Serve God from the Heart not the Head
February 4, 2020
Commentary
Joshua comes back with a reply that is perhaps one of the most shocking statements of the Old Testament (v. 19). After spending an entire lifetime of trying to get the Israelites to commit to serving God, and after getting the affirmative answer he was seeking, Joshua says: “You cannot serve the Lord.” Joshua goes on and gives two reasons for his startling statement: God is holy, and God is jealous. Up until now, the focus has been on all the things God has done. Suddenly the focus is on who God is. Joshua’s purpose in saying “You cannot serve the Lord” is to call them to a deeper commitmentbased not on God’s actions, but on God’s character. Serving God with only your head and not your heart will give us the wrong answer to life’s questions (vv. 23-24). Realizing that further words would be fruitless, Joshua solemnly renewed the covenant (vv.25-26). The covenant between Israel and God was that the people would worship and obey the Lord alone. Their purpose was to be a holy nation that would influence the rest of the world for God. The conquest of Canaan was a means to achieve this purpose, but Israel became preoccupied with the land and lost sight of the Lord God. The same can happen in our life. We can spend so much time on the means that we forget to finish well.
The book ends with three burials. (1) Joshua died at the age of 110 and was buried with honor in Timnath-serah (vv. 29-30). There is no record of any great memorial built for him. There were ten memorial stones placed in the land during Joshua’s lifetime, and they were all memorials to God and what God did. (2) Joseph’s bones had been brought up out of bondage and carried through the wilderness, and finally he rested in the land that Jacob had purchased (v. 32). (3) Eleazar the high priest, the son of Aaron, was buried at Gibeah, the town of his son Phinehas (v. 33).
Application
Scripture doesn’t leave room for sitting on the fence, by saying, “I’ll serve God,” but then doing things on my own. God asks for my full commitment.
Joshua 24:19– 33 (NET)
19 Joshua warned the people, “You will not keep worshiping the Lord, for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God who will not forgive your rebellion or your sins. 20 If you abandon the Lord and worship foreign gods, he will turn against you; he will bring disaster on you and destroy you, though he once treated you well.”
21 The people said to Joshua, “No! We really will worship the Lord.” 22 Joshua said to the people, “Do you agree to be witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen to worship the Lord?” They replied, “We are witnesses!” 23 Joshua said, “Now put aside the foreign gods that are among you and submit to the Lord God of Israel.”
24 The people said to Joshua, “We will worship the Lord our God and obey him.”
25 That day Joshua drew up an agreement for the people, and he established rules and regulations for them in Shechem. 26 Joshua wrote these words in the Law Scroll of God. He then took a large stone and set it up there under the oak tree near the Lord’s sanctuary. 27 Joshua said to all the people, “Look, this stone will be a witness against us, for it has heard everything the Lord said to us. It will be a witness against you if you deny your God.” 28 When Joshua dismissed the people, they went to their allotted portions of land.
29 After all this Joshua son of Nun, the Lord’s servant, died at the age of 110. 30 They buried him in his allotted territory in Timnath Serah in the hill country of Ephraim, north of Mount Gaash. 31 Israel worshiped the Lord throughout Joshua’s lifetime and as long as the elderly men who outlived him remained alive. These men had experienced firsthand everything the Lord had done for Israel.
32 The bones of Joseph, which the Israelites had brought up from Egypt, were buried at Shechem in the part of the field that Jacob bought from the sons of Hamor, the father of Shechem, for 100 pieces of money. So it became the inheritance of the tribe of Joseph.
33 Eleazar son of Aaron died, and they buried him in Gibeah in the hill country of Ephraim, where his son Phinehas had been assigned land.
Illustration: MacArthur’s Closing Speech
In MacArthur’s closing speech to the nation, he said: “I am closing my fifty-two years of military service. When I joined the army even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all my boyish hopes and dreams. The world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the Plain at West Point, and the hopes and dreams have long since vanished. But I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular ballads of that day which proclaimed most proudly that ‘Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.’ “And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away—an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Good-bye.” (Encyclopedia of Illustrations – #1542)