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. Well, good morning. Welcome to Lake Community Church's morning Bible study. We are in Joshua, chapter one. I mean, Judges chapter one. I've been in Joshua so long. We're in Judges chapter one, and we're dealing with verses 12 through 15. And now sometimes when you're studying the Bible, you'll come across something that. That it. When you're reading it, you're just. You. Just as you read it, you go, okay, I don't know how that fits in, but I know that God is putting this here for a. Really. Is putting this here for a reason. And I need to know. Well, I need to remember it because it matters. And so as we, as we study through this, we need to understand that God, especially in chapter one, where God is kind of filling in the gaps, he's going off of what is in Joshua and making sure that we have understandings that prepare us to go from really, what is the Book of Joshua to the Book of Judges. Because the Book of Judges is about stories of people. It's about the people wandering away from God and then God raising up a human being, a individual, to deliver them as their judge, deliver them from whatever trouble they have brought upon themselves by not following God. And so that's really what the Book of Judges is about. And it's a picture of the New Testament believer. We get ourselves in situations, and then God delivers us from those situations. And usually he uses us to figure out how to walk, walk with him and to walk in victory. We are oftentimes the Judges, but sometimes in our lives God will send someone who will build us up, give us strength, lead us, guide us to a place where we have victory. And so the Book of Judges has a. Well, it's not about the Spirit filled Christian life in the sense of the book of Joshua is. The Book of Judges is about how salvation works, how God works us through the process of being sanctified. And that takes. Well, that takes us learning how to trust him. And so the Book of Judges is about that. Now, in between those two books, you have at the end of Joshua, you have, well, Joshua passing away and the passing of the torch. And then in Judges chapter one, you have God given us some historical information. It's just kind of like, okay, here's the information you're going to need to know. Here are some things you might need to ponder on. Here's some understandings that you may not have. And one of the understandings that you kind of get from the first six books of the Bible is that God passes his inheritance in the land. His plan is to pass his inheritance in the land through the sons. And by the way, that's found even in Genesis with Abraham. We go through the sons, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And you got Jacob and Esau, and you've got Isaac and all the issues of having him and whether or not and who went up on the mountain and all that kind of stuff. You have all those problems and they go through the lineage and then Jacob has 12 sons. And there you are. Before you know it, you're really in the position where, where you're seeing that the promises are passed through the male children. Now you see that at work. And it is not spelled out in detail anywhere in scripture in that sense other than God says, I'm going to give this tribe the land and it's going to be passed out through the clans. And then the system begins, the system of how they did it. And by the way, that's how they did it. That's how they passed it on for a thousand years. That's why they passed it on till really even more than a thousand years, twelve hundred years, even in the midst of being taken into captivity. And all the things that happened when they came back to the promised land, when the Romans took over 150 years before Christ, all that's going on, that's kind of the system that's at play. But in the Book of Joshua, at the very start, right there in, you know, in Joshua 1:1 where God's going to throw out some information to us, information that he did not have to give us. I mean, it's not like this is critical information as to some inheritance or something like that. Okay? This is just information God gives us. Just hey, on the side here, I want you to see this. And I think that's important when we read this. Then Caleb said, that's the Caleb that, that told them to go into the promised land at the start. That was with Joshua, the same Caleb. Caleb says whoever attacks Kir Jath Sephir. And by the way, that's. That's one of the towns that they've been attacking. All these Kirjaths we see up here, that's one of the towns that they're going to try to take. He says, whoever takes it to him, I will give my daughter Ashka Ash as wife. And that's not a a s, C, H, it's a C, H, S, A H, which you know, is causing me all kinds of problems as I read those H's. Just wander all over that word while I'm, while I'm trying to put it together. To him, he would give his daughter Asha or Asha his wife. Hmm. Well, that's not unusual. Somebody does something great. Caleb says, I'm gonna reward you by making you a part of my family. And that would be something Caleb would do. And it says, and Othniel, the son of Kenaz, Caleb's younger brother, took it. So he gave him his daughter Asha as wife. So you've got Othniel, who's the son of Kenaz, Caleb's younger brother. So these two are cousins. Okay. And they're getting married. Something you need to consider there. They are cousins. And by the way, the Jewish people were told to marry within their own people. And so there were a lot of cousins getting married. That usually is not a problem in the whole, as long as you don't have a long line of being married to brothers and sisters and cousins for several generations. And so he said. So he gave him his daughter Asa as wife. Now, it happened when she came to him. She urged him to ask her father for a field. So she goes and marries Othniel and then she encourages Othniel to ask for an inheritance. Now notice that inheritance would have gone normally from Caleb to his sons, not from Caleb to his brother's sons. So she's asking for an inheritance, which would mean that Caleb is giving an inheritance to sure, his nephew and son in law. But really, if it's going to pass through lines, he's giving this inheritance to his daughter. And it says, and she dismounted from her dog Donnie. Donkey. And Caleb said to her, what do you wish? So she said to him, give me a blessing. Since you. You have given me land in the south, give me also a spring of water. So she's already. She's already gotten the land. It happened that she got the land. And then when she goes to see her father and he's given her the land, she goes and asks for a spring of water. And Caleb gave her the upper spring and the lower springs. Now, springs and wells are pictures of. Well, they're pictures of new sources or old sources of the blessing of the Holy Spirit. I mean, water is the cleansing and nourishment of the Holy Spirit. And that's a picture. Wine's a picture of the goodness of the Holy Spirit. Oil's a picture of the power of the Holy Spirit. Win. Water's a picture of the washing and the sustenance, the nourishment of the Holy Spirit. And so a spring is a picture of you getting that, and you don't even do anything for it. A well is a picture of where you, by faith, dig down and you trust God and you do the work of getting down there to get the water, and then the water's provided. A spring is a picture of the overflow of God. So a spring's the overflow. A well, it's a picture of the work of faith from the believer. And so you've got those two things that are going on. So you want to have springs in your life, and then you also want to have wells, because you don't want to just live by the springs because you're not acting in faith. You want that clothing of righteousness as we studied in Revelation, chapter 19, last night. You want that clothing of righteousness, and that righteousness comes by faith. You want to be clothed in the righteousness of God, meaning you want to walk by faith, and you want to wear that linen of righteousness. And so you want to do both. You want to drink from the springs, you want to drink from the overflow, and you want to dig the wells. You want to do both of them. Now, notice, Caleb gave them both to who? His daughter. All right, now you go. And then it says, and Caleb gave her the upper springs and the lower springs. So he gave in her. Gave her an abundance of it. Now you go, why are we. Why are we even studying that well? Because I want you to put it in your back of your mind. You need to put it in your memory bank, okay? And the reason you put it in your memory bank is because People are going to teach you that the church and scripture is patriarchal, and it's not. It's not patriarchal. And those who, those who are doing that oftentimes are trying to retain control or power. And women have a major, major role to play in the kingdom and in the church. And that role is powerful. And that role oftentimes is not the primary leadership role. And the reason that is is because God did make man head over woman. But, but, but, but, but women are like, as Pastor Terry's wife Diane says, you know, they're the neck. The head can't move without the neck. And they are very, very important. And they are very, very close to, they should always be very, very close to the leadership of what's going on. And they should always be doing ministry, and they should always be. And they should always be advisors to the leadership because they have access to the springs also. They have access to the springs also. And they have a right to the inheritance also. They have a right to the inheritance. And that's what this picture is saying. It's saying it's kind of giving you a hint for the future as you're looking out into the future. Because by the way, we're going to have a judge that is, is a woman. We're going to have female judges, okay? And you're gonna see that females play a heavy role and already have played a heavy role in the first six books of the Bible. Now you're, I mean, you know, Miriam played a huge role in Moses life and in his Moses leadership and in Moses ministry. That's the sister of Moses. Moses wives played huge roles. Obviously. Sarah played a big role in Abraham's life and a big role in the history of Israel. And so oftentimes when you get into certain church governmental organizations, it's going to be very, very highly patriarchal. And it does not recognize the importance of the females who have the giftings, who have the, the well of faith, they dug wells of faith, who have drank from the springs, who have been given the inheritance, which, by the way, this is what's happening here. She's getting the inheritance. They have all that, and they should not be discounted. A good male leader who does not value greatly not only the men that God have placed under him, who are oftentimes even more gifted than he is, and the women who are oftentimes more gifted than he is and maybe even more insightful than he is, should not discount them and should not. And if you see a leader who struggles with that, that's probably because they struggle with their own inadequacies. They are openly struggling with their own inadequacies. Now, a great leader will realize that you are inadequate and will rely on the people that God has blessed him with for direction. But, you know, sometimes that takes wisdom and takes time to figure that out. And so this passage kind of screams out to us, we need to listen. We need to be listening, and we need to take advantage of not just half of the population of the church and their giftings. We need to use the whole population of the church. And I'll probably be teaching a lot about that later on on, because, well, we got a lot of Bible to cover. 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.
