BEMA 35: Crossroads of the Earth
Transcription Status
18 Jul 22 — Initial public release
5 Jul 22 — Transcript approved for release
Crossroads of the Earth
Brent Billings: This is The BEMA Podcast with Marty Solomon. I’m his co-host, Brent Billings. Today, we wrap up our discussion about Joshua and bridge the gap toward the book of Judges as we ponder the mission of God and his choice of real estate for his people.
Marty Solomon: I think we can dive right into this discussion too. After this discussion, we can go back to grab a little review. I think the stage will be set well for reviewing after today’s podcast, at least once. We want to wrap our discussion about Joshua. Last podcast, we spent a whole bunch of time just wrestling with the problems that arise in Joshua — the ground level, the nitty-gritty, the murder, the genocide, the whatever you want to call that, the mass slaughter, the stories of conquest. What I want to do for this podcast, I want to step back. I want to take a 10,000-foot perspective. I want to ask the question of “What is God up to?”
The conquest isn’t just about victory and triumph. That’s how a lot of us read it from our Western world of triumphal politics. The biblical narrative is more about location. The question is, why this chunk of dirt? Why does God work so hard to give his people this particular chunk of real estate? That’s what I want to pull apart today and see what the implications of that are. We do have a presentation today, got some pictures there for you, some maps we got courtesy of GTI — followtherabbi.com, I should say, not GTI — followtherabbi.com. The first picture there, the map that we have there, gives you a snapshot of the civilized world of the biblical era.
Basically, you have all the kingdoms that you’re going to deal with in the biblical world represented on this map. To the left there, you’ll notice Rome is going to be quite a later date in the biblical story, but Rome, you’ve got Greece over there. To the right, you can see kingdoms like Assyria, Persia, Babylon coming over there. To the bottom left on the other side of the Mediterranean sea, you’re going to see Egypt. To the bottom right, you’re going to see the Arabian Desert. In the biblical era, there’s nothing that lives there. That’s uncivilized. You’re going to have the spice trade, the trade route — there’s an Eastern trade route that goes through that area, but there’s nothing out there.
That is just wasteland. That is midbar, that is desert in that direction. The chunk of dirt that God gives his people is in that little bit of green right there on the right side of the Mediterranean Sea. There’s a little chunk of dirt there that historians often called the “crossroads of the earth.” It sits right in between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. Basically, when I was there for one tour, I had a tour guide explain it as “the turnstile of the ancient world.”
If you wanted to go anywhere in the ancient world, you had to cross through this chunk of dirt. There was one main highway actually split into two or three different highways, but one main thoroughfare called the Via Maris. The Via Maris was how you got anywhere in the ancient world. It’s also how you would connect up to what was known as a silk road that goes through modern-day Turkey, ancient biblical Asia and Asia Minor.
The main highway that goes from north to south, if any commerce is going to take place, any global connection on any level, particularly commercial, but let alone travel of any sort, you’re going to go through, by land, you’re going to go through the land of what would become the land of Israel or the land of Canaan before the conquest. It was the most prized chunk of real estate, because if you wanted to control trade, if you wanted to have an impact on commerce, this was the place to be. If you wanted to be in the middle of it all, this is where you were going to be. If we were to flash back to Session 1, Torah in our study of Abraham, Abraham was told that what was God going to do through him, Brent?
Brent: Bless all nations.
Marty: He’s going to bless all nations. Now, if that’s still God’s mission, do you think that’s probably still what God is up to in this story?
Brent: Absolutely.
Marty: If Abraham and his descendants are going to bless all nations, that would be how many nations of the world.
Brent: I think all of them.
Marty: All of them. He’s probably not going to put them over in the corner. He’s not going to put them south of Egypt, he’s not going to give them a little slice of the Arabian desert. If God really wants to bless all nations, if God’s really adamant about putting the whole world back together and he wants his kingdom of priests — remember all this, we said that Torah — can you remember the one word we used to summarize Torah, Brent?
Brent: Partner?
Marty: Yes, the word partner, like God, has a mission. He’s looking for a partner. We said the Torah was missional. If that’s really what God’s up to, he’s going to put them right in the middle, his kingdom of priests. If he’s going to have a priesthood for the whole world, they’re going to need to be situated. I hadn’t even thought about this until today, but they’re going to need to be situated like the tabernacle was. Where was the tabernacle in the midst of God’s people?
Brent: Right in the middle.
Marty: Right in the middle of camp, so if you’re looking at this map and you’re going, well, that’s a civilized world…
Brent: That’s good.
Marty: I know. If you’re looking at this map and you’re thinking, where is the priesthood going to be? They’re going to be smack dab right in the middle of it all. That’s where God needs his priesthood. That’s where God needs it. Everybody’s got to have access to the priesthood. If God’s going to show the world what he’s like, that’s where they’re going to have to be. This mission, the conquest, we wrestled with all the questions last week. When it comes to its function, let’s just think about this practically and functionally, God needs this chunk of dirt if he’s going to accomplish his mission.
Really, I keep calling a chunk of dirt because that was my impression when I went over there. It’s not like we think about the land of milk and honey. We think about, especially coming from America, we think of unbelievable pitches of abundance, and it’s a desert.
Brent: The prototypical garden of Eden.
Marty: Yes, we think of it like paradise. It’s a desert. It’s a bunch of rocks. It’s hot. It’s dirty and sure not a whole lot going on over there, except for it’s still even to this day, still in the middle of everything. That’s what we see here is a picture of why God would want to place his people there. Now, if you go to the next slide, you’ll actually see how that land was broken up. When they walked into the conquest, when they took the land over, God also took all 12 tribes. The 12 tribes were descended from the 12 sons of Jacob, not in their entirety because you might remember Levi got a special assignment and you won’t see Levi on this map anywhere.
Levi serves as the priesthood. They don’t have an inheritance. God is their inheritance. Joseph, you might remember, he got, I won’t say lost, but he took a different path towards the end of Genesis and his two sons Manasseh and Ephraim, they were adopted by Jacob, which brought us back to the Number 12. Levi got a special job. Joseph’s two sons were given in place of Joseph, and now we have 12 tribes.
You can look at this map and you can see that God gave, not only in this chunk of real estate to His whole people, but within this chunk of real estate, every one of those tribes, each group of descendants also had a chunk of real estate. It wasn’t just their chunk of real estate, but we’ll get to that towards the end of our podcast today. This was how it got mapped out. Everybody got a piece of the pie. Everybody got a piece of the mission, everybody got a piece of the land.
Now, if we were to go to the next slide, you’ll also see how this land functions, because it also helps. I heard Aaron Couch explain this as a BLT, which may be the most unkosher illustration we could come up with.
Brent: Not to mention, just not a very good sandwich.
Marty: He says, you can think about this land with like two buns and then some lettuce and tomato and then strips of bacon. If you look at the map, you can understand what he’s getting at there. You have the Galilee up north and down at the bottom, you have the deserts, the Negev. If you could keep going on the map, you’d see the Paran, you’d see Zin, and you have these Northern and Southern quadrants. Then right in the middle running north to south, you have these different zones maybe, I would call them. You have zones. Over, all the way to the left, you have what’s called the coastal plain, and then two zones over, you have the Judah Mountains.
Now the Judah Mountains is where God’s people want to settle. If you want the comfortable, the nice place, the place without a bunch of headaches, you live in the Judah Mountains. That’s the place to be. The coastal plain? Well, if you’re God’s people, you’re not really water people. If you remember, you’re desert people. You don’t really want coastal ports. It’s really not what you’re into. You have the Philistines very prominent in the biblical story. Up north, you’re going to have the Phoenicians. These are coastal peoples, and they live on the coastal plain.
Brent: How did the Jews get the view of the water as the abyss?
Marty: Largely just because of where they were from. Coming from Babylon, coming from inland, they’re not water people and all of their creation narrative, if you remember, when we were — all the way back at the beginning, we talked about creation narratives. The floodwater was always seen as chaos because it was just so damaging in the desert world and, well, order, that would be what’s stable. Unchanging. Unshifting. Land is stable. Water becomes a symbol for chaos.
Brent: The other cultures didn’t necessarily have that perspective?
Marty: I would imagine. I’m not an expert in Phoenician culture or Philistine culture, but I would imagine that if you grew up in a more coastal-based culture, that may not be as prevalent or as true in your historical folklore or narratives, but I don’t know. It’s a good question. You have the coastal plain where the pagans live and you have the Judah Mountains where God’s people want to live. There’s this zone in the middle. It’s the hill country, which is called shephelah. Shephelah literally means to “bow down,” to kneel. It’s where the land bows down. The Judah Mountains bow down to the coastal plain, not in a spiritual reverence sense, but in a physical high to low sense.
You have the hill country, which becomes for the rabbis a metaphor for how God’s people are called to impact culture. God put them at the crossroads of the earth. Here’s another metaphor, not just of the turn style of the crossroads of the earth, but missionally, what it means to live at the crossroads of the earth is to live in the shephelah, to live in the place where the mountains of God’s people meet the coastal plain of the pagans. We’re supposed to live in this collision of two cultures to impact or engage culture in a way that brings shalom to the chaos or this tale of two kingdoms.
We might say “Let’s invade the empire and the imperial narrative of the world with the kingdom of God, with the kingdom of Shalom.” That becomes the metaphor. Now, farther east of that, so if we would go from west to east, we have coastal plain, shephelah, Judah Mountains, then we have the Judah wilderness, which is the plateau-y desert wadis we studied earlier, which lead down into what’s known as the Rift Valley. Now, the Rift Valley is the valley through which the Jordan River runs.
Brent: Apparently is labeled Jordan Valley on this map.
Marty: Yes. On this map, the Jordan Valley. There you go. There are your different zones. Now, it’s good geography.
Brent: Maybe I’ll replace it with a better map.
Marty: Well, there you go.
Brent: We’ll see what happens.
Marty: Whatever you’d like to do. The map they see may even be a better map than the ones that we’re looking at right now. I like that. We have these zones, and it’s good geography. Honestly, we should spend more time even on this podcast. We should spend way more time dealing with geography. One of the things I love about the trip is that we go over and we learn a bunch of geography. It’s very, very helpful. The geography also serves as a metaphor and it reinforces the same point that I’m trying to communicate, which is God doesn’t want us over in the corner.
God doesn’t want us in a safe, holy huddle where we’re not impacting and engaging culture. Now, I’m not here to critique a Christian subculture that would choose things like homeschooling, but there is a danger in a Christian worldview that says we are going to detach ourselves and insulate ourselves from the culture all around us. We’re going to have our own music. We’re going to have our own t-shirts. We’re going to have our own language. We’re going to have our own schools. We’re going to have our own, our own, our own, our own.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with those things inherently. There’s nothing wrong with those things in the mission of God, but the danger, and there’s going to be plenty of dangers to go around. We’ll talk about more dangers in our own discussion groups. We’ll talk about the tension between shephelah. What’s the danger of being all about the shephelah? What’s the danger of pulling away from shephelah? Part of that Christian subculture, the danger of that Christian subculture is we then disengage from the mission of God and we’re no longer doing the thing that God called us to do, which is to shine light into dark places, to bring shalom to chaos.
A couple more metaphors to continue to bridge this gap between Joshua and Judges and continue to make this same point. The next picture on your presentation is a diagram that depicts what’s known as a tel. In the archeological world, and again, if you read The Source, wonderful book, the whole book of The Source is written about the excavation of what was called the tel. Now in the book, it’s called Tel Makor, which is a fictional made-up place. There’s a tel, which is, if you look at this picture, you have multiple cities, different ages of history buried on top of one another.
If you’re looking at this diagram, you’ll see the first original city would be that blue city right there at the very, very bottom. That blue represents the first city. Somewhere along the way, that city gets destroyed and the enemy levels it. The next people that come along, then just build on top of it. Well, you’re thinking, why build on top of it? Why not go somewhere else?
First, because if you don’t build on top of it, you’re wasting precious real estate because all around it is probably valuable farmland, which leads to my second point. The tel is there because it provides all the things that you need for a healthy civilization. It should provide defense. It should provide a way to pursue agriculture and farming for daily sustenance. It should, most importantly, have a water source which is very, very much needed and essential to having a city anywhere in this world of the desert. This tel is sitting where it is for a reason, probably based mostly on water source. You can’t move the city. You need the city in the exact same place the old city was at. You just build up some dirt and you plant your new city right on top of the old city.
You had the blue city and now you have the light green city. Then that city gets destroyed. Then 400 years later, along comes a new group of people that wants to rebuild the city, and they do. I don’t know what color, is that purple? Whatever.
Brent: Periwinkle.
Marty: Periwinkle. Ooh, I love that.
Brent: I don’t even know if that’s the right color.
Marty: Not quite, but closer than purple. You get the idea. Level upon level upon level this city, if you were to take to the naked eye, in fact, I should, I bet we can get some by the time you post this presentation, Brent, a couple of pictures of some tels.
Brent: I’ve got a couple.
Marty: I like it. We’ll put a couple of pictures of what these tels look like in real life that are even unexcavated. We went to some unexcavated tels in Israel and Turkey. Mainly Turkey. You can actually see what these look like. It looks like a big pile of dirt, but underneath this pile of dirt is 1,000 or 2,000 years’ worth of cities, one on top of another. This is how archeological digs are done. I say all that to understand the context of what we’re about ready to say because if you go to the next slide, one of the things that we uncover or hope to uncover whenever we do archeological digs — and I don’t know why I always use the pronoun “we” when I talk about archeological digs.
I like to think that I’m one of them. I have a shovel. I’m uncovering this tel. I don’t know. Apparently, it’s a…
Brent: We’ve moved a few rocks in Israel.
Marty: Sure. Enough to call it “we”? I don’t know. Nevertheless, one of the things that we always like to find when we do, that they like to find when they do archeological digs, is called city gates. Now the city gates always, obviously, if you have a city, what do you need to put up around you for protection, Brent?
Brent: A wall?
Marty: A big wall. Now, that’s a problem because if you put a wall without a hole in it, you’re not going to be able to get in and around your city. You have, very naturally, a city gate. Now, these city gates become, if the wall is about defense, the city wall is also primarily in function about defense. Now, these gates over the course and the evolution of human history become more and more complex in their technology of defending the city. It started off in Abraham’s day. These city gates would just have a couple of chambers on either side.
You’d have a room on the right, a room on the left. You can put soldiers in those rooms. If people try to get through the door, you can only get three people through a door at one time, you kill the three people as they come through the door. You can keep putting soldiers in the rooms, and it just creates this bottleneck that you can’t penetrate. Well, eventually, people figure out how to get through that. Then they go from two rooms to four rooms. They go from four rooms to six rooms. They go from six rooms to eight rooms. They go from one floor to two floors.
They even have, in fact, if you go to the next slide here, you’ll see a cutaway of how a gate in, say, Solomon’s day, this would’ve been a Solomonic gate, a six-chambered gate. Eight chambered gates would’ve been Hezekiah’s day. We can actually date a gate depending on the amount of chambers that they had. David’s day had four chambers, two on each side. This would be a Solomonic gate, a gate like the ones that we see at Tel Gezer, which I will show you a picture of here in just a moment. The technology becomes so advanced that you can no longer even penetrate a city through the city gate.
There’s no way you can get through there. It’s too good. Its defenses are too good. Like these two-floored gates that you see here in this diagram, the cutaway here, they’re dropping rocks on you as the enemy comes through. They’re pouring boiling oil. They’re dropping tar. It’s a pretty advanced technology. It becomes more advantageous to build a siege ramp — we read about in history — and just come over the wall. That’s how good the defense is of these city gates.
Now, the thing about the city gates, in fact, we can go to the next slide here. Here are some pictures. We actually have some pictures of the chambers. This is the gate at Tel Dan for anybody that’s been there. Here’s another gate. I believe this is the other gate at Tel Dan. This might be Megiddo, but to be honest, I can’t remember. Here’s the next slide that actually shows a picture of Solomon’s gate or Gezer. This is the gate at Gezer. We went there this summer, Brent.
Brent: Is that Solomon’s goat over there?
Marty: Oh, I like that. Solomon’s goat. Oh, man. If you change this picture to a better one that you have, they’re not going to know what you’re talking about.
Brent: Well, if I have anything else, I’ll just add it to this one.
Marty: These are pictures of the remains of gates. Now, here’s why we like to find these things, is obviously their first and primary function is defense. It’s about defending the city. Your city only comes under attack on average, once every century or so. About every 80 years, they estimate. Some cities more than others, depending on their location. Your city’s not falling under attack all that often, so what do you do for the rest of the century?
If it is only 80 years, you have to put this gate to use somehow. All throughout the story of the scriptures, we read about people sitting in the city gates. Lot. Lot was in the city gate. Eli in the story of Judges that will read about, or excuse me, I should say the story of 1st Samuel. He’s sitting in the city gate because the city gate became the place where all of the city business. You’d find the politicians. You’d find the mayor and the city clerk and all the people of importance. You might even find royalty at the city gate. I wish it was that easy today. I wish we could go down the city gate and find our representative. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?
Brent: Yes.
Marty: Sheesh. That’s how it was in their day. In fact, if you talk about the stock exchange in Israel today, it’s actually called sha’ar. Sha’ar is the word for gate. The stock exchange is actually still named after this concept. The Hebrew word for gate is sha’ar. Now, not only would this be the place for your courthouse, be the place where your judges would sit, this was also the place where they would distribute to the needy. Here’s what I mean by that.
In fact, if you go to your next slide, you’re going to see that picture of the tel again. You can imagine a city sitting on top of that hill and the city on top of that hill would have a wall. Who do you suppose lives inside the city wall, Brent? Do you suppose that’s pretty advantageous real estate?
Brent: Well, part of me wants to say yes, but maybe if somebody’s breaking in, they’re breaking into your house basically before they get to the rest of the city.
Marty: Correct. What about inside the wall? What about all the way inside the city?
Brent: Oh, inside the city?
Marty: Yes, the center of the city?
Brent: Oh yes.
Marty: Now, that’s where you want to be.
Brent: That’s choice.
Marty: That’s choice. I want to be inside the city walls completely protected. That’s where your upper crust, your upper class, your upper echelon, your royalty, your really wealthy, your politicians, whatever. That’s where they lived. Now, most middle class lived inside the wall, which is what you were actually referring to in the wall, what was called “casemate” housing. The wall was actually constructed like these multiple apartment complexes. The reason they did that was because if your city came under attack, you could actually fill your house with stones, which is what everybody would do, and your wall went from being 8 feet thick to 30 feet thick.
It’s a brilliant move. Most of your middle class lives in what’s called Casemate housing. You might remember stories like Rahab or stories like Paul, who’s lowered out of a window on the outside of the city. That’s called the Casemate housing. Rahab lived in a middle-class apartment built into the city wall. She just lowers the spies outside the window, and they’re now outside the city. That’s your middle class. The people who are in need, the poor, the distressed, they end up outside the city wall, either in the little villages, which are sometimes called daughters — the daughters of Jerusalem.
You might remember Jesus when he’s on his way to the cross. “Don’t weep for me, daughters of Jerusalem.” He’s not just talking to women. He’s actually making a reference to the villages where the poor live outside of Jerusalem. Every major city would’ve had what was called daughters. Little villages. No walls, no protection, but that’s where the poor live because that’s all that they can live. The very, very poor, the really destitute, well, they’re driven to the trash dump.
If you were to actually jump back a slide to that picture of the Solomonic gate, you’ll see that big trench going through the middle. That’s actually their sewer line. They might have a water source that they open maybe once or twice a day and flushes all the sewage out through that trench. It would’ve been covered with pavers, so you wouldn’t have seen it. You wouldn’t have even smelled it as bad as you might imagine.
Brent: It’s a big step, so it’s good to have it covered.
Marty: Yes, absolutely. It is. That would’ve flushed all the sewage out to the main trash dump, which sat outside the city. It would’ve flowed down that hill and there would’ve been a designated area where your sewage would flow. It would also be the same area. Remember you’re not wanting to use a whole lot of real estate because you’re wanting to use the rest for agriculture, so land is precious. They take their trash, they dump it in the same area. They light it on fire and it just smolders because of the moisture of the sewage and the trash.
It’s a smoldering place where the trash — one of the things they called that was a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth. Well, that’s a reference to the poor. Weeping and gnashing of teeth is that tsa’aqah, that misery of the poor and the oppressed. I say all this to give you a picture of the city. You have a city on a hill and you have the wealthy inside. You have the middle class and the casemate housing. You have the poor outside the city. Now, Jesus actually makes a comment about this, and we could talk much more about this in discussion groups.So much we’re skipping and jumping around here. Go ahead and read that passage that you have from Matthew, Brent.
Brent: You are the salt of the earth, but if salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead, they put it on its stand and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.
Marty: Jesus says you are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. He refers to this very picture that we’re looking at here of a tel. You have a picture of a city on a hill. What Jesus is saying, if you’re the poor, what does the city on the hill represent to you, Brent?
Brent: It’s the wealth. It’s the people who are better than you, who are more valuable.
Marty: They’re also the people that have more than enough, correct?
Brent: Yes.
Marty: While you probably do have somewhat of a disdain like you’re talking about. You have this, “I wish I was them,” jealousy, whatever, maybe going on, they also represent your hope. In some ways, the city on a hill is your hope. Those city gates we’ve found throughout all our archeological studies, at every city we’ve uncovered the city gates was also the welfare system and the distribution center for the poor because the people inside the city had more than enough. The city gate became the place where the wealthy brought their abundance and it was rationed out and given to the poor who would come to the city gates.
The city gates, the city on a hill is your picture of hope. When Jesus says to the people in the Sermon on the Mount, he says, “Well, you are the salt of the earth. You’re the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.” He’s saying you are the hope of the earth. The earth looks to you. The world looks to you to find Shalom for their chaos.
That again becomes the same picture of what God is wanting to do with his people at the crossroads. He’s putting His people at the crossroads of the earth so that they can be the light of the world. They can be the city on a hill. They can be a kingdom of priests. He’s putting them right in the middle of it all so that the world can look to them for their hope.
Brent: Is that a generalized concept of the city that they would be taking care of the poor like that or is that more of a Jewish thing? I get the impression in the Matthew passage that Jesus is saying, “This is what you’re supposed to be,” as if they’re not seeing that lived out in most places.
Marty: Sure. Now, on some level, it’s very general. Even the pagans would do this. If you were to bring a visiting king in to see your city, one of the things you would want to show off is your welfare system. If you can’t take care of the poor, you’re not a very great king, so you would want to be able to say — everybody would want to be able to walk through their cities and say, “Look at all this stuff.” Let me tell you the numbers. It’s like America being like, “We give away more in our international benevolence programs than anybody while we spend over half of our budget on the military.” Nevertheless. You get this concept.
It’s one of the ways that we have always, all kinds of nations, thumped their chest and said, “Look at how we take care of everyone else. That’s how powerful we are.” Now, the heart that lies behind it is a totally different thing. What the listeners to the Sermon on the Mount are hearing in the context of Roman is a little tricky. It’s a little tricky because if you buy into the Roman ideology, life goes really well for you. They are definitely a city on a hill. They take care of you, healthcare, education, entertainment. Everything you could want, Rome gives you. Running water.
If you don’t buy into the Roman system, well, you’re out of luck. It’s an interesting dynamic with the listeners of the Sermon on the Mount per your question. One last observation as we wrap up this discussion, and that was I wanted to go back to that map that we had earlier. It showed the 12 tribes of Israel. You’ll notice everybody on this map has their own chunk. It’s not just about the chunk of dirt that you got. It was also about the mission that you had. This chunk of dirt came with a mission. Here’s what I mean by that.
If you look down on the map, you might find the slice of Dan, the tribe of Dan. Dan has a little orange, L-shaped slice of dirt there towards right above Judah. Judah is the big one, Simeon in the middle. Right above Judah, just to the north, northwest is Dan. Now, Dan was given this small little chunk of dirt. It fits within a photo frame to be quite honest. A small chunk of dirt, but they also sat bordering the Philistines. They didn’t just get a chunk of dirt, they also got a mission.
Dan received the mission of impacting, bringing shalom to the Philistine chaos. Now, I’m going to show you the next slide which is where everything actually ended up. If you go to the next slide, this is a map that represents where everybody actually ended up. Now, what do you notice when you look at that map, Brent?
Brent: It’s a little bit different.
Marty: What’s the key difference based on what we were just talking about?
Brent: Dan is not where he’s supposed to be.
Marty: Find Dan. For anybody who’s looking at this map for the first time, Dan is where, Brent?
Brent: He’s way up north.
Marty: All the way up north? When you read this in the book of Judges, which we’ll get to later, Dan totally forsakes their mission. They’re like, “Philistines, man…” By the way, do you see the Philistines on the map?
Brent: It’s there.
Marty: It’s there. See, they jumped out of their calling. They forsook the mission that God gave them. They went up north because they were like, “Man, forget this. I want to go somewhere else.” Now, here’s the problem with that — there’s so much to this context, too, but for the sake of our conversation, this is what we’ll do with it. If you were to jump back to the last map, first of all, look at that, no more Philistines, everybody’s doing their job. If you were to think in terms of like, “If I’m Dan and I’m going to want some help,” do you notice anything about where Dan’s located when it comes to help?
Brent: Right next to the lion of the tribe of Judah? The power.
Marty: Man, this massive, massive tribe. The most powerful tribe. Dan has their big brother Judah hanging right out at their right hand. In fact, when you read the story of judges, the story of Shimshon — we know him as Samson — Samson’s from Dan. Samson gets himself in some trouble. The Philistines come out to get Samson and who shows up immediately in the story?
Brent: Judah.
Marty: Judah’s there, “Hey, everybody, what’s going on,” is the great socio-political force. That was like, “Really, calm down. What’s going on?” Judah had their back. Now, if you go to the next, who’s got their back now?
Brent: They’re wide open.
Marty: The great tribe of Naphtali? No way. Like you said, they’re right out in the open. In the last map, they’re surrounded by their brothers. In this map, do you remember that first map we looked at with all the different countries? If Babylon is going to come in, if Assyria is going to come in, if Persia is going to come in, if the Greeks are going to come in, where are they going to come from?
Brent: They’re all coming to Dan first.
Marty: They’re all coming from the north. Who’s going to get pummeled every single time?
Brent: Dan’s going down.
Marty: Dan’s going down. They forsake their mission. In fact, Dan will get pummeled out of existence. Dan will eventually get hit so many times by incoming armies from the north that they’ll fall out of existence. When you read your book of Revelation — fun fact — Dan isn’t listed amongst the tribes. The implication there is if you don’t seize the mission of God, if you don’t realize what God’s called you to do and fulfill your role, you may lose your part in the whole story altogether.
Brent: Why? There are only 11 tribes listed or is there someone that takes Dan’s place?
Marty: There’s actually a tribe that will take Dan’s place, but we’ll leave that as homework for any of our listeners that want to jump ahead of the ballgame.
Brent: Perfect.
Marty: It’s going to be a little while till we get to Revelation.
Brent: Just a few more episodes to go.
Marty: Anyway, this whole episode, I wanted to be about the crossroads of the earth. What does it mean to live at the crossroads of the earth? It means being in the middle of the action. It means seizing you’re calling to engage culture. It means being the city gates and providing sustenance to the world around you, meeting their needs, being the hope of the world, the city on a hill. It means not forsaking the call that God gives us but fulfilling the role that we know God’s laid upon our family, us as individuals, us as churches, us as a Christian subculture. These are the things we can learn from the book of Joshua and the Judges.
Brent: Sounds good.
Marty: There we go.
Brent: Crossroads of the earth. We want to know what you guys think about Joshua, so get a hold of us. You can find Marty on Twitter at @martysolomon. You can find me at @eibcb. You can find more details about the show at bemadiscipleship.com. We’ve got a contact page on there if you want to get a hold of us that way. Let us know how you’re wrestling with Joshua. It’d be great to hear from you. Thanks for joining us on The BEMA Podcast. We’ll talk to you again soon.