Day 175: God Gives the Land [1]

Today's Connected Passages: 

• Numbers 32:1-42; 33:50-56 
• Deuteronomy  1:1-8; 3:1-20;  4:1-2; 4:44-49; 9:1-6; 
• Deuteronomy 11:26-32; 29:1-15; 31:1-6; 34:1-4 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome to the Canon Connected, where we read the connections, see the connections, and study the connections of the Bible. Thank you for joining us on day number 175 of the Canon Connected. And right now we are in a week's worth of studies on the physical, um, literal land of the Israelites in the Old Testament. And uh, regardless of what a person feels about um who biblical Israel is, I'm I gave my opinion on this, on who God's chosen people are. There's a lot of verses in the New Testament that refer to Israel or Jews in a figurative sense, meaning anyone who follows God by the faith of Abraham, even if they're not literal biological Jews. But regardless of if you disagree with me about that, or what a person believes about the modern nation state of Israel, and I know there's a lot of disagreement, a lot of lively conversation, even I'm sure some vitriol, even amongst Christians, and discussing that because it's absolutely in current events right now. But regardless of what a person believes about those things, I don't think there can be any doubt whatsoever that the literal physical land, the border land of the promised land, Canaan, literally, literally Israel as a as a as a uh country, um, a piece of land, property, so to speak, um, is extremely important in the Bible. And eventually this would be the place where God would dwell um with his people before he moved around in the tabernacle, the city of Jerusalem that David took, that we're gonna see tomorrow, um, became the the final, so to speak, in a manner of speaking, you know, dwelling place uh for God until the exile. And so this this land as it matters, and there is so much in the Old Testament about it. It is it is truly a dominant theme. I even referred to this yesterday that even though I wouldn't go to the wall for this interpretation, and I I definitely have no issue teaching Genesis 1 as the traditional understanding of it, as the creation of the universe and the earth, there is, you know, a an interpretation out there by Dr. John Salheimer in the book Genesis Unbound, um, that again is not some you know crackpot theory on Genesis 1, but it teaches that after Genesis 1.1, after everything was created, the Genesis 1-2, all the way through the sixth day before the creation of humans, is the promised land, which was the same as the Garden of Eden, being prepared for human inhabitation, that God prepared the land by providing you know the animals and the water and all of that. And it was uninhabitable according to Genesis 1.2, and so God prepared it over six days. And um, and again, the reason why I would say that's an interpretation worth considering, okay, not for any other reason, primarily to me, nearly, although it is backed again by very good Hebrew interpretation to me. It is not, you know, again, something that's just pulled out of the out of thin air and and and with some sort of cryptic, you know, uh source of its interpretation. But the reason why I think that that is worth considering is because the land is such a big deal. Even all the way back, you know, even if you throw out Genesis 1 as possibly referring to it, all the way back to Abraham and the Abrahamic covenant, this land mattered, the physical land of Israel, the promised land. It's a big deal. You can't, this is inarguable to me, regardless of what a person believes about Israel as a nation state or even who God's chosen people were in the old or New Testament in the Bible. The physical land matters. And so we talked about the promise of the land yesterday, and that's a big deal because today we're going to, and tomorrow we're talking about the giving of the land, and to God, they're essentially one and the same. And I'm crossing my fingers, you know, one over the other as we do to show things that are, you know, inseparable. Um, because that's how God's promises work. And that is something we absolutely should take from yesterday and today and tomorrow, and even the dividing of the land to come up afterwards and the two days after that, is that God's promises are as good as done. That's the grammar he even used. And I don't think that was accidental. Maybe I'm reading too much into it. It's not something else I wouldn't go to the wall for. But even if I'm wrong about that, that the when Genesis, whenever he said, I have given your ancestors this land, which doesn't make sense how you can have given something to somebody centuries in the future, but that's how God communicates to me because he's saying, My promises are true. They cannot be undone. This is going to happen. All right. And it really, in one sense, has happened because that's again how the sovereign God of the universe works. Um, and some of the connections that we can see from the reading today, the first one was uh maybe a bit surprising to some people, and that is how so many of these readings come from Numbers in Deuteronomy before Joshua's command to take over the land, because as we can see from a repetition, that the these these these two and a half tribes, um, Gad, uh Reuben, and the half tribe of Benesseh, they wanted the land on the east side of the Jordan, which wasn't technically the quote unquote promised land because of their of their of their uh their animals and their and the need to graze. That it seemed to be from reading the text that the east side of the of the Jordan was was better for that. And so that's why they wanted it. And the and the the battles that were won against Sihon and Og in Exodus, um, they this is a repeated, a connected idea from today's readings, are important because this is the land that these these two and a half tribes wanted. And so that's something we see that again is a little bit out of the box because when we think of the promised land, and as I've mentioned, uh just in this reading today and yesterday in the podcast on both days, the physical land is so important, and yet two and a half tribes opted for a different piece of land. And Moses, even at first, you can see it in the text, he's concerned, you know, like that they're not going to help them fight, but they make the promise, we'll go help fight, but we're coming back to the east side to have our piece of land. This is going to be our our inheritance as God's chosen people. And another connection that we can see, I think that absolutely does matter, is that God has told them, as I've said, that he promised them the land and he is going to fight for them. And now, this is something, again, this the sovereignty of God we've talked about a lot. Um, God of heaven's armies, we've talked about. This is Sunday School 101. This is the kind of thing that six and seven-year-olds should be learning in Sunday school, but it bears repeating because God speaks of it so much in in these passages that they needed to believe him because he was going to fight for them. Deuteronomy 9. Listen, O Israel, today you are about to cross the Jordan River to take over the land belonging to nations much greater and more powerful than you. They live in cities with walls that reach to the sky. The people are strong and tall, descendants of the famous Anekite giants. You've heard the saying, who can stand up to the Anekites? And doesn't this sound like Sennacherib, king of Assyria? Man, the connections in the Bible are so rich and so deep and so vast that I always feel so inadequate trying to put a reading plan like this together because this could have gone with the God of heaven's armies. I don't even remember, because he's going to talk about a devouring fire here in a second, if we even quoted this in any of those readings. There's just so much, it's just, it overwhelms the brain to think about these connections. So I always look at this reading plan as being a work in progress, inadequate, as being something God can use. But because the Bible is so interconnected on so many levels, I mean it it is impossible to get them all. But this reminds me of how Sennacherib, king of Assyria, trash talked through his messenger, you know, to Hezekiah in that story. Who can stand up to the Anekites? And then verse 3. And if this doesn't light your fire as a Christian, man, I think you almost surely need to get on your face before God and repent and confess and say, God, reveal yourself to me. But recognize today that the Lord your God is the one who will cross over ahead of you, like a devouring fire to destroy them. He will subdue them so that you will quickly conquer them and drive them out, just as the Lord has promised. And this is something we see from the connections today, this constant repetition of God to reassure them. Just like yesterday, the promise. God promises are going to come true. God's promises are going to come true. God's promises cannot fail. They are going to come true. We need to believe Him. The Anekites had this the famous uh Anekite giants had a reputation. The people of this land had a reputation, but the only reputation we need to care about here, care about is the reputation of our God. That's what Rahab did, by the way. I've mentioned her like 28 times by now. But Rahab didn't see any of the things that God had done in Egypt. She just heard it. The reputation of God was enough for her to believe. And these people had seen it. So they should know that God was going to do this for them. And yet we've seen over and over and over again the ten spies, a whole bunch of people went with them. They didn't believe and they didn't respond. And by the way, that leads to the final connection. There's more than one, you know, uh time here where it connects to the idea that um obedience is required by God, you know, to be in relationship with him and even to get this land. You know, he killed off all the unbelieving people over 40 years. He allowed Joshua, you know, and Caleb to live, to get to see the promised land. And even Moses was not above the duh the punishment of disbelief because he didn't get to go. That's part of the story. As great as a man as he was, again, there is a condition here on the conquering of the land. You have to be obedient, you have to have faith that produces you know response. And uh that's part of the connections too. And again, these are all things we've talked about a number of times, I know, but they come up. I'm not gonna try to make this say anything different than what I think it says. And so that is day one of the giving of the land. So interconnected, so intertwined, almost the same exact thing as the promising of the land, because that's how God's promises work. But tomorrow we're gonna get to more of the Joshua stuff, the actual, you know, um, marching around the walls of Jericho and those stories, and even some of the commentary in the later New Test the Old Testament books on how God did that. And so hope you'll come back and be with us again tomorrow as we continue to on the promise giving and dividing of the land. Read the connections, see the connections, and study the connections. Thank you.