Mike’s Bible Reading Journal
March 30, 2026 — Days 70 & 72 of 365
The Deeper Magic
Joshua 2 & 9 — Two Deceptions and a God Whose Purposes Run Deeper Than Any Human Failure in the Story
The Texts
“And the king of Jericho sent to Rahab, saying, ‘Bring out the men who have come to you, who entered your house, for they have come to search out all the land.’ But the woman had taken the two men and hidden them. And she said, ‘True, the men came to me, but I did not know where they were from.’”
— Joshua 2:3–4
“So the men of Israel took some of their provisions, but did not ask counsel from the LORD. And Joshua made peace with them and made a covenant with them, to let them live, and the leaders of the congregation swore to them.”
— Joshua 9:14–15
“There was a famine in the days of David for three years, year after year. And David sought the face of the LORD. And the LORD said, ‘There is bloodguilt on Saul and on his house, because he put the Gibeonites to death.’”
— 2 Samuel 21:1
The Observation
Two things caught my attention in the same reading.
In Joshua 2, the Israelite spies end up in the house of a Canaanite woman named Rahab. She is a prostitute. She hides them, lies to the king’s men about where they are, and strikes a deal for her household’s safety. The spies tell her to tie a scarlet cord in her window as a sign. She hangs it and waits.
In Joshua 9, the Gibeonites deceive Joshua and the leaders of Israel into making a covenant with them by pretending to come from a distant country. The text says plainly that Israel’s leaders did not inquire of the LORD before agreeing (Joshua 9:14). When the deception was discovered, the leaders concluded on their own that the covenant was binding. I had always noticed the failure to consult God before the covenant. What I hadn’t noticed was that there is no record of consulting God afterward either. They just decided.
Which raised a question. Was that just one presumption piled on top of another?
And then a harder question followed. Both stories involve deception. Rahab lies. The Gibeonites lie. But Rahab ends up commended in Hebrews 11 and James 2 and appears in the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew 1. The Gibeonite covenant turns out to be honored by God for four hundred years. So what is actually going on? How is any of this different from what the serpent did in the garden?
What Came Out of Studying It
On the Gibeonite covenant, 2 Samuel 21 gives the clearest answer. Centuries later a three-year famine falls on Israel during David’s reign. David does what Joshua didn’t do — he inquires of the LORD. God answers: “It is because of Saul and his bloodthirsty house, because he killed the Gibeonites” (2 Samuel 21:1). God treats the broken covenant as a serious wrong requiring atonement. He does not commend the circumstances that produced it. But he enforces it because an oath had been sworn in his name. A sinfully made covenant, sworn in God’s name, carried the weight of that name regardless of how it was obtained.
What God then does with the Gibeonites is worth noting. They become servants at the tabernacle. Gibeon becomes a priestly city. God appears to Solomon there (1 Kings 3:4–5). God took a covenant born in deception and wove it into the fabric of his people’s worship life for centuries.
On the deception question, the Bible is full of similar cases. The Hebrew midwives lie to Pharaoh and God rewards them (Exodus 1:20–21). Tamar deceives Judah and Judah says she is more righteous than he is (Genesis 38:26) — her son appears in the line of Christ. Jael kills Sisera through deception and the Song of Deborah calls her most blessed of women (Judges 5:24). Hushai the Archite serves as David’s spy against Absalom and the text says the LORD used his counsel to protect David (2 Samuel 17:14).
None of these are morally clean. The theological tradition has wrestled with them for centuries. Augustine argued that lying is always wrong and that God rewarded the midwives for their fear of him, rather than for the lie itself. Calvin took a similar position while acknowledging the difficulty. Others in the Reformed tradition have argued that when the structures of justice have been perverted — when Pharaoh commands murder, when a city stands under divine judgment — the obligation to protect innocent life can take precedence. The text does not resolve this cleanly and we should not pretend otherwise. What can be said is that the deceptions God works through tend to be oriented toward life and toward his stated purposes. The contrast with the serpent’s deception in Genesis 3 is not in the form — all involve stating what is not true — but in the direction. The serpent deceives to destroy and to sever the creature from the Creator. These other deceptions, however complex, are in the service of preserving life and protecting what God is protecting.
There is also a layer easy to miss: self-deception. Jeremiah 17:9 says the heart is deceitful above all things — the Hebrew word is the same root as Jacob’s name. The deceiver. We deceive others and we deceive ourselves about our own motives for doing it. Every person in these stories is operating with partial knowledge and mixed motives in a fallen world. They are sinful human beings doing what seemed necessary. And God works through them anyway.
The Gibeonites knew exactly what they were doing and why. They were shrewd survivors and the deception was deliberate. The failure belongs to Joshua and the leaders. They had been winning — Jericho fell, Ai fell — and somewhere in the momentum of success they stopped asking God and started deciding for themselves. That is the same movement Adam and Eve made in the garden. They were competent, experienced, and successful, and they concluded they could decide independently of God. The New Life booklet calls it selfish independence — the big lie at the root of all sin. It can look like rebellion. It can also look like confidence, like momentum, like a string of military victories.
What This Means for Me
The question I started with — is deception ever right? — turned out to be less important than what the stories revealed about God.
If God can only work through morally clean instruments he has nothing to work with. We are all sinful. We all deceive. We all deceive ourselves. The whole of Scripture is the story of God working through broken, self-deceived human beings toward purposes they cannot fully see — because that is the only material available in a fallen world.
People sometimes raise God’s sovereignty over evil as a reason to doubt him. How could a good God allow the serpent in the garden? How could he allow suffering? Tim Keller used to say that not knowing why God allows something does not mean God does not know why, and that if we knew what he knew we would agree with him. What the question is really proposing — a God who is not sovereign over evil — is not comfort. It is just a larger version of our own helplessness.
Nothing demonstrates God’s sovereignty over evil more completely than the cross.
Satan read the crucifixion as victory. A dead Messiah cannot save anyone. He was wrong — not because God improvised, but because the cross was always the plan. What looked like defeat was the instrument of redemption. What looked like the end was the beginning of everything.
C.S. Lewis called it the deeper magic — the magic that had been at work before the dawn of time, older than the enemy’s knowledge, older than death’s claim. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:8 that if the rulers of this age had understood, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. Satan’s own malice became the instrument of his undoing. Revelation 13:8 calls Jesus the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. The cross was always the plan.
Rahab had no idea she was being woven into the genealogy of the Messiah. The Gibeonites had no idea they were about to become servants of God’s tabernacle for centuries. Joshua had no idea the covenant he made in presumption would be enforced by God for four hundred years. Nobody in these stories sees the whole picture. They are all operating in partial light in a broken world. And God is sovereign over all of it — working through the failures and the deceptions and the presumptions toward purposes none of them could see.
That is what Easter is. The deeper magic revealed. God governing all of it — including the worst of it — toward the redemption of the world.
Key Scriptures
Joshua 2:1–21 • Joshua 9:3–27 • 2 Samuel 21:1–9 • 1 Kings 3:4–5 • Genesis 3:1–5 • Genesis 38:26 • Exodus 1:15–21 • Judges 5:24 • 2 Samuel 17:14 • Jeremiah 17:9 • Matthew 1:5 • Hebrews 11:31 • James 2:25 • 1 Corinthians 2:8 • Revelation 13:8
Prayer
Father, I recognize myself in Joshua and the leaders of Israel. They had been winning and somewhere in the momentum of success they concluded they could decide for themselves. That is the oldest lie — that I am competent to govern my own life without asking you. Forgive me for the decisions made in that spirit. Forgive me for the times I was winning and thought I had this. Thank you that your purposes did not depend on Joshua’s wisdom, or mine. Thank you that the resurrection is the final proof that you govern all of it — even the worst of it — and that your plans do not fail because your instruments are broken. Help me to live like I believe that. Amen.
Pray for someone you know who is riding a season of success and has quietly stopped asking God — that they would recognize the oldest lie before it costs them.
Leave a Reply