Choose Carefully Whom You Will Serve

          How are things with you and your family? Is your home a place where everything runs smoothly? Are your family members all dedicated to a common purpose? Is their peace and tranquility in the midst of industrious effort for good? No? Don't feel bad, we are still working to improve at my house too.

          Family is special — so special that our families are usually our dearest earthly relationships, the family is the oldest human institution on the earth, and family life is the foundation of society. Family is important and doing family life right should be one of our greatest concerns.

          Joshua recognized the importance family life as he gave final instructions to the Israelites in Joshua 24:1-28.

After initial success in the promised land, the Israelites renew their covenant with God despite the requirement for righteous living it carries. We would be wise to follow the example of Joshua and his household in their choice to serve the Lord, because the God has blessed us beyond what we care to acknowledge or remember, and because turning from God brings terrible judgment on us and our children.

          The passage is at the end of the story of the Israelites’ conquest of the Promised Land, when Joshua was old and the Lord had given rest to Israel from battles and wars. Joshua speaks “to all the people” (Joshua 24:2), and he speaks not from himself but as a prophet: “Thus says the Lord,” begins his speech in 24:1. What follows in verses 2 through 13 is a summary of the whole history of God's blessings.  God uses the word "I" repeatedly to make it clear that the success of the Israelites was His doing, not the people’s: “I brought you out” (v. 5); “I destroyed them before you” (v. 8); “I rescued you” (v. 10); “I sent the hornet ahead of you” (v. 12); culminating with, “I gave you a land on which you had not labored, and towns that you had not built, and you live in them; you eat the fruit of vineyards and oliveyards that you did not plant” (v. 13).

          Yet there is trouble in the undertones of the verses that follow. After all their success, the Israelites were in great danger of forgetting God’s powerful role in their blessings. They were in danger of developing complacency with their status and pride in their accomplishments. Without a permeating memory of God’s blessing ever before them, they would begin to turn from God under the difficult task of obedience to his commands. This would mean certain destruction for the Israelites.

          There is similar trouble today, in fact some would say we have already fallen into the trap that God was trying to prevent for the Israelites. In our world, we have long since forgotten God and turn to the idols of self-gratification that are so pervasive around us in rejection of the righteousness that is expected by God. Consider these words written about our nation in a more recent context:

. . . insomuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People? We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!

(Accessed May 22, 2017.  http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/fast.htm)

These words are from a resolution introduced in the U.S. Senate on March 3, 1863. It was passed and signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln on March 30, establishing a National Day of Fasting and Prayer. These words sound as if they could have been written in description of our nation just today.

Our sins against God, as a nation and as individual people seem far greater and far more destructive than were those of the Israelites and the people in Lincoln’s day. Is there any doubt that our judgement will not also be more sever?

Fortunately, God is patient, merciful, and full of grace, at least to a certain point. Such grace is made available in the passage when God sent Joshua to remind the Israelites of His blessings, His expectations, and His potential judgments. He gave them an opportunity to make an informed decision, a choice to serve God or pursue forbidden idols. When we get to Joshua’s charge at verse 14, the decision the people have to make is initially based entirely on remembering their own history through the perspective that God has narrated through Joshua. The charge is simple: “revere the Lord” and “serve the Lord.”

The people shined in their response to Joshua: “Far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods” (Joshua 24:16). The story stands as an example and a charge to us: Will we serve the Lord or the gods of our times? Will we be able to remember God’s blessing and return to a right relationship with him? Will we accept the charge to serve God and will we be an example for others, especially our own children, to follow?

God’s grace is still available to us today. God has drawn us to this point of remembrance and this point of conviction so that we can chose to serve him rather self-gratification and sin. If we choose well, we can avoid God’s certain judgments and preserve Godly heritage for our children and our children’s children.