Day 178: The Dividing Of The Land 2

Today's Connected Passages: 

• Judges 1:1-36 
• Psalm 78:55 
• Ezekiel 45:1-12; 47:13-48:29 
• Numbers 35:1-5 
• Joshua 21:1-7 

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. I am very thankful you decided to join us here for day number one hundred and seventy-eight of the Canon Connected. And today we are talking about the second day, the second half of Connected readings on how God led the people of Israel to divide the land. And as we've mentioned about every day for the past five or six days, the physical geographical land, the literal land of Israel, the promised land, often referred to as Canaan, early on in the Old Testament, is absolutely substantial and is significant. And God promising the land, giving the land through warfare, and through and then dividing the land fairly, you know, to show equality, to show, you know, diversity within unity, to show order and organization. This is all a huge part of the Old Testament story, and none of those things can be diminished at all when you read the Old Testament because they're so significant. And there's just chapter after chapter of this. And as we talked about days ago, the land was promised as a part of the Abrahamic covenant, all the way back in Genesis chapter 12 and then the early chapters of Genesis, because God wanted the people to have this land. And even we've seen that God uses land, he uses boundaries, he uses countries, nations, according to Paul in Acts 17, to draw people to himself so people will reach out and find him. So these things are not coincidental and then they're not inconsequential. These things do matter, and so we study them as if they matter. Because I truly don't care ultimately what a person believes about Israel today and the nation-state and the physical land, but in the in the Bible, I think we do study them as God intends for us to do, as again, being very important, a very important part of the people and the promises that God gave them through their forefather Abraham. And so in this second day of studying the dividing of the land, just again, just a couple of very obvious and very quick connections. There's not a not a lot to comment on here. I think the connections are pretty obvious. But again, one of the connections I wanted you to see that rolls over from yesterday is how even through the book of Judges, you know, after the death of Joshua, it says, so even after the death of Joshua, they are still fighting for the land. You know, they're they're rallying to go attack the Canaanites, and this is a result of them not wiping them out before as they should have. And so they have to continue to fight even after Joshua's death. I wish it were all tied in a nice neat bow, you know, Joshua and his and the people go in and they take the land, divide it 12 ways, you know, and give the Levites what they're going to give them at the end of this story, at the end of the connected readings today. And then they live happily ever after. But as we know from the real world, biblically and otherwise, there's just no happily ever afters. And the the wars continued and the fight for the land continued. And sadly, even as I'm you know alluded to yesterday, because we're going to see this even in the King's books, you know, later in Old Testament history, really, even before that, the Samuel books, um, at the end of this chapter one, they still have not driven all the people out. They still failed to do so. Um, they failed to drive out the people living in the plains who had iron chariots. Uh and then even though the God was with them and God had made promises to them, um they uh they did not succeed entirely in in wiping out all of the the threat of false religion among them, and that truly was what God's concern was. God did not want to wipe out the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Jebusites and all of those people just because he's a cruel, even wicked God, but because he gave them generations and centuries to repent and turn to him, and they never did, and he wanted his people to not have the threat, the temptation of false gods among them, and it just didn't happen the way that the way that I think that uh God fully intended, you know, understanding that again in God's sovereignty if he wants something to happen he will and he will. In this case, I think there's a a permissive, you know, um aspect of this story because um God still used it, but I think that his his desire was for them to wipe out the people, the the the foreign gods, completely. The rest of these, you know, uh uh passages today are either commentary on what we just read, you know, or in the case of Ezekiel, possibly the future from Ezekiel's perspective. I still have been very hesitant to take a hardline stance on these chapters in Ezekiel because they speak to so much about what we've studied from Exodus, but it does seem like Ezekiel's talking about the future, and there's not a consensus about what about what about the temple and the tabernacle that Ezekiel talks about and the dividing of the land here about when this is or who this is. But it is a reminder, though, again, that is an echo of what happens, you know, in the book of Joshua. Um it is God, you know, showing again, you know, at least a second time where He is again God, same God yesterday, the day, and forever, is that in the book of Ezekiel, whatever this is referring to, it is again the exact same thing as we see, the same God, the same division, the same fairness, the same justice that we see from the book of Joshua. And then Psalm 78 was the one that was a commentary, you know, this this psalm of history. It's just a powerful, you know, uh psalm in the Bible of going through the history similar to Acts chapter 7 with Stephen's sermon, Stephen's sermon. He drove out the nations before them, he gave them their inheritance by lot, he settled the tribes of Israel into their homes. And by the way, that is a commentary that we see, the inheritance by lot, on how, again, they tried to do it fairly. By the way, something I didn't mention yesterday, but we'll see again when we talk about the the Levites settling in their towns and their pasture lands, is that it was done again by a plurality of leadership, which I think is great. This is one reason why God didn't want them to have a king, and we're gonna talk about that in later readings. But the idea was again, you had Eliezer the priest, you had Joshua, you know, yesterday, and you had the the tribal leaders. All of their leaders were present. It's almost like a council, like a congress, which again I think is good because of the checks and balances. And that is good for human authority to not have one person who has all the authority and to have a fair and reasonable system by which you do things. There needs to be order. That's even true of things like business meetings and churches. Um you need to have leaders, yes. And you and even in cases of churches and other organizations, one you know, leader out front, I think is is the ideal, but it's gotta be done, you know, with with uh with again with checks and balances and with the plurality of wisdom and leadership. Um that's something we see again. This does come up again after the Ezekiel passages today, whenever um the uh the God tells them in Numbers 35 to give the ease the Levites from their property certain towns to live in. So they didn't get land, so to speak, but they still had to have a place to live, and this is what it numbers 35 and Joshua 21 are truly about. They need they need towns to live in. They need they need a place to live. Everybody does. And in Joshua 21, this is where it's what I was talking about. Then the leaders of the tribe of Levi came to consult with Eliezer the priest, Joshua the son of Nun, and the leaders of the other tribes of Israel. So we can see, you know, the um the setup here is healthy. It's good to have a plurality of leadership and not have all your eggs in one basket with authority. Human beings just cannot take that. And we see that in the book of Kings, by the way. We're gonna study that later, as I've alluded to several times already. And so again, they receive places to live. That's what these these uh chapters are ultimately about. And it is, I think, a part of the, I put in part of these readings because even though the land wasn't divided to the Levites, part of you know the land division to me is where are these where are these men gonna live? You know, these special men who have God as their inheritance, and and God takes care of them too. It's all God's justice, it's all God's fairness, it's all God's, you know, looking after people and making sure, again, that as far as as as is humanly possible, you know, we have circumstances in which we can um we can thrive and and and and and and rejoice in him, knowing that again sin always messes that up. But we still see glimmers of it, you know, and we see echoes of it in the Bible of this shalom idea, and I think that's what's reflected here. So tomorrow and the next day we're gonna do God's just wars, and it's not just gonna be about the book of Joshua, that's mostly the second day of the readings, but there are other just wars, you know, from Mo from all the way from Moses to David, all throughout the Old Testament, and I think this does fit with this as again an addendum, you know, as an extra two days to this five-day study on the land, the promise, the division, or the promise, the giving, and the division of it, because again, I mean, this this is uh how they they they got the land. They couldn't just walk in and the Canaanite say, okay, good to see you, we're out of here. God had to command war in the Bible at times because the world is messed up. And so we're gonna study that for two days, and I hope you'll come back and be with us again tomorrow as we continue to read the connections, see the connections, and study the connections. Thank you.