Transcript
I want to tell you a story this morning, but it’s not the story I thought I was going to tell. It started last Monday morning. I went down to Community Missions to help out with the shower ministry, and somebody approached me and said, my wife and I don’t really care for this new sermon series you’re doing.
I mean, we like biblical stories, but we already know all the stories. We were talking about it, and then remembered, you’re trying to tell these stories for people who have never heard them before, who might not know the Bible very well. And so now we like the stories.
We think you should keep doing it, but maybe you could find a way to slip in a gospel hook if it’s really for people who don’t know the Bible. I thought, okay, well that makes sense, and then at 2 o’clock that afternoon in worship planning team, one of my own staff members said, you know, people are not really loving this new sermon series. They’ve heard all these Bible stories before.
They’d like to hear something maybe a little more substantive, maybe something that you applied a little more carefully. I thought, all right, okay, that’s fine, and while I was talking to them, I got a text message from somebody who said, Jim, you’re a great storyteller, but I really need a sermon. That’s what I need on Sunday.
Why can’t you just stand up and preach a sermon? So I was having a hard day. I had already promised that we would be working through the narrative lectionary for nine months, telling Bible stories from Genesis to Revelation, yay. By the end of the day, honestly, I was ready to quit.
So before I went to bed, I thought, let me get a start on next Sunday’s story. Maybe it’s going to be better. Maybe people will appreciate it more.
Started into the book of Joshua, and I read the first six chapters, and just before I closed the Bible, I read that part where Joshua and the army of Israel rush into the city of Jericho and kill every man, woman, and child. And then I turned off the light, rolled over, and went to sleep. But sometime in the night, I woke up with an old joke in my head.
It was a joke about a farmer who was out plowing his field. When he began to feel discouraged, he said, Lord, I’m not doing so well with farming. I’ve tried planting cotton, and that didn’t work.
I’ve tried planting rice, and that didn’t work. I’ve tried planting soybeans. That didn’t work.
I’m about to give up on the whole thing. If you need me to do something else, if you have a different direction for my life, just show me a sign, and whatever it is, I’ll do it. And in that moment, he saw the clouds in the sky begin to rearrange themselves into the letters P.C. And he said, Preach Christ! That’s it! And he dropped his plow and went off to become a minister.
Turns out the little church that he was attending was looking for a preacher just then. And he went to the elders and said, Would you give me a chance to preach? I feel like the Lord is calling me. And they said, All right, this Sunday.
So that Sunday, he stood in the pulpit, and his sermon was terrible. None of it made sense. The illustrations didn’t match the passages that he had picked out.
It was long and rambling and boring. When it was over, the elders got together to see if they could find a way to let the young man down easy. But he insisted, No, God has called me to preach.
And they said, How do you know God has called you to preach? He said, I was out there in the field. I asked God to show me a sign. The clouds formed the letters P.C. And I could see right then, He wanted me to preach Christ.
And one of the elders, who was also a farmer, said, Son, I think you misunderstood God’s message. I think the Lord wants you to plant corn. Maybe so.
I was thinking about that at 2 o’clock in the morning. And I began to wonder if maybe, just maybe, Joshua had misunderstood what the Lord was saying to him. And that called for some serious Bible study.
So I got up out of bed at 3 o’clock in the morning and got out my study Bible. This is my serious study Bible. When I get this one out, you know I mean business.
It’s the Harper Collins Bible. It’s wrapped up in the cover my mother-in-law gave me 20 years ago. I opened it up to Joshua chapter 6 and began to read what was written there.
And here’s what it says. God says to Joshua, I am going to give you the city of Jericho, its king and its army. Here’s what I want you to do.
I want you to march the army around the city. And then the next day I want you to do it again. And the day after that, until you’ve done it for six days.
On the seventh day, I want you to march around that city with the priest in front and the Ark of the Covenant. And I want them blowing the shofar the whole time. And at the end of the seventh circuit around the city, I want all the people to lift up their voices in a loud shout.
And when they do, the walls of the city will fall down and you shall go straight into the city. Now to me, that sounded like God. That’s just the kind of crazy thing God would ask his people to do.
Let’s march around the city six or seven times. Let’s see if the walls fall down. And as you know, they did, they did.
And right there in chapter 6, it said, when the walls fell down, Joshua and the people went straight ahead into the city. And all of that was what God had told them to do. But then there was something God hadn’t told them to do.
They then devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys. And that’s when I began to think that maybe Joshua was having a PC moment, a PC moment when he misinterpreted what God was saying to him. He may have looked up into the sky and seen the clouds forming the letters S-E and thought that it meant slaughter everyone.
But what if God was trying to tell him something else? What if God was trying to say, share everything? And how would you know? That’s the real question for all of us. In the book of 1 Samuel, it says the word of the Lord was rare in those days. Visions were few and far between.
In our own time, how do we hear God speaking to us? And how do we know what is really from the Lord and not from someone else? How do we know? You may remember that I took an online class back in the spring that was about that very thing. How do we hear the word of the Lord in the 21st century? How do we discern what is from God and what is not? It was taught by this woman in Australia named Tanya Harris, PhD. She’d done lots of work in this field.
And as we talked about our own dreams and visions and hearing the whispered voice of God, she said, there is one rule you need to remember, just one. If it is the voice of God, it will sound like Jesus. And that’s when I realized that there is no universe I can imagine where Jesus would say, I want you to kill every man, woman, and child.
And then I realized that I was sitting there with my open Bible and my notebook doing a deep dive into the word of God, wondering about the violence in that text on the morning of October the 7th. And some of you will recall it was two years ago that this horrific thing happened in Israel where Hamas fighters broke through the fence between Gaza and Israel and killed 1,200 Israeli citizens and took 250 more captive. Israel responded with an incredible show of force, displacing 2 million Palestinians.
Israeli bullets and bombs killing 67,000 of them, one-third under the age of 18, 500,000 more faced with starvation. I was sitting there at three o’clock in the morning remembering that story and reading this passage and asking God, how do I know what’s from you? When I began to wonder if God had woken me up in the middle of the night on that particular morning to tell me something, like he told Samuel, maybe God had woken me up to tell me something. I say this with all humility because I really don’t know.
And I’m confessing to you the struggle of trying to understand. But in those wee hours of the morning, I wondered, is God trying to say to me so that I can say to you, the way of violence is not the way of the Lord? And you say, how could that be? Read the Old Testament sometime. There’s violence everywhere.
I agree, there is. But let me remind you, the Bible was written by people. I say that to you from time to time and I hope you remember, the Bible was written by people, by human authors who were filled with the Holy Spirit, but also limited in their understanding.
We know that the earth goes around the sun. They thought it was the other way around. They were full of the Holy Spirit.
They were limited in their understanding. There were some things they did not know. And one thing they did not know was Jesus.
We do. I like the beginning of Hebrews. Long ago, God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets.
But in these last days, he has spoken to us by a son. I love the beginning of the Gospel of John. In the beginning was the Word.
The Word was with God. The Word was God. The Word that was God became flesh and lived among us.
Which is a way of saying that the words of Jesus were the words of God. Jesus, who said, love your enemies, turn the other cheek. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Do not repay evil for evil. In one place, he says, you have heard that it was said by men of old, you shall do this. But I say to you, do something else.
Do something more. In that same passage, Jesus says, don’t think I have come to destroy the law and the prophets. I haven’t come to destroy them, but to fulfill them.
That is, I have come to fulfill the law and the prophets. With the meaning God intended from the beginning. He says in Matthew 22, that the most important commandment of all is the commandment to love God with everything in you.
And the other is the commandment to love your neighbor as you love yourself. On these two pegs, Jesus says, hang all the law and the prophets. If you’re going to fill them full, fill them full of love.
So how can I hear Jesus say all these things and believe that the way of the Lord is the way of violence? I look back at this story from the Old Testament, and I’d love the Old Testament stories, written by a people who really did believe that God was on their side, that he was fighting their battles, and that he wanted them to win. I wonder what really happened. And I think a group of former slaves who had escaped from Egypt were camped out on the banks of the Jordan River on the plains of Moab.
Eventually they crossed over, they conquered and killed many of the Canaanites, though not all of them, maybe just enough of them to make enemies for life. The book of Joshua tells us that the people conquered and settled in the land of Canaan, and when it was all done, Joshua said to the people, choose this day whom you will serve. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
And all the people said the same thing, until after Joshua died and they forgot their covenant with the Lord and began to break his commandments. The book of Judges is mostly about that, about how the people kept forsaking the ways of the Lord, and the Lord sent their enemies in to attack them. Time after time, they sinned, they came under attack, they repented of their sins, they cried out to the Lord.
He sent them a heroic Savior, one of the judges who delivered them from their enemies. Oh, like it says in the book of Hebrews, I wish I had time to tell you about Ehud and Barak and Deborah and Jephthah and Samson and Gideon and all those great heroes of the book of Judges. But by the end of the book, the story turns dark.
And the author says at the very end, there was no king in Israel, everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Do you know what happens to a nation when everybody does what is right in his own eyes? It crumbles, it falls to pieces, it can’t hold together. The book of 1 Samuel begins with this beautiful story about a boy named Samuel, who was the last of the judges and the first of the prophets.
I say he was the first of the prophets because the prophets didn’t come along until the kings came along. And when the kings came along, they needed some prophets to confront them from time to time, to bring them back to the way of God. Because that’s what prophets do, they speak truth to power.
And God was calling Samuel to be one of those. Samuel may not have wanted the job. Three times in the night, he ignored the voice of God, but eventually he said, here I am Lord, speak, I’m listening.
And God spoke truth to power. He said, you need to tell old Eli that he and his corrupt sons are finished. And I am handing over the job to somebody new.
I am handing it over to you. Now, Samuel may have wished that God had spoken any other word to him. But in the middle of the night, when he was just trying to get some sleep, God woke him up with a word.
Shall we pray? God, we ask you to keep on speaking to us through your word, through your prophets, through your priest. Keep on speaking and open our ears to hear you and to listen especially for those words that sound like the words of Jesus. He is your fullest and best revelation.
He is how we know you like the people of old could not. And we pray that we will cling to our new found knowledge and hold it dear. That we will live in a way that honors your intentions for humanity and honors the spirit of Christ.
For we pray in his name, amen.
