The Choice We All Must Make

Gracious heavenly Father, we ask one more time now that you would be glorified in our midst, and you would give us ears to hear. You are so kind to us that you have not left us without a word, you have not left us in the dark, you have not gone silent. So, give us ears that we may hear. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

We come to the end of the Book of Joshua. Nineteen sermons by my count, and we come this morning to Joshua chapter 24. After the first five books of Moses comes Joshua before judges. Joshua chapter 24. This is such a great sermon, and I don’t mean the one I’m going to preach, but I mean the one that Joshua preaches here, it is on its own a wonderful, amazing sermon and I want you to have the right ears to hear it. I almost thought I could just read this sermon from Joshua and that would be the sermon, and I know some of you are saying, “Mom, dad I wish he would have done that.” But, not quite going to do that, but I want to orient you to a couple of things so that you can hear the sermon rightly.

The first thing to note before I read through the passage is that this is Joshua’s final sermon. Remember in chapters 22, 23, and 24, three occasions he gathers the people, their leaders in increasing number to give them a final word, a final charge, and here he does so at this holy place of Shechem. It’s the last sermon that he gives to the nation of Israel. Turn to the end of the chapter, look at verse 29. Follow along as I read there. After these things, so this is after the sermon, after the covenant ceremony, after the back and forth we read from the narrator, Joshua the son of none, the servant of the Lord died. Being 110 years old, it’s the same age that Joseph was so there’s a parallel here. He took the baton from Moses, but there’s a parallel here with Joseph who also died at 110, as he was the last of the patriarchs there to die in Egypt and now, we’re going to find his bones are taken here at Joshua dies as the leader of this generation, the first generation to take possession of the Promised Land. They buried him in his own inheritance at Timnath-Serah which is in the hill country of Ephriam north of the mountain of Gaash. Israel served the Lord all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua and had known all the work that the Lord did for Israel and for the bones of Joseph which the people of Israel brought up from Egypt, they buried them at Shechem in the piece of land that Jacob bought from the sons of Hamor, the father of Shechem for 100 pieces of money, it became an inheritance of the descendants of Joseph. And Eleazar, the son of Aaron died, and they buried him at Gibeah the town of Phineas, his son which had been given him in the hill country of Ephriam. So, this wraps up the book, tells us that this is Joshua’s final sermon, his last act. He had lead the people very well and even though there had been some bumps along the way, and it is a bit of an open question as we will see at the end, whether or not they will prove to be obedient for very long, we have this great word in verse 31 that as long as Joshua was alive and the elders who had served with Joshua, so this generation of leadership, Joshua was such a strong Godly leader and those who had been with him as the elders, as long as they were ruling in Israel, God’s people serve the Lord.

Joshua crossed the finish line. He lived his life well. Very few of us, dare I say none of us, will live to be 110, though we have a few saints here who are giving Joshua a run for his money. It will, unless Jesus returns, come to each one of us, soon, medium, or decades from now that we will breath our last and whatever work we have done will pass to another, will pass to another in our family, in our church, in our community, whatever we have done, whether noticed by many or noticed by few, we will pass on our work to someone else. And what comes after you, you don’t have control over. But you do by God’s grace have control over the sort of life that you live, the sort of people that you surround yourself with, and whether or not you will cross that finish line. Everything in this world tells you to live for this moment, this pleasure, this satisfaction, this next thing, this brass ring, this next vacation and God says I want you to live for that finish line. As David Brooks once put it, to live for the funeral accolades rather than the resume accolades. The sort of things that someone can say about you as they lay you into the ground, live for that finish line. Joshua lived his life well and we’re going to hear in just a moment this last sermon. So that’s the first thing to note is the positioning here. It’s the last of these three final messages and this is the last act of Joshua as the leader. The other thing to note is that this is a covenant renewal ceremony. You can read in any of the commentaries or if you have a good study Bible it probably will say something that many of the elements of covenant ceremonies in the ancient near east are found in his ceremony in Joshua 24, you find them in a document like Deuteronomy, sometimes the parallels can be pressed too far, but there is a general pattern here. This is the way they did things in the ancient world. You see that there’s a preamble, there is a historical prologue that is giving some history of what God has done, then there are commands, there are witnesses, there are curses, there are blessings, and then the document is written up and it is placed in a holy place and that’s what we find here. It is a covenant ceremony, a covenant renewal just like when we gather for worship and especially this morning as we have this covenant meal, we come as God’s covenant people once again to commit ourselves and be nourished and strengthened and before God and before these witnesses to commit ourselves to Christ. So, there is a particularly formal setting, the most formal of these last three messages. You look at verse 1, he gathered all the tribes of Israel to Shechem. He summoned the elders, the heads, the judges, the officers of Israel and notice this official language they presented themselves before God as if they were standing at attention, likely the largest of the three crowds that have gathered here in its important official ceremony standing before God ready to present themselves before God, what do you have to say to us, Lord God Almighty through your servant Joshua. Joshua’s last sermon and it’s a covenant sermon. Now listen to this Word that God gives through Joshua.

Pick up at verse 2 and I want you to listen especially in these first 13 verses, the history he recounts. I want you to listen for the word I. As the Lord speaks through Joshua, I want you to listen the emphasis he puts on I. “And Joshua said to all the people, thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, long ago your fathers lived beyond the Euphrates, beyond the river. Tara the father of Abraham and of Nahor and they served other Gods. Then I, I took your father Abraham from beyond the river and lead him through all the land of Canaan and made his offspring many. I gave him Isaac and to Isaac I gave Jacob and Esau and I gave Esau the hill country of Seir to possess, but Jacob and his children went down to Egypt and I sent Moses and Aaron and I plagues Egypt with what I did in the midst of it afterward I brought you out, then I brought your fathers out of Egypt and you came to the sea and the Egyptians pursued your fathers with chariots and horsemen to the Red Sea and then they cried to the Lord He put darkness between you and the Egyptians and made the sea come upon them and cover them and your eyes saw what I did in Egypt. You lived in the wilderness a long time, then I brought you to the land of the Amorites who lived on the other side of the Jordan. They fought with you, and I gave them into your hand and you took possession of their land and I destroyed them before you. And Balak, the son of Zippor, Kind of Moab arose and fought against Israel and he sent and invited Balaam, the son of Beor to curse you, but I would not listen to Balaam, indeed he blessed you so I delivered your out of his hand and you went over the Jordan and came to Jericho and the leaders of Jericho fought against you and also the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Hivites and the Jebusites and I gave them into your hand and I sent the hornet before you which drove them out before you, the two kings of the Amorites. It was not by your sword or by your bow, I gave you a land on which you had not labored and cities that you had not built and you dwell in them, you eat the fruit of vineyards and olive orchards that you did not plant.”

I want you to notice what Joshua is doing with this opening part of the sermon. He’s retelling Israel’s history up to this point. He has four major sections, the patriarchs, the exodus, the fighting on the other side of the Jordan and then the conquest in Canaan and he tells the story and every one of those phases from the patriarchs with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Joseph to then the exodus when God sent Moses and Aaron and the plagues in the Red Sea and delivered them to then the wilderness years and fighting on the other side of the Jordan and even that time when Balaam, if you remember that story from the Book of Numbers, that Balak hires Balaam and he says I want you to curse my enemies and four times God turns the cursing into blessing and he is such a bad prophet he has to have his own donkey tell him what to do, but God will not let him curse because he promised all those years ago I mean to bless you and then in these more recent days as he lead them through Jericho and to the seven nations enumerated there and gave them the Promised Land every step of the way. Do you see this reference here in verse 12. “I sent the hornet.” Not exactly sure what the hornet is, but it seems to be a symbol, a metaphor for the panic and the fear that God sent ahead of his people. Remember we saw that back with the people of Jericho and with Rahab and many times it said their hearts melted, their hearing what Yahweh has done, that’s the hornet. We had a wasp up in one of our rooms this week and it was sort of like this dread and panic, “everyone out of the house now”, and you get whatever spray, and you just douse the whole house. There’s a hornet, wasp, a bee, run around and the feat that God put into their hearts was like a hornet that was driving them out, running with a mad fury. This retelling of their story helps us to understand how we should look at redemptive history. The Bible’s a big book and there are lots of lessons and there’s moral examples, good examples, bad examples, so there’s lots of things we can do with the Bible and yet we see how Joshua tells the story. Chiefly he tells the story as what God had done for His people. That’s what the Bible’s about. From start to finish. Yes, there are commands, you must obey them. Yes there are warnings, but it’s the book of God’s doings, of His grace, of His mercy for His people and so when Joshua tells the story he says let me recount for you where you’ve been in the last hundreds of years and that’s why I said pay attention to the word I as the Lord tells the story. Time and time again I did that, I sent Moses and Arron, I sent the plagues, I dried up the Red Sea, I swallowed up the Egyptians, I turned Balaam’s curses into blessing. Every bit of your privileged blessed life Israel is the story of God’s mercy beginning with that surprising story of grace. You notice the emphasis here.

Verse 3, “I took your father Abraham from beyond the river.” Says in verse 2, “Those fathers on the other side of the river Terah of Nahor, they served other Gods.” God didn’t look down and say mmm, Abram, he’s a great guy, he’s kinda getting it about 65% right, I’m gonna make him a great nation. He comes from a family as you would expect of idolators, they don’t know the truth and of his own sovereign unconditional mercy he chose him and he said “You, I’m gonna pluck you out and I’m gonna make of you a great nation.” This is God’s story and it’s your story if you’re a Christian. It’s the story of Israel from start to finish the Lord says, “This is what your life has been about.” Now they could have said oh God, but look at all of the difficulties that we’ve had and remember the sin of Achan and remember the wandering in the wilderness, yes, it’s a dynamic relationship with God and not every individual in the nation had a life free of suffering, of course they didn’t, but as a people God said “Here’s your story, I’ve been kind to you, I’ve given you mercy, I’ve given you grace and here you are.” So, like a good sermon now he’s going to bring this history, this Bible lesson to a point.

Verse 14. “Now therefore”, he’s turning to the application of the sermon, “Fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and faithfulness. Put away the God’s that your father served beyond the river and in Egypt and serve the Lord and if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, chose this day whom you will serve. Whether the God’s of your fathers served in the region beyond 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 kept telling my family we were going to take that little wooden plaque that we have in your house like you have somewhere maybe in your house, and I was gonna bring it, first time ever a visual demonstration, but it’s just the words right there so it’s not much. Maybe you have this, it’s a beloved verse. Verse 14 before verse 15. Verse 14 is the whole point of the sermon. “Fear the Lord, serve him in sincerity and faithfulness.” Or to give another word this message, this final sermon is about single mindedness, singlemindedness. Joshua is preaching to the people, here you are, you’ve gathered at Shechem, you’re about to return to your inheritance the land that God gave you, you’re eating of the fruit that God gave to you, you’re living in houses you didn’t build, and I want you to be absolutely sincere and single minded. There’s a choice you must make, and Joshua gives that famous response as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

How’s your house doing? In particular talk to the men. Here it is men and women, but as the head of the household as the Lord arranges it to men, how are you doing? Because you notice this isn’t just, yeah I love Yahweh, this is me and my house, not simply affirming something that is true, but we will serve the Lord. Men how are you doing, getting your family to church, how are you doing praying with them and for them, setting an example with them, leading your family to be involved not only Sunday morning, but in other aspects of the life of the church, Sunday school, Sunday evening, small groups, many other opportunities to get involved. Would your children, men, would they as I read verse 15, would they immediately think, “That’s my dad”, as for me and my house we will serve the Lord. They may like it, or they may not like it at this point but would they recognize or perhaps years later would they be able to look back and say, “Absolutely my imperfect, my loving earthly father lead our family like this.” Me and my household, God deals with us as families, he wants us to make a choice and look at what the choice is. This is, you may not have noticed this before because we know the famous, I chose whom you will serve, but look at what it says, the choice that He gives them is actually the choice between two sets of pagan Gods.

Verse 15, “If it’s evil in your eyes to serve the Lord choose this day.” What’s the choice, whether the Gods your father served in the region beyond the river, you want Babylonian Gods, or the Gods of the Amorites in whose land you now dwell. The literal choice he gives them; I want you to chose between two pagan sets of Gods. Obviously, he doesn’t really want them to be pagan idolaters because he already said in verse 14, “Put away those Gods.” Gods of the Babylonians, Gods of the Egyptians, the Gods of the Canaanites, obviously he wants them to put away those Gods, but he says here with a rhetorical spin, listen, if Yahweh is not God, if you haven’t seen enough in your life and in this Promised Land which you now inherit and benefit from and all those blessings, if you haven’t seen enough to commit yourself and your family to this God, then go ahead, you have a choice to make. You want the Gods of the Babylonians; the Gods of Abraham’s family then serve them. Let’s be honest. Or you can go ahead, and you can serve these Amorites. It is meant to be a ridiculous choice. Okay, if you don’t want Jesus, then decide who will be Lord of your life. If you don’t want Jesus to run your life then decide, you want drugs or alcohol, you want prostitutes or pornography, lying or stealing, you want college football or college basketball, fashion or food. You wanna live your life for online gaming or online gambling. Its presenting to them, if it’s not Yahweh then whose it going to be. You can go with the old false Gods or the new false Gods, either way they’re false Gods.

I like this insight that Dale Ralph Davis has in his commentary. He says there’s sort of a contrast here with the conservative choice and the liberal choice. The conservatives, he writes who were fond of tradition, of what had stood the test of time, who yearned for the faith of our fathers, well they might vote for Mesopotamia. Those are the traditional Gods. The liberals yearning for relevance, being in step with the times, they might prefer to identify as an act of goodwill with the current social milieu and enter into dialogue and worship with the Amorites, but you must choose. If not, Yahweh then take your pick and hear he quotes from Matthew Henry, “Take your pick from these dunghill deities.” If you don’t want Yahweh, what do you wanna be, you want the traditional Gods go for it, you want the new Gods of this land, pick you dunghill deities. Joshua is warning the people to serve the Lord is an exclusive commitment, exclusive. The relationship with God is like our relationship with a spouse, not like a relationship with a friend. Now it’s true, Abraham is called a friend of God and Jesus says that you are my friends and He lays down his life for His friends and he reveals himself to his friends, so it’s not that the language of friend is completely misguided, but what I mean by the difference between a spouse and friend is you ought to have many friends, you should not have more than one spouse. When you have a friend, you do not say, and forsaking all others. And let me say, any middle schoolers, you don’t get asked that of your friends. Friends can multiply. You can have many friends. Sure, we have a best friend, but you can have lots of friends and C.S. Lewis said, “The more friends you have, the different friends pull out different things from those other friends.” Lots of friends. You can keep adding more and more friends and in fact you can have a better friendship with that person when you have three other friends around. That’s not what obedience to the Lord is like, that’s not what it means to follow Christ and belong to Christ. That is an exclusive, that’s why all throughout scripture it’s likened to a marriage, you say, and forsaking all others. There is only one God, there is only one Lord and he’s a jealous God, so I cannot say well God, you should be happy because you’re in the friend zone with me, you’re one of my friends, you’re a real special friend God, you’re one of my best friends and you’re right up there in my life and the importance in my life with six or seven other things and people in my life. That’s not how God does it. Just like your spouse would not say, wow that’s really sweet honey, you love me and four other women, I feel so honored. No wife will ever express that nor husband or God. Joshua is saying your devotion to the Lord must be sincere and single-minded, choose, it’s not Yahweh, it’s one of these dunghill deities. And then look at the answer they give, it’s a great answer, or at least it seems that.

Verse 16 the people answered, “Far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other Gods for it is the Lord our God who brought us and our fathers up from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery and who did those great signs in our sight and preserved us in all the way that we went and among all the peoples through whom we pass and the Lord drove out before us all the peoples, the Amorites who lived in the land, therefore we also will serve the Lord for he is our God.: It’s a great answer. They say to Joshua, what you suggest is unthinkable. The gods of the Babylonians, the Gods of the Amorites, of course not, we know what God has done, we saw it with our own eyes how he drove out the Amorites from us, how the walls of Jericho came a tumbling down. I wonder how the people here felt about this question. Somebody probably stood up for the group. It’s hard to give this whole speech in unison with tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people, maybe somebody stood up and they said, Joshua let me speak on behalf of the people. Of course, of course we will serve the Lord and then he turned around to the multitudes, am I right and they said yes, yes, huzzah, three cheers, we agree. Maybe they were Presbyterians, and he made a motion and somebody seconded it. All in favor, they said aye, oppose, no one abstained, the motion carries. Somebody took the minutes; they’re recorded for us here. Maybe the people were actually a little incredulous, maybe some of them started elbowing each other, what’s Josh talking about. I mean these are church people after all, you have to get this in your head. You hear this as an evangelistic sermon, but Joshua’s not preaching to a gathering of Hivites and Jebusites. He didn’t say oh now I’ve come in and I’m glad all the Amorites and all the Canaanite people can hear. He’s speaking to people like us, he’s speaking to church people, people who are part of the covenant community, people who have been with him through thick and thin. He is saying to them, just like some of us might say, now wait a minute, come on, you know what we’ve been through, we’ve been getting into the, come on, we’re here, we love Jesus, why are you giving us this message. We saw the miracles with our own eyes, of course we’re gonna serve the Lord so they stand at attention, yessir, we will serve the Lord.

And now listen to what Joshua says next because it’s one of the most surprising things in the whole book. Verse 10. Put Joshua said to the people, “You are not able to serve the Lord for he is a holy God, he is a jealous God, he will not forgive your transgressions or your sins. If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, then he will turn and do you harm and consume you after having done you good.” Not what you expected. You thought Joshua would say warms the cockles of my heart. I knew you would get it right. You don’t know was there something in their demeanor, was it lackluster, was it just sort of a show of hands who wants to serve Yahweh, yes okay and we move on. Maybe there was something in their attitude, maybe Joshua knew what they were like. Maybe Joshua simply understood human nature and what people are like, but he says to them this first time around, time out. I can tell you’ve been to Sunday school and you know that Jesus died on the cross and saved you from your sins and you said that you want to follow Jesus. I’m here to tell you that if you’re flippant and you think that’s an easy thing, you can’t do it. He is certainly speaking with a bit of rhetorical force when he says you can’t do it because the end of the narration that we read earlier says that by and large they had served the Lord. But here he says, what a minute, if you’re just going about this casually you can’t do it, and when he says God won’t forgive you what he means is do not presume upon the Lord’s grace, do not think that this is an easy or a light thing. Didn’t Jesus do the same thing all the time?

Luke 14. Great crowds accompanied Jesus, and he turned and said to them, if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. If you build a tower, you count the cost, if you go into war you see if you can win the battle. Jesus was constantly making it harder for people to follow Him, so different from the impulse of modern religion which often just says lowest common denominator, if you think Jesus is okay then come on in. So different from the way political parties work. You’re a political party, you’re trying to build a coalition, a constituency. The main thing is you want them to pull the lever or punch out the hanging Chad, I hope they don’t use those anymore, and mark across the line and vote for their candidate and vote for their party. That’s what they want, that’s how political parties’ work. We’ve got a very broad constituency, we just want you, in this country you’ve got two realistic choices, just vote for our side. After that, fine. Some people think that’s what Jesus is like, you just say Jesus or Buddha, well Jesus. Jesus or not Jesus, well I’ll even take Jesus. The issue that Joshua knew in their hearts was presumption. He could tell there was something in their spirit or he feared it was there to presume that to follow God was an easy thing, that forgiveness was automatic, that sin was not a big deal. That’s the message that so many churches and voices give to people today, be religious but don’t be hard on yourself, don’t worry about the specifics, don’t get caught up with doctrine or form. If you sin, I mean try to be a good person, but if you sin it’s okay. As Joshua said, if you worship some other Gods, just don’t do it a lot, just say the right thing and when someone asks if you believe just say you do and if they ask if you go to church just make sure you have something in your resume that has a church affiliation. That’s all, that’s all God’s asking, just say Jesus is good and I got a church. There’s a lot of people that think that’s really what Christianity is, and Joshua’s sermon tells us here, if that’s what you think it means to follow God, easy peasy lemon squeezy, then you’ve got another thing coming.

Now look at how they respond in verse 21. The people said to Joshua, “No, but we will serve the Lord.” Then Joshua said to the people, “You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen the Lord to serve him” and they said, “we are witnesses.” So, Joshua says, okay, I want you to make sure are you serious, are you single-minded. You’ve got to reup this commitment and they say, Joshua yes of course we’re serious and Josua says, listen you’re witnesses against yourself. Every song you’ve sung in church praising Jesus, every time you’ve made a vow and as we’ve administered baptism or when you who are communing members in a church are going to take these elements professing to the world that you belong to Jesus Christ. Every time you say I’ll pray for so and so, every time you write a Bible verse on your Christmas card, or an email and you have some sort of Christian word there, everything you speak. I think of every blog I’ve ever written or book or sermon I’ve ever done, every prayer you’ve ever prayed is a witness where you have called upon the name of Jesus or you have said, I belong to King Jesus and you have confessed him before men and women, before students, before teachers, before your children, before your parents Joshua says, I want you to notice you’ve said it, your words are spoken and they will witness against you and then he finishes with the official covenant actions in verse 23. He said, “Put away the foreign Gods that are among you and incline your heart to the Lord, the God of Israel” and the people said to Joshua one more time, “The Lord our God we will serve and his voice we will obey.” So Joshua made a covenant with the people that day and put in place statutes and rules for them at Shechem and Joshua wrote these words in the Bood of the Law of God, and he took a large stone and set it up there under the terebinth that was by the sanctuary of the Lord and Joshua said to all the people, “Behold this stone shall be a witness against us for it has heard all the words of the Lord that He spoke to us, therefore it shall be a witness against you less you deal falsely with your God.” So, Joshua sent the people away, every man to his inheritance. You have these official elements of a covenant ceremony, even our language of cutting a covenant, cutting a deal we still say has echoes here and cutting a covenant usually involved the cutting of some animal, some sort of sacrifice and here they write down the stipulations and all that has been spoken and they put it there in the holy place at this time which is in Shechem. It’s another holy moment at Shechem. You’ve gotta have a good Bible memory to hear okay there’s something important about this place Shechem.

Genesis 12. Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, the Oak of Morah. So Shechem and a tree. At that time the Canaanites were in the land and the Lord appeared to Abram and said, to your offspring I will give this land. It was there at Shechem by the Oak of Mamre that God said first to Abraham, right here you’re a sojourner now, but one day your descendants will be a great nation, and they will inherit this land.

Genesis 33. Jacob came safely to the city of Shechem which is in the land of Canaan on his way from Padan-Aram and he camped before the city and from the sons of Hamor, Shechem’s father, he bought for 100 pieces of money a piece of land just like we read here. So, Jacob also later, when he’s passing from having spent time with his father-in-law and he comes back down through the land and he stops at Shechem and he buys a piece of property because he too believes that God’s people will one day inherit this land. Surely this was not lost on the people. Not one Word of all that God had promised had failed, not one promise had failed to come to pass all those hundreds of years earlier, right there perhaps on the very spot in Shechem and now with quite intentional movement he brings all the people here at this holy spot. It’s an amazing scene, it’s a tremendous sermon, it’s a powerful ceremony, but it also has a note of quiet caution about it because there’s something that doesn’t happen here that happened when God’s people were gathered at Shechem in Genesis.

Let me read it to you, Genesis 35. “God told Jacob to go to Bethel, then Jacob told his family to put away the foreign Gods among them.” And we read in Genesis 25, “So they gave to Jacob all the foreign Gods that they had and the rings that were in their ears, Jacob hid them under the terebinth tree.” Another tree, another terebinth, under the tree near Shechem. There’s a parallel, almost the exact same scene. You’ve got a terebinth tree, you are at Shechem and the patriarch says, put away your foreign Gods but here’s where I said there’s a caution because in Genesis we read immediately the family came out and took the rings out which were some sort of pagan symbol and they got their Gods and they said, here they are, we bury them. What we have here with Gods people is a verbal declaration, we will obey. We don’t see them bring out the Gods. Did they have them, were they meaning to tell Joshua, yep, we’ll get to that, we hear you. But with so many immediate parallels between the scene at Shechem with the terebinth tree under Jacob surely there’s a note here, what will Gods people do once Joshua and these elders have passed from the scene because we don’t see them brining out all the gods. Are they keeping some, are they hiding them?

Here in Joshua 24 Gods people say all the right things and many of you know how to say all the right things, but unlike Genesis 35 we haven’t seen them immediately do the right thing, not like Jacob’s family did in Shechem all those years ago. And Joshua says, this stone will be our witness. Normally in a treaty like this in the ancient near east your witnesses would be other Gods and Goddesses. We call the Asherah or Baal or Molak. We call some other deity to bare witness as we make a pledge to this deity or to one another, but of course there is no other God but this one, there are no other deities that are invoked so who’s the witness? A stone. Haven’t we seen several times the importance of memorial stones in Joshua. There were the stones gathered up in a heap when they crossed the Jordan and the stones that were over Achan and then the stones that were there over the king in the City of Ai once it was finally destroyed and all those cases it was to say, remember what God did, remember God’s power, remember how God fights for you, remember how God will punish the wicked and here one last time, quite fitting, there’s one witness stone. Of course, it’s an inanimate object, but God is God, he doesn’t need any other deity. This stone knows the truth. This stone has ears. This stone knows what you have promised as a people. This stone knows what the Lord is like even if you forget. Surely Jesus had this ceremony in mind on Palm Sunday when He told the Pharisees. If the disciples do not praise me, even the stones will cry out. The stones know what you don’t know. God is able to raise up children of Abraham from these stones. This inanimate object, it’s the comparison. Don’t be deader and dumber than a stone. This stone of witness knows the truth and the stone will cry out against God’s people and they did all those centuries later when Israel did not recognize its true King, its Messiah, its Savior, God come to earth and the stone of witness Jesus says will cry out. I hope you can see that this is not just the story of Israel, but it’s your story if you’re a Christian. This is the story of our redemption. Think about every step of this historical record and it’s your story. God is saying to you, I chose you, I chose you like I chose Abraham when I had no business choosing him. I redeemed you from slavery like I redeemed the Israelites from Egypt. I delivered you by blood, by the blood of a lamb. I had you pass through the waters of baptism. I solely by my sovereign hand by a monergistic work that is the working of only God working saved you not by anything you had done, or you eating of this good fruit have you inherited this land. I saved you God says, you contributed nothing, you have been given a new life, you have been given deliverance, you have been given a gift you did not deserve, and we have been made partakers of a heavenly inheritance that we did nothing to purchase just like them. And so, the Lord Jesus says to such a people like you and like me who have all of those blessings, will you be single minded. Fear the Lord, serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Choose this day and every day whom you will serve. Let’s pray.

Gracious heavenly Father, we ask for your blessing upon us that we may serve you. Like the people of Israel we know that in our own strength we cannot do it and we are too easily flippant and trivial. We need your help, your spirit, your Word, forgive us for the many times we fall short and give us strength to do all that we have born witness to, you are such a good and gracious God and have given us all of these many blessings, how could we turn from you. Help us and nourish us by your Word and now by your table. In Jesus we pray. Amen.