Joshua 8:1-29

What do you do after a failure that leaves you feeling discouraged or even disillusioned?  How do you move forward, back into mission and maybe more importantly, back into health?  I think we all want reassurance that we’ll be okay; that we’re not abandoned.

This is the part of the story that comes after defeat and a brutal reckoning because of sin.  It's all picking up after the hard thing, trying things a different way, and following God's instructions for us.  Don't be afraid, don't be discouraged!

Transcript

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What do you do after a failure that leaves you feeling discouraged or even disillusioned? How do you move forward, back onto mission, and maybe more importantly, back into health? I think we all want reassurance that says we'll be okay, that we're not abandoned. Welcome to Meet Me in the Word. I'm so glad that you've joined us today. We're in Joshua chapter 8, verses 1 through 29. The part of the story that comes after defeat and after a brutal reckoning all because of sin. While you're turning there, I'll invite you to prayerfully consider becoming a paid supporter. You'll be getting in on the ground floor and helping to grow and sustain this ministry. By the way, this is totally voluntary, and I'm not trying to take the place of your church. Links, though, are in each episode's description. Let's go ahead and jump into Joshua chapter eight. But before we do that, let's pray. Jesus, thank you that you meet us. Thank you that you care for us. Thank you that you help us to move forward after deep discouragement. God give us open ears and open hearts. We love you. Amen. All right, we're going to go ahead and jump into this Joshua chapter eight. I'm going to read verses one through nine, which sets the stage for us, and then we'll just kind of summarize a little bit. I would encourage you to read the whole story, but for our purposes here, I think this will be sufficient and help us to have a good conversation. Then the Lord said to Joshua, Do not be afraid, do not be discouraged. Take the whole army with you and go up and attack Ai, for I have delivered into your hands the king of Ai, his people, his city, and his land. You shall do to Ai and its king as you did to Jericho and its king, except that you may carry off their plunder and livestock for yourselves. Set an ambush behind the city. So Joshua and the whole army moved out to attack Ai. He chose thirty thousand of his best fighting men and sent them out at night with these orders. Listen carefully, you are to set an ambush behind the city. Don't go very far from it. All of you be on the alert. I and all those with me will advance on the city, and when the men come out against us as they did before, we will flee from them. They will pursue us until we have lured them away from the city, for they will say, They are running away from us as they did before. So when we flee from them, you are to rise up from ambush and take the city. The Lord your God will give it into your hand. When you have taken the city, set it on fire. Do what the Lord has commanded, see to it, you have my orders. Then Joshua sent them off, and they went to the place of ambush and lay in wait between Bethel and Ai, to the west of Ai. But Joshua spent that night with the people. The rest of these verses up until twenty nine really do depict what's kind of introduced here in the first nine verses. They go and everything happens basically according to plan. It works perfectly. They win emphatically, and all of that takes place, and so it continues on. There really is this total and complete victory for the people of Israel. Let's go ahead and make a few observations, and we'll make observations not just about this text, although some of them come straight from there, but also about what has happened kind of leading into this. I wanted to start by saying the hard part of this was already done. And if you go back and watch or listen to the previous two weeks episodes from Joshua chapter seven, uh there's two of them there, I believe, uh, we we we see the the angst and the and the just kind of the brutal, gut-wrenching things that the nation goes through, and particularly Joshua and the elders, they go through that discouragement and and they have to work through that. They went through that defeat. They had they had sought the Lord. You know, it describes them just getting down on their faces before God for like a long time, and and then they go through that really thorough and painful process of revealing sin and then dealing with it. It's it's pretty tough stuff to to read that, number one, but but I can imagine like going through that as a community of people, as a nation, would have been just absolutely uh, again, gut-wrenching. I keep coming back to that that little phrase. That's not to say, by the way, that any battle is easy, including the one that happens here in Joshua chapter 8, but the bewilderment, right, the discouragement, that stuff is now behind them. It's still fresh, it's still there, but they've they've done the things. They've confessed, they've revealed, they've repented, they've they've taken care of what needed to be taken care of. And from uh, I guess an emotional side or a spiritual side of things, again, the hard part is done. And you know, I've noticed um that in our own lives, and not that we need to compare everything back to battles and those sorts of things, but but when we go through those really tough moments, those defeats in life, and even ones that aren't caused by us, but especially the ones that are caused by us, and we realize that, oh, we actually need to confess some things and we are concerned about other people's reactions and we we we are worried about hurting somebody else or the way that they'll look at us or think about us in those ways, but we go through that process and we do reveal like what was hidden, and we go through that process, we confess it to whoever it needs to be confessed to, and certainly to the Lord, and and then we move into repentance. Man, like that that part is hard, but it's the stuff that gives us life and hope that helps us to move forward. And and I just I didn't want us to miss that part. Uh it's important for us, and it was important for them in their experience, but certainly for us, uh, even though that is difficult. And there might be like challenges that lay ahead of us even after that part's done, but then we get to move forward in freedom. We get to move forward with a with a sense of like, yeah, we're clean, we're good, we get to to kind of rock on and do this thing. All right, back to the story. Uh, I wanted us to also appreciate that God uses their past to aid them in their future, right? And it's not just about sin and that being confessed and move forward, but these the whole the whole thing changes. God gives them a couple of instructions that are fairly specific. One, take the whole army. If you go back in the in the first try that they had, they sent 3,000 people. And by the way, I happen to think that that plan could have worked perfectly fine. The real problem was the hidden sin. I think, you know, and I know when I'm saying that, I know that that's a very spiritual way of looking at a physical battle, and I just believe that it's true. Uh, but but this time, we're just we're changing all of it. God says, send the whole army. Don't don't just send a few. Don't don't do that. Let's let's lose everybody. And and then also set an ambush. Those two things are instructions specifically from God. And then Joshua picks up on this and and he does something that's pretty clever. They make it look like they haven't learned their lesson, at least that's how they present to AI. They go up in a similar fashion and uh and kind of dupe the king and uh and the army into just thinking, ah, these guys haven't learned. We won before, we'll win again, and they go after them. Of course, uh Israel surrounds them, they set that ambush, they they route them completely. Uh but but there is that element there of like you tried this thing and it and it went badly for you. So let's not waste that experience. Let's not waste what happened in the past. Let's utilize that and and leverage it into victory for this next attempt. And and then they're just their whole approach, their whole mentality is different this time around. Joshua, you know, clearly leans on the Lord's intel, right? And and and then gives very, very specific and direct orders, and and they it it all it all works. It's it's pretty incredible. They absolutely route AI. So let's reflect on this. How does a battle that happened thousands of years ago that is specific to a particular nation, a particular a particular people, how does that apply to us today? We've got two things. I seem to like doing two things, I've noticed that, but two things that were helpful for me in just kind of processing uh this account. So the first one is what's your response to failures and disappointments in life in general? And you might think of something that's specific if that's there for you, but just how have you responded? What do you do when when things kind of get turned upside down? And and I think it's important for us to really sit in that for a moment to go like, okay, yeah, maybe I do need a minute to kind of sulk for a bit and just kind of to be sad for a moment at least. But but what comes after that? What you know, how long do I remain in that in that defeated place? Do I do I seek the Lord? Do I seek out friends? Do I go to prayer? Do I go to scripture? Do I try to escape? How how do you respond to failure and disappointment? And then more importantly, how can God's presence in the midst of that experience help you to move forward into health, into healing? And I want to suggest that there are things that that maybe are or should be true for all of us. I think that God's presence makes that burden lighter. You know, Jesus says things like, My yoke is easy and my burden is light. We can find that in Matthew chapter 11, verses 28 through 30, and and that can be encouraging for us. But I also find that the Lord can really do that healing, uh, that healing work in us that we need. When we experience those defeats, it it can leave us in that place of of just feeling bad about ourselves. And and that's honest, and that's okay, but but healing uh allows us to move forward and to to not let the defeat have the final say in our lives. And I think that's part of the redemptive story of Jesus in us, that we do have this hope, that we can look to him. And I invite you just to continue exploring that, to, to just prayerfully ask, ask God, show me what it looks like to move back into health, to move back in into a sense of mission and living wholeheartedly for him. Let's pray. Jesus, thank you uh that you uh intervene, thank you, that you lead us even through dark seasons, but God thank you that the battle is ultimately yours, but that as we look to you, you are our strength and you are our victory. Be with us. Amen.