Welcome to another Sunday morning. I wake up at the same time every morning, but Sunday is the day I have the most time before I need to leave to go the church. With praise band practice, I still leave early, but not as early as I start my day during the week or even on Saturday with the art market.
Today we read Joshua chapters 19-21.
Definitions matter
This is another day of verses dealing with the allotment of land to the various tribes and clans of Israel. It is hard to find a lot of meat on those bones.
I’ve been puzzled for days about how they received six towns and the nearby villages. I wandered, what is the difference between a town and a village? How does this impact the occupants of each, and in what ways are they different?
A town was a larger, more organized structure. Walls and guards fortified them. The occupants were more proper and moved intentionally. When an army would attack, they would close the walls and have guards defending the town.
The royalty lived within the town. They want us to adhere to prescribed behaviors. The royalty want us to revere them.
God wants us to worship only Him. In towns, they tried to make royalty an extension of God, though they didn’t always serve Him.
Interactions with villagers
There were courts and palaces. On certain days, villagers brought goods into town to sell and trade in the agora. They were places to gather and to be seen. Officials administered justice in the town centers.
They built towns on hilltops when possible for added protection.
Villages were the suburbs of these towns and the farming communities which were beyond those. They had little protection when advancing armies approached. Their occupants were at the mercy of the townspeople. Some might find favor and the towns might admit them until the danger passes. The approaching armies forced others to flee or die.
They had shops and taverns, brothels and inns. The working class common people lived and worked here. Some people had to go into the towns to perform their assigned duties. But, then return to their hovels to eat and sleep.
Life was hard and treacherous in the villages. The villagers were looked down upon by the townspeople. They moved about in a scurrying motion. They scurried out of sight to avoid detection.
I live outside the city of Tucson. In town, there is everything and it is accessible. People have an air of entitlement when they live in cities. They expect protection and availability of resources. You should be able to find food and entertainment options on every corner.
The larger cities I have lived in or visited don’t even require transportation, because everything is available to its inhabitants. I lived in the Presidential Towers in Chicago and they had grocery stores, restaurants, fitness centers, everything you could need, all in the one building. You could avoid going outside for days.
I live in the suburbs now, a farming community. When we first moved here, the nearest grocery store was ten miles away. Now we have many more city type luxuries, but we’ve lost that sense of community that villages always had. In cities, you may never meet your neighbors, even though there are many.
I have known most of my neighbors for thirty years.
It’s about people
Townspeople would visit the massive cathedral in those towns to be seen. If you were prominent, you would have a seat close to the vicar. This was so you could make eye contact to make sure they knew how much you were contributing to the offering pouch.
In the villages, you would gather with friends and worship God. You didn’t want to be seen by anyone other than Him.
Not that the people were more religious in the villages. But they were more pious in the towns.
The wrap up to all this talk about towns is in Joshua 21:43. “The Lord gave Israel all the land he had sworn to give their ancestors.”. (NIV)
This was a promise made to Abram. Generations had passed. The descendants of Abram moved to Egypt, and the Egyptians enslaved them. God exiled them from Egypt and the sinned. Therefore, they wandered in the desert for so long that all the original ancestors had perished.
It would be easy for these people to doubt if God would ever fulfill that promise.
The message gets lost
They saw Him lead by cloud and fire, watched the sea part and the river stand up to let them cross. It is difficult to doubt their faith. But it had been a very long time.
In grade school, we would play the game called telephone, where we would whisper something in one kid’s ear and they would pass the message to the next. By the time it got around the circle, the message had little resemblance to the original.
It would be natural for the Israelites to question the validity of what their elders would tell them.
We have this same problem today. Though we believe Jesus lived, died and rose again; we are not always positive He is coming back. He said He would. But that was a long time ago!
God is faithful
God knew all this before creating the world. When He stood in the expanse of the heavens and spoke all of this into existence, He knew how much time would pass before things would be ready for the end of days.
He gave us examples throughout the scripture of how time can pass.
Still, we can see He is faithful. He is Holy. He said He would give them the promised land, and He did. This is how we can know, not just hope, but know, He will come back.
As verse 21:45 states, “Not one of all the Lord’s good promises to Israel failed; every one was fulfilled.” (NIV)
We serve a faithful God. Though we are as unworthy as Israel, who could not even resist idols for forty days while Moses was on the mountain.
He is coming back. I believe this will be soon.
Judges chapters 1 and 2
