The Sun Stood Still . . . in Defense of the Gibeonites

Joshua 10:  http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Joshua+10&version=NIV

            Someone is sure to ask, “What does it mean, ‘The sun stood still’?”  Did the earth stop rotating?  Is it just some kind of metaphor?  What’s going on?  I’ll give you my answer.  “I don’t know.”  There.  Here’s a link you can go to.  I have no idea who the author is; I’m not saying that I agree with any of his conclusions.  But at least he lists out some of the possibilities:  http://www.blueletterbible.org/faq/don_stewart/stewart.cfm?ID=625.

            I understand our concern to understand.  I understand these are questions that bother us and undermine our confidence in the Bible.  I get that, but I would say that those are not questions the Bible is interested in answering.  So, at the risk of dismissing hard questions with a wave of the hand, let me just say, “Let’s not miss the main point.”

            The main point, of course, is that the Lord gave the victory.  And notice that the Lord gave the victory in defense of the Gibeonites.  The Gibeonites had tricked Joshua into a treaty and were cursed to be ‘woodcutters and water carriers.’  Still, the Gibeonites were under the umbrella of Israel and therefore under the protection of the Lord.  It is a small indication that the Lord had never intended that Israel to be completely impermeable.  Israel’s life and existence was for the sake of the world.  The embrace of the Gibeonites—even in a small capacity—is a small indication of that greater purpose for Israel.

"Don't Be Discouraged"

Joshua 8-9:  http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Joshua%208-9&version=NIV

            “Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.”  Again.  Was Joshua just some sort of coward?  Why the constant encouragement?  I don’t think that Joshua was a coward at all; I don’t think he was afraid of warfare.  Bear in mind the context.  The thing that was getting Joshua down was Israel’s obstinacy; the defeat at Ai was the result of Achan’s refusal to obey and his desire to feather his own nest.  Consider that it was just a few weeks (apparently) since they had circumcised themselves and celebrated the Passover.  So soon after recommitting themselves to the Lord, and look how they had stumbled!

            If we were honest with ourselves, we’d probably have to admit that the thing that gets us down is our own interior weakness, too.  We make a stink about ‘the world’ and its opposition, but it’s much more discouraging to think how often we ourselves don’t live up to our high calling.  I’m writing this while I’m at a pastors’ conference.  We had our opening devotion at 8:45, and we prayed that ‘all our doings and life might please’ the Lord.  Having been awake since 6:30 this morning, I couldn’t help but think that it was too late for me to pray that my doings and life might please the Lord; two hours into my day it would have been more appropriate to pray for forgiveness for those places that my doings had not pleased the Lord.

            So, the Lord’s constant encouragement to Joshua can be a strong encouragement to us, too.  We can hear in it a word of forgiveness, that our failures are in the past and that the Lord remembers them no more.  We can hear in it and encouragement to pray every moment of our day that our doings and life would please the Lord.  It won’t do any good to get stuck on who we were and we have done; it will be much more productive to take courage and to say, “Today is a new day; this is a new hour.”

What a Strange Story!

Deuteronomy 31:  http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=deu%2031&version=NIV

            Have you ever been struck by how good it is that the Lord is God and that we are not?  I found Deuteronomy 31 a little disturbing.  In it the Lord says, “Look, I know that Israel is going to fail.  I know they’re going to abandon me and I’m going to punish them.”  I don’t know what to make of a God who knows beforehand the trouble that His people are going to cause, but who chooses to do things His way anyway.

            When I teach the story of the Bible, I refer to God’s strange plan.  And it is a strange plan that from a rebellious people He will bring forth the One who will heal their rebellion, and not just theirs but the rebellion of the whole world.

            It’s even stranger than that, though.  I read a book called The Life of Pi a few years ago.  The main character was an Indian.  Raised a Hindu, he describes his first encounter with Christianity.  Listening to the story of our faith with Hindu ears captured its strangeness for me in a really fresh way.

            “And what a story.  The first thing that drew me in was disbelief.  What?  Humanity sins but it’s God’s Son who pays the price?  I tried to imagine Father [a zookeeper] saying to me, “Piscine, a lion slipped into the llama pen today and killed two llamas.  Yesterday another one killed a black buck.  Last week two of them ate the camel.  The week before it was painted storks and grey herons.  And who’s to say for sure who snacked on our golden agouti?  The situation has become intolerable.  Something must be done.  I have decided that the only way the lions can atone for their sins is if I feed you to them.”

            “Yes, Father, that would be the right and logical thing to do.  Give me a moment to wash up.”

            “Hallelujah, my son.”

            “Hallelujah, Father.”

            What a downright weird story.  What peculiar psychology.

            I asked for another story, one that I might find more satisfying.  Surely this religion had more than one story in its bag—religions abound with stories.  But Father Martin made me understand that the stories that came before it—and there were many—were simply prologue to Christians.  Their religion had one Story, and to it they came back again and again, over and over.  It was story enough for them.”

The bit in question goes on for two more pages.  You can check it out of the library for yourself (Life of Pi, by Yann Martel).  My point is simply that our God has a unique approach to salvation, and it involves extending Himself through the agency of a rebellious people, just as He still extends His reign through humans, namely, His church.  The Lord knew Israel's weaknesses and brought salvation out of them anyhow; He knows our weaknesses and spreads salvation through us in spite of them.

Thoughts on Israel's Fate

Deuteronomy 30:  http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=deu%2030&version=NIV
            There are a lot of things to comment on in Deuteronomy 30.  First, I'd note an insight I gained from N. T. Wright, a New Testament scholar I really enjoy.  That insight is that Israel in Jesus' day thought that the exile had never really ended,  Sure, they had returned from their exile in Babylon, but they more most definitely not more prosperous than they had been when they left--even 600 years later!  Longing for the end of exile--that describes a deep dynamic that explains the life and hopes of Israel when Jesus came on the scene.
            A second thought is the hermeneutical one, that is, a thought about how to appropriately bring the story of Israel to bear on modern day, New Testament Christians.  Here's the key thing:  the scattering of Israel was a covenant curse.  Historically, Israel was scattered following the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC as a result of their chronic breaching of the covenant by following other gods.  It wasn’t an absolute rejection of Israel.  The Lord kept a remnant in the land and brought a portion back from exile because His promise would be fulfilled through Israel.  (Not all Jews returned to the land.  A Jewish population remained in Babylon; another developed in Egypt; still others grew in Asia Minor and points west.)

            However, the scattering of Israel in the exile and beyond ceased to be the biblical story after the ministry of Jesus.  Then, it was the scattering of the church that mattered.  The church was not scattered as a punishment but as a mission strategy.  So, for example, everyone knows that the so-called Great Commission does not contain a command to go.  The word there is a participle:  ‘while you’re on your way’ is a better translation.  (I don’t know why the English translations make the choice they make.)  God’s people are scattered like seed throughout the earth to produce a great harvest for the kingdom.

            The gathering of Deuteronomy 30 has its historical fulfillment in 538 BC, when the first exile return to ruined Jerusalem.  But for the church, the gathering becomes an end-time event; the return to the land becomes the advent of the new heaven and new earth; and the circumcision of hearts—now by faith—becomes the reality of renewed lives in God’s good presence.  So, as I often point out, let's be careful with applying passages like Deuteronomy 30 to our national life in the US.
            Third, Paul cites Deuteronomy 30 in Romans 10.  It's a great passage about the necessity of preaching (you can read it here:  http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rom%2010&version=NIV).  The thing that strikes me, though, is that Paul is not making a random defense of preaching; rather, that defense of preaching is embedded in a larger context (Romans 9-11) in which Paul is struggling with what went wrong with Israel that so many Jews were not prepared to recognize Jesus as the Messiah.  I suspect that part of the deep background of this passage is the fact of Israel's covenant unfaithfulness.  Someday I'll have to do more work on Romans 9-11 to see how this works out.

A Holy People--Dedicated to the Lord's Words

Deuteronomy 29:  http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=deu%2029&version=NIV

            There were two interesting turns-of-phrase in today’s reading.  The first was in Deuteronomy 29:10, “You are standing today—all of you—before the Lord your God.”  I found that interesting because of the common inclination to think that spiritual things belong to a more spiritual class of people.  I notice it all the time:  people seem to think that just because you’re a pastor you’ve got some sort of special prayer ability.  I don’t know if people think that the Lord listens more closely to well-spoken prayers, or if they think that pastors pray more than every other Christian, or if they think that clergy have a hotline to God—like he lets your prayers go to voicemail, but he gets mine on the direct line.  But here, the entire population of Israel (along with the foreigners living in their midst!) enters into the covenant; everyone stands before the Lord.  While the Church has a collective life, within that collective life, each one is called to stand individually with the Lord.  Classically, Lutherans have referred to this as the priesthood of all believers, the fact that every believer has the same standing, honor, and dignity before the Lord.

            The second turn of phrase is in verse 29, “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us.”  Lutherans make a theological distinction between what we call the Deus absonditus, that is, the hidden God, and the Deus revelatus, that is, the revealed God.  It’s a principle of our theology that God has not chosen to reveal every facet of Himself to us.  There are things that remain hidden in the mind of God, questions that we’ll never answer.  Think of the questions raised about conversion and salvation—why some are saved and others aren’t?  Think of the questions that tragedy raises—why would God let that happen?  Think of questions of timing—why does God delay?  Each of those is a question that the Lord has not answered.  On the other hand, the things that we are called to follow are those things that God has revealed in His Word.  His earnest desire to save humankind, the reality that not all will enjoy His presence for eternity, His sovereignty over all creation, His determined plan to work all things out for good—all of those we are bound to, even if we can’t answer all the questions they raise in our minds.

The 'Pool' the Prophets Fished In

Deuteronomy 28:  http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=deu%2028&version=NIV

            I’d invite you to re-read this chapter.  “Why?” you ask.  Re-read it because this language forms the pool from which the prophets will draw imagery about God’s judgment.  Isaiah, in particular, will fish in this pool.

            So, here is specifically covenantal language.  It is addressed to Israel, as a nation, as she is about to enter the next stage of her national existence.  If she keeps her end of the covenant, the Lord will bless her; if she doesn’t, the Lord will punish her—as a nation—with exile.  (Again, not to beat a dead horse, but these blessings and curses are stipulations of the Sinaitic covenant; they apply to Israel as the seedbed of God's promises; the application to our day or to any other nation calls for real care.) 700 years after Deuteronomy, Isaiah sees the disobedience piling up, and he sees in the Assyrians the working out of those national curses.  Isaiah also sees the days coming when Judah will face similar consequences because of her idolatry.  Many of his oracles of judgment (and many of his vision of restoration) have Deuteronomy 28 somewhere in the background.

            Now, here’s the thing.  Isaiah (and other prophets) often take blessings and curses specific to Israel and draw them into a larger eschatological framework.  That is, they see in the national fate of Israel an intimation, a foreshadowing, of the fate of God’s whole world.

            Christian reflection grabs that larger framework and runs it through Jesus, through Whom all of God’s plans and purpose of the world, are fulfilled.  Then, Christian reflection uses that same language and imagery to describe the ultimate fate of God’s whole world.  So Christian visions of judgment (and ultimate restoration) use these same images for the judgment and restoration of the world. 

            So re-read this chapter, because this is imagery that, while specific to the nation of OT Israel in this case, will find wider application in the reflection of what God ultimately has in mind for His creation, through Jesus.

Re-affirmation

            The scene that Moses describes in Deuteronomy 27ff. is a covenant renewal ceremony.  After Israel has gone into the land, they are to reaffirm their identity as God's people, His blessings to them, and their own loyalty to Him.
            As so often in the Old Testament, ‘mount’ is a little generous for Ebal and Gerizim.  According to one source Ebal rises about 1400 feet above the valley floor, and Gerizim rises several hundred feet over the same valley.  This is not  the Grand Canyon!  It is, though, a sort of natural amphitheater, with a fairly narrow valley framed by two sloping hills.  So, the picture we should have in our minds is the tribes of Israel arrayed on the slopes of the hills, filling in toward the valley floor.

            They’re arranged this way for a covenant renewal/affirmation ceremony.  They are, in a sense, summarizing who they are and affirming the consequences of disobedience to the covenant before them.  Their ‘Amens’ after each of the curses is sort of like signing and signing and signing when you get a loan or a mortgage.  Your signature says, “Yes, I agree to that stipulation.  Yes, I agree with that statement.  Yes, I agree that that’s a fair penalty if I default.”  The scene carries on for several chapters.
            Humans seem to need these reaffirmations.  Our sinfulness leads us astray and we need  constant reminders of who we are, Whose we are, and what we are supposed to be.  Christians do a similar thing in our regular recitation of the Creed.  If we were to use the Luther's order of Morning and Evening Prayer (http://www.cph.org/t-topic-catechism-dailyprayers.aspx), we'd find a reaffirmation in the sign of the cross, a reminder of our Baptism and God's claim on us as His adopted children.