Chapter 10 of Joshua concludes with a summary of God’s victory through His people over the southern kings of the promised land. The key verse is verse 42, which reveals they won because God was fighting for them.
So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb and the lowland and the slopes and all their kings; he left no one remaining but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel had commanded.
And Joshua defeated them from Kadesh-barnea to Gaza and all the country of Goshen, as far as Gibeon.
Joshua took all these kings and their land at one time because the Lord God of Israel fought for Israel (Joshua 10:40-42).
In our study of the first five books of Moses and Joshua, I’ve often pointed out that victory comes when we surrender to God’s will and follow His plan in our battles.
Today, let’s consider a battle that seemed lost but was actually the greatest victory of all. I’m talking about Jesus on the cross.
There, the perfect Son of God, fully aligned with the Father’s will, didn’t appear to win. But in truth, He did.
On the cross, Satan’s schemes were defeated, and we were freed from the bondage of sin.
To truly measure God’s victories, we must first understand His purposes. Here is how I recently applied this truth to my life.
During a morning prayer time, I was studying a Bible passage from Matthew 8. In this story, Jesus and his disciples are in a boat crossing the sea.
Suddenly, a storm arises, but Jesus seems uninterested. In Mark’s Gospel, it says he was asleep. The disciples felt they were about to perish as the boat was being swamped by waves.
As I meditated on this passage, I imagined myself in the boat with them. My instinct is always to fix things—grab an oar, help row, or bail water.
But Jesus didn’t think victory would be avoiding a storm or rowing to safety. He allowed the disciples to experience a frightening storm to show them he had control over the wind and waves. He simply stood up and told the elements to be still, and everything calmed down.
Since this prayer time, I’ve had several moments where I wanted to jump in and solve things. I felt I could win the battle for whatever situation was happening.
Instead, I paused and said, “Lord, you’re present in what is happening. Please come and fix what needs fixing, however you see fit.”
He knows best how to win our battles. Sometimes they look like a victory at war, and other times they are a victory through a cross.
Hardening of Hearts
Chapter 11 continues with more battles. At the end of this chapter, there’s an interesting phrase worth looking at. It says that God hardened the hearts of Israel’s enemies.
For it was the Lord’s doing to harden their hearts so that they would come against Israel in battle, in order that they might be utterly destroyed and might receive no mercy but be exterminated, just as the Lord had commanded Moses (Joshua 11:20).
How can we understand God hardening the hearts of humans?
In our YouTube presentations on Joshua, Rudy Ross explains that the inhabitants of the promised land had resisted God for at least 600 years. It may not be that God hardened their hearts, but rather that God gave them what they wanted. That’s one idea about the hardening of hearts.
Another way to see the hardening of the heart is that our thoughts turn into actions. When we repeatedly think and act in certain ways, these habits shape our character.
As Rudy mentioned, people who lived a certain way for 600 years developed a specific character. They didn’t need much hardening from God to resist His will because it was already ingrained in their hearts.
Another way of looking at the hardening of the heart is that God strengthened the hearts of those who resisted him. They were already inclined to resist God, and he used that to accomplish his purposes in history.
However, we understand the hardening of the human heart by God; we know this about him. There is no one in the universe who is as loving, holy, and just as God. Whatever we get from the hand of God comes from this kind of character and nature.
YouTube Discussion
Rudy Ross, Bruce Kirby, and I discussed this passage on YouTube today.
Real Voices 