Joshua 1:16-18

Unanimity

Jos 1:16-18

JOSHUA had commanded the officers of the people to pass through the host, saying, "Prepare you victuals; for within three days ye shall pass over this Jordan, to go in to possess the land, which the Lord your God giveth you to possess it." A charge was delivered to the people, interpreting the divine will, and promising great blessedness, possession, and rest. The people having heard the appeal answered Joshua saying, "All that thou commandest us we will do, and whithersoever thou sendest us, we will go." We see men occasionally at their best, and then the revelation of human nature is not without enchantment and great comfortableness. Men like to speak in crowds, to multiply their voices by a thousand and ten thousand; and then they imagine that they are revealing the strength and enjoying the confidence of what is termed unanimity. It is a beautiful thing to see forty thousand men all intent upon one purpose, and to hear them uttering one cry, and to know that their utterance is expressive of an obedient spirit. This is the answer which ought to have been given, and which ought now to be given to every divine appeal. We should answer love by love; we should answer music by music; when heaven descends to earth with some unusual blessing, earth should become almost heaven in its grateful appreciation and response. We see this sometimes in the sanctuary. A sublime revelation of divine care, providence, grace is made, and hearts are melted into one, and the final hymn becomes a pledge, a solemn vow, a great musical consecration of the heart. It is beautiful now and again to see what ought to be, occasionally to see the ideal, now and again to hear a common sentiment uttered by an inspired heart; surely such are sights and sounds which might do us good evermore! Herein is part of the benefit of the sanctuary: we become our best selves under its holy inspiration. We did not know altogether what was in us whilst we were outside the sanctuary, walking solitarily, brooding upon our own thoughts, and heaping up reproaches against society; when we came into the house of God and heard the universal language, something moved in us which claimed kinship with the speech, and we longed to spring with a thousand men to our feet to sing our convictions and to utter our vow in solemn music. You do not see a man at any one moment; you see some aspect of him, but what he is as to his true spiritual bulk, value, scope, force, you do not see at any one observation: but you see most of him when under the sway of inexpressible emotion, when his prayer is interrupted with praise, when his supplication sobs itself into confession and humiliation, and when his hope rises into song and expresses itself in exclamations of loyalty and thankfulness to God. We never could have known human nature in its wholeness but for religious influences and Christian appeals. The divine appeal is a resurrection-trumpet: it awakes the dead within us, it makes the churchyard of the heart throb with new life. You lose inexpressibly by cutting off religious connections, by interrupting channels through which religious communications flow. It seems to be an easy thing to leave the church and to allow great voices and appeals to waste themselves upon the empty wind, but we cannot tell how much we lose by ceasing to mingle in the common emotion and reciprocate the universal sentiment of the church. To leave the altar is to forego the touch which connects us in a mysterious but wonderfully sensible manner with the eternal throne, the infinite power, the ineffable grace. So do not put away the blessing of an ideal answer. The people meant every word of it. They did not know what they said; still, they were excited to a nobler selfhood than perhaps they had ever realised before; and we do say things in prayer and hymn and religious speech the full scope of which we do not apprehend; do not be literal with us and say that we lied in the hymn, that we committed treason in the prayer, and spoke falsely in the noble excitement; it is not so: another self, larger, better than we have ever known before, rose up within us and sang that grand hymn, uttered that heaven-moving prayer, and ennobled that sublime excitement.

This is an answer which experience has uniformly discredited. We have never lived this reply. The words are still ringing in the air, and the air seems to have a kind of pleasure in retaining the tones and reproducing them, until they become not reminders only but reproaches and criticisms and appalling judgments. We remember the altar: we need no mocking spirit to remind us how far we have wandered from it. We remember the wedding-day when Christ and we became one, and what a feast there was on that radiant morning; what vows were exchanged; what love was pledged; how the future was enriched with all the hospitality of inexhaustible bountiful-ness so that we would for ever dwell in the banqueting-house and for ever hear the flapping of the banner bearing the divinest name! We know what we said when we were young. Youth has a speech all its own a flower language, a garden rhetoric, a beautiful efflorescence and poesy. Every word was meant, and by the help of God the soul now says, every word shall yet be redeemed! But what wandering we seem to have had; how wayward we are; how subtle are the influences which bear upon memory, and becloud the imagination, and pervert the heart, and enfeeble the will! Did Adam fall? Certainly. There ought to be no more fully-attested truth in all the range of the theological judgment and imagination than the fall of every living man. Compare the speech of promise and its attempted excuses; compare yesterday and today; contrast the morning prayer with the evening recollection. No other man could fall for us. We seem to think there is a kind of substitutionary action in the Adamic apostasy, as if Adam had mysteriously consented to fall on our account, or to represent us in a great tragedy. The truth is, every man falls himself, in himself, and for himself; and the experience of the world is lost upon every one of us: were it not so, the first two chapters of Ecclesiastes would save the world from all further practical mistake. But nobody believes those two chapters; they read fluently, the style is copious and urgent, the experience is full of colour, and it beats with a very strong pulse, and we would not like to give up the chapters as part of a literary treasure, but who believes them? No living soul! Every man builds his own Jerusalem, gets around him his garden of delights, yields to his own serpent, and is damned on his own account. It is not for us to become the censors of antiquity, saying that Israel failed to carry out in literal exactness the pledge which was made almost in song. Let us keep to our own experience; stand upon the facts which make up our own daily life, and through them we shall see how it was that antiquity sinned and that the first man fell. Were we to close here we should close under a great cold cloud; but this is not the stopping-place: there are points beyond.

This was an answer given without full consciousness of the motive which dictated it. We are not rapid, as we certainly are not exact, in the analysis of motive: we take the first explanation which comes to hand, and are content if other people will receive it. A mysterious action is this, which we have come to know by the name of motive, that is to say, why we do certain things, or say them, fear them, or hope for them. It is not always convenient to descend into the secret place where motive lives and reigns. It is better sometimes not to know the deeper psychological reality. What was the case in this particular history? A great promise had been made; land was to be given; rest was to be assured: Sabbath was to dawn upon the world, and the desert was to be as a fruitful field; under this promise the command was given, and whilst the command and the promise mingled together in a common music, the people said We are ready! Nor did they speak untrustfully or insincerely. We do not surely know by what motives we are moved. Motives are not simple, they are complex, mixed up with one another, now coinciding, now separating, again approaching, and not to be expressed fitly in words. How far did the promise of the land tell upon the obedience of the men who answered Joshua? Who can tell how subtly the word "rest," which occurs so often in this opening chapter, entered into weary lives, distracted hearts, and made men ready to say anything that lay in the direction of its immediate and complete realisation? Who can take himself out of himself? Who can die unto God? This is a miracle which lies beyond us just now; yet it is well to keep our eyes upon a plan a position that must be attained if we are to grow up into the measure of the stature of men in Christ Jesus; we are to have no self: when asked where our life is, we are to point to the Cross on which it has been nailed and on which it has expired. Do we not find the operation of the same motive now in our spiritual experience? What is it that has been promised? rest, release from the torment of conscience, the destruction of accusing recollection; another promise has been made under a sweet name which no man has ever been able to define: we are to have heaven. We have placed heaven above the blue sky: we would not have it in the east or in the west, but straight up in the zenith of the visible firmament. We have thought of heaven as a place of pureness, rest, joy, song, recognition of one another, riddance of all evil, escape from death in every form; and whilst godly men have been making the soul these promises, what if the soul said We accept the conditions; we will obey; for such a prize we are prepared to serve and suffer until life's last day? Having uttered the pledge, we have another step to go to get back to old lines, and perhaps the interposition of that one step may happily deter us from returning to our old pursuits. A prayer should be a thick wall through which it is difficult to get back to the old non-praying state; a day in church should separate us by a practical eternity from all evil and irreligious propensity and act. Are not many men Christians because they want to. go to heaven? It is a poor reason, yet it may be better than none at all. It is full of selfishness: it is a little, narrow, unworthy reason. What we should aim to be enabled to say is this: If this life were all, it is better to live in the spirit of Christ than in any other spirit; if so be God will it that we are but contributaries to a greater humanity and an enduring civilisation, it is enough that we have ever prayed and ever loved. Who can attain that spiritual sublimity? We cling to the promised Canaan; we long to escape the threatened perdition. Our reasoning may be in all such respects narrow, superficial, and selfish, still, it is something to begin with: for the literary truth of Christianity cannot be urged upon us all at once: we have to grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, so that every day brings not its new Bible but its new interpretation, its larger claim, its ennobled and brightened outlook.

This was an answer given before battle. The idea of the battle was not fully recognised. The Lord said, "I will give you," and scarcely, as we have seen, had "I will give you" been uttered than the other words were, "Fight for it!" What land were they to possess? the land whereon their feet trod. You must go the land to claim it: your footprint must be your title. We are not called to some land that lies in the unmeasured region of the fancy; the land shall be yours whereon soever you set the sole of your foot. Hence we read in the third verse, " Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you, as I said unto Moses." That Is the true idea of possession. Do not live in the imagination "but in the realisation of spiritual truths. What have we fought for. Is there now a man who can stand up and say, "I have fought for my faith, and I hold it with a hand that has bled"? What wonder that we change our faiths easily if we took them into possession easily? We simply heard of them, and we desire to hear no more about them. Who has studied, pondered, prayed, corrected himself, modified his conclusions readjusted them, and gone on from point to point as from conquest to conquest, now and again chargeable with inconsistency, but only with the inconsistency of self-correction, profounder criticism, and using a broader light than was available yesterday? We want sturdy soldiers in the Church men who say, Though all is given to us, yet it has to be fought for, and our answer before battle shall be quiet, modest, religious. "Let not him that girdeth on his harness boast himself as he that putteth it off." "Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall." Do not force us to answer just now. We have heard the sublime appeal; we know it has come down from infinite heights, it has about it the fragrance of other worlds, thank God for it! for its broad words, its grand challenges: they move the soul, they shake the spirit out of prison; but as for the full reply, we ourselves will wait: every day we will add a syllable to the answer, secretly hoping that by the grace and comfort of the Holy Ghost we may be able at the end of the days to present a complete word, steady as a planet, bright as the sun, glorious with the purity of a good conscience; just now our answer must be hesitant, broken, confused, but, believe us, our meaning is right: we will pray ourselves into greater prayers, and transfer ourselves through the medium of action into higher sacrifice and higher expositions of holy mysteries. Do not judge any one by the one day. We are aware that he replied ecstatically "I will!" and he meant it in the very secret places of his soul. We know that the day after he faltered and fell, but his faltering and falling did not destroy the purpose of his soul: the seed of God was in him; and he in whomsoever that seed is found must win Canaan, with all its light and rest, its everlasting morning and its surprising joys. Do not fix your mind upon your failures and slips and apostasies; they are a thousand in number and they are without defence, but you can say, "Lord, thou knowest all things: thou knowest that I love thee." If you can say so honestly, the battle is won before it has begun; if you can say so sincerely, you need have no fear of the end; only be strong and very courageous, and there shall not a man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life. What are the appeals addressed us? not to take a Jericho measurable, but to advance to positions remote but glorious. "What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God." "Come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord,... and I will receive you." "If any man come to me, and hate not his father and mother... he cannot be my disciple." Who is on the Lord's side side of righteousness, side of truth, side of pureness? These are the questions and propositions that are thundered upon our ears. Let us reply saying, God helping us, we will endeavor to be true, constant, loyal.

Prayer

How many there are whose life is a battle thou knowest, O Father of all living! They wonder why they should exist; all things are hard to them: the night is dark, every road is difficult of passage, every door is shut, every man is a foe. They wonder and can hardly pray; they are amazed, and struck down with astonishment. Yet sometimes a little shining of light makes them glad; then they foretell the time of peace and rest and joy. Thou hast set in the midst of the week a day on which there shall be proclamation from time to time of thy mercy and sympathy, and on which some hint of life's great meaning shall be given to the sons of men. Thou dost show us that all thy way is full of goodness, though we cannot now realise the significance of every event. When the grave is dug, thy meaning is pitiful and merciful and most compassionate; when thou dost send sorrow upon our life it is to chasten and refine that life and cleanse it of all defilement Thou dost cause all things to work together for good to them that love thee; and thou dost surprise thy children by newness of revelation. We set to our seal that God is true; we will stand up and say in the hearing of men God is good, and his mercy endureth for ever; he abideth through all the ages, and his love is an unchanging light. We are enabled to say this notwithstanding the battle, the bereavement, the great loss, the mortal disappointment; when we recover ourselves a little we say, Thou hast done all things well; thy will not mine be done; lead kindly Light. So we feel it worth while to fight all the battle and endure all the sorrow, that at the end we may see light as we never saw it before, and feel the very peacefulness of peace, the very restfulness of rest. We come to thee by a way that is living, the eternal way, the only way. We look unto Jesus, and are saved: we behold the Lamb of God, and in beholding him with the eyes of our faith we see our sins carried away. Was ever love like his? Scarcely for a righteous man will one die: for a good man peradventure some would die; but thou dost magnify thy love towards us in that while we were yet sinners neither righteous nor good Christ died for us, amazing love! Oh the depth of the wisdom and grace! We are amazed; we are made glad; we feel we are forgiven. Amen.