READING GUIDE FOR DECEMBER 27, 2024: JOSHUA 6, REVELATION 18, PSALM 131 JOSHUA 6 Perhaps the favorite tradition at Taylor University is called “Silent Night.” It is a basketball game that is always played in December on the last Friday night of the semester. Those students fortunate to win the lottery for tickets dress up in wild costumes and sit/stand with others from their dormitory wing. No one in the crowd makes the slightest noise until Taylor scores its 10th point, at which time everyone in the crowd screams and rushes onto the court. After order is restored, the game resumes. When victory is clearly in hand toward the end of the game, the crowd stands, locks arms, and sings, quite touchingly, “Silent Night.”
Although this gets Taylor on ESPN each year, it is rather mundane compared with Israel’s victory at Jericho. There are a few similarities, however. All the people march around the walled city silently once a day for six days. On the seventh day, they circle the city seven times and then the priests blow a blast from their seven trumpets of ram’s horns. (Wes Hanson owned one of these, much to Ann’s annoyance.) Then at Joshua’s signal, all the people shout, the walls collapse, and the people rush into the city. They were advised to kill all the animals and people, with the exception of Rahab’s family; save the metals to deposit into the Lord’s treasury; and not to take any items called “designated for destruction,” perhaps because of connection with false gods.
This was clearly a victory wrought by God, but all the people had to obediently play their role, which likely made little sense to them. For the most part, they did. The result was the destruction of the kind of fortified city their defeatist parents so feared: “The people who live in the land are strong, and the cities are fortified” (Num. 13:28). There is another victory God will win, and He has also given us a role to play: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to follow all that I commanded you; and behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:19-20). LET’S DO OUR PART!
Revelation 18: We are still recovering from Christmas! Today’s reading is not too much of a seasonal Christmas message. This chapter shows the final destruction of the city of Babylon. The chapter goes into great detail of her sins, her luxuries and the final judgement that comes to her. Let’s take a few moments and reflect on this command that is spoken from heaven to God’s people: “Then I heard another voice from heaven say: "Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues; for her sins are piled up to heaven, and God has remembered her crimes” (18:4-5)
What does it mean to “come out of her?” Does this mean that we should have nothing to do with the world around us? Some take it so far as to say that we should not celebrate Christmas
READING GUIDE FOR DECEMBER 27, 2024 CONTINUED: REVELATION 18, PSALM 131
because it has become too “worldly.” In 1621, Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony criticized people who took the day off instead of working. The Puritans discouraged Christmas celebrations in New England and frowned upon them. As followers of Jesus, we are called to live in the world but not to be of the world. Our allegiance is first and foremost to the King whose birth we celebrate today. That means our celebration of Christmas should look a little different from the way the world celebrates. Our focus is not on accumulating all the luxuries we can. Perhaps these verses from James and John can help us:
You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. (James 4:4)
Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world--the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does--comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever. (1 John 2:15-17)
We must “come out of her,” so we do not share in her sins. Don’t get bogged down in the traditions of men (Mark 7:8). Understand the reason Jesus came to earth and then trust Him as our Lord and Savior; don’t lose sight of Jesus’s earth-saving mission at Bethlehem due to our materialist culture.
PSALM 131 This Psalm magnifies humility, which sounds a bit like a paradox. Yet, humility is praised throughout the Bible. It is essential for believers, especially those in leadership. It is a reason God chose and used Moses: “Now the man Moses was very humble, more than any person who was on the face of the earth” (Numbers 12:3). Paul commanded the church to possess and practice it: “Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility consider one another as more important than yourselves” (Phil. 2:3). The lack of humility is a pathway to idolatry, then and now: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and they exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible mankind” (Rom 1:22-23). This is the great sin of the post-Christian west, especially the USA: making ourselves (i.e., men and women) the ultimate measure of truth instead of God as revealed in His word.
While it good to be curious about great philosophical and scientific issues of our time, the Bible tells us due to our human limitations there are certain matters we cannot know fully now but for which we need to trust God in faith, hope and love, like a child resting upon her/his mother: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I also have been fully known. But now faith, hope, and love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:12-13). Feeling inadequate? Good, look to God.
