Being Careful With Our Loves

“Be very careful, therefore, to love the Lord your God.” – Joshua 23:11

“My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.” – Augustine, Confessions

In this chapter, Joshua speaks his last words to the leaders of Israel: he looks back and he looks forward, much as we do this time of year. Not one word has failed of all the good promises God made to us, he says of the past. And do you want to know the single most important factor in determining whether your future will be good or bad? How careful you are to love God.

This verse has six different words in the Hebrew: m’od shamar shamar nephesh ahab Yehovah Elohim. Shamar means to keep watch or guard, and is repeated twice for emphasis. What do we guard? Our nephesh, our souls, our whole selves, a word which doesn’t explicitly make it into the ESV translation. Ahab is a comprehensive word for love, though it literally means “to desire, breathe after,” getting at a sense of longing, delight, and affection. Yehovah elohim are personal and universal names for God. 

But the word that strikes me most is m’od. It is an intensifier which means “exceedingly, diligently” and comes from a root word that refers to a wooden poker, the kind used to rake embers and stir a fire. What an interesting word picture: that there is, within my soul, the embers of love. The need to desire after something. As James K. A. Smith writes, “To be human is to be on the move, pursuing something, after something. We are like existential sharks: we have to move to live.” And that desire is powerful, like a conflagration that grows easily out of control, that drives and consumes us: because we are what we love; we become what we worship. We are defined not by what we know, but by what we desire. It is what we desire that drives how we live.

The person who realizes this, who realizes the importance and power of his or her desires, is the one who holds the fire poker, the one who tends the embers. Because love is not, as popular culture likes to think, something we are seized by, or fall into, or stumble upon. It is a choice, but I think this picture goes beyond choice: it introduces a sense of diligence and habit. The point of the fire poker is to adjust the wood so that the flow of oxygen, availability of fuel, and proximity of nearby embers either make the fire grow or force it to die out. It takes constant attention and some amount of practice. The same is true of our desires: they grow, or die out, depending on the kind of attention and practice we give them. Love as it is lived out in our lives is, in this sense, not so much a conscious choice as a baseline orientation. And we reorient our desires not by acquiring information, but through practices that inform the habits of how and what we love, through rituals, routines, rhythms, done over and over again.

Learning to love God takes practice. It takes understanding the pyrotechnics of the soul, the workings of desire. It takes choosing to suffocate unhealthy appetites or idolatries in our lives by ruthlessly cutting off whatever habits tend to feed them. It takes repetitive, daily exposure to God in his Word. It takes various spiritual practices that nurse our loves, and there are many very good ones, many worth exploring until we find a good rule of life for the season we are in. This new year, this new decade, what are the loves that are being lived out in your life? What habits do you have in place to train your dispositions, to form, teach and affect your desires?

The Geography Of Promise

“Thus the Lord gave to Israel all the land that he swore to give to their fathers. And they took possession of it, and they settled there. And the Lord gave them rest on every side just as he had sworn to their fathers. Not one of all their enemies had withstood them, for the Lord had given all their enemies into their hands. Not one word of all the good promises that the Lord had made to the house of Israel had failed; all came to pass.” – Joshua 21:43-45

Slogging my way through these last few chapters in Joshua feels a bit—laborious, to say the least. It’s like reading a map without a map, as someone who isn’t all that interested in maps to begin with (unlike Dave, who looks at maps for fun). But then these golden verses tucked away at the end of chapter twenty-one tell us what the last nine chapters were about: they were God spelling out in exacting detail the fulfillment of every word of his promise.

Boundaries matter a lot when it’s your land it involves. When we were remodeling our house in Palo Alto, there came a point late in the pre-construction phase when we realized there was an issue with one of the setback lines: the entire thing had to be scratched, which set us back quite some time and endangered our ability to move in before the school year started. Imagine if the land didn’t just affect your house or school year: imagine if it was the actual embodiment of all God’s promises to you. All you had hoped for as a wandering pilgrim without a true home. Imagine if it was the rest you longed for after suffering, labor, and war. Every single word of these chapters would matter.

But that is what it means to us. We are wandering pilgrims on this earth, sojourners looking to our true home. God is not going to remove us from this earth, but remake it and give us an inheritance in it one day. Jesus will lead us to the true rest that Joshua could not make last (Hebrews 4). There are so many promises of God I live by, that are sometimes the only things helping me put one foot in front of the other, and all these chapters of Joshua are saying, in the language of geography, through the detail of nomenclature, that God keeps all his promises. He does not miss a single one.

When God Commands Destruction

“So Joshua struck the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb and the lowland and the slopes, and all their kings. He left none remaining, but devoted to destruction all that breathed, just as the Lord God of Israel commanded.” – Joshua 10:40

We can’t really read through Joshua and Judges without addressing the elephant in the room: how could God give his people the promised land by commanding the destruction of all who were already living in it? This is far too large a topic to be addressed in one post, but here are at least some points worth considering. 

The mission of Israel to occupy Canaan was unlike any military operation, before or since, in several important ways. It was not carried out on the basis of race and cannot be a warrant for ethnic cleansing: in fact, God later judges the Israelites themselves through military defeat and exile. It was not carried out on the basis of imperialistic expansion, to expand Israel’s power or wealth: unlike most military invasions at that time, the Israelites were commanded not to plunder or enslave anyone. It was not carried out because the Israelites were intrinsically superior to the Canaanites: in fact, the need to evict the Canaanites only testifies to the Israelites’ spiritual weakness in the face of temptation.

The war is carried out as God’s judgement upon the Canaanites, through direct verbal revelation (Joshua 1:1-9, 23:1-16; Judges 1:1), for the purpose of breaking down idols and evicting pagan worship. This was a specific category of warfare that, in Deuteronomy 20, God makes clear is different from war conducted outside the promised land, where total destruction is not commanded. This was a specific act of judgment that occurs after God had given the Canaanites four generations for their sin to reach “its full measure” (Genesis 15), upon an unrepentant people who persisted in practices like child sacrifice, temple prostitution, incest and adultery. Despite the commands, there are provisions for salvation as we see with Rahab and the Gibeonites, again making it clear that the point of judgment was not ethnicity but rebellious unbelief. The war protected Israel’s theocracy: a union of religion and government unique to that time.

One theologian, Meredith Kline, calls this an “intrusion ethic”: a time when future judgment “intrudes” on the present. God, who alone knows who will be condemned on Judgment Day when Jesus returns, is in these instances bringing down judgment upon those people early, the same way the blessings of the gospel are also intrusions of the future grace into the present.

And that brings me back to this question: why should God’s intrusions of judgment bother me more than his intrusions of grace? One interesting thing I’ve noticed about our children is that two of them tend to be justice-oriented: they need to hear, “you can’t do whatever you want to get whatever you want.” The other two tend to be grace-oriented: they need to hear, “sometimes being kind is more important than being right.” The point is, however our inherent personality, personal experiences, or cultural milieu may make us lean, God is a God of both justice and mercy. Jesus came from the Father, full of grace and truth. Both. Not one without the other. In fact, without judgment, grace would be meaningless. The disturbing parts of the Bible arrest our attention for good reason. They point to gaps between how we like to think of God, and who He really is. How we like to think of sin, and what sin really means. How we like to think of grace, and how costly that grace really was to Him. 

Stones Of Memory

“And the people of Israel did just as Joshua commanded and took up twelve stones out of the midst of the Jordan, according to the number of the tribes of the people of Israel, just as the Lord told Joshua. And they carried them over with them to the place where they lodged and laid them down there. And Joshua set up twelve stones in the midst of the Jordan, in the place where the feet of the priests bearing the ark of the covenant had stood; and they are there to this day.” – Joshua 4:8-9

If I asked you to think back on a time when you most experienced God’s power in your life, when you knew without a shadow of a doubt that what was happening was due to God’s might and not yours, when would that be? Would it be easy to remember, or difficult?

As at the shore of the Red Sea, here God has led his people to an illogical location before an untraversable body of water under a new leader. The traditional crossing point for the Jordan River was the city of Adam, 17 miles north of God’s chosen crossing point. Near Adam, the Jabbok River joined the Jordan from the east, and Wadi el-Fara from the west, making anywhere south of that point difficult to cross, and the riverbanks were already swollen that time of year from the winter rains. But as with the Red Sea, God moves the waters of the Jordan River for the people to cross on dry ground, in perhaps a more orderly and militaristic fashion this time, but again to establish His power, the people’s belief in their leader, and fear of God himself (Exodus 14:31, Joshua 4:24).

This time, God asks them to take a souvenir. One man from each tribe hefts a stone from the bottom of the river and sets it somewhere it never would have arrived naturally: up on dry land. Unasked, Joshua also marks the place where the priests’ feet stood, like an invisible memorial to say, we were here. Our feet touched the bottom, and because God made a way, we rose up from the water to walk into new life in the land of covenant promise. It was all by God’s power. These water-stones, these land-stones, they hold that memory, the memory of salvation itself. 

One would think it would be hard to forget an experience like that, walking across ground no person in recent history had trod, the only thing between you and certain death the hand of God holding back a wall of water to your right, passing by an ark with the fearful presence of that very God along the way. Yet we forget. We forget the magnitude and reality of God’s saving power. We need prompts to remember. And the remembering is to be done together: brother to brother, parent to child. They all crossed together. God’s power stayed death and provided a way for their loved ones as much as for them. They didn’t all heft one big rock, but each tribe brought their own, the memorial they created an amalgam of shapes and sizes. 

How do we remember? How do we remember together? What memorial stones have we set up in our lives? What do we leave for our children that is so obvious, so unavoidable, that they can’t help but ask about it?  Maybe our memory reads like a journal, tastes like the eucharist, sounds like song. Maybe it’s found in liturgy, testimonials, stories, holiday traditions. Our memories are fickle, but our God is unchanging, and the point, I think, is that God’s power works not only during the moment but in the revisiting of that moment, in the stories told of that moment, and it is worth some labor to make sure that happens.