Arise & Go Pt.4 - Pastor Bennett Glubish

Hi, this is John Ozanting, lead pastor of Evolve Church, and this is the Evolved Church Podcast.

Thanks so much for tuning in.

We hope that you find today's message encouraging and full of hope for wherever you're at.

Well, good morning, church.

I don't know how many of you have been a part of our soap guides that we've been doing yet, but I would encourage you as a part of this Arise and Go series.

We've created a soap guide, which is scripture, observation, application, prayer that goes along through the book of Joshua, where you can do some of the work and study at home to continue to learn what God is wanting to teach you through this series and through his word.

And you can access that on the E in the seat in front of you, or you could ask at one of our info centers or go to our website.

But it's a great spot for you to continue to do some of the work on your own.

And I get to tackle the chapter of Joshua 6, The Walls of Jericho today.

But before we get into it, I want to ask you this question.

Are you ready to conquer?

What even comes to mind when you think of the word conquer?

Is it winning a battle or winning a war?

Is it completing a large quest?

Maybe having the greenest grass on your block, which no longer matters because the snow is coming soon?

Or maybe it's clearing your sidewalk off first and going the extra distance and doing the conquest of getting all your neighbor's sidewalks done at the same time?

I think back to a computer game I used to play when I was probably 11 years old called Command and Conquer.

And this was a game where you had troops and you had a base and you had to expand your territory, take over other areas, build buildings, and conquest the lands and take over the entire map.

And that's what I think of here of conquering, taking over, taking ground.

And as we dive into Joshua 6 this morning, can we agree that although we're not facing a city and giant walls that need to be knocked over, we are still facing a battle today.

We're still in the midst of an area where God is saying for us to get up and he's calling us to conquer.

And when it comes to war and battles, there's often a fear that's associated with them: a fear of losing a loved one, the fear of death for yourself or an unknown losing the friend fighting next to you.

And there are other fears for all of us in the room as we deal with the fear of the enemy and the fear of the unknown.

Can we start in verse 1 of Joshua 6?

Now the gates of Jericho were tightly shut because the people were afraid of the Israelites.

No one was allowed to go in or out.

And in verse 1, right there, we can already see the first thing we're gonna look at today that we can learn from this, and that's that we need to see the enemy through God's eyes.

Earlier in Joshua, we heard about twelve spies and going into the land and coming back, where ten of them were full of fear, where the enemy was too big and too strong, and they'd never be able to conquer.

But here in verse one, we read that the Canaanites locked themselves into the city of Jericho, relying on their large walls to protect them, because they were afraid.

They had already heard of miracles, they had heard of what had been taking place, and they had followed the story of the Israelites leaving slavery, getting out of Egypt, and everything that happened from there.

And they were afraid, so they locked the doors and no one was allowed in or out.

And this morning, our enemy may be real, but he knows the God that we serve.

He knows that if we are faithful and obedient, that he can never win.

The fortress is real, but it's not final.

The enemy is real but does not have the power.

The walls are real, but they can and will fall down as we are obedient.

What walls are present in your life this morning?

What obstacles are you up against that are having you feeling like you will never walk into the promises that God has for you and your family?

Where are you seeing an impenetrable fortress, a stronghold that's causing you to step back and say it's never gonna happen?

Because what looks to be immovable and unbeatable, impossible to you, has already been marked for collapse by God.

If he says it, it will happen.

The enemy's size is never greater than God's promise in our lives.

So let's continue to read verse two to five today.

But the Lord said to Joshua, I have given you Jericho.

Already right there, the Lord says, I have delivered Jericho into your hands.

It's already been done right in verse two here.

I have given you Jericho, its king, and all its strong warriors.

You and your fighting men should march around the town once a day for six days.

Seven priests will walk ahead of the ark, each carrying a ram's horn.

On the seventh day, you are to march around the town seven times, with the priest blowing the horns.

When you hear the priests giving one long blast on the ram's horn, have all the people shout as loud as they can, and then the walls of the town will collapse, and the people can charge straight into the town.

The second thing for us this morning, trust the strategy that doesn't make sense.

Are there any war buffs in the room or people that just like a good war movie?

Or Lord of the Rings fans, because there's a lot of good battle scenes in there, and particularly ones where there's a siege or a fortified wall or city that's either being defended or taken.

I can't help but think of the Battle of Helm's Deep and of a great fortress, a safety for the good guys in that instance.

And I'm gonna put a picture of Jericho and what it could have looked like based on historical records on the screen, so you can at least imagine what the city looked like and what would have needed to be done to march around it.

With great cinematography and epic music in the background, the Israelites clearly did their march.

Well, this was the most fortified city in all of the lands, the safest place anyone could go.

The place where the Canaanites truly felt nothing can touch us in here.

And for anyone with a very analytical brain, your mind goes maybe in a different direction when you see this wall.

You look at a fortified city, you see the weak points, you start to wonder what material it's been made out of.

Are there any hidden openings?

Is there an entrance that is there for the people the people to sneak in, for spies to come and go?

And I used to love the show Prison Break when it first came out.

And in that show, the main character, Michael Schofield, he gets a full tattoo on his body of a blueprint of a prison and everything he would need to perform and break his brother out of prison.

On his body, the complete map of every weakness, every little situation that needed to happen, because he had it completely planned out.

And I couldn't help but wonder did Joshua have these tattoos of the city of Jericho on him as they were marching around and knowing this is where we need to stop, this is what's gonna happen.

Well, no, because there was no architects and structural engineers that looked at the wall and said, This is how it's gonna fall.

They didn't have battering rams or scaling ladders like normal military process would have them.

They simply marched in faith and relied on God.

They had the instructions already.

After all, he had told them, I have given you Jericho.

So everything else to follow just made sense that they should listen.

And Pastor John last week talked about how the Israelites went to Gilgal, to that mountain, and they created an altar of remembrance where they looked back and were grateful for all the miracles that had taken place, for everything that had already been done for them, that God had shown himself faithful.

So in this moment, God is telling them that it's theirs.

They need to listen to him because he's already come through in every other situation for them.

And they would need to listen to every detail of the instruction.

In Proverbs 3, verse 5 to 6, it says, Trust in the Lord with all of your heart.

Proverbs 3:5–6

Do not depend on your own understanding.

Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take.

And this is so important that we need to be asking God's will and his presence into our everyday lives, into the everything that we do.

And then trusting and admitting that we don't have the understanding that we need, it's never gonna be enough.

Realizing that our finite view of any situation is gonna miss something.

We can't see everything.

That no matter how smart we are, no matter how educated we are, no matter the amount of training and experience we have in any situation, we still need to trust in God first, to trust his strategies.

And while sometimes those strategies might use our skills and the things that we've learned in the past, it starts with trusting in him first and then going from there.

And the march on Jericho is this ultimate test in trust in the Lord and not depending on their own understanding.

Marching around a wall day after day seems like something that could never actually knock a wall down unless it's in your basement and the city's been built and your toddlers are a little rambunctious and the walls will come down then.

But that's not what happened in Jericho.

This wasn't a wall of blocks and rambunctious kids.

This was the safest place in all the lands.

And then what about the trumpets?

What was the significance of the blaring trumpets?

These instruments were Jubilee trumpets used in connection with Israel's solemn feast to proclaim the presence of God.

The conquest of Jericho was not therefore exclusively a military undertaking, but also a religious one.

And the trumpets declared that the Lord of heaven and earth was weaving his invisible way around this doomed city.

God himself, in effect, was saying, in the long blast of these priestly trumpets, lift up your heads, O you gates, be lifted up, you ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in.

And when Christ returns, he, the King of glory, will enter the cities in triumph.

The conquest of Jericho was a similar kind of triumphant victory.

And there were even different trumpets that had been used back in that time.

There were silver trumpets that were used for declaring things like we're going to war, giving marching orders and all of this, but they didn't use silver trumpets here.

They were told to use the ram's horn because Israel wasn't actually declaring war on Jericho.

They were proclaiming victory that had already been won, the year of Jubilee, declaring God's presence in that land.

So even the very trumpets that they were told to use were declaring the Lord's presence in what he was going to do in that place.

A celebration for the city that was going to be taken.

Let's move on to verse 15 and 16.

On the seventh day the Israelites got up at dawn and marched around the town as they had done before.

But this time they went around the town seven times.

And the seventh time around, as the priests sounded the long blasts on their horns, Joshua commanded the people, shout, for the Lord has given you the town.

And the third thing we get to see this morning is to stay faithful to the word you've received.

The strategy, it may not make sense, but we need to remain faithful.

And if you can take a moment and imagine yourself in the Israelites' camp, one of the soldiers marching around, and then what it must have been like going to camp back in the evening, listening to maybe some of the grumblings and complainings as there often were, some of the talks of paranoia in the evening, maybe military advice that would have been given.

Asking questions like, what happens if the doors of the city are opened and Jericho comes marching out and disrupts our pattern in our line?

How do we continue the march?

What if arrows started to fly from behind the walls as they were marching and taking them out one by one?

Well, God's instructions were simply to march around each day.

He said nothing about fight.

What would happen?

Well, the thing is we still need to stay faithful to the word that we've received, even when it feels like there are so many unknowns and like there is a better way to do it, we cannot edit or try to improve God's plan.

We'll never be able to improve upon his plans.

In fact, it's when we are consistent in the ordinary that it positions us for the miraculous.

Marching around the wall day after day after day.

And this procedure was also designed to test Israel's obedience to God's will.

Do any of us ever feel like we need that test?

Or maybe we're always being tested there.

And that was not easy in this case.

Every day they were exposing themselves to ridiculous dang ridicule and danger.

A Jericho soldier may have looked down from the wall on the army of Israel and asked, Do they think they can frighten us into surrender by the sound of their ram's horns?

Or if you've watched Veggie Tales, keep marching, but you or keep walking, but you won't knock down our wall.

And they have the big slushy machines up there, and it's pretty great.

But what would have been like the Jericho people watching?

What are they doing out there?

There was fear inside the walls, but what were they doing?

The Israelites had many problems over the years with patience, with waiting that had caused people to question and complain constantly.

And I guarantee you that there were people here in this situation who thought seven days is a complete waste of time.

And I'm sure you have wondered in your life at times when you've heard God's will or you were trying to trust where He was leading you, and you said, Why am I being taken on that path?

Why wasn't it faster?

Why hasn't it been easier?

Why doesn't it make more sense to me in the moments?

You felt it was a waste of time to wait and to wait and to wait, and you probably had those questions to God in those moments.

But questioning God is okay as long as we still remain obedient and faithful to the words that He's given us.

The words that are spoken directly to us from Him, from others, or through His Word, the Bible that we have to get our face in the book, to meditate upon Scripture and trust that the words spoken there are for us and to remain obedient.

And I think back as I was preparing for this to the time of my calling into ministry and the experience I had when I went to Bible college and started in 2008.

And I felt like God was saying it's time for you to become a pastor.

And then four years later, you graduate and get married, and then year after year goes by, and I was still working in construction, and every interview seemed to go the wrong way, and doors were closing over and over again, to the point where some of my family and friends were saying, You know what?

Did you just waste four years of your life?

Like, why keep pursuing that?

You're in a good position, you're a carpenter, you can make good money and provide for your family.

You'll never be in a better financial situation.

Travel the world, enjoy your life.

And we did enjoy our life, but there was still this calling that I needed to be obedient to.

And then when Evol was planted and we got the opportunity to be a part of this space eight years ago when we joined that team and we said yes to being a part in any way possible.

You know, it was great in that first season to be a bivocational minister.

And then all of a sudden I had more friends and more family that were asking, why aren't they paying you yet?

Why aren't you on staff yet?

You should leave.

Someone else will hire you.

And in those moments, I still had to wonder, okay, God, what is your plan?

And go back to his word and his calling and say, I don't care about any of those things because I know right now this is where he's calling me.

And it doesn't make sense that this is how long it's been.

I thought this would have been a decade ago, but hey, this is God's timing, not my timing.

I had questions along the way, but in every one of those moments, I had to trust that the calling of my life and the obedience that I was doing was for a reason.

And looking back, I can see every step of the way that his hand was in it.

And I'm sure many of you have had situations like this in your life, but we can all say a prayer like this.

It says, Lord, help me to understand that my ways are not your ways.

Help me not to lean on my understanding.

Help me to acknowledge you in everything that I'm doing, and help me to be patient.

And I can't help but wonder what would have happened if the Israelites decided they wanted to be done maybe in five days.

Or maybe they decided they wanted to shout every day at the end of the march because they needed to get that energy out and their war cry every day.

Or what if on the third day they marched around the wall three times because three is a pretty good number in the Bible?

Or what if they just decided to blow the horn and cry out whenever they felt like it, calling on God.

Would God's power still have been able to deliver Jericho to them?

And I think the answer is of course his power could have, and he actually might have in that moment.

But sometimes in the midst of disobedience or only partial obedience, which I will call partial obedience, still disobedience, God still comes through with the miraculous because he loves us dearly.

But often when we're not fully obedient, we will face consequences on the other side.

And I even look back to Moses and Aaron in Numbers chapter 20.

Numbers 20 · chapter mention

The Israelites were complaining as they did about being thirsty and they had no water.

And so Moses and Aaron heard from God and he told them to go to a rock and to speak, and that water would come out from it if they called for it.

And so Moses, in his complete frustration, listened and went to the rock.

But he was so mad at the Israelites, he was so sick of them complaining that he lifted his staff and he struck the rod twice struck the rock twice with his with his staff out of anger.

And sure enough, water came out and they were able to drink.

But he wasn't fully obedient in that moment, and he paid the consequence.

In verse 12 of chapter 20 in Numbers, it says, But the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, Because you did not trust me enough to demonstrate my holiness to the people of Israel, you will not lead them into the land that I am giving you.

Moses took the matters into his own hand and went a little further, and he allowed his frustrations to shape his actions.

God still provided, but there were consequences.

Back to the walls of Jericho.

God had a plan.

He gave it to Joshua, and Joshua led the army in obedience, right down to the numbers.

And in the Bible, the number seven often signifies and symbolizes completeness and perfection.

Seven days of marching, seven times around the wall on the seventh day.

The plan of perfection to see God's power on complete display.

A plan for victory.

And here is the key to faithful obedience.

Victorious Christians are people who know the promises of God because they spend time meditating on God's word.

They believe the promises of God because the word of God generates faith in their hearts, and they reckon on these promises and obey what God tells them to do.

And to reckon means to count as true in your life what God says about you in his word.

Not just to believe it and say you believe it, but to count it as true and to actually take a step and act on it.

Let's look at the rest of chapter six.

Verse 17 says, Jericho and everything in it must be completely destroyed as an offering to the Lord.

Only Rahab the prostitute and the others in her house will be spared, for she protected our spies.

Do not take any of the things set apart for destruction, or you yourselves will be completely destroyed, and you will bring trouble on the camp of Israel.

Everything made from silver, gold, bronze, or iron is sacred to the Lord and must be brought into his treasury.

When the people heard the sound of the ram's horns, they shouted as loud as they could, and suddenly the walls of Jericho collapsed, and the Israelites charged straight into the town and captured it.

They completely destroyed everything in it with their swords men, women, young and old, cattle, sheep, goats, and donkeys.

And then verse 24.

Then the Israelites burned the town and everything in it.

Only the things made from silver, gold, bronze, or iron were kept for the treasury of the Lord's house.

So Joshua spared Rahab the prostitute and her relatives who were with her in the house, because she had hidden the spies Joshua had sent to Jericho.

And she lives among the Israelites to this day.

And our fourth area today is that we need to arise and conquer.

And within this, Joshua was given four commands that I believe it's important for us to look at as a part of his conquering the walls of Jericho before they came down and after they came down.

Can one devote the entire city to God?

Normally, soldiers get to share in the spoils of war.

The treasures, the money, the goods, they're shared amongst the amongst the soldiers that they get to take back and help their families become wealthy and well off.

But in this case, it was to be presented to God as a first fruits.

Everything was put into his treasury for the future of what he had.

And I can't help but think in this vision-building season, this call for miraculous faith for all of us to trust not in our own understanding of how God's gonna get us to where we're going, but to say, how can I be obedient in this moment to what God's calling of me?

Pastor John shared with us the four D's as we look at how we can be a part of our vision offering in November.

Decrease, spending less, delay, what purchase.

Can we wait to make?

Doing more to earn more money into a house, getting creative and selling things, whatever it looks like, so we can put more and donate into the treasury, into God's storehouse.

Because it's not about us, it's about what God wants to do to further his kingdom here in Edmonton, to knock down more walls, to expand and to conquer, to arise and to conquer.

But it starts, we have to do things differently.

It might mean not taking that treasure we normally would have for ourselves and fully trusting God with everything.

No longer leaning on what we think we need.

Command number two rescue Rahab and her family.

God rescued Rahab and her family because of her faith, and it got her a place in the Faith Hall of Fame in Hebrews chapter 11.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

Rahab's faith was the cause of salvation, not only for herself, but for her family, and it saved her family from the complete destruction and ended up making it so that her family could be the route to start the lineage of Jesus.

Her story mattered, her faith mattered.

King David was a part of her ancestry.

And as we think about what it means to arise and go, as we think about what it means to put vision names on the vision wall in the back, people that we're praying for, I would encourage you continue to think of people in this season who you know that need the love of Jesus in their lives.

Because your faith can change things, it can change the course of someone's life because you are believing for them.

You have faith and you're going to act on that faith just as Rahab acted on her faith.

And we can believe together in faith and to step out to invite someone, to invite someone to a church service on a Sunday morning.

And maybe they just show up through these doors and get welcomed by our team out there, and they get to experience a sense of belonging for the first time in their life.

Or maybe they're gonna go to another church and experience Jesus there.

But we get to plant the seeds of faith and trust God with the rest.

But we can't stay content.

We need to start arising and conquering.

The consequences of sin can be changed by radical faith.

Who is going to be saved in your life because of your radical faith?

Rahab was able to save her entire family.

Who is going to be saved this morning?

Because you choose to stand up with that radical faith in this season of conquering.

And the third command: destroy all of the people.

If I'm being honest in the room, this is probably the hardest for a pastor to want to address.

And I even asked Pastor John o last week, do you want me to even touch on this?

Can we just skip over that end part of the chapter and talk about the conquering and the conquest and God's provision?

But I don't think it's something we can brush over to kill every man, woman, and child.

It's there in the Bible for a reason, so it must have relevance.

It was written, and so how are we gonna handle that?

Because in war, you don't normally kill the innocent woman and children.

You kill the soldiers, and then you take everyone else after that.

But in this case, what does it look like to kill every man, woman, and child?

Well, it's not something we can push away, but I can tell you before we go forward with it that there's something here that we have to remember.

The character of God as described throughout scripture will remain true no matter what.

He's a loving God, a forgiving God, a God of grace, a just God, a God that cares, a God that still wants to have relationship with his family, with his kids.

He wants to involve us in his lives.

He wants us to be a part of that.

That is never changed and will never change ever.

But what we don't see in this passage in Joshua is that the civilization in Canaan was incredibly wicked, complete evil.

And God did not want the holy people contaminated by these evil neighbors, leaving them to infiltrate the beliefs and actions of the Israelites.

Israel was to bring about God's blessing into the world, to one day make way for Jesus to come and save everyone from the destruction of sin.

And the devil was constantly working to taint the Jewish people, to try to prevent the Savior Jesus from coming into the world and dying for our sins.

There were many accounts in the Old Testament of great men who went on to marry pagan women, women of other cultures who served other gods, and they themselves ended up giving way and making way for other gods in their life, not just the one true God.

They were tainted because of the cultures that they let stand by straying away from what God had called them to do in serving other gods.

And we needed to prevent that in this situation.

God didn't want that for his holy nation, for his children.

He wanted them devoted to him.

And the evil in Canaan needed to be destroyed.

And the people of Canaan had been given plenty of opportunity to repent and to turn to God.

In the same way that Rahab believed and had faith, and she was saved.

There was over 400 years since the time of Abraham that they had been given the chance to turn.

The nation of Canaan was pure evil.

And they did not turn to the one true God.

Every wonder that God performed and every victory that God gave his people was a witness to the people of the land.

But they preferred to go on in their sins and reject the mercy of God.

Never think of the Canaanites as helpless, ignorant people who nothing about the true God.

They were willfully sinning against a flood of light.

And while this doesn't make it easy to understand how death was a part of the plan, it highlights something.

In the destruction of Jericho, God is letting us know that he does not tolerate and will not compromise to sin.

Not in the lives of his people, not in our lives today.

He did not tolerate it then, and he's not gonna tolerate it now.

He wants us as his people to go and to conquer and to take ground, to get rid of sin and to get rid of that evil that's in our land, to knock down walls and say, evil get out.

Sin go away.

You have no more place here to knock down the walls that are hiding the sin in our lives and exposing sin to the light of Jesus so that it can be changed and saved from the destruction.

We need to expose it.

God doesn't tolerate sin, He's not gonna compromise, and that is why destruction was necessary.

Romans 6 23 says, For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.

And the sin of Canaan is what brought them death.

It was the consequence of the evil that they had been going on in for so long.

And today we get to know we've been told the consequence of sin is still death.

It's an eternity spent apart from our loving God.

And this is why conquering matters.

We don't want to see people lost.

We don't want to have walls getting in the way, preventing people from the best that God has for them, has for us.

Our mission is to conquer and to say, sin be gone.

Sin, we're on a mission to get rid of you and destroy you.

Sin, you no longer have a hold of our life, and you no longer have a hold of the life of our friends, of our family, of our coworkers.

We're gonna say enough is enough, and we're gonna fight to knock down every wall so that sin doesn't have that hold.

So that people everywhere we go get to experience the same forgiveness that we have.

And then the fourth command was to burn the city.

And this is a foreshadowing of one day what will come at judgment day for all who reject the truth of Jesus.

God declared war on Satan, and one day he will declare the victory when Jesus comes as conqueror to establish his kingdom.

If you eliminate the militant side of the Christian faith, then you must abandon the cross.

For it was on the cross that Jesus won the victory over sin and Satan.

And that is our goal this morning.

There is a militant aspect to faith that matters because we need to arise and go to arise and conquer.

And that is gonna look different for every one of us.

It's not marching around some physical walls, but it is something in the lives of our friends and our family and our coworkers as we need to start taking steps of faith and praying, God, how can I be someone used by you?

God, speak to me, God, teach me.

I want to know your strategies, Lord, and I want to go by them.

I'm gonna read your word, I'm gonna trust in it, and I'm gonna take a step to conquer.

Because if we don't take a step, what is gonna happen to the people we love and care about that don't know Jesus yet?

You might not think you're qualified, you might think that a better strategy would be using someone else.

But 1 Corinthians 1, 26 to 27 reminds us: remember, dear brothers and sisters, that few of you were wise in the world's eyes or powerful or wealthy when God called you.

Instead, God chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise.

God wants to use each and every one of you, even when there's no sense about it whatsoever.

In the same way that the Israelites use the ram's horn instead of the trumpet, the silver trumpet, we get to proclaim the victory.

We get to proclaim the presence of God in our land and say sin has already been conquered when Jesus died on the cross.

And then we get to commit to God's plan, mixed with God's presence, giving us that guaranteed victory.

Because when the Israelites were marching, they not only marched as an army, but they carried the Lord's presence and that Ark of the Covenant with them.

They had God's presence every step of the way, God's plan, God's presence, guaranteed victory.

And we often we seek the plans, we seek directions, but we need to remember that the presence of God is just as important as the plans, that acknowledging Him and everything we do is just as important as those plans.

And victory is on the other side of your obedience.

Thank you so much for listening to today's message.

If you're ever in the Edmonton area, pop by for a visit.

And if you need any more information, visit EvolveChurch.com.

We hope to see you.