Who Goes First? – Joshua 3
June 2/3, 2002
Intro:
At times in our lives, each of us reach points of critical decision – places where the decision we make will have huge effects on the rest of our lives. We come to a T intersection, and have to make a choice about whether we head left or whether we head right. I came to one of those points of decision in my life in 1992. I had been dating this wonderful, beautiful, brilliant young woman, and I decided to ask her if she would be my wife. I cooked a nice dinner (at her place… I lived with a bunch of messy bachelors and who wants to propose in that kind of atmosphere??), and then offered her a ring and the chance to spend the rest of her life with a great person like me… She faced a critical decision point then also. What to say to this guy who is somewhat strange, often stubborn, lazier and messier than she might have liked…
You can relate. You can look back and see those points of critical decision in your life as well. For many of us, the biggest decision we look back towards was a spiritual decision – the choice to accept God’s offer of salvation and invite Jesus to become our Savior and Lord. Career choices, decisions about how to respond to illness, if and when to start a family, all of these are critical points of decision.
Our friends the Israelites face just such a junction in chapter 3 of Joshua. As you are looking it up, I want to ask you to try to imagine spending your entire life dreaming of one thing. Your parents and grandparents dreamt of it before you, and would tell you stories from the time of your earliest memories about how wonderful it would be when this one thing finally came to pass. Now imagine that every other person you had ever known was also looking forward to this one thing – it was not a personal dream but rather a national dream, shared by everyone around you. All of your activities were supposed to be moving you in that direction, it was the one goal towards which everyone was striving. Can you imagine it? Can you feel the longing for it?
Try to imagine you are one of the Israelites as I read this story. (NLT).
Context:
Let’s put the story in context. First God chose Joshua to follow Moses as the leader of His people, and gives Joshua both the command, “Be strong and courageous and take the land,” and the promise, “I will be with you always.” Then Joshua sent two spies across the river to get a handle on what was waiting for the Israelites on the opposite side – they have returned with a favorable report. And now, finally, after forty years, the time has come.
We hear that 40 years figure all the time, and I wonder if we really appreciate how long of a wait that actually was for the people of God. I’ve never waited that long for anything – I’m not even that old! An entire generation has passed, the nation that stands here on the banks of the river was completely different than the nation that walked out of slavery in Egypt. So this national dream of a homeland has been the central focus of two complete generations of Israelites. And now the time has come. Now the command comes. It’s time to cross the river.
1. “Purify Yourselves…”
First, the leaders get the people ready – they go throughout the camp and tell them to follow the priests (vss. 3-4). There is a great line there in verse 4 – “since you have never traveled this way before.” This is a new chapter, a new adventure, a new land. And since it is all new, God is the guide.
Part of that preparation is a spiritual one. Joshua commands the people to “purify” themselves – to get spiritually ready for what comes next. (vs. 5). He knows that God wants to do something amazing, “great wonders,” as the NLT puts it. And he also knows that God can only do great wonders when we, His people, are pure. When we are holy.
There is a critical lesson here for us. If we want God to act in mighty ways in our lives and in our world, we had better stand before Him in purity. Now, we know that the first mighty thing that He does is to make us pure – to forgive us and release us and set us free – that is where it starts. I know that is kind of scary for some of us. We are afraid to stand before God and ask Him to purify us, we are ashamed, we are comfortable, we kind of like our sin because we are used to it and we have learned how to cope. In our more honest moments, we admit that it is harmful to us and to others around us, but we still lack something that will enable us to change and really experience freedom. I heard that on the news from people who smoke when the Alberta government slapped another huge tax on tobacco – “I know it’s bad for me, and for others, and it’s really expensive, but I’m still not going to quit. I can’t.” It’s like that with a number of things – treating those closest to us unkindly. Lying. Pornography. Being selfish. Sabotaging relationships with people who care about us because we are scared of really getting intimate, and then crying because we are lonely. It’s not that we want life to be like that, but we get trapped, then we get used to it, then we learn to cope and accept the things that are wrong, and then change becomes really really hard. Patterns get established that are hard to break.
Joshua says, “Purify yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do great wonders among you.” The same is true today. If we become pure, God can do these great wonders in our lives. Jesus said, "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor." (Lk 4:18-19). Freedom comes through Jesus, in the power of the Holy Spirit, and is simply proclaimed. (Sun: It is offered here, at the Lord’s table, this morning.) (Sat. maybe stop here for some ministry time?).
2. Standing in the River
Now the text doesn’t record for us the people’s obedience to the command to purify themselves, but we can safely assume they did. Because the next morning, Joshua heads over to the priests and gives them their instructions: “get the ark and lead us across the river.” That’s all he says! He doesn’t tell them that God is going to do a miracle, he doesn’t lay out the plan in detail, he just says get the ark and go jump in the river. And they start out. Verse 7 and 8 record for us the Lord speaking to Joshua, and making the instructions a little more specific – “just take a few steps into the river and stop.” But still no promise of a miracle, no explanation of why or what. Just the command. It isn’t until the next paragraph, when the entire nation has broken camp and is gathered at the edge of the river, that Joshua tells everyone how they are going to get across. He says in verse 13: “The priests will be carrying the Ark of the Lord, the Lord of all the earth. When their feet touch the water, the flow of water will be cut off upstream, and the river will pile up there in one heap.”
Imagine the response of the people! “Pardon? How does a river ‘pile up in one heap?’” I tried to recreate this scene in my mind. The text is a little confusing, but after studying it for a while I’ve come to the conclusion that what actually happened is this: the people gathered at the edge of the water, Joshua told them what was going to happen, and then the priests took the plunge. Now the text is careful to tell us that it was flood season (vs. 15). I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced a river that is flooding, but it is kind of a scary sight! A number of years ago I took a group of Junior High kids camping to Pembina River. We’d been there before, and the river was this nice, calm, slow, sedate, mellow river which gently meandered along. The year prior, we could walk down to the water’s edge, down a hill about 8 feet (vertical drop), and then spread out towels and stuff on a dry gravel bed about 20 feet wide before actually getting to the water. This particular year, though, the 8ft vertical decline was only about 4 or 5 feet and then suddenly I was waist-deep in the water. And I had to fight to stand up against the current – I had to plant my foot against a solid stone and lean way in in order to stay in one place. One of the park rangers casually mentioned that they were still looking for a couple of older teens that had been on the river the day before that they still hadn’t found… That is kind of how I imagine the Jordan. And Joshua tells the priests to go stand in it, holding the Ark of the Covenant. I don’t imagine that would have been an easy task! And yet it came with a promise – that as soon as their feet hit the water, the flow would be cut off upstream.
Let’s think about that for just a moment, shall we? This place “upstream” was 20 miles upstream. Now here is where the text gets a little confusing: did the water flow get cut off 20 miles upstream the moment the priests feet hit the water, or did God time the cut-off earlier so that the moment the priests step into the water they experience the river drying up? I believe that the flow started to get cut off the moment they took those steps – that is why I chose the NLT to work from today, because it makes this point clearly: half way through vs. 15 it says, “But as soon as the feet of the priests who were carrying the Ark touched the water at the river’s edge, the water began piling up at a town upstream called Adam, which is near Zarethan. And the water below that point flowed on to the Dead Sea until the riverbed was dry.”
Some of you are thinking, “so what?” Here is what I find fascinating and consistent with how God works even still today: if the NLT and I are right, then those priests stood in that river for quite some time before they saw anything happening. And the people stood on the banks of the river, watching this somewhat dangerous activity, without seeing anything happening for the first little while. Can you picture it? Joshua had said the river would stop, and we believe it, but so far… um, nothing’s happening…
Why am I making such a big deal about this? Because we always expect the miraculous to be instantaneous. And sometimes it is! And yet, more often I think it happens in our lives the same way it happened for those priests and Israelites. We have to wait. We have to stand in the water, fighting the current, believing in the promise, and then we see the miracle. Maybe God does it to test our faith, maybe He does it to prove His faithfulness and His presence prior to the miracle, maybe He does it to teach us how to be strong in the current, maybe He does it just because He works on a different agenda than we do. But here is the key to the promise: He always comes through. The Israelites would have likely seen a gradual miracle – the water level would have dropped slowly but steadily, and I can imagine them saying to one another, “I think it’s getting lower… maybe… yup there… or maybe that was like that before…” until it became completely obvious. That is often how I see God heal – it takes a bit of time, but He does it. That is often how I see God set people free – it takes a bit of time, an intentional process, some hard work on our part, but God does it. That is even how God saves people – it takes a bit of time, but God reveals Himself and draws people to salvation.
So we’ve noted the command to be pure before seeing God work “great wonders,” and we’ve seen that the miraculous isn’t always instantaneous. There is one other point I want to make from this story, and that is simply this:
3. God goes first.
I haven’t commented on the Ark of the Covenant yet. Basically, this was the visible symbol of the presence of God among them. In many ways, we can think of it as God’s throne among His people. It is this Ark that leads them across the river.
Part of the command was to keep their distance from the Ark – about a half mile. I see this upstream from where the people crossed – and if they happened to shoot a nervous glance upstream to see if the waters were surging towards them, they would see the Ark standing there. Standing between them and the mighty pile of water. The distance was a sign of respect, an evidence of the holiness of God.
But the significant point of the story, and even of the whole book of Joshua, is that God goes first. The Ark enters the water ahead of the people. The priests walk out and stand in the middle of the river “ahead of the people” (vs. 14). And then the people follow, they obey, they step out in courage and cross the river.
Conclusion/Application:
Let me quote from a commentary by John Huffman:
The Israelites stood at the banks of the Jordan River during the flood season. This was a terrifying experience. Most of us are familiar with long wilderness experiences to which we’ve become accustomed. There are moments in which we stand shuddering at the edge of the Jordan, knowing that before us are rushing waters, the fortress city of Jericho, chariots of iron, and even giants in the land. As leaders, we tend to be conservative, as do our people. We don’t have the natural openness that marked the life of Rahab. The nature of her business caused her to take risks. This doesn’t tend to be the nature of very many clergy and the majority of comfortable people who sit in comfortable pews. We are determined to hold on to the familiar. God wants to break through our constitutional conservatism and to help us become “crossover” people – people who are willing to grow and expand, claiming new territory, inheriting the future He has in store.
Here is the challenge for us today – will we take the risks to cross the river? I have a strong sense that we are at a critical decision point, individually for many of you here today, and also corporately. Individually, I know many of you need to make a decision to stand for Jesus – to partner with God in becoming free from the sins of the past – to step off the edge of the river bank into the flood waters. There are places in your life that God is begging you to give up to Him. There are places where God wants you to risk trusting Him. Today I proclaim to you God’s promise – He will set you free. He will first cross over ahead of you to show you the way, and He will also walk moment to moment by your side.
I want to challenge you to make that leap. And it strikes me that a big, big part of the Israelites crossing the river was that it was a public thing. The surrounding nations witnessed this – they knew the Israelites were coming and would certainly have spies and observers keeping a close watch on things. We know this from the last chapter – the people of Jericho were right on top of what was happening with these Israelites. I believe this crossing was the same – God used it to make His power known to all the people in the land. And so I want to challenge you to make that leap publicly. We are a community, this place is full of people who want nothing more than to be obedient to God, it’s safe for you to share your willingness to make a decision here right now. Let us encourage you! And support you and pray for you!
So, what is the Holy Spirit calling you to right now? Is it to confess an area of sin, is it to release something you are holding on to, is it to take a leap into whatever scary river is in front of you? I want to invite you to respond, to make that decision right now, and to make it publicly.
(Sat go to a time of prayer/song and then call people to share verbally; as the Spirit leads; Sun invite those people to come forward for communion).
We are crossing the river together. Corporately. God goes ahead, He is preparing the way, He is going to do “great wonders” in our community as we claim back God’s territory. (Sunday bridge here into communion. We need to have space for people to come to the front before we serve the elements; I think I should walk down to the table, make a few preliminary comments, and then have some time to prepare ourselves, which we should do with a song, which is also the opportunity for people to come to the front to make a public declaration of their desire to make some type of commitment. Then into the elements talking about a meal we share together, a covenant meal in which we first purify ourselves and then look to Jesus on the cross like the Israelites looked to the Ark, and then we “go” together.).
