ENGAGE
Life is full of choices. In fact, this morning all of us here have already made a number of choices today that will impact how this day turns out, haven’t we?
For many of us, the morning began with the choice of whether or not to get out of bed when the alarm clock went off. And then that choice led to a whole string of other choices:
• Am I going to take time to read my Bible and pray?
• What am I going to eat for breakfast?
• Am I going to go to church today?
• What am I going to wear?
• Which route am I going to take to get to church? That one is a particularly difficult one when almost every road between your home and the church is under construction.
So every day we have a string of those moment-by-moment choices that each impact to a large degree how my day is going to turn out.
We also all have larger life choices that also have a tremendous influence on our lives:
• Am I going to get married, and, if so, to whom?
• Am I going to have kids?
• Which job am I going to take?
• How will I handle my finances?
• How am I going to allocate my time?
• What am I going to do to maintain my health?
And every one of those choices also have a tremendous impact on what my life is going to look like, so it’s important that I make wise choices.
TENSION
But this morning, we’re going to look at a choice that is far more important than any of the kinds of choices I’ve already mentioned because it the fundamental choice that will not only impact the kinds of choices that I’ve already mentioned, but which will ultimately determine my destiny. That is because…
My destiny is not a matter of chance,
it’s a matter of choice
So many times we look around at other people who seem to have things so much better or so much easier that we do and to think that the only reason they are in that position is purely a matter of chance. They were born into wealth or they got some breaks along the way or they knew the right people. And you know what, as far as their earthly destiny, that might very well be true for a season. But when it comes to their eternal destiny, that destiny, just like all of ours, is 100% dependent on one crucial choice, not just chance.
In a moment, we’ll take some time to unpack that choice in some more detail.
TRUTH
But before we do that, we need to do what we’ve been doing each week in this journey through the Old Testament and set the stage. But this morning, I’m going to do that in a different way. This week, I ran across a video that provides the proper context in a very interesting way. So let’s watch that video.
[Play The Bible Project video on the Book of Joshua]
The choice that we all have to make today is the same choice that the Israelites had to make there at Shechem – What are we going to do? Are we going to choose to be faithful to God and experience a destiny that is full of life and blessing or will we choose to be unfaithful to God and experience a destiny of divine justice and exile?
I’m pretty sure that all of us here this morning would immediately say that our choice is to be faithful to God, right? But before we’re too quick to do that, let’s look at how Joshua addresses the nation of Israel when they, too, are quick to voice that choice without really thinking through the consequences of that choice.
Go ahead and turn to Joshua chapter 24 and follow along. I’m actually going to begin in the middle of the chapter, in verse 14:
[Read Joshua 24:14-15]
That part of the passage is probably pretty familiar to most of us isn’t it? Some of you probably even have some kind of plaque in your house with verse 15 written on it – “But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” But as we’re going to see this morning, making that choice requires a lot more than just putting a plaque with those words in your house.
Let’s continue and see how the people respond to Joshua’s challenge:
[Read Joshua 24:16-18]
The people immediately respond. “We will serve the Lord. We’ve seen what He has done on our behalf and we’re ready to serve Him.”
But Joshua is not so ready to just take their words at face value. He has seen what their hearts are like and he wants them to consider the cost of that commitment. Let’s look at his response:
[Read Joshua 24:19-20]
We need to be really careful here not to take these two verses out of context, either the context of the entire book of Joshua or the context of the entire Bible.
Joshua is just pointing out what has been true since the days of Adam and Eve. Because of man’s sin nature, he is incapable of serving God perfectly in his own strength and power. In a moment, I’m going to further discuss the idea of serving other gods, but for now what I want us to see is that because God is holy and jealous, when we make the choice to serve other gods instead of serving Him, we are then no different than the godless Canaanites that God had driven out of the land and we ought to expect the same treatment from God.
This is exactly what God had told the people before they entered into the Promised Land. In his long discourse in Deuteronomy 28, Moses had laid out the blessings that would accompany the people’s obedience and the curses that would result if they disobeyed God.
The point that Joshua is making here is that the people shouldn’t be too swift to make a commitment that they weren’t ready to keep because the consequences of continued disobedience would be the same that the Canaanites had experienced – God’s divine justice and exile. And unfortunately, as we’ll see later in our journey through the Old Testament, that is exactly what eventually happens to Israel.
But even in spite of Joshua’s waring, the people once again promise to serve God:
[Read Joshua 24:21-27]
For a second and third time, the people confirm their choice to serve God. So Joshua wrote their words in the Book of the Law and confirmed a covenant with the people by setting up a large stone under the terebinth tree – possibly the very same one where Jacob had buried the idols that his household had given up in response to the words he spoke that are echoed by Joshua here in verse 23:
So Jacob said to his household and to all who were with him, “Put away the foreign gods that are among you and purify yourselves and change your garments.
(Genesis 35:2 ESV)
He said, “Then put away the foreign gods that are among you, and incline your heart to the LORD, the God of Israel.”
(Joshua 24:23 ESV)
My destiny is not a matter of chance,
it’s a matter of choice
On the surface, it appears that the people made the right choice. Three times they had promised to serve God alone. But obviously they were merely giving lip service to that commitment, because by the time we get to the next book of the Bible – the book of Judges – we find that the people had already violated their promise:
And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers. And there arose another generation after them who did not know the LORD or the work that he had done for Israel. And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the LORD and served the Baals.
(Judges 2:10-11 ESV)
There is so much we could learn from this account. Certainly one thing that comes to mind is the importance of passing on our faith effectively from one generation to the next. But since our time is limited, let’s focus on…
APPLICATION
HOW TO CHOOSE TO SERVE GOD ALONE
1. Remember what God has already done
For time’s sake I’m not going to read the first 13 verses of Joshua 24. But I really encourage you to go back and do that later. In those 13 verses, Joshua exhorts the people to remember all that God had done for them, from the time He had first called Abraham and promised to give the land they now occupied to his descendants up until the present time. In verse 13 he summarizes what God had done for them by pointing out that they now had land they had not labored for, cities they had not built and a harvest that they had not planted.
If we’re going to make the choice to serve God alone then I think it is absolutely essential that we constantly remember what He has already done for us. Obviously the primary way we do that is through His Word. There are a lot of great reasons to be consistently reading the Bible, but I’m convinced that one of the most important reasons is to be constantly reminded of all the things that God has done for His people and for us personally throughout history.
Corporate worship is also an important way to be reminded of what God has done for us already. When we gather together with other believers and sing and read God’s word and pray and give with fellow believers, we remind each other of just how good God has been to all of us.
And, as we’ve talked about before, it might very well be helpful to establish some physical reminders of God’s goodness – things like baptism, or keeping a journal or some other way to be reminded of all that God has done for us.
2. Get off the fence
The biggest danger here wasn’t that the people wouldn’t worship God. It was that they would develop a religion that just mixed in God along with all the other gods that I’ll talk about in a moment.
When Joshua urged the people to choose which god they were going to serve, the implication was that the choice was not whether they were going to serve god, but rather which god they were going to serve. Joshua recognized that everyone serves someone or something. Even the atheist who claims to serve no god at all is serving the god of self.
Things have not changed at all today. And I think one of the biggest dangers for Christians and non-Christians alike in our culture today is not that they will reject Jesus, but rather that they will just add Jesus into their lives along with all the other gods that are already there.
Both Joshua and Jesus teach us that straddling the fence like that just won’t work in the long run. Joshua says “Choose whichever god you want to serve, but make a choice. Get off the fence.” And Jesus is even more direct in the Sermon on the Mount:
“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.
(Matthew 6:24 ESV)
The word translated “money” there is literally the word “Mammon”, which was actually the name of one of the Amorite guides that I’m going to talk about in a moment.
And if we’re going to be effective in getting off the fence and choosing who we will serve, then serving God alone requires us to take the third step:
3. Eliminate all other gods
It’s really easy for us to ignore this principle since there is a tendency for us to think we don’t have any other gods in our lives. I don’t know of anyone here who worships Allah or Buddha or who has some kind of carved idols in your house that you bow down to. But the list of other gods that Joshua includes here make it clear that a god can be anything or anyone for which we have such a passion that that thing or person governs the way we live.
In this passage, Joshua identifies three classes of gods other than the one true God:
• The gods your fathers served in the region beyond the river. This refers to the gods that the people worshipped during the time of Abraham’s father, Terah, in Babylon before God called Abraham to cross the Euphrates River and go to the land God would show him. There were a number of gods people worshipped there but two of the most prevalent there were:
o Tammuz and his mother Semeramis, who was revered as the queen of heaven, and who was also known as Astarte, the goddess of fertility. So basically it was the worship of sex.
o They also worshipped the zodiac, which may very well be why the tower of Babel was built in order to better follow the movement of the constellations.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see how those same kinds of gods exist in our culture today, does it, with people allowing their lives to be directed by their sexual appetites and their horoscopes.
• The gods your fathers served in Egypt. The Egyptians were pantheistic, making gods out of just about everything imaginable – the sun, the moon, the Nile River, even flies. And one of their chief gods was the calf. All of the plagues that God directed against Egypt were directed against their gods to prove that they really weren’t gods at all.
Today, we see a similar kind of worship where people have made gods out of the things that God has created and worship the creation rather than the Creator. Certainly the New Age movement falls into this category.
• The Gods of the Amorites. The Amorites had an essentially pragmatic approach to worship. They wanted abundant harvests so they worshipped a multitude of god and engaged in practices which they thought would promote fertility and growth. Their worship also included other practices which God considers detestable like child sacrifice and the occult.
Again it’s not too hard to find parallels in today’s culture. I would certainly argue that abortion is the present day equivalent of child sacrifice. Psychics and horoscopes carry on the occult. And there is no shortage of people who worship pleasure and material prosperity.
Unfortunately, we can unknowingly make gods or idols out of even good things in our lives. So how do I know when something or someone has become a god to me? I can’t give you a complete answer to that question in the time we have remaining, but a good place to start is to evaluate whether something is taking more of my attention, time and resources than I’m giving to God.
For me, planning a vacation is a huge part of the enjoyment I get from that vacation. I enjoy doing research, finding bargains and making the arrangements. But one of the things I have to guard against is that I don’t get so consumed with that process that it becomes a god where I spend more time thinking about and doing those things than I do reading my Bible and praying and developing my relationship with God. Now that may not be the thing that could become a god for you, but I think all of us probably have some of those potential gods in our lives and we need to take steps to guard against them taking the place of the one true God.
4. Stay the course
I’m going to be really brief here. I pointed out earlier that the choice of the people at Shechem that day was short-lived. Within one generation they had completely forgotten the commitment they had made.
As the apostle Paul reminds us, the Christian life is a marathon, not a sprint.
I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.
(2 Timothy 4:7 ESV)
God is not impressed at all by rash decisions that are made today only to be abandoned tomorrow. I think that is why Joshua was so adamant that the people count the cost before they made the commitment to serve God and why Jesus also urged His disciples to count the cost before they made the decision to follow Him.
My destiny is not a matter of chance,
it’s a matter of choice
INSPIRATION
This week I had the opportunity to go to lunch with three other guys that I went to high school with who have all become disciples of Jesus since that time. It was a really encouraging time. During our conversation, one of those guys, Ron, said something that has continued to resonate with me all week:
“There are a lot of believers, but very few followers”
That day at Shechem, there were a lot of believers who said “I believe God and I’ll serve Him.” And I don’t doubt that they were sincere in what they said that day. But it wasn’t long until those proved to be only hollow words and not a determined choice that would lead to the destiny that God wanted for them.
The one thing I don’t want to do in any way this morning is to cause any of you who have made a sincere choice to serve God alone to doubt that choice or the fantastic destiny that goes along with it. But on the other hand I would be remiss if I allowed anyone to leave here today thinking that you’ve made a decision for Jesus when that decision didn’t include remembering what God has already done for you, getting off the fence, eliminating any other gods in your life and counting the cost so that you’ll stay the course.
ACTION
So as we close this morning, I’m going to give you a few moments to pray about these things and ask God to reveal any changes that you need to make in your life as a result of what we’ve learned together this morning. But before you do that, will you commit right now to follow through and obey whatever God might reveal to you in these next few moments?
[Prayer]
Discussion Questions for Bible Roundtable
1. Why is it significant that God picked Shechem for this event? What other significant events had taken place there earlier? What application can we make to our lives?
2. What are some good things in our lives that could potentially become gods/idols? How do we keep that from happening?
3. Read Deuteronomy 18:9-14. How does this passage help us understand why God wanted His people to be so harsh with the Canaanites? What application can we make to our lives?
4. What are some practical steps we can take to evaluate whether something has become a god or an idol in our lives?
5. Why is it important to “count the cost” before we make a decision?
