Joshua 3:2-3 | Episode# 1222

June 23, 2026

Hope Alive: Applying God’s Word to Your Daily Life

Joshua 3:2-3

I am Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and had been serving as a pastor for over 25 years. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word verse-by-verse and find God's will for your life. The purpose of studying scripture is that you might know the character of Jesus Christ, and that you might see the world from the Father's perspective. That you gain wisdom that changes your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open His word to you and allow you to see Him and to know Him. To know His will, that you might glorify Him and that you might walk in faith and power each day, especially today. In Jesus name.

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Transcript

This is Hope Alive, where we apply God's Word to our daily life. My name is Chad Harrison. I'm first a husband, a father and a grandfather. I'm also the teaching pastor at Lake Community Church in Dadeville, Alabama on beautiful Lake Martin. I've been serving as a pastor for over 30 years. I also serve as the Tallapoosa County District Judge. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word verse by verse through the Bible and to find his purpose and will for your daily life. If you would like sponsor this podcast, go to the Show Notes where there's a link where you can make a donation. I pray in the name of Jesus that God would open his word to you, allow you to see him and to know him, so that you would know his will and his way for your life, that you might walk in faith and power each and every day, especially today. Word of God, please speak to the hearers of your voice today in the name of Jesus. Amen. Foreign. We are in Joshua, chapter three and we're dealing with verses two and three. I want to read them to you and then I want to give you the explanation. And kind of the best way for me to do it, I guess, is to do a dichotomy, a difference between crossing the Red Sea and crossing the river Jordan and. And how that plays out not only in the stories, but how that plays out in their differences as far as the work of God that's being done in both situations, what they symbolically point to and then how we can understand how God does His work, what he does to effectuate his plan in our lives. And so it says. So it was after three days, remember they left the acacia grove and came to the Jordan and they lodged there before they crossed over, meaning they set up camp on the other side of the Jordan river, it says. And so they were there three days. And that has significance in the sense that, remember when they left Egypt, they left and they made bread and it was the bread of haste. They didn't add leaven to it. They had to move quickly. Once the angel of death passed over the night before passed by them because there was the blood of the Lamb on the doorpost, which is a picture of God placing the blood of the Lamb, the perfect Lamb, on our hearts, giving us a circumcised heart, a new heart. And we're gonna deal with circumcision too, by the way, and its picture for our Christian life. But when they did that, the next morning, boom, they're leaving. And when they're leaving. They're following God. God is the one who's done all the work. Well, they've done nothing. Moses has. But Moses is couched in the position of the deliverer, okay? And so he's going to move into the position of. Of the leader. And then ultimately the lawgiver, the prophet, the one who gives God's revelation, he's gonna move into those roles. But when he goes into Egypt, he is functioning as a type of Christ, as the deliverer. He's the one that's going to deliver them. They don't do anything. In fact, while they're in Egypt, they murmur against them. When Pharaoh says, try to make you. You gotta keep up with the brick count, and you're not going to be able to do it with straw. And so then they have to go out and glean the straw from the field at night in order to make their brick count. And they murmur against God. And so they're doing nothing. They're absolutely doing nothing to deliver themselves out of Egypt. God has planned it. From time immemorial. He prophesied that they'd go into Egypt, that they'd buried there, and that they'd be in slavery and that he would deliver them. And God sends the deliverer to deliver them, and they come out of Egypt in haste. And Pharaoh the next day realizes that he feels like he's made a mistake. And so eventually he sends his army to chase after them. Moses sends them out to the road, out to the sea. They follow the road out to the sea, not the northern road, which they would have been able to navigate pretty easily and not have to cross over sea. He takes them out there where they have their backs to the Red Sea, and they have Pharaoh now chasing after them in a chariot, in his chariot army. And so when they get there, then panic breaks loose when they realize Pharaoh's coming with his chariots. And they say, you've let us out in the wilderness to be killed. And. And what happens? Moses says, step back. See what God's going to do. They haven't done anything. They haven't done anything other than bake the bread of haste, sacrifice the lamb, put it over the doorpost, and head out with Moses. Loot the Egyptians, take whatever the Egyptians were going to give them. And the Egyptians were giving them stuff. Y' all just go. We've had enough of these plagues. And. And they've done nothing other than just grab up what God has done for them and follow him. That's it. That's all they've done. I. They get to the Red Sea, they do nothing, absolutely nothing. Moses lifts his arm, God parts the Red Sea, and all they do is cross over. All they do is cross over. And that's a picture of repentance. That's a picture of. All we do is turn to God and follow after what he is saying in our hearts. That's a picture of the conversion experience. What modern culture, modern Christian culture, especially in the south, calls, they call salvation when a person gets saved. What they mean is when a person realizes that God has done this work for them, that he's calling them to repentance, and then they turn and they chase it. They. They turn to God and we do a prayer oftentimes and things like that. But really, the important thing is not the physical acts. The important thing is the attitude of the heart. The heart turns toward God. And once the heart turns toward God, then God can do all the other things that he desires to do in their life. But they got to do that. They got to have their heart turned toward God. And so when we get to this place, God allows them to cross over the Red Sea. Pharaoh's chariot army decides to chase after them, gets to the middle of the Red Sea. God closes up the Red Sea and destroys Pharaoh's chariots. That's. That's how. That's how it's done. That's how the crossing of the Red Sea takes place. By the way, the crossing of the Red Sea is. The picture. Is the true picture of baptism. Oftentimes we get these pictures all mixed up. It's a picture of what we call baptism. When we go in the water and. And we're immersed and then we come out clean. It is the picture of that baptism that is the baptism of God's deliverance, okay? And that baptism takes place in the Red Sea. Then there is the baptism of our faithfulness, okay? And that takes place at the Jordan River. And then obviously, there's another work of God that. Where he gives us a new body, the baptism of his glorification. Jesus said, a new baptism I've got to undergo, and that one is by fire. Well, what's God gonna do? He's gonna take these bodies and get rid of them and give us a glorified Holy Spirit, perfect body. And so when we get those things, all of a sudden you're beginning to see all these pictures come together, and you're beginning to realize that there's the work of justification at the Red Sea, there's the work of sanctification that Begins at the Jordan River. And then there's the work of glorification that, that begins in our death. And so when you have those pictures of. In the Old Testament we would call them anointings. In the New Testament we call them baptisms. When we have those pictures, you begin to. It all begins to correlate in your mind. You begin to put those things together and realize, you know, this is a full fledged plan. And so I need to understand what it meant for God to deliver me out of Egypt. But I also need to understand what it means for him to, to invite me to cross over the Jordan river and to join him in the work that he wants to do in my life and to take on the fullness of the power of the Holy Spirit at work at what we're doing. And so when we have those things going on in our lives, when we have those things happening in our lives, we're powerful before him, we walk powerfully before him. So it was after three days that the officers, this is verse two, went through the camp. Okay, so they wait there three days notice. There is a plan. This is a calculated effort. This is something that they're actually going to think through and do. This is something that has a purpose to it. And that purpose is already known by the people as they go in. It's not going to be like the Red Sea where they panic. They see the Egyptians coming, they panic, they don't know what's going on. Red Sea crosses. Oh, let's go across the Red Sea. I think about the veggietales and how they depict some of these things. You know, it's weird. In my own mind sometimes in my own mind as I think through things, I remember movies and you would think I would remember Charlton Heston and the ten Commandments of them crossing the Red Sea. But the truth is I remember a bunch of vegetables crossing the Red Sea. Why? Because it's really more of a, a over the top view of how we're like, you know, God's delivering us and we turn and it's just, you know, wholesale chase after God cross the Red Sea. We gotta get, you know, we got. And we gotta get saved. And we do that in our own hearts and minds. And we do that. We just, it's just. And we don't know what's happening. God's doing it. God's doing everything. And that's really what the redemption process is about. God does all the work of redemption. You don't do anything for it. You don't do anything for his redemption. He does the whole work of it. But when we get to the Jordan river, this is a I have decided to follow Jesus moment. This is not a thank you, Jesus, that you have redeemed me and saved me from this world. That's not the moment. The moment is I've decided that I wanna walk with God and I want to experience the life that he has for me. And I am willing to walk through that plan. I'm willing to walk it out in my life. And that's what the Jordan River's about. That's why the Pentecostals call it the second baptism. You'll have mainline denominational people call it the Spirit, the anointed Christian life, the fullness of the Holy Spirit. There's all kinds of phraseologies to be. And I'm not trying to sell you any of the phraseologies. What I'm trying to give you is the picture. Because you yourself can have the anointed, powerful spirit filled Christian life. Whether you come from a Pentecostal persuasion, a Catholic persuasion, a Presbyterian, a Methodist Baptist, and I don't care where you come from, because you've been redeemed out of Egypt if you are a follower of Christ. And that comes in so many forms now, there's just too many. There's too many flavors to mention, okay? Whatever flavor you come from in your theological journey, and you didn't even know what the theological journey was. You were just doing what people were telling you to do from Scripture. As you follow Jesus, there does come a time where you have to decide, I'm going to follow Jesus. For me, it was when I was 18 years old and God was dealing with me about who I was going to be as a man in my future. And I distinctly remember God saying to me, are you going to follow me and do what I want you to do, or are you going to follow after the world or follow after your own will and do what you want to do? It's time for you to decide to do my will, my way. And I remember, you know, the song that was being sung. I remember the location I was at. I remember the smell of the carpet as I knelt down before God. And I remember that moment because I decided that I would cross the Jordan. And now did I get. Get good? Cross the Jordan and do, you know, take the promised land immediately? No, no, no, no. But what I did is I began the process of learning how to walk in the fullness of the Holy Spirit. And boy, I wasn't good at it, at starting out not at all. And if you had to grade me on how well I do it right now, I'd say, you know, I'm still in the F category. I'm definitely not above 60%. But. But as you grow in it, you know, 60% of the full power of the Holy Spirit is pretty doggone good. So if you could ever even get to 10, 20%, wouldn't that. I mean, wouldn't it be just wonderful? Absolutely it would. Absolutely it would. And so he says, they commanded the people, saying, when you see the ark of the covenant of the Lord and the priest, the Levites bearing it, then you shall set out from this place and go after it. Now, here's the critical part about that. Moses, when he opened the Red Sea with his hands lifted high when he opened the Red Sea. And God in Moses as his role as the deliverer. When God fulfilled his promise to deliver his people out of Egypt, they did nothing. But that's not the ultimate plan of God for him to glorify himself through humanity. Okay? That's not the ultimate plan of God for him to glorify himself through humanity. The full plan of God for him to glorify himself through humanity is not humanity. Just make it through. And God does everything. The plan is, is for us to bear the image of God, who he is to be the house, you know, to him, for the Holy Spirit. Do you not know you're a temple of the Holy Spirit? For the Holy Spirit to live inside of us. And we bear his image, his likeness. We're his image bearers. And we carry the presence of God into the world, and we work that out in our lives. That's. That's the plan of God for. For us to go from being broken and lost and unredeemable to redeemed and then being back in his image, doing the things that he made us to do so that people in the physical could see the physical, but recognize the presence of God in the spiritual and glorify Him. That's what Adam was made to do in the garden, was to be the image of God. And the way we do that is we have to. We have to make those steps of faith. Remember, this doesn't have anything to do with being delivered from Egypt and, And. And. And not being lost anymore. We're. We're past. Way past that, okay? We're at the place now where we've heard the word of God. We've eaten the manna, we've drunk water from the rock. We. We've. We've had all this stuff. And now it's time to go in. It's time to go in and be the people of God for the kingdom of God. And at that moment when you realize that's what we're doing in your life, they commanded the people saying, when you see the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, that's the presence of God, that's the physical presence of God. Remember that. Remember those angels sitting there and where the angel's wing touched. That's the propitiation spot. That's the mercy seat where. That's where the eternal God met the children of Israel in the physical world. That spot. Where, where is it going to be? Is it going to be sitting in a tent, in a tabernacle? No, no. It's going to be carried by the priest of God. Those who have access to the presence of God. You, you're the priest. You're the one carrying the tavern, the ark across the Jordan River. You're the one taking the promised land. And he told them, when you see that arm own human beings, when you see that presence of God on being bore, you know they're bearing the presence of God on their shoulders. The mantle of God, the, the, the image of God. When they bear that on their shoulders, what are you to do? You're to go into the promised land. And that's what the picture is all about. That's, that's what they're going to do. And we're going to talk about how that process takes place. Because he's defining, this is when. These are the instructions. When you see the presence of God own human beings, you follow, you go, you go in and, and you'll be victorious. You, you, you honor God by being what you were made to be. Wow. What a, what a, what a whole wild, powerful, amazing thing God does. And that's why I love Joshua. I love it. Love it. Why? Because, well, I mean, they're going in, they're handling it, they're. They're learning what it is to, to get past all that goes on with the justification of God. And they're moving into sanctification and then into bearing God's image in their lives. The Spirit filled Christian life. The Pentecostals called second baptism, the anointing of God being evident in your life. I want some of that. Don't you? As you go today, I pray that the Lord will bless you and keep you, that he'll make his face to shine upon you and that he will give you hope and peace today in Jesus name.