The Weight of Words

Joshua 9

In Joshua 9 Joshua and the Israelites make a foolish and sinful covenant with the Gibeonites, people of the land. Had Joshua sought the Lord, he would not have been so easily tricked and God's people would have avoided much heartache. Here's my question: why did God allow them to be tricked?

He could have revealed the truth to Joshua. He could have struck the Gibeonites dead. He could have done an infinite number of things to stop this from happening. Instead He taught the Israelites (and us) an important lesson: a right response to God is more important than acts of obedience.

In other words, God's priority wasn't that Israel just obey, but that they remember to rely on Him for wisdom. God will allow His people to make huge messes of their lives in order to teach them to respond rightly to Him. The painful consequences are often an ongoing lesson - we must turn to God for direction and guidance.

Proverbs 3:5-6 says it like this: Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on  your own understanding.

The Conquest Thanksgiving

Joshua 8:30-35

This is a beautiful event in Israel's history. Nestled between two mountainsides, they whole gang comes together to worship God after conquering Ai. They do so according to specific instructions left by Moses (Deuteronomy 27:2-8).

They build an altar with rough, unshaped stones taken from the ground. They were not to shape them or smooth out the rough edges. They weren't to touch them with tools at all. Why?

"[I]f you wield your tool on it, you will profane it." (Exodus 20:25)

Dirty, jagged stones were an acceptable vehicle for worshipping God. Clean cut, shaped stones were defiled and polluted...

This bit of instruction comes just after Charlton Heston delivers the 10 Commandments in his bathrobe. One of these commandments says we aren't to make graven images. It seems that man is perpetually tempted to worship the works of his hands.

Maybe God didn't want His people making an altar of shaped stones because He knew they would end up worshipping the altar rather than Him. It would introduce a bit of pride into their worship and a little bit of self-worship destroys the possibility of God-worship.

Maybe He knew that if they started shaping stones they would get so absorbed into building fantastic altars that they would forget God altogether. He wanted them to look beyond the altar to the sacrifice and beyond the sacrifice to the God.

God asks that His people come to Him in unadorned simplicity. Don't get distracted crafting fancy words, just pray. Don't get distracted with dress codes, just gather with other Christians to worship God. Don't get distracted by the particulars of a worship service, just sing joyfully to God, encourage one another, apply your mind to His word, and submit your heart to His hands.

The Conquest of Ai

Joshua 7:1-8:29

But the sons of Israel acted unfaithfully regarding the things under the ban...therefore the anger of the Lord burned against Israel. - Joshua 7:1

Imagine God as a fireplace with two giant logs inside. These logs are God's passions. One log is called glory. The other is called holiness. When His people are disobedient and sinful, these logs erupt into flame. This is God's burning anger. It's different from our anger, which is set aflame by our our passion for our own glory. God's anger is right, because His glory and His holiness are proper passions. And in Joshua 7, His anger rages against Israel for sinning against Him.

The result of God's burning anger: Israel's sin rises to the top where it is visible and can be scraped away. God's anger is a purifying anger that burns the sin out of His people, like gold refined through intense heat.

Here God uses defeat to purify His people. Other times He might use failure, misfortune, calamity, setbacks. As painful as these things are, they are sometimes flames God uses for the good of His people. But we want holiness without fire, don't we? Just like we want muscle without exercise, wealth without work, sex without marriage, character without trial, success without discipline, life without death, salvation without crucifixion - we want holiness without fire. But it is the flame that purifies.

May we be open to the purifying flame of God's loving anger.

The Absolute Destruction

Joshua 6:12-21

Amputation is always the last resort; but when a disease endangers the whole, it becomes necessary. The Canaanites were deeply infected by a malignant disease. The symptoms included (from Leviticus 18 and Deuteronomy 18):

1. Incest.
2. Fornication and adultery.
3. Homosexuality.
4. Bestiality.
5. Idolatry.
6. Child sacrifice.
7. Divination.
8. Witchcraft.
9. Sorcery.

The Canaanites had become an oozing, throbbing, cancerous tumor in the land. Their destruction was necessary to preserve God's people, Israel. And so, Joshua utterly destroyed them. Men and women. Sons and daughters. Brothers and sisters. Uncles and aunts. Nephews and nieces. Newborns and senior citizens... Absolute destruction.

Is this blood-stained God unrecognizable to you? Have we focused so exclusively on His grace that we've forgotten His wrath and hatred for sin? Have we focused so exclusively on our new life that we've forgotten Christ's bloody death? Indeed, the blood that flows from God's wrath against sin is a cornerstone of the gospel. Go check out Romans 5:8-10.

We must see sin for what it is. Not merely a choice, a lifestyle, an orientation, a weakness, a mistake, an addiction, a bad habit, a character flaw. We can live with these things. Yet, here we see that sin should send us running to the surgeon, begging for the scalpel. It must be carved out of our families, our churches, our homes, and our hearts or we'll be destroyed like the Canaanites.

We're infected and it's spreading, but there's hope: we must submit every naked corner of our hearts to God's scalpel wielding hands. The only path to freedom from the disease is to leave our dead, sin-ravaged bodies behind and walk in newness of life. This is what Jesus offers in the gospel