Joshua 23-24
“Departure and Direction”
May 16, 2010 - Ascension Sunday

         I told them they couldn’t do it. I knew they would fail. I was as confident of their failure as I was of all the victories we had won together, battling the Canaanites. After a hundred years of life, I knew these people all too well. Yes, they would try. They would even succeed in serving God for a generation or so. But then the habits would creep back in. A dry year and they would sacrifice a little goat to a water god they met in Egypt. A couple lean crops and they would be offer sacrifices to Baal, hoping a Canaanite God would be better for this land. Yes, they would make the same mistakes all over again. I told them so.

         The first time I told them is recorded in what you call Joshua 23. My knees ached. My breath was getting short just walking a mile or so. My back was bent over and I used a sturdy staff to lean on. I was getting old, really old. I could hear the death angel’s wings hovering nearby.

         So I summoned them north to Shiloh. That’s where the Tabernacle was. That’s where they came when we cast lots to distribute the rest of the land. So I brought them there once again, all Israel and their elders, their leaders, their judges and all the minor officials.

         We commandeered an old Canaanite vineyard. Some of my men hammered together a little platform for me to stand on. The leaders sat down among the vines, some still bearing grapes, which a few idly plucked and ate while they waited for me to slowly pull myself up on the rough boards. My knees complained, but finally I was up and turned to face them. I looked over the leaders’ heads and saw men and women and children all spread out over the hillside rising above the vineyard. I looked down at the bored men popping grapes in their mouths. I would remind them all where those grapes came from.

         “I’m old, very old,” I started out, my croaking voice proving the truth of what I said.  Then I warmed to my subject. “You’ve seen what God has done for you. God,” I told them, “the Lord your God has driven out all these other people for you. He gave you their land. He fought your battles. He assigned each tribe of you cities to live in and fields to plant and vineyards to tend. He did it. The Lord.”

         Lest they miss the point, I reiterated the obvious. “Remember what Moses taught you. No other god ever helped you. Don’t worship the Canaanite gods that people here worship. Don’t even use their names, not even to swear by. It’s the Lord who made you what you are today. Don’t forget that.”

         “One of you,” I said, “just one of you goes out waving a spear, and a thousand Canaanites go running. You imagine that you are great fighters. But it’s all the Lord’s doing. He’s the reason for your success. Don’t forget it.”

         Then I warned them. I took a deep breath, leaned on my stick, bent over and tried to make eye contact with every leader, every elder, every judge. “Don’t do it,” I said. “If you do, if you mix yourself up with these other people, these other gods, it will be a disaster. If you associate with them and marry them and start saying a prayer here, offering a sacrifice there to one of their gods, that’s it. You’re done for. They will start defeating you. They will raid your cities, steal your women, burn your fields. Canaanite terrorists will hide behind every rock and be like whips on your backs and thorns poking in your eyes. And you will die and lose all this good land that God gave you.”

         I tried to finish on a positive note. Well, sort of. I held my hand out to them and let them see it shake with palsy. “I’m old,” I said, “I’m about to go the way of all the earth. I’m going to die. So remember when I’m gone. The Lord never failed you. Not one of His promises turned up empty. He defeated your enemies. He gave you the land. You live in peace. Remember all the good He did for you.”

         Yet I was an old man. My back hurt as I stood up there. My bladder was asking for relief. I didn’t have the patience for nice words. I concluded harshly. “Just as every good promise of the Lord your God has come true, so the Lord will bring on you all the evil he has threatened until he has destroyed you from the good land he has given you. If you violate the covenant of the Lord your God… and go and serve other gods and bow down to them, the Lord’s anger will burn against you, and you will quickly perish from the good land he has given you!”

         I stood there with my trembling hand still out, pointing at one and the other and then another. Some of them wouldn’t look me in the eye. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I turned and motioned for the young man who helped me up. He came and put his strong arm under my elbow and led me to the edge of the platform. He and another fellow who ran up actually lifted me down. I shook them off, stood as straight as I could and tottered away with my stick. That was that. I had told them. Now it was up to them.

         A year later I was still alive. My knees ached worse than ever. I couldn’t walk a hundred yards without coughing and wheezing. But God kept my soul in my body awhile longer. He seemed to be telling me that I needed to do it again. I needed to remind and warn and encourage the people one more time.

         You call it Joshua 24, the last chapter of my story. I was a hundred and nine. I would need somebody to carry me, but I decided this time to have them come even farther north to Shechem. It was an old, old place. Old stories told us it was the place where God first met our ancestor Abraham in this land long ago. The great oak tree was there even then, five hundred years ago. Under that tree, Jacob, the father of all our tribes, dug a pit and buried all the foreign idols his family was carrying. It was a place that would surely remind us of the Lord and remind us to stay away from any other gods.

         The scene was much like the previous year’s gathering at Shiloh. The leadership was all down front again. There weren’t any grapes to eat, but they pushed and shoved each other to get places in the shade cast by the big tree. Behind them again gathered the people: men wishing they were home to take care of their farms, women nursing fussy babies, children playing around the edges of the crowd.

         This time two strong youths lifted me straight up onto a large flat-topped rock that stood a little ways off from the tree. One of them handed up my staff. I pushed the tip of it against a little crevice in the stone and steadied myself.

         Just as I had them travel farther to get to Shechem, I started my speech farther back in time. Speaking with the voice of God, as His Spirit inspired me, I mentioned Abraham’s father Terah and how that family served other gods back in Mesopotamia. I rehearsed the names of our patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I made them remember yet one more time how Jacob and his twelve sons, our fathers, went down to Egypt and began to multiply into the great people we are today.

         Then I had them recall the miracles by which God helped Moses and Aaron bring all our people out of Egypt. And I reminded them how they spent a long time just wandering in the desert, unable to go back, unable to go forward.

         Finally, I recounted our recent history, the victories on the east side of the Jordan, against the Amorites, against Balak and the Moabites. Then the campaign on the west side, as God gave us Jericho and Ai and defeated Amorites, and Perizzites and Canaanites and Hittites and Girgashites and Hivites and Jebusites. God fought for us and with us, even driving out our enemies with hornets.

         Then I picked up my stick and swung it round, pointing at all of them. Speaking for God I said, “You didn’t do this! You did not defeat those warriors and giants with your swords and bows. You didn’t work or fight for all this. I did it!” I shouted, not “I” Joshua, but “I” the Lord God of Israel. God gave them cities they didn’t have to build and vineyards and olive groves they didn’t have to plant. He did it all.

         “So,” I wound up, “Now fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your forefathers worshiped beyond the river and in Egypt.” I aimed my stick toward the slight mound under the old oak tree, making them think of the idols Jacob had thrown away and buried there. “Serve the Lord,” I said again. But I’m I knew them too well.

         Like Moses before, I had put up with these people a long time. I had dealt with Achan’s greed and with the elders gullibility when the Gibeonites fooled us. I listened to Ephraim and Manasseh whine about not having enough territory. I watched hot-headed folks on the west side almost start a civil war with their brothers on the east side. I knew them way too well.

         So with my tongue firmly in my cheek, I gave them a choice. “If serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living.” I gave them a choice, then told them where I stood: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

         I offered the choice and then I shaded my eyes and looked out over them and my heart fell. They didn’t really understand. Some of them were young and eager, but with almost no experience in the world. Others, not quite as old as me, but old, were tired, hot and impatient to get some food and drink and head for home. Some were just willing to say or do whatever the rest of the crowd would.

         The didn’t understand at all, but they all jumped up, waved their hands in the air, and cried, “Far be it from us to forsake the Lord to serve other gods!” They recited back to me that God brought them out of Egypt and did miracles and watched over them and drove out the Canaanite nations, concluding, “We too will serve the Lord, because he is our God!”

         That’s when I really let them have it. All the frustration and disappointment and cynicism I held back all those years came out in what I said next. “You can’t do it,” I yelled, “You are not able to serve the Lord. He is a holy God; he is a jealous God. He will not forgive your rebellion and your sins. If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, he will turn and bring disaster on you and make an end of you after he has been good to you.”

         I’m not sure if they really heard me, if they were really listening, but right away they yelled back at me, “No! We will serve the Lord!” O.K., I thought, it’s on your own heads. “You are witnesses against yourselves,” I told them, “that you have chosen to serve the Lord.” And they agreed with that, “Yes, yes, we are witnesses, we are witnesses, we are witnesses,” went the chant around the assembly.

         We confirmed it all again. It was a covenant, a solemn promise between the people and God. They were to throw away all other gods. They would serve only the Lord. Someone helped me down off the rock. I had ten strapping young warriors haul that boulder into the shade of the oak. On top of it I laid down the tablet of the Law of God and scraped into the clay more words, recording the oath, the covenant made that day. The stone itself, I said, would stand there as witness to their covenant with God. Let it remind them if they turn away from the Lord they promised to serve. Then I sent them all home.

         Not too much later, a little into my eleventh decade, I died. You have the record of what happened next in your own hands. You can read it for yourself. For awhile they did better than I had hoped. As long as the elders were alive who sat there under the tree and who watched me write down their promise, as long as those men lived, the people stayed more or less faithful. They came to Shiloh and sacrificed at the Tabernacle. They burned or buried the Canaanite idols they captured. They forsook other gods and served the one true God who had done so much for them.

         Yet it wasn’t long, it only took a new generation—a generation who hadn’t marched with me around Jericho, who hadn’t seen God rain hailstones down on their enemies, who forgot where the houses they lived in came from—it only took one new generation to mess it all up, leave God behind and think they might do better worshipping elsewhere. You can read that story in Judges and the rest of what you term the Old Testament, a story of people just like the ones I led, people sometimes full of faith and courage and loyalty to their Lord and people who sometimes did the stupidest, vilest, most faithless things you can imagine.

         Still and all, I know now that God would continue to be faithful and good to them through it all. He would even be good to you, people I would have back then called “Canaanites,” foreigners, strangers with no part in the God of Israel. Yet God loved them all, and He loved you all. I only endured a century of trying to get recalcitrant men and women to believe and trust in the Lord. But the Lord Himself, He has stayed faithful and true and good and merciful for century after century after century.

         Twenty centuries ago He did the greatest thing He’s ever done for our people, that He ever did for the whole world. He sent you a Man—named after me, I might say—who was more than a Man. Joshua of Nazareth, “Jesus,” you call Him, came to us, came to you as our greatest leader. Jesus is God Himself come to lead you into a new promised land, a new Kingdom that will never be captured by our enemies, but will last forever.

         That new, better, greater Joshua—it’s more true to say that a thousand years before He was born, I was named after Him—that new Joshua made a parting speech like I did, made a couple of them, like I did. You are remembering today how Jesus assembled His disciples and gave them instructions and called them to faithfulness as He was leaving them. Yet He was leaving them not to die as I did. He had already done that. Jesus had died and risen and was now ascending to sit down on His Father’s right hand as the great King who rules us all.

         That Joshua, that Jesus, left you a greater challenge than I left Israel. Oh, my challenge is still before you too. Choose whom you will serve. Are you going to serve God, or will you serve the gods of this world? Will you serve the Lord who died on the Cross and rose again, or will you serve the god of pleasure, or the god of money, or the god of comfort, or the god of security, or the god of power, or the god of entertainment, or any of the multitude of deities that your time worships without even knowing you are serving false gods? Will you keep the Covenant Jesus made with you or keep some lesser covenant with some trivial god of your time?

         Jesus’ Covenant is deeper than mine was. I called my people to be witnesses against themselves in regard to the promise they made. I set up that rock under the oak tree as another witness. Jesus also called His disciples and called all of you to be witnesses. But He called you not just to be witnesses to yourselves. He called you not just to remind yourself and each other of all God’s goodness to you and of your commitment to Him. No, Jesus said “and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” That’s the Covenant He’s asking you to keep.

         Just like then, the choice is yours. Just like then, as I had my doubts about my people, I have my doubts about you all. I know you will fail. You will be unfaithful to your Lord. You will forget Him and go after all those idols, all those other gods that tempt you in the culture and the people around you. Yet I also know that God is always faithful to you, that your new Joshua, just as He promised, will always be with you. So I ask you like I asked Israel. Choose to serve your Lord, to serve Jesus. And be His witnesses, witnesses not just to and for yourselves, but witnesses for the world.

         May the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joshua be with you. Shalom.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2010 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj