Scripture: Joshua 7:13b “Hidden among you, O Israel, are things set apart for the Lord [for destruction]. You will never defeat your enemies until you remove these things from among you”
Observation: Israel has been disobedient to the Lord’s commands. They have broken covenant. Someone in the camp has kept some plunder that they were clearly told had to be destroyed – and the disobedience of this one person meant the defeat of the Israelites in a comparatively small battle, when the Lord had promised them victory!! How can this be??? – even the Israelites were mystified at first! But the principal here is that God’s directions are set in place to protect His people from the wiles of the enemy. They are not there because He is mean, but because He wants to abundantly bless, and He can only do that when we live according to the way we were designed to live – His ways! The items kept by Achan were obviously beautiful & valuable. Achan couldn’t stand the thought of destroying them. He wanted them above anything else – even God!! Here was the breaking of the first commandment (to love the Lord above all else) in it’s essence. “ I will have what I want no matter what –who’s to know? – Who’s going to get hurt?” (see Joshua 8:21). But that’s what sin does – it blinds us to the truth & has consequences that not only affect ourselves. It harms our loved ones & our community. Israel had been promised “the world” by the Lord – the only One who could actually deliver the world!! Yet until Israel learnt to honour Him for Who He Is, and put Him first, they continued to allow the enemy to have predominance, and so prevent the victory that the Lord already had “in the bag”!!
Application: Like Israel, until I remove the things in my life that the Lord has declared need to be destroyed, I will never walk in the victory that Christ has already won for me at the cross. He has already defeated sin’s power in my life. Am I walking in that? When I succumb to sin’s lure, I am allowing the enemy to defeat me – effectively nullifying the Lord’s promises of victory in my life!! When I do fail - &, yes, I still do – I am so thankful that the Lord has made the way to be restored to Him – through confession, repentance & acceptance of His forgiveness so freely given through the application of Jesus’ shed blood. But, surely, as a blood-bought child of the living God, the living of my life as a Covenant-keeper must be increasingly more the norm than that of a Covenant breaker! Otherwise I might just as well “chuck the whole thing in”!! Either Christ’s sacrifice for me is effective for every area of my life, or it is effective for none! There is nothing I cannot overcome with the resurrection power of Christ within me! If my disobedience can negatively affect all those around me, imagine what a blessing my obedience will be to the world I live in!
Prayer: Dear Heavenly Father, thankyou SO much that, through Christ, You have made the way for me to be forgiven & restored to you, and that, not only has He defeated sin & death, but the very power of those things to cause the fear & distress in my life that the enemy desires. I ask that the revelation of what Jesus did for me might grow in ever-increasing strength in my life, that I might less & less succumb to the lure of sin, that I might “remove these things from me”, & that the resultant evidence of Your victory in my life might become a mighty blessing to the world around me. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Sue Otto
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