And so we might ask ourselves, 'What are the meaning of these stories for us?' Like the 12 stones, each story in the Old Testament is a memorial of certain aspects of God's character, and of His relationship to each one of us. What does the Torah mean to us? The first five books of the Old Testament span the time from Creation to the Iron Age, and introduce us to some of the greatest characters who ever lived. We are invited into their thoughts, their fears and their failures as well as their faith and their triumphs. Their stories have inspires some of the best thinking of mankind. (Kierkegaard wrote a whole book about Abraham's walk up Mt. Moriah with Isaac, and Thomas Mann spent a decade and 1500 pages pondering the life of Joseph.) Generations of families have read these stories and believed as a result that God could help them fight their own Jericho battles. And they have been right to believe.
Many scholars contend that the book of Joshua should be part of the Torah, because it finishes the narrative arc as Israel crosses the Jordan and begins to inherit the "land of milk and honey." Milk and honey, by the way, prefigure the millennium, because they are two essential foods that you can consume without killing anything. Milk and honey also refer to the two great, and often competing, occupations, herding and agriculture. (I got those two facts from scholarly articles. Being on a different level, milk and honey just makes me think of Winnie the Pooh, and I find myself longing for a "little smackerel of something…") Joshua brings the fulfillment of Abraham's promise.
What Have We Chosen to Worship?
The great issue that the book of Joshua deals with is expressed in the final chapter during the "recovenant" ceremony, where Joshua recounts all of the miracles that have led them to the banks of the Jordan, ready to cross into the promised land. He says: "Choose ye this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." (Joshua 24:15) We tend to skip the middle of this verse, but it's important to realize that serving other gods was a very viable option for these people. They hadn't been monotheists all that long, and had always been surrounded by a variety of deities, in whom many had faith. We need only look back on Rachel, risking her life to steal her father's household gods, or the former slaves of Egypt building a golden calf as soon as Moses turned his back, to appreciate the pull that these "other gods" had.
Some of us might be in the same boat, figuratively speaking. Craig and I have been setting up a second home in Utah, where two of our kids live, and recently we were having a discussion about what kinds of pictures to put in the living room. We wondered if pictures of the Savior might be too "religious" for the living room, and instead belonged in the secondary rooms. Meanwhile, we never gave a second thought to putting the biggest TV we could fit in that room, as well as making sure that we had WiFi, and Netflix, and every other technology that streams worldliness into our home. I thought about that today when I read Joshua's words, and wondered if I was worshipping "other gods" without realizing it.
Like the children of Israel I can confidently say, "The Lord our God, he it is that brought us up… from the house of bondage, and which did those great signs in our sight, and preserved us in all the way wherein we went, and among all the people through whom we passed…therefore will we also serve the Lord, for he is our God." (Joshua 24:17-18) That is the point of every one of these stories.
When we remember to lean on His mighty arm, no matter what the battle, the walls come tumblin' down. Those "other gods," while entertaining, have no real power to save or heal us. So that picture of the Savior is going up in the living room after all.
