Joshua: Living the Victorious Life
Devoted to Destruction
Joshua 10:28-43
Superintendent Mike McAvoy
Southeast Region Conference of the Free Methodist Church June 9, 2024
SIN = To miss the bullseye.
The problem is that our misses/sins have a distorting, destructive effect.
1. The Israelites literal conquest of Canaan serves as a living metaphor of God’s conquest of our personal lives.
• The Israelites had not entered fully into the promises of God.
• Entering the promised land is no guarantee of staying in the promise land.
(Hebrews 3:12-14) See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. 13 But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. 14 We have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original conviction firmly to the very end.
2. How do we reconcile God as good, gracious, and loving while giving the order to massacre 31 kingdoms (men, women, children) in the land of Canaan?
(Isaiah 55:6-9) Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; 7 let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. 8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. 9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
• Sin is a gangrene that will pollute and kill.
• We try to measure the activities of God by the measuring stick of the finite, but He operates by the metric of eternity.
(Isaiah 57:1) The righteous perish, and no one takes it to heart; the devout are taken away, and no one understands that the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil. (NIV)
(Psalm 116:15) Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.
(Deuteronomy 29:29) The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.