Looks Can Be Deceiving!

 Dear Dad’s (Randall Hartinger) Bible teaching. VITAL. BLESSED!

🔥💥✝️⬆️🆙☝️🏹🎯🙏☑️✅📖⚔️🛡️💯⚠️⚓👑

LOOKS CAN BE DECEIVING…

09/13 Daily Exhortation (Heb.3:13; 10:25; Matt.6:11; Luke 11:3)

A 9:13 for 9/13 for your perusing pleasure…

Joshua 9:13 And these bottles of wine, which we filled, were new; and, behold, they be rent: and these our garments and our shoes are become old by reason of the very long journey.

In Bible Numerics, 9=fruit. 13=rebellion. Joshua and company, on their Canaanite Conquest, are about to partake of the fruits of rebellion. This will unveil one of Satan’s most SUCCESSFUL Strategies. Will it work for you? 

Looks can be DECEIVING. Modernity: "Looks can be RECEIVING." Shame. 666. But the inverse false garb of Pharasaic false-humility is FAR MORE DANGEROUS... 

Here’s the story: Some men of the Gibeonites were sent to deceive Joshua and company. They were a nearby people, but wanted to pretend they were from afar and to make a covenant/league with Joshua that they not be destroyed. But it says in verses 4 through 6…

“4 They did work wilily, and went and made as if they had been ambassadors, and took old sacks upon their asses, and wine bottles, old, and rent, and bound up;

5 And old shoes and clouted upon their feet, and old garments upon them; and all the bread of their provision was dry and mouldy.

6 And they went to Joshua unto the camp at Gilgal, and said unto him, and to the men of Israel, We be come from a far country: now therefore make ye a league with us.”

They worked “wilily” which typifies the “wiles of the Devil.” They “made as if” they were “ambassadors.” They were deceiving to get in league/covenant. Satan has employed these tactics for millennia to WEAKEN A WORK WITHOUT A WEAPON. Lord knows even tiny little churches have encountered these  type of things many times. Some will have heavily guarded secrets for years, and when the secrets get exposed, they GET ANGRY AT YOU because you have the misfortune of KNOWING.

Have you leagued up with folks that worked wilily? It was quite costly. And you end up partaking of the fruit of their rebellion. Live and learn, get better and not bitter, fail forward, and PRESS ON. It’s WILILY designed to WEAKEN THE WORK FROM WITHIN. Repent, renounce, rebound, restore the years the locusts have eaten, etc. It happens! 

EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. PERIOD. And in every single time period. 

This is why we desperately need the gift of discernment. FALSE REPRESENTATIONS abound these days. Some leagues are irrevocable. Once Isaac had blessed Jacob, even via deception, Esau received no blessing. In this case of our focus passage, the league stood. But with you, break the league and move on. 

Gibeon means “hill-city.” It’s quite the roller-coaster ride. You were burned. Move on. Truth will trump the trickery. God will avenge.  

Today, in your perusal, is there a refusal to break league with deceivers? Is there a wishful-thinking willful ignorance about the wilily-working deceivers in your circle? Snap out of it. It will be quite costly the longer you linger. Ask me how I know. 

This 9/13, ask God to Holy Ghost smoke out the deceivers in your life. Lovingly pray daily for their Repentance and reconciliation if not reprobates, but purge out the leaven. 

May false ambassadors be EXPOSED and EXPELLED, -r <3