Choose You This Day

Joshua Chapters 11-24
March 3, 2019
First Presbyterian Church, Sterling, IL
Christina Berry

As we come to the final sermon of this series on Joshua, we are going to cover a lot of ground in a short time. The scripture you’ll hear today is a condensed version of Joshua 7-24. I’ve selected portions that I hope will summarize the story for you, and that include the significant but often overlooked parts of the story. We left off with the battle of Jericho last week, which culminated in the sparing of the Canaanite Rahab, who alone with her family was spared from slaughter when the Israelites overtook the city of Jericho. In the chapters that follow, we see the Israelites continuing to attack cities to the north, south, east and west, and conquer all the kingdoms, putting every inhabitant – men, women and children – to the sword. The only people who are spared death are the Hivites, from Gibeon, who tricked the Israelites into a treaty that spared their lives.

In the remaining chapters we see the distribution of the land of Canaan to each of the twelve tribes of Israel, with a special gift of land to Caleb, one of Joshua’s chief leaders and a bold comrade in arms. From the eleventh chapter, a summary of the taking of the land and the “extermination” of the Canaanites:

Joshua 11: 16-20

So Joshua took all that land: the hill country and all the Negeb and all the land of Goshen and the lowland and the Arabah and the hill country of Israel and its lowland, from Mount Halak, which rises toward Seir, as far as Baal-gad in the valley of Lebanon below Mount Hermon. He took all their kings, struck them down, and put them to death. Joshua made war a long time with all those kings. There was not a town that made peace with the Israelites, except the Hivites, the inhabitants of Gibeon; all were taken in battle.

For it was the Lord’s doing to harden their hearts so that they would come against Israel in battle, in order that they might be utterly destroyed, and might receive no mercy, but be exterminated, just as the Lord had commanded Moses.

Finally, in selections from Joshua 23 and 24, we hear a reiteration of God’s command in the first part of Joshua: the command to stay focused on God, to love God, and to serve God alone.

Joshua 23:1-11

A long time afterward, when the Lord had given rest to Israel from all their enemies all around, and Joshua was old and well advanced in years, Joshua summoned all Israel, their elders and heads, their judges and officers, and said to them, “I am now old and well advanced in years; and you have seen all that the Lord your God has done to all these nations for your sake, for it is the Lord your God who has fought for you. I have allotted to you as an inheritance for your tribes those nations that remain, along with all the nations that I have already cut off, from the Jordan to the Great Sea in the west.

The Lord your God will push them back before you, and drive them out of your sight; and you shall possess their land, as the Lord your God promised you. Therefore be very steadfast to observe and do all that is written in the book of the law of Moses, turning aside from it neither to the right nor to the left, so that you may not be mixed with these nations left here among you, or make mention of the names of their gods, or swear by them, or serve them, or bow yourselves down to them, but hold fast to the Lord your God, as you have done to this day. For the Lord has driven out before you great and strong nations; and as for you, no one has been able to withstand you to this day. One of you puts to flight a thousand, since it is the Lord your God who fights for you, as he promised you. Be very careful, therefore, to love the Lord your God.

Joshua 24: 14-18

“Now therefore revere the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. Now if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”

Then 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 ancestors up from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, and who did those great signs in our sight.

He protected us along all the way that we went, and among all the peoples through whom we passed; 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.”

The word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.


I bet most of you know the end of that Bible verse, Joshua 24:15
“As for me and my house…. we will serve the Lord.”

When I was a kid, I memorized a lot of Bible verses.
Don’t misunderstand – I was not a pious and reverent child;
we got prizes for memorizing Bible verses.
They weren’t big prizes – a roll of Lifesavers or gum for single verse.
If we memorized all the verses for the week, and it was a lot,
we could choose a prize from a catalog.
It would come in the mail a week or two later –
a bank, or a book, or a glow-in-the-dark cross!
I might be just a tiny bit competitive, so that was incentive enough.

So I memorized.

But sometimes I got things mixed up.
Like this verse.

Joshua says to the people: “choose this day whom you will serve,”
and I would mix that up with Patrick Henry saying,
“I know not what course others may take, but as for me,
give me liberty or give me death.”

So instead of “Choose you this day whom you will serve,
but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
I said, “I know not what course others may take,
but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

There’s an interesting connection, as it turns out, between these quotes. We don’t have a manuscript of Patrick Henry’s stirring speech of 1775. We don’t know for certain what he actually said, because the speech we have in all our history books was reconstructed by a historian 30 years later.[1] We know, too, that the stories from Joshua were not written when they happened, but many decades later, during the reign of Kings Hezekiah and Josiah, and were edited over and over again with a purpose in mind. That purpose was to form in the Israelites a national identity, and to establish and solidify the sense of belong to a nation, rather than “a shifting confederation of tribes.”[2]

For Josiah, that purpose was to ingrain a nationalistic fervor that would help him solidify and maintain political dominance. Any politician knows that one rapid way to gain support for yourself is to establish a sense of fear and urgency – a national emergency, and once that fear is established, to demonstrate what happens to those who oppose you.[3]

In the story of Joshua, those who opposed the Israelites were eradicated. The Canaanites were “other,” “alien,” and “foreign.” They had to be exterminated or neutralized. Those who submitted, like Rahab and the Gibeonites, were spared. “The historian wanted to terrorize the populace…into submission to Josiah by showing what happens to a class of people whose interests are opposed to the interests of Josiah's monarchy…”[4]

So in the book of Joshua, the historian "uses the rhetoric of warfare and nationalism as an encouragement and a threat to its own population to submit voluntarily to the central authority of a government struggling to organize itself and to [re]create its own ideological framework of inclusion. In order to justify violent action [to that end], the dynamics of the literature of warfare usually consist of a division [often outrageously overstated] between self and other," us and them.[5]

In other words, terrorize the people into division.
Make them believe that their own nation is superior
and that others are inferior and dangerous.
And make them believe that you, and only you,
followed with unswerving loyalty,
can make them safe and successful and powerful.[6]
Say to them, “The nation is in crisis. And I alone can fix it.”

That is what Josiah was attempting to do, using the book of Joshua. The stories of the book of Joshua and the conquest of Canaan, like my confused quote that muddles religion and patriotism, entangle two good things – serving God and loving our country -- in a way that creates a dangerous and toxic outcome.

But that doesn’t mean we need to throw out the book of Joshua, any more than we need to disregard the passionate patriotism of Patrick Henry. The written manuscript of Henry’s speech gives us a glimpse of him, an image of a man so eloquent, and so defiant, so fervent in his cause, that he was said to have “an unearthly fire burning in his eye.”[7] The manuscript is not the man.

Likewise, the Bible is not our God – it gives us a glimpse of God. For all the editing and agendas, the overlays of nationalism and violence, there is a core truth and message to which we can hold fast.

There’s an old saying that when we read the Bible,
we should do it the way we eat fish -
eat the meat, and be careful to pick out the bones.

It is important to pick out the bones – the parts that stick in our throats.
Parts like extermination of entire cities.
Parts like violence and genocide.

Once we pick out all the bones,
and once we get past the editing and political agendas,
it’s easier to see the beautiful truths in Joshua:

Be strong and courageous, do not be frightened or dismayed,
for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.

Hold fast to the Lord your God, as you have done to this day.

Be very careful to love the Lord your God.

Most of all, choose this day, choose every day, whom you will serve.

Will you serve the gods of nationalism, the gods of superiority and power?
Or will you serve the God of love?

Choose this day, choose every day, whom you will serve.

Will you serve the gods of fear, of violence and domination?
Or will you serve the God of grace and mercy?

Choose this day, choose every day, whom you will serve.

Will you serve the gods of literalism, of division and exclusion?
Or will you serve the God whose arms encircle every human being
of every race and tribe, of every orientation and gender, of every land and nation?

I know not what course others may take,
but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

Amen.




[1] https://www.history.com/news/patrick-henrys-liberty-or-death-speech-240-years-ago
[2] New Interpreters Commentary on Joshua, accessed at https://www.ministrymatters.com/library/#/tnib/4920a7a100deffe2a28eb30a7b0f223b/composition-during-the-monarchical-period.html
[3] JOHN COAKLEY (2004) MOBILIZING THE PAST: NATIONALIST IMAGES OF HISTORY, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 10:4, 531-560, DOI: 10.1080/13537110490900340
[4] New Interpreters Commentary on Joshua, accessed at https://www.ministrymatters.com/library/#/tnib/4920a7a100deffe2a28eb30a7b0f223b/composition-during-the-monarchical-period.html
[5] Rowlett, "Inclusion, Exclusion and Marginality in the Book of Joshua,", 23.
[6] Bonikowski, Bart, and Paul DiMaggio. 2016. “Varieties of American Popular Nationalism.” American Sociological Review 81(5):949-980. Publisher’s version: http://asr.sagepub.com/content/81/5/949
[7] https://www.history.com/news/patrick-henrys-liberty-or-death-speech-240-years-ago