Sermons from Past Years

Joshua 7 "The One and the Many" Scott Hoezee

A week or so ago a gay pride festival was held in Orlando, Florida. A couple of days later evangelist Pat Robertson said on his nationally televised 700 Club that in the wake of this event, Orlando could expect a pretty bad hurricane real soon. "I wouldn't go waving those gay pride flags in God's face if I were you" Rev. Robertson warned. Similarly, a few years back when areas of the Midwest were devastated by floods, Operation Rescue's leader Randall Terry publicly declared that many of those states were suffering in this way because they had, after all, refused to support his anti-abortion legislation.

In the early 1980s a very liberal preacher delivered a highly controversial sermon in the beautiful Minster cathedral in York, England. In this sermon this clergyman declared his doubts as to the virgin birth of Jesus as well as to a few other such doctrines. Three days later a storm raked York and a powerful bolt of lightning struck the main bell tower of the York Minster, starting a devastating fire. And people all over England wondered out loud if maybe this unorthodox sermon had had anything to do with that bolt of lightning.

Always and again in history, including the history of the Christian church, there has persisted the idea that somewhere in heaven there is a God or a group of gods who are forever policing the precincts of our world, searching for infractions and immediately sending down lightning bolts of various kinds every time someone somewhere sins. Sometimes we treat this suspicion humorously as when someone at a dinner party tells a slightly heretical joke and the rest of the guests back their chairs away from him a little, grinning as they say, "We don't want to be too close when you get nailed for that one!!"

But other times such fears of a divine tit-for-tat lead to soul-wrenching, hand-wringing remorse, as when a child dies and other members of the family wonder what they did to bring on this calamity. Far too many saintly people have had their spirituality corrupted by the fear that they did something wrong and that's why something has gone sour in their lives.

Of course, most of us recall the most famous biblical counter-example of this kind of thinking. It happened one day when the disciples stumbled on a blind man, brought him to Jesus, and asked, "Who sinned? This guy or his folks?" The disciples clearly believed that every disability has a discernible cause in the history of the sufferer. But since they could not figure this one out for themselves, who better to clarify the matter than Jesus? But Jesus didn't want to play this game and so told the disciples that no one was at fault here. These things happen to the best of people. Speculations on who brought about such unfortunate states of affairs are futile.

Then again, as tonight's story from Joshua shows, sometimes bad events do as a matter of fact have a cause. The overall sweep of the Bible discourages us from trying to reduce every sickness to a sin. In a fallen world where evil and sin are everywhere it is naive to assume you can diagnose a sinful cause for every bad event. Trying to do so is like taking a swim in the Atlantic Ocean and then afterwards trying to find back the very first drop of water that touched your body. With all the water in the ocean, that would be impossible. With all the brokenness in this world, it is likewise perilous if not often impossible to make simple connections of a certain sin to some later event. Life just doesn't work that way.

Well, not always anyway. You see, if there were absolutely no biblical examples of a sin leading to a larger disaster, then perhaps we could dispense with our inclinations toward always searching for a cause. But there are just enough passages like Joshua 7 to remind us that sometimes individual lapses do lie at the root of some unhappy events. So for the next few minutes let's examine this story to see what it does teach and what it does not teach.

Last week we saw the triumphant story of Israel's surprise victory over Jericho. That entire story is summed up in Joshua 6:27: "So Yahweh was with Joshua, and his fame spread throughout the land." However, this happy verse immediately hits a brick wall in the very next verse: "But the Israelites acted unfaithfully." This piece of bad news is followed by a brief genealogy which does two things at once: first, this mini family tree locates the sin right in the heart of Israel in the tribe of Judah and second, it singles out for us the man guilty of stealing some of Jericho's goodies: Achan.

Already in this first verse we should be struck by a couple of items. First, we are told that "the Israelites" acted unfaithfully such that, at the end of this verse, we are also informed that "Yahweh's anger burned against Israel." The whole nation, all of its citizens, are declared unfaithful and so are the object of God's anger even though we are specifically told that really only one man broke God's rules. This is startling and initially rather baffling.

After all, suppose an auto worker currently on strike in Flint did something terrible on the picket line--suppose that he swung his heavy picket sign and whacked a little girl who was getting too close. Granted this would be a rotten thing to do, but how would the rest of us feel if the entire state of Michigan were held liable for this? Suppose we read in the paper that President Clinton's anger burned against Michigan such that he cut off all federal funding for the whole state. Wouldn't Governor Engler and the rest of us protest? Wouldn't we say, "Now hold on here! We're no happier about what Mr. Henderson did than the rest of you, but he's just one citizen among millions in Michigan so don't punish us all!"

One man named Achan did what he was not supposed to do. So far as we know, no one else, including probably his own family, knew about this. And yet the whole nation is held guilty and so the whole nation goes down to ignominious defeat in the attempt to capture Ai. When Joshua falls flat before God to protest this tragic turn of events, Yahweh tells Joshua to stop whining and recognize what should be obvious: Yahweh is not fighting for Israel because Israel has booted Yahweh out of their camp.

As we saw last week, Israel's conquering of Jericho was the complete work of God--it was a gift. Since God was the one who gave this gift, he was also in a position to say that the city belonged to him alone so the Israelites were not to try to pad their own pockets with its loot. But Achan did so anyway. He brought a little of Jericho into Israel such that now, in God's eyes, all of Israel is no better than Jericho.

So Joshua ferrets out the guilty party, gets a full confession out of Achan, and then the story ends violently as Achan and also his family are stoned to death in what became known as "The Valley of Trouble," or as it could also be translated, "The Valley of Taboo." Only when the taboo was removed could Israel be Israel again. Only then, in the midst of Canaan, could Israel be a holy people--an island of shalom in the midst of Canaan's sea of sin.

At minimum this incident taught Israel--and maybe Joshua too--a hard yet vital lesson. For one thing, God is not their mascot who can be marched out at will. Yahweh is not at Israel's beck and call but rather Israel is there to accomplish Yahweh's larger goal of restoring shalom to the earth. But that is serious business--so serious that Israel had to be very careful in never assuming too much about what God would do for them.

Because God, it turns out, is a little dangerous to have around. The stakes are so much higher for Israel in that it is nothing less than God's holy Name that is on the line every time Israel does something publicly. At the end of his lament, Joshua fears that Israel's name has now been damaged by this ridiculous rout at Ai. He then says, "And what about your Name on the earth, O God? How are you going to generate any respect for your own Name if your people go down to silly defeat like this?!"

In reply God says that he is very concerned about his Name and reputation--so much so that he cannot risk being associated with unholy folks. Nothing in heaven or on earth could be more important than what people think of their Creator. But a good deal of what people think about God depends on what they think about God's representatives on earth--in this case the Israelites. Joshua needs to realize that what's going on here is not some local set of political skirmishes for territory. No, all of this is a matter of cosmic dimensions.

In other words, the circumstances of Joshua 7 are anything but typical. For at this moment in salvation history Israel alone is God's people. For this time God is working uniquely through Israel in a way he is not working anywhere else. As we said last week, God is no doubt up to far more than the average Israelite could possibly know--that's why the Israelites keep bumping into God in surprising places like Rahab's brothel.

Still, during this time of salvation history Israel stands alone as the chosen people of Yahweh. They alone know about the covenant of God's grace; they alone have been given the gift of God's Law, showing them the blueprint for life in this universe. Therefore, Israel alone is going to reflect God to the world for good or for ill. But that is why a sin like Achan's is so grievous: the stakes are so utterly high for Israel.

The point of all this, of course, is to remind ourselves that we should not too quickly use the Achan story as proof that behind every bad thing there is a definable sin. We should not use Achan's tragic end as evidence that each time a church experiences a heartache, it is evidence that somewhere in the congregation there is a sinner who needs to be removed before the ministry can go forward again. No, the circumstances attending Israel at this time preclude our making any such tidy transfers into our own lives.

However, we still cannot entirely dispense with the idea that sometimes there is cause and effect in this world. One of the most prominent features of the Bible is the Wisdom tradition, the core of which is the truth that if we honor the Creator, then we will seek a heart of wisdom. And what is the wise heart if not the discerning heart, the one that pays close attention to how things go in this world so as to figure out what actions lead to health and what ones lead to sickness?

The wise are encouraged to pay attention to life's big patterns precisely because we believe God has created a stable world. Touch a hot stove, you'll get burned every time; have an adulterous affair, you'll wreck a marriage most every time. Spit into the wind, you get a wet face; shroud yourself in a web of lies and deceit, you'll eventually cut yourself off from God because you'll despise the truth that God alone knows about you. So it goes in life, the Bible says. Some actions lead to joy, others to sorrow; some lifestyles go with God's flow and others are forever trying to paddle upstream and so lead to an exhausted frustration. And it's the wise person's job to figure out which are which.

The process of figuring all that out is not usually simple and sometimes even the wise must admit there are some things they just don't know. But to deny all connection between sin and later unhappiness is to be guilty of what the Bible simply calls "folly." But if it is the wise person who prudently tries to make various connections, then that same spirit of wisdom should serve as a restraint on our too quickly diagnosing the fallout of various sins in others. In most cases we know far too little about the larger dynamics of this fallen world even to begin to understand why some things happen.

That's why predicting a calamity in Orlando because of one event you deem sinful is to show great naiveté. What about all the Orlando churches that were holding wonderful worship services while the gay pride rally was going on? What about the countless deeds of mercy that were being done in Jesus' name all over Florida during that same period of time? How do we know what Florida in general looked like to God at the moment Dr. Robertson made his grim and cheeky prediction?

But the same is true of the life of any given person. No one of us knows enough about any other person's history or heart to be able to predict future disaster or to connect some current hurt to a past sin. Instead it seems that if we wish to draw some applicatory lesson from the story of Achan, then it is not that we should be scrutinizing other people's lives but that we should pay attention to our own lives. Granted, no one of us--and no individual congregation--is the sole locus of God's work today the way Israel was in the time of Joshua. Still, we do bear responsibility for what other people think of God.

None of our sins is likely to bring down the whole kingdom like Achan's sin threatened to do, but if our actions as Christians sully other people's ideas about God, then for those people at least, we have perhaps threatened their inclusion in God's kingdom. When how we act, think, talk, or make decisions cast God and his Church into a bad light, then we are impeding the forward progress of at least some part of God's salvation--and neither God nor we can take that lightly.

These days, sometimes even in the church but certainly in the wider society, sins and misdeeds are at best viewed as hindrances to personal growth. That's why, again and again, celebrities and others who get caught in some pretty terrible crimes talk about how they are working to "forgive themselves" so that "the healing process can begin" so that so-and-so might finally "get on with his or her life."

But the story of Achan is a dismal reminder that within the company of God's people we need a wider perspective. Whether or not our sins end up damaging ourselves, they often do great damage to others. The good news of grace is that we are forgiven in perpetuity by God and that liberating fact is the core of the gospel.

But there is a big difference between your own experience of God's grace and undoing the damage you've inflicted on others through your actions. It may be great that you have been forgiven, but if, like Achan, you have done something that has damaged other people's perceptions of God, then your own forgiveness is not the end of the matter. Something more must be done to repair the damage.

Thankfully, that "something more" does not typically involve your own death by stoning! But it may involve some other form of sacrifice as you, like Achan, own up to and so try to unmake whatever damage you've done. Joshua 7:1 freely mixes up the singular of Achan with the plural of all the people and it does so because we really are just that connected among God's people. What people think of God depends greatly on what they think of God's representatives. Like Achan, we forget that to our great peril.