"Necessity," they say, "is the mother of invention." When your back is up against the wall, it’s amazing what you can come up with, what you can do. Well the Gibeonites have their back up against the wall. They didn’t even have Internet or television, but they had heard, by word of mouth, how the Hebrew people had devastated Jericho and Ai, two formidable cities in the land of Canaan. What’s more, they had heard that these Hebrew people, whoever they were, seemed to have some kind of special force with them, some power, some divine favor. And they had reason to fear that they, the Gibeonites, were next.
And so the Gibeonites, with their backs to the wall, get creative; they resort to "a ruse," the Bible says. They trick the Hebrews into negotiating a peace settlement with them. They make it look like they’ve traveled a thousand miles so that Joshua will say, ‘Sure, go ahead and make peace with them. We have no interest in such a far—away land.’ The thought crosses the Hebrews’ minds that maybe these people do live nearby. But they hastily make a deal with these people: they promise, by an oath, to let these people live.
The key verse in the chapter is v. 14, "The men of Israel sampled their provisions (the Gibeonites’ provisions) but did not inquire of the LORD." They checked out the dry bread and the cracked wineskins and the worn—out sandals and concluded that the Gibeonites had indeed traveled a great distance. But they didn’t inquire of the Lord.
Now "inquire of the Lord," most students of this passage agree, refers to the use of the Urim and the Thummim. The Urim and the Thummim (which are referred to many different times in the Old Testament) were actually two stones which the priests used to make important decisions. We’re not totally clear how it worked, but the Urim and Thummim really seems to amount to a religious flipping of a coin, only flipping a coin, or tossing the rock with full confidence that God controlled whether it landed on heads or tails, God controlled whether it was the Urim or the Thummim. Beyond the mechanics of throwing these stones, the point here is that it was possible to know God’s will, to discern God’s leading, to get direction from God when a decision needed to be made. And Israel simply hadn’t bothered.
And the book of Joshua judges this failure of Israel to be a critical failure—for this is now the second time that Israel has failed to inquire of the Lord. The first time was with Ai. They thought they knew how to conquer this city and went right ahead without even seeking God’s guidance and counsel. But they did not inquire of the Lord.
Well if Israel believed that it was possible to know God’s will, to discern God’s leading, then how much more can we as New Testament Christians have confidence that we can discern, know of God’s ways, God’s leading. We don’t have Urim and Thummim any more, and we don’t have the OT priesthood. But we have much more. We have the full Word of God which gives us such a fuller picture of God than just the few Books of Moses the people of Joshua’s day had, which reveals Christ—his life, his death for us, his resurrection, his plan for the church and the ages. We have the full Word of God and we have the Spirit of God. We live in the age of the Spirit. We believe that the Spirit leads us individually (through God’s Holy Spirit within us, teaching us, convicting us), but also communally (the Spirit works in and through the community of the church—people together seeking to discern God’s ways.) Those two things together (the Word and the Spirit) give us great confidence that we can know God, his ways, his will, his leading, in matters where God has chosen to reveal himself, and where his will is clear in Scripture.
But even though we have the Scripture and the Spirit, far superior ways of knowing God, knowing the contours of his kingdom, the fact is that we too, very often, fail to inquire of the Lord. We live our lives at a horizontal level. I spent some time reflecting this week on why we do this.
I think, first, that we all have what I’ll call a tendency toward self—sufficiency. We can do it ourselves. That may be pride. In this culture, though, we often think of it as virtue. Self—sufficiency is a good thing in this culture, especially when its opposite is dependency on others. And there’s something to be said, of course, for taking responsibility for our lives. The fact is God has given us tremendous potential, as image bearers of God, to set a goal and achieve it. We strive for self—sufficiency and self—determination because we believe that is good, and in some ways, it is.
It’s also somewhat understandable that we tend to rely upon ourselves so much instead of inquiring of the Lord because, at one level, there’s seemingly all kinds of evidence that we don’t really need God. A "secular" world, in fact, is just that, a world where people can and do live their lives without God. The undeniable fact is, all kinds of people go all the way through their life, and make thousands of decisions and commitments that determine the course of their whole life without ever consulting God. They’re not even sure they believe in God and they appear to get along just fine.
Christians too can live in a secular world as though there is no god. Leslie Newbigin, world—renowned theologian and missionary, says that Christians today are bilingual. We know the language of the Bible, of church, of God. But we know even better the language of secular world where God has no place. And we can go for days, weeks, even longer and never think about God, much less mention him or pray to him.
But that leads to the second thing that’s going on in our failure to inquire of the Lord, and that’s not just a misguided self—sufficiency; it’s what I call spiritual myopia. Now if you look up myopia in the dictionary, you will learn that myopia is a disease of the eye in which you can only see things clearly that are very close to you. Get beyond a very short distance and you can’t see a thing. Now when you have myopia, you know it and you go to an eye doctor and you get glasses to correct that condition. And then you can see further. The problem with spiritual myopia is that it’s possible to have it and not know it. Indeed, we can go all the way through life and never inquire of God, or to put it another way, we go through life and never see the bigger picture of our life, never ask the bigger questions about life.
It’s very interesting to notice a shift today in books and articles and discussion on the subject of leadership. Fifteen years ago one of the huge books on leadership and management was the One Minute Manager. In those days, the goal was to see how much we can get done, how quickly we can get it done. And the goal was to get to the top of a given ladder as quickly as we could.
Today, the best books on leadership don’t deal with the clock; they deal with the compass. Where are you going with all of this activity? What’s the bigger picture? Or to use another common metaphor today, the focus is not so much on climbing the ladder as fast as you can; the focus today is making sure that your ladder is leaning against the right wall.
You see, when you have spiritual myopia, when you don’t see the bigger picture to life, then you can be ever so busy, and even productive, but not have a clue what it’s all for, what it’s all about. In America, and increasingly in other parts of the world today, if you never inquire of the Lord, if you never get a bigger perspective on life than you get by just going along with the tide, then you would believe that what life is all about is making a lot of money, spending a little more money than you make, being happy, and experiencing every pleasure you can stuff into your schedule and body. That myopic view of life is so deeply engrained in us that even Christians functionally often live this way. Spiritual myopia—not looking beyond, inquiring of the Lord.
Tony Compolo, well known defender of the Christian faith, points out that, parents, whether they realize it or not, give their children a strong message about what goals they have for their children. He said, "In Japan today, there is a high value placed upon being successful. A Japanese parent might say to their children, ‘I don’t care what you do in life, I just want you to be SUCCESSFUL’." And then Compolo asked his audience, "Now, what’s the value that we American parents operate with in this North American culture? An American parent says, I don’t care what you do in life, I just want you to be . . . HAPPY." And then Compolo went on to point out that he grew up in a home where the message was, We as your parents don’t care what you do in your life, we just want you to be GOOD. Now you only get that kind of insight into life and into what’s actually going on in our own life and values and in our culture when you have a bigger picture of life, when you get some glasses, when you inquire of the Lord, when you seek after God and his kingdom, when you entrust your life to Jesus Christ, and when you trust his Word and Spirit to guide you into the truth about life.
How can we do a better job of "inquiring of the Lord?" What can we do to counteract our habit, even when we believe in God, of really living life without God, I think there are four things we can do to live more inquiring lives, deeper, more thoughtful lives; There’s no particular order to these things.
The first is worship. No matter how smart we are, or even how spiritual we are, the fact is, we need to worship God each week to clean our glasses, to see the bigger picture, to inquire of the Lord, to see, once again, where we’ve been duped by the world into believing that life is just about me and my desires. Worship is a specific way that we inquire of the Lord. And for worship to achieve its purpose, it’s important for you to come to worship expecting to meet God, yearning to meet God, almost afraid to meet God because you know how it will change your life, yet eager to meet God because you want that, you want to live in truth and freedom. Worship.
The second thing we can do is get closer to God’s Word. Knowing, studying, and contemplating God’s Word. When you read God’s Word with a prayerful, expectant heart, God reveals himself to you. When we inquire of the Lord, he answers, through his Word.
The third thing we can do is pray. Obviously all these things are overlapping. But prayer, daily prayer, personal prayer, meaningful prayer is a way we have to break through the myopia, to be freed from the prison of self—sufficiency; and it’s a way to unleash power and energies of the Holy Spirit that we never dreamed of. Prayer.
The fourth thing we can do is be in relationship with other people seeking after God. If you want to be a person who seeks after God, who inquires of God, who lives life with the big picture, who has the ladder leaning on the right wall, who’s following a compass, not just a clock, then you have to surround yourself with such people. We simply can’t sustain a true picture of life by ourselves. We’re just not smart enough or strong enough. There’s a proverb that says, "Iron sharpens iron." Do you have relationships in your life with people where you can help each other keep perspective, stay on track? If you don’t you are in peril. It’s nearly impossible to be a Christian alone. God’s design here, of course, is the church, not just an institution or a building, but the body of Christ, people joined and knit together in love, in worship, in service, in fellowship. To put it another way, seeking after God, inquiring of the Lord, isn’t just an isolated act. It’s a way of life. It’s a lifestyle. It’s being imbedded in a community that seeks after God. Worship. Word. Prayer. People.
Seek after God. Inquire of the Lord. Or, as the New Testament would put it, seek the one in whom all things hold together. And then, hold on, for this Christ, as Paul puts it in Eph.3, is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine according to his power that is at work within us. To which Paul says,
To him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus, throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen.
Prayer
God of light, lead us and guide us, we pray, through Jesus Christ, our light and life forever. Amen.
Duane Kelderman
Rev. Duane Kelderman is the Vice President for Administration and an Associate Professor of Preaching at Calvin Seminary in Grand Rapids. Before his current position he served as pastor in Christian Reformed congregations in Toledo, Ohio; Denver, Colorado; and Grand Rapids, Michigan. Rev. Kelderman is married to Jeannette and has three children and two grandchildren. He was born and raised in Oskaloosa, Iowa and attended Calvin College and Calvin Seminary. He enjoys reading and carpentry.
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