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To Whom Should We Listen?


Then the two men started back. They went down out of the hills, forded the river and came to Joshua son of Nun and told him everything that had happened to them. They said to Joshua, “The LORD has surely given the whole land into our hands; all the people are melting in fear because of us.” (Joshua 2:23-24) 

          What a change forty years can make. I have to wonder whether Joshua only sent two spies because of the twelve sent the time before, only two came back with this sort of report. I also have to wonder whether he was very careful to pick people he could trust to come back with a reliable report.
          How often do we base our decisions on no report at all, or on bad reports? It's easy to take the word of someone who sounds like an expert. Only two of the twelve original spies said that Israel should do what God had told them to do. Ten of the original twelve spies used "common sense" and Israel suffered for forty years as a result.  Now, these two spies brought back information that confirmed for Joshua what God had told him to do. It's easy to be derailed by "common sense" or by the words of those proclaimed to be "experts."  The first question we should ask ourselves is whether common sense or the experts happen to agree with what God has said in His Word. If they don't, maybe we need to find the type of "spies" that Joshua sent to Jericho instead of putting the matter to a vote.
 
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On the Calendar:
Rosh Hoshana

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