Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Do You Trust God? | Historical Books | Joshua 3

Episode Date: January 6, 2025

Do you trust God? Do you treat God like a lucky rabbit's foot? How have you seen God provide in your past? In today's episode, Keith shares how Joshua 3 encourage us to put our trust in God, who always provides what we need. 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 3

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 Keith Simon. Trust is hard to come by these days. According to every survey, trust in almost every institution has been dropping for the past few decades. Ask yourself whether you trust the media more or less than your parents did. Unless you're an outlier, I promise you the answer is less. Heck, you probably trust the media less than you did 10 years ago.

But it's not just the media that people trust. less. It's corporate America. It's the government, the medical establishment, the military, even the church. We live in a cynical age, and there's lots of reasons for this. The one that people point to most often is the internet. We now know every failure made by every leader. That's a new development. Most Americans didn't know that FDR was in a wheelchair from polio, or that JFK and many other presidents had extramarital affairs. We know every foible of every leader. We know every foible of every almost instantly. But we've also lost trust because leaders have been untrustworthy. Leaders have lied to us or used their position to enrich themselves or otherwise acted irresponsibly.

So why am I bringing this up on TMBT? Because I think that the most important thing you have to do in your life is trust God. And I'm concerned that declining trust in institutions might lead to declining trust in God. And when we don't trust God, we are inevitably drawn into sinful decisions and habits that lead us far from God. When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and refused to trust God's word, they chose to sinfully trust themselves. And when you don't trust God, you are tempted in similar ways. Like, if you don't trust God with your cancer, you're going to be tempted to give him to anger. Or if you don't trust God with your money, you're tempted to lie to gain more money. When you don't trust God with your reputation, you're tempted to boast about your own accomplishments

and achievements. When you don't trust God with your time, you're tempted to be impatient. When you don't trust God with your kids, you're tempted to control them. When you don't trust God with your future, you're tempted to worry. See, trusting God is everything. Well, we're in luck because Joshua 3 is about this topic. It's about trusting God. Now, let me briefly reset the scene.

God had promised Abraham and his descendants that he would give them the promised land. Under Moses's leadership, the Israelites left slavery in Egypt, but refused to enter the promised land because they refused to trust God to defeat their enemies who live there. Now, after 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, they are back where they started. Moses has died and his successor is Joshua. The leader may have changed, but the people are faced with the same question. will they trust God and go into the land he'd promised them? We pick up the story in Joshua chapter 3.

The Israelites are preparing to cross the Jordan River and the leaders are going through the camp saying, when you see the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord your God and the Levitical priests carrying it, you are to move out from your positions and follow it. Verse 4 continues, then you will know which way to go since you have never been this way before. But keep a distance of about 2,000 cubits. That's about 3,000 feet. So he tells them keep a distance of about 3,000 feet between you and the ark. Do not go near it.

So it seems like God is telling them to keep their distance from the ark for a couple of reasons. First, he wants them to be able to see the miracle of the Jordan being dried up so that they can cross. If they stay back, they're going to have a better view of the miracle, better view of what God does. But secondly, the ark represents the presence of God. God is holy, and it's important that the people not treat him casually or flippantly. Sinful people must be careful approaching a holy God. Verse 5. Joshua told the people, consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do amazing things among you. So it's not only distance, but it's their attitude that mattered.

The people need to prepare themselves for seeing God at work. Now just pause for a moment. How do we treat God? It's true that he's our friend, but he's also the holy judge. We must be careful that we don't treat him as a lucky rabbit's foot or good luck charm. So what would it look like for us to consecrate ourselves to prepare for church on Sunday? Maybe that means something as practical as getting a good night's sleep on Saturday night so that you'll be ready to worship on Sunday morning.

Or maybe it means praying on the way to church, asking God. God to open the eyes of your heart so that you can see him. We want to approach God with a sense of humility and deep reliance on His grace. Now, the next paragraph in Joshua 3 is really important. It has a lot to teach us. So we'll pick up in verse 9. Joshua said to the Israelites, Come here and listen to the words of the Lord your God. This is how you will know that the living God is among you and he will certainly drive out before you all your enemies. the ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth will go into the Jordan ahead of you. Now then choose 12 men from the tribes of Israel, one from each tribe.

And as soon as the priests who carry the ark of the Lord, the Lord of all the earth, as soon as they set foot in the Jordan, its waters flowing downstream will be cut off and stand up in a heap. All right. So let me translate to make sure we know what's happening. Our faith in God is fueled by focusing on how God provides. in the past. The way it plays out in Israel's life is that God knows that they are going to face enemies in the land. So God is going to part the Jordan. He's going to dry it up for them so that they can cross in order to produce in them faith. So they'll trust God with their future enemies. You see, he wants them to see that if he can deliver them through the Jordan, he can deliver us from any

challenge we face. Here's the way it once played out in my life. My wife and I both became Christians in college, and then we got married right after we graduated, and we raised all of our own financial support to go on staff with the same campus ministry that had such a huge impact in our life. So we saw God do the equivalent of feeding the 5,000 from a few loaves of bread and fish. See, we didn't really have people that could support us financially when we graduated with college and went on staff with this campus organization, we hadn't grown up in church. But despite all the obstacles, God raised the finances that we needed. And then five years later, when we decided to go to seminary with two little kids, God raised the money that we needed to do that. So when the

opportunity came to start the church we're at now, we didn't have any money. We didn't have a core group to start the church with. But since we'd seen God provide in the past, since we'd seen him raise the money we needed to go on staff with the campus ministry. Since we'd seen him provide for us as we were in seminary with a young family, we were able to trust God with the finances of starting the church. God's past provision fueled future faith. How have you seen God work in your life? And how should that fuel your faith so that you can trust him in the future? Before we finish, can we just tackle one more question. Does God promise depart the Jordan for everybody who trusts in him?

No. God doesn't promise he will cure us or fix the mess we're in. We shouldn't say, because he did this for Israel, he will do this for us. Now, when we read a story like this in Joshua 3, the first thing we should focus on is God's character. What is this story teaching us about God? So we allow the story to teach us about God before we draw parallels to our lives. Now, we can always learn a great deal from these stories, but never assume that God expects you to do the exact same thing the people in the Bible did, or that he promises that the same things will happen to you that happen to them.

We don't have to convince ourselves that God will part the waters of our Jordan River by some divine intervention. That may or may not be his plan for us. What then does the story have to say to us? Well, a lot. It teaches us that this is our God. Our God is the God who reigns over heaven and earth, over time and eternity. Our God is the God who works all things according to the purpose of His will. And that all things includes every circumstance of our life.

Romans 828 says, And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. But sometimes we fail to read the very next verse to see what his purpose really is. We tend to assume that God's purpose must be to meet our desires to do what we want him to do. But the next verse shows us that it's something far richer, something far deeper than that that God wants for us. It says in Romans 829, for those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son. See, his purpose is to make us more and more like Jesus. That is how we are to face the crises and the adversities in our life.

to see them as the part of the transformation process that God knows that we need to go through to become increasingly dependent on him so that we will produce the fruit of his life in us. See, Joshua 3 tells us that we can trust God to do the right thing. Sometimes that might mean parting the Jordan River, but every time it means using the circumstances in our life to make us more like Jesus.