(Through The Bible) – Joshua: Zac Poonen (Transcript)

Full text of Zac Poonen’s teaching on the Book of Joshua which is part of the popular series called Through The Bible.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Zac Poonen – Bible Teacher

We’ll turn to the book of Joshua. Joshua, chapter 1. We could describe this book as the book that tells us about how Israel possessed the promised land. It’s very similar to the Acts of the Apostles, because it was a new beginning and there were tremendous manifestations of power. And Joshua was a great leader, brought them into the promised land.

Just like in the Acts of the Apostles, we read about people who came into the fullness of the Spirit and came into a new beginning of a new covenant.

And we also see in the book of Judges, immediately after Joshua, how backsliding came very quickly in after the time of Joshua, which teaches us that when God’s people don’t have good leaders, backsliding enters in very quickly. And we see that as soon as the apostles died, backsliding entered in very quickly as we read in Revelation chapter 2 and chapter 3 among the churches.

So the book of Joshua is very similar to the Acts of the Apostles. And just like we learned from the Acts of the Apostles, we could learn from the book of Joshua.

See, the book of Joshua pictures God as a God of war. And sometimes we can’t understand that. But God is a God of war because He’s a God of love. He hates anything that harms His people. Just like a father would make war against the diseases that are in his son, a good doctor would make war against disease, where there are polluting influences that would defile and corrupt His people, the only way was to eliminate them.

So the land of Canaan is not a picture of heaven. Some people talk about crossing. We sing songs sometimes about crossing Jordan in death and entering Canaan. Canaan is not a picture of heaven because there are no giants in heaven to be killed. And that’s the clearest proof that Canaan is not a picture of heaven. It’s a picture of life on this earth, of an overcoming life.

Sometimes some of these songs we sing have got wrong theology in them. Canon is a description of a Spirit-filled life where the giants of sin, the lusts in our flesh, are crucified one by one. All the giants were not killed in a moment.

You know, the people of Israel had to go, cross two bits of water in their journey from Egypt to Canaan. One was the Red Sea and the other was the River Jordan. And these both speak of death. We saw in 1 Corinthians 10 that going into the Red Sea was a picture of baptism. The River Jordan is a picture of another death. That’s where John the Baptist baptized people. That’s where Jesus was baptized. And that speaks of another death.

And we need to understand these two, the spiritual meaning of this if we are to enter into the promised land ourselves.

See, the Bible speaks about the old man being crucified. Romans 6:1-6 speaks about your old man was crucified by God. We don’t crucify our old man. Romans 6 is very clear that our old man, which is this mind that wanted to sin when which we were in our unconverted days, our sinful bent of mind was crucified with Christ on the cross. It was God who did that.