17: Case Studies in S.L.O.W.

[00:00:00] Stephanie: Season 2 Episode 17. Today we are continuing our Lessons from the Wilderness series with a look at some case studies for Joshua and the SLOW model. Hello, father.

[00:00:12] Marcus: Hello, daughter.

[00:00:14] Stephanie: Good to be with you.

[00:00:15] Marcus: It is good to be with you.

[00:00:16] Stephanie: Today we have a lot to cover, so I’m doing rapid fire icebreaker no explanation.

Okay, Fruit salad or veggie salad?

[00:00:25] Marcus: Fruit salad.

[00:00:26] Stephanie: Veggie salad. All right, tell us in the comments. Are you fruit salad or veggie salad?

[00:00:31] Marcus: We had a song about fruit salad. Yummy, yummy. Okay.

[00:00:36] Stephanie: Fruit salad is good, okay. No explanations. Last episode, we talked about Joshua as a model for the victorious Christian life.

Today, we are looking at case studies as we follow Joshua through these various battles, especially these four core battles. Did they use the SLOW model to follow this trust plus obey equals victory? Did they follow the model or didn’t they? Because God sets out this formula for victory, which we’ve been discussing, trust plus obey.

Trust, plus obey – trust me and obey me and you will be victorious. And how do you do this? You stop and seek, you listen, you obey, and then you get to watch what happens. So you have a new acrostic for us that you sneak peeked, I think last episode, and that is JOSH.

[00:01:30] Marcus: JOSH. There it is. No joshing around.

All right. There is in technical terms, a chiastic structure to the first part of Joshua. And it starts with God giving him the formula for success, right? Meditate on my word, obey what I say, and you’ll see victory. We’re meditating on God’s word to build our faith so that we remember to obey, so that he can give the success and victory he promises.

So that is the establishment. Then there are two battles. Then there’s a major battle that they win. And then there is a battle where they forget to seek God, listen, and obey. They don’t follow the SLOW model. They don’t seek God, listen, obey, and watch what happens. And so, the formula’s given, and then there’s these two a big battle where they win, a small battle that they should have won that they lose at the center of this chiasm. They are at Shechem, where there are two mountains, and these two mountains represent the covenant.

And it is mountain number one that represents the blessings that come with obedience and mountain number two represents the curses that come when you disobey. And there they rededicate themselves to the original formula. We will trust, we will obey, we will do things your way and trust you to provide.

So they come back from that and then immediately they have an inferior enemy that they don’t seek, listen, obey and watch. So the battle at Ai, for example, is parallel to the battle at Gibeon. And then they have a major battle where they do all these things and they win. So I know that’s complicated, especially if you can’t see it.

[00:03:11] Stephanie: Can you explain it? What is the point of a chiasm?

[00:03:20] Marcus: So, yeah. So the point of a chiasm is that we outline things with like Roman numeral, one, two, three, ABC, that sort of thing. That didn’t exist when they wrote the Bible, so the one thing you can be sure of is that the biblical authors did not Roman numeral outline what they were doing.

One of the more common organizational strategies is called a chiasm, and that’s usually like A, B, C – C, B, A kind of thing. Like A is, this A is parallel to this A, this B is parallel to this B. So in Joshua, what you have is an A, B, C, D. Followed by C, B, A. What chiasms tend to do is they tend to emphasize what’s at the beginning and the end, and they tend to emphasize what’s in the middle.

So it is not uncommon in something chiastic that the thing that is in the middle is the core message that the author is trying to communicate. So here what we have is that the beginning of the chiasm are instructions that say, trust the Lord, obey him, do things his way, and you’ll be successful. In the middle of the chiasm is The Shechem Covenant ceremony where they’re dedicating themselves to do this and at the end of the chiasm we don’t have it.

But what we do have is a list of 32 battles that they win and the idea that they have now done it. And what we see is they are now 32 and they just beat all of these kings and we have this this list of kings who were defeated. So it starts with the promise and then it ends with the fulfillment.

And so that’s like the anchors of this chiasm. And then you get the next step in, Battle of Jericho, which is in parallel to the battle with Hatsor, which are two major cities where they obeyed God and they saw great victories. And then you’ve got the Battle of Ai, paralleled with the Battle of Gibeon, both of which were small and shouldn’t have been a big problem, but they didn’t seek God, therefore they couldn’t trust him, therefore they couldn’t obey, and it turned into a problem.

So you get these parallel things happening in there. Now, that’s the chiasm part of it.

[00:05:23] Stephanie: Okay, and now for JOSH.

[00:05:25] Marcus: Okay, so JOSH, I used to teach my students back in the 80s when we were teaching this stuff. They could remember the four battles as Jericho for J, O is Overtime at Ai. And the idea is they didn’t lose the battle of Ai, but they had to go into overtime to win.

So overtime at Ai. S is sun stands still, right? The sun stands still, which allowed them to win the battle of Gibeon, which frankly was a battle they’d never should have had to fight. We’ll get into that. J is Jericho, O overtime at Ai, Sun stands still at Gibeon, and then H is Hatsor. Now Hatsor may be the biggest battle that nobody’s ever heard of, so we’ll talk about that more later, but Hatsor was actually significantly larger and significantly more powerful than Jericho.

[00:06:14] Stephanie: It was a climax of battle and epicness if it was filmed. Oh my goodness. Anyway but we digress. So we have two times when they SLOWed: Jericho and Hotsaur.

[00:06:32] Marcus: So again, the idea of SLOW is stop, listen, obey, watch.

And if you do it, you get to see what God does. When you don’t stop and seek God, you can’t listen. Therefore, you can’t obey. And you also get to watch what happens. And so, yes, in the two big battles, they stopped, they sought the Lord, they obeyed, and they watched God do something miraculous. In the two What should have been small battles, they did not do this, and because they didn’t stop to seek God, they didn’t listen for his strategy, therefore they couldn’t obey, and both things ended up being much harder than they should have been.

[00:07:03] Stephanie: All right, so let’s dig straight into quick highlights from Jericho.

[00:07:06] Marcus: So Jericho highlight number one, is one of these ironic things like you’ve got the two spies staying in the house of a prostitute, which of course raises, you know, ethical issues of its own, but it’s good cover.

It’s good military strategy. Now he’s going to be surprised that two foreign men would go there. What is truly surprising is that Rahab becomes a model of faith. Like she is the one who reports to them, “Everybody here is terrified of you.” And specifically they’re terrified of your God, right? They heard what your God did to the Egyptians.

They’ve heard what your God has done. Nobody has ever seen a God like yours that fights like this. And she’s like, in fact, I’m drawn to your God. I would let you know, I trust him more than I trust our gods.

Please protect me and my family. This is an example of faith in God without any moral transformation or anything. This is an example of salvation by faith alone, right?

By faith alone, apart from works, she was saved because she said, I’m putting my trust in your God as being greater than ours. So that’s the beginning of it. Related to emotional healing, too, with Rahab, is this thought that you run into with a lot of women who’ve been sexually abused, and I’ve heard the word slut a lot.

Like, I feel like a slut. I feel like I’m horrible. I feel like I’m dirty, is the other word. I don’t feel like I’ll ever be clean again. Well, I think Rahab is kind of that, almost like the patron saint of women who have had to go through sexual trauma that God redeemed. And while patron saint is not necessarily the correct term to use, it’s the idea that she is a metaphor or a type of women who have had to go through sexual trauma who had an identity formed around that which God redeemed. And he gave a new identity and she became not only a member of the Hall of Faith in the book of Hebrews, but a member of the line of the Messiah.

There’s some scholarly debate about this, but it looks clearly like she is in – that it was her son who married Ruth, right? And so you begin to see these things come together. We actually paused during the break to look this up because we were both so curious, right? Make sure we got that right.

So here I am in Matthew chapter one, going through the genealogy and it says here that Salmon, not the fish, but Salmon fathered Boaz by Rahab. So the debate is, is this really the same Rahab? But I don’t think there’s a strong reason why it wouldn’t be.

That’s a very well-known character to people. So Boaz then is the son of Rahab. And that is interesting in that Boaz was predisposed to be willing to marry a foreigner because his mother was a foreigner. And so we have Ruth, who becomes the mother of Obed, who becomes the father of Jesse and David.

So you got literally, Ruth, Obed, Jesse, David. So Ruth is the great-grandmother of David, which makes Rahab the great-great-grandmother of David. It’s right there.

So Rahab is one of those fascinating characters here that’s worth a little attention.

[00:10:34] Stephanie: Yeah. No, very, very good.

All right. Any other highlights from Jericho that you want to bring up, especially in relation maybe to the SLOW model or victory?

[00:10:43] Marcus: Well, again, I think our point here was like, so sometimes we stop and seek God and sometimes God stops us. And Jericho was one of those cases where God stopped Joshua and the angel of the Lord literally showed up in full battle armor and was like Hello.

And Joshua was like, hi, how are you? And he was terrified. He’s like, well, whose side are you on? And he goes, yeah, wrong question. And that is something just genius about the whole thing – there’s a principle here. When God fights, God wins. So, we need to make sure we’re on God’s side.

And that’s really what it boils down to. It’s not how do I get God to fight for me? It’s how do I make sure that I am fighting God’s battles and I’m on his side with what we’re doing? So, in this case, God literally stopped Joshua and said, Here, listen to me. I’m telling you what I want you to do, which may have been needed in this case because what he wanted was so radical, right?

I want you to march around this place once every day, six times. On the last day seven times. So, 13 times we’re marching around the city. Did I say it right? It’s six times and then seven on the last day, so 13 total times. And we don’t know why. A lot of people guessed that there was some occult reason for this, taking back some kind of rituals.

But the reality is, it’s what he was told to do, he obeyed, and God gave him the victory.

[00:12:14] Stephanie: We don’t always have to understand why God says to do something. We just obey, because we know he understands why. All right. Well, let’s move along to highlights from the heap of rumors, from A. However we want to pronounce that.

[00:12:31] Marcus: Yes, when we looked up Ai, I’ve always been like, how do you actually pronounce this? So we found out a couple of interesting things. First of all, the town of “IE” or “Aye”. It’s gonna sound almost British. I.E. and then you put an H sound in front of it. Which is interesting because that word in Hebrew means a heap. The H sound in front of it becomes the heap, which leads to the idea that either is saying there’s the town of Bethel, and then there’s ruins near it, which is the Heap, or another town had been built on these ruins. And so there were two towns there. It doesn’t really matter. That’s just total curiosity, right?

[00:13:18] Stephanie: So it’s funny, I think one of my professors one time was like, oh yeah, the dump, you know.

[00:13:24] Marcus: He calls Ai, the dump because it means the Heap.

[00:13:28] Stephanie: But this is where we have Achan and his rebellion.

[00:13:32] Marcus: There you go with your Hebrew. I’m sorry. Nobody knows it by a shrine. It’s akin to the Samaritans. Okay.

[00:13:38] Stephanie: Sorry. Yeah, that one guy. It’s like physically painful to say Achan now because of the class I was in. I know.

[00:13:50] Stephanie: All right. What do you want to say about this?

[00:13:57] Marcus: Well, you know, Achan again becomes a metaphor and archetype.

[00:14:01] Stephanie: And for those who don’t remember who he is, are you explaining him?

[00:14:03] Marcus: Well, I’ll get there. So Rahab is an archetype of sexually traumatized women and also of salvation by faith apart from works.

Achan is a metaphor or the archetype of those who are seduced by the world. and by the love of the world. There was a clear decree from God that Jericho was to be placed under something called Harem. All right, now, Harem, there you go, get your guttural in there. It’s interesting, the word it sounds most like is harem.

[00:14:40] Stephanie: Well, and I’m pretty sure it has the root of Arabic.

[00:14:43] Marcus: Yes, they are basically related words from the same root. And the idea is like a harem is women who are devoted to the king and belong to him only. And if you touched one of them, you were killed. So in the same way, when God said the city of Jericho is harem to me, it means it is devoted to me.

It belongs to me. If you take any of this you forfeit your life because it’s mine. And so what that meant specifically was that if it was living, it became a sacrifice. If it wasn’t living, it went into the tap and went into the treasury. So when Achan goes into Jericho, he sees this beautiful Mesopotamian robe, he sees some gold and his love of the world takes over. First John talks about the lust of the eye, the pride of life, right? He saw this stuff. He said, I’m going to get rich and nobody will ever know. So the problem here is that he has to include his family in this cause he hides it in his tent, right?

Which means other people are helping him hide the secret. And they go through a trial. Now, this is not a normal trial that follows like, here’s a detective and all the evidence. This is God is putting you on trial, right? We’re casting lots. And at each step along the way, Achan and his family have an opportunity to come clean and nobody does.

And so finally at the end, God puts the finger on him and said, it’s you. And there’s a reason why he and his whole family are put death. One, they have stolen from God. They have violated the highest level of violation that you can do in terms of stealing. And the whole family is in on it.

And so they are executed. And that is called purging, right? They were purged from the land. The evil was taken away. And as a result, now they’re able to go back to Ai. And now they seek God and say, what is it you want to do? Now they follow. So they seek God. They listen, they obey, and they get to watch what happens as they want a complete victory now.

They have to go to overtime, but they win in overtime at Ai.

[00:16:49] Stephanie: And then they rededicate themselves to that core proposition we were talking about.

Then do you want to do you want to go over to the parallel of Gibeon?

[00:17:01] Marcus: We talked about chiastically how the story of Ai and Gibeon are parallel because both of them are inferior groups that they didn’t think they needed to seek God’s advice.

They just handled it now with Gibeon. They came disguising themselves as if they were from a distant country and they made a covenant with Israel. Now Israel had been specifically forbidden from making covenants with the local people. And so these folks disguised themselves. Now to understand fully the impact of this, you got to think of it in modern terms. Right now Israel has a lot of enemies like Hamas and Hezbollah who don’t want them to exist.

And you can imagine if there was one of them that pivoted and said, you know what, we’re going to go make an alliance with Israel. Like all of the others were like, no, no, no, no. And they would attack them. You know, not just would they be upset with Israel now they’d be upset with whoever reversed policy and became friends.

And so that’s what happened with Gibeon. The rest of the Canaanite nations declared war on them and said, no, we cannot have anybody defecting and befriending Israel. So five kings formed an alliance and attacked Gibeon. Israel is now in alliance with Gibeon and they have to come to their rescue and they find themselves in a battle.

Joshua does seek the Lord this time. He does obey and they are winning the battle. And this is that famous battle where Josh was like, I’m running out of time. We can get a complete victory if we just have more time. And he prays that the sun stands still. And it does. And God gives him a complete victory.

And so this is that famous battle where the sun stands still.

[00:18:46] Stephanie: And I just find it fascinating in that context that God shows up to honor the covenant that Israel has made and to help Israel, even though they shouldn’t have made that covenant in the first place. But he still redeems the situation.

And they were operating on the second part of that with SLOW, just like we saw with Ai that they fumble it in the beginning and then they remember to seek God and do things his way and things work out. So in both cases, God was merciful and very good. All right.

Do you want to get to Hatsor?

[00:19:26] Marcus: Yeah. So Hatsor is his most famous battle nobody’s ever heard of. The city of Hatsor is located north of the sea of Galilee along a little body of water called Lake Merrim, and it was the capital city of a large coalition of kingdoms and throughout many centuries. It was an important city that was often the royal city over a large a large group of people in Joshua’s day, it was probably the largest city in Canaan.

It was much larger. Archaeology has shown us it was much larger than Jericho. And in this case, as with Jericho, Joshua stopped. He sought the Lord, he listened, he obeyed, and they won a complete and total victory over the city. In fact, it’s told that the city was set on fire and it was not rebuilt for a long time afterwards.

Now, interestingly, in Judges, Deborah ends up fighting the same city. That famous story also involves this city. So it does get rebuilt and it does once again become an important capital city, which just tells you how important it was. So we get the parallel big battles with Jericho, big battles with Hatsor, but because they seek the Lord, they listen, they obey, they get decisive victories.

[00:20:42] Stephanie: Very good. So then let’s move into a little bit of application – implications for our healing journey or even just as we’re studying scripture and practicing our own SLOW, what can we learn?

[00:20:54] Marcus: So one of the lessons we learn is that God is a God of redemption, that we can make mistakes and it isn’t the end of the world.

In my own journey I often struggled with anxiety and I realized that underneath the anxiety was shame. Like when I would mess up and I knew it was my fault I felt like I couldn’t count on God to come through to take care of me after all I deserved, you know, where I’ve made my own bed, it’s time to lay in it, kind of thing.

And it’s not that there aren’t consequences to behavior, but for us as Christians, our story is never a story of ruin. It is always a story of redemption. And that’s an important lesson that we take from here as well. Whether it’s Rahab or whether it was the messing up with Achan and Ai or what happened with Gibeon, God didn’t abandon his people.

It wasn’t the end of the story. There were consequences, but he still came through for them.

[00:21:49] Stephanie: Mm hmm. Yeah, that’s really good. And then I know you’ve also talked about just the “duh factor.” When we’re reading the scriptures and you see these patterns over and over again, you see the models enacted and you get to the point when you’re reading the Bible and something happens and you’re like, well duh, what did you think was gonna happen?

[00:22:11] Marcus: Exactly. I have a whole lesson actually. Called the Duh Factor and it’s what happens when you read the Bible long enough and you see people start to do something and you’re like, What are they thinking? Don’t they know that? Why are they doing this? Why would they go worship the Baals? Why would they do that? And you find yourself going well, duh, what did they think was going to happen?

So that’s the Duh factor and that means that you’re reading the Bible correctly, right? The Bible is trying to get you to begin to internalize this feeling like there’s a right way to live life and if we live life that way, we can expect God to bless. It doesn’t mean there won’t be battles, but there are victories in these battles.

And so Yeah, we call that the Duh Factor. It’s like gold. What did you think was gonna happen?

[00:23:01] Stephanie: Yeah, that’s why it’s so important to stay in it so you can recognize the patterns and see it and build up that Duh factor.

[00:23:07] Marcus: It’s why biblical meditation is so important.

[00:23:09] Stephanie: Exactly. And then another lesson that you and I have talked about is this idea of competency and prayer life scales and how you see when people think, Oh, I’ve got this.

Been here, done that and I’ll just do it my way or lean on my own accumulative knowledge and understanding or strength.

[00:23:33] Marcus: It reminds me of when I was at a banquet once I heard Bruce Wilkinson speaking back when he was the president of Walk through the Bible and he had just written the Prayer of Jabez.

And he was talking about how common it was for ministers, when they first get into the ministry, they don’t have much competence. They don’t have a lot of experience. They’re praying over everything. They’re just, you know, God, please make this sermon work. Please God, give me what I need for this to happen.

And they’re there. So they’re high on intimacy with God. They’re low on competence. But as you spend decades in ministry, your competence goes up. You know how to do this. You can prep a sermon pretty easily. It’s like clockwork. You know how to do it. You know what it’s going to take.

You go through it. In all aspects of ministry, this can begin to happen where you don’t rely on God. And so what happens is you stop practicing SLOW. You’re not seeking God. You’re not stopping. You’re not listening. You’re not going through that process. And not only does it affect the success of what’s going on, but it’s a great recipe for burnout because if I am relying on my own competence and I am not seeking God on a regular basis, I am going to burn out because I’m trying to do ministry in my own strength.

It’s not a good recipe.

[00:24:53] Stephanie: Yeah, that is a good word, a good challenge. And next episode, we’re going to be wrapping up the whole series. Do you have any final thoughts you want to leave us with?

[00:25:06] Marcus: Well, you know, I do think that the core idea of these case studies is that the Bible often does this.

We see it again in Chronicles. We see it in other places where it’ll give us a thesis and then it’ll give us case studies to prove the thesis. And in the book of Joshua, that thesis is you need to meditate on God’s word. You need to obey and watch what happens. So we talk about SLOW.

I stop, I seek, I listen, I obey, I watch. And then we get to see. And when you put it into practice, no matter how big the battle, no matter how big the enemy, you can trust God to come through.

[00:25:41] Stephanie: Huzzah! Very good. Thank you. Thanks for joining us on the trail today. Did you like this episode? Would you like more people to see it?

This is the part where I ask you to comment, subscribe, share with a friend. And do you love this channel? One of the best ways that you can support us is by becoming a Deeper Walk trailblazer. Thanks again. We’ll see you back on the trail next week.