We come to Joshua 9. This encounter with the guiley Gibeonites. It says they act “craftily” [4]. For this word, we go back to the beginning…
[Gen 2.25-3.1 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. But the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made.] The serpent is described as “arum”. It’s the same word used for the Gibeonites. Sometimes it’s translated as crafty, or shrewd. Sometimes it’s translated as prudent, or sensible. Wise. I.e this same word that describes the serpent shows up repeatedly in Proverbs, the book of wisdom. [Prov. 14:8 The wisdom of the sensible is to understand his way, but the foolishness of fools is deceit.] So what’s the difference? Both the crafty person and the prudent person are very smart, very clever, gifted by God to figure things out and make things happen. But prudent becomes crafty, it goes bad when there is hiding. Some hiding or twisting of the truth. Deceit.
Now, by contrast, in [Gen 2], the first couple is described not as “arum” but as “arom”. It sounds almost the same - the serpent is arum, and Adam/Eve are arom. WE translate arom by saying they were naked. I.e. what we see with them is there was NO hiding whatsoever. No hiding. And they had no reason to hide. They were unashamed. No guilt. No guile.
The Hebrew emphasis is that, on the outside they were innocent, no public disgrace. Nothing to hide, no need to hide anything to keep up appearances. But I think there was also an inner peace, an inner acceptance of themselves, no contaminating or condemning thoughts about who they were. They were arom. Everything was out in the open - literally! They had no misgivings about how God had made them - nor should they have. They were fearfully and wonderfully made, made in the image of God, to reflect what He is like. Just like you and I. They knew that God SO loves us, just the way He made us. They weren’t listening to the voices. The world. Or our feelings. Cuz the world and our feelings often try to convince us that the truth about who God made us to be needs to be hidden. Or twisted. So fast forward several millennia, and what we find today is a pandemic of self-doubt & self-loathing. And hiding. [Think about all the things the average person would say, I don’t like about myself.] I imagine every person in here can think of things we don’t like about ourselves. We can all struggle with coming to terms with how God has made us. And I think if the Lord could tell us one thing this morning, it’d be: Don’t doubt how I made you. I went to great lengths to weave every part of you together in your mother’s womb. And I have good plans for you. Let Me help you become all I created you to be. Practically speaking, this is where faith comes in. Faith is the assurance of things unseen, isn’t it? God, I believe that You knew what You were doing when You made me. Thank you for making me. I may not see it or feel it, but I choose to believe it. We don’t need to be ashamed. That’s arom.
Now, what was the first thing the first couple began to do after they did the one and only thing that God had told them not to do? [Gen 3.7-8 At that moment their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves. When the cool evening breezes were blowing, the man and his wife heard the LORD God walking about in the garden. So they hid from the LORD God among the trees.] They fell - and they hid. Our fallen instinct is to hide - hiding from one another, and from our Maker. AND we hide from the truth. When God asks them what they did, how do they respond? Naked honesty (arom) would say, yes I did it. But how do they respond? [11-13 And God said, “Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” The man said, “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate.” Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” And the woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”] The simple naked truth is, they messed up. But they deflect the truth, they twist the truth. Running from the truth. Hiding.
And that’s what their descendants have done ever since. That’s what we do. We avoid the truth. We twist it. And we hide, don’t we? We hide our faults. Our fears. Our failures. We hide our feelings. Our motives. We hide from one another. We try to hide from the truth. From God. We deceive ourselves into believing a lie. [Rom. 1:25 For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie.] Exchanging God’s truth doesn’t make it any less true. But this hiding the truth is what makes the serpent - AND these Gibeonites - crafty as opposed to prudent: they’re hiding. They "get things done", but they’re hiding the truth - from others AND from themselves. And to put it bluntly, they’re reflecting the image not of their Creator but of the serpent… [John 8:44 “You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.]
So what DOES this crafty deceiver try to do? He tries to get us to question what God says [Gen. 3:1 And (the serpent) said to the woman, “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?”]. And on top of that, he layers the logical negative. The logical opposite. Instead of if p then q, he insists, if p, then not q. If you eat it, you will surely die, God says. And the serpent fires back, if you eat it, you surely will NOT die. We not only deny the assertion, we contradict it entirely. This is wrong - no, it is right! This is bad - no, it is good! Of this we should be ashamed - au contraire, we should be proud! Can you see how this has filtered into modern thinking? So much twisting, and hiding, hiding from the truth, from who God designed us to be. But there’s nothing "progressive" about this - it’s as old as the garden.
So, back to Joshua. The people of Gibeon, who act with “arum”. Crafty. They’re the 3rd people spotlight we get in Joshua. We’ve seen Rahab (who hid the spies), and then Achan (who hid the booty), and now Gibeon, hiding AND twisting the truth. But there’s a difference. Do you know what sets Rahab apart from the Gideonites? With Rahab, who is the focus, Who gets the credit? [2.9-11] For the Gibeonites. who is the focus, who gets the credit? [9.24-25] Joshua. They aren’t looking vertically, up at the great God of heaven. They’ve heard something about Him, but they’re looking horizontally. And so it comes as no surprise what they do. Instead of trusting in the God of Israel, the one TRUE God, their response is to resort to human reasoning, human means, to craftiness. And truth-twisting. Unlike Rahab - who simply trusted in the God of Israel - the Gibeonites hope for deliverance, hope to turn away destruction by human effort. Negotiation and deception. They’re trusting in themselves, in their own attempts to get things done. [For insight on who we are trusting, consider how you would answer if the Lord asked you the following: Why should I let you into heaven? Is my focus/trust on myself or on the Lord?]
We are too often tempted to put our hope, our trust in the horizontal. Things like Negotiation. And Deception. And what do those sound like to you? How about politics? Sadly, isn’t that often the case, that so many of our political solutions are about what WE can accomplish by means of negotiation and, if necessary, deception? Craftiness? [Who can we really trust?] Our world is broken, our leaders are flawed. Our own efforts (invariably fall short)? We ought always put our focus, our trust, our hope in The God Who saves. Yeshua. He will never lie to you. No hiding…
In the end, the Gibeonites are trusting in themselves, their own efforts. And they put their God-given cleverness to work to deceive God’s people. In the end, they are deceiving themselves. And they wind up as slaves [23]. Unlike Rahab. She trusted in the God of Who saves - and she got included in His family, the family of Messiah. Yeshua - God saves. Have you put YOUR trust in Yeshua?
