December 11, 2024 -- Joshua 22:32-34 -- How can this fighting ever end?

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Then Phinehas the son of Eleazar the priest, and the chiefs, returned from the people of Reuben and the people of Gad in the land of Gilead to the land of Canaan, to the people of Israel, and brought back word to them. 33 And the report was good in the eyes of the people of Israel. And the people of Israel blessed God and spoke no more of making war against them to destroy the land where the people of Reuben and the people of Gad were settled. 34 The people of Reuben and the people of Gad called the altar Witness, “For,” they said, “it is a witness between us that the LORD is God.”
Joshua 22:32-34 ESV
 
The background is so important if this small portion of bible reading is to make any sense. When the people of Israel were prepared to take the Promised Land West of the Jordan, the tribes of Reuben and Gad chose territory to the East of the Jordan. The other tribes were angry at first, until Reuben and Gad (and to be fully accurate the half-tribe of Manasseh) explained they’d cross the Jordan, enter the Promised Land, and fight with the rest of Israel to conquer all the land the LORD was giving to them. Now that all the battles were done and Reuben and Gad returned to their territories, their wives and children, their flocks and herds and cities and pasturelands a report reached the leadership of the tribes of the Promised Land that Reuben and Gad built an altar. This is a direct violation of the command of God as such an altar could only be built where the LORD commanded His people to build it and make sacrifices on it.
 
Old wounds were ripped open among the tribes in the Promised Land. Perhaps Reuben and Gad had an agenda against them after all! War was about to break out among the people of God because of the altar, which could be considered an act of treachery. The Reubenites and the Gadites explained, that no this is not an altar for sacrificing, it is an altar of witness. It large enough to be seen on the other side of the Jordan. It stands as a sign so that the rest of Israel will know, whenever they pass by it, that the family of God which lives farther away from them, separated by waters, are still part of them. They belong. They chose to be faithful. They and their families will worship the Living God at His tabernacle, wherever He places it. What happened becomes for all the people an Altar of Witness, a monument to remind the people of their past and the future they will forge together.
 
Beloved, sometimes our sins and our hurtful acts committed as husband and wife, or as members of a congregation, or as a church against another church (or nation against nation) become a bone of contention. Every remembrance of it stirs up anger and frustration. How then can we live in the harmony God intends for His people?
 
The Altar of Witness pointed to the Altar at the Tabernacle. It is the was place where sacrifices were offered. Those sacrifices were a reminder to the people that God had set aside His just anger against all their sins and would vent His anger until Jesus, the full and final sacrifice for sins, would come. How can we as believers get along when there are so many hurts and wounds and landmines among us in our relationships? It is the work of Jesus—He is our Altar of Witness. He is the full and final sacrifice that enables us, as the people of God, to live in real and deep community.
 
Our old arguments and fights and resentments can become one of two things: a source of contention that deepens the rift between people or an Altar of Witness. Every time you reach the same place of anger, you can rehearse it and hate it and hate the person or people who incited that int he first place. It is what the world does. It is deadly poison that sours relationships so that even generations later old enmities become inflamed and the cause of rivalry and fighting. However, the Word of God shows a better way. The very place of conflict is the place where the warring parties remember the work of God. In the Old Testament that is an altar, in the New Testament, that is the cross of Jesus Christ.
 
At the cross believers know that God has accomplished the work only He could. The Father, in love chose people for His Own. The Son, in love and fullness of submission to the Father’s purpose and for His glory, offered Himself as the sacrifice that takes away the anger of God against sin, and removes the thorny barrier which sin and hatred that had been erected between warring factions. The Holy Spirit applies the love of God and the healing forgiveness of Jesus so that former enemies can live together in peace.
 
The very bone of contention, the place where anger was incited, now becomes a monument to the endless love of God and the forgiving grace of Jesus and this is sealed by the Holy Spirit. Believers can say, “remember how we used to fight about this? What a glorious God we serve, that we can be reconciled and healed!” Wait a minute! What about the times when I am prepared for healing, but the other party keeps throwing it in my face?
 
Beloved, I Peter 3:1-7 speaks to this, a believing spouse and an unbelieving spouse in conflict. The believing spouse will live for Jesus with such commitment and submission to Jesus that the other will be won to God. A  wife might win her husband to God, or a husband with his great gentleness might win his wife to God. It is evangelism, costly and difficult right in one’s own home. When the conflict is broadened, between families or churches, the command is not to repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling. (Reviling is hurling abuse and bitterness and cursing against the other person). When you are abused, like Paul you can say, “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake” (Colossians 1:24).
 
Being a Christian is costly. We submit our joys to God and our lives to God and our on-going hurts and wounds and the very things that are plaguing us. Step 6 is: “I am ready to let God take away all my hurts, character weaknesses, and wrongdoings” (Overcomers Workbook, page 111). Are you? Seriously, are you prepared to endure all suffering for the sake of Jesus and to share in His suffering and so also to share in His exaltation (as Philippians 2:1-11 commands)?
Then let very abuse and wrong-doing committed against you cause you to look to the Altar of Witness, or, as New Testament believers, look to the cross of Jesus Christ—where ultimately every wound is healed, every wrong forgiven. It is also the place where the judgment of God is enacted against the world. All who refuse Jesus, will themselves be punished to the fullest extent of God’s just anger against sin. They will be punished for their sins and their haughty rejection of God’s goodness. If you’ve ever really considered hell, the horrors of it, the depths of it, the terrors of it; then in this life, looking to Jesus, you are prepared to do what you can to help people find in Jesus such healing and such grace that even old rivalries and reviling can find their healing in Him alone.
 
Father in heaven, there are countless times I see what others did, or do, and I can feel my blood boil. But a passage of Scripture, like this one, remind me that You saw, see, and know what I will commit against You, and yet in love You gave Jesus Christ so that His cross is witness between of us Your limitless love. In the precious Name of Jesus, forgive me all my waywardness and all my reviling against others. Spirit of the Living God help me to live in such dedicated submission to Jesus that my love, like His, will bear all things. believe all things, hope all things, endure all things and like Jesus’s love my love poured into my heart from the well of living water, will never end. Amen.
 
https://youtu.be/ogS5n0QtSm0?si=1dwEOgDSQ59SVzUf “While You Were Sleeping”
 

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