Faith in Strange Places

Almost everybody who’s ever flipped the pages of a Bible has noticed most versions have bold headings interspersed throughout its paragraphs to help the reader navigate what would otherwise be a daunting wall of text. Most also understand that these are not original content, which is to say they were inserted by English-speaking translators or editors relatively recently. They were added for much the same reason most of our blog posts have little orange headings every few paragraphs. They break up the text and give you an idea what you are about to encounter. They help the eye keep moving.

The heading atop Joshua 9 in my ESV reads “The Gibeonite Deception”. That’s not wrong exactly, but it’s sure not the whole story of that chapter. Sometimes you find faith in strange places.

The Gibeonite Deception

The Gibeonites did indeed deceive Joshua and the leaders of Israel, as the chapter documents. Confronted with an invasion sponsored by a God they did not know and could not figure out how to placate, the Hivites living in the city of Gibeon were not content with passivity in the face of the complete destruction righteously decreed for their people. They were also not so foolish as to hasten their own demise by attacking Israel as the inhabitants of other Canaanite cities were doing. They determined instead to make peace with the invaders whatever the cost. So they sent envoys to Joshua and Israel. These men made every effort to appear as if they had traveled a great distance. After all, if they were not locals, Israel had no reason to besiege and dispossess them.

They lied, which should not have surprised anyone. Canaanites were probably as skilled at deception as they were at other varieties of iniquitous behavior, the guilt of which they had piled up over the previous four hundred years, and for which they were under God’s judgment.

So then, Gibeonite lies are the feature of the narrative almost every version of the Bible chooses to highlight. “Deception”, “guile”, “trickery”: all different ways of saying the same thing. I checked at least twenty different translations, and every Bible with headings handled it just the same way. The sole exception I can find is the New King James, which calls it “The Treaty with the Gibeonites”. Definitely more neutral, but still not the whole story.

If I had to put a title on the chapter, I’d call it “The Faith of the Gibeonites”.

Faith in What?

Now, that faith was not in the generosity, goodness or amiability of Joshua and the Israelites. No, they believed the God of Israel would do all he had promised. They banked on it, and took a major risk in attempting to make peace. Here’s what they told Joshua later on:

“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.”

Call it what you like, that’s faith. God had ordered complete destruction, and God would accomplish it. They feared greatly. They acted accordingly.

This is almost exactly the reasoning of Rahab, whom Joshua spared at Jericho for sheltering two spies, and who become a traitor to her people. She said:

“I know that the Lord has given you the land, and that the fear of you has fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the land melt away before you. For we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea before you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to the two kings of the Amorites who were beyond the Jordan, to Sihon and Og, whom you devoted to destruction. And as soon as we heard it, our hearts melted, and there was no spirit left in any man because of you, for the Lord your God, he is God in the heavens above and on the earth beneath.”

Concerning this, the writer to the Hebrews says, “By faith Rahab the prostitute did not perish with those who were disobedient, because she had given a friendly welcome to the spies.” She believed God and it was credited to her for righteousness, and we know it because it came out in her subsequent actions. She switched sides. The reasoning of the Gibeonites is not quite as fully developed as Rahab’s, but it is very much along the same lines. They believed God, they feared, and they acted to preserve themselves.

Isn’t that what faith always produces? Preservation, among other good things. That’s why they call it “saving faith”.

Faith and Failure

So yes, the Gibeonites lied. To me, that’s a minor feature of the narrative. Rahab lied too, and it was the least of her sins, if in fact it was a sin at all. What’s important is that the Hivites in Gibeon were the only representatives of any nation to even attempt to make peace with Israel, and God stood with them in that, even though, like Jacob, they came into his blessing by way of deception. God is not a man that he should change his mind. Once the leaders of Israel had given their word to the Gibeonites and made a treaty with them, they were bound by it, even to the point that they came to the defense of the Gibeonites in the very next chapter when the kings of neighboring cities attacked Gibeon for making peace with Israel. The “punishment” of the Gibeonites, if we can call it that, was limited to this: Joshua made them “cutters of wood and drawers of water for the congregation and for the altar of the Lord”. Compared to what the Bible’s critics love to call genocidal extermination, that seems a pretty sweet deal to me.

What saved the Gibeonites was first and foremost their faith, which prompted them to seek peace by any means necessary. But another factor contributed to their salvation: Israel’s failure. The men who investigated the Gibeonites’ story glanced at their stale provisions and the poor condition of their clothes and concluded they were telling the truth, but the writer of Joshua adds this: “They did not ask counsel of the Lord.” Had they done so, the whole charade would have fallen apart and the peace treaty might never have been made. So God used Israel’s failure of dependency to preserve not just the city of Gibeon, but three other Hivite cities beside.

Unexpected Blessing

How about that? Sound familiar? It sure does to me. For every time I have remembered to ask the Lord how to proceed when I have come to a crossroad in life, there have been probably four or five occasions when I have simply and reflexively used my own powers of reasoning to decide what to do next. That can lead to some embarrassing outcomes, and there is nothing particularly meritorious about it even when my negligence in prayer and the suboptimal choices that often result from it produce unexpected blessing in the life of someone else.

As we see in this chapter, this can actually happen. Our Lord is just that gracious to those in need of his blessing and protection, and just that pleased with the least display of genuine belief in his word.

Even when you find that faith in very strange places.