Joshua 6 & 7 - Making a Choice

I embarked a few months ago on a rather large, though admittedly uncreative, project, that of reading through the Bible from cover to cover. I've done a lot of Bible study, but haven't attempted going through the whole thing since I was a kid, and that endeavor wasn't particularly successful. It's pretty interesting, when you do that, what you notice. I thought I would share one of those things.

The story of the Battle of Jericho is pretty well-known. It's the first battle the Israelites fought in their conquest of Canaan proper. They marched around the walls for a week, the walls fell down, and the Israelites ran in and destroyed the place. It's a well-covered story, and a good one, but what caught my interest was a pair of events that happened immediately after it, the end of Joshua 6 and then Joshua 7.

The first event is easy to overlook. Before the battle, Joshua sent spies into Jericho to check things out. They stayed at the house of a prostitute named Rahab. The rulers of the city got wind of this, and they told Rahab to give them up. Instead of doing this, Rahab helped them escape, and they in turn promised to save her and her family. And so, after the battle, the former spies went to her house and brought out her and her family, and they joined the train of the Israelites. “And she has lived in Israel to this day, because she hid the messengers whom Joshua sent to spy out Jericho.” (6:25b)

The second is better-known. After Jericho, Israel went out to take down a rinky-dink little town called Ai. It was so little, they couldn't even afford a third letter in their name. And the Aiites walloped Israel. In searching for a cause for this, it turned out that a man named Achan, of the tribe of Judah, hadn't quite listened to God back at Jericho. Rather than destroy everything, like God commanded, Achan grabbed some nice-looking items for himself, and hid them in his tent. He was thus punished, by death for him, his family, and his livestock. “And all Israel stoned him with stones. And they raised over him a great heap of stones that remains to this day.” (7:25b-26a)

What do these two stories have in common? They demonstrate an important principle about the people of God. In Joshua, as begun in Exodus and as ultimately consummated at the Cross, God is forming and establishing His people. And He makes it explicit what it is that is to define them: “You shall be holy to me, for I the Lord am holy and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine.” (Lev. 21:14) In other words, they were to be a separate (the literal meaning of “holy”) people, belonging to, and living in line with, Him.

Rahab was a prostitute. According to footnotes, the Hebrew term can also be used as “innkeeper”, but that's an unlikely translation. Achan was an Israelite who seemed so good that he had to be outed by God Himself. Funny, then, that in His shaping of His people, God showed favor to the first by grafting her in (she's even in Jesus' ancestry) and had the nice pew-sitter stoned.

The difference was in the heart. Rahab understood that God was at work, and chose to obey and then trust Him, in defiance of the world. Her choice showed a heart in line with the purpose of Israel, and she was welcomed into the fold as one who truly belonged. Achan heard that God was at work, but saw what he wanted, and decided to grasp it while he could. God removed him from the body like you'd remove a cancerous tumor, because his heart made him precisely that.

Every person, “Christian” or not, is presented with a similar grand choice: What will he value most? Will he put God first, and abandon himself completely to God's cause and provision, or will he instead obey his own lusts for trifles and idols in the here and now? Either option is valid, but make no mistake: there is no middle ground, and both choices have prices and consequences. God knows your heart, and looks on that more than even your actions. Choose your leader wisely.


“For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but 'Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.' This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring.” - Romans 9:6b-8