Joshua 9

Perhaps you’ve heard the famous quote, “those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” This can be true on a mass scale, like economic collapse, or nations invading other nations and failing. But it can also be true on a smaller scale, on a more personal level. Usually this reality can lead to a comment like, “they will never learn.” 

My Mom likes to joke that her boy's 2nd home was the emergency room. And while a lot of those visits were sports related injuries, there were quite a few that were self-inflicted. While many of my peers were in the party scene on the weekends, my idea of fun was a video camera and potential pain. This could involve shopping carts, roofs and trampolines, or a number of other things. And while we were out having the time of our lives, the medical bills would beg to differ. If you’d like specifics, let’s grab a coffee sometime. 

It’s amazing to me how quickly Israel forgets. We are no more than a couple of months since Israel’s victory over Jericho. Not only that, but in our text this morning, we are mere weeks from the nation-wide worship experience on the sides of the mountain. 

Big Idea: We must seek the Lord for discernment.

1. A Dangerous Coalition (1-2) (Read vs. 1-2)

As soon as the kings heard of “this.” What is “this?” It’s referring to Israel’s defeat of Ai. It’s referring to the so-far successful conquest of Israel. And so all of these kings, who normally would fight against one another, come together to fight against Israel. It’s as they say: “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Now, these people groups that are mentioned make up the southern part of Canaan. And they would have represented not just 5 cities, but really more like 5 regions. So far Israel had defeated 2 cities, Jericho and Ai, but to go against the whole southern portion of the land all at once would be a much different battle. 

However, in the midst of this coalition, there was one group of people that had other plans. 

2. A Great Deception (3-13) (Read vs. 3-13)

The Gibeonites were crafty. Gibeon would have been the next city en route to conquest after Ai. They were practically neighbors, and surely they knew what had happened there. There’s a slight difference though. We saw that Ai had a total population of around 12,000 people, however, in Joshua 10:2 we see that “Gibeon was a great city, like one of the royal cities, and all its men were warriors.” It sounds like Gibeon could have put up quite the fight. 

But it’s interesting what we see here. In the midst of the deception, they claim to have heard about the Lord. It sounds very similar to what we heard from Rahab. “We have heard about the Lord your God. We heard what He did in Egypt. We heard what He did to King Sihon and King Og, and because of this, we have come.” Is it faith? We aren’t sure in this moment, but it’s amazing what we see later and how they become a crucial part of the nation of Israel. 

But how crafty are they? They found old tattered bags to lay over their donkeys, and old wineskins that had been mended from overuse. They made bread, and let it sit out until it was dry and moldy. They looked disheveled with their torn sandals and clothes. I mean this is an Oscar worthy performance!

Even in their deflecting of the Israelite leader’s questions. “Who are you? How do we know you aren’t locals?” And the Gibeonites don’t give specifics, just a false front of humility, “we are your servants.” Joshua isn’t buying it, so he asks again, “who are you? Where do you come from?” This time they direct his attention to the Lord. “We’ve come because we’ve heard about your God! We had to come see for ourselves! We traveled a long way to meet you, and see for ourselves. In fact, we came so that we could serve Him by serving you! I mean look, this bread was freshly baked, these were new clothes when we left!”

They are playing their cards perfectly. Everything is going according to plan. And then Israel makes a huge mistake. 

3. A Grave Error (14-15) (Read vs. 14-15)

“But did not ask counsel from the Lord.” Joshua, my brother, what are we doing?! Remember what happened last time you made your own decision without seeking the Lord first? You trusted in your own wisdom, your own power, and that small little village of Ai overtook and killed 36 of your men? Do you not remember that? And now, here we are again, looking at things through a scientific lens. 

Warren Wiersbe speaks on this: “They depended on their own senses, examined the “facts,” discussed the matter, and agreed in their conclusion. It was all very logical and convincing, but it was all wrong. They had made the same mistake at Ai  and hadn’t yet learned to wait on the Lord and seek His direction.”

So they make a covenant with them. And the covenant stated that they would not be destroyed. And this wasn’t just a spit and a handshake agreement. The Hebrew here means to “cut a covenant,” which implies a sacrificial animal, cut in 2 pieces, with the agreeing parties walking between them together. When this type of covenant was made, it was made before the Lord, and it was unbreakable. I’ll show you future repercussions in a bit. 

The really interesting thing about this whole situation, is that Joshua and the leaders were being obedient to the Law, as far as they could tell! This is the danger of deception. But in Deuteronomy 20:10-11, we see “When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if it responds to you peaceably and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you.” And if you read further on in verse 15, the Lord says “Thus you shall do to all the cities that are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here.”

So Joshua and his leaders believed they were being obedient to the Lord! They were so blinded by the enemy's deception, that they could not discern the reality of what was right in front of them. 

Let’s pause here for just a moment. Is this not the strategy that the enemy still uses today? Ephesians 6:11 tells us that the enemy uses “wiles,” or “schemes” to get a foothold in our lives. That word in the Greek means “deceit, trickery or cunning arts.” And the scary part about this is that he’s so good at it. 2nd Corinthians 11:14 tells us that “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.” This is why our Big Idea this morning is so important. We must stay tethered to the Lord, and pursue Him first and primarily when we need wisdom or discernment. 

Alright, so what happens next in our story this morning?

4.  A Sovereign God (16-27) (Read vs. 16-27)

So the Israelites somehow figure out that they’ve been duped. We don’t know how, but they rally the troops and march a 3 day journey over to the cities of the Gibeonites. It seems that on the way, the people of Israel had planned to attack. But, even after a mistake by the leaders of Israel in making a covenant, they were committed to keeping that covenant before the Lord. It’s such an interesting situation. And because of this, the people become frustrated with their leadership! “How can we let them live when God told us not to? Haven’t we heard of the dangers of letting wickedness prevail?” 

Fortunately for the Gibeonites, the leadership steps in, explains that they must hold to the covenant that they made before the Lord, and let the people live. It wasn’t without consequence though. It says that the Gibeonites became woodcutters and drawers of water for the nation of Israel. And we cannot miss verse 27. Look at the primary place where they served. They served in the location of the altar of the Lord, wherever it would be, until this day. And the covenant lasted generations. We see how seriously the Lord took the promise, when King Saul broke it and killed a large number of the Gibeonites. As a result, 2nd Samuel 21:1 tells us that there was a 3 year famine in Israel because Saul put the Gibeonites to death. 

Now I want to walk out the sovereignty of God this morning. You know, God works sometimes in ways that don’t make sense to us. Sometimes God takes a situation where we messed up big time, and He redeems it down the road. Gibeon became a part of Israel. In fact, nowhere in Scripture do we read that the Gibeonites pulled Israel away from the Lord, nor do we ever read of a defector. It would seem that they became followers of the Lord as they were integrated into the nation of Israel. Listen to this, from Francis Schaeffer: 

“When the land was divided, Gibeon was one of the cities given to the line of Aaron. It became a special place where God was known. Approximately 400 years later, David put the tabernacle in that city. This meant that the altar and the priests were in Gibeon as well. At least one of David’s mighty men, those who were closest to him in battle, was a Gibeonite. At that important and solemn moment when Solomon, David’s son, ascended the throne, Solomon made burnt offerings at Gibeon. Much later still, about 500 years before Christ, in the time of Zerubbabel, the genealogies of those Jews who returned from captivity under the Babylonians included a list of Gibeonites. In the days of Nehemiah, the Gibeonites were mentioned as being among the people who rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem.” 

Application

Now, we can learn a lot from this passage, and hopefully you have. But I want to circle us back to our Big Idea.

Big Idea: We must seek the Lord for discernment.

If we know that Satan is prowling around like a lion, looking for someone to devour, and that he uses schemes and trickery, often disguising himself as an angel of light, then we must be so disciplined to seek the Lord first in every decision that we make. We must not have it said of us, “BUT, he or she did not ask counsel of the Lord.” 

We must not become complacent. When we trust in our own wisdom, in our own judgment, and we forsake fellowship with the Lord, we are in danger of making the wrong decision. When we are not tethered to the Lord, Satan can weasel his way in and deceive us. What we think might be the right thing could be the wrong thing. If Joshua would have sought the Lord over these travelers, it would have been revealed to him that they were from right next door!

I feel like I’m kind of beating a dead horse, but that’s the whole point of this message series. We are at war, and the enemy is crafty. He uses catchy music or innocent-seeming cartoons to infiltrate the minds of our children. He uses doom-scrolling to distract us from the Lord. He uses social media to put in front of our eyes those things that cause lust of the eyes, of the flesh, of the mind. We must be diligent in our pursuit of the Lord, begging the Holy Spirit to give us wisdom around what is truth, and what is a lie. We must beg the Holy Spirit for discernment over right and wrong. 

Here’s the point. In everything, we must seek counsel from the Lord. Especially before any major decision, but even in the small ones. Let us be a people so tightly connected to the Lord, that like the wise man in Proverbs 16:9, “the Lord will direct our every step.”