The Foe On The Inside

You will know if you are at all familiar with your Bible that in the conquest of Canaan, Joshua had to meet and defeat thirty-one different kings. These were rulers over petty kingdoms. The Canaan experience of the children of Israel represents the deepest and best spiritual experience, typically speaking. We may consider these thirty-one kings as representing the different foes which we must meet and triumph over if we are to apprehend that for which we have been apprehended. God has called you and me not simply that He might take us to heaven, but that a certain purpose might be fulfilled in our lives, and therefore there are various things we must recognize if His purpose is realized.

As there are thirty-one kings before us in this book of Joshua, it seems to suggest that we may expect to meet a new foe every day in the month, not excepting Sunday!

In all that series of battles, Joshua suffered only one defeat. You know when he entered the land, the first city he had to attack and take was Jericho with its immense walls defended by an army of giants. Forty years before, Israel had come to this border and their spies had reported that the walls reached to heaven and the giants there made the men of Israel look like grasshoppers. This city struck terror to their fathers, and they were sent back to the wilderness through fear of them.

But when Joshua came to the city, he walked in humble obedience to his God and followed the divine program and the divine plan as given to him by the Angel of the Lord. You know the story of how the walls fell and the city was taken without the loss of one soldier. And that was also true of the twenty-nine other battles.

“A Little One.”

But next after Jericho in the line of march was the little city of Ai over against Bethel where Abraham had built his altar nearly five hundred years before. Ai must be taken. The scouts were sent out and they returned and reported that it was only a “little one.” They said, “The fighting men are few and we need not send all our forces; just a few men will do.” And so, three thousand soldiers were selected and they marched upon Ai. As they started to ascend the hill, they received the surprise of their lives. When they were half way up, the gates flew open and down came their enemies. The onslaught struck terror to the hearts of these three thousand men and they fled, a disorganized horde, and thirty-six of them were slain.

And you know, this brought next to a panic to Israel, and to Joshua more than any other. He could not understand it. He even accused God in his prayer of making some mistake as I feel we do when we encounter a difficulty like that. But Joshua rent his garment. He put ashes on his head and fell on his face before the Lord. If your defeat will humble you and drive you into the presence of the Lord, you will find, as Joshua did, the cause of your failure. Joshua very soon learned why the army had been defeated. I want to mention some of the practical lessons that we may learn through this defeat, which followed the splendid victory at Jericho.

It Is Easy To Fail.

First, the best of us may fail and disappoint God. That point, it seems to me, applies directly to the holiest and best of us. How easily we may fail, how easily we may forget something that is absolutely essential, how easy it is to walk in the flesh, for that is natural.

Here is Joshua, a man that has a record of forty years of faithfulness. He was one of the two that stood out against the spies some forty years before and said, “Our God is well able to give us the city.” They nearly stoned him upon that occasion because of his faithful testimony. You find him all through his life standing for things worthwhile. But he made this mistake, and I think mistakes become blessings to even good people if they have not come to that unfortunate place where they are so satisfied with their experience and their theories that they try to make defeats victories in order to buttress up their theories. That is very frequently done.

Now it was Joshua who failed. You say, “No, it was Achan.” Yes, Joshua failed. How? By not consulting with God before he made the attack upon the city. He failed by going before he was sent. At Jericho, he met the Angel of the Lord with the drawn sword and when Joshua saw him he said, “Art thou for our enemies or for us?”

“Nay,” said the angel, “as captain of the Lord’s host I have come.”

And true man of faith that Joshua was, he fell on his face and said, “What hast thou to say to thy servant?” And the Angel of the Lord gave him a plan for taking of Jericho.

“Oh, yes,” the people said, “we will pray about this great problem and make sure of God’s plan.” But when they came to little Ai, they thought their own ways would do. We are all like Joshua. Listen, friends, there is no Jericho too big for victory if you are walking with God and there is no Ai too little for defeat if you are walking out of fellowship with Him. I think that a lesson God’s people must learn.

A Common Experience.

In a meeting a few years ago, we sang that old hymn:

“Prone to wander, Lord I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love,
Here’s my heart, O, take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.”

At the close of the service a brother came to me and said, “I object to the singing of that hymn.”

I said, “Why?”

“Because it isn’t true.”

“In what respect?” I asked him.

“Why, I am not ‘prone to wander, prone to leave the God I love.’”

I said, “Brother, I am going to tell you that you have a different experience than I have. I find I am ‘prone to wander and leave the God I love.’”

A few years after, that brother fell into a very grievous sin and lost his testimony and his ministry. The last time I saw him he was a broken man. The natural heart, and that is the heart that you have, “is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it?” “Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.”

Our Enemy.

We have a three-fold enemy. There is the Trinity on our side, but we also have the world and the flesh and the devil against us and the greatest of these is the flesh. You know what the flesh is? Spell it backwards and leave off the last letter and you have it. The devil may not attack you every day. The world is not always making its appeals. But “self” is always right there with its low seductive voice. It is the siren that can sing sweeter than any other. Jesus Himself said, “Deny self daily.”

There is an old hymn we used to sing:

“Oh, this cruel self, how it strives
And works within my breast,
To come between Thee and my soul,
And keep me back from rest;

How many subtle forms it takes,
Of seeming verity,
As though it were not safe to trust,
And venture all on Thee.”

Sin Is Sin

I think a great deal of trouble comes these days by giving sin some other name. We think of sin as drunkenness and lying and adultery. But friends, when you take the Bible and see what it has to say about sin, you will revise your opinion of it. “In the multitude of words there wanteth not sin.” Sometimes words are as sharp as knives. They are like fire. They will kindle a whole church into a flame.

“The thought of foolishness is sin.” You know this is a day of foolishness. People want entertainment, comic sections in the paper, and they want them from the pulpit, too.

A brother minister once spent and evening joking and telling stories to a company of young people. Later he said to a consecrated woman. “I entertained them fine, didn’t I”

“Yes,” she said, “but, pastor, isn’t that the clown’s part after all, and not the preacher’s?”

“The thought of foolishness is sin.”

“Whatsoever is not of faith is sin.”

“If you have respect unto persons ye do commit sin.”

“To him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”

I am just speaking of these things that you may see, beloved friends, that sin is very subtle and very common.

God Gives The Reason.

Joshua went to God about that defeat and God revealed to him the reason for it. Now I would have you notice another great fact here. No man liveth to himself. Of course the Scriptures say that, but that is particularly true of one in the membership of The Moody Church. Not one of us lives to ourselves. We are members of His body (thank God we are, isn’t that a wonderful truth?) “members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones.” What a sense of security that brings to me. A speaker at a Bible conference was greeted years ago by someone who had been greatly impressed by his messages. “I am so glad I came here.” Said the brother, “I have learned something I never knew before. I have learned that I am safe in the arms of Jesus.”

“My,” said the doctor, “that is fine. But I have learned something better than that.”

“Better than to be safe in His arms?”

“Yes, better. I am as safe as an arm of Jesus for ‘I am a member of His body, of His flesh and of His bones.’”

I tell you, you need to take those Scriptures that talk about the security of the saints in these days and read them over to refresh your own heart.

If one sins, all suffer. You are a member also of another body. “We are members of one another.” Just as my finger, being hurt, crippled or paralyzed, body, the church, anything that happens to one member affects the whole body.

Sin Is Far-reaching.

Let me read you a verse that impressed me greatly this week: “But the children of Israel committed a trespass in the accursed thing.” Think of it for a moment, beloved friends. Achan never dreamed how far-reaching the consequences of that wrong or evil thing would be. He never dreamed that the nation was going to be affected by what he did. He took a gambler’s chance. He knew what he was doing. That Babylonish garment and that wedge of gold—they appealed to that “something” in him that is in us all.

And he said, “Now here’s a chance. No one sees me. I can get away with it. Even if I am caught I will take the punishment. I will take a chance.” He never thought he would involve the whole nation. He never thought he would break Joshua’s heart. He never thought that thirty-six men would be slain because of that transgression of his.

God has put this here for a purpose. He wants us to know how vitally we are related one to another in a spiritual sense. “No man liveth to himself and no man dieth to himself.” This was a secret sin. Nobody knew, not a person heard of it. His friends came into his little tent and walked over the hidden evidence of his sin. He had buried it under the floor. Nobody knew—except the One with whom we have to do, the One upon whom depends the victory. The battle is not yours but God’s and it is with Him you have to do. Even though you may deceive everybody in the church, even through pastors and officials and the whole membership are unconscious of your wrong-doing and your secret sin, He knows it all.

The Thing God Hates.

Oh, how He hates sin! Isn’t it remarkable that at the beginning of the conquest of Canaan He should punish the sin of covetousness? Have you ever noticed that it is listed with the vilest sins? That hellish thing that creeps into the churches today and into the lives of so many of God’s people—“covetousness.” At the very beginning of the conquest of Canaan, God says, “I am going to teach you how I hate that sin so that in all the years to come, you will shun covetousness.” And then when a good many hundred years later, the church was formed for the conquest of the world we have a similar judgment. It was a curse coming upon a man and a woman for the very same sin, upon Ananias and Sapphira, that we might know that God hates the sin of covetousness; and that every secret sin is known to Him.

No one seemed to know anything about the sin of Ananias and his wife. They put up the bluff that, like Barnabas, the son of consolation; they brought everything they had to God. And all at once, Peter had the impression borne in upon him that Ananias was a liar and the Holy Ghost said to him, “Rebuke him.”

And Peter said, “Ananias, why hast thou allowed the devil to put it in thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost?”

I would rather lie to the preacher than to the Holy Ghost! I would rather lie to the official board than to the Holy Ghost! If you are a secret sinner and are pretending to be out and out for God, you are lying to the Holy Ghost.

Some folks are praying and calling upon God: “Give us a revival. Pour out thy Spirit upon the church in Chicago.” And yet the church will be defeated and her banners will trail in the dust and she will be humiliated before her enemies, because of these enemies on the inside.

A prominent woman evangelist said to me the other day with tears in her eyes, “I am giving it all up. How can I ask God to give me blessing in the church where I am trying to minister? How can I ask God to send souls into the churches where the Word of God is being denied and the Spirit grieved?”

Oh, yes, what I am affects you, and God knows what I am. I feel, beloved friends, more and more as these days go by, like falling on my face and saying, “Search me, O God. I may have a good estimate of myself, but O God, search me and see if there is any evil way in me.” That is what you need. That is what I need. I am not your preacher only. I am your brother in tribulation. I am only a sinner saved by grace with a weak heart and a faulty life.

Sin Must Be Judged.

The Lord said to Joshua, “Get thee up—Israel hath sinned.” Before there could be any marching or fighting, this sin question had to be met and settled.

Tribe by tribe, all Israel was brought before Joshua and the “Tribe of Judah was taken” and then one “clan” in that tribe and then one house in the clan, and it was narrowed down to the household of Carmi. Then Achan, his son, was taken.

Such pity came into my heart for poor Achan as I read the story yesterday for it is so natural to take a Babylonish garment. It is so natural to take a wedge of gold.

I see poor Achan. He thought nobody knew. At last Joshua says, “It is Achan!” Now notice the process. He says, “I saw, I coveted, I took, I hid.” But God saw too. And that was the trouble. I am glad God saw. We are all going to appear before the judgment seat of Christ. I am a child of God and yet Paul says that I must appear before the judgment seat of Christ and answer for the deeds done in this body. Hidden things will be brought to light, things done in secret will be revealed from the house tops. Oh, brother, it is a glorious thing to be a Christian, but it is also a solemn thing. It isn’t a selfish luxury; it is a sacred trust.