Josué 8

Josué 8

Meyer - Arrest and Defeat (JOSHUA 8:1, 2) “ ‘Now, Christians, hold your own—the land before ye Is open—win your way, and take your rest.’ So sounds our war-note; but our path of glory By many a cloud is darkened and unblest.” KEBLE. THE conquest of Canaan occupied seven years, and during the whole of that time Israel lost but one battle; indeed, the six-and-thirty men smitten in the head-long flight before the men of Ai seem to have been the only loss which their hosts sustained. The story of this defeat is told with great minuteness, because it involved lessons of the greatest moment to Israel, and of incalculable value to ourselves. The experience of defeat is far too common to the majority of Christians. They are constantly turning their backs before their enemies. They are defeated by in-dwelling sin and the assaults of Satan, and by the mighty evils which they assail in the name of God. But instead of taking their defeats to heart, they become inured to them. For the time they are filled with mortification and chagrin, but the impression soon wears away. They do not lie on their faces before God, eager to discover the cause of failure, to deal with it, and to advance from the scene of defeat to wider and more permanent success. If we but carefully investigated the causes of our defeats, they would be only second to victories in their blessed results on our character and lives. There were three causes for this defeat. I. THEY WERE SELF-CONFIDENT BECAUSE AI WAS SMALL.—Jericho was a heap of smoldering ruins. Man and woman, both young and old, and ox and sheep and ass, all had been utterly destroyed with the edge of the sword. The only relics were—the silver and gold and vessels of brass and iron which had been placed among the precious stores of the Tabernacle; the woman Rahab, her people and her property; and a certain Babylonish garment, some silver shekels, and a wedge of gold, of which we shall hear again. Fearing no attack from the rear, Joshua at once set his face toward the interior of the country, and chose a deep gorge or ravine, which lay a little toward the north, as the passage-way for his army. Eight miles from its opening on the Jordan valley this ravine met another, “in a wild entanglement of hill and valley,” and near the junction of the two stood the little town of Ai, with a population of twelve thousand persons. The proportion of fighting men has been calculated at about two thousand; but the situation was strong and commanded the pass, so that Joshua had no alternative but to mete out to it the same terrible fate as that with which he had visited Jericho. Speaking after the manner of men, there was considerable force in the report of the spies sent up the valley to reconnoiter. The place was much smaller than Jericho, and would apparently require much less expenditure of time and strength for its capture. Jericho may have needed the entire host; but for Ai, some three thousand men would surely suffice. “Make not all the people to toil thither; for they [i.e., the men of Ai] are but few.” But this recommendation went on the supposition that Jericho had been overthrown by the attack of the hosts of Israel; whereas, in point of fact, they had had singularly little to do with it. They had walked around it, and shouted—that was all. It had been taken by their great Captain and Leader, and by him given into their hands. The silence that reigned over its site was no criterion of their might, but of his. To speak as they did was to ignore the real facts of the case, and to argue as though the victory were due to some inherent qualities in themselves; with the inference that because they had conquered at Jericho they must therefore necessarily conquer at Ai. There is no experience in the Christian life so full of peril as the hour when we are flushed with recent victory. Then comes the temptation to sacrifice to our net, and burn incense to our drag. We magnify our part in the conflict till it fills the whole range of vision. We boast to ourselves that we have gotten the land in possession by our own sword, and that our own arm has saved us. Counting from our great triumph at Jericho, we despise such a small obstacle as Ai. Surely, we argue, if we have carried the one, we shall easily prevail at the other! And so it frequently happens that a great success in public is followed by a fall in private; that those who had swept all before them in the pulpit or on the platform are overcome by some miserable appetite, or by petulance in the home; and the bitter regret of that sin wipes out all the glad exhilaration of the hour of victory. We never so need to observe the injunction to “watch and pray” as when the foe is flying before us. When the mighty convocation breaks up, its convictions having been turned by our single voice—as in the story of Elijah—and as the people are departing to their homes, and the bodies of the priests of Baal choke the Kishon, we must be careful to go up to the top of Carmel, where we had girded ourselves for the conflict, and, bowing to the earth, put our face between our knees in prayer. Had Joshua acted thus, he would never have been induced by the words of the spies to reason on mere military grounds; he would never have presumed on the insignificance of the little town; and he would never have had the anguish of seeing his panic-stricken soldiers come rushing down the rugged pass, or sheltering in the stone-quarries on either hand, whilst the men of Ai, in full pursuit, were cutting down the hindmost and least nimble. There is nothing small in Christian life—nothing so small that we can combat it in our own strength. Apart from God, the smallest temptations will be more than a match for us. So weak are we, that occasions of sin, which are perfectly contemptible in themselves, will overthrow our most confident resolutions. The victories which we have won in fellowship with God have imparted no inherent might to us; we are as weak as ever; and directly we are brought into collision with the least of our enemies, apart from him, we shall inevitably go down before the shock. The faith, watchfulness, and fellowship with God, which availed before Jericho, can alone serve as the key to Ai. II. THEY FAILED TO WAIT ON GOD.—An accursed thing in their midst broke the link of fellowship between them and the hosts that served beneath the celestial Warrior who had appeared to Joshua. And though it must have been a severe sorrow to Jehovah to inflict sorrow on his people, yet for their sake, and for the sake of his holy name, the sin must be judged and put away. Joshua pleaded, “What wilt thou do for thy great Name?” But it was for that very reason that the defeat had been permitted. There is not the least doubt that if Joshua had been in abiding fellowship with God, the Spirit of God would have indicated the presence of evil in the host; so that Achan and his sin would have been discovered and judged before the march to Ai. It was so in an analogous case in the Acts of the Apostles. What Achan was to Israel, that Ananias and his wife were to the early Church. The fifth chapter of the Acts would have recorded some great defeat or crushing disaster, if it had not contained the story of the discernment on the part of the apostle Peter, and by the Holy Ghost, of the accursed thing to which the guilty pair were privy. If we may dare to imagine what would have been the consequence in the primitive Church had that root of evil been left unextirpated, we should be obliged not only to wipe out the record of the signs and wonders wrought among the people, of the unity of the disciples, and of the burst doors of the prison; but we should have to interpolate an account of how the hosts of God, in diminished numbers, gave back before the fury of their adversaries; of how Peter lay with his face in the dust of the Temple courts; of how panic and dismay filled the hearts of leaders and led; and of how the name of the Lord Jesus was blasphemed, and his character traduced. But none of these things befell, because the Spirit of God was able to utter his unhindered testimony. Very important is it for us to heed the Apostle’s warning, “if we discerned ourselves we should not be judged.” God sees the little rift in the lute; the spot of decay in the fruit; the ulcer in the flesh, threatening to eat away its vitality. These may not be realized by us; but he knows how inevitably they must lead to defeat. Nor is he slow to warn us of them. Yet of what use is it for him to speak to deaf ears; or to those who are self-confident in their own wisdom; or who pride themselves on victories which were wholly his gift? Amid the gayety of the revel, we do not see the handwriting on the wall; amid the unanimous advice of the false prophets, we do not inquire for the one voice that may speak evil of our plans; amid the radiant sunlight of the morning, in which the dancing wavelets flash, we do not care to see the falling glass, or be guided by the dark prognostications of the weather-beaten sailor. Probably there is no single temptation which has not to claim permission of God before it touches us. He who permits it prays for us, raising his voice in lonely vigil whilst we sleep, anticipating the attack by ambushes of intercession. Yea, not content with this, he warns us not once or twice; he even touches us with fingers that would thrill us were we not insensible, steeped in spiritual lethargy. Where God’s children, like Joshua, are oblivious to the warning voices which speak in ever fainter tones as they are disregarded, God is compelled to let them take their course until some terrible disaster flings them on their faces to the ground. Ah, if Joshua had only prostrated himself amid the shoutings of victory over Jericho, there would have been no need for him to prostrate himself amid the outcry of a panic-stricken host! If he had only sought counsel of God before he sent the spies up the pass, there would have been no need to ask what he should do to repair his defeat. The iron pruning-knife of trouble has to do for many of us, roughly and hurtfully, what the silver pruning-knife of the Word of God might have effected. Before ever we make some new advance, although the point of attack be but an Ai, it is our duty, as it is our best policy, to get back to Gilgal. Joshua does not seem to have returned there after the fall of Jericho. We ought to seclude ourselves in spiritual converse with our Almighty Confederate, asking if he has aught to say to us; entreating that he should reveal any evil thing that he may see in us, and mustering the tribes of our heart before his scrutiny, that the Achan lurking there may be brought to light before, instead of after, the fight. III. THEY HAD COMMITTED A TRESPASS IN THE DEVOTED THING.—(1) Joshua was inclined to lay the charge of their failure on God. It seemed to him as if the Almighty had done ill by them in bringing them into the heart of such mighty difficulties. In his judgment, warped by the presence of disaster, it appeared as if it had been better for the camp to have remained on the other side of Jordan. The dreariest anticipations of defeat and destruction passed in spectral form before him. He spoke as one whom faith had deserted, the locks of his might shorn, and himself no longer a hero, but, like the Canaanites themselves, whose heart had melted as his did now. But, in point of fact, the blame lay not with God, who was engaged in conducting his people within reach of superlative blessedness, but wholly with themselves. There are times in our lives when we are disposed to find fault with God. “Why, Great Potter, hast thou made me thus? Why was I ever taken out of my quiet home, or country parish, or happy niche of service, to be plunged into this sea of difficulties?” When we are smarting from some defeat, caused by the overpowering might or the clever strategy of the foe, we are prone to blame God; either that our nature was not stronger, or that he has brought us from the shelter of comparative obscurity and placed us on the mountain slope where the storms expend their wildest fury. Alas! we forget that our Father brings us across the Jordan to give us larger experiences, to open before us vaster possibilities, to give us a better chance of acquiring his unsearchable riches. There is no task without sufficiency of grace; no foe without a sufficiency of victorious power; no trial without a sufficiency of resource by which, as in the old dream of the alchemist, the hardest, commonest metal may be transformed to gold. The defeats that we incur in the Land of Promise are not necessary. They are due entirely to some failure in ourselves, and they cause grief to the immortal Lover of our souls. There is no reason for defeat in the Christian life; always and everywhere we are meant to be more than conquerors. The course of the Christian warrior should be as the sun when he goeth forth in his strength, and in regular gradients drives his chariot from the eastern wave up the steep of heaven. Child of God, never lay the blame of your failure on God; seek for it within! (2) One Israelite only had trespassed, and yet it is said, “The children of Israel committed a trespass in the devoted thing.” Not one of us stands alone; we cannot sin without insensibly affecting the spiritual condition of all our fellows. We cannot grow cold without lowering the temperature of all contiguous hearts. We cannot pass upward without lifting others. No asteroid revolves through space without affecting the position and speed of every member of its system. No grain lies upon the seashore without influencing all its companion grains. “None of us liveth to himself, and none dieth to himself.” “Whether one member suffereth, all the members suffer with it; or one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it.” If Israel had but realized how much the safety of the whole depended on the obedience of each, every individual would have watched his brethren, as he watched himself, not for their sakes alone, but for his own; and did the members of Christian communities understand how vast an influence for weal or woe depends upon the choice, the decision, the action of any, there would be a fuller and more intelligent obedience to the reiterated injunctions of the New Testament—for the strong to bear the infirmities of the weak; for the loftiest to stoop to wash the feet of the lowliest; and for all to look not on their own things only, but also on the things of others. “Looking carefully lest any man fail of the grace of God.” Should these words be read by any soul which is conscious of playing an Achan’s part, let it take warning, and whilst it is called To-day, confess, restore, and repent. Not only that it may escape an inevitable judgment; but that it may not bring disaster and defeat upon those with whom it associates, dragging the innocent down into the vortex of a common fate. The hands of Achan were stained with the blood of the thirty-six that perished in the flight to Shebarim. (3) How careless we are of God’s distinct prohibitions! Nothing could have been more clearly promulgated than the command to leave the spoils of Jericho untouched. The city and its contents were devoted to utter destruction, a specified number of articles only being preserved for Tabernacle use. This ordinance was probably intended to preserve the children of Israel from the temptation which must have accrued, had they glutted themselves with the spoils of the city. The abstinence tended to strengthen their character, and to educate their faith. But to Achan, the will of God was overborne by the lust of his eyes and the pride of life. The strong tide of passion swept him over the barrier reared by the divine word. Let us not, however, judge him too hardly. He is not the last who has acted in distinct violation of divine commands. The Bible is full of prohibitions against the love of the world, the love of dress, the love of money; against censoriousness, and pride, and unhallowed ambition; against the Babylonish garment and the wedge of gold; and yet thousands of Christian people live in complacent disobedience, as if God were one of themselves, or as if his words were unsubstantial as smoke. What wonder that the forces of his Israel meet with defeat, and that the old word is verified in individual experience and in the history of the church, “Israel hath sinned; yea, they have even transgressed my covenant which I commanded them; yea, they have even taken of the devoted thing. Therefore they cannot stand before their enemies. I will not be with you any more, except ye destroy the devoted thing from among you.” F B Meyer Ebal and Gerizim (JOSHUA 8:30) “Therefore, child of mortality, love thou the merciful Father! Wish what the Holy One wishes!—and not from fear but affection: Fear is the virtue of slaves; but the heart that loveth is willing; Perfect was before God,—and perfect is—Love and Love only!” LONGFELLOW. THIS was one of the most impressive scenes that occurred during the occupation of Canaan. Jericho and Ai were heaps of blackened ruins; their kings and people utterly destroyed; their dependent villages mute with terror. And all through the land the rumor ran of the might of Israel’s God. And beyond the horizon of the visible, into those realms of evil spirits, which had too long filled the chosen land with horrid rite and obscene orgy, must tidings have come that struck the knell of their supremacy. There must have been panic there, in those dark realms, like that which Milton, in his sublime “Ode to the Nativity,” ascribes to the hour of the birth of Christ. The nations of Canaan appear to have been so panic-stricken that they offered no resistance, and made no attempt at molestation, as all Israel went on a pilgrimage of thirty miles to perform a religious duty, which had been distinctly, and more than once, commanded by the great Lawgiver, whose words constituted their supreme directory. “It shall be,” so the word stood, “on the day when ye shall pass over Jordan unto the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, that thou shalt set thee up great stones, and plaster them with plaster, and thou shalt write upon them all the words of this law” (Deut. 11:26–32; 27:2). Joshua lost no time in obeying these minute and urgent injunctions; and within two or three days after the fall of Ai—perhaps within three weeks of the passage of the Jordan—the people were assembled in the valley of Shechem, which lies from east to west, sentineled on the north by the sterile slopes of Ebal, rearing itself gaunt and barren against the intense blue of the Eastern sky; and on the south by its twin-giant Gerizim, “a majestic mass of limestone, with stately head and precipitous sides, but fruitful and picturesque, girt with foliage and beauty.” The valley between these two is one of the most beautiful in Palestine. Jacob’s well lies at its mouth; and all its luxuriant extent is covered with the verdant beauty of gardens, and orchards, and olive-groves, rolling in waves of billowy beauty up to the walls of Shechem; whilst the murmur of brooks flowing in all directions fills the air. The width of the valley is about a third of a mile; though the summits of the two mountains, in the lap of which it lies, are two miles apart. It is remarkable that where the two mountains face each other and touch most closely, with a green valley of five hundred yards between, each is hollowed out, and the limestone stratum is broken into a succession of ledges, “so as to present the appearance of a series of regular benches.” Thus a natural amphitheatre is formed, capable of containing a vast audience of people; and the acoustic properties are so perfect in that dry and rainless air, that Canon Tristram speaks of two of his party taking up positions on the opposite mountains, reciting the Ten Commandments antiphonally, and hearing each other perfectly. Thither Joshua led the people, that, by a solemn act, they might take possession of the land for God. I. THE ALTAR ON EBAL.—Ebal was stern and barren in its aspect. There was a congruity, therefore, between its appearance and the part it played in the solemn proceedings of the day. For far up its slopes gathered the dense masses of the six tribes, who, with thunderous Amens twelve times repeated, answered the voices of the band of white-robed Levites, as, standing with Joshua and the elders and officers and judges in the green valley, they solemnly repeated the curses of the law. But that was not the first proceeding in the holy ceremonial. Before the people took up their assigned places on the mountain sides, an altar was reared on the lower slopes of Ebal. Special directions as to its construction had been given in Deuteronomy 27. It was to be built of unhewn stones, on which no iron tool had been lifted; probably to guard against any attempt to set forth the likeness of God, and to discountenance the florid and lascivious ornamentations of which the surrounding heathen were so fond. There they offered burnt-offerings, and sacrificed peace-offerings. The Burnt-offering was what was known as a sweet-savor offering. The whole of the victim was burned. “It was an offering made by fire, of a sweet savor unto the Lord” (Lev. 1). Herein the Holy Ghost signified, secondarily, our duty to present ourselves without reserve to God; but primarily the devotion of our blessed Lord to accomplish his Father’s will in our redemption. He held nothing back; there was no reserve. He emptied himself, and he did it ungrudgingly; for he said, “I delight to do thy will, O my God.” How sweet this was to the heart of the Father! If on the one hand there was anguish such as only God could feel, on the other there was the gratification of delighted love. The Peace-offering also belonged to the sweet-savor offerings, but it was not wholly consumed; a part was eaten by the offerers, to testify that in it they had fellowship and communion with God. In the sight, therefore, of Israel, Joshua and other chosen representatives par-took of portions of the sacrifices, and obeyed the divine injunction, “Thou shalt eat there, and thou shalt rejoice before the Lord thy God.” If any of the native Hittites, peering out from behind great bowlder-stones, were spectators of that scene, they must have been impressed with the thought that Jehovah delighted in the happiness of his people, and that his service was as the scent of clover, or as the feast of children at their father’s table. We feed on the peace-offering when we meditate on the love and death of our blessed Lord, and enter into some of the Father’s thoughts of satisfaction at the work he did, and the spirit in which he did it. As we pass into the Land of Promise we must see to it that we do not leave behind the devout and loving consideration of that precious blood by which we have been redeemed and which is our life. Our highest and most rapturous experiences can never take the place of this. Constantly we must remind ourselves and others that we are redeemed sinners; and that all our hopes of salvation, our fellowship with God, our motives for service, are derived from what our Saviour did when he bore our sins in his own body on the tree. Since he died there, we need never stand on the mount of cursing. Because he counted not his life dear to himself, those gaunt and forbidding slopes have become the scene of blessed communion with God. We sit and feast with him, and from peak to peak joy chases the terrors of the curse; and smiles look out on us from the old rocks, whilst the torrents tinged with the light of the sun flash and sing. Because he shed his blood, there shall, unlike the field of Gilboa, be “dew, and rain, and fields of offerings,” even on Ebal; until its terraced slopes resemble those of the opposite mount of blessing. Ah, blessed Lord, how shall we thank thee, who hast redeemed us from the curse of the law, and made Ebal so choice a trysting-place with God! II. THE LAW IN CANAAN.—Around the altar strong men reared great stones, and plastered them with a facing of cement, composed of lime or gypsum, on which it was easy to write all the words of the law very plainly (Deut. 27:8). In that dry air, where there is no frost to split and disintegrate, such inscriptions—graven on the soft cement, or written on its polished surface when dry with ink or paint, as in the case of the monumental stones of Egypt—would remain for centuries. As the time could not have admitted of the inscription of the whole law, it is probable that the more salient points were alone committed to the custody of those great cromlechs, to perpetuate to after generations the conditions of the tenure on which Israel held the lease of Palestine. They were a standing protest against the sins which had blighted those fertile valleys, and an incentive to the obedience on which so much of the future hinged. But when we turn from the literal to the metaphorical, and ask for the underlying typical meaning of this inscription of the law in so prominent a position in the Land of Promise, we are at first startled. What can it mean? Is there a connection after all between law and grace? Are those who sit with Christ in heavenly places still amenable to law—“under the law,” as the Apostle puts it? Is it not true that, by our union with Christ who died, we have passed out of the sphere in which we were married to our first husband, the law, and have left it behind us? Are we not, therefore, discharged from the law of our former husband and married to another, even to him that was raised from the dead? There is but one answer to all these questions. We have died to the covenant wherein we were holden. We do serve in newness of the spirit, and not in oldness of the letter. We are not looking to our obedience to merit the favor of God, or to win aught of the blessings of the Gospel. But it is also true that faith does not make the law of God of none effect; and still, in the Land of Promise, he undertakes to write it clearly on the tablets of our hearts. In each one of us there is an Ebal with its altar and its stones. The soul comes back again and again to those first principles of the perfect life; not by compulsion from without, but by the impulse of the Holy Spirit. The case is this. When we yield ourselves entirely to the Spirit of life which is in Christ Jesus, and which passes freely through us, as the blood through artery and vein, he makes us very sensitive to the least commandment or desire of him whom he has taught us to love; we dread to see the shadow of suffering pass over his face more than to feel the pang of remorse rend our hearts; we find our heaven in his smile of approval, and the “Well done!” that glistens in his eyes when we have done aught to the least of his; we are conscious of the pulse of a love which he has instilled, and which supplies us with the highest code for life—and so insensibly whilst we yield ourselves to him we find ourselves keeping the law after a fashion which was foreign to us when it was a mere outward observance, and we cry with the psalmist, “Oh, how love I thy law! it is my meditation all the day.” III. THE CONVOCATION.—When these rites were fulfilled, the third and concluding scene of this extraordinary transaction took place. In the center of the valley the ark rested, with its group of attendant priests and Levites. Hard by, Joshua and the leaders of the tribes, elders, officers, and judges. Then up the slopes of Ebal, finding seats on its terraced sides, were Reuben, Gad and Asher, and Zebulun, Dan, and Naphtali; whilst up the slopes of Gerizim were the larger and more important tribes of Simeon, and Levi, and Judah, and Issachar, and Joseph, and Benjamin. It was as though the voice of blessing must be louder than that of cursing—a prediction of its final prevalence and triumph. Then Joshua read aloud “all the words of the law, the blessings and cursings, according to all that is written in the book of the law. There was not a word of all that Moses commanded, which Joshua read not before all the assembly of Israel, and the women, and the little ones, and the strangers that were conversant among them.” And as he solemnly read, whether the blessing or the curse, each several item was responded to by the Amens that thundered forth from thousands of throats, and rolled in reverberating echoes through the hills. Earth has seldom heard such shouts as those! It is well worth our while to ponder the list of blessings appended to obedience in that memorable twenty-eighth chapter of Deuteronomy, that we may discover their spiritual counterparts, and, having found them, to claim them. Let us, first, be quite sure that we are right with God; next, that we are on his plan and doing his will; also thirdly, that we are set upon his glory, altogether irrespective of our own interests; and we shall find ourselves able to appropriate blessings of which we little dreamed. The Lord will open his good treasury in heaven and make us plenteous for good, and establish us for an holy people unto himself. Nor can we better close our meditation than by asking that the Holy Spirit may so indwell and guide us that we may choose what he ordains, and not swerve by a hair’s breadth to the right or left of the narrow path of obedience; keeping his commandments; obeying his biddings; perfectly conformed to his will. Thus shall Ebal cease to frown, and Gerizim rain its blessings upon us. Ours shall be the Beatitudes with which our Master opened his great discourse. Ours, the heavenly Kingdom, the divine comfort, the earthly inheritance, the filling and the mercy, the vision of God, and the blessed prerogative of sonship, and finally the great reward (Matt. 5:1–12).