Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz and you're listening to the Bible in a year podcast where we encounter God's voice and live life through the lens of Scripture.

The Bible in a year podcast is brought to you by Ascension.

Using the great Adventure Bible timeline, we'll read all the way from Genesis to Revelation, discovering how the story of salvation unfolds.

And now we fit into that story today. Once again, today we are joined by Jeff Kavins, who is going to introduce the next time period. We've gone through a number of time periods already from the early world to the patriarchs to the desert wanderings Exodus and Egypt and now we're coming on to the next time period, which is conquest and judges who are entering into this time period where Israel is about to cross the Jordan River and heading on in to the promised land and whatever happens now is going to be the content of the next number of days.

As we're going into judges and the book of Joshua and that's what we have. So Jeff is joining us today as the expert helping us to kind of get ourselves situated and having a context for these next number of days as we're going through this this new time period. Welcome Jeff once again.

Thank you. It's good to join you and yeah, we're going into a very, very exciting period.

Yeah, it's a lot that happens. Yeah, there's an amazing amount that happens and this period is actually not that long and it's made up of two books. It is Joshua and Judges.

And for those of you that are following along and your Bible timeline chart, this is the green period and this it's green because it reminds us of going from the the desert wanderings, which is tan now into the lush green land of promise, the land of Canaan. That's why that's why it is green.

And yet, excuse me, and yet there's going to be not just not just green means go like in the sense of easy or in the sense of just kind of go up and take the land. There's going to be some some struggle that is kind of really marks. I think this time of conquest and judges. I mean, obviously conquest means would would involve struggle. But but this this time period isn't clean.

And it's one of those things like I think if anything we take away from these first however many days we've been we've been journeying through this, but through the Bible is that even though God is with his people, it's it's not always very clean.

You know, it's not that one of those situations where it's just, oh, God's with us. Therefore, the road is smooth. It is oftentimes marked by by certain struggle and certain even catastrophe. Yeah, but it's interesting is that even today people think that it should be nice and easy and clean because God is with us.

But what we're going to find out here in this period, father is that is the fact that God is with them. There's also going to be trials in the period to see will they really trust in the Lord.

So let's kind of set the stage. We just went from the book of numbers and now we're moving into Joshua. The last period left off on the eastern side of the Jordan River looking westward across the Jordan.

You can see Jericho and you can even see Jerusalem way up on the hill and this is where they're going to be going into the principal books are Joshua and judges and then in the midst of judges, there's Ruth.

So we have really two major sections here. We have the conquest of Canaan and then we enter a very, very difficult period called the judges and we'll talk about that in a little bit.

The main character is Joshua Moses has died on Mount Nebo on the eastern side of the Jordan in modern day Jordan and Joshua is the one that's going to take them across in this first book, Joshua and it's very dramatic.

They are going to go across the Jordan River and the waters are going to be rolled back all the way to a city called Adam and that's about eight miles upstream. Now this is interesting because the waters, you know, the Canaanite God system is the really worshiping bail and there's all kinds of derivatives of this.

And the two principal gods are Astra and L, Astra and L get together. They have a baby God, any cute and his name is Bale and Bale is over fertility. Bale is over the waters over agriculture and the very first thing that God is going to do and going into the land is he's going to move that water all the way upstream and everybody in Jericho is going to see this.

And they're going to go across and the man is going to cease. They're going to circumcise the young men who they didn't in the desert. Then they're going to take Jericho and most people have heard that story and then they're going to divide and conquer.

There's going to be a southern and a northern campaign in the book of Joshua, but they don't utterly take the land. They take the, they take the hill countries and then the Canaanites have the lowlands.

If you look at warfare today, you'd say, yay, I mean, we've got the upper hand we're up on the mountains, but that's not true because it's where the chariots are. That's what counts and that's down below.

And so they settle into the land and you know what, you know what's really happening here, fathers, they've been in boot camp for a year at Mount Sinai and numbers in Exodus and it's showtime.

...