Joshua 24

Bible Passage:  Joshua 24

“And if it seems evil to you to serve the LORD, choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.”

I seem to remember the last line as a theme for Spiritual Meeting some years ago. This also reminds us of the theme of Joshua – it is about the family of the chosen race. I chose this photo that was taken in one of the churches we visited in Sabah, because it contains believers young and old, TJC members rich (i mean the Singaporean members) and poor(er), and a nice frontal picture of the house of God. It is a beautiful image of “me and my house”, the house of God, to me.

We have come to the end of the book of Joshua. How did you feel going through the battles with God’s people?

Indeed we can see ourselves in the battles in the spiritual sense, as the previous writers have reminded us, that instead of fighting the Canaanites we are really fighting the sin that is within us. Any sin that we fail to annihilate can become a big problem for us in the future.

Here, old Joshua gathered the elders of Israel, the heads, the judges and the officers, and God spoke through Joshua to the people and did a quick recount of how He chose Abraham and fulfilled His promise to give his descendants the land of Canaan, which has come to fulfilment in Joshua’s time. We learn from the history in Genesis, that the promise of God will be fulfilled but sometimes over a span of many years. Even though Abraham, Isaac and Jacob did not live in the flesh long enough to see the promise of God being fulfilled, they had faith and finally their children enjoyed the fruition of their faith. Would you rather be in the shoes of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who first heard the promise but did not receive it during their lifetime, or be in the shoes of the Israelites who fought the wars and inherited Canaan, or the Israelites who actually grew up in the promised land?

It is interesting for me to read that even when the people of Israel said “We also will serve the Lord, for He is our God” in verse 18, instead of praising them for their affirmation of faith, Joshua replied them “You cannot serve the Lord, for He is a holy God.” This “also” I believe it means they will also serve God as Joshua serves Him, but it just gave me another thought that it will be terrible if they want to serve their gods, and also the Lord!

Joshua reminds them that serving the Lord means they cannot transgress against him and sin. Also he reminds them that if they were to forsake God and serve foreign gods, God will turn and do them harm and consume them, after He has done them good.

Today we have received much goodness from God. However not all of us are determined to put away all other gods. These gods do not refer to physical idols, but the things of the world that ensnares us, or simply our own pride. We think that we will receive blessings from God if we serve Him, but often we also mistakenly thinks that if we forsake Him, He who is full of love will only let us be and not punish us, and all we lose is God’s blessings. We hardly associate leaving God with arousing His wrath that will harm us and consume us.

Joshua reminds us:

“You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen the LORD for yourselves, to serve Him.”

Perhaps we have, at some point of our lives, make a proclamation to God, whether in front of others or within our heart, that we want to serve the Lord and be faithful to Him. Whether other people remember what we said, we are witnesses against ourselves. Joshua took a large stone and said that the stone shall be a witness to them, for it has heard all the words of the LORD. What can a stone speak to a man? But don’t forget that God hears even the blood that cries out to Him from the ground. Let us hold on to the choice we made, return to God if we have gone away from Him, and cling on to Him if we are still by His side.

The book of Joshua was really about the second generation of the Israelites. Most of them did not experience the ten plagues of Egypt, and probably spent their childhood in the wilderness, but they grew in faith and trained themselves to war for God, to war for the promised homeland. They were not slaves, neither did they miss the food in Egypt. Some people call the book of Joshua the book of victory. Indeed it records probably more victories than we can read in other books, but the question is whether such victory is everlasting? We read from the middle of the book till the end how they began to divide and settle in the land, and they did not follow the commandment of God to annihilate the Canaanites or drive them out thoroughly. Sadly, even though the generation seem strong and full of faith as we see them make their covenant at Shechem, the Canaanites that they left behind became a great snare to the third generation that grew up in the promised land. For the third generation that neither gone through slavery (rather they were masters of Canaanite slaves) and did not witness the ten plagues, nor have gone through the wars of wonders that God fought for the Israelites, they even turned to the gods of the defeated/subdued nations! Do you think they could have fared better?

As a matter of fact, the True Church of God also has to pass through many generations before we can all face the Lord’s Day. Yes we all have our lifetime of faith to fight and the goal is when we pass on we can enter heaven to receive our reward. But it is not right that the faith of the Church of God degenerate over the years. What we are aiming for is continual victory of the church over the generations till we inherit the new heavens and new earth. Is there any generation that we can actually relax and enjoy rest from war? No. I suppose when we choose to serve the Lord, it also means that we have chosen to serve the next generation of God’s chosen people too, because they are the ones that will determine whether the victory that we fought for in our generation will endure to the next. May God keep us fighting fit all our life.