Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - What's the Danger of Assuming? | The Life of Joshua | Joshua 22

Episode Date: September 1, 2021

Have you ever had a miscalculation or made the wrong assumption and it led to trouble? Or maybe you had a disagreement with someone and it started to blow up. Where is God in the midst of those situations? In today's episode, Tanya shares how Israel's wrong assumption in https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Joshua%2022&version=NIV (Joshua 22) almost led to a civil war and how Christians should respond in times of miscalculation and disagreement. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so 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 https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO and @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Social Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks (https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks) Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/) Twitter: https://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast (https://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast) Passages https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Joshua%2022&version=NIV (Joshua 22) 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.

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. I'm Tanya Wilmuth. And I'm Patrick Miller. Right now, we're going through the Book of Joshua. Also, if you want to connect with us, follow us on Twitter at TMBT podcast. You can also check out our hashtag, hashtag, Ask TMBT, where you can ask us anything, and we'd love to connect with you. When I was teaching high school, they were a couple of pieces of lit that could captivate even the most reluctant.

language arts students. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and Mopison's short story of the necklace, both had surprising and tragic endings because of a simple wrong assumption or miscommunication. You probably know the story of Romeo and Juliet, that basically Romeo, who is passionately in love with Juliet, hears from one of her servants that Juliet is dead, and so in his grief he goes out and buys poison and drinks it and dies. But Juliet isn't dead. Rather, she's in a drug-induced coma, and when she wakes up, she finds Romeo dead with a poison bottle in his hand, and she's so distraught that she stabs herself with a dagger. My students who'd been struggling with the language and the iambic pentameter all the way through had fallen in love with the characters by this point, and they were

just incredulous that they could make such a dramatic air at the end of their story. The other one's a short story called The Necklace by Guy de Mopisant. And in this story, there's a character named Madame Lucille, who's a... is really unhappy about her station in life. So she borrows a really fancy necklace from a really fancy friend to go to a fancy ball, but she loses it. And instead of telling her friend what happened, she and her husband go to a shop to try to replace the necklace and find that it costs nearly $200,000. They buy it anyway and give it back to the friend without saying a word. And at the end of the story after basically scrubbing floors and living like peasants, they find out from the

wealthy friend that the original necklace was a fake, full of fake diamonds and worth only a few dollars. And then the story ends. Anyway, I think we love these stories because we see ourselves in them, but we think we're much too good or too wise to make these same kinds of mistakes, these miscalculations based on wrong assumptions. But is that really the case? Are we really so wise and so patient, so transparent, so honest, so right, that will never be fooled by wrong assumptions? Did you know they were people in the Bible, godly people, that made wrong assumptions too? You remember the 12 tribes that crossed the Jordan to gain the territory of the promised land,

and two and a half of those tribes were there as a support system? Those two and a half tribes had sent their fighting men to help conquer the new territory, but their families and their livestock had stayed behind on the other side of the Jordan because that's where they were going to live and farm for the rest of their days. So now, in Joshua chapter 22, we pick up when the fighting is pretty much done and it's time for those two and a half tribes to go back home. The passage tells us that God had granted rest to the Israelites. And so having done what they did.

set out to accomplish these two and a half tribes, Rubinites, Gaddites, and Manasseh, head for home. And maybe they were having thoughts that sounded kind of like this. Wow, that was amazing to be part of God's battle. That was pretty amazing to see all that God did and provided for us. We can't wait to go back and tell our families how faithful the Lord is, how good he's been to us. So they head back. But before they crossed the Jordan, they stopped to build a ginormous altar. Verse 10 describes it as an altar of imposing size. But right after that, in verse 12, we read this. When the people of Israel heard of it, meaning the altar, the whole assembly of the people of Israel gathered at Shiloh to make war against them.

We've gone from mutual help in battle to a proposed civil war, and over what? all we know as readers is something about an imposing altar. But those other 10 tribes, they got serious. They wanted to protect the name and the holiness of their living God. So they sent their chiefs and the heads of their families down to meet the altar builders and find out what they were doing. But they accused them of all out rebellion against the Lord. And they compared them with Aiken, who stole goods from Jericho,

and cause defeat at AI for the whole nation. It's not until after some of these pretty egregious accusations that the two and a half tribes have a chance to speak on their own behalf. And when they do, what they say is different than what their accusers thought. They tell them that they built the altar out of adoration for the Lord and fear of the Lord. Also, fear that their children would see that Jordan as a dividing line between God's promise and themselves and not know the whole story,

not know how they work together to claim the territory because they believed and obeyed God. They say they built the altar to be a witness to their children of the Lord and his ability to unite people for his common purpose and to bring his plans into fulfillment. So when the accusers heard this, it wasn't what they thought. and it says that then they bless God, and then they spoke no more of making war against them to destroy the land where they were settled.

But that was close. So what do we learn from God's word in all this? Well, first, when we hear about something that causes us to feel disturbed or maybe even angry, let's press the pause button, no matter how imposing that idea or that, that opinion might sound, chances are we share some common ground. Another way you can say this same thing is to assume the best about the people that disagree with us and our ideas. It means that even when someone ruffles our feathers, find the ideas and the interest we share in common. If the Israelites would have stopped to do this, they would have remembered that the other tribes loved God too.

The second thing we can learn is that we need to be people that listen with our tails between our legs. You know the posture. So I have a golden retriever Max, and he loves to eat socks. So if I tell him no, but his ears are up and he is panting, I know that he's just thinking about what he's going to do when I turn my back. But if his tails between his legs and his ears are down, I know he's truly humbled, and he's actually listening to my voice. Listening with our tail between our legs means we aren't thinking about what we're going to say next

because really we aren't going to say anything at all. We're going to listen and then we're going to think about what we heard. There's nothing more frustrating than having someone say, I'm just here to listen and then walk away having listened to that person talk the whole time. I wonder if the 10 tribes would have asked and listened to the, the Gadites and the Rubinites and the half tribe of Manassah first, if they could have avoided some of the harmful allegations and accusations that probably severed a lot of relationships. And finally, in all situations, we can look for God. When we look at today's passage, Joshua

22, we see God giving obedient people rest. We see God taking care of basic needs. We see that the people themselves knew and found that God was in their midst and that they did share something in common. We see God allowing them to listen and hear each other and reconcile their differences. What is God doing in your heart situations or disagreements? What is he doing in that person's life that isn't making the same choices as you? What is he doing in you as you struggle with it? and what might he want to do in you? I hope you and I can all come together and find the Bible to be just as fascinating

as those reluctant ninth graders found Romeo and Juliet. I hope as we study the Bible together, you and I are finding common ground in falling more in love with and becoming more like Jesus. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps others find this podcast more easily.

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