Ripple Effect

Your future, it can seem mysterious and frightening, but there's good news. God has a promised land for you to move into, courageously and fearlessly. And the book of Joshua shows you how it can happen. How to live your promised land life. Well, good morning, everybody. How's it going? It's great to have you here in church today. My name is René, I'm one of the pastors here at Twin Lakes Church. I wanna invite you to take these out of your bulletins. If you're joining us live in the auditorium, these are the sermon notes, and these will help you follow along with the message, and it'll give you something to take home too. And if you're watching online or over in venue, or you're watching on our TLC app, the iPhone or Android app, you can download the notes as well, so you can get them however you are joining us today.

Promised Land Living is what we call our series in the book of Joshua. And Joshua is a book from 3,400 years ago. This is a very ancient book of the Bible, 1,400 years even before Jesus Christ and the New Testament. And it is a fascinating ancient book about how the children of Israel, the very early Israelites got set free from slavery, and then they got to go through the desert into their promised land, which was the land of Canaan, where modern day Israel is today. And it is full of all kinds of lessons and principles for you and I to apply to our lives as we walk into the Promised Land life that God has for us.

And specifically this morning, I wanna talk about what I call the ripple effect. Now what's the ripple effect? Well, you know how when you drop a pebble in a pond, it makes ripples, right? And you and I, in our life, we make ripples. Our actions, our attitudes, our words, even our moods create ripples in our world all around us. Sometimes they're ripples for good, and sometimes they're ripples for bad. But the big idea for this story we're gonna look at today is that my actions never stop at me. There is always a ripple effect. Even your mood has a ripple effect.

I was just reading this week some fascinating work that's being done at Harvard University. There's a researcher there, Sean Acor, and in his work, he studies how, as he puts it, we are influencing people literally all the time as we walk through our day. In fact, you don't know this, but as I look at your faces as I preach, you are influencing me because when I look down and I see people smiling or like, see people looking at me, then that kind of subtly, I don't even think about it consciously, but it motivates me to kinda preach better. And then when I see people smiling more, I preach better. So you're influencing me and then I'm influencing you, and that's just one example of the ripple effects that go around all the time.

For example, in this Harvard research, they have shown again and again through fascinating studies that our moods affect other people. Most people feel happier when they are around happy people, for example, and the inverse is true. Grumpy people make everybody feel worse. And so the question, somebody said, sorry. And so, and so the question is not am I impacting other people with my life, it's how am I impacting other people. What kind of ripples am I making as I move through my day, as I move through my life? You are definitely making ripples, but are you making ripples that impact people for good, or are you making ripples that impact people, and I don't just mean the people you meet today. I mean, perhaps generations of people. Are you making ripples that affect them for good or for bad?

We're gonna look this morning at a fascinating, weird story in Joshua, chapters seven and eight, that shows ripple effects both in the wrong direction at first, and then how it turns around to the right direction, and I just wanna warn you about the Bible right off the bat. This is probably a story you have never heard of, even if you grew up in church, because most people sidestep this story, because we tend to gravitate toward happy stories in the Bible, especially if you grew up in Sunday, how many of you grew up going to Sunday school when you were little kids? You know, the story we're gonna look at today is a story about a guy named Aiken, A-C-H-A-N, and how he basically corrupts the morale of an entire nation, and he stops the forward momentum of the whole Promised Land movement for the people of Israel by one small, stupid act of his, and that is not the stuff of Sunday school songs.

When we teach kids songs in Sunday school, we like stories like Joshua and the wall came down, you know, and David, and he slew Goliath, and Jesus, and he walked on the water. No Sunday school class has ever learned a song like, you know, "We think of Aiken's corruption and the subsequent sinful eruption." No kids ever sing that, unless you grew up in a very, very weird Sunday school. But this strange little story survived, you could put it, the final edits of the book of Joshua. It stayed in there for a reason, and so I'm not gonna sidestep it, because while not everything in this story applies to us today, a lot of the stuff in there, the warfare and so on, was for a particular point in history 3,400 years ago, but it has lessons. And ultimately, if you read all the way to the end, a very positive lesson, but you have to stay with me and stay with me all the way to the end.

So I'm just warning you here, brace yourself. Are you ready for this? Are you ready for a story that at times will be a little bit off-putting? If you stay with it all the way through, you're gonna hear a lesson that just might change your life for real, so let's plunge in. The very end of Joshua chapter six, the very last verse is where I wanna start. It says, "So the Lord was with Joshua, and his fame spread throughout the land." Now what is this referring to? Again, last verse of chapter six. So what has happened in all the previous six chapters of the book of Joshua so far? Quick recap, the Israelites had been slaves for 400 years in Egypt, endured horrible stuff, but they're set free by God's power. He parts the Red Sea, it ends up drowning the best of the Egyptian army, and they're set free by his power, and they go through the desert, and after a little 40-year detour, they go into their ancestral homeland, which God promised them one day, you'll get back to it, and they do.

And in fact, they're right on the border of the Promised Land, which is the Jordan River. It's at flood stage, but God dries up the river so that they can get across, and then God brings down the walls of Jericho, which was a fortress city guarding the valley that went into the land of Canaan, which was the Promised Land. So Joshua and his crew must have felt at this point like, man, we are on a roll. It was about a week, only about a week, that passed between they crossed the Jordan River and they worshiped the Lord, and then Jericho's walls fall, and so for that week, man, they just had one victory after another, but then, a couple of very small decisions have a ripple effect that almost causes all the wheels to come off.

What we're gonna look at today is really, it's the nadir of the Book of Joshua. It is when the people, morale-wise and morality-wise, just bottom out, but there's lessons to learn from the times when other people bottom out because we all have these experiences in our lives. So go back to that verse, the last verse of Joshua chapter six, and if you got your pencil or pen out and you're taking notes, circle the word fame, because would you agree with this? There can be a problem with fame, right? Fame, if you're not careful, can go to your head, right? Fame can make you cocky. Fame can make you overconfident. Fame can make you excuse and rationalize weird behavior, and theologians actually have a very precise technical word for this. They call it the Justin Bieber effect. No, that's not true, but if you're a Justin Bieber fan, you can feel free to email me your objections to what I just said.

But this is what you see happening here. First, you see three ripples in the wrong direction, and I'm not pointing fingers here because I've seen every one of these in my own life. Not in this exact situation, but in other situations, I've seen the same exact plot arc. Number one, jot this down, distrust leads to disobedience. Distrust leads to disobedience. The tiny little pebble dropped in the pond that leads to everything else is this attitude that they just didn't really trust God. Now, they call themselves God followers, but they really didn't trust that he knew what he was talking about. Now, let me just explain what I mean.

Let's talk about trust for just a minute. You know, we have three kids, and they're all young adults now, but when they were all still little, they used to love it when I played with them, and especially when we'd go visit some friends who had a pool or we'd go to a community swimming pool here in town, and they loved it when we played a game. And here was the game. They would come up to me and I'd be kind of on the edge of the pool, and I would, I don't know why they liked this, but I would pretend I was angry with them, and I would say, "I have just about had enough of you!" And I would toss them in a high arc into the air, and they'd fly through kicking, "Ah!" and they'd splash down into the pool. Then they'd swim over at me, do it again, Daddy, do it again, do it again. And I'd lift them up, "I have just about had enough of you!" And I'd launch them again and they'd splash them. I don't know what the other parents thought I was doing. Called Child Protective Services on me or something, but the kids would come back, they would do this for an hour, until finally at the end I said, "I have had enough of you," and I threw them the other direction. No, that wasn't true. That's not true.

But they would come up to me time after time after time, and they never asked me, "Are you really mad at me?" They knew I wasn't, of course. They never asked me, "Are you going to throw us the wrong direction and hurt us?" They never asked me, "Dad, have you thought this through?" They never asked me those questions. And it was a joy for me because you know, what that was was an act of trust on their part. The question is, do we have absolute 100% trust in our father? Because everything good in every relationship starts with trust. And it's the same thing with your relationship with God. Jesus said, "The work of God is this, believe in the one he has sent." That's really all God asks of us, is to just trust him. Trust that he knows what he's talking about. Trust that he knows what he's doing.

But what you see here is even after all they just experienced in the previous week, they really don't trust God when he tells them to stay away from certain things. So let's look at the first verse of chapter one. Here's that horrible word, but, but. The Israelites were what? Unfaithful in regard to the devoted things. Achan, here's our villain, but honestly, I think he was just acting out an attitude, as we'll see, was kind of part of the people and part of the army. Achan of the tribe of Judah took some of the devoted things. And so the Lord's anger burned against Israel. And if you're like most people, you're going, "What does that mean? He took some of the devoted things." Here's what this is all about.

When God gave Joshua instructions about how to take the fortress of Jericho, he stated specifically that the entire city and everything in it was under what was called the ban. And that's translated here as the devoted things. He said, "I want you to consider all the food, all the grain, all the clothes, all the gold, all the silver, I want you to consider those things devoted to me and you are banned from taking any of them as loot." God says, "Even though you're conquering the city of Jericho, if you take those things, that would be stealing. I want you to leave all those things there." Why? Well, God wanted to make something very clear to the on-looking world. This conquest was unlike any other warfare the world had ever seen. This was not to be about plunder. This was about God's promise. This was not about treasure. This was about the territory of the promised land.

And so he says, "Leave all the stuff. Do not steal it. Do not enrich yourself through this war because this war is not for you to enrich yourself. It's for the people of God to be established in this territory." And archeology backs up the fact that Israel actually, a lot of them, followed God's command. This is why archeologists studying, for example, the ruins of Jericho have found entire jars full of grain untouched, treasure hoards of valuable Egyptian jewelry and gold and silver just left there in the ruins. And you ask yourself, "Why would somebody not plunder this if they're attacking the city?" Well, because God told them not to. But there was a second reason that I believe God told them not to take the valuables.

Last November, and I mean last November, November 2016, archeologists digging in Israel found a clay pot buried underneath the ground. And inside was a 3,600-year-old cache of Canaanite gold and silver. And what's interesting is it all had to do with their gods. These are some of the items that were found last November. There's an Egyptian scarab, and that's the goddess Isis, who was their goddess of fertility, and that's the god Sin, who was their god of the moon. These were the two main gods the Canaanites worshipped, and there's some other objects that they found. They were all in some way related to their religion, to their idolatry. And one of the reasons God did not want the Israelites to plunder any of this loot was he did not want the Canaanite religious system to become a part of the Israelite camp.

He says, "I don't want you to touch any of these. Why not?" We're gonna touch on this later in this series, but the Canaanite religion had devolved into one of the most oppressive systems ever known. A few years ago, an archeologist named John Hennessy was digging near the Amman Jordan Airport, and he uncovered a Canaanite temple from right around the time of Joshua, and he found the central altar of the temple. And all around the altar, where people would sacrifice things, he found hundreds of bone fragments. Now, that's not unusual, because of course, in those days, people would sacrifice animals on these altars, but these weren't animal bones. They were bones of human infants that had been burned. Archeology confirming what many ancient sources describe, not just the Bible, but there's ancient Egyptian sources, very ancient Greek sources that describe the Canaanites and their descendants as practicing just what all the other ancient people who surrounded them thought was vile, and that was child sacrifice.

They would literally put children on the metal arms of their idols, and they would roll down into the belly of the beast, which was a furnace. It was just horrific stuff. And in the Bible, God says he's actually punishing the Canaanites for this evil. This is why he's bringing in the Israelite army, and he does not want, of course, he does not want any part of this system in the Israelite camp. So he says, "Do not take any of their stuff." But one of the Israelites' soldiers sees some really nice stuff, kind of like this stuff, and more stuff, and some super sweet clothes too. And he decides to sneak away with it, and he hides it, because he does not trust that God really knows what he's talking about when God said, "Don't take that stuff." We see later in the Bible that more Israelites took more stuff, and in fact, the Israelites end up, unbelievably, they end up practicing that very same horrible religion, and then they're judged in the same way by foreign invasions, but God says, "I don't want it to infect you." But this soldier and others did not trust that God knew what he was talking about, and so he disobeyed, and that's actually what happens to you and me too.

We don't trust God when he says, "Don't bring that into your life, because if you do, it will lead to idolatry and other bad things." And we go, "I don't really trust that he knows what he's talking about." And that leads to the ripple of disobedience, and that leads to another ripple, and number two, disobedience leads to defeat. Disobedience leads to defeat, and what happened for the army was, they just have this attitude. Aiken was the guy who demonstrated it most clearly, but really everybody had this prideful, self-centered attitude. They get very cocky. They're like, "Hey, we just decimated Jericho," even though it had nothing to do with them, and they're just like, "Next city, bring it on!" Verse two, chapter seven. Now Joshua sent men from Jericho to Ai, and he told them, "Go up and spy out the region." Notice he does not pray. He doesn't ask God why. Well, Ai was up in the ravine behind Jericho, and it was just a tiny little fortress. It was much smaller than Jericho. In fact, the word Ai means pile of rubble. That's what Ai means. Compared to Jericho, Ai was just a pile of rubble.

So next verse, when the spies returned to Joshua, they said, "Pfft, not all the army will have to go up to Ai." Said two or three thousand men to take it. Don't weary the whole army. Only a few people live there. Now what do you think happens next? If I were Dr. Seuss, I was thinking about this, 'cause we celebrated his birthday, I would say, the spies on Ai said, "Don't even try. No one will die." But that was a lie, my oh my. Because look what happens, starting in verse four. But they were routed by the men of Ai who killed about, how many? 36 of them. Remember that number. Circle it, underline it, 'cause that's kind of important later on. They chased the Israelites from the city gate as far as the stone quarry. So the Israelites get proud, they start to live in their own strength, and they go down, and that's so much like our spiritual lives, isn't it? I get proud, you know, of where I'm at. Proud of where I've gone spiritually, and I start trying to figure out life on my own strength, and I flop. And that's what happens with all these ripple effects here.

And then number three, defeat leads to despair. They just start spiraling down to, that's it. This is all hopeless, starting at the end of verse five. At this, the hearts of the people melted in fear, and Joshua tore his clothes and fell face down on the ground before the Ark of the Lord, remaining there until evening, and in fact, the elders of Israel did the same. They're following his lead, ripple effect, and they're sprinkling dust on their heads, and they do this all day long, and now it's nighttime. And let me ask you this, when you fail, does that failure look better at night? No, it's at night when you start what somebody called catastrophizing. And everything that was bad enough in the daytime just looks worse at night, and this is when Joshua prays a prayer to God that's recorded in the next few verses, and then in this prayer, you see the progression of despair, and it's almost humorous, in a way, how he exaggerates this first, there's questioning God.

He says, "God, why did you ever bring this people across the Jordan to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites to destroy us? God, why one setback of their own making?" And now it's all God's fault. You ever do that? You do? But let me ask you a question before we move on. Have you ever noticed that when you ask God why, you don't usually get an answer to that question? Because that's actually kind of an unhelpful question. Is the answer to why really gonna help you that much? It's not gonna change the situation at all, even if you know why. But what you do get an answer to is what next? That is a helpful question. All right, now this happened. What would be the best thing to do next? You can always find an answer to that question, as you'll see in a minute.

Then we often move, along with Joshua, to regretting choices we made. Joshua says, "Oh, if only we had been content to stay on the other side of the Jordan." Ever get a case of the if-onlies? You know what I mean? If only I turned left instead of right. If only I'd done this instead of that. If only I hadn't eaten that second donut at church today. And then if only I hadn't eaten that third donut at church today, and it just goes on. If only, that's only two words, but it is a huge, huge cause of despair. But it doesn't make any sense because you can't go back into time and change some decision you made. That's impossible. You can only move forward. But Joshua has a bad case of the if-onlies, and then he spirals down to exaggerating failure. And I want you to look very carefully at this.

He says, "Israel has been routed." The country has been routed. Now, is that true? How many people died again in the battle? 36. Now, that is horrible, of course, for those 36 people and their families. But there were literally millions of people in Israel at this point. 36 people is not a rout of your entire country, but in the middle of the night, following a failure, we all have a tendency to catastrophize. And that's why finally he moves to predicting disaster. He says, "They're gonna surround us, and they are going to wipe out our name." And that means our memory. He says, "The memory of Israel is gonna be wiped out. Of all history, nobody will ever remember this." 3,400 years ago, was he right? No, of course he wasn't right. The fact that we're remembering him and talking about this proves he wasn't right, but he's gotten it all out of perspective. And you and I can do this all the time, don't you?

This is the secondary temptation of any failure. You probably ran through these things on this bullet point list of four when you flunked that test, or when you dropped out of school, or when your marriage started to go south, or when you lost that job, or when you failed that project, or when you faced that challenge, or especially when you yielded to that temptation. Because this is what happens. Before the sin, we minimize the sin. After the sin, we exaggerate the sin. That's the secondary temptation of every sin, to think, "I am doomed. I am doomed to failure at anything ever. I may as well just quit my job, or quit my marriage, or quit this ministry, or quit the whole Christian life." Despair's conclusion is my failure is final. And this can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because what happens is you bench yourself, and you start to sabotage yourself.

And it's all a ripple effect that starts with not trusting God. Now, in case you're going, "Man, you're right, René, the story's kind of a bummer, keep reading." Because it starts to take a U-turn up ahead when you start seeing three ripples in the right direction. And you can apply these to your own life too. This is good news. Number one, despair can lead to diagnosis, right? When you hit bottom, what happens is you can go, "Okay, why did this happen, and what can I learn?" I love verse 10. I love, love, love verse 10. Where, remember what Joshua's doing. And then the Lord said to Joshua, "Stand up, what are you doing down on your face?" Here's a question for you. Do you ever imagine that when you make a mistake, God actually wants you to bench yourself and feel miserable and tear your clothes and face down, keep saying, "I'm such an idiot." Do you ever feel like God wants you to do that? I do.

But look at what God says when Joshua does that. Stand up. What are you doing down on your face? And then next he says, "Israelists sinned. They have violated my covenant, which I commanded them to keep. They have taken some of the devoted things. They have stolen, and they have lied, and they have put them with their own possessions, and you cannot stand against your enemies until you remove them." God cuts right to diagnosis. Listen carefully. If you're wired the way I'm wired, not everybody is, but if you're wired the way I'm wired, you can think, you can imagine that repenting from something I did that was stupid from some sin, that repenting means repeating to God over and over again, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." And repeating to yourself, "I'm so stupid, I'm so stupid, I'm so stupid, I'm so stupid."

And God goes, "Get up, what are you doing on your face?" Because what that does is just, listen, it feeds the self-destructive cycle. Because you're making yourself miserable, and what happens is you end up justifying more self-medication with your self-destructive behavior of choice, because A, it kind of relieves the misery, and B, I convince myself I could never change anyway. And so you yell at your kids more, or you drink more, or you go out and shop for things you can't afford, or you look at pornography, or whatever it is that your weakness is, because you feel miserable, and at least that's gonna make you feel a little bit better, kind of let it out, and you convince yourself, "I'm such a stupid idiot, I can't change anyway." So boom, you explode. Somebody said, "It is extremely difficult to get up for life when you're down on yourself." And God knows that, so he says, "Get up." God doesn't want you miserable, he wants you malleable.

He wants you willing to change. Listen, repentance is not about feeling sorry, it's about taking action. So you feel horrible about something that you do, "Okay, you feel horrible, so now what are you gonna do about it?" Or more accurately, "When are you gonna let go and let God deal with it?" And for some of you, that means coming to our recovery groups on Monday and on Thursday nights. The point is this, don't dwell on it, deal with it. Because what happens then is this diagnosis can lead to disclosure, can lead to coming clean, it can lead to honesty, and that's what happens next in this sequence, diagnosis can lead to disclosure, coming clean.

Joshua finally confronts the man who did all this, looks him in the eye and says, "You gotta come clean." And Aitkin replied, "It is true," verse 20, "When I," now watch this, "When I saw the plunder, in the plunder, a beautiful robe from Babylonian." Now watch, doesn't it sound to you like he's trying to justify what he did, like, "Joshua, you should have seen this stuff." You would have taken it too. I saw on the robe a beautiful robe from Babylonia, and 200 shekels of silver, and a bar of gold weighing 50 shekels, well I coveted them and I took them. And now look at the three verbs in this. I saw and I coveted and I took. Are those not the ripple effects of any self-destructive behavior, of any sin, right? I saw and then I wanted it for myself, I coveted it, and then I took it, I had to have it. It all starts with I saw, I was looking at something, you know, that I shouldn't have been looking at, thinking about it.

I told some of you, our youngest son David, when he was just a little boy, we were at church some Sunday morning and some people gave him some skittles. Why people do that, I don't know, they give your kids, here's some sugar, pat them on the head, now go be a nuisance to your parents for the rest of the afternoon. So they give him some skittles and he has some skittles. We get home and we kind of roll up the top of the bag, we say that's enough skittles for a day, let's have, we can have a little bit more tomorrow and the rest of the week. And so we put it on a shelf in our entry, and David stands there and he's just like staring at it like this, probably two hours later I come back, he is standing in the same exact spot, looking at the skittles. Now I don't really think he was standing there for the whole two hours of course, although I'll never know because there he was. He's just standing there like this and I said, David, what are you doing? And I'll never forget his answer, he goes, oh, just looking at something I can't have.

Does that define what you do sometimes? Just looking at something I can't have. I don't know what your deal is, what you struggle with, but whatever it is, it is dangerous to window shop for something that you know you can't buy. You know? How many times are we just looking at something I can't have? The took doesn't happen without the look. So try to stop as early in this cycle as you can. Now, I'm gonna get to the most uncomfortable part of this story. And it not only, if it makes you uncomfortable, it's because you're made in the image of God, because as I'll show you later, this part of the story made God uncomfortable, more uncomfortable than it's going to make you. Because what happens is Achan is court-martialed, we would call it today, and he receives capital punishment for his sin.

And that's because it traces back to Joshua chapter one. You might remember the soldiers all stand before Joshua and they make a vow to Joshua starting in verse 16. Here's what they say. They say to, this is the army. And they say to Joshua, "Whatever you command, we will do. And wherever you lead, we will go. Whoever rebels against your word and does not obey it, whatever you command shall be put to death." Now, if you read chapter one, there's no evidence that Joshua asked for this strict of a vow. There's no evidence that God asked for that from the soldiers, but this is the vow the soldiers made. And in those days, this is before codes of law were common. There's no constitution. Law was the vow you made in your relationships. Thought that was law. So the soldiers have made this vow one week later. One of their own has broken this vow already. And so the sentence is capital punishment.

God says, destroy those things that he took and him. So you can kind of understand that this is a part of this court martial based on the law that they adopted. But here's the hard part. The narrative says that his family is killed. Some of the Israelites take them and stone them to death. What's unclear in the narrative is whether that was right or wrong. Because read chapter seven carefully, God said to destroy his possessions. He does not say anything about his family. And I'm not aware of any place in the Bible that calls somebody's family his possession. So there's unanswered questions here. As usual with these Bible narratives, these are not stories of perfect role models. These are stories of just real people doing their thing and we're supposed to bring our intelligence to bear and our understanding of the whole scope of scripture.

So what happened there? Was that a mob mentality against his family? I don't know because the Bible doesn't say, but what we can say, and the reason this story is in the Bible is this. Whatever the reason for his family to be killed as well, here's the point. Aiken's sin had a ripple effect on everybody he loved. That's the transferable principle. And whatever you and I do has a ripple effect on the people we love. And so we need to take our choices very seriously. We need to take our decisions very seriously because of the ripple effect. Now in case you're going, but I thought you said there was good news in this story. This is heavy. This is bumming me out. The air is thick here. I can feel it too. And so that's why I decided at this point to put up a picture of my grandson.

Because we just need to raise the temperature here just a little bit. And this is also the point where it really does turn into great news because point three is that disclosure can lead to deliverance. You see at this point, of course all the people are understandably miserable. I mean if you looked at a plot arc of the book of Joshua, this is the low point in every way. It's like, wow we had so much victory, fantastic. And then a week later, it looks like it's all just crashing and burning. Everything's a disarray. It's chaos. What have we done? Did we do the right thing? Are we recovering the right way? And then God says, listen, listen. I wanna calm everybody down here. And Joshua chapter eight verse one. Then the Lord said to Joshua, do not be afraid. Do not be discouraged. Take the whole army with you and go up and attack I. I have delivered into your hands the king and the people and the city and the land.

This is the exact thing that he said to Moses. It's the exact thing he spoke to Joshua a week before. Here God knows I gotta say it again. It's the theme phrase of the book of Joshua. Say it with me. Do not be afraid. Do not be discouraged. Someone here needs to hear that. Because someone in this room feels like, feels like the people felt in this story. You feel like I made a bad mistake or someone made a bad mistake to me. And it's chaos. All the wheels are falling off. And somebody else's bad decision or my own bad decision is, yep, René, yep, it's having ripple effects. And it's all just a catastrophe. And God wants you to hear this phrase. Say it with me again. Do not be afraid. Do not be discouraged. Why? What he's saying is your failure need not be final.

He's saying, yep, you guys messed up, but I still have plans for you. He's saying, I will still keep my promise to you. He's saying, even though you violated my command, your failure need not be final because I promise to make you a nation and I always keep all my promises. Jot this down in your notes. My failure need not be final. And the same thing is true for us as believers as was for them. In fact, watch this, watch this. His promises, if anything, are even stronger to us in the New Testament. Even when you fail, God says to you, I will never leave you nor forsake you. I still have plans for you. I'm with you always until you mess up. No, to the very end of the age. Paul says, if God is for us, who can be against us? Not the mistakes of anybody else, not even your own mistakes can stop God's plan for your life, even your own failure.

And really, here's a question that this story begs, if I can put it this bluntly. Why don't we all die for our sin? You know, the Achan did here in this story, but the Bible does say the wages of sin is death and the Bible says that we're all guilty, so why don't we all suffer that ultimate consequence? We don't suffer that because God did not want us to suffer that. We don't suffer that because God did not like what happened in this story much more than you disliked it. God hated it so much that he said, I never want anyone to have to suffer the ultimate penalty for their sin again and I will come down incarnate in Jesus Christ and I will pay the penalty so that, as Romans eight says, therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Because through Christ Jesus, the law of the spirit who gives life has set you free from those old laws, from the old law, the old covenants of sin and of death. God says, I never want anybody to have to suffer that way again and so I came to set you free and what he did for you and me on the cross has set us free from any kind of that sort of condemnation that is not for us anymore. And if you didn't like that, he doesn't like it either. So when I fail, when you fail, we need to take that sin very seriously because there are ripple effects, but don't dwell on it, deal with it. And most of all, switch your focus back to the ultimate ripple effect, which was what Jesus Christ did on the cross because the impact of that splash is going to be felt for all eternity. Drowning out all the good and bad ripples that we ever create, just swamping all of those with God's love.

So don't focus on your failures, don't focus on your mess ups, focus on the love of God, that's really the bottom line. All those ripple effects started with a lack of trusting God and so Joshua's solution is this, at the very end of chapter eight, Joshua built on Mount Ebel an altar to the Lord, the God of Israel. And then he reads everyone, the Torah, the verse five books of the Bible. Why? When I fail, I need to refocus on God and his promises, not on my sin, not on my failures, not even on my victories or my challenges. A simple focus on God starts. Starts a ripple effect to everyone I touch. So let's focus on him right now. Would you bow your heads with me, let's pray.

Lord, we just come to you with a confession today. We've all sinned. Because we forgot you. And we got scared and we did stupid things. We catastrophized late at night. And so now we refocus on you. Not on our mistakes, we're not gonna wallow in the past. If onlys, they're pointless. What we hear is your voice telling us, get up. Don't dwell on it, deal with it. And God, specifically I pray that if there's somebody here today who's coming back to you or coming to you for the first time, may they pray something like this. Lord, I wanna come to you right now confessing my need of you and receiving your sacrifice for me, taking my penalty upon yourself. And now I choose to move forward trusting in you and you alone, in Jesus' name, amen.

Amen.