Let's go to the Scriptures and the Scriptures that have been assigned to us for today is the entire 8th chapter of Joshua and it's a long chapter. And I'm going to spare you the reading of the first part of it because I will sort of summarize it in the narrative and it's the story of the conquest of the town of AI. But following that conquest something happens, it's very important in the life of Israel and it's the last half dozen verses of the chapter. And let me read that for you it's in chapter 8 beginning in verse 30. At that time Joshua built an altar to the Lord the God of Israel on Mount Ebal, just as Moses, the servant of the Lord had commanded the people of Israel as it is written in the book of the law of Moses and altar of uncut stones upon which no man had wielded an iron tool. And they offered on it burnt offerings to the Lord and sacrificed peace offerings. And there in the presence of the people of Israel he wrote on the stones a copy of the law of Moses which he had written. And all Israel sojourner as well as native born with their elders and officers and their judges stood on opposite sides of the ark before the Levitical priest who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord. Half of them in front of Mount Gerasim and half of them in front of Mount Ebal just as Moses the servant of the Lord had commanded at the first to bless the people of Israel. And afterward he read all the words of the law the blessing and the curse according to all that is written in the book of the law. There was not a word of all that Moses commanded that Joshua did not read before all the assembly of Israel and the women and the little ones and the sojourners who lived among them. The word of the Lord you may be seated. Here's the wonderful thing about the story we just read. This is the account of God's people gathering just not more than 15 miles or 20 miles beyond their latest victory at a place that the Lord Himself had designated. Two great mountains came together and later there came to be a mighty city in that area called Sheckham and not too many centuries later our Lord who would go through that area which had become Samaria by the time of our Lord would stop at a weld and have a conversation with a Samaritan woman. Yes and she would point to one of those mountains and say is this the mountain where we are to worship the Lord or are we to worship the Lord as you Jews say down in Jerusalem. And Jesus would say to her there comes a time when we will not worship in this mountain Ebal and Girozim whichever one she was pointing to or in Jerusalem. But the Lord seeks those to worship him who will worship him in spirit and in truth. Joshua had gathered the people together at a great place to do something quite unusual Moses had told them and it's recorded back in Deuteronomy chapter 27. Moses had told them that when you get to this place I want you to build a great altar of stones that have been uncut unhewn by iron tool. In other words I want you to use natural stones. I mean altar building is an interesting thing when you study it in the scriptures. How that Adam and Noah and Abraham and others of the great patriarchal period built altars to the Lord and they are commanded to build an altar with uncut stone. You see the building of the altar with the uncut stone is a symbol of order and of precision because they had to match the stones and make them in such a way that they would form a great altar contrast that with the pile of stones that you saw them throw upon acen in our lesson last week which symbolized the trouble and the sinfulness and the disorder and the chaos and the repulsion that was to be there. Instead they were built this wonderful altar to the Lord and it doesn't say so here but if you study it in Deuteronomy, they are to plaster over the stones of the altar with plaster and then they are to engrave in their the law of the Lord significant verses and phrases and statements from the law. And that's what they do. It's an incredible ceremony. It's an establishment of the written word of God in the land of Canaan. But these people had said before they ever crossed the Jordan that they were going to obey the Lord. Remember that? And they promised obedience and fidelity to the covenant but they broke covenant and we looked last week at the story of acen in his sin and how he brought all Israel under the curse. So now Joshua has the people lined up in fact in the Deuteronomic passage, it's spelled out which tribes were to be on which mountain and six tribes on one side and six on the other and the Levites attending in the middle and they are to hear the words of the Lord and they are in an antiphany back and forth. They would read out the blessings in the curses, the heart of the law of God. Great ceremonial significance. This is covenant renewal. This is a people of God who have failed him, who have sinned against him, who have backslidden, who have moved away in apostatized, coming back to the Lord and they're coming back to the same place spiritually that they walked away. They're coming back to the place where they are swearing their allegiance to the Lord and are willing to open their ears and to hear the word of the Lord. It's interesting here that it shows that the sojourner as well as the native born and the women and the children and everyone formed this great congregation to hear the words of the Lord. We'll see this enacted centuries later when Ezra, after the restoration, after God's people had sinned and been taken off into Babylon and they come back into the land, Ezra sets up a great ceremony similar to this and he does precisely the same thing. He stands upon a pulpit of wood and reads the word of God to the people. God waits for welcomes even impels and draws his people back to himself when they stray. I know Tinsley who will be preaching in the next two hours has a beautiful and wonderful title here but doesn't fit what I want to say. I want to call this particular little homily this morning a do-over. God grants us a second chance. He is the God of do it again. Do it my way. Get it right and it'll work and I will bless you. And that's precisely what Israel did on this occasion. They had gone up to AI to fight and it set spies up there and Joshua had his own idea of how to wage war and you know it resulted in an embarrassingly humiliating battle. And they lost and they lost all lives and they came back completely demoralized in their strength. The Lord said, I was not with you but he tells Joshua to go again and this time he says I will be with you. Remember the people had corporately confessed their sins through the miserable and difficult and absolutely unspeakable act of picking up the stones and stoning aching and purging from the camp that sin. They had confessed their sin and rejected their sin and they had walked away from their sin and they had taken the same view of their sin that the Lord takes and they had abandoned it. And there had been bloodshed in the camp and there had been a purging. There had been an atonement made for sin. And the life of Akin willingly confessed knew that God's punishment must be needed out. So now the people have a clean slate. They've got a clean sheet of paper. They're now restored before their God. Confession of their sin has brought them near and they are now in a place to do it all over again. They're not going to proceed from here. They're going to go back to the very place where they had been before and had failed so miserably. They're going to go right back to that same city, the city of AI and they're going to wage war. But this time they're going to listen to the Lord. This time the commander of the armies of the Lord, remember he had appeared to Joshua some time earlier before they crossed and before they went up to Jericho and he now is pronouncing the strategy that will be used in this battle. And here it is. It's pretty simple. Joshua's told to take the whole army of Israel. Remember the before they had just taken a contingency of just a few thousand. He's told to take the whole army of Israel. And he's to move up toward AI. But he is to dispatch a smaller group. And that smaller group is to go around and to leave the main valley path, the wadi that they would follow up to AI and take a a circumlocucious route in which they would take an extra day of travel time to get to where they needed to be and to locate themselves on the west side of AI. Now if you'll remember your geography, they're coming in from the east, they cross over the Jordan River, they go up to Jericho and now they're going to AI. So when they are camped at Gilgal, they are told to send them and they send them all the way around and they camp on the west side of AI. And then hide in an ambush. And then Joshua takes the larger group and marches up the same path that the original group had gone and moves toward them. And it's an interesting, it's kind of difficult to sort of work your way through it but it ends up being a two day operation. Joshua spends two nights in the valley with the people. And then it comes time for the battle and this is how the battle proceeds. Joshua comes up to AI just like the group had done before but with a much larger group. And so the centuries of AI look out and they see here comes Israel again but this time they've got a larger group. This time they look more formidable. This time they're a little more threatening but you know what? We routed them so easily the first time that I think if we just go out there and try one more time we'll route them just as easily. And so the men of AI with quite a bit of confidence, in fact they had made league with the city of Bethel and the city of Bethel sent the contingencies. So now they have a two armies that are able to, an army that's able to assist them. And the men of AI have every confidence in the world that all they have to do is to do the same thing they did the first time and come out of the gates of the city of AI and pursue Israel and Israel will turn and run and flee like they did earlier. And that's precisely what happened. The men of AI charge the men of Israel, the men of Israel stand for a moment and then having been instructed to do so by Joshua they fake, fear and turn and run. And as they run following the same path going down toward the steeps that they had gone before, the men of AI pursue them. And when they see that this is really going to be a route they call all the warriors out of AI and tell everybody to come and enjoy this. We're going to defeat this, this people of Israel once and for all. And so there's a bandwagon effect. Everybody gets on the bandwagon and they all go out and pursue meanwhile Joshua is still fleeing and running and getting away and more and more joined and they come out in their confront Joshua. And Joshua makes it to a high place and he raises the sword, the javelin of the Lord. And when he raises the sword it signals the man who had been capped over on the west to then go into the unguarded city of AI and absolutely take it down. And he holds all day during the battle the sword of the Lord high sword of the Lord by the way in scripture is a symbol of the word of God. You see everything's based on the word of God. Joshua was saying this battle belongs to the Lord. This is not me wielding the sword. This is the sword of the Lord and as he holds the sword high the battle pursues and the men go in and take the city of AI. And then Joshua gives command and the men that are under his command turn and move toward the men of AI. And a great noise is raised and the men of AI look back and they see the flames and the smoke of their city coming up and they know they've been had. There's nothing they can do. There's no fortified city to run back to and there's no place now they're outnumbered and out manned completely on the field of battle. By the way I left there's a lot of details in here I have to leave out. One of them I left out was that the king of AI determined where he wanted to fight the battle. He had a appointed place out there we'll chase them into this little area right here and that's where we'll get them. They didn't have any ground and not only that the men the Israelites soldiers that had been in AI then with the city burning behind them were able to come and block the retreat of the men of AI. And there was a great great slaughter so Joshua came upon them suddenly at Gilgal and they were completely all I mean it came upon them suddenly from Gilgal and they had all everything about it was a disaster for AI. One of those marvelous victories for Israel God did exactly what he said he said I will give them into your hands and that's what he did. This time they did it God's way this time this time they have the victory. Let me read a little bit of the text here it's kind of interesting Israel struck them down until there was none left that survived or escaped but the king of AI they took alive and brought him to Joshua. When Israel had finished killing all the inhabitants of AI in the open wilderness where they pursued them and all of them to the very last had fallen by the edge of the sword all Israel returned to AI and struck it down with the edge of the sword. And all who fell that day both men and women were 12,000 all the people of AI but Joshua did not draw back his hand with which he stretched out the javelin until he had devoted all the inhabitants of AI to destruction. All the inhabitants of AI being part of the Amorites that we spoke of earlier they received the exact same judgment of God that that Jericho had received but notice this there's a difference. Only the livestock and the spoil of that city Israel took as their plunder according to the word of the Lord which he had commanded Joshua. Remember they were told not to take any spoil from Jericho but now God has given them the spoil and God's going to give them the spoil of the rest of the conquest. You see it's the first fruits that belong to the Lord. We don't have to steal from the Lord as they can do it because there's going to be an abundant blessing to follow. God is going to bless and they're going to be able to take the spoil of all of the cities and all of the land that they conquer from now on. God has given it into their hands. I believe we can live on the 90% that's left after God has taken his 10. That's the principle of scripture. There's an interesting thing that happened here and I want to close with this. Remember in the text there it said that they took the king of AI alive. Listen to this portion of the scripture. So Joshua burned AI and made it forever a heap of ruins as it by the way the word AI means ruin. So he made it a heap of ruins to this day and he hanged the king of AI on a tree until evening. And at sunset Joshua commanded and they took his body down from the tree and threw it at the entrance of the gate and raised over at a great heap of stones. There's another one of those piles of rock that they're heaping up as they go along. He raised over at a great heap of stones which stands there to this day. There are a lot of pictures in scripture. The scriptures in our evangelical and our reform tradition, we love to get in and parse out Greek words and do all the studies of the Hebrew and all of that. We do quite a bit of technical study. But the truth is that if you back up and look at scripture you'll see it's a book filled with word pictures. It's not enough to know just the tense of the verb and the number and so forth of the nouns. You've got to see the picture. And there's a picture all through the Bible. One of the pictures I mentioned earlier was the picture of a woman at a well. You remember Rebecca? You remember Hagar? Over and over in the Old Testament there's a picture of a woman at a well. But one of the pictures in the Bible that's so vivid that preach is incredible gospel is the picture of a king hanging on a tree. You see it in the Old Testament in several places and it's put there by a stipulation in the book of the law that in Deuteronomy 21 that talks about a curse, a special curse falls upon one who hangs on a tree. Now all of the curses in the Old Testament are for disobedience. You're cursed if you do that. In fact, if you go back and read the covenant that was actually read at Mount Ebal and Gerazine, the way Moses spells it out is they read all these curses. You'll see that the curses are for our acts of disobedience and abominations and all of that. And the blessings are for obedience. But the Bible puts a curse upon a person hanging on a tree rather by fiat. It doesn't matter what you did to hang on the tree. Just by virtue of hanging on a tree, you fall under a curse. Did you hear that? Just by virtue of being hung upon a tree, you fall under the curse of God. This picture of a king hanging on a tree. We see in the story in the Old Testament of Absalom. Absalom was David's favorite son. Absalom was David's most capable son. Absalom was David's most beloved son. And Absalom was the most popular son of David in the whole realm. But yet Absalom disobeyed and rebelled against his father and tried to overthrow David. You remember that story? He tried to overthrow King David. He was very successful, got all the way to Jerusalem. He even got a lot of David's inner circle to join his conspiracy. But eventually in battle, David did not want to fight Absalom. He had to be persuaded and everything finally David agreed to go to war against Absalom. And when he did, Absalom was killed in battle. And the way he was killed in battle is his mule. All of David's sons rode on white mules and his mule ran under a tree and his great head of hair caught in the branches of the tree and he hung there on the tree alive until someone came and ran him through. And the person that did it got in a lot of trouble with David and David lamented, Absalom my son, Absalom my son. Here was the disobedient rebellious, incorrigible son hanging on a tree. Maybe about now you're thinking of Christ. When Pilate, the Roman authority on the scene that day, gave them permission to crucify Jesus and commissioned it to be done. He told him to write something and put it up on the cross over the indictment, the letter and he wrote Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. And that offended the Jews, the authorities, the Sanhedrin, the council who had called for Jesus' death and said crucify him, crucify him, that infuriated them and they went to Pilate and said, take down that sign. He's not the King of the Jews. He said, put up instead a sign that says, he said he was the King of the Jews. You remember Pilate's reply? What I have written, I have written. Pilate had to run up to here with those guys and he wasn't going to amend anything. He was also standing for what was absolutely right because Jesus, in fact, is the King of the Jews. And here he is hanging on a cross under the curse. Now the curses in the Bible only fall upon those who have been disobedient but Jesus was not disobedient. He was the perfect son. The Father had said, this is my beloved son and whom I am well pleased. He had not broken one single law. He looked at the people and said, which of you accused me of sin? Jesus was sinless in his life. He had not broken a single law of the Lord. He had lived his life completely and wholeheartedly, loving the Lord with all of his heart, mind, soul, strength. And yet he fell under the curse of the law because the law had a stipulation in it that was separated from obedience and disobedience. It was just a fiat stipulation. Curst is everyone that hangs on a tree. So there Jesus was able to be cursed by God according to the law without ever actually having done anything to deserve that curse. That marvelous. The innocent perfect son. David had another son who came to be king, man by the name of Solomon, whose very word means peace. Solomon was indeed the prince of peace. Solomon, Solomon was the heir and the obedient son. And Jesus during his life long ministry said, a greater than Solomon is here. You see, Jesus hanging on that cross was able to bear all the curse of the law on our behalf without actually having sinned himself so that God could be as Paul says, both just and the justifier of those that believe. God's got it all figured out. The plan of salvation is absolutely marvelous the way God lays it out. And it's really not strange to see that just like Jesus, just like Jesus, this old wicked king was taken down off that display and was thrown into a tomb and stones were put upon him. That's the way they treated Christ. They took him down off that cross and a stone with Roman authority with a seal stamped on it was put there. God wants those stones laid just right. There are some stones that are heaped up. There are some stones that are stacked and fitted together with beautiful masonry style. And there are some stones that are just rolled away.