Sermon Tone Analysis

I spent part of Saturday with a dear friend who was one of the men most responsible for my spiritual growth and for me being in the place where I stand today.

Mac would be the first to tell you that, for much of his life, he was a hard-drinking waterman whose vocabulary consisted primarily of four-letter words.

I didn’t know him during that time of his life.

By the time I met him, Mac was following the Lord with all his heart.

He was bold for sharing the life-changing message of the Gospel, because he knew what a difference it had made in his own life.

But the Gospel did not just make Mac a better sinner.

The Gospel made him a saint.

Now understand that Mac is still a sinner, just as we all are.

But what God sees now when He looks at Mac is a man who is being made into the image of Jesus Christ, whom Mac made his Lord and savior years ago.

Any day now, Mac will stand before his savior, and I believe he will hear the words, “Well done, My good and faithful servant.”

Mac is in the final stages of cancer — mesothelioma, acquired during years of working around asbestos at the shipyard.

On Saturday, he was a shell of the man I have known.

Many of you here today know just what I mean by that.

You have lost loved ones — some recently and some not as recently, but the wounds are still fresh.

As we look at these candles that have been lit this morning — each one representing some loved one who has been taken from us — it would be easy for us to believe that death has won.

This curse that was brought upon us by Adam and Eve’s rebellion against the rightful King in the Garden of Eden — this curse that we confirm through our own sins — can seem to us to be the final word in the matter.

As we stand before the grave stones of our deceased loved ones, we weep for what we have lost.

We feel the full pain of the curse.

But I am here today to tell you that there is Hope.

There is a God who loves you.

There is a God whose steadfast love is never failing.

There is a God whose great grace and mercy extended all the way to a Roman cross, where His only Son, Jesus Christ, suffered the punishment for the sins of mankind and prayed that His Father would forgive the very ones who had crucified Him.

There is a God whose promises are from everlasting to everlasting.

And today we will take a look at those promises from the perspective of His chosen people, Israel, whom He rescued out of bondage in Egypt and to whom He gave the land that He had promised their forefathers.

Turn with me, please, to Joshua, Chapter 24, and let’s discover the faithfulness of this true King.

By this time in the history of the nation of Israel, the people had been in the land of Canaan for 40 years.

They had been directed by God to bring His righteous judgment on the people of that land for their great evil.

Despite the fact that since the Battle of Jericho God had shown the people of Israel that He would fight for them and that He would win the victories on their behalf, the people had had only mixed success in doing what God had called them to do.

Their lack of faith had caused them to make alliances with people they had been called to drive out of the land, and those people would prove to be problems for Israel for the rest of its history as an ancient nation.

When we compromise with the world on Kingdom matters — when we fail to have faith that God will provide for the things He has called us to do — then we ensure our own future failure.

And that’s just what happened with Israel, when God allowed the nation finally to be overrun by the Assyrians in 722 BC, and to Judah, when God used the Babylonians to destroy Jerusalem and carry its people into exile in 586 BC.

But today we are still near the beginning of Israel’s history as a nation.

Today, we are entering the story at the end of the life of Joshua, the great man of faith who led the people of Israel into the Canaan and into the promise that God had given Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and all their descendants.

God had promised Abraham that He would make him the father of a nation and that this nation would live in the land that God would show him.

Now, having entered and taken possession of much of that promised land, Joshua was at the end of his life.

We will pick up the account in verse 29.

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Here we see the accounts of the deaths of two great men of that early nation of Israel — Joshua, who had led them in battle, and Eleazar, who had led them as their priest.

Both men are buried in the places of their tribes’ inheritance.

They were buried in the family plot, as it were.

But take a look back at Verse 32.

This verse speaks of the God’s faithfulness to His promises, but we’ll have to trace a bit of history to see it.

Nearly 250 years earlier, God had called a man named Abram, whom we later know as Abraham, to take a journey of faith.

Gen 12:1

Gen 12

Abram was 75 years old when he began this journey, and his wife, Sarai, was 65.

They were childless, but God’s promise — which He repeated and expanded during the next 25 years — was that they would have a child together.

This child was Isaac, born when Abraham was 100 and Sarah was 90.

And then, when Isaac was just a young man, his mother died at the age of 127.

We see, through the next few verses of this chapter, a negotiation between Abraham and the owner of a field near Hebron for the purchase of that field as a burial place for Sarah.

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So Sarah was buried in Canaan, which God had told Abraham would be the place where Abraham’s descendants would have their nation.

But God had also said that there would be a time of suffering for those people outside of the land before they would see the promise fulfilled.

You see, God’s promises do not come due on our time.

God is faithful, but in His faithfulness, He does not promise us a life of ease.

He keeps His promises, but He does so in His timing and in His way.

We may not find ourselves subjugated to slavery as the people of Israel would be, but

This place where Sarah had been laid to rest was the place that God had promised them.

And even though God had told him there would be hundreds of years of slavery for his descendants, Abraham had faith that God would keep His promise to return them to Canaan, to the land where Sarah had been buried.

Abraham lived to be 175 years old and was buried in the same cave with Sarah, “in the field of Ephron the son of Zohar the Hittite, facing Mamre” ().

His son, Isaac, grew old, having sons of his own, including Jacob, whom God would later name Israel and through whom the 12 tribes of that nation would be formed.

And just as it had been said of his father, Isaac “was gathered to his people” at his death.

He was buried in the family plot in a cave in the field of Ephron the son of Zohar the Hittite, facing Mamre.

Jacob, however would not die in Canaan.

To understand what happened to him, we have to follow the story of his son, Joseph.

Joseph had been the boy whose father loved him so much that he gave him a coat of many colors, honoring him above his many brothers.

His brothers had been angry about Joseph’s preferential treatment, so they sold him into slavery and then told their father that he had been killed.

But Joseph was taken to Egypt, where he distinguished himself to such a degree that he eventually became second only to the Pharaoh in that nation.

And then, when a famine struck the land of his family, they came to him for help.

Joseph, demonstrating an incredible God-given grace, forgave them for what they had done to him, and he put them up in Egypt.

In fact, the Pharaoh thought so much of Joseph and his family that he gave them a land there to live in.

So when Jacob died in Egypt, he was given a great funeral.

But not in Egypt.

He had made his sons swear that they would not bury him in Egypt, but in the land of his fathers, Isaac and Abraham.

So even though the family was now living in Egypt — and even though they surely had heard of God’s warning that it would be more than 400 years before they could come back to visit the grave — Jacob’s sons took him to Canaan, to the land of the promise, for his burial.

And then the book of Genesis ends with the death of Joseph.

But not before he had demonstrated his own great faith in God’s promise.

But what happens next in the history of Israel is that the oppression of which God had warned soon began.

Most of you will know the story.

The people of Israel were enslaved by Pharaohs who did not know or care what Joseph had done to serve the nation of Egypt.

And for more than 300 years they were in bondage there.

God then sent Moses to bring the 10 plagues that eventually caused the Pharaoh to let the people go, and they crossed the Red Sea and then wandered in the desert for 40 years until the next generation — now led by Joshua — would cross the Jordan River and go in to take the land that had been promised so long ago to Abraham.

But in the excitement of their escape from Egypt, there’s something that is easy to miss.

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Joseph had had faith that God would keep his promise — so much faith that he had made his sons promise they would take him to be buried in Canaan when they went back there.

Moses would be part of God’s plan to bring Joseph back to the land that God had promised.

We tend to look for great miracles from God, and He can and does still provide them.

But sometimes we miss the point that God works most often through faithful people — people who recognize how hard it will be to carry a coffin full of bones around the wilderness for 40 years but do it anyway, because they are standing on God’s promises.

So Moses and the people of Israel carried the bones of Joseph around the wilderness for 40 years, and then Joshua had them carried across the Jordan River into Canaan.

And that brings us back to our Scripture focus today, from the book of Joshua, where we find Joshua has died at the age of 110, 440 years after the death of Joseph.

Joshua and Eleazar were buried in their family plots.

Where were the bones of Joseph finally buried?

Note that this is not the same place where Abraham and Isaac and Jacob had been buried.

This was in nearby Shechem, on a plot of land that Jacob had bought before his family had moved to live with Joseph in Egypt.

Joseph had always had faith that God would bring him back to the Promised Land, even to the place that his father had purchased.

And here he was, finally having his bones laid to rest there.

Folks, you can have faith in the government or faith in the stock market or faith in your husband or your wife.

But none of those kinds of faith will serve you when you are gone.

The faith that Joseph had, the faith that Jacob had and that Isaac had and that Abraham had is a faith that is stronger than death.

It is the faith in a God who has power over death itself.

Their faith is the same as the faith that we who follow Jesus Christ have — that the God who raised His Son from the dead on the third day after His crucifixion will one day raise the followers of Christ from the dead, when our restored and glorified bodies will join our spirits in heaven.

My friend, Mac, has this faith, and I know that when I see him again in heaven, his body will no longer be the emaciated shell I saw on Saturday.

He will once again be young and strong, and he will be singing praises to his Savior with all his might.