Things under the hand of Joshua are now closing. The land has been partly conquered and wholly divided. A strange condition, as I have already noticed. But so it is. The unconquered parts are left that Israel might be tested, whether indeed they would be obedient or not; the Lord being pledged by His servant to prove Himself able and ready to conquer what remained still in possession of the Canaanites, and make it actually His people’s, if they did but stand in their allegiance to Him. But Joshua warned them that if they went back from following the Lord, then the unconquered people should be plagues to them, scourges in their sides and thorns in their eyes, until they themselves were destroyed from off that land which had now been given them.
This is now recognized by Joshua as being the condition and standing of Israel in the land of Canaan. It is like Adam’s condition in the land of Eden. Adam was there, surrounded by the witnesses of God’s goodness to him, and by the perfection of his own estate; but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which was in the midst of the garden, was there, to be the occasion of testing his obedience—and a warning and a threat were pronounced, and the penalty of death, if the injunction not to eat of that tree, were despised.
The resemblance, the moral resemblance, between these two conditions, Adam in Eden and Israel in Canaan, is perfect; and we might have expected that it would be so, because we know from the teaching of Romans 5 that Adam was put under law in the Garden of Eden, and that Israel were put under law in the land of Canaan.
Grace had conducted them hitherto. It was the God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, who had brought them out of Egypt, and had carried them through one wilderness after another, till, having crossed the Jordan, they are now planted in the Canaan promised to the fathers; but grace having thus set them in the land, as God of old in goodness had set Adam in the Garden, they must now hold it upon terms of their own covenant, or on condition of obedience. It is thus, I may add, with the throne of David afterward. In grace God chose and exalted David. He sustained him and gave him victory upon victory, till there was no evil or enemy occurrent. He set his throne in peaceful glory, in the person of his son Solomon, but then the family of David had to keep the throne of David on terms of obedience; and we know they lost the throne, as the tribes of Israel lost the land, and Adam the Garden.
Being set upon these terms, Joshua exhorts them. He would fain have them faithful, and obedient, and happy. He repeats his exhortation. He is concerned for them. He was not merely officially over them, but personally of them and with them. He was not an hireling, whose own the sheep were not—he felt his own deep interest in them. He exhorts them, first, in an assembly of the people, with their elders and rulers and judges, after the Lord had given them rest, and when he himself was now well-stricken in years, and about to go the way of all the earth, and again, in a still fuller assembly, the people all solemnly presenting themselves before God. And here he rehearses too, in the name of the Lord, all the Lord’s doings for them, from the day of the call of Abraham down to that hour.
It is blessed to mark all this—the fervency of spirit, with which this aged servant of God and this full-hearted friend of Israel, thus closes his ministry. It may remind us of Moses speaking to Israel on the edge of the wilderness, in the words of the book of Deuteronomy—or of David counseling his son, his nobles, and his people, as he was about to leave them, in 1 Chronicles—or of Paul exhorting and warning the elders of Ephesus, when seeing them, and as it were, his ministry, for the last time in Acts 20.
True affection, the love that makes the interest of others our own, dictated all these occasions, the Spirit of God using them, whether in Moses, in Joshua, in David, or in Paul. In distant, separated parts of the word, are these occasions found, but how does one Spirit fill His vessels with like treasure, and quicken them, and the same gracious, serving affections!
The people accept the exhortation and pledge obedience. Joshua warns them not to be confident. They persist in giving their pledges, and that too, again and again. For they are the same self-trusting, and boastful generation, which they had been in the day of Exodus 14; the same when now they had ended their journey and experienced what they were by the failures of 40 years, as they had been on their starting. They are still confident in their own sufficiency, and desirous still to stand upon a title made out by themselves. They had said under Mount Sinai—“all that the Lord hath spoken, we will do,” and now it is, “the Lord our God will we serve, and His voice will we obey.” Literally one generation had passed and another had come, but morally they are the same generation. And the same generation has not passed away even to this day (Matt. 24:3434Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled. (Matthew 24:34)).
After all this, the Covenant is settled between the Lord and the people in this conditional character; their confidence in themselves in their early day under Mount Sinai having led to this, and their renewed pledges here at Shechem binding them afresh, and reminding them of their responsibilities.
Now, after all this, I ask, can they wonder at the judgment which has now overtaken them, or complain of the desolations and captivities which they are enduring? They must be speechless, like the man in the parable of the marriage of the King’s son; or like the Jews after listening to that of the wicked husbandmen—they must pronounce sentence upon themselves. They are without excuse. They undertook to answer for themselves and they have ruined themselves. They left God’s hand and got into their own, and their own hand has betrayed them—and as always, so in the judgment of Israel, we may say with David and with Paul, to God, “that Thou mightest be justified when Thou speakest, and be clear when Thou judgest” (Psa. 51:44Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight: that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest. (Psalm 51:4); Rom. 3:44God forbid: yea, let God be true, but every man a liar; as it is written, That thou mightest be justified in thy sayings, and mightest overcome when thou art judged. (Romans 3:4)).
A stone is then raised, not as on the banks of Jordan, in the beginning of the book, in witness that the God of salvation had brought His people through all that intervened and hindered, to the land of promise, but as a witness that the people had now taken these covenants and obligations upon them—“O foolish people and unwise!”
Joshua then dies, and is buried in his own portion in Mount Ephraim. Moses had died in the wilderness, and the Lord had buried him, Joshua dies in the land, and his brethren bury him. But Moses passed from his grave in the wilderness to Heaven, Joshua rests in the land in the hope of a resurrection-inheritance of it. I speak of mysteries, of Moses as signifying the heavenly destiny of the church, of Joshua as pledging the earthly promises of God to Israel; and together giving samples of that dispensation, when, in the fullness of times, all things both in. Heaven and on earth shall be gathered together in Christ (Eph. 1:1010That in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him: (Ephesians 1:10)); and this is the same as was exhibited long before these times in Enoch and in Noah, and long after these times in Elijah and Elisha, so that all times, the times of the patriarchs, of Moses, and of the prophets, might in their several ways, rehearse beforehand the glories of the world to come. According to all this, it is Moses and Elijah that reappear there in the heavens. They are seen as a witness that the people had now taken these covenants and obligations upon them—“O foolish people and unwise!”