FRIDAY 30th
Joshua 8:30-35
ESV (v35) – ‘There was not a word of all that Moses commanded that Joshua did not read before all the assembly of Israel, and the women, and the little ones, and the sojourners who lived among them.’
In the verses surrounding our text for today especially verses 30-35 Joshua is renewing the covenant, the heading for this section in my ESV is ‘Joshua renews the covenant’.
The people of Israel had had an amazing victory under the LORD God’s direction at Jericho, then in chapter 7 they suffered a humiliating defeat against the city of Ai as a result of the sin of Achan and their disobedience to the command of God (7:10-11), we read that his sin is uncovered and he is put to death as a result of it (7:22-26). In chapter 8 the people of Israel are to go up against Ai for the second time and they win. When you read some of these accounts of the battles and conquests, they don’t make very pleasant reading, the gruesome things that are done, they are enough to make you shudder and we perhaps cannot always get our heads around why God did things the way he did, but as I have often said he is God and when we can’t fully grasp or understand, we need to remember that he knows, and we just have to rest in the knowledge that he is outworking his good and perfect purpose. Perhaps one way to consider the details we think as gruesome is to understand that the land needed purging, just as sin needs to be dealt with in our own lives and it took the gruesome death of the Lord Jesus at Calvary to make it possible, so to deal with the sin in the land, it needed gruesome ways to make sure it was dealt with and the land purged from evil, whether it be evil people, evil ways or evil rulers.
But we come to chapter 9, Ai has been defeated, and Joshua decides the covenant needs renewing. Could we put it this way, the relationship of the people of Israel with the Lord God needed renewing they needed to be reminded of their privileged position as God’s people and therefore their incredible responsibility towards following him with obedience and whole heartedly. They had so easily slipped into sin, they had learned that sin cannot go unpunished, therefore, the better option is to repent and to renew their covenant with the LORD God.
I will end this devotion here today with a personal challenge to us all as individuals and return to the same verses again tomorrow. For individually we have a responsibility toward the whole or us all collectively as a local Church, sin in the camp led to devastating results in chapter 7, but a correcting of the wrong led to victory in chapter 8. We each need to ensure that we are all doing the very best we can not to allow sin to enter into our lives, be it through thought or deed as it not only has an effect upon the individual that is sinning, but it can have an effect upon us as a whole, a congregation of God’s people, and therefore we need to ensure that sin is not active in our camp, but that we are all walking in a right relationship with God and with one another. In 1 Peter chapters one and two, we are shown how we should be within the Church, or in the context of our text today ‘our camp’ chapter one verse 22 says, ‘Having purified your souls by the obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, since you have been born again . . . .’ Peter then shows how we have been born again in verses 23-25 and then he continues the instruction in chapter two, ‘So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander . . .’ In other words, keep oneself free from sin so that it has no effect upon the camp! Then finally in chapter two and verse eleven, Peter continues, ‘Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain form the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.’
May God keep us all free from anything that would restrain us as a Church from moving forward and reaching the goals that God himself as set for us to achieve.