Sermon Tone Analysis

basically talk about the divisions of land that each tribe would get.

These chapters go into great detail as to who gets what and what borders they will control.

It is a little bit difficult to read.

We don’t have to apologize for that.

Remember, this book is written to be an historical account of the people of God as they take possession of the promised land.

This is like the legacy contract that dots all the i’s and crosses all the t’s.

Everything that needs to be reported is reported and we see how each tribe/or family get’s their possession, their land, and what are the boundaries of that land

And this can be hard for us to really spend time pouring over, especially if you don’t know the territory.

These lands, these cities mean nothing to us here and now, but basically it would be like saying, this tribe goes from the northern boundary of Townsend to the southern boundary of Bear and following the line to the west to Maryland.

This tribe’s land goes from The Elkton line all the way to the river at Perryville.

And it goes on like that for a while.

9 chapters or so.

And these chapters, although hard to get through help us as we think about the big picture.

It’s good to go back a little bit and remember the promise God made to Abraham.

The next verse talks about how Abraham lived in Bethel next to AI

Pretty neat.

God told Abraham that his people would have this land.

And we just talked about Bethel and AI a couple of weeks ago.

Joshua and his army took those cities right after Jericho.

Some 6 or 7 hundred years after God promises Abraham a particular stretch of land and Abraham has no kids, and now, the descendants, hundreds of thousands if not a couple of million descendants of Abraham are now taking possession of this land that God promised them.

We need to Read the Bible as a whole.

Understand this for a minute.

Too many people will take a couple of verses out of the bible and read them and claim that for that day.

Now, it is good to read your bible even if it is just a couple of verses here and there.

But please, understand that there is a whole story that is going on here.

There is a whole thing happening that you miss if you shoot here and there.

You miss out on so much if you aren’t really reading the book, within the context of itself.

If you don’t know who the author is, if you don’t know when in history it was written, if you don’t know who it was written to then you aren’t receiving the intended message those words have to say.

That is really important.

We should always aim to find the intended point that the writer is trying to make and not insert our own agendas to the verse.

There is no other book that you would read like that.

I am reading a book with my son, the Hunger games series and I could never just open it up and read something and expect to really understand what is going on.

We need to be intentional about how we read the word of God.

At least read books at a time.

Unless it is proverbs, or the Psalms, because those are collections put together.

They aren’t a narrative.

That is why it is so easy to mess up, that is why it is so easy to take verses out of context.

Some of our favorite verses that we claim for ourselves that encourage us may be setting us up because that verse might not be written in the context that we are taking it in.

We should really be reading the bible in context.

So when we read that Abraham was promised a particular land, we see hundreds of years later that Joshua is taking the exact land that God promised Abraham.

Even names the same cities.

When you put that together and see how it fits you really see the faithfulness of God.

You begin to trust Him even more with your life because you see that He can be trusted and you see that He truly cares for His own.

Do you know God loves you and cares for you?

He loves sinners.

He loves those of us who don’t have it all together.

And what we are talking about today reinforces this whole idea that God loves us even when we mess up.

God made good on his promises.

and when you go back to Genesis where God says, I will make you a people as numerous as the sand on the shores and as many as the stars in the sky.

It seemed impossible for a guy like Abraham to believe it.

But, miracle after miracle, little step after little step and here we are.

The people of God now possess the promised land.

Mostly They didn’t take all the land

Joshua is setting up the boundaries and now he is getting to a part where God was specific and asked for a certain number of cities to be set aside as Cities of Refuge.

Cities of Refuge

Now a city

God cares so much about his own, about His people that He has set up a place of sanctuary for the person who commits murder unintentionally.

This is something that God mentioned to Moses back in Deuteronomy.

He is to set apart certain towns of sanctuary where a person who unintentionally killed someone could go and live in safety.

20 Cities of Refuge

A promise made by God to care for those who killed unintentionally.

I want to talk a little bit about this.

This is something that God told Moses to do back in Deuteronomy

In order to understand the cities of refuge we need to understand the way that we got here.

When sin first entered into the world, It used to be the law of the jungle.

That is how people lived.

It started with Cain and Able.

I don’t like something about you and will do whatever necessary to remove it, even if it means killing.

Very harsh, not what God wants but it gets worse.

There is another story in Genesis about a man named Lamech.

People are taking the law into their own hands, which is usually not good.

It’s the wild west going on.

Sounds a little like today.

Shootings are so prevalent that we don’t react any more to it.

It just becomes part of normalcy.

It really seems like the wild wild west.

And even though we don’t live in the big city we still experience some of this.

As a matter of fact, I bet many of us deal with a huge problem in the world today, and that is road rage.

Anyone here experience road rage before?

Whether it has been done to you or whether it is just you?

I bet that is most of us here this morning.

We take our problems, our conflicts out on each other instead of, letting it go, or letting someone in charge take care of it.

Speaking of road rage.

Drivers ed .com

reports that 2/3 s of people who die in car crashes every year are the result of road rage?

We take the law into our own hands.

This is a problem now just like it was back in Genesis.

Even though people were prosperous, even though they were blessed they still were murdering and killing one another.

Something had to be done.

God begins to speak about ethics and the law and says in

Exodus

Exodus 21:33-35

This is where we get eye for an eye.

This is where we get the idea that the punishment should be in proportion to the crime.

But the idea of ethics continues to develop later in Exodus (remember that this is where the law is given to Moses.

God is telling Moses how this civilization is supposed to work).

As a matter of fact, in ancient Israel’s history, the nearest relative of a murdered person is responsible for avenging the blood of the one who kills another.

Tough stuff to hear.

But

God is a God of Justice, but he is also a God of Mercy.