“If it does not please you to serve the Lord, decide today whom you will serve, the gods your fathers served beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose country you are now dwelling. As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).
This passage comes from the Ebook of Joshua, the sixth ebook of the Previous Testomony, in response to the web site Bible Gateway. It is named after Joshua, the chief of the Israelites.
The twenty fourth chapter of Joshua “has often been cited as a seminal passage of Scripture, where ancient ritual fractures modern routine to re-establish faithful worship for God’s people,” Carlos Campo, PhD, instructed Fox Information Digital.
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Campo serves as CEO of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.
“What makes the passage powerful for me is its formal call for a response and its emphasis on how we are a ‘forgetting people’ in nearly constant need of reminding of what God has done for us,” he stated.
Carlos Campo, PhD, CEO of the Museum of the Bible, described Joshua 24 as “a seminal passage of Scripture.” The U.S., he additionally stated, could also be in want of a “call to action.” (Museum of the Bible; iStock)
Within the chapter, Joshua gathers the Israelites for a “covenent renewal ceremony” in a spot that was “fraught with meaning for them.”
Shechem, the place Joshua had everybody meet, “is the place where Abram (even before he became Abraham) first encounters the Lord and enters into a covenental relationship with him in Genesis 12,” Campo famous.
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Additionally it is the identical location in Genesis 33 the place “Jacob ‘pitched his tent for 100 pieces of money'” and “the place Joseph requested to be buried as he lay dying in Egypt” in Genesis 50, Campo stated.
“As one commentator has said, Shechem is ‘Lexington and Plymouth Rock and Independence Hall all in one,'” Campo famous.
The biblical metropolis of Shechem, seen right here on this 2022 photograph, was the positioning of many notable occasions within the Previous Testomony, Campo famous. (iStock)
Location apart, “the ritual itself is a remembrance and a call to action,” he stated, noting that Joshua “likely shocks his audience by proclaiming that ‘your ancestors … worshiped other gods,’ a fact only implied in earlier narratives.”
Joshua instructed these assembled about God’s faithfulness to different prophets “right up to the present day.”
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“They have all ‘crossed the Jordan’ together, but now the fateful choice remains for all,” Campo stated. “Will the Israelites proceed to worship the gods of their ancestors or, like him, ‘serve the Lord?’”
“Joshua requires the people to affirm their choice three times — just as Jesus requires of Peter after the resurrection — emphasizing the solemnity and finality of this ultimate, binary choice: ‘Whom will you worship?'” Campo stated.
“As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
However earlier than something will be stated, Joshua leads along with his declaration, one which has “become a mantra for God-followers throughout the ages,” he stated. “‘As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.'”
This declaration “stands in contrast to the vacillation of the Israelites,” Campo stated, “who seem given to azab or ‘forsake’ as easily as they would abad or ‘serve’ the Lord.”
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“In their spiritual equivocation, the Israelites establish a pattern that history has repeated endlessly: God’s people renewing their faith only to stray and then be ‘revived’ to serve him once again,” Campo stated, pointing to the numerous revivals which have occurred in america all through the centuries.
Joshua’s declaration, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord,” has “become a mantra for God-followers throughout the ages,” Campo stated. (iStock)
These revivals “have served to awaken the slumbering faithful, punctuating the forgetful nature of a fallen people, given to mammon instead of manna, to Babylon instead of Bethlehem,” he stated.
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“Joshua’s people had passed into the promised land but had also forsaken the edicts of the Lord. They had become assimilated with the neighboring people and are now distracted by ‘foreign gods’ and the allure of the new and exotic,” Campo stated.
“In their spiritual equivocation, the Israelites establish a pattern that history has repeated endlessly: God’s people renewing their faith only to stray and then be ‘revived’ to serve him once again.”
Joshua knew it was apt to “gather and collectively remember God’s faithfulness and renew the covenant, pledging to be faithful,” he added.
The U.S., Campo stated, could also be in want of “that same reminder and call to action.”
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“In the face of increasing rancor and divisiveness is some new return to faithfulness waiting to be birthed to a somnambulant nation,” he stated.
“Time will reveal all things, but Joshua’s covenantal call seems as relevant as ever.”
