Sermons from Past Years

Joshua 10:1-15 "All Things Now Living" Scott Hoezee

According to the Chinese writer Ningkun Wu in his book A Single Tear, Communist Chairman Mao Tse-tung was not content trying to control every jot and tittle of human life--no, he wanted to extend his control into the realm of nature as well. So in 1958 Chairman Mao launched what he called "A Campaign Against Four Evils." In this campaign Mao mustered the Chinese people to help him stamp out the evils of rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. Especially the sparrows, Mao contended, were an enemy of the people in that the little birds freely helped themselves to millions of tons of food each year. Clearly these pesky birds had to go--how dare they take food away from The People?!

So one day the entire Chinese populace was ordered to wage war on the sparrows. At the same hour all the people were instructed to pursue the sparrows relentlessly by banging loudly on pots and pans so as to chase the little birds into a frenzy. And it worked. Sparrows by the millions finally dropped dead of exhaustion, their winged abilities proving no match for the iron fist of proletarian dictatorship.

The next day the official Chinese newspapers were triumphantly filled with stories of marketplaces all over China being glutted with more fried sparrow than the people could eat. Alas, however, what the government-run press never reported was that as a result of this victory over the sparrows, in the next two years China experienced massive crop loss and famine. It seems that without the sparrows around to eat them, wheat-eating insects flourished, consuming massive amounts of grain and other foliage in what these bugs must have regarded as a wonderful, all-you-can-eat communist buffet!

A story like this one surely lends new meaning to the idea that God's eye is on the sparrow! But it is also a poignant reminder that where evil holds sway, far more than human beings end up getting threatened and harmed. More than we know, the battle between God and the Devil takes place on the stage of the non-human creation. Also more than we know, those who threaten God's creation sometimes get hurt right back by that same creation.

A few years ago when we did a series on the Book of Exodus, we noted how God fought Pharaoh principally with the weapons of creation. By the time it was all over, God defeated Pharaoh by battling him with rivers, frogs, flies, gnats, hailstones, boils, and the utter darkness that came when God switched off the light of the sun for a few days.

The Book of Exodus, of course, began the same story that we have been reading in the Book of Joshua; namely, the story of Israel's return to the Promised Land. However, more than just the beginning of that story, Exodus is also the continuation of another, older story: the story of creation that began in the Book of Genesis. The Book of Exodus does not merely come after Genesis, it is a sequel to Genesis. Whereas Genesis narrated the story of creation made and lost, Exodus shows the Creator God doing what it takes to get his beloved creation out of the clutches of the Evil One.

But really, that's what the whole Bible is about--the Bible is one long story of how God is salvaging the work he did in the beginning. Perhaps that is why, as Larry Rasmussen notes, religion in the Old Testament frequently seems hard to distinguish from good highlands agriculture, from proper treatment of topsoil and animals, from joyful celebration over bountiful harvests and the warm glow one gets from a goblet of fine wine. Religion and creation get all mixed up together because the God we serve in our religion is the Creator who refuses to let his creation handiwork slip through his fingers.

Indeed, the whole purpose of Joshua's conquest is to fulfill what had long been God's premiere promise to everyone from Abraham forward: namely, the promise of a good land. Along the way to this goal we find God repeatedly making use of the creation to accomplish salvation: he speaks to Moses through a bush, God fights Pharaoh through plagues of creation, we find God parting seas and bringing forth rivers of water in the desert. Again and again the spiritual and the physical intertwine. That's why Israel's idea of salvation, their pictures of what we call "heaven," were not of cloudy, vapory, ethereal places paved with streets of gold and filled with people strumming harps all day. No, salvation and life with God were, to their minds, exceedingly earthly and earthy.

It seems that the Israelites could not conceive of a salvation that did not involve some kind of throwback to the Garden of Eden. That's why when Solomon builds his grand Temple in Jerusalem, he fills it with carvings of bulls and bears, of pomegranates and lilies, of depictions of the ocean and sprays of palm trees. Unlike our modern houses of worship which are so often devoid of the physical creation--even having stained glass windows that prevent us from even seeing the outside world--Solomon was very deliberate in creating a worship space that harked back to Eden and that pointed forward to God's promise of a renewed earth. Similarly, the reason the prophets ultimately predict that one day we will beat swords into plowshares is not only to end bloody warfare but also to enable us to return to our true calling: earthkeeping, tending the garden of God's creation!

In the meantime, however, the fight to redeem the creation involves the clashing of many swords. The strange and intriguing passage of Joshua 10 curiously intertwines many of the themes I've just laid out. For here we have yet another bloody battle between the Israelites and the Canaanites as part of the forward march of salvation history. And yet right at the climax of this battle, the creation takes center stage in a way that seems calculated to remind us that what's going on here is a matter of cosmic importance. This is not just one of history's countless skirmishes for territory, this is the Creator working hard to accomplish a goal larger than either the Israelites or the Canaanites could ever have fully grasped.

The first part of Joshua 10 seems routine--it's the kind of history that you could read in the military annals of countless past civilizations. Peace treaties are made, battle lines are drawn up, armies square off, lives are lost. But as Joshua 10 proceeds, things start to happen that are anything but typical. First, hailstones the size of hand grenades start to rain down upon the Amorite troops--and only on them. It is as though the Israelites have some invisible umbrella over top of them because somehow not one of the Israelite troops gets clunked in the skull by these high velocity chunks of ice.

That was strange enough, but it turns out it was but a small prelude to the day's real wonder. For as the battle is reaching fever pitch, Commander Joshua suddenly turns to the sky and issues a military-style order to, of all things, the sun! "Sun," Joshua barks, "don't you move an inch until I tell you to!"

Well, I don't doubt a few people near Joshua thought that he had been in the sun a bit too long. But although it took a couple of hours for anyone to realize it, it turns out the sun obeyed Joshua as though it were no more than one of his sub-lieutenants! People kept looking at their watches only to see that while time was marching on, the sun was not. By the time it should have been dusk, the sun was still at the top of the sky as though it were high noon. What's more, the sun stayed stuck to that spot until the battle was finished. Only then did Joshua give the sun a little nod and the day started to wind down as usual.

Commentators note that this is perhaps the single most remarkable story in the Book of Joshua. Unfortunately, those who are minded to dismiss this story as sheer fantasy are aided and abetted by the fact that the original Hebrew text of this portion of Joshua is a bit fuzzy. Thus, some claim we can't really know what happened that day.

However, if we accept verses 13 and 14 as the authoritative interpretation of this event, then it appears that what we are supposed to believe is that Joshua lengthened the battle day by keeping the sun up in the sky for far longer than usual. We now know that actually it is not the sun that would have stopped moving but the entire earth--for this event to take place the earth would have to stop spinning on its axis. From what little I know about astrophysics, if God really did stop the earth from turning for a time, then the grandeur of this miracle is enhanced. Most of the surrounding solar system would have been affected by such a happening as the usual laws that keep the fabric of space in one piece would have had to have been suspended in order to keep planet earth from being completely destroyed.

The Israelites didn't know any of that complexity but then again, neither did they need to. Because so far as they were concerned, the entire universe was lending a collective hand to help Israel win the day. Furthermore, to their minds this would have made utter sense. After all, the Israelites knew perhaps better than we that God's salvation involves the entire creation because God's salvation aims to reclaim the entire creation.

The Israelites were as stunned as anyone when God performed creation miracles. They, too, were agog when the River Nile turned to blood back in Egypt; their jaws went slack too when the Red Sea split. But though they were properly awed by such displays, seeing the creation play a role in their redemption made theological sense to them. Since the fruits of God's salvation were ultimately going to be earthy, why would it be any surprise to see God working through the physical creation along the way?

The Israelites knew all of this well, but I am not always so sure we Christians do. Indeed, it sometimes seems that Christians pit spiritual themes against physical concerns about the creation. "Turn your eyes upon Jesus," the song says, "and the things of earth will grow strangely dim." And such physical concerns have grown dim and fuzzy indeed in the hearts of many Christians.

A year-and-a-half ago we all shook our heads over the Heaven's Gate cult and their tragic mass suicide which was discovered during Holy Week in 1997. Most of us no doubt remember that the reason these people killed themselves was so that they could hitch a ride with the UFO they thought was hidden in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet. "This earth is destined to be recycled," the wild-eyed leader of the cult said on the group's farewell video tape. Since their visions of God's kingdom had nothing to do with this earth, they decided to jump ship and hitch a ride to the next dimension.

We Christians sadly shook our heads at all that, yet only twenty or so years ago millions of those same Christians bought a book, the title of which seems to take a similar view of this earth as did members of Heaven's Gate: I refer to Hal Lindsey's best-seller, The Late, Great Planet Earth. That sounds like an obituary for all things earthy! It is ironic that when we celebrated Easter last year, the media were still buzzing about this cult. The contrast should have been striking: while the news was filled with stories about a cult that could not wait to divorce itself from all things earthly, Christians gathered in their churches on Easter Sunday to celebrate the greatest affirmation of earthly things ever; namely, the resurrection of the body!

Still, oddly enough it seems that the more spiritually devout and biblically serious Christians are these days, the less thought they give to the physical creation. A couple of years ago a survey was conducted, the results of which showed that churches which are the most committed to the idea of biblical inerrancy are the same churches that have the least interest in the environment. In other words, the more Christians think about the Bible, the less they pay attention to one of the Bible's two greatest themes: creation.

I suspect the Israelites would take a rather dim view of such an anti-creation stance. For they knew that God the Creator is the same divine Being as God the Redeemer. In fact, do you realize that if sin had never come into the world, we would know God only as Creator? God would not need to be our Savior if there were nothing to save us from! And have you ever reflected on the idea that even if the crucifixion had never been needed, then the gift of God's good creation would still be more than enough reason for us to give God all the praise we could muster? Creation matters supremely to God. Does it to us?

In one of his many theological bull's-eyes, Anthony Hoekema once pointed out that to envision God's salvation as anything other than the restoration of this cosmos would be to concede a great victory to Satan. Why? Because if God had no choice but to scrap the whole creation, then Satan would have succeeded in the most diabolical of all his schemes--the complete trashing of God's handiwork. As it is, God will show his complete victory over the Devil by restoring this good creation and banishing Satan from it!

Well, perhaps it seems like we have wandered quite far afield from the story in Joshua 10. Yet this Bible story is one of many in Scripture where the creation responds and contributes to God's saving activity because the creation itself is an object of that same salvation. Joshua knew that the sun and moon would respond to his prayer because Joshua knew that the creation is participating in God's grand program of renewal. In Romans 8 the apostle Paul writes that the creation is eagerly awaiting its liberation from pollution and decay. Joshua would agree and that's why he freely enlists the aid of the creation in his battle for the Promised Land.

As Barbara Brown Taylor notes, to this day it seems like birds can't get enough of God and so they sing to him mind-boggling numbers of songs every day. Dolphins are crazy about God, too, and so are whales, what with all their delightful spouting and breaching, the sight of which God claims to be one of his chief delights in life--at least that's what God told Job.

But we people--the very ones made to most resemble God in this world--we often seem too busy for God, resisting our status as creatures in favor of fancying ourselves "self-made people," as though that were a plus and not a minus. Worse yet, when we do get around to considering and worshiping God, we have the audacity to fancy that we alone matter, that we alone will be included in heaven long after the loons and redtail foxes have been reduced to cinders.

How foolish we are not to have a wider creation perspective on salvation! Oh, it may well be that human beings are the apple of God's eye, but God's divine eye is pretty big--there's room in the divine vision for all. Perhaps on that long ago day in the region of Gibeon it looked foolish for Joshua to bring the sun and moon into his battle plans. But for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, for those with a perspective on creation akin to God's own perspective, it was not foolish at all. The creation is only too happy to move forward toward salvation. "Let all things now living a song of thanksgiving to God the Creator triumphantly raise." They do and they always will, right on into eternity!