Joshua 5
Leaders Prep Section
Watch this video, read these notes, and send the pre-written email (below) to your group 2-3 days before you meet.
Notes
Obedience is a tough one. Dogs obey, children should obey, but grown men don’t like that word…for good reason. It’s too submissive and we value strength and independence. We’d rather cooperate than obey. But consider…should it be different with God? Are we so outmatched when it comes to God that we should simply acknowledge his position and do what he says? Is it OK then?
Group Guide Starts Here
Context of scripture
The Israelites are west of the Jordan now, very close to Jericho and everyone can feel it in the air. War is here.
Read Joshua 5: 1-7
Circumcision signaled the relational bond between God and his people and was established with Abraham, done to boys 8 days old, using a flint knife. 40,000 men armed with sharp metal weapons, had to go find flint and make knives to keep with the original commandment.
Counting only those 20 years old and older, there were 600,000 uncircumcised men. Gibeath-haaraloth translated directly means, “hill of the foreskins.”
The men would have been sitting ducks…incapacitated while camped right next to their enemy. Why does God ask this at all…and why now?
Read Joshua 5: 8-9
Gilgal means to roll and reproach means blame or disgrace …so God rolled away (removed) the blame and disgrace of slavery in Egypt from Israel. The purpose of obeying God is starting to take shape…even though the people left Egypt 40 years earlier, it’s this day God separates them from the disgrace of Egypt.
Have you ever been in a bad place with your wife or girlfriend because of something that happened a long time before? What did it take to get you guys out of that bad place?
Read Joshua 5: 10-12
Milk and honey wasn’t a hyperbole. A 20th century B.C. text from an Egyptian official described Canaan this way, ‘Plentiful was its honey…there was no limit to any (kind of) cattle.1 There it is; milk and honey.
Read Joshua 6: 13-15
In the original Hebrew, this conversation is best understood as, are you one of us, or one of them? The answer is, “No”…meaning, I’m neither one of yours or one of theirs.2
What do you make of it when Joshua asks, “Are you one of us or one of them?…, and the man says, “No.”
When you think about your relationship with God, do you tend to think, “I’m with him” or “he’s with me”?