O Lord, You tell us that all Scripture is breathed out by You and it is profitable, so we ask now that we might profit from the reading and preaching of Your Word to correct us, to rebuke us, to train us in righteousness, that we might be competent for every good work. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Please turn in your Bibles to the book of Joshua. After the first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses, the Pentateuch, we come to the book of Joshua. This morning we are in Joshua 18 and 19. I know that many people read their Bible off of a phone and that’s okay. There is an advantage to having a physical book in front of you. Sometimes it’s nice, we spend so many hours in front of a screen, to have a physical book. It’s also when we look at a large passage of Scripture, like this morning two chapters, it can be helpful to have the page fold open in front of you and be able to see some of the sections. So, if you need a Bible, there’s one in front of you in the pews.
Joshua 18 and 19. We took a short break over Christmas and we are ready to jump back into the book of Joshua. I saw “we,” but maybe I should say “I” am ready to jump back into the book of Joshua. I hope you are ready as we have maybe about a month more of sermons and it will be as you see the sermon bookmark interspersed with some other guest preachers along the way.
I’m not going to give you much of a summary of where we’ve been in the book or where we are because this opening section in chapter 18 will remind us where we’ve been and what is going on. Just in very general terms, we can say that chapters 1 through 12 dealt with the conquest of the land. Crossing over the Jordan and then the walls of Jericho falling down and then the various battles. The conquest of the land in Joshua 1through 12.
There here in chapters 13 through 19 we have been dealing with the division of the land. Even though as you read through your Bible in a year this is not on the face of it the most exciting part of Scripture, I think we find that chapter by chapter the Lord has lessons for us here. Sometimes I go into the week maybe the same position you are in right now. I’m really curious what we’re going to see here. Sometimes I think, “Why did I take these two chapters? What are we going to find?” and yet every week the Lord has something for us.
So follow along. We’re going to move somewhat methodically through the first 10 verses and then we’ll move quickly through the actual land allotment and we won’t read every verse in chapter 18 and 20. So start here at verse 1 of Joshua chapter 18.
“Then the whole congregation of the people of Israel assembled at Shiloh and set up the tent of meeting there. The land lay subdued before them.”
So we encounter this place which will be very important in the history of God’s people, in particular here in the time of Joshua and in the time of Judges, before the monarchy, before Israel has a king, that’s Shiloh. Shiloh is right in the middle of Israel.
Now maybe your Bible has a map in the back, the pew Bibles don’t, I think. I think once in my whole ministry I used something on the screen, so I get one time. So, maybe some other time. But if you think about a map of Israel, and in fact, kids, if you’re doodling right now, I’ll give you something that you can doodle on some black part of the bulletin. You can try to draw a little map of Israel. You say, well, I don’t know what Israel looks like. Well, think about it. You try to do a line up across the top here, and then sort of a line going down vertically this way, and then on this side is the Mediterranean Sea. Sort of a sloping arc like this. It makes sort of a curvy rectangle here. So, here’s Israel.
Now Israel is like this and God’s people have Shiloh now right in the middle of that map, the tent of meeting. That’s the tabernacle. Now remember when God’s people were wandering in the wilderness they had this tent and they could move it from place to place. It’s not a permanent structure. Well, now it’s going to be semi-permanently located in the middle of Israel in Shiloh.
We’ve yet to have what the Lord promised in Deuteronomy that there would be a place, that place we’re going to find out later in the Bible is Jerusalem, and that’s where David and Solomon will first build a palace and then will build the temple and will be the permanent location. But here in this part of Israel’s history, it’s at Shiloh. See the connection at the end of verse 1, “the land laid subdued before them.” There’s a connection between worship and rest. That’s what the Lord’s day is for, worship and rest.
So when the land is subdued, now, there’s still work to do but by and large it’s subdued, now we can think about where we will have worship because worship is always at the very center, here geographically at the center of God’s people. So the congregation gathers together and they’re going to have the allotment for the remaining tribes. So let’s continue reading. Verse 2. Kids, if you drew that little map outline, I just want you to have it there because I’m going to give you some things to fill in.
“There remained among the people of Israel seven tribes whose inheritance had not yet been apportioned. So Joshua said to the people of Israel, “How long will you put off going in to take possession of the land, which the Lord, the God of your fathers, has given you? Provide three men from each tribe, and I will send them out that they may set out and go up and down the land. They shall write a description of it with a view to their inheritances, and then come to me. They shall divide it into seven portions. Judah shall continue in his territory on the south, and the house of Joseph shall continue in their territory on the north. And you shall describe the land in seven divisions and bring the description here to me. And I will cast lots for you here before the Lord our God. The Levites have no portion among you, for the priesthood of the Lord is their heritage. And Gad and Reuben and half the tribe of Manasseh have received their inheritance beyond the Jordan eastward, which Moses the servant of the Lord gave them.””
Here’s a very nice summary of what we’ve seen. So you think about this map and you can draw this. If you go about two-thirds of the way over toward the east, you can draw a little circle up here, that’s the Sea of Galilee, draw a line going down to a bigger sort of oval there, that’s the Dead Sea, and that river there is the Jordan River. Feel like I’m doing the weather but there’s no green screen behind me. Here to the east of the Jordan River, remember two and a half tribes during the time of Moses already received their inheritance – Reuben, Gad, and half the tribe of Manasseh.
So, that means there are 12 tribes, the 12 tribes come because Jacob, the patriarch, had 12 sons. Now one of those sons was Levi, and this passage here reminds us Levi, he’s going to be the priestly clan, the priests and Levites, and they’re scattered throughout. Their inheritance is not land, their inheritance is the priestly ministry of the Lord and that’ll be in two weeks, the land, the cities that they get, but not their own territory. So, we’re down one of the sons. But Joseph, he was one of the sons of Jacob, he has two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, so they are the tribes. So those are our 12 tribes, two and a half, and that means we have nine and a half on the western side of the Jordan.
Now this paragraph reminds us, and here’s where you can just sort of sketch it in on your little makeshift Israel map, so Judah is there in the south, and then in the north you have a little sliver of Ephraim, and then further north the bigger chunk is Manasseh. They don’t quite touch because one of the tribes is going to come between them. But we’ve had the two most important tribes, because remember usually the promise and the blessing would go with the firstborn son, but Jacob’s firstborn son Reuben sinned by sleeping with his father’s concubine, so he didn’t get the promise and the blessing, so it goes to Joseph and it goes to Judah. Over time we’ll see that the Messiah is going to come out of the tribe of Judah.
So that’s why we’ve had those tribes first. The half tribe of Manasseh on this side with Ephraim, that’s Joseph, his two sons, and then Judah. So, doing your math, seven tribes left. These seven tracts of land.
Now it’s a little different way of dividing the land here. You notice up in verse 4, three men from each of the remaining tribes. So 21 guys are going out, three from each of the remaining seven tribes, into the land and they’re like map makers. They’re going to go and they’re marking out the cities. It must have been that there some natural borders – okay, there’s that tree and that rock and that riverbank. So, they have some sense of where the land should be divided.
It’s very smart here. You read through this and it doesn’t make sense at first and then you realize this is really quite orderly. We’ve had two and a half tribes, we got Judah, we got Joseph, we have seven tribes, and three from each. Why? Because you want, when you’re going to cast lots for who gets it, you don’t some of these people to say, “Now wait a minute. You sent out three guys from Asher and I don’t trust those guys.” No, you had three from every tribe so they came back with sort of either a map book or the written kind of coordinates and presented there to Joshua and the congregation, here are the seven remaining allotments.
Then in some way, we don’t exactly how, they are going to cast lots to determine which of these places they’re going to live. So pick it up at verse 8.
“So the men arose and went, and Joshua charged those who went to write the description of the land, saying, “Go up and down in the land and write a description and return to me. And I will cast lots for you here before the Lord in Shiloh.” So the men went and passed up and down in the land and wrote in a book a description of it by towns in seven divisions. Then they came to Joshua to the camp at Shiloh, and Joshua cast lots for them in Shiloh before the Lord. And there Joshua apportioned the land to the people of Israel, to each his portion.”
So the men come back, they have their book, a list of all the towns and seven divisions, and they’re going to draw lots. We don’t know if they drew sticks or stones or tokens or flags or what they used or rock, paper, scissors. They did something of a drawing of lots. It seems that Joshua must have said, “Okay, here’s the first land division,” and gave the descriptions and the cities and said, “All right, we are going to draw whose land will this be.” Pulls out their stone from the bag and the first division goes to Benjamin.
Now this may seem tedious and somewhat unnecessary to us, but you can understand how important this was to them. It shows us how this allotment was very orderly and this was important. Sometimes Presbyterians get made fun of for doing things decently and in order, but it’s a verse in the Bible, okay? It’s a good verse in the Bible and we see it here that they did it orderly.
Think about it. This is where they were to live, they and their family, and their clan and their tribe, in perpetuity. Or at least until they finally proved to be covenant breakers and were kicked out of the land. They are going to live there as far as they know forever. So it’s pretty important that this process can be shown to be from God Himself. There’s a reason why the whole congregation is assembled here. This is public. If Joshua just said, “Hey, I went into the tent, guys, and let me tell you what the Lord said.” Well, he would have had a right to do it that way, but this provides maximum transparency. It’s orderly, every one of these seven tribes had three representatives to go up and down the land, to write the whole thing down. There’s no funny business, no questionable ballots, no voter issues at all. Here it is, the seven allotments.
Now, we’ll move through them quickly. You can see in your Bible there’s a heading in the ESV for each one.
Look at verse 11.
“The lot of the tribe of the people of Benjamin according to its clans came up, and the territory allotted to it fell between the people of Judah and the people of Joseph.”
So if you were still with me and you were drawing your map, you’ve Judah in the south and Ephraim and Manasseh in the north, there’s a little liver in the middle that was open and that goes to Benjamin.
Look then at chapter 19, verse 1.
“The second lot The second lot came out for Simeon, for the tribe of the people of Simeon, according to their clans, and their inheritance was in the midst of the inheritance of the people of Judah.”
So pretty quickly Simeon gets swallowed up in Judah because Simeon actually is a kind of donut hole right there, (I know the donuts, we all enjoyed the donuts, we’ll bring them back sometime), the donut is right there in the middle of Judah. That’s for the people of Simeon.
Then turn to verse 10, 17, 24, 32. You can see the headings.
“The third lot came for Zebulun… The fourth for Issachar… The fifth for the people of Asher, and the sixth for the people of Naphtali.”
These four tribes, again if you’re thinking of the map. So, Ephraim and Joseph are in the north. Well, these four are farther north than Manasseh. They go up even farther north. These four tribes are in the northern part of Israel with Asher running up along the Mediterranean coast. Which leaves just one remaining and that is the inheritance for Dan. Verse 40.
“The seventh lot came out for the tribe of the people of Dan.”
His territory is right next to Benjamin, in between kind of Ephraim, Manasseh, and Judah, but his runs over to the Mediterranean Sea. Then look at verse 47.
“When the territory of the people of Dan was lost to them, the people of Dan went up and fought against Leshem,” or Laish sometimes it’s called, “and after capturing it and striking it with the sword they took possession of it and settled in it, calling Leshem, Dan, after the name of Dan their ancestor.”
So years later they get a city in the far north of Israel and they call it Dan. Now why is that important? Well, because maybe you’ve heard this refrain in the Bible “from Dan to Beersheba.” Dan to Beersheba. That’s like saying from Maine to Florida, or from Washington to North Carolina, Washington State. So this is the north/south axis. Dan was the very northern part and Beersheba was the city in Judah down in the Negev in the desert and so sometimes they would say the land stretched from Dan to Beersheba. That’s the land of Israel.
Now before we talk about what this means, just notice there is one person who’s been waiting very patiently. Although this is not mainly a passage that’s to teach us lessons about leadership. There is something of a lesson here. Joshua is the leader and he goes last. Verse 49.
“When they had finished distributing the several territories of the land as inheritances, the people of Israel gave an inheritance among them to Joshua the son of Nun. By command of the Lord they gave him the city that he asked, Timnath-serah in the hill country of Ephraim.” That’s His people. “And he rebuilt the city and settled in it. These are the inheritances that Eleazar the priest and Joshua the son of Nun and the heads of the fathers’ houses of the tribes of the people of Israel distributed by lot at Shiloh before the Lord, at the entrance of the tent of meeting. So they finished dividing the land.”
So this whole thing was done publicly. You have the political and military leader Joshua. You have the spiritual leader Eleazar. In addition you have the heads of the family’s household. So everyone can say, “We saw this thing. This was done out in the open for the division of the land.” And last but not least, Joshua gets to pick a city for himself.
Now take a breath and you say, “All right. Those two chapters make a little more sense. I can see what’s laid out here. What does any of this mean for us? I can see how it was important to them, that’s where they were going to live. I don’t live there.”
But put yourself in their shoes, or sandals, for a moment. Of the average Israelite who had this whole land division unfold, or imagine years later you’re an Israelite and you have someone read this scroll to you or perhaps someone passes on these stories and recounts them, what would you be thinking as you hear this story? And then years later you live in it because you live in one of these physical places that had been allotted. What would be impressed upon you, and therefore what might be relevant to us?
Three things.
First. Here’s one thing that I think would have been absolutely clear to them. Some things in life are given to us as our lot in life.
Now for them it was literally their lot in life. God doesn’t promise to guide us by casting lots, that’s not the way He works. There was specific provision in the Old Testament for it here and it shows up one time in the New Testament when they have to pick a successor to Judas and they have two men equally capable and they cast lots. But that’s not the way, having the Scriptures, having the Spirit, that’s not the way that God typically is guiding or expecting to guide His people.
But here it’s how God specifically was making His will known. This was a way of saying God Himself has determined where you are to live. So one of the lessons for them and for us, and it sounds rather prosaic but it’s really important, there are many things in your life that you don’t get to choose. You did not get to choose where you were born. You didn’t choose the country of your birth citizenship. You didn’t get to choose who your parents were. The house you grew up in. You had no choice in the DNA that shapes so much of who you are. You didn’t get to choose whether you were a boy or a girl, that was given to you. You didn’t get to choose the color of your eyes, how tall you would be, your metabolism. You didn’t get to choose what things you would naturally be really good at and what things you would naturally have a very hard time with. There are many elements of your personality that you did not get to choose.
Now this does not mean that we have to accept every one of those things, of course. Most people move to a different place. People can change parts of their personality. There may be people here praying for parts of your personality to change. There are things about our bodies that we might change.
Just incidentally, it’s sort of a good rule of thumb, now there are still gray areas, but a good rule of thumb before you think about what you want to change in your body, is this some aspect of the Fall? So if someone’s born with a cleft palate, say yes, that’s good that there are surgeries. Or if you have bad eyes. I am wearing glasses or I have contacts. Or if you have some gland doesn’t work or some hormone deficiency. So is there something that this is not working because this is aspect of living in a fallen world versus this is simply something I don’t like. Today we have people who don’t like that they were born a boy or a girl, or almost all of us at some point in our life will have some part of our body we think is too big or too small, or something that we wish were different. Well, we can certainly do some things and people color their hair and people work out and people grow, but there are many things that are simply given to us and ought to be accepted as God, that our bodies are God’s way of telling us, “Here’s what I have given to you” and with it there are some things you can do and there are always some things we can’t do.
Now come back to the tribes. We are not told for the most part what these other tribes thought. We know at one point Joseph’s tribes, they complained a little bit and said, “We don’t have enough room here” and they gave a little grumbling. But for the most part, we don’t know. But you can look on a map later at this land allotment. They didn’t all get the same size land. They didn’t all get a pretty view of the mountains. They didn’t all get some part of the coast. Wouldn’t that be nice? They didn’t all have the same number of cities or the same kind of cities. They didn’t live in the same place with the same weather or the same fields for crops. There were a whole bunch of things that God determined were going to be different for them.
We want people to have equality under the law, but it’s simply never going to be the case that everyone is born into an equal station in life. You can mark it very well. You will always have someone to envy and there is always someone who envies you. There is always someone you can look up, boy, they got the sweet lot in life, and there’s some people that think that about your life.
Now this wasn’t a cruel system. The rest of the Old Testament tells us there’s a system for helping each other. There’s a year of Jubilee, there’s second chances, there’s remedy for disasters and challenges. So God wants to make the life together as peaceable and fruitful as possible, and yet we have to recognize they simply had to trust that God drew the lot for them and that is what they were given.
Think about all the things in your life you did not have a say in. All sorts of things about your parents and your life and your abilities and your personality and your body. One of the things that this ought to have done for them and for us is rather than making them grumblers, it should have made them grateful because they were given life.
I think about my life. I was given two parents who love each other, who brought me to church. I had an education. I lived in a safe home on a safe street. We weren’t rich but we never lacked for any essential. Sure, I can recount that I have inherited really bad eyes, bad ankles. This one I’ve sprained about 50 times. I have celiac, I have allergies, I have canker sores, woe is me. Boy. It’s my sin that wants to grumble when I have so many blessings, things that I had nothing to do with. You could say, “I worked hard and I followed the rules.” No, I did not get to choose a whole bunch of the best blessings in life.
Now some of you are saying, “That’s very nice for you, Pastor, and I have friends like that, but that wasn’t me.” That’s true. You may feel like that person was born on third base and you were born with two strikes against you. No one should make light of those hardships. It is true that there are people who are genuine victims of someone else’s mistreatment or someone else’s mistakes and their life is made to suffer because of someone else’s sin.
In fact, you want to think about, I’ll come back to Joshua at the end, Caleb and Joshua? They had to suffer because of the sins of the other 10 spies. No one in all of Israel had to wait for the Promised Land as long as Joshua and Caleb. Why? Because everyone else died. They made it. No one waited longer and they were the only two who were faithful. So Caleb and Joshua suffered because of the sins of other people.
So, it’s true, people are mistreated. But there’s a difference between being a victim and having a victim mentality. What do I mean by that? What I mean is focusing on two things. The wrong sort of mentality does this. Number one – you focus on what you don’t have instead of what you do have. Number two – you focus on what you cannot do instead of what you can do. That is to say, there are things in your life you didn’t choose, there are things in your life you can’t control. There were things that other people did to you that you perhaps suffered because of their mistakes or their sins. And you can’t do anything about it.
But it doesn’t help you or anyone else to say that’s me, that’s my identity, is all those things that happened to me, all of those limitations. It’s like if Zebulun said, “My whole life I wanted to be the tribe of surfers.” Well, you didn’t get any land by the sea, Zebulun. You got to go hang out with Asher. He got all the land by the sea. But, Zebulun, you can spend your whole life thinking about what you don’t have and how Asher got all the breaks and he got the land by the Mediterranean Sea, or you can think about what you do have and what you’re going to do.
So they all had to learn the very important lesson – to trust the Lord who literally drew the lot for where they would live that would determine so much of their life. There are all sorts of things you cannot control.
Second lesson. We’ll move through these next two more quickly. The promises of God should not make us passive people. Yes, there are promises, yes, we trust, but they do not make us passive.
Dale Ralph Davis says in his commentary the promises were not meant to be sedatives but stimulants. Not to put you to sleep spiritually but to wake you up.
This has been a recurring theme throughout these chapters. Over and over we have heard God say, look, He’s given you the land, it’s a gift, but there’s work to be done, so get up out of your seat, go clear some trees, take down some giants, and win the land.
We see it again. Look in your Bibles, go to chapter 18, look at verse 3. We see the same refrain. Joshua said to the people of Israel, “How long will you put off going in to take possession of the land, which the Lord, the God of your fathers, has given you?” Okay. How long are you going to wait? He’s given it to you, now you got to go after it and get it.
You remember the parable of the talents in Matthew 25. One man gets five, one gets two, one gets one. The Master says, “Okay, I want you to go and bring me a return on my investment.” The one with five talents goes and he gets five more. And a talent there is not as we think of talent but it’s a monetary unit, represents opportunities, abilities. The one with five gets five more, the one with two gets two more. You remember they’re both given the exact same commendation – well done, good and faithful servant.
God does not expect the one with two talents to come back with 100 talents. No, the one with five got five more, the one with two got two more, and the Master says to both of them, “Well done. You have both been faithful.” Somebody got five, somebody got two, but they were faithful with what they had been given.
But the man who had one was afraid. He didn’t take risks and he was scared and he buried it in the ground. He came back to his Master and he said, “Well, I know you’re a hard man and I know you’re very gruff and I didn’t want to disappoint you, so I buried it in the ground and here it is.” You might think maybe the Master said, “Well, at least you were cautious, at least you were careful, at least you didn’t lose anything that I gave you.” But that’s not what he said. He cast him away. He said, “You’re a worthless servant. You could have at least put this with Bank of America or Truist or Wells Fargo or somebody. We’ve got lots of bankers. They could have given you some return on it. You didn’t do anything. You were too afraid. You didn’t get a return.”
The investment that God made in you made you passive when it was there to make you active. There’s been lots said about younger generations. An article recently in the Wall Street Journal, “What happens when a generation never grows up?” Young adults keep waiting longer and longer to take possession of the land. Some of those things are with circumstances outside of your control. You might say I want a job or I want to get married, but insofar as it depends on you, young people especially, need to take initiative. You need to work hard. You need to follow through. You need to take risks. You’ve been given an allotment in life. God has given you gifts, abilities, opportunities, skills, most of you some kind of education, capacity, not equally but He has given something to all of you. God promises to be with you. So go venture out, settle down, live, work for His glory. That’s one of the things that they should have had impressed upon them. The promise of God is not to make us passive. A stimulant, not a sedative.
Here’s the final lesson. God sees you when you do the right thing and He won’t forget. He sees you when you do the right thing and He won’t forget.
So come back to Caleb and Joshua. I mentioned this at the beginning of this whole section and just see it again. If you go back to chapter 13 we have the land allotment on the east side of the Jordan. So the land allotment on the west side of the Jordan, that starts in chapter 14. You remember what it starts with? It starts with Caleb, Caleb who says, “Give me Hebron and I’m going to go up into the mountains and I’m going to take out the giants.” Very deliberately the land allotment west of the Jordan starts and ends with the only two spies who were faithful in the land, way back in the book of Numbers when Moses sent the 12 spies. Ten of them said, “It’s too scary, there’s too many giants, we’ll never do it, it’s really intimidating,” and Caleb and Joshua said, “Yeah, it’s big, our God is bigger. We can do it.”
As I said, no one waited longer for the promise than Caleb and Joshua. So it’s very fitting this allotment starts in chapter 14 with Caleb and the very last allotment goes in chapter 19 to Joshua. I wonder if Joshua knew or if it was a surprise. The people come forward. It says at the end of chapter 19, “By the command of the Lord,” and it says, “If they say okay, Joshua, it’s your turn. Where do you want to live?” and he picks this city. I think it’s God’s way of reminding us that He will reward His people when they do what is right. They may be the last ones to get it, they may have to outlast everyone else, but He sees, He knows, and He does not forget. If anyone had a right to complain, it was Caleb and it was Joshua.
Don’t be a complainer. Don’t be like your pastor is so much. Don’t ask my wife and my kids if I ever complain. Be like Caleb and Joshua. They didn’t mess up. But they had to wait longer than everyone else and we don’t hear a murmur from them. We don’t hear a rebuke. We don’t hear a complaint. They could not control what the other 10 spies did or said. They had to suffer the consequences of the other 10 spies and their disobedience. But they were faithful to do the right thing no matter what, no matter how much a minority position it was, and in the end God was faithful to them.
So God wants in this allotment to begin and to end and to say, “Remember these guys? Remember they’re old men now, Caleb and Joshua, but they were faithful. Caleb, if you want Hebron, I give it to you. Joshua, if you want the city in Ephraim of Timnath-serah, it’s yours. And he rebuilt it.
God sees when you do the right thing and He will not forget.
As we close this sermon, you may think, well, that is a good sermon, some good application, and maybe you think it sounds a little like the Serenity prayer, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Made famous, it’s in Alcoholics Anonymous, it’s attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr. You say, well, okay, it’s good, but is that basically what this is about? Some things you can change, some things you can’t change, know the difference.
Well, there’s truth in that prayer, even if it’s become a cliché. If that’s all we said, it’s misleading, or at least it’s incomplete. Because the New Testament will draw out implications from here that are more than just about leadership, more than just about activity in your life, more than simply going out and claiming the promises. All that, I think, is fair inference.
But if you know the New Testament, you know that the New Testament picks up on this language of inheritance. There’s another inheritance. Like this inheritance, it’s a gift from God. Like this inheritance, even though it’s entirely a gift, you also have to strive to enter that rest. So I want you to hear how Peter talks about our inheritance because what we’re looking for in the Promised Land is not a sliver in the hill country of Israel. Something better.
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to His great mercy He has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”
First great act of redemption – Moses brought you out of the house of Egypt, through the Red Sea. Joshua had you cross through the Jordan River. That exodus and conquest.
Well, here’s the even greater act of redemption. It is Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection and ascension. Then Peter says, “Born again to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, unfading.”
You say that’s really good. I want to write it down. Can you tell me what are the coordinates for this inheritance? Well, the Bible tells us, “kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.”
They entered into the Promised Land by faith. As God delivered them by the plagues, He dried up the Red Sea, He dried up the Jordan, He made the walls come down. Once in the land, they had work to do, just like we work as Christians. But here we see there is a better inheritance, kept in heaven for you. You know all of its coordinates. We’ve heard in our church just in the last hours, days, members of our congregation who have gone on to receive that inheritance and no one here knows the time when you will be called. Will you have faith? Do you now have faith to receive that inheritance, because one of the things we can’t change is our own hearts. Only God can give us a new heart, only God can cause us to be born again to a living hope, only God can save us from our sins. When He does and when we trust, He guarantees an inheritance kept for us in heaven.
Let’s pray. Father in heaven, we give thanks for Your Holy Word. Help us by Your Spirit to preach this sermon a better sermon than the one that has just been preached, that we might hear it all week, and You would lead on, O King eternal, and may we follow in Your lead. In Jesus’ name. Amen.