Joshua Circumcises the Israelites Before They Can Occupy Canaan

After 40 years of wandering in the desert, the Israelites were finally about to walk into the Promised Land. But before they could enter, there was still one thing they needed to do to be made ready. We read about this in Joshua chapter five:

At that time the LORD said to Joshua, “Make flint knives and circumcise the Israelites again.” So Joshua made flint knives and circumcised the Israelites at Gibeath Haaraloth. Now this is why he did so: All those who came out of Egypt—all the men of military age—died in the desert on the way after leaving Egypt. All the people that came out had been circumcised, but all the people born in the desert during the journey from Egypt had not. The Israelites had moved about in the desert forty years until all the men who were of military age when they left Egypt had died, since they had not obeyed the LORD. For the LORD had sworn to them that they would not see the land that he had solemnly promised their fathers to give us, a land flowing with milk and honey. So he raised up their sons in their place, and these were the ones Joshua circumcised. They were still uncircumcised because they had not been circumcised on the way (vv. 2–7 NIV84).

Stories like this one were recorded in the Bible under the inspiration of God not only to document real historical people who did real historical things, but also to serve as object lessons that teach us the larger plan of salvation (1 Corinthians 10:1–6).

• The Hebrew slaves in Egypt who left during the Exodus were born into slavery. They did nothing to enslave themselves and, thus, accurately represent human beings who, because of Adam’s sin, have been born slaves to sin (Psalm 51:5) through no fault of our own.
• Pharaoh, who does not know God, represents Satan, the cruel slave master.
• Moses represents Jesus, who went into enemy territory, confronted the slave master, destroyed his power, and freed the slaves.
• The pillar of fire and the cloud of God’s presence, leading the people, represent the Holy Spirit—the two streams of fire that empower and lead the church.
• Going through the Red Sea represents baptism, dying to the old life of fear and selfishness, being washed by the Holy Spirit, and being reborn with a spirit of love and trust (1 Corinthians 10:1–6).
• Pharaoh and his army being destroyed in the sea, when God lets go and stops using power to hold back the waters, represents the final end of Satan and his forces—the time when God no longer restrains or holds back His power, when He stops veiling His life-giving glory and lets it wash over the earth again. Pharaoh and his army put themselves into a position where the waters drowned them; likewise, Satan and his army put themselves into a position where they reap the natural consequences of sin when God no longer uses His power to shield them from it. As Paul wrote, “The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction” (Galatians 6:8 NIV84).
• Then the people don’t listen, don’t follow God’s direction, rebel, and wander 40 years in the wilderness, which represents the church apostatizing and wandering in the wilderness of the Dark Ages.

This now brings us to the Hebrews crossing the Jordan to conquer the Promised Land, which represents our generation being on the border of heaven. But before they could enter the Promised Land, they had to be circumcised.

Why? What does this represent? What is the object lesson for us today?

The Illustration of Circumcision

The physical circumcision of the body represents the cutting away from our hearts of everything interfering with our connection with God.

A man is not a Jew if he is only one outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. No, a man is a Jew if he is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code (Romans 2:28, 29 NIV84).

Circumcision of the heart is an important requirement in our current-day spiritual warfare. Our generation must experience the cutting away of worldly attachments before we can succeed in fulfilling our end-time warfare mission of confronting satanic forces on our way to our heavenly promised land.

Circumcision of the heart is the cutting away from our hearts, our affections, anything within us that exists, functions, and operates in any way that interferes with our connection to God.

God is the source of life—anything that gets between us and Him disrupts that connection and interferes with His presence in our lives, interferes with His love inspiring us, moving us, compelling us, interferes with our ability to hear His voice, interferes with God’s truth enlightening, correcting, and transforming us, and interferes with our ability to live in harmony with His designs for life.

As a metaphor, consider your car’s fuel line. That tube is the lifeline of the vehicle, providing it with the energy it needs to run. Anything that plugs up or interferes with that line, reducing the flow of fuel, will cause the car to be less efficient and eventually stop functioning.

We are all created beings who do not have life original, unborrowed, underived; we are not immortal beings who can live independently from God. We are creatures whose lives originate in God and are sustained by Him. Anything that interferes with that connection reduces God’s presence in our lives, causing us to get sicker, weaker, decaying, and eventually, when our connection to God is severed completely, we will die, not just temporarily awaiting resurrection, but after the judgment, eternally.

Faith Versus Fear

Because of Adam’s sin, we are born with spirits, the animating life energy, the breath of life inherited from Adam that is contaminated with fear and selfishness (Psalm 51:5; 2 Timothy 1:7). We come into the world fear-ridden, seeking to find things to comfort ourselves, to get for self, to make self feel better. We come into the world afraid and distrusting, and we form all kinds of attachments, coping skills, and belief systems to make ourselves feel safe, secure, good—and every single one of those things that stands, exists, operates, functions in between our souls and God, everything that we prioritize above God, must be cut away and put in its proper place so that our life is founded on God and God alone.

As Jesus taught, we are to:

‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ (Matthew 22:37–39 NIV84).

We must love God first, with all our heart, soul, and mind, and only then are we healed, transformed, and enabled to love others because we have healthy love for ourselves.

If we don’t do this, then when what we value above God—not cognitively (we would never say we value something above God) but functionally—what we cherish, cling to, find our security and comfort in, is threatened, we are vulnerable to being overcome by fear and justify the methods of Satan to protect ourselves or others.

Ultimately, this circumcision of the heart is possible only when we have embraced the truth of who God is as revealed in Jesus, surrendered to Him in trust, and been reborn with a new life, a new spirit, the life/Spirit of Jesus (John 3:3).

And this circumcision of the heart represents the covenant relationship with God, the saving connection, the agreement we individually make with our Creator for our salvation and simultaneous equipping for fulfilling the purpose He has for us.

As the writer of Hebrews wrote:

This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest (8:10, 11 NIV84).

This covenant is the covenant of God’s design for life, the covenant of love and trust built upon truth and freedom. It is represented in the marriage covenant in which two become one. And this unity, this oneness, cannot be achieved by the use of external law, imposed laws like humans make up, and law enforcement. It is accomplished only by the living law of truth, love, and freedom being reproduced within the heart and mind of the person that results in a living trust in God.

Satan’s Lie Instills Fear

Sadly, many misunderstand this covenant because they are indoctrinated to think God’s law functions like human law, and when they read passages like the one above, they think of rules and rule enforcement. But God is the Creator of reality, and His laws are the protocols all creation and life exist and operate upon. Deviations from God’s laws sever our connection with Him and ultimately result in death. This is why the covenant, or agreement, that brings salvation is that which cuts out of our hearts and minds everything that interferes with our love-trust connection with Him—including false penal/legal theologies that teach God’s law functions like human law and that God is the source of inflicted pain, suffering, and death as punishment for sin.

People get confused because they see in Scripture many places where God did impose laws (Sinai, Levitical laws, etc.) with imposed punishments for the establishment of civil order in a world of sin, with people whose hearts are in rebellion, fear-ridden, selfishness, for people who do not know or trust God. People mistake God’s parental, loving protections to hold back sinful people from self-destruction with His actual heavenly government and how reality works. 

We come back to true appreciation, gratitude, love, and trust in God only when we reject the imposed-law lie and realize God’s laws are design laws, and then we understand all the imposed laws in Scripture are God’s grace stooping down to protect us long enough for us to mature and realize how reality works.

When a child has parental rules imposed and discipline applied, they don’t typically experience gratitude and appreciation while they are still children. Gratitude and appreciation come when they grow up and look back and recognize that the parents and their rules were never against them; their parental rules were not reality; they were artificial guardrails added in love to protect the ignorant and immature child from the harm they would do to themselves by breaking the laws that reality is built upon.

However, if the child never learns this and leaves the home thinking there was no reason for the rules, only authority to force compliance, gratitude is not typically generated; instead, rebellion is.

But when the child realizes the reasons for the rule to brush their teeth or not play in the street, they look back with love, affection, and increasing admiration and trust in their parent. It is only as the artificial rules are seen in the context of design-law reality that the child is set free from the fear of rule-breaking and punishment to live lives of love and trust.

The Last-Days Connection

How is this connected to the circumcision of our hearts and the preparation we need to fulfill God’s purpose for us as we stand on the brink of entering our heavenly promised land?

The false imposed penal/legal theologies exist, operate, function inside of hearts and minds in such a way that they interfere with the soul’s connection with God. And these lies about God, His law, government, and character must be cut out of our hearts and minds so that we can be fully united with Him, so that He can recreate us in His image and write His living law of love into our inmost being.

Operationally, what the false human-law model of salvation does is to functionally lead people to distrust the Father while trusting in either Jesus or the legal mechanics put in place to protect us from the Father. People are taught to be thankful for Jesus who came to be punished by the Father as our atoning self-sacrificing substitute. And now we are offered a legal pardon because our penalty was legally paid by Jesus, and if we accept it, God won’t torture and kill us. But if we refuse to accept Jesus’s legal payment, then God will still be legally bound to torture and kill us in order to uphold His law, government, and justice.

But this is analogous to an abusive parent and a child who has a sibling who steps in to take the beating for them. Yes, the child would have gratitude to their sibling for taking the beating, but they certainly wouldn’t love and trust the parent. (This is not to be confused with the concept of loving discipline to save the child from self-destruction, but the infliction of punishment for rule-breaking.)

For some, the legal model may indeed inspire gratitude for Jesus, but it really does not lead to genuine love and trust of the Father, which is why those who cling to it teach theologies that function to hide and protect them from the Father, and many continue to live in fear—fear of a sin not being confessed, fear of the judgment, fear of being in God’s presence without an intercessor, fear of committing a sin and getting hit by a truck and dying before one had time to confess and get it legally pardoned; and some create theologies to protect them from this fear, such as once saved always saved doctrine, the root of which is fear of the Father while trusting in the legal payment made by Jesus.

If Christians don’t leave the legal way of thinking behind and mature to worship God as Creator and understand His laws are design laws, then instead of growing in love, they grow in fear and doubt and become more hard-hearted, controlling of others, and intolerant—just like the legalistic Pharisees who crucified Christ while claiming to be obedient to God, the Bible, and God’s law.

Proclaiming Truth That Sets Free

Thus, as we stand on the border of heaven, a message is to go forward to cut out of our hearts everything that interferes with our connection with God. It is a message that calls people to worship God as Creator, the one who made the heavens, earth, sea, and fountains of water, to stop judging Him to be like a creature, an imperial dictator who makes up rules enforced through punishment. (For a deeper dive into this special end-time message see our magazine, The Final Message of Mercy to the World: The Three Angels).

See and embrace the truth that will set you free!

The truth that God is the source of life and not the source of death; the truth that sin severs our connection with God and causes death. The truth that we are all born terminal and Jesus came and voluntarily took this terminal condition upon Himself and suffered the agony and torture of heart and mind that sin causes for the purpose of eliminating sin, of purging the infection of fear and selfishness, of destroying the carnal nature, of eradicating from humanity the spirit of fear and selfishness and replacing it with His sinless holy life, the Spirit of perfect love and trust. (For a deeper dive into why Jesus had to die for our salvation and what His death objectively accomplished see our magazine, Salvation and You, What It Really Means to be Saved).

Thus we, when we are won to trust by the truth, open our hearts and become partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4); it is no longer our old fear-based, self-centered spirit animating us, but the Spirit of Christ living in us, and we live to love God and others (Galatians 2:20). We are reborn with a new life (John 3:3), a new breath of life, the life of Christ that He gives us freely and it is only possible because Jesus joined His divinity with our humanity and became a real human being descended from Adam.

This is not a legal adjustment in books; it is reality, a real-world, internal power that indwells you through the reality-based links that God built into all reality. We live new lives, the life of Christ. And this is why we must cut everything out of our hearts and minds that interferes with our connection with God.

This is transformation; this is freedom from fear, guilt, and shame. This is the gospel, the true message to go to the world. This is righteousness by faith—that we become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). This is what we must experience to be victorious as we move forward to the heavenly Promised Land!