Domesticated Religion

 

 At this time I am reading through the book of Joshua in my personal devotions. Just today I read in chapter 10 about the heroic and intensely masculine actions taken by Joshua and the Israelites. To set the context, in chapter nine we read about the failure of Joshua and the Israelite leaders to bring a matter to God before joining into a covenant of peace with the Gibeonites, who acted deceitfully towards the Israelites due to the very real and relevant fear of their people getting wiped out by the military campaigns by the Israelites against the peoples of the land of Canaan. The Israelites determined with only their eyes and their ears whether the Gibeonites were a people from far away as they stated, or if they were a nearby people acting to save their own skins. The Israelites failed to inquire of God in this matter and they were deceived.

Upon discovery of the deceit, of course, Israel was angry, but Joshua was determined that they would not break the covenant that they had made, even though it had been negotiated in bad faith by the Gibeonites. This was a noble move. But the Gibeonites did not entirely escape the consequences of their deceit; Joshua told them that from that time forth, they were to be the servants of the Israelites, cutting wood and drawing water for the needs of the people of Israel.

We pick up the story in chapter 10 where we read that five kings allied themselves to take their own revenge on the the people of Gibeon for allying themselves with the "invading" Israelites. When I read this story, my first inclination is that Gibeon deserved to be attacked as a consequence for their deceit, and one might think that Joshua would have felt the same way. But when Gibeon sent men to Joshua to seek defensive assistance from them, instead of leaving the Gibeonites to their own defence, Joshua did the honourable thing and went to their assistance. This was also a logical decision since the Gibeonites were now the servants of the Israelites and thereby fell under the protection of the Israelites as their possession. If the Israelites would not or could not defend their own property, then they would become targets of attack from the other nations. But there is also the simple matter of stewardship over that which is yours. We are called to take care of the things and people that belong to us.

I do wonder what Joshua first thought when he received word of the attack on Gibeon though. Did he think the same way that I did, that the Gibeonites deserved to get annihilated for their deceit, or did he immediately recognize his responsibility to these people? We don't see any mention of Joshua taking this to the Lord before he decided to go to their assistance, but I have to think that Joshua must have learned a lesson from his first dealings with the Gibeonites in regards to taking these things to God first. We do see that God tells Joshua that He has already given all of these five kings and their warriors into the hands of the Israelites, but this appears to be told to Joshua when he has already decided and left to go to battle.

Now I want to interject a couple of thoughts that have occurred to me as I have been writing this. My first thought is this; it is very likely that once Israel had discovered the deception of the Gibeonites, they probably came against them and largely disarmed them in order to dissuade them from taking up arms against their new masters. This will have left the Gibeonites unable to mount a defence of their own, which would make Joshua even more liable for the defence of a people that he has disarmed. My second thought is in regards to the sequence of Joshua's actions and God's response. Sometimes God will wait for us to act in faith before He reassures us of the outcome of our actions. Assuming that Joshua had disarmed the Gibeonites leaving them subject to the protection of the Israelites, and assuming that the narrative of the story does actually indicate that Joshua acted first and received the confirmation of success later, God may have been either testing or reinforcing the protective nature of the Israelite people over those that they are conquering, and having seen their acceptance of their responsibilities, He then blesses their actions and assures them of their success.

Now as we continue our examination of the happenings that we read about in this chapter, we see some amazing things, which I believe God gave provision for in order to show His support of Israel as well as to instill fear into the hearts of the remaining nations of Canaan whom the Israelites were to later engage in battle.

First, we see that Joshua uses the element of surprise in that he and his men march all night in order to reach Gibeon as fast as possible, but then they immediately attack. These men will have begun their previous day as they would any other day, tending to their livestock and their families and their tents, as well as possibly maintaining their battle gear which was already seeing quite a bit of use. Then they are called to prepare for marching and battle, they march all night, and they launch immediately into fierce conflict against the armies of five enemy kings. I think of myself and how I would feel even by the time that I was called to engage in battle. I will have spent my day taking care of that which was mine until the time of the call to battle. Then I had to gather up my weapons and supplies, see to the needs of my family for the near future and then march all night. You can imagine the exhaustion that these men must have been feeling by the time they spotted the enemy. But then they had to fight for their lives!

There are certain aspects that would kick in right away, the first one would be namely the creation of adrenaline as the battle began, which would temporarily reinvigorate the soldiers as they entered the battle. There was also the assurance that Joshua would have shared with his warriors that the battle had already been given to them by the hand of their God. On top of this, I imagine that the armies of the five kings were astonished and frightened at the prospect of dealing with the Israelites so soon and to see them suddenly appear faster than they would have anticipated and ready and eager to do battle must have put fear of these new and unexpected opponents into their hearts. These three things would have helped the men immensely, but they weren't expecting what was to come.

If we look carefully at the text of verse 10, we read, "And the Lord confounded them [the five kings' armies] before Israel, and He slew them with a great slaughter at Gibeon, and pursued them..., and struck them as far as Azekah and Makkedah." It actually appears that God did the fighting, and as we read on, it seems that Israel was only responsible for the mop-up.

In verse eleven of chapter 10, we read of God's direct and incredible intervention in the battle. While the attackers of Gibeon were fleeing before God, He attacked them with large stones that He threw at them from heaven! In fact, in addition to the damage that God had already inflicted on the armies by "His own hand "at Gibeon" (v. 10), He then cut off their escape by hurling hailstones at them, large enough to kill them! Joshua 10:11b says that, "there were more who died from the hailstones than those whom the sons of Israel killed with the sword." But God still was not finished!

God's Spirit must have inspired Joshua to call out to the sun and the moon to stop their progress across the sky and to stay in place in order to add their support to the uproot of God's enemies. In verse 13 we read that the sun stopped in its place and did not continue on its route for about a whole day. In the meantime, God must have strengthened and invigorated the soldiers of Israel to maintain the pursuit of the Amorites throughout the time of the battle. That means that they spent one day as they normally would up to the point of preparing for battle, then they marched all night just to start fighting immediately upon meeting their enemy, and they fought for that whole day plus another day in unbroken sunlight! What an incredible feat of endurance, undoubtedly enable by the provisional powers of God!

Besides this, the warriors found the kings of the Amorites hiding in a cave in the midst of the pursuit of their armies. These warriors had the wherewithal to withdraw their hand from killing these kings outright and, at Joshua's command, they closed the kings in their cave with large stones in order to hold them there until the armies had been dealt with, after which they removed the kings, displayed their power over the kings by placing their feet on the kings' necks, and then killed them and displayed the kings' bodies before disposing of them in the same cave in which they had hidden.

Again, I have spent more time and characters on the exploits of the Israelites than I had intended to, but I needed to lay all of this out in order to draw a contrast between what we read about then and what we are witnessing now, but here is where it can get a little hairy, especially for those of a more sensitive nature.

We see here that about four to five thousand years ago, we read of men being men. They were decisive. They were bold. They were aggressive in the protection of that which was theirs. As men, we should be reading the stories in this chapter and have pride in what these God-fearing men accomplished in God's name.

So what happened?

I know that times have changed and I also recognize that God was using the Israelites to mete out His justice on the people of Canaan, whose sins were heaped up to the heavens and whose time for recompense had come. God tells Abram in Genesis 15:16b "for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete.", and this is at least partly why the land of Canaan was not given to Abram as his inheritance. Since God allowed Joshua to lead Israel into Canaan and to capture it, we can assume that the time for the sins of the Canaanites to be piled up has been completed, and that God is now asserting His righteousness on the world as only He could. So this was a different time and different circumstances than what we face in the world today.

I also believe that under the New Covenant, immediate judgment for sins is not to come at the hands of men in the same ways that it was expected in the Old Covenant, but I wonder if our modern religious ideals have made men weak and domesticated.

I have been watching for several years now what has been happening in Europe and Great Britain. The so-called "Arab Spring" of 2010 started a mass migration of Muslims into Europe, and this migration has been composed largely of young, military aged men who arrive without women or children in tow. This has had many level headed Christians wondering where the women are and what is the purpose of this migration. They cannot all be refugees if only the men are leaving their countries. The only conclusion that I can come up with is that this is a slow and insipid invasion. These men are accumulating in numbers in what have been historically, at least nominally christian countries. They gather in communities and push the native Europeans out by way of intimidation, filth and violence. These men coalesce into groups that then venture out into the general population and act to intimidate and attack the native Europeans that have not yet fled.

These men almost never travel alone. In this way they are able to intimidate the European people who have felt safe to travel alone in their own countries for centuries. These Muslim invaders will then also attack in groups, usually targeting lone individuals, especially "christian" women, and they taunt, abuse and even rape these women openly in the streets. They face no consequences because the governments have opened the borders to these people and have foisted "multiculturalism' on their own people to the point that even for police to intervene is viewed and even decried as "racist"! In short, these "christian" nations have allowed themselves to be invaded by Muslim men intent on conquering the infidels, but not through bravery and weapons and warfare; they will do it through intimidation, fear, sexual conquest and out-breeding the "christians" by impregnating their own women, and all of this is enabled by weak-willed men who do nothing about it except to run to the police. And these police do nothing about it because they have been ordered by their superiors to stand down! 

I have to wonder where the men are who are the fathers, brothers, uncles and cousins to these women that are getting raped. How can they stand by and watch the police do nothing, and then do nothing themselves? I understand that there would be legal consequences to taking action for themselves, since the police are all to eager to charge those who do anything against those poor migrants, but when is enough enough? Where are the men who should be defending or avenging the violence on their own people? This is the result of domesticated religion!

Germany and Great Britain have all but fallen to Muslim marauders, and the people sit back and watch it happening. There are literal no-go-zones in these countries where the police do not enter and the government has ceded any and all control over these areas because they are overrun with Muslims. Not only are these governments allowing this to happen, they are bankrolling it with tax payer funded immigrant and "refugee" support programs, which provide money, housing and cell phones to these invaders when the native population is suffering and struggling to provide the basic needs that their own families have.

We see the same thing happening in the United States, and to a slightly lesser degree in Canada as well, with the wide open southern American border and even with the lax immigration policies of the Canadian Liberal government, which lets people enter Canada under dubious circumstances who then either mooch their survival off the Canadian tax payers or illegally enter the United States through our porous shared border, where the American welfare state has been set up to provide an easier existence to unproductive migrants than what hard working Americans are able to achieve.

We are far past the point where men need to stand up and defend what God has given us! Have you not noticed that violent crimes are rising across the entire developed world? Have you not noticed that the names and even the nationalities of these violent perpetrators, when they are caught at all, are being withheld from the reports of the violence? This is intentional!! Our handlers don't want us to rise up and react to the invasion. This is an invasion of civilized countries planned by people who need the civilizations to collapse into chaos so that they can implement severe control mechanisms that their own people will eventually plead for. People will plead for their own enslavement in order to return to some semblance of peace and order that they used to have when they were governed under Christian ideals, which was granted to them by God when their forefathers actually recognized God's sovereignty and worshipped Him. Now we have belligerent and pagan populations that either don't think about God or regard Him as weak and worthless, so God is allowing our civilizations to be overrun by heathens who seek our enslavement or destruction. This is our punishment. 

God used the Israelites, as God-fearing people, to punish the godless people of Canaan. God is now using the godless pagans to punish what had formerly been God-fearing people for abandoning Him, as He has done in the past, and we have become too domesticated to stand up and push back against the politicians and bureaucrats who have foisted this destruction on us by their godless policies. And right now the fight is against cowardly politicians and not yet emboldened invaders.

I think Europe is almost lost, though there are small pockets of resistance developing here and there, but the resistance is merely political and may not achieve the necessary reversal without what is currently viewed as "racist" policies of mass deportation.  

I think America is approaching the point of no return and had they not rejected the woke left ideologies in their latest elections, I think the slide to destruction would have accelerated. Canada is on the verge of turning the page on woke ideology as soon as we can get our next election, but political leaders are not the solution; they have been the nexus of the problem, and though we may receive a short reprieve through the North American elections, this will not be a permanent solution, as society will eventually discard the wisdom of christian conservatives again, due to the desire for "progress", and other policies will be implemented by other newly elected governments in the future.

We don't yet have to fight for our very lives in North America. We still have the opportunity to stand up and be decisive, be bold and be aggressive in the protection of that which God has given us. For now, we still have the option of acting in the political sphere to save the countries and the values that we love, but we must act! We must be decisive, bold and aggressive! We must return to God and seek His direction for what we must do.

And most of all, we must abandon the domesticated religion of our churches and embrace the masculinity that God has endowed His followers with. It's there. Stop hiding behind your Bibles! We are called to more!

As always, your comments and feedback are always welcome.