Today’s passage is one of the reasons why most people – even Christians – don’t read much of the Old Testament. It’s also why I thought long and hard about whether to look at Joshua for our Daily Inspirations. Where’s the feel-good factor here, the nugget of encouragement?! It’s tempting to settle for enjoying the Psalms, maybe the last bit of Isaiah and a few other iconic stories, but leave the other 1,000 pages of the Old Testament alone!
And yet: if we believe that ‘all Scripture is God-breathed’ – and bear in mind that St Paul wrote this when the New Testament hadn’t been assembled, so he was referring to the Old Testament – we have to tackle passages like this head-on, and ask the hard questions. Why it is here? Why the destruction?
The central question which the bible addresses, and which is the besetting problem of all human history, is the corruption of the human heart. God made us to walk with him, in loving intimacy and joyful obedience. But we just don’t. Mostly we either won’t, or can’t. This is the universal human condition – but it’s not what we were created to be. So how do we restore this loving relationship, how do we live the kind of life God calls us to?
By the time of Joshua, the people had God’s law, given to them through God’s encounters with Moses. But they were endlessly distracted by the cultures around them: so the solution was to live in a land where there were no other influences. That is why they are told to purge all other inhabitants: to create an environment in which they could obey God’s law completely, and in doing so, become a model society which demonstrated to the rest of humanity the right way to live.
It failed, and even before his death, Moses knew why, and told them so – the problem was not God, or his law, but us: ‘Take this Book of the Law and place it beside the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God. There it will remain as a witness against you… For I know that after my death you are sure to become utterly corrupt and to turn from the way I have commanded you. In days to come, disaster will fall on you because you will do evil in the sight of the Lord.’ (Deuteronomy 31:26,29)
Harsh words: but proved true, again and again. The people’s heads were turned by the pagan cultures around them, whose religions not only included worshipping other deities, but some truly abominable practices: child sacrifice was not uncommon in parts of the land they were settling. We need to beware seeing the towns they were fighting against as ‘innocents’ – brutality was normal, and there was little concept of the individual: tribes lived, or died, together.
Ultimately, the Old Testament shows us that we need another way, a better way. And God gave us a radical new solution: he would take the evil of the world – my evil, your evil – upon himself, and then dwell in our hearts directly. This new solution is promised in the Old Testament, but also embedded in ‘glimmers of grace’ throughout its pages. Even here, in this grimmest of chapters, we see it. As the King of Ai is raised on a wooden pole, so we can’t help but think of Someone Else, more than 1,000 years later who would likewise be lifted on a wooden pole, for our salvation. As St. Paul testifies in Galatians 3:13-14, the curse of being lifted on a tree becomes the source of grace. God enters into this broken world and redeems even its harshest practices.
Today, give thanks that God led humanity towards a better way. It may be some way off in Joshua, but there are echoes here. Grace is the beautiful, subversive idea which runs like a golden thread through all of Scripture: and which has, gloriously, saved you, and me.