Section 01 - The Joshua Apostle

Joshua 11:23 says:

So Joshua took the whole land, according to all that the LORD [Yahweh] said to Moses; and Joshua gave it for an inheritance to Israel according to their divisions by their tribes. And the land rested from war.

The apostle is the highest ministry office of all. This means that apostles must be leaders. If you are to be at the top of the pile, everybody will look to you for direction.

If you are called to be an apostle, it is therefore very important that you understand what it means to be a leader. You should know how leaders behave, what they look like and the qualities that are required in them.

Apostolic Leadership

When I began to prepare this teaching I looked to the Lord to see what I should emphasize from the life of Joshua that relates to the apostle. The Lord said to me that I must emphasize apostolic leadership.

So now as we look at the Joshua apostle, we are not only going to look at what the function and role of the Joshua apostle is. We are also going to see some very important qualities that are involved in being a leader in the Kingdom of God as an apostle.

How is an apostle trained to become a leader? And how is apostolic leadership displayed? Those are very good questions. Can you paint a clear picture? Could you look at a person and say,

"That is an example of apostolic leadership."

Perhaps you are a leader in this world and you have been in management in a worldly organization. Maybe you have been a managing director of a company or something like that. If so you may have a concept in your mind of what it is to be a leader.

However the world's concept of leadership isn't always the same as God's. There are things that overlap. So I want you to put aside all preconceived ideas of what it means to rise up; to be an apostle and a leader. Everybody wants to be an apostle, because an apostle is top of the pile.

You say, "I want to be the big guy. I want to be the one who calls the shots and tells everybody else what to do."

By the time you are finished looking at the life of Joshua you might have changed your mind. So let's see how apostolic leadership is displayed from the life of Joshua.

Joshua is one of the apostolic types that I would like to call a discipled apostle. In other words, Joshua is an apostle who is trained through discipleship. This is unlike some of the other apostles who receive their call and their training directly from the Lord, without the agency of a master/teacher.

How Joshua is Trained

Joshua is trained exclusively through somebody that God has already raised up into Apostolic Office.

We will look first at the call to discipleship and training. We will see how such an apostle will be trained, and how he or she will learn to rise up and take their place.

Submission and Obedience

The first thing that such an apostle needs to learn is submission and obedience.

You may say, "I thought I was going to be a leader."

That's right, but if you want to lead you first have to learn to follow. If you want to give commands you had better first learn how to obey them.

Anybody who has been in the Army knows that. You don't start out as a general. You start out as a private. You start out as a nobody; as a nothing. You begin by saying,

"Yes sir, no sir; three bags full sir."

You are saluting so fast at every officer who walks past that your hand nearly falls off. That is what qualifies you to rise up and become that leader.

Joshua is a classic example of that. The first appearance we ever see of him is described in Exodus 17:9 where it says:

And Moses said to Joshua, Choose us out men, and go out, fight with Amalek: tomorrow I will stand on the top of the hill with the rod of God in my hand.

An Obscure Start

We are not told where Joshua came from or how Moses came to know him. We are not given much of a background. All we are told is that he was the son of Nun, so Nun was the name of his father.

We don't know whether he had a mother, because mothers are never considered important enough to mention in Scripture. So he was the son of Nun, whoever Nun was.

We don't know that either. He was just an obscure little nobody who came out of nowhere and was known as the servant of Moses. That was a great exalted title; a good way to start out as an apostle.

So here was Joshua. We are not sure what kind of relationship he had with Moses. But we know that as the Children of Israel were journeying towards the Promised Land, suddenly they were attacked by Amalek.

Who was Amalek? He was a descendant of Esau. He was actually the child of Esau's son through a concubine.

Esau in the Scripture is always compared with Jacob, and the two are often allegorized. Jacob is pictured as the one that was blessed, and Esau as the one that was not blessed. Jacob is a picture of the Spirit and Esau is a picture of the Flesh.

So Amalek stands for everything contrary to and against God's order and purpose. And the first thing that happened as the Israelites tried to move towards the Promised Land is they were attacked by Amalek.

I am not going to go into a lot of detail on that because we will deal with that later. But here were these Israelites who had been in slavery. They had never had a chance to do much except work very hard, so I guess they must have had good muscles.

They must have been pretty tough guys, so they would have probably made good warriors. But they had never been trained to be soldiers. If they had been trained they would have killed all the Egyptians and taken over.

They clearly were not organized enough, otherwise they would have broken out of Egypt by themselves. They needed a leader to come and bring them out.

So here was Amalek attacking the Israelites. Moses was the leader, and he was on the spot because now he had to fight back. So he did what many seasoned leaders do. He passed the buck to somebody else. He said,

"Hey Joshua, I have a job for you. I want you to go and select men to go out with you, and I want you to go and fight these Amalakites. But don't worry Joshua, I'm right behind you. I'll be standing on the mountain watching you get killed."

Did the Dirty Work

Poor Joshua was Moses' servant and he was going to rise up. He was going to be Moses' right hand man, but the first thing he got was the dirty work that nobody else wanted.

Do you want to be trained to be an apostle? Start by being the servant, and get used to the idea that you will do the donkey work that your senior guy doesn't want to do.

You will get your hands dirty when he doesn't feel like it. And you will moan and groan and complain and say,

"But that's not fair."

Make your choice. Do you want to rise up? Do you want to become that leader? That is the first price you will have to pay.

Why is this? It is because if you are to rise up and be a leader, as an apostle you will need to have worked your way up from private. You need to know every rank.

Learning How to Function

Do you want to rise up and lead a company in business? Then you need to know what every single employee in that company does. You need to know how they think and how they function. You need to have been in their shoes.

Look at the guy who just gets handed it on a platter from his dad and takes over the company. You will see an inexperienced leader.

And usually by the time dad disappears so does the company. This is because he has never learned to understand the employees. He doesn't know what is involved in running the company.

But you see the guy who started out as the janitor. He worked his way up and eventually became the managing director of the company. This is a man who understands the employees.

He understands the jobs. He understands every aspect of the company, because he has been there and worked his way up through it. He is the guy who makes the best leader of all.

Do you want to be an apostolic leader? The most efficient you will ever be is if you are prepared to submit yourself in humility. You will start out as the servant and do all the dog work and dirty work that nobody else wants.

Do you want to learn to be an apostle? That is where you start - by doing the dirty work.

Learning to Trust

So here was Joshua, doing the dirty work. But you know Moses didn't just sit back, send him off and wait for it to happen. Moses went up that mountain, he took the rod of God and he said,

"Joshua I'm right here with you. I'm standing with you and watching you. I'm here for you."

Moses held up his rod. As he did so, he gave that covering of protection to Joshua, and Joshua couldn't lose. The moment Moses became tired and let down the rod, Joshua started to lose.

You see it wasn't Joshua's wonderful skill that was making him succeed in this very first job. It was the backing of his master. It was having somebody over him, watching him, protecting him and speaking power on him that gave him the ability.

So while you are out there doing the dirty work, don't forget that without the covering and protection of your master, you will fail even in that.

You have to learn to trust your master. You have to learn that when he or she gives you a job to do they have a reason for giving you that job. You have to learn that if they say they are going to be there to back you, that they are there to back you although you cannot see them.

You have to trust them, because if you cannot trust them you are not going to learn to trust the Lord that they represent to you. This is because they are God's representative to you at this time.

So Joshua had to learn to trust Moses implicitly and to do exactly as he was told.

Natural Leadership Temperament

Joshua was not a weak guy. He was a strong driver temperament. You have to be to go out onto the battlefield, take charge of a lot of men, and go and kill the Amalekites. He was not a wimp.

Joshua was a tough guy. He was probably a young 6ft 6in type of person who played football. He was very strong. He was ready to go out there and let them have it. In fact he was very zealous as all driver/expressives are - ready to just go out and kill.

That can be a good leadership quality. But it is what the world calls natural leadership.

God doesn't necessarily need that natural quality to make you into a leader. Sometimes it can actually become an obstacle to your leadership. The Lord has to deal with it and bring you to a place where you don't depend on your natural strengths.

Too Much Zeal

A little later we see how Moses called out the 70 elders. And God took of the anointing that was on Moses and put it on the 70.

The Scripture says that two of them didn't come out. They stayed in the camp. And when the anointing came on the others, these guys who didn't come out for the official meeting still received the anointing. They were prophesying there in the camp.

Moses and Joshua were together when the news came and someone said,

"Hey, these guys who never bothered coming to the meeting are prophesying."

Joshua got all angry and said,

"Moses, you can't let them happen. Tell them to keep quiet."

Can you see the expressive/driver in him? He was ready to go and give them a smack.

He said, "How dare you guys prophesy! You didn't bother coming to the meeting."

He wanted to zap them. Doesn't this kind of remind you of Moses in Egypt when they first started out? He was so zealous. Moses just smiled to himself and said,

"Thank you for being so zealous for me Joshua, but hey, I wish everybody was a prophet. Don't stop them. Just calm down; I have it under control. You don't need to help me out on this one Joshua, because I have it in hand."

The disciple sometimes thinks the master has become a doddering old fool and says,

"We have to help him out. This guy has no backbone. He just lets people ride all over him. He's become old and he can't handle this anymore. He needs somebody young and full of strength and energy to go and fight for him."

He had the great zeal of a typical young apostle in training and wanted to conquer the world. If you are like this God has to deal with some of that in you. He has to calm you down a bit, otherwise that temperament will control you instead of the call of God.

So Joshua learned through submission and obedience and let the Lord deal with all of his natural strengths.