Faith and Action

Introduction:

What does God want from us?

This is not some deep existential question.

It is one that brings us back to the Bible for universal answers.

God wants us to trust Him.

He wanted Israel to trust Him.

Trust, however, shows up in the actual world in the form of obedience.

The life gets structured under God’s authority, within His boundaries, and in obedience to His teaching/doctrine.

This begins with the evidence for God’s trustworthiness, His reliability.

There is a noticeable missing section of the chronology, but this is not by accident.

We will see this from Joshua.

By Faith the Walls Fell

We should begin this investigation by noting a few things about the text itself.

We have the repetition of the “by faith” phrase, so we know we are still thinking about the same thing.

The writer shifts to focus on the walls falling not the people directly.

The Israelites remain the unstated subject (Heb. 11:29).

The focus on the walls enables the writer to frame the condition met for them to fall.

Israel’s Encircling Demonstrated Trust

This follows with the Passover: it required trusting God (Heb. 11:28) and the crossing of the Red Sea (Heb.11:29).

The themes of Joshua:

One of them is the question of whether Israel will obey God.

There are intentional references to the events of Kadesh-Barnea.

Joshua makes explicit connections between crossing the Red Sea and crossing on the west side of the Jordan River.

Joshua 3:17 - The Lord turns this into a Red Sea moment. Exodus 14:31

Joshua 4:20-24 (note the connection with the Red Sea).

God’s instructions about Jericho: Josh. 6:1-14.

The Final Matters of Jericho:

The writer of Joshua does, what at first glance, a strange thing, namely, pays more attention to Joshua’s instructions to Israel than to the military concerns.

Victory was not secured through generalship but obedience.

The open question is will Israel obey.

Marching

Shouting

Abstaining

Observing (by which I mean looking at things and people from God’s perspective).

His account of the walls’ collapse will be brief.

He spends more time on the instructions than the destruction.

Josh. 6:15-21

Introduction (Part 2)

The writer of Hebrews stays in the complex world of Joshua for the last of his focused examples.

This one falls outside of the norm.

The writer of Hebrews perhaps anchors her at the end of the focused examples because of the summary of reality he can present through her.

There are two types of people in the world.

Post-Genesis 3, everyone starts out in one category: unbelievers.

Believers.

2 Cor. 2:14-16.

Rahab provides an illustration of someone who isn’t destroyed because she demonstrates her faith.

This is why she is also used in James.

The Example of Rahab

We will look at the section beginning in Josh. 2:8, where we learn that Rahab and the men had a lengthy, important conversation before she hid them.

This conversation will have two implications:

Rahab’s personal expression about Jehovah.

The confidence the people gain from hearing what she had to say (see Josh. 2:22-24).

The real importance of the incident comes from the conversation she has with them.

Notice how she reinforces all the common themes from previous scriptures or statements.

Check the passage list here.

Josh. 2:11 is the important statement.

If we think about this from an ancient perspective, then, we can get a sense of the theological importance of this conversation. First, what does it suggest about the confidence of the people in the local gods to provide security for them? Often, conflicts between people are conceived as contests between gods. Why would the people of Jericho have anything to fear if their gods protected them?

Notice the statement “on the earth/land” beneath. This is a remarkable statement because Canaanites, like other Mediterraneans, thought of gods as localized and belonging to boundaries.

She would have been rejecting the polytheism of Canaanite religion, but she would also have affirmed the statements in Ex. 20:4, Dt. 4:39, Dt. 5:8. She has arrived at the right conclusions based upon what she and the others of her city heard.

James uses Rahab in James 2:25. There, he illustrates how her expressed “trust” was shown to be legitimate through her actions or deeds. She proved trustworthy, but she also trusted God and the people to protect her.