June 24, 2007 Sermon

Joshua Takes Over
Joshua 3 and 4 (excerpts)

When Moses died the Israelites needed a new leader. But God had already provided one: Joshua, son of Nun. Today we start studying the book of Joshua. It picks up the history of the Israelites at the moment they invade the Promised Land. Under Joshua’s leadership, they take possession of the land, fulfilling one of the two great promises God had made in His covenant with them. (The other promise was that they would become a populous nation.)

But the Israelites had to conquer the tribes already living in the Promised Land. And to get at those tribes, first they had to cross the Jordan River. Joshua ordered the Israelite priests, “Take up the ark of the covenant, and cross over ahead of the people.” In fact, Joshua had them enter the water and then just stand there. When they did, the river stopped flowing. The water “piled up”, as the Revised Standard Version of the Bible has it. This happened at harvest time when the river ran at flood. The water backed up all the way to Zarethan, a village well upstream.

What was this ark of the covenant? Where did it get the power to hold back a river? The ark was essentially a wooden box carried on two long poles by four men, two in front and two behind. Inside the box, Moses had put the tablets on which God had inscribed the Ten Commandments. Some piece of God’s glory resided in the ark. You remember the Indiana Jones movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. Although I seldom miss a chance to say the word “Indiana”, in this case my madness has a method. At the climax of this fictional movie the supernatural power contained in the ark was unleashed. Through the eyes of faith I see that God’s glorious power did indeed emanate from the real ark, with the actual stone tablets inside.

Though the Israelites understood that the ark and the tablets were not, in and of themselves, God, they also understood that God’s powerful presence was somehow focused wherever the ark went. The books of Numbers, Leviticus, and later, II Samuel contain stories that demonstrate this. Thus, when the priests of the Lord God Almighty carried that ark into the midst of the Jordan River and the river backed up as if to avoid the fearsome power of God, surely the Israelites were not terribly surprised. After all, Joshua had just told everybody but the priests to stay at least half a mile away from the ark.

Joshua also told each of the twelve tribes of Israel to select one man, whom he instructed to pick up one rock from the riverbed. The men must have chosen big rocks; the text tells us they had to carry them on their shoulders. When the whole nation encamped for the night, Joshua had the twelve men set their rocks in a pile in their midst. He explained that the rock pile would serve as a memorial, a reminder to future generations of how God had delivered the people through water, and brought them at last into the Promised Land.

The nation of Israel finished its wandering journey of forty-plus years with a walk through water. It had also started its journey with a walk through water. When Moses had led the Israelites in their escape from Egypt they had passed through the held-back waters of the sea. These events had powerful symbolic meaning. Above all else, they displayed God’s power—and God’s determination to deliver the Chosen People safely into the Promised Land. But these events also acted like baptisms. They symbolically washed the people from their sins. And they symbolically “watered” the people, giving them new life in this new place.

Joshua understood the importance of God’s action at the Jordan River. He knew he would immediately lead the people into battle. They would have to fight for their new land. It meant everything to him, and to them all, to receive this fresh evidence that God would fight with them. What wilderness have you been wandering through? What battles do you face? What would it mean to you to believe that God will fight with you?

In January of 1776 George Washington commanded a rag-tag army that faced the British at Boston. The situation was desperate. On paper the Americans had 9,000 soldiers; in reality, sickness had reduced their numbers by about half. They had enough gunpowder for only nine rounds per man. And they had nothing more potent than muskets. No cannon, no mortars, nothing serious to counter the British heavy guns—not to mention the firepower of their fighting ships at anchor in Boston harbor. Colonel Henry Knox approached Washington with a wild idea: he would go to Fort Ticonderoga, about two hundred miles to the west, and bring back the artillery the Green Mountain Boys had captured there a year before.

Before the war Knox ran a bookstore. At twenty-six years of age he had never served a day in any army. Every military thing he did he had to learn from books. But Washington, one the greatest judges of character our nation has ever produced, trusted Knox. He approved the wild idea. Knox took a week to travel to Fort Ticonderoga by horse. It took him two months to return. He and his mean started by rowing the sixty tons of weapons twenty miles down Lake George, against steady headwinds.

Knox then led a team of mule drivers pulling all those tons of metal on sleds. They crossed the Hudson River on ice four times, because the most direct route required it. On one of those crossings the heaviest cannon broke through, leaving a hole in the ice fourteen feet in diameter. He and his men pulled it back up out of the water. They then struck out to the east across the Berkshire Mountains. They climbed twisting paths to the passes between the mountains. Following a blizzard the snow reached two feet in depth. On they plowed.

Knox quickly learned that going down each mountain was a tougher engineering challenge than climbing. The slopes often were as steep as rooftops. The mule drivers lashed branches to the sled runners to act as brakes and used thick ropes to tie the sleds to the bigger trees as they passed. On some days they progressed less than half a mile.

On January 20 Colonel Henry Knox led his team into General Washington’s army lines. He had lost not a single piece of artillery. When the American army placed those guns on the heights overlooking Boston, the British made a decision. As soon as the weather and the tides permitted it, they boarded their ships and sailed away.

It has become fashionable to think that Washington was a Deist who believed in a god, but not a personal god, not the God of the Bible. This is false. Washington not only believed in a personal God, he believed that God had created us for liberty—and for doing good with that liberty. Washington wrote that he saw Knox’s incredible achievement as an act of Providence, an endorsement from God for their cause.

Joshua and the Israelites certainly saw their crossing of the Jordan as an act of the providential God. He, like Washington, had no illusions about the bitter battles they soon would face. Both men would suffer defeat, at times humiliating defeat. Both men kept their faith not only in God, but in the ultimate justice of God’s cause. I ask it again: What wilderness have you been wandering through? What battles do you face? What would it mean to you to believe that God will fight with you?

We must never assume that God automatically endorses every fight we get into. We must never assume that God automatically wills for us to win every battle. But we must always believe that if we seek God’s will, and do our best to follow it no matter how tough the wilderness we must wander, God will guide and protect us. This is an important message from Joshua: with God, we can get through. We can get through not always to victory, at least not as the world defines it, but always to victory as the God of the Bible defines it: a life lived with meaning and purpose, and hope to eternal life with Christ. Follow God through everything.