Schaeffer Joshua and the Flow of Biblical History

1. Auflage 2004
ISBN: 978-1-4335-1689-4
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

The book of Joshua brings to life real history during the crucial period of transition for the Israelites as they follow God's direction and settle in the promised land. Israel needed discipline in light of their newfound freedom. They faced the responsibility of living as a covenant people while adapting to change. Joshua describes the historic shift from the revelation of God's promises to their realization. God's care of his people becomes obvious, and their struggle with disobedience, selfishness, and fear is very human. Francis Schaeffer's thoughts on the book of Joshua show readers the historic, spiritual, and intellectual nourishment available for the Christian life through the examples of Joshua and his fellow Israelites. In the book of Joshua, Schaeffer finds that God reveals his sorrow over human sin, as well as his gracious love for his people. This is as true for us as it was for those in Joshua's time. This study of the settling of Israel will inspire readers to see the hand of God present in all of history, including today.

 Francis A. Schaeffer (1912-1984) authored more than twenty books, which have been translated into several languages and have sold millions globally. He and his wife, Edith, founded the L'Abri Fellowship international study and discipleship centers. Recognized internationally for his work in Christianity and culture, Schaeffer passed away in 1984 but his influence and legacy continue worldwide.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Schaeffer, Francis A.

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

Joshua is one of our favorite personalities in the Bible. In a dramatic march around Jericho’s strong walls, he leads the band of migrating Israelites for seven days against a major protected settlement in the Jordan valley, until the walls fall with the sound of trumpets, and the city is conquered. We like such stories. David and Goliath is another one, followed by Daniel in the lions’ den and Peter’s miraculous liberation from King Herod’s prison. “Get up quickly, dress yourself and put on your sandals!” an angel says. And then the iron gate, leading into the city, opened of its own accord (Acts 12:7ff.ESV).

These are real events, powerful actions in the flow of history, which later generations refer to with delight and confidence. They greatly appeal also to our age, which craves eyewitness events and defines what has happened in a person’s life as significant truth. Here are action stories that could even surface in a video arcade.

Yet such events become merely the seedbed of anecdotes, personal interest stories, and testimonies unless they are rooted in a deeper soil of what Schaeffer called “True Truth.” That notion is often foreign to our cultural climate. For now the story alone is the event; our thrill in response to it matters more than what actually happened or why it happened. Each person or each society has heroes who must perform marvels to satisfy what are easily heightened expectations for an overstimulated public.

Part of the reason for this need among our neighbors in town or in the pew is that they are too much affected by various kinds of relativism with regard to personal faith, a loss of confidence in real truth, and an overconfidence in one’s own understanding at this moment. Postmodernism, intimidation on an open market for religion, ignorance of a wider world, and hasty conclusions contribute to a lust for attractive events and a disdain for reflection from a wider perspective.

Joshua (and the Bible in its entirety) expands our field of vision. There is more to it than a story for the familiar Negro spiritual “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.” The series of sermons that became this book allows Schaeffer to stretch our minds. We are taken to a higher vantage point to observe a vast landscape with intersecting paths between fields, where the historic, spiritual, and intellectual nourishment for the Christian life grows on the rich soil of God’s revelation for the human race after the Fall.

Joshua was the commander of the Israelites at the time when their exodus from Egyptian slavery brings them into the land promised to Abraham some 400 years before. The book of Joshua brings to life real history during a crucial period of transition for a people who now settle down to also become a nation. They are the families of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their numerous descendants in later generations. After bondage they discover freedom and the need to practice discipline. From weakness and exploitation they move to power and responsibility for a state, a society, and the rule of law—God’s law. They had known life under Egypt’s ruling Pharaohs, but now they crossed the river Jordan to the other side and had to build their own civilization.

What they believed about God and humanity, their ideas about all of life, now more than before, needed to be first cleansed of any pagan Egyptian influences and then translated into the behavior and action of God’s people. The personal faith of their sojourning fathers had to become the public demonstration of truth—about God, about human beings, and about life in history. For that is the Bible’s insistence: We believe God to be alive. He has told us in his Word how we should live and order our lives, set our priorities, and what sense to make of being human.

Transitions often involve changes and adaptations. But the book of Joshua speaks also of the basis for continuity. The continuity of nature’s laws across the globe and in all history is matched by the continuity of God’s laws for human beings everywhere. The text links, going backwards in time, the five books of Moses, or Pentateuch, to the truth of God’s character, the shape of creation, and the beginning.

But the book of Joshua also lets us go ahead into Israel’s history, for which the social and ethical foundations are laid now in society and in geography: They take possession of their own land. Each Israelite must decide in the end whether he and his house would follow God, as Joshua said about his family. And that choice, repeated in each life and each generation, is then fleshed out in the subsequent texts, starting with the book of Judges, which describes a time when everyone did what was good in his own eyes with often horrendous consequences. The books of Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, and the prophets down the path of history reveal with great honesty the failures and confessions, the struggles and the victories of God’s people all in the context of real history.

Joshua is in the Old Testament in relation to the Pentateuch what the book of Acts is in the New Testament in relation to the four Gospels. This book is the implementation of the insights and instructions given before, exhibiting in a new era their truthfulness, humanity, and joy from inside the believing and practicing community to the world around it. The importance of what is true, just, and right is fleshed out in continuous history from Moses in the past to faithful believers in all ages. They are not left alone to become an “againand-again” society of stifled repeaters so common to most of the world’s religions. The text of the Word of God in their midst needs to be understood, argued with, and applied. Judaism and Christianity insist that God has spoken outside our heads or hearts and left a record. Believers also have the promise of power from the only God, whose existence is the only sufficient explanation of their existence as human beings, as real persons. They have seen on multiple occasions the supernatural presence of God in their midst. It would be hard to miss the continuity of this in Christ’s words in Matthew

28:18 and in Acts 1:8.

The consequences become evident in people’s lives. We never stand alone, but are grafted into the continuity of confident believers, whether as Joshua or Elijah, as Deborah or Mary. For the same reason we are foolish when we neglect or violate what has been made so amply clear in the text we carry with us as a constant reminder to us of a larger reality than our personal feelings or even experience. The continuity of blessings is matched by a continuity in punishments: The sin of Achan finds its parallel in Acts 5, where Ananias and Sapphira hope to get away with lies. Sin is not to be taken lightly; its effects are real and require a heavy price.

The Bible speaks of a real and historic journey in time and space, not merely an internal, personal, or poetic one. God is the creator and judge of history, not just an idea in the mind of Moses or Joshua, as he is in the mind of Buddha or in the visions of Mohammed and Joseph Smith. Spirituality involves the willing submission to the mind of God, revealed by his Spirit in the form of language with reference to reality. It requires comprehension, not submission and denial. Biblical truth relates to right thinking and right acting, to soul and body, to time and space. It shows people in their obligation to God and their wonder over his interest in them. God’s response to the fall of man starts with a question: “Adam, where are you?”

The continuity in Joshua, however, is more than merely historic. It is also a continuity of ideas and their influences over choices. Joshua describes for us the historic flow from revealed ideas, laws, and God’s promises to their realization in the landscape of life. God’s care of his people becomes obvious, and their struggle with obedience, selfishness, and fear is very human. There is a strained, yet tender relationship between the high calling given by God to the children of Abraham and then the often terrible fall from that position into the pit of greed and lust for power among their descendants.

In all the confusion and contradictions of human history, the steady and reliable promises of the God of the Bible stand out clearly as we pass from Moses to Joshua. They are upheld in the training of a new leader before Moses’ death. With references to the past, Moses looks into the future and expects the fulfillment of the Abrahamic promises of God. There is a concrete dimension to the promise of God’s work of our salvation given already to Adam and Eve right after their fall into sin in Genesis 3:15.

That longer perspective is the reason for Joshua’s courage to take the survivors of the Exodus and the desert wanderings into a land where other people practiced inhuman religious rituals that needed to be stopped under any universal moral considerations. That perspective is not rooted in a tribal religion, but applies the continuing requirement to be human and rational, and to have ear and heart tuned to the mind of the creator of our humanity. The “consecration” required of each Israelite before entering the land was not a religious rite, but an examination by each person as to whether he or she was willing to abide by the law of God, marvelously summed up in the Ten Commandments. That would be their specific civilization: a people under a common law based on the truth of the universe, in which we should love God and our neighbor.

The law was...