Joshua 3:6 | Episode #1225

June 26, 2026

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

Joshua 3:6

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. And really moving slow.

And.

And that's okay because I want you to see the pictures. I want you to understand what's going on. When I say pictures, I'm talking about. I'm talking about spiritual stories. These are true stories, but they're also spiritual stories. And what I mean by that? Well, they're true stories, but because they're being led by God, because God is the one who is authoring these things, because God's one who's bringing these things about. Obviously he is Spirit, The Father is spirit. So they come from a spiritual source and they have spiritual understandings. And another reason I say that is because. Well, the New Testament tells us that. The Old Testament is a schoolmaster, it's a teacher. It is there to teach us. And what is it supposed to teach us? Well, obviously, because we are in the New Testament, supposed to follow the Holy Spirit. We're supposed to be led by the Spirit. We're supposed to be filled with the Spirit because the Holy Spirit is our paraclete, our counselor, the one who walks with us each and every day, the one who is in our presence all the time. Because of that, obviously, these stories that the Holy Spirit reveals to us brings us to the New Testament and allows us to have a better understanding. These physical human stories allow us to have a better understanding of spiritual truths, which means innately, they have to be spiritual. Now, oftentimes when we're studying scripture, we need to, especially in the Old Testament, we need to seek out the spiritual understanding, seek out the spiritual value of what we're trying to learn here. And so if we're studying this and we get to a place where we

see a parallel between the Old Testament

and the New Testament, the parallel being a physical something happening in the Old Testament that kind of parallels a spiritual insight, then we tie them together. And as you begin to tie those things together, and as you begin to look at those things pretty closely, you begin to realize there's a lot of

spiritual things going on in the Old Testament.

And I remember at one point in time when I was very young in the ministry, I had an older minister say, you may be over spiritualizing things. And the more I have thought about

that comment and the more I've thought

about, about whether or not that would be true, I'm not sure that there's any way to over spiritualize. I might not be getting the spiritual truth that I need to be getting from it. I might be wrongly spiritualizing it, But I'm not sure I can over spiritualize it. Because these stories are the school, they're the textbook for the New Testament in which we can, you know, we've got these, these live in the field exercises. If you're in the military, these are field exercises going on in the Old Testament that teach us truths that we can easily connect them with in the New Testament. And then secondly, once I thought about that secondly, I realized there's one person who is really, really heavily into spiritualizing the Old Testament, and that's Jesus. And so when Jesus gives us that example of taking Old Testament truths and spiritualizing them and drawing out New Testament understandings by spiritualizing the Old Testament, I realized, you know, I'm not in bad company. Anytime I can say that I'm doing something that Jesus does, that's probably a good place to be. And so I felt comfortable that I may wrongly spiritualize something, But I don't think I can over spiritualize anything. Especially considered that when Jesus refers to the Old Testament almost exclusively, he is spiritualizing it. What does that mean? Well, he's taking that Old Testament truth and placing it in his teaching to give you the spiritual understanding for the New Testament work he's doing. And so those are cool, cool things. And so when we get up to verse six, it says, then Joshua spoke to the priest. Remember, anytime you read priest, you think, I'm a priest. We're a kingdom of priests, in fact. And why are we priests? Well, priests have access to God. You got access to God. In fact, you are a temple of the Holy Spirit. You're not only the priest, you're the building too. Okay? So if you think about, you know, if you think about that old story, when you put your hands together and you know, you lock them together, you know, here's the church, here's the steeple, open the doors, like, here's the people. Well, here's the cool thing. You're the church and you're the people inside and you're the priest that has access to God. You're. And I'm not over spiritualizing that child like Little Diddy that I did there. You're not over spiritualizing it. You are, you're all those things. And I know that Bible teaches me that. And so we are the priest. So when he says here, and so when we see the priest acting here, we need to say, this is us. Joshua told the priest, take up the ark of the covenant. Remember, anytime you think of the ark of the covenant in the Old Testament, you think of the presence of God because that mercy seat is right there. That's the spot where God meets humanity. And remember, that mercy seat is moved from that ark to your heart. So I'm not over spiritualizing that. That's just New Testament teaching. Okay? So if the priests are taking the AR on their shoulders and they're carrying it, then the presence of God would

be, and I'm going to use a

preposition here, the art. The presence of God is upon you, okay? And in the New Testament, that, that

preposition is epi epi and it's translated upon.

And then in the New Testament, if

something were to be in you, the Greek word for in I n is actually en. So it's pretty easy.

In fact, pretty much pronounced it the same way.

N or in. The word is basically the same.

And so when we're studying the Old Testament and then the Old Testament, and especially when we're studying God leading them into the promised land, them taking the Spirit filled Christian life. In the Old Testament, generally speaking, there are some exceptions. When the Holy Spirit works with humanity

in the Old Testament, he is upon them.

Take for instance David. David, the Bible says when he is anointed king of Israel by.

By Samuel.

When Samuel came to his father's house and saw all his brothers and said that none of them are the man. And he said, do you have any more sons? They went to get David, brought David back, and so they poured the oil on him and anointed him. Notice the oil is the Holy Spirit and it's a picture of the Holy Spirit being on top of you being anointed with that power. When they poured that oil on him, the Bible says the Spirit of the

Lord came upon him and never left him. Okay, now it doesn't say that it was in him. It says it was upon him.

Now, a lot when you read David, and especially when you read the story of David, you begin to think, well, maybe the Holy Spirit was in him also. But it doesn't necessarily say that.

It says.

And David does kind of allude to

the Holy Spirit being in him. And so that point is a fine point that I have not come to a conclusion on. I'll be honest with you.

40 years of Bible study, I still

have not had a. I do not have a complete conclusion of that matter in my own heart and mind.

But I know that the Holy Spirit was upon him. And I know the picture of entering into the promised Land or the picture of the Spirit filled life, that the Holy Spirit in the New Testament comes in you. He breathed on them, said, receive ye the Holy Spirit. And then when they're faithful, when they

act in their faith, God energizes that.

And the Holy Spirit begins to flow out of us, which means he goes from doing a personal work inside of

us to be in the presence of the God of God outside of us.

We're like the best way for me to describe Artesian well, like Jesus said to the woman at the well, you know, it's going to well up to you that, that. That living water that you drink is going to well up to you to eternal life. It's a picture of the Spirit of

God coming out of you in power and upon you.

And so in the New Testament, the

Holy Spirit is both in us and upon us.

And those two events, how those two things work, are different because in the New Testament, when we are born again, obviously the Holy Spirit goes and births

a new Spirit in us. And those two commune with each other. So the Holy Spirit is in us already.

Okay? When we're born again, the Holy Spirit's

the one that did the borning or

did the birthing or did the conceiving or did the begetting. You can use that word in us. And then what causes the Spirit of

God or the Spirit to come upon us in power? Well, obedience. Obedience born of faith, faithful obedience. Obedience not for obedience sake, but obedience that's born of our trust in God. Obedience is born in our belief in who he is. Obedience born of our hope in him, our anxious expectation of who he is.

And so when we have that happen, we have the.

The Presence of God upon us in power. He is upon us in power.

And the priests in this story are giving us that spiritual picture in order to enter the promised land. In order to enter the promised land,

the ark's got to be upon us. The presence of God has to be upon us.

And so when Joshua says to the priests, take up the ark of the covenant and cross over before the people as the priest, in order to experience

the promised land, have to have the presence of God upon us. That's the picture, that's the story, the

picture of a spiritual truth that takes

place in the New Testament.

So what are you saying in the New Testament happens? Well, what I'm saying in the New

Testament happens is justification is the point in which the Holy Spirit conceives in us a new spirit and the Holy Spirit is in us. Sanctification is the process by which we learn to be obedient to God, to

all of God's will. Okay? And we do that by faith.

And when we're obedient by faith, the Holy Spirit and his work in our life

goes from just being a personal

work inside of us to an eternal work outside of us for the world around us.

And that's how we go from receiving

the light of the world, that's Jesus, to being the light of the world world, which Jesus said, I'm the light of the world. And then later on he says, you're the light of the world. So how do, how does that happen?

Well, we go from the Holy Spirit

being in us to the Holy Spirit being EPI being upon us.

And you see that in the New Testament you see God talking about people,

things happening, that the Holy Spirit was in them. And then you see that the Holy Spirit was EPI upon them. And then you go, well, that's got

to be two different works.

And it is, and it is.

And so, and so we need to

understand when we're reading this picture, it

says, so they took up the ark

of the covenant and they went before the people in order to experience the

Spirit filled Christian life.

We as the priesthood have to be obedient to God and take the, the

presence of God which is already in

us in the New Testament, and, and be obedient by faith and carry his presence upon us into the promised land. Now that was a lot of talking to get to that point, but I think we need to have a good, solid, robust understanding of what's happening here picture wise, because it has great, it has great insight. It's a great teaching tool for us to understand what's going on in the New Testament. And, and it's not over spiritualizing to do that. It's actually God is giving us those clear pictures and he's not hiding them. He's.

He's not hiding the ball.

He's.

He's showing us. They're going to cross the Jordan river

in the same place that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan River. And Jesus is going to say that it's necessary that he be baptized there to fulfill all righteousness. What is righteousness? Righteousness is obedient by faith. So it's necessary that he do this because he needs to show us how to be obedient by faith.

And when he is, what does the Holy Spirit do?

It descends not in him, but upon him like a dove. And so you have those parallels tying us off. How do I see. How do I see these things? And then all of a sudden you realize, oh, there's an important work going on here and I need to understand it. And it's not just a pretty story and it's not just a beautiful picture of a dove lighting on Jesus. Oh, how sweet that is. Although that is sweet and beautiful, it is really, really important that we understand that the Holy Spirit wants to move from in us where he is justifying us and making us right to upon us because we are being obedient by faith to the Father and we are going through the process of being saved or salvation. Wow, what a good picture that is. What a great story it is that God is doing in our lives. And what a great parallel it is that we could see this and know this, that Joshua, whose name is a variant of Jesus himself, writes a book

about what God did for him.

And it just so directly parallels well, the Jesus of the New Testament, who is the Lord God himself.

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.