As soon as all the kings who were beyond the Jordan in the hill country and in the lowland all along the coast of the Great Sea toward Lebanon, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, heard of this, 2 they gathered together as one to fight against Joshua and Israel. 3 But when the inhabitants of Gibeon heard what Joshua had done to Jericho and to Ai, 4 they on their part acted with cunning and went and made ready provisions and took worn-out sacks for their donkeys, and wineskins, worn-out and torn and mended, 5 with worn-out, patched sandals on their feet, and worn-out clothes. And all their provisions were dry and crumbly.6 And they went to Joshua in the camp at Gilgal and said to him and to the men of Israel, “We have come from a distant country, so now make a covenant with us.” 7 But the men of Israel said to the Hivites, “Perhaps you live among us; then how can we make a covenant with you?” 8 They said to Joshua, “We are your servants.” And Joshua said to them, “Who are you? And where do you come from?” 9 They said to him, “From a very distant country your servants have come, because of the name of the Lord your God. For we have heard a report of him, and all that he did in Egypt,10 and all that he did to the two kings of the Amorites who were beyond the Jordan, to Sihon the king of Heshbon, and to Og king of Bashan, who lived in Ashtaroth. 11 So our elders and all the inhabitants of our country said to us, ‘Take provisions in your hand for the journey and go to meet them and say to them, “We are your servants. Come now, make a covenant with us.”’12 Here is our bread. It was still warm when we took it from our houses as our food for the journey on the day we set out to come to you, but now, behold, it is dry and crumbly. 13 These wineskins were new when we filled them, and behold, they have burst. And these garments and sandals of ours are worn out from the very long journey.” 14 So the men took some of their provisions, but did not ask counsel from the Lord.15 And Joshua made peace with them and made a covenant with them, to let them live, and the leaders of the congregation swore to them. 16 At the end of three days after they had made a covenant with them, they heard that they were their neighbors and that they lived among them. 17 And the people of Israel set out and reached their cities on the third day. Now their cities were Gibeon, Chephirah, Beeroth, and Kiriath-jearim. 18 But the people of Israel did not attack them, because the leaders of the congregation had sworn to them by the Lord, the God of Israel. Then all the congregation murmured against the leaders. 19 But all the leaders said to all the congregation, “We have sworn to them by the Lord, the God of Israel, and now we may not touch them.20 This we will do to them: let them live, lest wrath be upon us, because of the oath that we swore to them.”21 And the leaders said to them, “Let them live.” So they became cutters of wood and drawers of water for all the congregation, just as the leaders had said of them.
22 Joshua summoned them, and he said to them, “Why did you deceive us, saying, ‘We are very far from you,’ when you dwell among us? 23 Now therefore you are cursed, and some of you shall never be anything but servants, cutters of wood and drawers of water for the house of my God.” 24 They answered Joshua, “Because it was told to your servants for a certainty that the Lord your God had commanded his servant Moses to give you all the land and to destroy all the inhabitants of the land from before you—so we feared greatly for our lives because of you and did this thing. 25 And now, behold, we are in your hand. Whatever seems good and right in your sight to do to us, do it.” 26 So he did this to them and delivered them out of the hand of the people of Israel, and they did not kill them. 27 But Joshua made them that day cutters of wood and drawers of water for the congregation and for the altar of the Lord, to this day, in the place that he should choose.
Many have asked why Israel kept this vow when they made it under false pretenses. And make no mistake the leaders in verses 18, 19 and 20 make the comment that they had made an oath, they had entered into a covenant, a relationship by which they invoked the name of the Lord. I think we conclude that Israel should have just gotten out of this, that breaking a vow made under these circumstances, would be no big deal…because we have a very low view of the importance of the honor of our word and more importantly the honor and majesty of God. But, and this is no small point, we don’t find that problem in the godly men and women of Holy Scripture. A promise made, all the more a vow in which the name of the Lord was invoked, had to be kept. This is the Bible’s viewpoint from beginning to end.
In Genesis 27 we read the account of Rebekah and Jacob tricking Isaac into giving Jacob the blessing that he intended to give to Esau. But that blessing was the Lord’s blessing given by prophecy by the patriarch. Isaac knew he could not go back on his word; he could not break the promise he had made in the Lord’s name. Did you know that seven of the descendants of King Saul would eventually die because Saul had tried to break the very covenant that Joshua and Israel made with the Gibeonites here in chapter 9? That is how seriously vows were taken by the faithful in Israel and that is why they took them so seriously: because Yahweh himself takes them so seriously!
In Ezek. 17 we read of the Lord’s anger toward Zedekiah, one of the last kings of Judah. Zedekiah had sworn an oath to Nebuchadnezzar to submit to Babylonian rule, but then broke that oath and negotiated with the Egyptians. The Lord punished Zedekiah by consigning him to exile and death in Babylon and, as we read in Ezekiel 17:16-20, explicitly because he betrayed the oath he had sworn in the Lord’s name to a pagan king!
In Malachi 2 we read that the prayers of God’s people were falling on deaf ears in heaven because Israelite men were betraying the covenant they had made with their wives, divorcing them to marry other women. That is why we read in Psalm 15:4, in an elaborate description of the godly man, that such a man “swears to his own hurt and does not change.”
The NIV aptly translates the same phrase as “who keeps his oath even when it hurts.” That psalm, by the way, has been remembered in Scotland as the psalm to be sung at an elder’s deathbed! Why? Because an elder is supposed to be a godly man, such a man who keeps his vow even when it hurts! (RSR)
This is also why Jesus would tell us in His Sermon on the Mount, in effect, “Don’t swear lightly because when you swear in the name of God, God expects you to be faithful.”
Do you see how emphatic the Word of God is at this point? Even covenants made and oaths sworn under the most deceitful of conditions are to be kept. God’s people are to keep their word and God’s name — so often invoked when Christians take vows — must not be dishonored.
Many of you have made vows, invoking the name of the Lord on your wedding day…How are you doing? Gentlemen? Love, honor, and cherish…do these words mean more to you today than they did then? They should. Ladies? Honor, obey and submit?
And what about church vows, those too invoke the name of the Lord. Think of the reasons that you personally know of that Xns have given for leaving the church where they had taken vows in the name of the Lord. The great majority of those who leave a church and break their vows give reasons that would not be even close to as good as the Israelites could have given for breaking THIS vow, but they knew they could not!
When we are faced with situations like we find in our text, instead of realizing that the trouble, the problem is ours and that we have to deal first and foremost with ourselves because we didn’t inquire of the Lord, we didn’t seek wisdom… Instead of dealing with ourselves, we look to blame someone else, in this case the Gibeonites, for the way THEY went about the whole thing. “Yea, I shouldn’t have done that, but when he…” And here comes the justification for our own sin and failures.
So, we blame others and of course this is really easy to do when there is actually something that the “others” did that WAS wrong, again, like the Gibeonites. We will admit, of course, that we were wrong but…and then our focus is not upon our own repentance and humility but upon what other people did or failed to do or more in my experience, people will ruin their lives by their choices and turn around and blame the church…I could give you story after story on this front.
So, what are we to do? We fail to trust in the Lord with all our heart and instead lean on our own understanding and things go south…what are we to do? The answer is simple: We are to live faithfully in a twisted situation. (Davis) You are required, however you want to say it, to be faithful, to be holy, to be righteous while living in situations that your own foolishness has contributed to creating.
We all know this. You find yourself in a difficult situation that your own sin, your own folly has entirely created or partially created and what you are supposed to do is ask the Lord’s forgiveness, plead His mercy and steel yourself to honor the Lord your God amidst all the mess. Regardless of the situations we find ourselves in, the Lord loves faithfulness. He is faithful and He loves it when his people imitate him and are faithful both in our dealings with God but also with one another. In other words, our sin need not be the final word.
As I said earlier we, modern American Christians might have thought this whole thing to end differently. We would have figured out a way out of this vow we had taken and felt guilt free in doing so pointing our fingers at the deceitful Gibeonites. But Joshua and the leaders, again at this time, faithful and believing men, understood that option was not open to them. And if we truly know the Heart of God we would expect that because He loves faithfulness, He will reward faithfulness.
We should know He is up to something, something that magnifies his love for sinners and his plan for His mercy to conquer the world. It is true that the Gibeonites chose servitude, that is, to be woodcutters and water-carriers for the sanctuary of God instead of being utterly destroyed. For most of the Gibeonites, their day-to-day lives would have changed very little, for example the women and children would live pretty much the same as they always had.
But the men, some of the men, as vs. 23 says, would have to stop the trades that they had inherited from their fathers, stopped being farmers or carpenters to work in service to the Israelites. Sin pays a wage and the Gibeonites have certainly sinned. This was no doubt a burden for the Gibeonites and not something they wanted, but better than death by the sword. They knew they would be exchanging freedom for their lives.
The Lord Jesus, remember, once reminded us of the wisdom of this course of action. If your enemy is coming and you know you can’t beat him, come to terms. Get the best terms you can, of course, but it is better to live and to save your loved ones than to sacrifice them all in a war you have no chance of winning. That was precisely what the Gibeonites thought and did.
The cities of Canaan would suffer crushing defeats at the hands of Israel as they came and took the promised-land as God commanded. Most of these Canaanites would be killed and their homes destroyed. And in the midst of all of that, there sit the Gibeonites safely going on with their lives in their untouched towns and cities. Servants, to be sure, but it wasn’t very long before the Gibeonites were largely assimilated as part of the population of Israel. We find them in King Saul’s day at least somewhat a separate and identifiable people.
Later the Gibeonites had clearly already become simply Israelites with a different ancestry. One of David’s mighty men, one of the men closest to him and upon whom he relied, a fellow named Ishmaiah, was a Gibeonite. [1 Chron. 12:4] In Nehemiah 3:7 we read that men of Gibeon repaired part of the wall of Jerusalem when Nehemiah saw to the rebuilding of the walls of the capital. And in the list of those who returned to Judea from exile in Babylon, we read in Neh. 7:25 that there were 95 sons of Gibeon: that is, 95 Gibeonite families in that group of exiles returning from exile. Those were believers who came back to the Promised Land because they wanted to honor and serve that Lord. And among those believers were a sizable group of Gibeonites!
Isn’t it just like our God to use sin, sinlessly and to bless sinners!!! The Lord honored this covenant even though it was the result of Joshua’s foolishness in not inquiring of the Lord and the Gibeonites deception and lying to God’s people…and He honored it not simply by allowing Canaanites to live within the Promised Land, which seems a pretty risky thing to do…but by allowing Hivites like Rahab and Gibeonites to find a place among the OT church, and, I remind you at least at this time, the faithful, believing OT church.
What effect do you suppose it had on these men as individuals and their families to be constantly serving at the sanctuary? Unbelievers serving the church, unbelievers, at least at first and for a while, serving the people of God, and serving them as it touches upon their worship.
They would have been exposed over and over again to the worship of God by these faithful Israelites…they would be exposed to true faith… they would hear it sung and watch it practiced…did that faith become their faith? Apparently for some it certainly did! Granted, this was not Joshua’s intention. He was a warrior not an evangelist. Nonetheless, it seems very likely that we are going to find Gibeonites in heaven! Wouldn’t you love to see, to learn in that holiest of places, with time stretched out before you, of the wonders of God’s grace and how sin can never thwart what the Lord intends for the salvation of sinners? Wouldn’t it be fascinating to sit and listen to Joshua and a Gibeonite wondering aloud about the marvelous grace of God?
Do you know why this happened? Because unlike men, unlike you and me, the Lord our God is always faithful to His word. He never lies, He never deceives us and He always keeps His promises. And among those promises is this one: “He who comes to me I will never drive away!” If we know that and if we know that the Lord’s word never fails and his promises are always kept, then we too will want to honor him by keeping our word and honoring our promises: our promises to Him and our promises to others.
Prayer: Father, I could not count the number of times I have contented myself that my word could be mitigated and I could escape the commitments my lips have uttered. I have done this so often that my conscience is hardly pricked at all. Help me to bring my thoughts and words as well as all my actions under the scrutiny of Your Word and by Your Spirit make me one who honors You by faithfulness to my promises and vows, in Jesus name, Amen.
Song: Here I am
