As for Me and My House, We Will Serve Yahweh

14“Now therefore fear Yahweh, and serve him in sincerity and in truth. Put away the gods which your fathers served beyond the River, in Egypt; and serve Yahweh. 15If it seems evil to you to serve Yahweh, choose today whom you will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you dwell; but as for me and my house, we will serve Yahweh.” 16The people answered, “Far be it from us that we should forsake Yahweh, to serve other gods; 17for it is Yahweh our God who brought us and our fathers up out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage, and who did those great signs in our sight, and preserved us in all the way in which we went, and among all the peoples through the middle of whom we passed. 18Yahweh drove out from before us all the peoples, even the Amorites who lived in the land. Therefore we also will serve Yahweh; for he is our God.” 19Joshua said to the people, “You can’t serve Yahweh, for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God. He will not forgive your disobedience nor your sins. 20If you forsake Yahweh, and serve foreign gods, then he will turn and do you evil, and consume you, after he has done you good.” 21The people said to Joshua, “No, but we will serve Yahweh.”

Over thirty-three sermons we have followed Joshua closely as he ran his race of faith. Through Joshua we have met God and learned how God works. We have seen the God who promptly disciplines even his own people when their faith is not whole, and we have met the God who protects to the end those who obey as Joshua did. If you carry out, just as he gave it, Joshua’s last charge to the people to fear God alone and serve him well, you will receive a wonderful blessing.

Suppose two envelopes lay before you, and depending on which one you chose, you might go on a trip abroad or be sent to a grueling boot camp. You would choose very carefully. If one of two jars held a snake, you could not lift the lid of either without hesitation. The world is like that: nothing in it is certain, everything as clouded as frosted glass. So no one in it can claim to be right. By the world’s yardstick, no one can say with confidence that this is good and that is evil.

What the world calls good and evil shifts its standard of judgment depending on who is looking, where, at what, and from which side, so the line between good and evil can move as well. But if we make God’s word the standard, good and evil will be plain to see in any situation.

The difference between believers and the people of the world is whether they look at the world with the eyes of the flesh or judge it with the eyes of the spirit. Believers who judge the world by the spirit do not build their future on human wisdom, but rely on God and see the world farther and wider. Those who build their future on their own wisdom shape their lives on what they have seen and learned, and since they cannot shake off anxiety about what they cannot see, their vision is bound to be narrow.

But those who depend on God, who created the world, are like someone with a navigation system that shows the way once the destination is entered: they can travel safely down even the small back alleys of life. When we set heaven as our destination, God tells us what buildings lie along the road and where accidents often happen, and in his wisdom he shows us where to slow down and where we may drive fast. Is the life you are looking at now cloudy, or is it clear?

Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to Shechem and called in particular for the elders, the heads, the judges, and the officers. Before he went to his rest in God, he wanted to pass on God’s faithful love to the people he loved. He told them that if they obeyed in faith, God would wipe out the Canaanite peoples. But if they left God, the foreign nations would become a snare and a trap to them, and they would suffer. He did not speak of God from his own point of view, but delivered the message in the first person, as though God himself were speaking to them.

In Joshua 24, the word “I,” by which God speaks of himself, appears again and again in what Joshua said. I brought Abraham out, God said; I sent Moses and Aaron; I did what I did among them; I brought your fathers out of Egypt; I put darkness between you and the Egyptians; your eyes saw all that I did in Egypt. And again: I brought you into the land beyond the Jordan; I fought them for you; I destroyed them; I would not listen to Balaam; I sent the hornet and drove out the seven nations of Canaan; I gave you, as a blessing, a land on which you had not labored. God himself made the nation of Israel and led it, and through Joshua he told the people every bit of it, leaving nothing out.

God told them everything, from calling Abraham out of Haran to bringing them into Canaan and settling them there, and in all this history Israel had no merit of its own. God had chosen the land of Canaan before he ever called Abraham, and when Jacob led his family down to Egypt, God had already spoken of his plan to lead them back to Canaan four hundred years later. Yet though God told them all these plans in advance, we see the people divided into those who obeyed his word and those who did not.

The people saw God’s promise to lead Israel into Canaan after four hundred years come true. They saw the Red Sea parted and water brought out of the rock, and they ate manna. Yet even after experiencing these miracles firsthand, they died in the wilderness because of their own sin.

Judas Iscariot met Jesus, Achan met Joshua, and Gehazi met Elisha. Like them, people who are given the chance to become God’s people still choose the place of sin for themselves. That tells us that human beings are evil by nature.

When grain is winnowed, the chaff blows outside and falls to the ground, while the grain comes in and gathers into the owner’s lap. In the same way, God winnows every soul each day with the circumstances and conditions of life, separating chaff from grain. If we are not filled with the word of truth, we will be driven out like chaff with every winnowing and blown away by the wind. Achan, Judas Iscariot, and Gehazi saw the word of truth answered in real life, yet they did not hold fast to their faith, and like chaff they fell to the ground. The owner planted, tended with care, and harvested. If it still ends up as chaff and falls into the fire, the fault lies wholly with the chaff. Though God watched over them and cared for them all the way into Canaan, their failure to live by faith was entirely their own responsibility.

However carefully grain is winnowed, a few husks can still slip in. Even if they reach the barn with the sound grain, they are picked out and thrown away when the rice is cooked. In the same way, even an Achan who came into Canaan mixed in among the people does not receive eternal life if he does not stand firm in faith.

Joshua told the people that God had led them, helped them, and loved them, that he was keeping them still, and that he was the Father who gave them fruit to eat that they had not planted. Now, he said, they must fear Yahweh. One can almost see his anxious heart for his descendants as he faced death. He would have no other chance to tell them they must live in the fear of God, no more time to rebuke them and tell them to put away their foreign gods, and that must have made him all the more urgent. If Israel had held a true faith that served God alone, he would not have pleaded with them so earnestly.

Joshua 24:15

15If it seems evil to you to serve Yahweh, choose today whom you will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you dwell; but as for me and my house, we will serve Yahweh.”

Joshua told them firmly to choose today whom they would serve if they did not want to serve Yahweh, whether the gods their fathers had served in Egypt or the gods of the Amorites. In other words, he could not trust their faith.

Facing such a people, Joshua declared that as for him and his house, they would serve Yahweh. He showed his resolve: until now he had striven to live a life without spiritual regret, and though he was preparing for the end, he would serve God alone until the moment he died. On the verge of death, Joshua was firmly urging the community of Israel to stand upright in faith.

1 Kings 18:21

21Elijah came near to all the people, and said, “How long will you waver between the two sides? If Yahweh is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.” The people didn’t say a word.

When it comes to salvation, there are only two ways: to be saved or not to be saved. There is no vague middle ground where one seems both saved and not saved. If someone hesitates in front of a house and cannot walk in with confidence, that house is not theirs. If you asked whether it was their house and they answered that it seemed to be theirs and also seemed not to be, would you think they owned it?

It is the same with believing in God and with being saved. If someone says that sometimes they believe in God and sometimes they do not, and that they seem to be saved and also seem not to be, that person neither knows God nor has been saved.

Elijah came to a contest on Mount Carmel with 850 prophets of Baal and Asherah, to show which god was the one true God, which god was alive and at work. To Elijah, the contest was not even worth having, but he took it on for the sake of the people.

Yet the people only stood and watched. Exasperated with their wavering, Elijah rebuked them: if God was the only God, they should come to this side, and if Baal was their god, they should go to that one. Those people, standing in the middle and hesitating, meaning to side with whichever god won and so be blessed, offended him, and he could hardly bear the sight of them.

Joshua had probably seen in the Israelites before him the same unbelief Elijah saw in his people. Hence his rebuke: since he and his house would serve Yahweh, they must make it clear which god they would choose. At his rebuke, the people promised that they would never forsake Yahweh to serve other gods.

Though they had loudly promised to serve God, Joshua could not trust their promise, and his heart was not at ease. So he told them that if they did not serve Yahweh faithfully, God would never forgive their sins, and that even after he had done them good, he would bring disaster on everything they had.

Why did Joshua go out of his way to draw the promise from them again and again? Because eternal life hung on it. The people did promise to believe in God alone, but they turned corrupt as soon as Joshua died, and that shows the promise they made then was false.

What Joshua feared came true: God made the people suffer hardship, and mighty nations conquered Israel and brought on them more pain than they could bear. Joshua had pressed the Israelites for a pledge because he was worried for them, and he had done it not for himself but out of a longing to see them live in peace. Failing to grasp this true heart of Joshua’s, the people abandoned their promise to him and left God.

Joshua 24:25

25So Joshua made a covenant with the people that day, and made for them a statute and an ordinance in Shechem.

To make a covenant, as Joshua did with the people, was to kill animals and cut them in two and to swear before God that if they broke this promise, they deserved to die like those animals. The people set up a great stone under the oak by the sanctuary and vowed that this stone would be a witness to their promise, and that just as the stone did not change, neither would they. Yet Israel forgot their promise and fell away.

We take our vows to God so lightly that we make a promise first and then sin by not keeping it. But we must not forget that an animal died because of that sin. It was because Jesus willingly took up the cross to save sinners that we could become children of God.

We who have become God’s children through the death of Jesus break our promise to fear God alone all too easily, and we feel no fear at all. We act this way because we do not know how fearsome God is. People promise to be as unchanging as the stone set up under the tree, and still they change. But we must know that God truly does not change, like that stone.

There was nothing more Joshua could do for those who left God even after receiving his earnest plea, his statutes, and his ordinances, because he had gone the way of all the earth.

As Jesus entered Jerusalem, he looked at the city and wept. He shed tears because he knew that a life without the fear of God may seem easy and pleasant for now, yet how great the suffering it brings. Though he knew that in a few days he himself would suffer terribly on the cross, Jesus wept out of grief for a people who would be caught in still greater suffering because of their sins. Like Jesus, who wept as he saw Jerusalem’s future, Joshua, who knew the future of the people of Israel, must have grieved. Their loud answer that they would serve God alone rang like a hollow echo, and Joshua’s own heart would have felt hollow too. I hope you will not make promises to God like theirs, promises that beat the air.

Joshua died at the age of one hundred ten. His life was lived for God and the people alone, a life of sacrifice that gave itself without holding back. If Joshua had been given one last moment to reflect before he entered the gate of heaven, he would have realized how empty the ties he had formed with people in the world were, and that all he had left now was the grace of God. And he would have smiled a lonely smile. He had labored all his life to build people up in faith, yet he would have reflected that by his own strength he had not built up a single one, and laughed at the vanity of vanities that was his life.

Knowing that he could enter the gate of heaven and see God not because of his own faith but because of the grace of God, who never abandoned him to the end, he would have given thanks from the bottom of his heart. This is the love of God that we must hold to until the very end.

Now Joshua would slowly fade from the memory of the people of Israel, and the word he had delivered so earnestly would slowly be forgotten too. But God would remember him, who had been faithful to death, and the descendants in faith who longed to walk the way he walked would not forget him. I believe he is now sharing glory with God in the Kingdom of God, enjoying a happiness beyond anything we can imagine. That is why we must keep God’s word.

If this world were really the end, you and I would have no need to believe in God at such cost. But since we too must go to the heaven Joshua entered, we must live by a true faith. The Lord who stood at the throne to welcome Stephen with joy as he was martyred was perhaps standing at the throne again to welcome Joshua, who had carried out his calling to the end and was going home to God. Now Joshua closed his eyes in peace. His life came to a moving close. Those who had known him would miss him as long as they lived.

May you, too, live a life like Joshua’s. I hope that you will now receive and enjoy the love of God, who cherished Joshua all his life and granted every desire of his heart. We have now looked closely at Joshua’s life. What he wrestled with, what he decided, how much he loved God: all of this we have seen and heard and lived through together.

Now it is your turn to make the same judgments and decisions as Joshua, to be trusted by God as he was, and, clothed with power and grace, to build a beautiful life. And on the day that, like Joshua, you lay aside your weary body and enter eternal rest, you will enjoy eternal life in the glory of God.

May you always live by a faith that is strong and courageous like Joshua’s, a faith that serves God. I bless you in the name of Jesus Christ.