40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Joshua 10:22-11:5 (Episode 191)

Episode Date: November 23, 2019

We find out what happens to the five kings trapped in a cave and Chad and Daniel spend quite a bit of time discussing violence and death in the Bible. Israel continues the campaign in Canaan and wins battle after battle. But a group of cities joins with an enormous city to fight against Joshua. All this is discussed. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network Houston City Event Las Vegas City Event Great Freedom Conference in Germany Donate to Giving Tuesday

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast. check out all the other podcasts that are living over there. While you're over there, you can go to the events page. On the events page, you will see city events. We got a city event in Houston on February 22nd and Las Vegas March 21st. In Houston, we'll be talking about what happens when people encounter Jesus in the Gospels. I'll be there, Chad will be there, Loso, Gretchen Ronovic, Scott Keith, and Matt Popovitz. Registration is free. You can go over

and just sign up and then show up. Same applies for Las Vegas, free, sign up. We'll be talking about Galatians, six speakers, six chapters of Galatians. I'll be there, Eric Sorensen, Scott Keith, Adam Francisco, Blake Flatley, Cindy Koch. It's gonna be a good time. If you are in either of those areas,

register and we would love to see you there. Chad, what is going on? Well, I'm just thinking, I've got a new appreciation for those who are in the occupation of painting. Yes. Yeah. You know, on occasion we get exposed to people who do different things and, you know, you kind of get to appreciate all the labor that's involved with whatever it is, you know, whatever this is doing. over the weekend my wife decided we were going to paint the house so we spent like eight hours on saturday and an hour and a half on sunday painting our family room and our kitchen in the

hallway we were we grew to appreciate those through that kind of labor full-time that'll happen man that reminds me of when i last year when i had a water line burst in my yard and i had to dig it up oh i remember that yeah it was a special kind of hellscape that i was experiencing and uh yeah i was thinking how much they pay these guys to do this because you'd have to pay me a lot of money to do this every day yeah that's kind of what i thought about the painting too yeah she's got a whole uh list of uh renovations we're doing the house so that was step one getting everything painted so we'll uh we'll see what happens next yeah that's one of those projects where you get in it you're like we're gonna save money and do it ourselves and then you realize why people pay

people to do that because also it takes you like 10 times as long as it would take them yes exactly exactly yeah so yeah painted this weekend and uh getting ready we're our grandsons are coming out of town uh around thanksgiving so we'll get to be uh lolly and pop to them for a few days uh celebrate the holidays so a lot of good stuff happening yeah well all right well you know what's not good that's happening is uh five kings yeah in a cave all uh uh you know wondering if they're going to be able to escape but the answer is doesn't look like it because they're all blocked in there yeah we had to leave in the cave last week they've been waiting for us all week seven seven days they've been looking for another way out yeah yeah didn't didn't happen yeah this is

in the middle of uh joshua 10 and uh we had these five kings that uh got together decided that they had a common enemy being joshua and the israelites so they attacked him and things did not go well for uh the kings or their armies their armies had hailstones thrown on them from heaven so god was doing his own kind of battle against him joshua and his armies pursued them and uh it's almost an idiomatic phrase. You know, we have this idiomatic phrase in English that somebody's got their butt kicked. Well, there's sort of that same phrase in verse 19, where Joshua tells them to strike them in the rear. So it's kind of the same thing going off there. It's idiomatic phrase in Hebrew, meaning to strike or smite the tail. And that's what happened to them. They got their

their tails smited they got their butts kicked and the kings escaped from all this hid in a cave joshua and his soldiers found them piled some rocks over the front of the cave and then pursued the armies from there so we're going to find out beginning of verse 22 what happens to uh to these guys and it's going to be uh actually a fun discussion because what i what i want to talk about for a few minutes is suppose you're either studying this particular story which i know a lot of you who are listening do because you have uh you have bible studies which are basically following either 40 minutes the old testament or 30 minutes in the new testament and uh you uh use a lot of our discussions for your own discussions so if you're doing that

here you go or you know maybe there's somebody out there who's preaching through joshua and you're kind of here at chapter 10 and uh the question is all right you're reading this story and you're coming at it from the the same kind of hermeneutic same kind of interpretive lens that we use throughout these podcasts and that is that christ is the center of everything that in one way or another all this points to christ and he is uh in some way present in this story. So how is he? That's what I want to talk about here for a minute, because as I was reflecting on this particular episode that we're about to read, I began to make some connections that I actually never had made before. So it's kind of fascinating. Anyway, all that is a preamble

to what I'm about to read here. So I'll start here with verse 22 and stop there maybe at 27. So Joshua chapter 10, beginning with verse 22. Then Joshua said, open the mouth of the cave and bring these five kings out to me from the cave. And they did so and brought these five kings out to him from the cave, the king of Jerusalem, the king of Hebron, the king of Yarmouth, the king of Lachish, and the king of Eglon. And it came about when they brought these kings out to Joshua, that Joshua called for all the men of Israel and said to the chiefs of the men of war who had gone with him, come near put your feet on the necks of these kings so they came near and put their feet on their necks joshua then said to them do not fear or be dismayed be strong and courageous for thus the lord will do to all your enemies with whom you fight so afterward joshua struck

them and put them to death and he hanged them on five trees and they hung on the trees until evening. And it came about at sunset that Joshua commanded, and they took them down from the trees and threw them into the cave where they had hidden themselves, and put large stones over the mouth of the cave to this very day. This is the gospel of the Lord. Yeah, it's good that that's not the gospel reading. I always do kind of a side note here. You know, sometimes you'll have, if you're in a if you're in a church that uh that is more liturgical uh you'll you'll know that after the reading of the gospel a lot of times the the reader will say this is the gospel of the lord and everyone will respond thanks be to god or praise be to you oh christ or something like that

you know sometimes you'll have those uh readings in the gospels that are just like loaded with law or you have john the baptist talking about you know taking an axe to uh to the root of the tree I was just going to say that the best one is when they go, even now that the axe is laid to the root, who told you to flee from the wrath to come? The brood of vipers. The brood of vipers. This is the gospel of the Lord. And you're like, oh, okay. Yeah, yeah.

That's when you're glad that gospel does have a broader sense also in the Bible. You read Jesus, like, you know, Matthew 23, the woes to the Pharisees. this is the gospel of the lord that doesn't sound very gospel-y to me yeah no it's not like much good news there yeah well this is uh this is kind of an old testament version of that right i mean this is a i know because people have told me i know that these kinds of stories disturb people yeah and understandably i mean this is a this is an r-rate if this was in a movie if the bible or a movie then this would definitely be one of those scenes where yeah you don't want your kids to watch right remember the veggie tales episode they did on this one you know they did when they

pulled the five carrots out of the cave and chopped their heads off no i don't remember no that's not a thing that's why they conveniently skipped this one yeah as they would have to a lot a lot of these Old Testament stories that are just brimming with violence. So this is, yeah, this is a, I mean, there's no kind of softening of this particular narrative. Yes, it's violent.

Yes, it's bloody. Yes, it is just full of death and full of destruction. So what are we going to do with this? I've been actually reflecting. I can't tell you why. Maybe it's something I read recently, but I've been reflecting. Maybe it's because this is the end of the church year and we have all these readings about the apocalypse and wars and rumors of wars and persecutions. But violence in the kingdom of God has been on my mind a lot. Maybe it's because of Joshua. But I do think that's one of those things that maybe we need to deal with a little bit more in our preaching.

the violent nature of the kingdom of God. And by that, I don't mean physical violence, although that does happen, of course, because you have persecution of believers, violent persecution of believers. But what I mean by that is that I don't think that we often realize that as the gospel advances through preaching, through just people telling others about Christ and his grace, that actually this is a war that's taking place. It is a violent conquest that's happening when the gospel is expanding the kingdom of God from place to place, because even though we might not see it, lurking right beneath the surface is always this intense spiritual war between all the forces of evil and all the forces of God. I mean, kingdoms are

clashing as the gospel advances just like in joshua kingdoms one kingdom the kingdom of god represented here in the nation of israel is advancing it's conquering and it's a bloody business and people die and there's a there's this this sense in which the same thing happens in the advancement of the kingdom of god in the new testament as well that's one of the reasons I pointed this out way early, I guess when we started Joshua. But the book of Joshua is the Old Testament parallel to the book of Acts. You've got the four gospels, and then you have the book of Acts. You have the Torah, the five books of the Torah, then you have Joshua.

And just like the book of Acts describes how Jesus continues his work through his people of bringing the gospel to more and more people, expanding the kingdom of God. So Joshua is now the continuation of what God is doing through Joshua, the Old Testament Jesus, as the people of Israel take that kingdom and are claiming it as their own. And in both cases, New Testament as well as Old Testament, you've got death. You've got people dying. Now, it's more obvious in the Old Testament. People actually are physically dying.

But you have death taking place in the book of Acts as well, Because any time that people are brought into the kingdom of God, it's through death. They die. They are buried with Christ, crucified with Christ, buried with Christ. So there is a violent death that takes place. And there is a resurrection. There is this life that the Spirit pours into them. So anyway, that's just been on my mind because of Joshua, because of the time of year it is,

that one of the things we don't always realize about the work of the church is it is a violent work, because beneath the surface is always this spiritual war that's going on, and death and resurrection are happening all around us. Yeah, I think you see this reversal happen, too. I mean, in the case of Joshua, you see the children of God having to engage in violence over and over and over again. You know, in this case, these people attack them or attack Gibeon, and Israel had to intervene. But obviously, there's other cases where, and lots of them, where, you know, Israel attacks other people. And you see all this violence going on to sort of, you know, this is the conquest of Canaan and, you know, taking the promised land. But one of the things

you see reverse in the New Testament is that Acts is a pretty violent book. I mean, you have the violence of Saul, you have people like Stephen, you know, getting brutally stoned to death. You have, I mean, outside of Acts, you have church history, which tells you the fate of all the apostles, which is most of the horrific. And the violence is sort of reversed in the sense that you don't see the the church doing any violence and there's not even any retaliation right and i think that part of what happens there is you know jesus has this interesting saying when he talks about the kingdom of god and he says uh the kingdom of god suffers violence and the violent try to take it by force yeah and what he is saying there some people i've heard people take that and say hey you

have to you know the kingdom of god you gotta you gotta fight and this is not at all what he's saying and he's saying the opposite. He's saying that the kingdom of God suffers violence, that there will always be violence against the kingdom of God, and that what people think has to happen is that the kingdom of God will be taken through violence, that this is how it will be achieved. And what you see in the Old Testament is even in all this violence,

and yes, they're going to get the promised land and stuff, but none of this is going to ultimately work. i mean they don't you don't you see they're gonna get to this place they don't get to keep the promised land they're not going to obtain the ultimate promises of god through conquest what's going to have to happen is that jesus is going to have to come and he's going to have to die and he's going to have to be hung on a tree and this even happens to him because the religious leaders are trying to violently hold on to the kingdom of god try to take the kingdom of god from him, what he says about the kingdom of God, take it from him through violence.

And so what ends up happening is the cross is sort of the end of any violent conquest that the children of God endeavor to do. And now the kingdom of God is taken through, what does it say in Revelation, the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony, the word of their confession, right? And this is how it works now. And so there is this reversal that happens that all of this violent foreshadowing ultimately culminates in the violent death of Christ. And that's the end of any sort of trying to take anything through violence or force for God's people. Yeah.

Yeah, and the irony in all that is that through Christ-suffering violence, through the church-suffering violence, through this ongoing crucifixion of the people of God, that in itself is the victory. Right. Yeah, that's the amazing, unexpected reversal that takes place, is the victory still happens. And on the surface, yeah, it looks like the victory is accomplished by those who are the enemies of Christ, but it's the exact opposite. Because God hides his victory beneath seeming defeat. So when Christ is seemingly defeated, he is victorious. Whereas when his enemies are seemingly victorious, they are actually defeated. So this is God's way of switching everything around.

Yeah, and this is a huge struggle, and for obvious reasons and understandable reasons, that the people of Israel and the religious leaders have with Jesus, is that when they think about a Messiah or they think about Israel going back to the good old days, well, they're reading stuff like this, and they're like, when are we going to get back to domination? Like, when are we going to get back to winning? When are we going to win again?

When are we going to put our feet on the necks of the Romans? Yes. Like, when is this all going to happen? Like, we've been losing for a long time. And what they think the Messiah is going to do is come and, well, Jesus is another Joshua, as much as he is not another Moses. as Luther would say all the time, but he is another Joshua.

But he's very different in the way that they would love a Joshua. They want this Joshua. Yeah. But they don't want this other Joshua who says, you know, love your enemies. They don't want this Joshua who says, you know, I'm going to suffer and die. They're like, what kind of Messiah leader is this? He's obviously a fraud, and we don't want anything to do with this. We want the kingdom of God the old way, so we have to do violence to this guy.

that's how it works yeah yeah yeah i mean this is the theology of the cross right where the way that god works seems to be foolish that's why paul says in first corinthians one that it's a stumbling block to people and not just to not just to gentiles but to the jews as well because this does not match their expectations and yet what what what the new joshua does is he actually in one way replicates what the old joshua did and that's where i want to go now with this whole image of their feet being on the neck of those that they that they conquered except it just happens in a way that doesn't seem to be that that fact seemed to be the exact opposite so take this instance they bring the kings out and joshua has the leaders of the army come up to

him, and they put their feet on the necks of these kings, and then, of course, later they're executed. Now, first of all, this was a pretty common way in the ancient Near East in which the victors would proclaim victory over the vanquished. I mean, we have depictions in Egypt, we have depictions in Assyria of the enemy lying there with the conqueror having his foot on the neck of the defeated. So, I mean, this was pretty common image. Joshua is doing what the Egyptians did, what the Assyrians did. And here's the difference when you see it from the broader biblical perspective. So, look at what's happening here in Joshua 10 in connection with the most frequently quoted Old Testament verse in the New Testament. I think I brought

this up before. So the psalm that occurs, well, first of all, the book of Psalms is the most frequently quoted Old Testament book in the New Testament. And Psalm 110 is the most frequently quoted psalm. And Psalm 110 verse 1 is the most frequently quoted Old Testament verse in the New Testament. Well, what does Psalm 110 verse 1 say? The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet. Now, just think about that image for a minute. Of course, it comes up in Jesus' dialogue with the Pharisees when they're debating,

if the Messiah is David's son, why does David call him Lord? And this particular verse is quoted. But notice that last half of the verse. So the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet. well what's the metaphor there well the metaphor there is exactly what's happening in joshua chapter 10 if your enemies are a footstool for your feet of course your enemies are under your feet they have been conquered and now the very position that they're in is iconic of their

defeat and of your victory so this is the father saying to the son so in the hebrew it's yahweh said to Adonai, we would kind of put it the New Testament language would be the father said to the son, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet. So the Messiah is pictured as one who is standing there or sitting there and under his feet are the ones that he has conquered. So Psalm 110 is using a depiction that's drawn from the book of Joshua as well as some other places. And then in the New Testament, this verse, which occurs over and over again, becomes thematic for the victory that Christ has. But how does Christ win this victory? Well, he wins the victory by letting death take him. But in death taking him, he actually destroys death, as well

as sin, as well as the power of the devil. And so all these enemies, through him undergoing crucifixion and then being raised to newness of life all of these enemies are destroyed and they become like these five kings they're underneath the feet of of the israelites so you have you have a lot of things going on here because you've got joshua 10 you've got psalm 110 you got all the occurrences in the new testament but take it take it back take it back even further all the way to Genesis chapter 3. What's going to happen in Genesis chapter 3 according to verse 15? Well, there's going to be enmity between the serpent and between the seed of the woman. What's going to happen? Well, the serpent is going to strike the heel of the seed, but the seed is going to

strike the head of the serpent. So this image of the enemy being crushed or placed beneath the heel of the victor, it goes all the way back to Genesis chapter 3, and that's often called the first messianic prophecy. It's a description of this age-long enmity between the seed, the Messiah, and between the devil and his followers, which ultimately climaxes in the crucifixion, when Christ crushes the power of the devil beneath his feet, and in that very act, the fangs of the devil are injecting venom into the heel of the messiah so that he dies so you you see in joshua 10 and everything that's going on there a pulling together of a lot of different parts of the scriptures it harkens back to genesis 3 15 it points ahead to psalm 110 and then that finds

its place all over all over the new testament it's just it's a great example of how there's this whole constellation of verses that you can pull together to see one smallness in it like this in the bigger light of the rest of the message of the scriptures, and to see then finally as all these come together that, yeah, this violent episode in the life of Joshua that strikes us is just just hard to read hard to understand actually it it it points ahead to who christ is as well as points back to the prophecies of christ and ultimately actually is the gospel of the lord when you see it uh in light of everything else the scriptures teach oh so appropriate to say this is the gospel of the lord then appropriate yeah yeah there you go when you when you put your

old testament ears on yeah i think that uh and you and you see the connections that it has backwards as well as forwards yeah yeah it's a it's hard to read it's it's bloody it's deadly it's violent but it also is interconnected with these deep themes of scripture that all coalesce in the work of christ i guess we've spent quite a bit of time on those verses but I thought it was worth, I thought it was worth kind of delving into it as just a, an example of, uh, so you're, you know, you're, you're reading along in here or judges or Kings or wherever, where are you going to come across things like this? And you say, well, what does that have to do with Jesus?

Well, just do that kind of, that kind of connecting work that we were just talking about. And I think that you'll see that in one way or another, it's going to, I think a super simple answer is that death always has to do with jesus yeah always oh yeah it with jesus and of course it's connection with us in terms of sin so yeah i mean you've got law and gospel anytime you have death you've got law and gospel implicit there yeah well i mean i think what we what we it's easy to read a passage where mercy is shown and say like okay i see i can see jesus in that but the truth is that anywhere in the scriptures old testament where there is sin or there is death this has to do with jesus because this is what he is about he is he is about taking on sin and he is

about uh defeating death through dying so wherever there is sin and death i assure you there there we are we are pointed to christ yeah yeah there is no sin and death that he has not come to take and there is no sin and death that he's not come to conquer. So all of this has to do with him. Amen. Well, shall we keep moving? Let's do it. Let's do it.

All right. So I think the rest of the chapter is going to be pretty straightforward. It's kind of a summation, actually, of what happens after this. So after the kings are killed, hung on the tree, and then buried in the cave, we get to verse 28. and 28 through uh 39 is is is the next section next section and it just goes step by step through the process of ongoing victory that joshua and his soldiers were able to uh to experience so there's a list here of not not unexpectedly a list of seven different conquests

uh the the scriptures do this all the time yeah there were probably there might have been eight that might have been 12 there might have been 15 different places were actually conquered but as the scriptures will want to do they like to list things in terms of of seven yeah it was going to be seven or seven or 40 so we got off we got off good yeah that's right yeah the chapter will be a lot longer but you know i think it is worthwhile pointing out that this is not a complete list it it it well it is and it isn't it's a complete list in the sense of because there's seven listed that is of course the number of completeness but yeah there might have been eight there might have been 15 there might have been 40 who knows but this is the scripture's way of

summing things up by choosing a certain list of seven so here's here's the list it's makedah they captured it livnah captured it lakish or lakish however you want to pronounce it they took it. I'm going to come back to that one in just a second. Now, the next one listed, the fourth one, is not necessarily a town, but a person. Verse 33 says, then Horem, the king of Gezer, came up to help Lachish, and Joshua defeated him and his people until he had left him no survivor. Now, it says that he defeated the king, but not the city. That's important because, as we learn from later on in the scriptures actually that that particular city remained outside the control of the israelites in fact if i remember seems like that particular city was

given as a gift by an egyptian pharaoh to his daughter when she married the king of solomon i'm not positive about that but anyway that's one of these places that in this list that's that's the one different one because it's a king it's not a city that's this concrete next is eglon so the three cities we have horam king horam then we have eglon then hebron and then finally verse 38 we have devir and this is all basically all of these are set up the same way that joshua and the israelites attack these places and they take its king they take its people and every single situation they they put everything under the ban which is haram we've encountered several times before in which there's a complete, complete destruction. And we've talked about that

multiple times as to why there was this complete, complete destruction. Now, I said I wanted to go back to Lachish in verse 31 and 32, because it's kind of interesting historically. 31 says that Joshua and all Israel went with him, passed on from Lebanon to Lachish, and they camped by it and fought against it. And the Lord gave Lachish into the hands of Israel, and he captured it on the second day and struck it and every person who was in it with the edge of the sword now it's important because this is the only city that it took two days to conquer and the reason i point that out is because we know from both archaeology and later biblical records that this was a tough city to conquer in fact i think it's about 700 years later in any way it's when the uh the

Assyrians are attacking. They have to build this huge siege works against the city to finally be able to capture it, like this ramp that goes up toward the city wall. That's the only way they were able to get in and to take the city. So it was a city that was pretty close to Jerusalem. And in fact, we have archaeologists have found these fragments from broken pottery in which there's military correspondence from between the leader of the city of Lachish to the people in Jerusalem. So this primitive war correspondence, if you will, letters back and forth from this particular city to Jerusalem. them so anyway it's a a city that that features later on in the biblical record it's also huge if uh if you're by a computer or you got your phone uh google the the tell t-e-l at lakish and it's just a massive mound that rises out of the air so this was a this was a big big city

and it's in its day and you can still see archaeologists have uncovered enough of the siege works that the assyrians built you can still see it kind of the slope or this ramp going up to where the the city wall city wall would have been anyway all this happens all these places in this one particular king are taken out and then uh the last few verses kind of sum up all of these victories in this what's called usually called the southern campaign of joshua verse 40 and following says joshua struck all the land the hill country and the negev and the lowland and the slopes and all their kings he left no survivor but he utterly destroyed all who breathed just as the Lord the God of Israel had commanded Joshua struck them from Kadesh Barnea even as far as

Gaza and all the country of Goshen even as far as Gibeon Joshua captured all these kings and their lands at one time because the Lord the God of Israel fought for Israel so Joshua and all Israel with him returned to the camp at Gilgal so that's the end of the chapter so they right now At this point, we've had what's usually called the central campaign. That's what we started out with, where they took Jericho. They took Ai and then Gibeon, which was in that same area. As you remember, they surrendered, basically, by tricking the Israelites. So that was the central campaign.

And then the southern campaign is the one that we just finished up, in which you have all these various cities and their kings captured and destroyed. So what remains is the northern campaign, which is actually going to be the focus of the next chapter. There's just a lot of conquest. Yeah, there's a lot of conquest. You know, something to keep in mind, and we'll get to this eventually, is that a lot of people like to say, well, there's all these contradictions between Joshua and Judges. Because when you get to the book of Judges, you find out that the conquest wasn't quite as complete as you might have surmised from the book of Joshua. We're actually going to, I can't remember where it's at in Joshua, but later in the story, there's evidence, there's plenty of written evidence in Joshua that, yeah, they didn't take the whole land.

And this is sort of a summary of what was going on that we have in Joshua, and then the details are given to us later in the book of Judges. So even though it says they took all these places, we actually know from later in Joshua, they had to go back and retake some of these places. Because as you can see, they move on. They don't leave soldiers behind to guard these places. So they conquer them, and then they move on to the next place. Well, people are going to come back. they're going to move in so some of these places had to be recaptured by the tribes by the tribes later on so you've got you've got a vision of complete victory but then you also had the book

of judges the the other perspective which says yeah it was almost a complete victory you had you had a lot of conquest taking place but you also had some places that still were never never conquered yeah this happens all throughout history though i mean anytime you have like a sort of a conquest of of massive areas uh whether it's the romans or you know the alexander the great or whatever what happens is you you take stuff and you can't you can't thin yourself out by leaving too much behind and then you have like uprisings and different places you've already been you have to go back i mean this is all throughout ancient history this happens yeah that's just the that's the way military conquest work that's why it doesn't really work on this

on this scale yeah yeah exactly we we've got a few minutes left let's kind of introduce chapter 11 and that way we kind of have it fresh in our minds when we come back to it uh next week uh probably just have time to talk a little bit about actually the the main city here that we're going to uh be introduced to right away at the beginning of the chapter so 11 starts out this way then it came about when jabin king of hazor heard of it presumably heard about everything going on with the southern part of Canaan when he heard about all this that he sent to Jobab king of Madon and to the king of Shemron and to the king of Akshath and the kings who were of the north and the hill country in the Arba south of Kinnerut

in the lowland and on the heights of Dor on the west to the Canaanite on the east and on the west the Amorite the Hittite the Perizzite the Jebusite in the hill country and the Hivite to the foot of hermon in the land of mizpah so you have all these places listed this is very similar to what we heard at the beginning of joshua chapter 10 where you have all these guys getting together right because they have a common enemy there's a threat of the israelites and especially after what just happened in the southern part of canaan these guys in the north they realized we better get our act together these guys are going to completely annihilate us we we've got to act as a unified front against this foe that is encroaching upon our territory.

Now, the first city that's mentioned here is Hazor, and we'll come back to this story next week, but Hazor is just a phenomenal city. I was trying to think of a modern example that maybe could help us to appreciate just how old and magnificent this city was, and I'm coming up blank i'm sure somebody could uh help me out there with an example but just keep this in mind just kind of give you a perspective so i live right outside san antonio texas and we just celebrated last year our tri-centennial so we're 300 years old which you know if you're an american that's like that's an old city wow 300 years old well at this time at the time of joshua the city of Hazor was already three times as old as my city of San Antonio we know that it's it's

at least a thousand years old the city is by the time that Joshua comes along and it's huge so they can archaeologists those who look at these tells these mounds where the city's once located they'll tell you that the average average city in this part of the world was about 15, maybe 20 acres was the average size of most of the cities in the ancient land of Canaan. Well, Hazor was about 200 acres. So just kind of puts into perspective just how big the city was. It's located, I think, about 10 miles north of the Sea of Galilee, which here is this word Kinneroth, which occurs in verse 2. That's the name of the Sea of Galilee. So you'll see that sometimes in the Old Testament, the Sea of Kinneroth. So it's located in an ideal spot because

it's kind of the covers the northern part of the land of Canaan. So it's a big city. It's an old city. It's a city that's mentioned in Egyptian correspondence. It's a well-known city in the ancient world. And it is the head of all these kingdoms. So the question is, how are Joshua and his army is going to be able to to match the military might of not just hazel but all these other kings as they're going to be marching against him not just with armies but as we'll see with horses and with chariots as well so we'll have to leave it there because we're our 40 minutes are up man we are what happens next week man we are uh getting really good at the cliffhanger man they set it up it's pretty good nobody read ahead you can't figure out you can't find out

yeah yeah exactly you gotta wait chad you know the year is is coming to an end as we discussed and 2019 has been a good year of growth for 1517 podcast network at now averages over 175 000 downloads per month if you want to do that math uh that's a lot of downloads every year so 175 000 monthly downloads we had over 20 000 students enroll in the online academy taking those academy class 20 000 uh taking this stuff cool now that's just part of what we do i mean you have all the city events that we've done and the general conferences and uh the the blog all all of this stuff you know uh that we do i mean the vast majority of it's just free stuff I mean, we're just creating all this stuff.

So, obviously, it's not all free because we have to have people doing this stuff. And so what we're doing is that there's a day called Giving Tuesday, which is December 3rd. December 3rd is a day where people give to nonprofits and this sort of stuff. And what we are trying to do to keep all of this stuff going, to get the gospel to more people, to give more people rest, more people consolation, give more people Christ, is we are going to try to raise $100,000 by or on Giving Tuesday.

So Giving Tuesday is the day that we're trying to raise it, but you can get a head start by going to 1517.org slash Giving Tuesday. And so I will put a link in the show notes. I know a lot of people listen to this. They already give, and please continue to do that, and thank you for doing that. And if you are able to do a one-time thing to help us reach that goal

so that we can keep doing all this stuff, that would be greatly appreciated. So link is in the notes. It's been a good year, so we're going to try to keep it going. We've got big plans for 2020. So if any of that stuff has been helpful to you, maybe you don't do all that stuff, but you appreciate the fact that it's served other people. now's a a great time to to give back and and help us continue the work so thank you so much to those

of you who uh do give and that will give to this and and yeah you really do make it possible and we'll see you next week see you then