The Story of God: Joshua

Listen along as we look at the story of God unfold in the book of Joshua.

Notes/Quotes:

 

Joshua 1:1-11

“One of the problems is that we so often read this story, or horrible little bits of it, in isolation, and then try to find some meaning, justification, or excuse for it. But what we really must do is what we should do with every part of the Bible, namely, to put it in the wider framework of our whole Bible. We must get into the habit of doing that when we read any Bible text, and never more so than here.” - Chris Wright

“Israel is not the bully or dictator invoking the gods to justify her conquest of the weak. Israel is the opposite: the weakling who’s been getting her lunch money taken every day by the playground bullies. She is the little nation whose vessel’s been under constant attack by pirates while lost at sea. She is the dissenter among the nations getting railed on by the dictators. Canaan is not just a little bit stronger, not just overwhelmingly stronger—they are in a different league altogether. Their firepower puts them in a whole other category. Israel should get routed. Her only hope is that God goes with her” - Joshua Ryan Butler

Joshua 11:18-19

“In a few places the phrase “all men and women, young and old shows up, but in English this phrase is misleading. Hebrew scholars note this was a stock phrase used to imply totality, and to Hebrew ears the use of this phrase does not require that women and children were actually present in the militarized outposts, only that the forts were totally depopulated in the aftermath of victory…God is pulling down the Great Wall of China, not demolishing Beijing. Israel is taking out the Pentagon, not New York City.” - Joshua Ryan Butler

“Israel did not arise to protect faith in Yahweh, but Yahweh came on the scene to defend Israel.” Gerhard Von Rad

The twentieth century gave rise to one of the greatest and most distressing paradoxes of human history: that the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practiced by those who believed that religion caused intolerance and violence.”
Alister McGrath

We live now in the wake of the most monstrously violent century in human history, during which the secular order (on both the political right and the political left), freed from the authority of religion, showed itself willing to kill on an unprecedented scale and with an ease of conscience worse than merely depraved. If ever an age deserved to be thought an age of darkness, it is surely ours.” - David Bentley Hart

Hebrews 11:30-31

Joshua 24:14-15