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[0:00] In Joshua chapter 9, starting at verse 1, says that it came to pass when all the kings which were on this side, Jordan, in the hills and in the valleys and in all the coasts of the great sea over against Lebanon, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Parasite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite heard thereof that they gathered themselves together to fight with Joshua and with Israel with one accord. And when the inhabitants of Gibi and heard what Joshua had done under Jericho and to AI, they did work wildly and went and made as if they had been ambassadors and took old sacks upon their asses and wine bottles, old and rent, and bound up and old shoes and clouded upon their feet and old garments upon them and all the bread of their provision was dry and moldy. And they went to Joshua under the camp at Gilgal and said unto him, And to the men of Israel, We become from a far country. Now therefore make ye a league with us, and the men of Israel said unto the Hivites,

[1:04] Per adventure ye dwell among us, and how shall we make a league with you? And they said unto Joshua, We are thy servants, and Joshua said unto them, Who are ye? And from whence come ye? And they said unto him, From a very far country, Thy servants are come, because of the name of the Lord thy God, for we have heard the fame of him and all that he did and each of them. We'll stop reading right there and not to not place to stop reading because there's a common, but we'll pick up and read again here in just a little while. But here these people from Gibi and these Gibionites, what's it saying about them? They've heard, they told Joshua and the rest of the Israelites, they told them why they came. They said, We came because of the name of the Lord. We have heard the fame of the name of the Lord folks. They didn't come to worship God. They didn't come to join up with Joshua because they wanted to worship the one and the true living God. They came because they had heard the fame of

[2:08] Almighty God all right and they had heard what had happened in Jericho. They heard what happened in A.I. and they didn't want the same thing happening to them. They understood that there was a conquest just as Rahab had heard what had happened over in Jericho. She heard that God had dried up the waters of the Red Sea and allowed the Israelites to pass through. She had heard these things and folks that caused the fear of Almighty God to come upon her. But here in this account, here these Gibionites, they had heard the fame of Almighty God. They said, We've got to do something because God is on the side of these Israelites. He's on the side of these Jews that have come up from Egypt. He's on their side. There's nothing that we can do if Almighty God wants to destroy us.

[3:00] If their God gets ahold of us, there is no hope for us. There's no chance for us. We'll be destroyed utterly. We'll be destroyed totally and there is nothing that we can do about it. So they did not come unto Joshua and to the Israelites to worship God. They come to them out of fear for their own lives. They come to him in a cunning way though. The same way that Satan will do to you and that Satan will do to me. These Gibionites came to the people of God just as demons come to us nowadays right here in 2021. They came with lies. They came with half-truths. They came putting on a show, trying to show us something that is not true, that is not so false, that has ever been the practice of Satan all the way back in the garden when he came to Eve and he convinced her to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He didn't completely lie to her. He told her the half-truth. He told her just enough to get her to doubt what God had told Adam and her. He told her just enough to get her interested in it. These Gibionites done nothing different here. They come to Joshua and the Israelites infected with story, hoping to get sympathy, hoping to get compassion, and hoping to save their own lives. This is a picture of Satan himself, how he will come to the people of God, how he'll come to these men here, folks, Gibion, this land, it wasn't just a few miles over the hill from Gilgau where the Israelites were camped out here. It wasn't some far-distant land like they told Joshua that it was. Look at it on the Bible map. Sometimes if you don't believe me, it was just a few miles away, but they had to maybe convincing and what they were telling Joshua. That's why they got the old wine skins.

[5:00] That's why they got the Modi bread. That's why they put their own clothes on. You read a little bit brother in the scripture and it says, hey, this bread was hot when we took it out from our houses, but now it's gotten old, it's gotten proud, it's gotten moldy, it ain't worth a dime to us. It's what they were telling them folks. Satan will tell you every lie that he can, but his lies are convincing. You put your nose in the Word of God, put your trust in the Word of God. Do what God said. Do not make the exact mistake that these Israelites here made. God said, you go in the land, you get rid of them all, but here they were about to make a pact with these Gebeonites.

[5:46] All because of a lie that they told. All because of a lie that they told. They were about to make a pact with them. They wanted to make pacts with people. They weren't supposed to do that. God gave them specific instructions. You go into the land, you get rid of all of them. This land is yours. It's not theirs. You're not to coexist with them. Folks, I get so sick and tired of seeing these coexist bumper stickers. It'll never happen. My Bible teaches that it'll never happen, that the Muslims cannot coexist with the Christians. Folks, atheists can't coexist with Christians.

[6:24] Christians can't coexist with the atheists or with the Muslims or the Buddhists or anything. They go, why is that? Because they serve a false God and we serve the one and true God. Now folks, they've had demons that have convinced them that their God is the one and true living God, but I got news for every one of them. Their God never descended from heaven. Their God never hung on a cross. Their God never gave his own life and his own blood for his people. Their God is full of nothing but hatred for the people of Jehovah God. That's for Jews and Gentiles alike. That's for everybody's part of the church. Everybody that has been saved. Everybody that's been born again.

[7:06] Any other religion out there has nothing but hatred for the people of God. Does that make them our enemies? That doesn't mean we go out and we pick a war with them or we pick a fight with them. That simply means that they are not for us, so they must be against us. Folks, and that's something Jesus said over in the New Testament. You remember one point in the Gospels. John came to Jesus. John, the one that wrote the Gospel of Love, came to Jesus and he was bragging. He said, Lord, there was one casting out devils in your name and we told him to hold his peace. We told him to go on his way because he wasn't part of our circle. He wasn't part of us. He wasn't part of the 12 that you picked and Jesus told him, why in the world did you rebuke him if he's not against us? He's for us. Hey, if he was casting out demons in the name of Jesus Christ and those demons were leaving, praise God, amen, and hallelujah for it. If you've got a brother or a sister in Christ that worships just a little different from you, but they still claim the blood and still claim salvation through the love and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, hallelujah.

[8:18] They don't matter what denomination they are. You take denomination and flush it down the commode for all I care. I care less about any of the denominations, but back to Satan. Satan will come to you and he'll tell you similar lies that these Givianites told Joshua and the Israelites.

[8:39] They said, they said, we come from a foreign country. These wine skins, they made them old to make it look like they'd been traveling for a long time out there in the desert sun and they had dried and they had cracked and they were worthless. But why were they doing it? They were doing it to convince these Israelites that they were harmless, that the Givianites were harmless folks. They weren't no more harmless than the people in Jericho, no more harmless than the people in AI, and no more harmless than anybody else that God ever sent his people to clear out of that land.

[9:13] God had a purpose for that land to be cleared out. It was a land that was promised to Abraham, all the way over in the Book of Genesis, and Joshua and the Caleb and the rest of these Israelites were descendants of that man Abraham and they had gone into that land, God had given them instruction to clear out the land, kill every parasite, kill every hittite, kill all of them, get them out of the land. This land is yours. You do this thing, you do it the way I say it to, you don't leave any standing, you spare none of them, don't take their gold, don't take their silver, those things are consecrated to the Lord. That's what he told them before they went in. Folks, God said don't take those things, they are mine. Yet they done it. Yet they did it. How many things have we done?

[10:02] Because we've been convinced, because we've been convinced by a demon whispering in our ear. How many things have we said? How many thoughts have we had? And folks, those thoughts come spur of the moment, come like that, a lot of times. Before we even realize that we've thought of them, we thought. I understand how that works. I'm not there in the same boat with you all. I ain't nothing but human and I ain't nothing but flesh. But these gibbians out here, they were convincing.

[10:32] They were completely convincing to the Israelites. Hey, we need, we're your buddies, we're your friends. If that's what's safe, we'll try and tell God's people. Why does he do that? Or first, how does he do that? He's got thousands of different ways he can do that. A lot of them come straight from the pulpit right here in America. A lot of those ways come straight from church pulpit, with a preacher that gets up and preaches false doctrine, a preacher that gets up and preaches that there's many ways unto salvation outside of thee way Jesus Christ. A preacher will get up and they'll convince somebody that's running around in their sin, that because they made a profession, when they was five years old at an altar, that they're all right with God and they're on their way to heaven. Folks, that is contrary to what my Bible says. My Bible says that when we are saved, we are made a new creature in Jesus Christ. And if we're made a new creature, we'll have a new nature about us in Jesus Christ. We will have fruit that bears witness to that new nature that we have in Christ

[11:34] Jesus. If somebody supposedly got saved when they were five years old and they'd gone out for 40 years, living like a hellion, they never got saved. And that's the fruit of it.

[11:48] Folks, Jesus said it himself, said a good tree can't bear corrupt fruit though. Now a corrupt tree can't bear good fruit. It is impossible for those things to happen. It is impossible. James even touches on that. Of course, this subject matter, his principle is a little bit different.

[12:04] He says out of the same mouth, bless it in cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be. You can't do that. You can't bless the Lord one second and curse someone or curse God for that matter the next second and be right with God. It is impossible for that to happen. Folks, I say that we don't sin. I say that we don't have bad thoughts. I say in any of those things, the folks just as I preached last week, the thing about it is when we had that liberty in Jesus Christ that Paul talked about in Galatians chapter five, when we stand fast in that liberty that is given to us in Christ Jesus, we had the liberty to go unto God and to ask that forgiveness. Folks, that liberty wasn't granted to these folks here in the Old Testament. That liberty was left up to a man that they called the High Priest once a year. He went to the Holy of Holies, made the sacrifice, sprinkled the blood, and then simply rolled their sins back for another season. That's all it did. Boy, my High Priest, he has a lot more than that. My High Priest never had to offer something for his own sins because he never sinned. My High Priest is forever seated at the right hand of glory, making intercession on my behalf and on your behalf. My High Priest is much better than the ones of the Old Testament. I don't care who they were. I don't care where their decency was from.

[13:30] I don't care who their mama was, who their daddy was, or any of those things. Jesus Christ is my High Priest. He's the only High Priest that we need. He's the only one that can be the propitiation for your sin and for my sin. He's the only one that can be the sacrifice for your sin and my sin.

[13:52] And he is the only one that God will listen to to make an argument on your behalf or mine. That's my High Priest. If we keep that in our head, we won't be tricked like these Israelites were here by giving us. We'll be tricked a whole lot less. But Satan is cunning. What is the Paul saying in the Book of Ephesians chapter 6? Everyone else knows. It says put on the whole armor of God that you can do what? Withstand the wiles of the devil. It says here these Givianites worked wildly. That's the only time, about the only time in Scripture you find that word. It's hard to say wildly. But you put on the whole armor of God to withstand the wiles of the devil. What's the first thing that we get with that armor of God? We get saved. What's the first thing? It would have to be the shield of faith. Because without faith we can't get saved. Without that faith we can't get saved. Now I understand your feet shoveled the preparation of the gospel and I understand the helmet of salvation. We obtained that too when we get saved. But that shield of faith folks, that's what's going to get you through situations like this. I mean, look, you read the account here these Givianites that were coming in, they were lying, but they were no immediate threat to it.

[15:20] It would have taken the shield of faith. It was taking the shield of faith for these Israelites to have shown them these Israelites to have had. But they did not practice that. They didn't put that shield up, that faith. That they did not do what God told them to do. They halted in their place. They stopped what they were doing. They didn't continue on with the conquest and it cost them a little bit of time and it cost them with Almighty God in the long run. I don't want that to happen to me though. I don't want that to happen in my walk. I'll keep on reading just a little bit here in verse 10. It says, and all that he did to the two kings of the Amorites that were beyond Jordan to sign King of Heshbon and to Awe King of Bashun, which was at Astroff, wherefore our elders and all the inhabitants of our country spake to us saying, take victals with you for the journey and go to meet them and say unto them, we are your servants. Therefore now make ye a league with us. This is our bread. We took hot for our provision out of our houses on the day we came forth unto you, but now behold it is dry and moldy, folks. And I brought this up just a little while ago. It's just a few miles away. It took them less than a day to get to where Israel was, to get to where the Israelites were, to get to where Joshua was. But they're sitting here alive. It says, these bottles of wine which we filled were new and behold they be rent and these are garments and our shoes are become old by reason of the very long journey and the men took of their victals and asked not counsel at the mouth of the Lord. That was their problem. That was the problem. They asked not counsel at the mouth of the Lord. They didn't pray. They didn't say, God, I need help with this. They had said, God, I know you sent us in here. You give us a job to do. You told us to kill everybody, get rid of them all, but these folks have come up and they were making it sound like they weren't from the Promised Land. Like they weren't from Canaan. They said, we come from this far off land, so they wouldn't just get jumped on immediately, but the Israelites didn't bother to pray. They did not ask counsel of the Lord. That's where they made their mistake. Folks, when you hear these preachers, I don't care if it's on television, radio, I don't care if it's from a pulpit out here in Johnson City or somewhere else in the county or the country, for that matter.

[17:45] When you hear a preacher or a teacher say something that you think is contrary to the word of God, look it up in the word of God for yourself. You make sure they're telling you the truth. You make sure that follow along in your Bible while they're preaching. And folks, if I ever preach you something that is wrong, please tell me. Tell me that I've done so because I don't want to continue teaching or preaching it wrong. But when you discover that someone has taught you falsely, someone has taught you something that is contrary to what does say it, the word of God, hey, you turn that person off, you don't listen to them again. If it's somebody you know, you might take them to the side and call them out on it, show them their mistake. If they continue on the way they go and they ignore that they have been corrected, they are nothing more than a woven sheets, clothing, looking for the handbag of man on their back. They're looking for money, they're looking for fame, they're looking for clout and recognition and they are not looking for the glory of God.

[18:46] We call them out on these things. I want to be called out. I do because I try my best to have scripture to back up scripture. Anytime that I teach you all something or preach for that matter, I do my best to have scripture to back up scripture. The Bible is its own best commentary.

[19:02] The Bible will back itself up. Charles Spurgeon says, I said one time, C.H. Spurgeon said, defend the word of God, I just assume defend the line. He said, turn the word of God loose and it'll defend itself and it will and it can. It has for centuries, it has for millennia now. The word of God has stood fast. God's word says it is forever settled in heaven. If it's forever settled in heaven, you can't change it, I can't change it, ain't nobody change it. I don't care what version you get. I don't care what the people that publish the MSG Bible have done to it. If you've ever read that, folks, that version of the Bible is nothing more than a joke. That version of the Bible is a disgrace to the actual scriptures, but no matter how much man changes it, what it says, God said before man was ever even formed. Hey, he was there from the beginning. The Bible says he's the ancient of days. He's the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega. God had this same down before you and I were ever created. And it's been that long and it'll be that long in the future, but don't be deceived like these Israelites were. And how's the best way to do that?

[20:15] By that last line I just read, and the man took it to the victals and asked not counsel at the mouth of the Lord. That's where they made their mistake. They did not pray on the matter. Folks, again, when we hear preachers or teachers or when we hear our own family members sometimes, we hear people say, and folks, I've heard it from folks in the years since I've been saved. I've heard it at the church that I've been to. I've heard it from visitors that have come here. I've heard it from other churches that I've been to. I've heard it everywhere. People will stop you and they'll ask you about a certain scripture or something like that. And they've been convinced by somebody along the line that a scripture means something that it was never meant to be. It's never meant to mean. And you try and explain that to whoever it is and folks, they don't want any part of it because they've already been convinced. Eve was convinced in the garden that what she was doing was no harm. She was convinced in the garden that it was okay to offer that fruit to her husband.

[21:22] And it goes like that throughout the scriptures. You look at Peter though. You look at Peter over in the gospels. What did Jesus Christ tell them? He said, every one of you are going to be offended of me this very night. That was the night before they arrested or the night that they arrested Jesus Christ. And what did Peter say? He said, Lord even if I die with you I will never be offended by you. And Jesus told him before the cop pro twice thou shall deny me thrice.

[21:56] These Israelites, much like what I preached this morning, much like what I preached, they were dependent on themselves. They had come in, they had whipped them folks in Jericho, they had whipped the ones at AI by this point. They said, we're doing pretty good. They asked not counsel at the mouth of the Lord when something fishy came in, something conspicuous stepped in on the scene. It didn't raise a red flag to them. They asked a few questions. Yeah, but it turned out they were all right with it from the time being. Now in the next passage, we won't talk about it tonight. In the next passage in Jericho chapter 9, the lying of the Gibbonites is discovered. It's discovered that they lied to those Israelites and the Israelites still didn't do what they were supposed to do. They made a pact with them, made a league with them, done exactly what the Gibbonites wanted out of them to begin with. Why they do that? To save face.

[22:52] They done it to save their own, save their own face value because they done said, okay, this is fine. We'll do this thing. Folks, it don't matter what lie the devil tells you or what lie demon tells you. If you make a pact with whatever that is or if you trust in whatever that lie is and then you discover later on that it was just an absolute, total and utter lie, go to God, ask forgiveness for believing that, ask forgiveness for not confirming it per the scripture, ask forgiveness and he will give you that forgiveness. And folks, you do that in humility.

[23:34] You do that, you do that shamefully. You go to God with a broken heart and a contract spirit. He don't just save you. Hey, you go to God with a broken heart and a contract spirit after you saved as well. And if you go to God in that way with a humble heart, God will hear your prayer. God will forgive your sin. God will keep you. God will hold you in that much closer. Hey, my Bible teaches that he is close to those that have a broken heart. So if we go to him like that, it's going to move him with compassion. Then folks that follow Jesus around in the scriptures, several times in the scripture it says, but he was moved with compassion. He was moved with compassion. These folks that was following him around and some of them were following him just to see the miracles. Some of them, they had no need of bread. They had no need of healing. They had no need of any of those things, but they were following this man Jesus to see what blind man he healed next or what deaf man's ears he opened up next or how many, how many thousands he would feed with the next few fish and couple of loads of bread. They were following him just because of that. But there were those that followed Jesus though. Praise God. There are those that followed Jesus because they believed that he was Messiah, the Son of God. There were those few, there was a handful of them that followed him just because of that regardless of the miracles and regardless of the things that they did, it was brought up. I remember if it was tonight or this morning, it was brought up today at some point that the disciples said to increase our faith. Folks, those disciples, they had seen the man healed blind people, men that had been blind since birth. Not some accident they had had just a couple years before. They'd been blind every day they'd been on the earth.

[25:22] They had seen, the disciples had seen Jesus Christ make the lame to walk. People that were lame on their feet, Jesus Christ told them to rise up and walk. He told them, rise up, take up your bed, go on your way, get to the house. They had seen these things and they still said, Lord increase our faith. My goodness, how much faith do you have there? I mean miracles as God worked in your life though and you still say God, I feel like I'm lacking in faith. Shame on us, me too. Shame on everyone else for having that attitude, but everyone else has had it. Everyone else has had it regardless of how many times God has healed us, regardless of what soul we've been praying for, as God said and we get new sometime later that soul got saved, regardless of that happening, regardless of the time that we didn't know if we was going to be able to eat the next day or not. Somehow I know there was food and a pantry, there was money in the account, there was something along the lines where we could get some bread in our mouths, regardless of how many times that's happened.

[26:24] God comes through, he'll be with his people. David said, I was young now, I'm old, I've never seen the righteous forsaken, never seen begging for bread, we have seen it over and over and yet our faith dwindles. Shame on us, shame on us Christians for that happened, especially preachers, shame on everyone else. But folks, the men took in their victors and asked not counsel at the mouth of the Lord. What does that tell me? To ask counsel at the mouth of the Lord. If asking not counsel at the mouth of the Lord is what got them in trouble and it is, well first, let me back up, first they didn't do what God already told them to. That got them in trouble first. Secondly, they asked not counsel at the mouth of the Lord, they didn't pray, they didn't ask God's guidance, that kept them in trouble, that kept them in the original trouble they had gotten into. If they had just asked, I'm sure, I'm positive, I'm persuaded, God would have guided them in the right decision to have made.

[27:26] No, you get rid of those givey and nots, they're lying to you. What else, what other lesson we got from this? If we believe a lie, God will allow us to do that. That spirit, it'll fight, that spirit will let us know, but we'll war against the spirit, will we not? The flesh and the spirit, war with one another. Hey Paul wrote back to the church in Rome, he wrote to the church in Galatia, he said, if we live in the spirit, let us also walk in the spirit. And if we're saved by the blood of Jesus Christ, we've got that spirit. And that spirit, when the demons lie, they whispered those lies in our ears, that spirit will let us know that it's a lie, but we will fight and we will fight because the demon has whispered something that we really wanted to hear. The demon has whispered something that appeals to us, he's not gonna whisper something about dope in my ears, I've never been a dopehead in my life, that's not gonna appeal to me, but it'll whisper something to me that he knows will get my attention. They know where my weak spots are, they know where your weak spots are, you know why they know? Because we let them know, we tell them, we let them know in our actions, we let them know in our thoughts, believe it or not, demons have access to your thoughts, they've got complete, they don't have access to your heart, praise God, they don't have access to a born again child of God's heart, but they have access to your thoughts, they know what you're thinking, but most of them know what you're thinking because of the actions that you take, and because of the speech that you use, they know exactly what's on your mind, because of these things, but folks ask counsel of the Lord, these people, these Israelites, they got in trouble, but instead of praying about it, they went on the way, they took of the victals of the Gideon

[29:14] Islands, they took of what those Gideon Islands had brought, and that's not counsel of the Lord, ask counsel of the Lord, ask counsel at the mouth of the Lord, I promise you, He will not lead you astray, He will keep you on that straight and narrow way that He has set you up.