that you're living and go to a place that I will show you, a land that I will show you. And Abram did that. He followed God into the place, and Abram ended up in the land of Canaan. And it was there, in Genesis chapters 12 and 15, that God gave his promises to Abram, or as we call him, Abraham. And he promised him lots of people, and he promised him a place for those people. But he says, it's not going to be easy. There's going to be hundreds of years where your people are going to be enslaved in a place not their own, in a land not their own. But I will deliver them from that place. But that's how Genesis, that's how the people got from Eden to Egypt, is that they were indeed enslaved in Egypt, in a place not their own. In fact, the last phrase of Genesis ends with, he was placed in a coffin in Egypt. And that was speaking of Joseph, the great-grandson of Abraham. So the next act of God's unfolding story of redemption, we called it God's divine design, the first half of the book of Exodus, where God once again reached out to a man named Moses. And he spoke to him at Mount Sinai, also called Mount Horeb, and he said, I have heard the cries of my people in Egypt. And it was God's desire to deliver them and bring them from Egypt, geographically from Egypt, to Mount Sinai. And he said, I want you to help me with this, I want you to be the tool that I will use for this. And it pretty much happened just that way. Moses was the man that God used as a deliverer to bring his people out of Egypt, and right there to the base of Mount Sinai, where God revealed to him, to them, his character and his law. He said, I want to dwell with you guys. And so it's going to require some special things, and having the tabernacle was one of those things. And that's where we left them, after divine design. And then our third Bible study was the Wilderness Way, and geographically we saw God's people go from the base of Mount Sinai, right to the banks of the Jordan River. And so after God revealed to him his character and his law at Mount Sinai, and after they built that tabernacle so that he could dwell with them, it should have taken them about 11 days to get to the land that he promised to Abraham, but it ended up being 40 years because of their unbelief. And so they were in the wilderness for 40 years. We say they wandered in the wilderness, but they weren't lost in the wilderness. They were delayed in the wilderness. So this fourth Bible study now is called the Path of Promise, because in many ways it is about God's promises and God keeping his promises, all right? The Path of Promise will be a verse-by-verse, chapter-by-chapter study through the book of Joshua, again, where God unfolds his plan to unite his people with his place. When God interacted with his people called Israel, after the grandson of Abraham, also called the sons of Abraham, his desire was to bring them into a real and tangible place, real land where they could bring their livestock and build their homes. But you know what? Their journey is symbolic for us because God also desires to bring us, his kids, if by faith we have believed in Jesus, we are, the Bible calls us sons of Abraham, and God desires to bring us also into a real place. But it's not real and tangible in terms of soil and building houses. It is a place of promise. It is a place where we accept, we pursue the promises of God, but it is a place of victory and it is a place of rest if we're willing to agree to it by faith. And so that's a little bit what this Bible study is going to be about. When we begin a new book of the Bible, I do like to whet our appetite by actually beginning with a couple verses. So today we're going to read through Joshua, chapter 1, verses 1 through 9. Just to dive right into this, okay? I'll be reading from the ESV. And so it goes like this.

Do you see in that a suggestion or an option? No, it's a command, arise and go over. This is the next thing to be done. And so God is giving Joshua a command. He says,

Remember, we said this is about God keeping his promise. He made a promise to Abraham and he's keeping it through Joshua. He said, I will cause you, or you will cause. as them to inherit this land that I am giving to them. You are the vehicle I'm going to use that will cause them to inherit that land. It's gonna be important to us.

And those are the words that God spoke to Joshua in that moment when he told them that he was to cause the people to inherit the land. God spoke words to him. Moses needed in that moment, he was the new leader, and he needed direction. He needed warning, and he needed encouragement. And as I stand here today, I think to myself, wow, I need direction today. I need warning today, and I need encouragement today, and so do you. We need those things all the time from the Lord. It's a matter of if we're willing to listen and to get a grip. Now, I said that this was the first book of the Bible that was named after a man. We call the first five books sometimes the Law of Moses, the Books of Moses. But none of them are named after Moses, okay? This is the first one, it is not a biography of Joshua at all. And yet it seems fitting that the man, the leader God chose to unite the people of God with the place of God would be named after this leader. So I wanna look at his name. This book bears his name, I wanna look at it. We learned something about Joshua that his name wasn't always Joshua. In fact, his name was Hosea, it's spelled H-O-S-H-E-A. In Numbers chapter 13, we find out that Joshua was actually one of the men that was selected to go on this spy mission 38 years ago out of Kadesh Barnea and go into the promised land. So he's already been there. He was there once 38 years ago. He was representing the tribe of Ephraim. And his name was Hosea, okay, which means deliverance. That is a good strong name, isn't it? Hosea, deliverance. But in that same chapter, we learned that Moses had a little pet name for him. It tells us that Moses called him Yahoshua. In other words, he called Hosea, the son of Nun, Joshua. And the difference between those two names is a few letters. In fact, some similar letters from the name of Yahweh just infused into the name to change the meaning from deliverance to God is deliverance. So that is what Joshua means. God is deliverance or God is salvation. Now, you may know that the Greek name Jesus is the same name as the Hebrew name Joshua. God is deliverance. And of course, in this Bible study, we will see how in the same way that God caused Joshua, or allowed Joshua, to cause the people to inherit the place of God, the promises of God. So too, Jesus causes us to inherit the promises of God. But I'm getting a little bit too ahead of ourselves. Names are interesting, but it was Moses' job to bring Israel out of slavery, Joshua's job to bring them into the promises of God. Okay, so why is it so important, why was it so important that the people enter into the place that God promised them? And I'll tell you why. Because God never intended his people to live in the wilderness. That was never the place God intended for his people to live. The wilderness was a terrible place, and that was not God's intention. And so right now, I wanna take this Bible study and just swivel it around and look at us. And I wanna say that for us, God never intends for us to live in the spiritual place of wilderness either. His desire for you and me is that we would enter into the place of promise, that we would inherit the promises of God. What was the wilderness like? If you were with us in our last Bible study, you'll remember that the wilderness was marked with grumbling. It was marked with complaining. It was marked with unbelief. It was a place where they were just grinding out their days, grinding out their years, burying people right and left, with no purpose, no victory, and no joy. That is what the wilderness is like. And you know what, God doesn't intend for us to just grind out our days. He intends for us to face our days on this earth with purpose, with victory, and with joy. And so those are the parallels that we see. Now, does that mean that the place of promise for us is a place of sunshine and lollipops? Absolutely not. Because as we'll get into this book, we'll find out as soon as they got into the land of promise, it was filled with barriers and battles. But barriers and battles go along with blessings. And isn't that your life? That is my life. It is filled with barriers, with battles, but it is the place of blessing. It is the place where God blesses. And right now, you might say, well, that sounds wonderful. But I don't think I know how to do that. Well, that's legitimate. But what I wanna say is two things about that. First of all, it's why we study the scripture. And second of all, it's not us doing it. It is Joshua. They were, God said to Joshua, I want you to cause them to inherit. The same thing is true for us. Jesus causes us to inherit, and so we rest. But we have to desire, and we have to be willing. But he does the work for us. And that's one reason why studying the Old Testament is so special and so important to us. Because as we look at the nation of Israel and kind of make them into one man, this nation through whom God's promised Messiah would come, and we kind of turn their existence into a person, a human being. It shows us all kinds of parallels for how God deals with us human beings. And we learn so much to apply to our life. So as we do this Bible study, we're gonna use three filters. The first filter that we use, so you'll have an assigned passage to read. And the first filter that we use is what does it say, all right? Very familiar. We wanna ask the questions, what really happened in this passage to real people at a real time in history, and process that. And then the second filter that we put on is, what does that mean? And that's where we ask these questions. It's like, okay, this is symbolic. This really happened to people. But it is also symbolic for us as New Testament Christians, for us to understand God's plan, God's unfolding plan. And then the third filter that we use is, what does it mean to me? And that's where we just bring it right into our own life. And we ask, how do I process these truths in my own life, with my own barriers and my own battles, as I am seeking this place of blessing, this path of promise? One thing that I see is that it takes courage to possess the promises of God. It did for them, and it does for us. So let's look at that last verse again that we read, verse nine. I wanna highlight that.

The Lord spoke this to Joshua multiple times. And it reminds me of where we left off last fall in our study of the I Am's of Christ, the very last one. John chapter 15, verse 9. I am the vine, you are the branches. Apart from me, you can do nothing. Abide in the vine, okay? Stay connected. That was the whole message, to stay connected. And here, God promises Joshua, the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. In other words, God will not disconnect. Now you might disconnect, you might want to disconnect from the vine, but God is not the one disconnects, and that is a promise that he gives. And I love that, such beautiful words. Whenever we run across really encouraging words, a good exercise to go through is to ask, can that be lifted up out of this context for any situation, for any person ever? That's a compelling thing to ask. So as we're thinking that through, let's back up. one more verse. Let's back up to verse 8 and read that, and let's see the light that it sheds on that. So

Two words I want us to circle and highlight as key words for today in this, and that is the word meditate and the word success at the end. And the reason I'm highlighting those two words is first I want to talk about meditate, and I want to say it's twin, memorize, alright? And then I feel your blood pressure rising, but I want to tell you that we're going to help each other through this nine-week Bible study, we're going to help each other to memorize a scripture every week. And you might say to yourself, you know what, I just don't do that very well, and I think we could all say that. It is an exercise that is kind of difficult for many, many people, but I'd like to point out something to you. If I started saying, I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, every one of you would join in effortlessly with that. And the reason is repetition. You just repeated it so much that you finally knew it. And in first grade you didn't grab a little index card and write it down and work really hard on, you know, like I need to know this by tomorrow, I need to know this. No, it's just repetition, it was just over and over. And I think that that's one strategy to memorizing God's Word, and that's why I like this. Don't let it depart from your mouth. Keep it in your mouth. Keep rolling it over. Repetition. So as we give a memory verse each week, let's just work on it repetitively until we own it. And I think that for each of us, we'll be able to kick it up a level in just meditating on God's Word. And the other key word here I want to talk about is success. We want success in our spiritual life, and we're not talking about business success. That's probably what we normally think of. But spiritual success. What is spiritual success? And I'd like to paint it this way. The New Testament talks about a couple of options for us as Christians. Walking in the flesh, walking in the spirit. And so I'd like to say that spiritual success is walking in the spirit. Making a conscious choice to walk in agreement with the spirit as opposed to walking in the flesh. In fact, can I say, maybe, that we could say the wilderness experience that God never intended for his kids is likened to walking in the flesh. And the promised land, the place of promise that God did intend for his kids could be a parallel to walking in the spirit. The path of promise doesn't lead to heaven. Crossing the Jordan is not symbolic of going to heaven. What it is symbolic of is born-again Christians pursuing to enter into that life of true faith, walking in the spirit through our oneness, our companionship with our Joshua, Jesus Christ, who causes us to inherit that place. He is the one that causes us to inherit that land. So many Christians are truly saved. They have been delivered from bondage in Egypt, delivered from bondage to sin, and yet are just delayed in the wilderness and not experiencing that path of promise. So that's where we're headed, ladies, is into the path of promise where we have a more full walk with the spirit. Alan Redpath, who was a pastor at Moody Bible Church years and years ago, said something that I want to read to you. He said, full blessing in the Christian life is not bestowed except eager, hungry people who press in and receive it. How do you feel about that? How do you feel when I say that statement? Let me read it again. Full blessing in the Christian life is not bestowed except eager, hungry people who press in to receive it. That is what I want for us in this Bible study, to be eager, hungry people who press in to receive it. And so what it will require is as we open up our Bible, open up our study guide, look at the passage, we will stop and pray and say, Lord, I am eager to press in, but I can do nothing apart from you. And so I invite you now to show me what you want to show me. And I'm going to resist the temptation to think that I should, you know, be following the same path as, you know, someone else and getting different things. You just show me what you want to show me in this particular passage, trusting in Jesus to show us. And so I'm excited to get started. Next week is going to be chapters one and two. We'll be right back here going through the scripture and then discussing that together. So let me just pray. Father, thank you that we have this opportunity to go through this book. Lord, thank you that you show us things in the Old Testament that are relevant to our life. And I just pray that you would really just develop in each of our hearts a greater understanding of your unfolding plan of redemption, unfolding story, and help us to see our place. Help us to see what it means to us. Help us to make changes. Help us, Lord, to meditate day and night and not let your words depart from our mouth. I pray all these things for myself and my sisters in Jesus name. Amen.