Many Christians have the simplistic understanding that the next life will be a matter of the reward of heaven and eternal bliss for those who accepted the Lord and a corresponding eternal punishment for those who did not. There is far more to the plan of God than that. Basic to understanding the coming kingdom, we must understand that the Lord will restore mankind and the earth to its original purpose, the paradise that it was intended to be. We also need to understand the process of restoration through which this will be accomplished.

We need to understand...

Last week we began discussing what the earth will be like when the kingdom has come and the earth has been restored. Certainly there is far more to this than we have covered, but since the Bible is quite general about this we will be the same. The Bible is general about such things because we do not need more information about this now. We only know that it will be fully restored to its original intended purpose and state—a paradise that man will rule over as he again walks daily with God. When this is done, the earth...

As we see in the Book of Hebrews and other places in the Bible, many things in Scripture are a prophetic type of other, greater things. The Promised Land of Israel was to be a prophetic type of the establishing of the kingdom of God on earth. Joshua is the Hebrew name for Jesus, the Messiah who will return to set up His kingdom on the earth. If we are to understand this rightly, we must begin by understanding that no prophetic type is a perfect model of what is to come, but is a "shadow." The shadow is...

The next few chapters of Joshua are the history of how Israel defeated and possessed all of the cities and fortresses in their Promised Land. They were commanded to utterly destroy the inhabitants because they had been given over to forms of idolatry and perversion. If they were not completely destroyed, they would cause Israel to stumble in the future.

Israel was called to be a light to the nations, a nation that was of a different spirit, governed by law and justice, and free from the perversion of soul that was a cancer destroying the nations. Radical...

Amazingly, right after Israel absorbed the lessons from Achan's sin and their initial defeat at Ai, the next main event in the conquest of the Promised Land was their deception by the Gibeonites. This, too, was the result of presumption on the part of Israel's leaders. Indeed, presumption is a difficult habit to break.

As we read in Joshua 9, when the Gibeonites saw what Israel had done to Ai, they decided to act craftily and deceive Israel in order to spare themselves. They sent envoys to Joshua to make a covenant with Israel. They took old wineskins...