Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Confidence You Get From God | Historical Books | Joshua 24:14-33

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

What does it mean to serve the Lord? Have you yielded your heart to God? What is the significance of Joseph's burial? In today's episode, Jeff shares how Joshua 24:14-33 encourages us to be confident in our Creator King. Read the Bible with us in 2025! This year, we’re exploring the Historical Books—Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, and 1 & 2 Kings. Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Joshua 24:14-33

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Jeff Parrott. In Andrew Peterson's book, Adorning the Dark, he tells a story of some neighbors who were building a new house and wanted to demonstrate how every part of their life, including their new home, would be devoted to God. So to do that, they went into the house before the insulation and drywall went in, and they wrote Bible verses on as many two-by-four studs as they they could. It wasn't some kind of mystical ritual. It was meant to be an embodied way of living the truth that their home was not meant for serving themselves, but meant for serving God. I love that picture of just going into the house, writing on the two by four studs,

truth and love of God. It's such an awesome picture of what serving God with our lives can and should look like. And even if most of us, for sure, aren't going to be able to write Bible verses. about God's truth and God's love on the studs of a physical house, we can still display the love of God and the truth of God and the framework, the foundation of our lives. We can be devoted in such a way that our lives aren't about serving ourselves, but about serving the one who made us and saved us and sustains us. Today we get to the end of the book of Joshua, and we get a chance to see how that theme of devotion is foundational and looking back on God's story so far. Yet we're also going to see how that sense of devotion will be the fuel that keeps the story going into the rest of

historical books and beyond. Now, as we approach God's word together, let's just slow down and ask for His grace, for His love and his truth to move through our time. Heavenly Father, thank you for the gift of life and breath in this new day. Thank you for your word. We bring before you our joys and our sorrows, our anxiety, our excitement, our calendars and our contingencies, every part of our lives that's planned and unplanned. God, we ask you to meet us in this space and this time. Jesus help us abide in you, to remain in you, to be connected to you as we engage with your truth. And Holy Spirit, we ask you to move, powerfully move in and in through this time. In Joshua, as we read these words, let these words read us and restore us.

In Jesus' name, amen. Now let's start by just orienting ourselves to the context of this passage. Joshua's death is imminent. And in the first 13 verses of chapter 24, Joshua has been recounting God's faithfulness toward his people, his promises. He's been revisiting key moments in the history of God's people to show how the Lord is perfect in keeping every single one of his promises that he's made. Now, after this portrait of God's ultimate devotion to his people and his purposes, the focus is now put on God's people. How will they respond to him with their own devotion?

Verse 14 picks up by shining the spotlight on the Israelites. We read this in verse 14. Now, fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness. throw away the gods your ancestors worshipped beyond the Euphrates river and in Egypt and serve the Lord. So this is key right here. Verse 14 is kind of foundational. It sets the tone for this whole passage. God's people are meant to fear him, to live in reverent awe of him, and they're meant to serve him with all faithfulness. That's a key word here in this entire section at the end of Joshua, serve. But see here how this theme of serving God is accompanied by an intentional turning away from

other objects of devotion. There's both serving and throwing away. This is how we're called to respond to God's devotion, God's faithfulness to us. Now, after the people declare their devotion to God, as this passage goes on, Joshua gives a kind of summarizing command in verse 23. It's really significant. I want to just notice it. here. This is what we read in verse 23. Now then, said Joshua, throw away the foreign gods that are among you and yield your hearts to the Lord, the God of Israel. All right, I love this. This is big. Let's camp out here for a second because the language is really powerful. Joshua is saying that if you really want to serve the Lord with all of who you are, with all faithfulness, you have to not only throw out the old

objects of your devotion. You also have to yield your heart to the Lord. I just think about that for a moment. Yield your heart to the Lord. Man, that's such a piercing phrase, isn't it? I mean, here biblically, the heart isn't just talking about our physical organ. It's talking about the seat of our desires, the center of our being, what we long for, what we live for. And it's convicting for me to think about whether I've actually yielded to God in that area of life. Have I actually yielded my heart to God? I wonder what that's like for you. I mean, if I'm just brutally honest with you here in this moment,

God has some of my time, God has some of my talents, some of my treasure, some of my allegiance, but I'm still in an ongoing struggle to yield my heart to him. There is still, I mean, just, so much, I need to surrender to him every single day. So what about you? What's the thing that's hard for you to throw away? The thing that, if you're honest, is keeping you from really serving

the Lord with everything you have, with all faithfulness. As you take a moment to reflect on that here, what would you say you're yielding your heart to? What do you need to surrender to God so that you can actually yield your very heart to him. Because here's the deal. We're all going to yield our hearts to something or someone. We're going to live for and long for something or someone. The question is, who or what will we yield our hearts to? Every day we're faced with his choice, and God is trying to heal our hearts by having us yield them to him. He's inviting us to live out the words of Joshua in verse 15. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord. We will yield our hearts to him. So what does it look like for you to do that today? Now as the book of Joshua comes to a close,

Joshua does die and he's buried, and we get a picture of God's people remaining faithful during the time right after his death. But if you know the story of Israel, you know that it doesn't take long for God's people to waver and their devotion to God. In fact, they don't just waver, they tank. Now, in light of that future failure of God's people, I mean, it's coming. A lot of us have a lingering question here at the end of Joshua. What hope do God's people actually have if we know that their devotion is going to be so fickle in the long run? I mean, this is where I actually really love the ending of the book of Joshua, because we get a kind of unexpected glimpse of the hope that God's people have here at the very end of the book. And that hope comes by way of another burial that takes place after Joshua's burial, except this time.

It's the burial of someone who died long before Joshua. In verse 32, we read how the Israelites bury the bones of Joseph, his bones that were brought up from Egypt. Now, this is going to seem like a really small, maybe even weird event at the end of this book, but I want to invite you to see how this is actually a huge and powerful moment that serves as a meaningful capstone to the book of Joshua, and really even the entire story of the Bible up to this point. Because this isn't the first time that we read about Joseph's bones in the Bible. Just a really quick recap. Joseph is one of the sons of Jacob whose story takes up the ending of the first book of the Bible, Genesis.

So in his life, after some horrific instances of being sinned against by other people, God elevates Joseph to a place of prominence in the land of Egypt to save his people in the lives of many other people during a famine. Joseph's life becomes this kind of signpost of God's purposes persisting in the face of seemingly impossible barriers. So it's significant that the end of Genesis, Joseph says this to his brothers with his dying, words. I am about to die, but God will surely come to your aid and take you up out of this land, to the land he promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And Joseph made the Israelites swear an

oath and said, God will surely come to your aid. And then you must carry my bones up from this place. Now, did you catch that? Joseph says, God's going to come to your aid. He's going to deliver. on his promises. And you can be so confident in his devotion to his purposes that I want you, after I'm dead, I want you to take my bones out of here whenever you head to the promised land. That is how confident you can be in the Creator King. So Joseph's story at the end of Genesis, it's this living testament to God's purposes persisting in the face of seemingly impossible barriers. and as wild as it seems to us, his bones become this ongoing memorial to God's faithfulness, even when it seems like there's no hope.

And there really are times in seasons where it feels like there's no hope, aren't there? Maybe you're in a season like that now. Maybe it's difficult for you to yield your heart to God because you're not sure if he's actually with you. You're not too sure about his faithfulness. And if that's you, you are not alone. Because after Joseph's death, God's people ended up living in generations of institutionalized oppression in Egypt. But in the midst of that, seemingly impossible barrier, God was with them.

God saved them. And so after the Israelites crossed the Red Sea, we read this in Exodus 1319. Moses took the bones of Joseph with him because Joseph had made the Israelites swear an oath. He had said, God will surely come to raise. and then you must carry up my bones with you from this place. Do you see how Joseph's bones are this ongoing memorial to God's faithfulness in the face of impossible circumstances? His bones are almost like a version of those verses

that were written on the two by fours of a house. They're this tangible picture of devotion. Only here they serve as a picture of God's perfect devotion to his people. When Joseph's bones are buried here at the end of Joshua, it's God's way of not just talking about his faithfulness, but showing it. Joseph's bones, they direct us to the ultimate way that God displays his devotion, to his saving grace and the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God who was also buried, but who rose again to defeat sin and death and evil forever. In Jesus, we see the clearest, ultimate evidence that God's faithfulness will persist in the face of seemingly impossible barriers.

The end of Joshua gives us a twofold message when it comes to the idea of devotion. Yes, our devotion to God matters. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. But as we grow in boldly serving God, we also have to bury the bones. we have to remember that it's all about his faithfulness that makes the impossible possible. God, thank you for your relentless love, for your faithfulness that stretches from Genesis to Exodus, to Joshua, to Jesus, and into our lives today. We need you far more than we know, and we are loved by you far more than we know. Thank you for your faithfulness to us and Jesus.

Amen.