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It Is Written

Sabbath School 4th Quarter 2025: Lessons of Faith from Joshua

Eric Flickinger

Barna Magyarosi

01 Recipe for Success

02 Surprised by Grace

03 Memorials of Grace

John Bradshaw

Alive From the Dead: The Strange Truth About Baptism

04 The Conflict Behind All Conflicts

05 God Fights for You

06 The Enemy Within

07 Ultimate Loyalty - Worship in a War Zone

08 Giants of Faith: Joshua and Caleb

09 Heirs of Promises, Prisoners of Hope

10 The True Joshua

11 Living in the Land

Eric Walsh

12 God is Faithful!

13 Choose this Day!

Welcome to Sabbath School brought to you by It Is Written.

We are taking a journey through the book of Joshua and looking at lessons of faith in the book of Joshua.

Today, we are looking at lesson number 12, God is faithful.

Father, thank you for being with us today as we open your word, as we delve into it once again and learn more about you, your character, your plan for us as we look at the life of your servant, Joshua.

We ask that you'll Bless our time together and may we walk away from our study today with a deeper understanding of your plan for our lives.

We're grateful to have with us also again today the author of this quarter's Sabbath school lesson, Barna Majoroshi.

When we take a look at this week's lesson, there's a main theme, a significant theme in the book of Joshua that appears once again at the very tail end of the book.

What is that theme and why is that so important?

The major theme of the book of Joshua is that God is faithful to his promises.

And these verses basically, we talk about, we jump back a little bit and talk about the end of chapter 21 and then chapter 23.

But it is amazing to see that it tells us that, let's just read the last verse of chapter 21.

"'Not 1 word of all the good promises that the Lord had made to the house of Israel had failed.

And this is amazing because we saw that Israel tried to be faithful but they had their own shortcomings and their own challenges and and yet on this end on his own side God has been faithful.

We have this Hebrew expression kol, which means all, everything.

Of course, in English we translate it with all, everything, every, but in Hebrew, it is kol, kol, kol, kol.

It's like more than 6 times it is repeated.

All the promises, all that what God has promised, all have been given.

It is an emphasis on the fact that the promises of the Lord, they all have been fulfilled.

And if we look at the New Testament, we have the same testimony, that the promises of God have been fulfilled.

And I like how Paul puts it in 2 Timothy 2.13.

He says, if we are faithless, God is faithful because he cannot deny himself.

So even despite the shortcomings of Israel, God has stayed faithful.

And this is an overarching theme that takes off at the beginning of the book and it lands here in the last chapters.

So we're seeing evidence of God's faithfulness through the book of Joshua.

How does that evidence of God's faithfulness in this story that we've been dedicating our time to over the course of the last 11 lessons, 12 lessons now.

How does the evidence of his faithfulness in this story give us confidence that he's going to keep his promises in the future or in our day or in our future?

We definitely can because if we look at God's faithfulness in the past, that is the foundation of our hope for the future.

Allow me to tell you a short story here that I read and it impressed me a lot.

It is about a school that has a program of helping students or pupils that are sick in order to catch up with the studies and the lessons and they would send teachers to their home or to the hospital to help them with the same lessons that were taught at the school.

And a boy, about 10, 11 years of age, he suffered an accident, and he suffered a fire accident.

So 80 some percent of his skin was completely burnt.

And of course he was not in a state of studying or doing anything, but perhaps the school didn't have the right information.

And the nurse comes in and says, listen, Peter, somebody is here from your school because they want to teach you something about verbs and adverbs.

And Peter thinks about that and he musters all the strength that he had and puts on pillows and sits up and endures through the 2 hours of verbs and adverbs.

Even the teacher was shocked to see the situation and condition in which Peter was.

And a few days later, the teacher comes back and the nurse says, what did you do to that child?

Because the moment you left his situation turned and ever since he's improving because he he's fighting back he will survive and later on when they asked Peter he said at that moment when the teacher came I realized that they wouldn't send a teacher to speak about verbs and adverbs to a dying child, would they?

Now this is how I look at God's promises.

If we see that God has been faithful and He promises something for the future, He sees something in that future and that gives us hope.

That hope can and should get us through challenges that we're facing in our lives today.

And if we can grasp a hold of that, it'll carry us through.

What's the purpose of the main themes in Joshua's speech to Israel.

What are the main themes that he dwells upon in this speech and what's the purpose of him dwelling on those themes?

We have mentioned 1, which is God is faithful.

But he also speaks about the fact that, yes, God is faithful, but there is more work to be done.

You have other additional territories to conquer.

It is amazing, and we have that text right behind you, that Joshua At the beginning, he needed to be encouraged by the Lord and by Moses before he died.

Now he is the great leader that encourages the people.

And then 1 of the main themes of this chapter is warning.

Be careful how is your relationship with the surrounding nations is going to be.

They have not been completely faithful to their duty because the Canaanites, they are still among them.

And they will prove to be a snare if they do not, if they are not going to be careful.

Joshua takes a very strong position concerning Israel's relations with the surrounding nations.

Why does he choose that as 1 of those final themes that he presents before the people?

Now, we could say that Joshua was xenophobic, or we can look for a better reason.

And if we look at the life of Solomon, who was 1 of the greatest and the wisest leaders Israel ever had.

The moment he started to have to take wives from the pagan surrounding nations, he started to go down.

And that was his demise, because they requested him to build a shrine, or an altar, or a sanctuary for their God that led Israel astray into idolatry.

Now idolatry, of course, we can look at idolatry in 2 ways.

We can see in idols just a simple statue or a figurine or a piece of wood or and we say this is innocuous, this is not dangerous.

Or we can look at idolatry and realize that behind those objects there are powerful, rebellious, spiritual beings, demons, that they come and with their best effort is to lead Israel astray from the true worship of God.

So this is not just about being concerned about pieces of wood and stone and metal, but these are really, it comes back to that great controversy theme to some extent.

In fact, to a great extent that there are things going on behind the scenes and Joshua knows about these things.

The people may be more or less aware of them, but he knows that we're talking about genuine fallen angels, angelic beings who have made a decision to go in the wrong direction.

Series

Sabbath School 4th Quarter 2025: Lessons of Faith from Joshua

12 God is Faithful!

Transcript

Parent Series

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Recorded

Sabbath School 4th Quarter 2025: Lessons of Faith from Joshua

01 Recipe for Success

28m

Sabbath School 4th Quarter 2025: Lessons of Faith from Joshua

13 Choose this Day!

28m

Sabbath School 3rd Quarter 2024: The Book of Mark

09 Jerusalem Controversies

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Sabbath School 1st Quarter 2026: Uniting Heaven & Earth: Christ in Philippians and Colossians

02 Reasons for Thanksgiving and Prayer

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Sabbath School 1st Quarter 2026: Uniting Heaven & Earth: Christ in Philippians and Colossians

04 Unity Through Humility

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Sabbath School 1st Quarter 2025: God's Love and Justice

03 To Be Pleasing to God

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Sabbath School 4th Quarter 2024: Themes in the Gospel of John

08 Fulfilling Old Testament Prophecies

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Sabbath School 4th Quarter 2025: Lessons of Faith from Joshua

08 Giants of Faith: Joshua and Caleb

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Sabbath School 4th Quarter 2024: Themes in the Gospel of John

06 More Testimonies About Jesus

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Sabbath School 2nd Quarter 2025: Allusions, Images, Symbols: How to Study Bible Prophecy

02 The Genesis Foundation

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Sabbath School 4th Quarter 2025: Lessons of Faith from Joshua

03 Memorials of Grace

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Sabbath School 1st Quarter 2024: Psalms

03 The Lord Reigns

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