Half of My Heart

We're going to finish up our series.

And Joshua and we've spent months watching God keep promise after promise.

The land taken, enemies defeated, nothing was left undone.

Today, in the last two chapters of the book of Joshua, Joshua turns and asks Israel the only question that actually matters after all of this.

Now, what are you going to do with it?

So, in other words, God has been incredibly faithful.

God has left nothing undone.

And he has this people that are here now.

What are you going to do now that God has gifted you all of this?

We have a lot of ground to cover this morning.

I'll be candid with you.

We're going to cover chapter 23 and 24.

And we have baptisms today, so I hope you guys are ready to be here until the Lions game starts.

We'll just put it on right afterwards.

It'll all be good.

He said no, so I won't.

I'm not going to do it.

The text that we have followed the commands of God to varying the truth is that the people followed the commands of God to varying degrees of success, as we've now seen.

And he these are gonna in many ways be and actually exactly be the last words of Joshua.

So I'm gonna ask you to open up uh the if you don't have your Bibles, there's a Bible right in front of you under the um seat.

Grab that.

In that particular Bible, we're gonna be on page 186.

So I invite you to turn.

And we're going to march through verses or chapter 23 and 24.

We're not gonna read everything for the sake of time, um, but I do encourage you at some point to sit down and immerse yourself in these last two chapters, because there is a a lot here.

Now, and starting in verse 23, uh, in chapter 23, verse 1, the author is doing something very deliberate, a deliberate callback to chapter 13, verse 1.

Let's just jump in quickly and read it.

A long time afterward, when the Lord had given rest, uh given rest to Israel from their surrounding enemies, and Joshua was old and well advanced in years.

So the narrator already tells us, old and advanced in years.

Joshua summoned all Israel, its elders and heads, its judges, its officers, and said to them, I am now old and well advanced in years.

I love that.

That's exactly what happened in chapter 13.

And the funny thing is, is I was like, I've heard somebody talk about this and make this joke, but I it wasn't me, so who was it?

And it was John.

He did chapter 13.

Uh, but, anyways, it is funny to just be like, and he's really old, and then he gets everybody together.

He's like, Yeah, I'm really old.

I'm just I'm kind of tired.

But I got some stuff to say.

So now he's gonna say it.

Verse 3.

And you have seen all that the Lord your God has done to all these nations for your sake.

And it's for the Lord your God that he has fought for you.

Behold, I have allotted to you an inheritance for your tribes, those nations that remain, along with all the nations that have already been cut off from the Jordan of the Great Sea to the west.

The Lord your God has pushed them back before you and drive them out of your sight, and you shall possess their land just as the Lord your God promised you.

Okay.

So God is a God who makes promises and then keeps those promises.

God is no liar.

Joshua says, You have seen all that the Lord has done, and this hasn't been reported to you.

You've witnessed it, you've been a part of it, you have seen this.

He says, So therefore, Joshua challenges the leader, starting here in verse 6.

Therefore, be very strong to keep and to do that what is written in the book of the law of Moses, turning aside from it neither to the right nor to the left, that you may not mix with these nations remaining among you, or make mention of the names of their gods, or swear by them, or serve them, or bow down to them, but you shall cling to the Lord your God just as you have done to this day.

So he starts where this whole book started.

God speaking to Joshua says, Be strong.

Deliberate echo to chapter 1, verses 6 through 9.

And Joshua is taking what God has told him personally and now bringing it to the leaders of the nation.

The call is to moral and covenantal strength and keeping the commands of the Torah.

And verse 7 is the imperative command.

It starts with that you may not, and he says, that you may not mix with these nations, make mention of the names of their gods, swear by them, serve them, bow down to them.

Again, they have walked into a nation, Canaan, that is completely pagan and has lots of different kinds of gods.

And they worship lots of different kinds of gods.

And so they're entering into this, having serving one God, Yahweh, and Joshua's saying, like, stick to that.

Don't let any of this stuff seep in.

That he says, but that you may cling to the Lord your God.

This is the same verb used in Genesis 2.24.

For the holding fast of husband and wife.

Verse 9.

For the Lord has driven out before you great and strong nations, and as you and as for you, no man has been able to stand before you this day.

One man of you puts to fight a thousand, since it is the Lord your God who fights for you, just as he promised you.

So Joshua is just going at, like he's saying, we got like, don't let any of that stuff seep in.

And let's remember, we're gonna see this all throughout these two chapters, of Joshua reminding the people of who God is and what God has done, and then it they are faced with what they're going to do with that.

Joshua gives the motivation for their obedience.

God has fought for you, God fights for you, God will fight for you.

The Lord has driven out before you strong nations.

No man has been able to stand before you this day.

No one man of you puts to fight to flight a thousand.

Again, God has done this.

We've seen it.

Since it is the Lord your God who fights for you.

Finally, after the command is uh to be strong and obedient, the motivation for it, Joshua gives his most overt warning.

Verse 11.

He says, Be very careful, therefore, to love the Lord your God.

For if you turn back and cling to the remnant of these nations remaining among you, and make marriages with them, so that you associate with them and they with you, know for certain that the Lord your God will no longer drive out these nations before you.

But they shall be a snare and a trap for you, a whip, and on your sides, and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from off this good ground that the Lord has given to you.

Okay, that is a very, very strong warning.

Joshua starts with, be careful.

Be careful to what?

To love the Lord your God.

Love the Lord your God.

Verse 11.

Draws on ancient Near Eastern treaty vocabulary where vassals, people, were commanded to love or to be loyal to their sovereign, whoever that was.

However, this is distinct from a normal ancient Near Eastern treaty because love as loyalty is essentially don't rebel and pay your taxes.

But this biblical command comes after God has already acted graciously and lovingly towards Israel first.

In other words, it in this treaty, God moved and acted graciously towards Israel before he asks anything in return.

Another display of grace.

Now, as Joshua continues on in verses 12 and 13, he names the specific danger: intermarriage and association.

Key is verse 8 and 12.

Verse 8 calls for God's people to cling to the Lord.

And verse 12 is he warns against clinging to the remnant of the conquered nations.

So these word choices, this idea of cling, to hold fast, it's not a coincidence.

He's saying, hold fast to God and his commands, to the Lord your God, love the Lord your God rather than cling to the remnant.

Now, to our modern ears, this sounds peculiar in some ways.

It could sure sound like ethnic purity.

Right?

I don't want them to intermarry or intermingle with those people.

Right?

This is what Joshua is going after here.

Is that we just need to keep everybody ethnically different?

I don't think so.

Is God concerned about ethnic purity or is she concerned about spiritual purity?

Just remember Rahab.

The Canaanite woman who had very questionable job.

Did God want nothing to do with her?

Or did he graft her into the family of God and put her in the lineage of Christ?

Or what of the Gibeonites who were wicked but threw in their lot with God and God grafted them as in as well?

Or what about later on in Ruth or Tamar earlier in Genesis?

Again, Gentile women who are in the line of Christ himself as Savior.

So he is not primarily or maybe at all concerned with ethnic purity.

This intermarriage problem is that he is very concerned about spiritual purity.

Person cannot cling to God and also cling to their idols at the same time.

Hold on to that one.

Now for the final words of his first speech.

I know we're going quickly.

Stay with me.

We're gonna go, we're gonna go fast, but stay with me, please.

Verse 14, and now I am not, I am about to go to the way of the earth.

And you know in your hearts and souls, all of you, that uh not one word has failed of all the good things that the Lord your God promised concerning you.

All that have come to pass for you, and none of them has failed.

Verse 15, but as all the good things that uh the Lord your God promised concerning you have been fulfilled for you, so the Lord will bring upon you all the evil things until he has destroyed you from off this good land that the Lord your God has given you.

Okay, now we've turned a corner.

Verse 16 If you transgress the covenant of the Lord your God, which he commanded you, and go and serve other gods and bow down to them, then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you, and you shall perish quickly from off the good land that he has given to you.

Again, a continued reminder of the way God works and interacts with his people.

God has not failed to follow through on any promise, not one, but also with that a solemn warning.

A warning of what life looks like when you are apart from God.

What life looks like when you are opposed to God.

It will look like what it has looked like for the nations that you have seen in this land that are essentially conquered.

Evil.

You are in a covenant with him.

And to break it is idolatry.

So he is a real warning.

You've seen what's happened to all these nations that are against me that are evil, you've seen it.

And if you go that way, your fate will be the same.

Okay, continuing on.

Chapter 3 was spoken to Israel's leaders at Shiloh, and chapter 24 gathers the whole nation at Shechem, which we have read uh our scripture reading this morning.

Now, chapter 23 warns stay faithful or you're gonna lose the land.

Chapter 24 formalizes a covenant sealed and witnessed.

Both share the same concern in many ways, loyalty to God who's kept every promise, but we're 23 assumes the answer, 24 makes Israel say it out loud.

We have a location shift, as I said.

Chapter 23 is was probably in Shiloh, the site of the tabernacle.

Chapter 24 explicitly moves to Shechem, about eight miles north.

Now, Shechem, if you remember, was where Yahweh first told Abram, To your offspring I will give you this land.

It's Genesis 12.

A promise now that's being fully realized.

Now, another note that I want you to keep in your back pocket is another thing that happened in Shechem.

Genesis 35.

Jacob and his household bury their foreign gods before building an altar.

So again, faced with this idea of idolatry, they have made the right, they made the right turn, and they took all of the idols that they had taken, and they had buried it, and they have gotten rid of it, and they have they have sent it away, and they built an altar to memorialize that.

Happened in this this same exact place.

Starting in verse 2, chapter 24.

Joshua said to all the people, Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, long ago your fathers lived beyond the Euphrates, Terah, the father of Abraham and Nahor, and they served other gods.

Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the river and led him through all the land of Canaan, and made his offspring many.

I gave him Isaac, and to Isaac I gave Jacob and Esau, and to Esau, the hill country of Seir, to possess, and Jacob and his children went down to Egypt.

So God, Joshua being his mouthpiece, takes them into the Wayback Machine.

He's continuing to remind them, and now he's going to really remind them.

And he reminds them of something interesting.

You didn't start off as believers.

You didn't start off that way.

Abraham was pagan, a moon worshiper.

A reminder that they did nothing.

This is why he starts here.

You did nothing to obtain this relationship with me.

I chose you.

God plucked Abraham and made him promises of land and offspring, not because he was deserving, but because he is God.

He didn't call Abraham because he showed unusual promise or virtue.

The call itself was the beginning of everything, an act of pure grace with no prior merit involved.

So he reminds them of that.

You didn't start off with me.

I plucked you out of the mess.

Now, again, for the sake of time, we're not going to read the next chunk, but I did want to kind of walk us through it, and I do think you should read it.

So it actually pains me in some ways to not this morning.

So I think you should, but I want to kind of go through it just so that we have our bearing.

So he starts off that way to remind them of Abraham and that God plucked him out for nothing Abraham had ever done, but because God is who God is.

And then in verses 5 through 7, he covers the way God was faithful in Egypt and the Exodus.

And then in verses 10, 8 through 10, he covers the time in the Transjordan and the victories that uh took place there over Sihon and Og and Balaam and Balak, that whole episode.

He covers that.

Verses 11 through 13, he deals with, he reminds them again of the conquest in Canaan, of what we just dealt with in the book of Joshua, all the nations that they had faced, and God had given them into their hands.

And this takes us up to verse 14.

Joshua tells them why this history lesson has taken place.

Now there's a lot going on in this section, and we're going to spend a few minutes trying to deep dive a bit, but again, for the sake of time.

But essentially, there are four beats that we're about to see.

In essentially verses 14 through 28.

And commentator Dale Ralph Davis is very helpful in helping us see.

So the first beat is essentially Joshua makes a demand in verses 14 through 15, and then Israel makes a decision in verses 16 through 18.

And then Joshua's response in verses 19 through 20 is a caution, a very strong caution.

But Israel insists in verse 21.

We're going to see all this.

Joshua questions again in verse 22.

Israel acknowledges this, and then Joshua makes another demand in 23.

Finally, beat four is Israel again reaffirms, now more fully, and a covenant is ratified.

This is the four beats, kind of back and forth.

So let's dive in.

Verse 14.

Now therefore, again after this history lesson, just to set the stage.

Now therefore, fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness.

Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the river and in Egypt, and serve the Lord.

And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the river, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you now dwell.

But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

So Joshua calls the people.

He sits them down.

Now the shift from 23 to 24.

23 is all the leaders.

Now 24 is all the leaders and all the people.

So everybody's listening now.

And he gives them this history lesson, reminds them of how they landed, where they are, all of God's faithfulness, and he calls the people to fear God, to honor him, to surrender to the Lord and serve him.

And then he puts every kind of divided loyalty that he just went through on blast, essentially.

He mentions the gods beyond the river, the gods of Egypt, to put away or to turn aside those false gods, those idols.

And he frames it as a choice.

He says, choose whom you serve.

And one of the things I want to unearth a little bit for us today is he frames it as a choice, but is it?

Let me explain.

Here would be the theoretical choice that Joshua's putting forth with the people.

Either serve the dead ancestral gods, the defeated Amorite gods, or God who did everything that he just said he did.

It's like, do you want the spoiled milk or do you want the milk?

It's your choice.

Right?

It's like it's one of those kinds of things.

It's like you can choose.

As for me and my house, we're gonna serve the Lord, who I just went through the laundry list of how he's been completely faithful to us and all the promises that he's made to us, they have all come through.

Not one thing has not happened the way that it's supposed to happen.

He has fought for us in a way that no other God obviously has fought for us.

He plucked us out of obscurity.

He's he's made us his people, not because we are owed it, but because he wants to give it to us.

So either serve that God or you can serve the dead ones.

The choice is yours.

What is Israel's response, verse 16?

Then the people answered, Far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods, for it is the Lord our God who brought us and our fathers up for the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, and who did those great signs in our sight and preserved us in all the way that we went.

And among all the peoples through whom we passed, and the Lord drove out before us all the peoples, the Amorite.

Who lived in the land.

Therefore, we also will serve the Lord, for he is our God.

Okay, that's a pretty good answer.

Right?

You're like, okay, let's close up shop.

Turn the page.

Judge is time.

Hopefully it goes okay.

Verse 19.

But Joshua said to the people, You are not able to serve the Lord, for he is a holy God.

He is a jealous God.

He will not forgive your transgressions or your sins if you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods.

Then he will turn and do you harm and consume you after having done you good.

Oh.

You kind of imagine people are like, oh, oh, okay.

That's not the answer.

I was kind of okay.

Joshua has gotten the answer that he wanted in many ways, but he responds with, you can't do it.

Joshua says that God is holy.

God is jealous.

He will not forgive you if you serve the false gods.

In fact, he will destroy you if you do.

Now, I don't believe that Joshua is doubting their sincerity in that moment.

It's Joshua exposing that they haven't reckoned with the cost of what they just said.

Study and understanding and reading a lot of their differing perspectives on exactly what is happening here, and if another time maybe we can dive down this, but I think, but I think that what makes the most sense to me, what has been believed for a long time about this, is Joshua is saying, Yahweh is holy and jealous, and he won't keep forgiving rebellion indefinitely.

And if Israel deserts him, he will consume them.

Joshua is dramatically poking at the kind of cheap, emotionally worked up commitment.

Sort of decision people make in the moment without reckoning with what they're actually promising.

I believe that Joshua is making sure, as best he can, that this commitment is genuine and not cheap.

And as he says this, Joshua 24, verse 24, the people respond, and it says, And the people said to Joshua, No, but we will serve the Lord.

Joshua 24:24

So they double down even after that challenge.

Verse 23.

Then Joshua said to the people, You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen the Lord to serve him.

And they said, We are witnesses.

And he said, Then put away the foreign gods that are among you and incline your heart to the Lord, the God of Israel.

So Joshua goes, Okay.

And he starts using courtroom languages, but you are witnesses against yourself.

You're on the record now.

And if you stray, if you don't do what you're saying you're gonna do, we will remember what you said here, and you will be a witness even against yourself.

Then for the third time, Joshua repeats this demand in verse 14.

Get rid of the foreign gods that are among you.

This is the second time he's done it.

Again, keep that in your back pocket.

Verse 24.

And the people said to Joshua, the Lord our God we will serve, and his voice we will obey.

As you compare this to the first confession, verse 18, uh, you know, we will also serve the Lord against the second, uh, the Lord will, our God we will serve, and his voice we will obey.

This is addition of obedience.

What God says we will obey.

Some scholars give Israel the benefit of the doubt here that they they said that they would obey.

There's another way to look at this.

We will here in a second.

Verse 25.

So Joshua made a covenant with the people that day and put in place statutes and rules for them at Shechem.

And Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law, and he took a large stone and set it up under the Terebeth, and was the sanctuary of the Lord.

Joshua said to all these people, Behold, this stone shall be a witness against us, for it has heard all the words of the Lord that he has spoken to us.

Therefore, it shall be a witness against you, lest you deal falsely with your God.

So Joshua sent to the people away, every man to his inheritance.

So he basically says, Okay, then we are going to make a covenant here, and we are going to memorialize this covenant.

And this stone that is here is a witness.

It is a memorial for us to remember the commitment that we have made to God based on what God has already committed and done for us.

And we this this we will be witnesses against ourselves, and so will this rock if we don't follow through.

The covenant has been renewed, and there was a memorial stone put there.

It would be a reminder that they kept it or they didn't, a physical marker that will function as a silent legal witness against Israel if the covenant is later broken.

The final section of this book, this chapter, but this book is what was already read this morning as our scripture reading, but we'll read it again here.

After these things, Joshua the son of Nun, servant of the Lord, died, being 110 years old, and they buried him in his own inheritance in Timnath Sarah, which is in the hill country of Ephraim, north of the mountain of Gash.

Israel served the Lord all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua and had known all the work that the Lord had done for Israel.

As for the bones of Joseph, when the people of Israel brought them up from Egypt, they buried them at Shechem.

The piece of land that Jacob bought from his sons, from the sons of Hamor, father of Shechem, for a hundred pieces of money.

It became an inheritance of the descendants of Joshua, or Joseph.

And Eliezer, the son of Aaron, died, and they buried him at Gibeah, the town of Phineas, his son, which had been given to him in the country of Ephraim.

So we have this callback, this interesting callback.

So Joshua is buried in his plot of land, and they have this interesting callback when the people of Israel left Egypt, they brought the bones of Joseph with them, and we finally get Joseph's final resting spot.

With that, a great servant of the Lord had passed away.

He was buried.

And with that, the name that shares his name.

This book is also finished.

Now, next week, we are going to start our series in Judges.

We're going to continue on.

That will lead us probably up to around Christmas time.

And we'll turn the page to Luke.

So we'll be out of the Old Testament for a while.

We'll be in Luke for a while.

But it's interesting as we as we are about to see, and I don't want to give too much away, but the truth is go home and read it for your own on your own.

Spoilers alert for yourself.

Just go read the Bible.

But judges, things don't go very well.

And it leaves us in a spot as we kind of know that as Joshua ends here, we kind of go, okay, we've spent a lot of time walking through this book, and a lot of, this has been a difficult book, a lot of things that our society, even in our culture, they look at this book and they read it and they just go, I don't like any of the things that happen in there.

We've marched through that, and I encourage you to go back and listen if you haven't already.

We have these two chapters, these two farewell speeches, an old man standing before his people twice, saying a lot of the same things, but with a little bit of a different twist.

And if we had to put this all together into one sentence or one statement, I think it's this.

Total faithfulness calls for an undivided heart.

So total faithfulness calls for an undivided heart.

Let me unpack that a little bit.

One of the things that we have seen in this final two chapters is a rundown of the complete faithfulness of God.

And then he he makes the the challenge that's made is regarding your heart and my heart, the heart of the Israelites, but in today's terms, your heart and my heart.

It does beg a question.

Are our hearts divided?

Notice the order here.

God doesn't demand an undivided heart and then go prove himself worthy of it.

It's the other way around.

Joshua, verse in Joshua 24, verses 2 through 13, Joshua stands in front of the whole nation and rehearses in detail everything God has already done.

Joshua 24:2–13

Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the Exodus, Balaam's curse turned into a blessing, Jericho's walls, land they didn't clear, vineyards they didn't plant, cities they didn't build, point by point, generation by generation, one word has not failed.

So when verse 14 finally says, Therefore, therefore, the fear of the Lord, therefore, put away the other gods.

Therefore, serve him.

That word is carrying the weight of everything that came before it.

This isn't a demand out of nowhere.

This is a demand that comes after the case has already been made completely and full.

God doesn't ask for everything before he's given everything.

But again, we might ask, why undivided?

Why not mostly?

Why not eventually?

Or as much as you can manage at this time.

Because of who God actually is.

Verse 19, the line that stops everyone in their tracks.

Israel just said enthusiastically, we will serve the Lord.

And Joshua's response is, you are not able to serve the Lord, for he is a holy God.

He is a jealous God.

Again, that's not Joshua being difficult.

That's Joshua telling the truth about who God is.

Jealousy in God is not insecurity.

It's love that refuses to share with us, share us with something that can't actually carry us.

We don't get to keep the gods, the little gods, in the tent, so to speak.

And call the rest of our heart faithful.

Not because God's keeping score, but because we're the ones who lose something every time we do.

A divided heart doesn't shortchange God necessarily.

It shortchanges us.

And here's what should unsettle us in many ways.

How many, watch how many times they say this, we will serve the Lord, verse 18.

No, but we will serve the Lord, verse 21.

We are witnesses, verse 22.

The Lord our God we will serve in his voice we will obey, verse 24.

Four times, rising in intensity the whole time, but twice, verses 14 and 23, Joshua tells them to do one specific concrete thing.

Put the foreign gods that are among you away.

Do not cling to them, cling to me.

And what we don't hear in this passage, and I think becomes implicit as we walk into judges, is we get no confirmation that they actually did it.

Now, again, compare that.

I already said it, but I'll say it again.

Compare that to Jacob, generations earlier, at the exact same spot in Genesis 35, where his household actually buries their foreign gods under an oak tree, and the text tells us plainly that that happened.

And Joshua 24 pointedly does not tell us that.

Now that's not to say that they didn't actively go do that, but it is to say, if we read some clues here and see what happens in Judges, they didn't really do it.

They still hung on a little bit.

Their mouths were fully surrendered, their hands were not told.

And that's what a divided heart looks like.

It's really dramatic.

It doesn't announce itself.

It sounds like the right word said sincerely, followed by nothing changing in the one place that actually is asked to change.

That's what it happens, looks like in my life oftentimes.

So here's the question underneath.

It's not just do we believe in God?

That's a good question.

Well, what have we said yes to God about that we're we've never actually let go of?

What note is our heart tuned to?

What's actually humming underneath quietly and in the parts of our body, and the parts of ourselves that nobody's checking?

Comfort that we won't risk, approval we can't live without, control we keep talking back, uh taking back the moment God asks us to release it.

A relationship, a habit, a grievance.

We've said, I've surrendered this.

And it's still right there.

In the tent, not dealt with.

Total faithfulness calls for an undivided heart.

Not a louder yes, a whole one.

Here's the honest truth.

On our own, we're not able to serve the Lord with an undivided heart.

But everything this passage has shown us about God, not one word failed.

Every promise kept was fully lived out by one man, Jesus.

Jesus who prayed, Not my will, but yours be done before he was crucified.

And he meant it all the way to the cross.

His heart was never divided, not once.

And that's the gospel.

His faithfulness isn't just an example, it's actually credited to us.

We're not saved because we finally managed a whole heart.

We're saved because he had one and gave it to us, a new heart.

And because of that, he does the second thing too.

He gives us a new heart and we can actually that we can actually walk in.

I will give you a new heart and put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in me.

What Joshua could never ask for, could only ask for, I'm sorry.

Jesus fulfilled, and he gives to you and me.

So choose this day whom you will serve.

Being reminded that he's already chosen you when you are in Christ.

Total faithfulness calls for an undivided heart.