The rejected brother, and the last of the unloved, are given a place at the front line of God’s plan of salvation through Jesus.
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Transcript
Dan:
Well, hi everyone, and welcome to trainingforliferedeemed. I’m your host, Dan, and as always, I’m joined by my father, David Jackson. And today we are continuing our series as we work through the book of Joshua. Today, we’re up to Joshua 19 Dad. And throughout this whole series, you’ve been talking about how every part of the Old Testament points us forward towards Jesus. This whole chapter though is about tribes and stuff that have disappeared. Really. They’re not existing at the moment in particular parts of Israel with their land allocations and Israel technically is there, but it’s not these tribes. We don’t even know where some of these places were back then. So how does this help us with the gospel? How do we go with this whole big description of land being divided and tribes? And let’s start with Simeon.
David:
Simeon’s good fun. I mean, when you start off with this concept that Jesus took the disciples through the whole Testament and showed them it was all about him; When we first heard that, people sort of looked at our professor and said, you’re kidding. And he threw out the challenge, okay, pick a part of the Bible, show me, you know, open it up and I’ll show you how it’s got something to do with Jesus. Well, of course, we go to this sort of stuff. We’ve just got this, what seems like a random list of unpronounceable Hebrew place names, and when you go through the research, you don’t even know where some of them are. And so it’s a fair question. What’s this got to do with Jesus? And I think Simeon’s a really good example of how to do that because Leah has four sons and three of them get disinherited by Jacob. And the last one is Judah and Jesus is going to come through Judah. So we all know we’re going to follow Judah. It’s going to lead to David. That’s going to take us all the way down to Jesus Judah’s no problem. What do you do with these other guys? Simeon went into Shechem and slaughtered all the fellows in Shechem with his brother, Levi, Jacob, disinherits him. And now we’re in the promised land. He’s not supposed to get any land. And his brother, Judah, looks across the table, as it were and says, well, Hey brother, I’ve got all this massive block of land down here in the south. Just move in with us. And the end result is Simeon basically merges with Judah. And when it comes time for Israel to go into exile and all these terrible things happen, and the Northern tribes walk away from Yahweh, Simeon’s part of Judah. He gets saved. The guy that Jacob didn’t love and didn’t care about and got upset with. He gets saved because he goes into Judah. And so you’ve got this little model of a God redeeming, a broken family where brothers are pitched against brothers, and then you have God taking this homeless son and bringing him into the territory of the one who will be king. and so you’re going to follow this area here all the way through to Jesus. So how cool is it ? You get to be invited to be part of the line of Judah, even though you’re not.
Dan:
Yeah . Okay. So Simeon’s lucky he gets to join Judah. Judah is really nice to Simeon. They must have , you know , as a large tribe. I mean , I imagine they’re both quite numerous at this point , to have had the elders meet or something and go , and Hey, you can come and join us. Hmm . That’s lovely. So they’re part of the tribe of Judah leading to Jesus that have five other tribes. What happens? How do they link to Jesus?
David:
Yeah. These five, you sorta got to feel sorry for these five. Cause they, in that we’ve , we’ve given the Southern land and the Hills and all that sort of stuff to Judah. Then you’ve got the middle area that we’d give to Ephraim and Manasseh and Benjamin and so on. and now these fellows five tribes are going to fit into an area that’s probably now about the size of Blacktown . you know , it’s, it’s not, it’s not a big territory that they’re getting. Might be Blacktown and Penrith combined. It’s not big. And you’re doing nearly half of the nation of Israel is crammed into this tiny little area. And you think they’re getting the short end of the stick. But as you follow the story through, what the five tribes end up with is all the land around the Jezreel valley. And the Jezreel valley goes, most of the roads go north south. The Jezreel valley goes east west. And it’s your main road between all of Asia and Africa. So you’ve got the roads coming in from Europe and you’ve got the roads coming in from Asia. And they’re all heading down this coast through Israel. Israel’s like the big toll gate for three continents and they get the toll gate for Asia and they’ve got the coastal bit as well, which we call today Lebanon. And they’re right up there in this area. And it’s the most fertile, huge valley. So it looks really good. But what it’s done is it’s taken all the Southern tribes they’re pretty much isolated from foreigners. They’re up in the Hills if the foreigners want to march up and down the highway on the coast, you just go up and stay on your farm up in the Hills and wave at them as they go past. But if you’re up in the north with these five, these armies are going match straight through the middle of your corn patch, and they’re gonna take your cattle and your sheep and anything else on the way through. So they’re being put right in the face of the foreigners and that’s a frightening place to be. So later on one of the prophets calls, it’s Hosea, calls Jezreel, the valley of slaughter, this is where all the big battles are going to happen. that’s where, you know, where people like Saul get killed and Gideon fights these battles. So this is the area where Israel faces all the big cat nations in the area. And so it’s called Galilee of the Gentiles. And when you come to Jesus, Jesus is born in Judah, cause he’s a Judah fella , but he doesn’t live there and they go and live in this area where these five tribes are Nazareth is right up there in the north. Capernaum is in this part of the world and that’s, Jesus’s safe place. How ironic is that? The safe place is right on the frontier, where all the foreigners are and the dangerous place is down south in Judah with the temple and so forth. So Isaiah does this. Isaiah makes the connection between Joshua 19 and Jesus. A thousand years after this, he says, there’ll be no gloom for the one who was in distress in former times. And this is an area where there’s lots of scary stuff going on. He made light of the land in the land of Zebulun and Naphtali. And he later will cause them to be honoured the road west across Jordan, the circle. That’s the word Galilee of the Gentiles. The people who walk in darkness will see a great light. Light will shine on those who live in the land of the deep shade, because a child will be born to us. A son will be given. So you’ve got all this, what we call that , that Christmas promise about the child born in Bethlehem. But the focus is on Galilee because this is the scary place. This is the circuit. This is the darkness and Jesus is going to focus his ministry there. So it’s as if you’ve got the , the last and the most, I guess you could say unjustly treated put in the most dangerous place, furthest from the temple. And that’s where Jesus spends most of his public ministry. And it’s because the gospel is going to go from there to Asia and Europe. This , this is your, this is the setup for gospel mission. So we’re going to stake our claim on it. The one I feel sorry for is Dan. Funny About that .
Dan:
And yet you name me after him. Probably a different Dan, I think.
David:
Yeah. But this Dan, he gets it like a tiny strip of land , that goes from a frame Benjamin and heads west. So he’s sitting on this beautiful dairy farm country and he’s right. Opposite. The Philistine main base. So the Philistines are constantly coming up that valley, the Aijalon valley, raiding all of these farms. This is where Samson grows up. So the Danites are looking at that going, A, we don’t fit in a valley this big and B the Philistines are beating the tripe out of us because they got iron weapons and we’re still running around with copper ones. So they hit up north and attack some poor innocent, you know , unarmed village and take over territory at the foot of Mount Hermon. They’re the furthest north from dander bear shiver never abandoned what God allotted to them. And they’re up there in the mountains. And you think you’re right on the edge of , um , all the superstitious gods and everything else. And that’s where Peter tells Jesus, you are the Christ right in the middle of Dan’s little bit of territory. So it’s , it’s like we’re setting up , a chess board ready to play the gospel game , in years to come, you’ve got to follow these guys. They’re all going to end up with Jesus.
Dan:
Well, Jesus does a bit of a , a tour through all these ones land, right?
David:
Sure does. He crosses it this way and that way. It’s amazing.
Dan:
Well , Dad, thank you so much for sharing all that with us. If you are listening and you would like to grab this study notes to go along with this episode, please head over to trainingforliferedeemed.com/45. You can grab everything there with the show notes. You can watch the video there as well. If you enjoyed this episode or love, if you could leave us a review and of course, make sure that you subscribe and come back and join us next week as we continue to work through Joshua and we look at Joshua chapter 20, I will see you then.
