03/02/2022 – Day 003 – Joshua – Chapters 1 -5 / Introduction to Joshua (link attached) / Concluding with: “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheiest!”, once again.
I can’t recall linking an entire introduction to a book of the Bible from my CSB Holman – The Apologetics Study Bible before. But this one is excellent.
https://www.biblestudytools.com/commentaries/csb-apologetics/joshua-intro.html
I’ll be back with commentary from our reading. God willing before the day is out. Blessings!
03/03/2022: I’m late! ; let’s get started!
We will see numerous times this coming year where the passage from our Old Testament reading in the week connects with our New Testament reading for the very same week. And so it is this first week: In our first day, from the “Genealogy of Jesus Christ”, Matthew 1:5 begins: “Salmon fathered Boaz by Rahab”. And here is Joshua, we learn of the “Promise to Rahab”, the Canaanite”. At the risk of her life, she hides the two Jewish spies who are scouting out the land. My bible has multiple footnotes on this section, including a note that Rahab was both a harlot and an innkeeper, adding that the two spies only were customers on the later. The 2: 8-14 footnote captures the big picture: “The main point of the passage is Rahab’s confession of faith in the Lord. She acknowledged (1) His divine providence in Israel’s possession of Canaan, (2) His presence in Israel’s exodus and migration through the wilderness, and (3) the Lord’s sovereignty over the universe. So, this Rahab was probably David’s great-great-grandmother.
I would like to highly encourage y’all to read the introduction link above to this book fo Joshua. Why? Certainly, all scripture is “God-breathed”, but to this day we have christians who speak of the Old Testament and the New Testament as if they were completely separate and not connected. In the lengthy list of herecies of the past two thousand or so years, there was a dualism conjured up early on that there were actually two gods: one the angry creator god of the Old Testament and the “nice” god of the New Testament. So, just touching upon this briefly: How could an all-loving God command his people to kill all the inhabitants of a newly conquered territory in the promised land?
First, this article points out that such incidents were rare. Second, there was a reason that the Israelites were commanded early on not to inter-marry. In reading archaelogical finds years ago, I ran across an account that there was evidence that the Cannanites had a practice of sacrificing their children and putting their corpses in the walls of their home in order to appease the gods. Today, in America, we kill our children and sell their body parts, funded by “we the people”. How is it that we can even call ourselves civilized? I submit: “we are not!”. So, one God, the Alpha and Omega! And if we remove the angry jeolous God, we also lose the unfathomable loving, fully sovereign God of justice. To conjure up a god from our favorite attributes, is idol worship of a false god. We are either all in, or all out.
I also wanted to touch upon this pervading disbelief in documented miracles in the Bible. In that vein I want to share my footnote on 4:9 , in the section of “The Memorial Stones”:
“The stones are there to this day” is the first instance of aetiology, or the explanation of origins, in the book of Joshua, Etiologies often contain the phrase “to this day”, referring to the time when the biblical write was composing or compiling the narrative. Many critical scholars reject the authenticity of these etiologies, assuming that later editors inserted them. Recent scholarship, however has shown that these etiologices should be taken seriously as preserving authentic reasons for the existence of particular situations, customs, place-names, settlement arrangements and the like. The etiological use of the phrase “to this day” is found elsewhere in the book of Joshua at 5:9; 6:25; 7:26 (twice); 8:28-29; 9:27; 10:27; 13:13; 14:14; 15:63; 16:10. The stones were set up at Gilgal (v. 20), a name drived from the Hewbrew word for “roll”; the name may reflect the method by which the large memorial stones taken from the Jordan were put in place.” (*A)
(*A) Holman CSB ‘The Apologetics Study Bible’
And from my “Pocket Handbook of Christian Apologetics” by Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacell, I would like to share this fascinating connectivity between His absolute truth and logical presentation of that Truth:
“Also, it is very difficult to prove the authority of Scripture first to the unbeliever. It is much easier to prove something like the existence of God (chapter three), or even the the divinity of Christ (chapter eight), where arguments can be simple, short and clear in a way that the arguments for the authority of Scripture can never be. Tradional apologetics, Protestant as well as Catholic, has more often used the opposite order, coming to the authority of Scripture later. Instead of
- Scripture is infallible;
- therefore Christ is infallible;
- therefore Christ is divine
the more convincing order is
- Scripture is reliable as historical record, as data;
- Christ’s claims to divinity are found in Scripture;
- then comes the argument for the truth of these claims (chapter eight).
You don’t need to prove scriptural infallibility first to confront someone with the claims of Christ.”
And I am sorry, you are going to have to buy the book in order to read chapter eight. But once fully presented, I cannot see any other logical conclusion other than: “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.” And call me Christian Calvinist if you like, but, I don’t believe my saving faith came from me, but that it too was God’s grace! (A gift!) Now, my mission as a messenger, by the great commission, is to spread the good Word to lost souls.
Soli Deo Gloria!
Love,
Your brother in Christ by His grace! ,
Jimmy