Easter 7
1 June 2025
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
Gregory Pope
CONQUEST: LIFE IN THE PROMISED LAND
(From Creation to New Creation: The Biblical Story #5)
Joshua-Judges-1 Samuel 1-15
As the biblical world turns and the biblical story continues . . . the Hebrew people have completed forty years of wandering in the wilderness and have now approached the entrance to the Promised Land at the Jordan River.
During her time as Israel’s prime minister Golda Meir remarked that Moses led her people 40 years in the wilderness and brought them to the only place in the Middle East without any oil! BUT . . . it was a land flowing with milk and honey.
To lead God’s people into the Promised Land, Moses, before his death, lays hands on Joshua as a sign of God’s anointing. Following the death of Moses Yahweh tells Joshua: Proceed now to cross the Jordan into the land I have promised. Be strong and courageous, for you shall put this people in possession of the land that I swore to their ancestors. Do not be frightened or dismayed, for I, the Lord your God, am with you wherever you go.
Whenever we prepare for some task or ministry to which God is calling us, this same instruction and encouragement God brought to Joshua is to be God’s word to us: Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened or dismayed. For I, the Lord your God, am with you wherever you go. It is the faithful presence of God-with-us that gives God’s people courage to do the hard things and follow wherever God leads.
So with the assurance of God’s power and presence, Joshua steps up to the task at hand. He tells the people to prepare, that in three days they will cross the Jordan into the Promised Land. Joshua sends two spies into Jericho to check out the situation. After being shielded from the Canaanites by a harlot named Rahab, the spies return three days later and tell Joshua the land is ready to enter.
Early the next morning Joshua rises and leads the Israelites to the Jordan River. When they arrive at the Jordan it is swollen with seasonal rains and looks impossible to cross. God then gives the instructions to Joshua: “Tell the priests to carry the Ark of the Covenant above their heads as they step into the water.” The Ark of the Covenant was the box that held the Ten Commandments and other sacred objects. (It is the Lost Ark Indiana Jones sought to save from the Nazis!) “When the feet of the priests hit the water,” God says, “the waters will cease and you will able to cross.”
That’s how it is in the life of faith: we often have to get our feet wet first before the threatening waters will cease. God doesn’t usually take care of our problems for us. Faith calls us to participate with God in our deliverance.
God tells them to pick twelve people, one from each tribe, to follow the priests into the water. And as they do, the waters cease and the people pass safely through the river bed into the Promised Land. God tells the twelve to pick up a stone from the river bed and carry it with them as reminders of God’s mercy. Then in a sermon I would not want to deliver, Joshua orders all the male Israelites to be circumcised as the mark of being God’s chosen people – the same mark given to Abraham.
While camping at Gilgal, the Israelites observe Passover, remembering God’s deliverance as they left Egypt. So the Exodus begins and ends with a Passover meal. The wanderings of Israel through the wilderness conclude on the same calendar day it started forty years ago.
Then in similar fashion to Moses, Joshua receives a divine visitation. A man appears to Joshua. Joshua says to him, “Are you one of us or one of our adversaries?” The man says, “Neither. I come to you as commander of the army of the Lord.” And Joshua falls on his face and worships. The commander says to Joshua, “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy” – the very same words Moses heard from the burning bush. And from there Joshua will rise as the new Moses to lead the people into the Promised Land.
The entrance into Canaan begins with the destruction of Jericho in dramatic fashion. Yahweh tells Joshua to take all the warriors and march around the city walls for six days. On the seventh day they are to march around the wall seven times. And as they do, the priests blow their trumpets and the people shout and the walls of Jericho come down and the armies march in and take Jericho.
Then when looking through Christlike eyes, we come upon a disturbing scene: the Hebrews zealously believe God wants them to kill every man, woman and child as well as all the oxen, sheep and donkeys. (We will return in a moment to the issue of divine genocide.) But as the Book of Joshua tells the story, all the Canaanites are indeed murdered except the family of Rahab the harlot, who helped protect the spies. Rahab will eventually find her name in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus. The city is burned except for the silver and gold and vessels of bronze and iron which are placed in the temple treasury.
Throughout the conquest of Canaan, according to the book of Joshua, there are only occasions of disobedience on behalf of Israel and Joshua calls them back to obedience. He builds an altar to Yahweh on Mount Ebal and reads the whole book of the law of Moses to the people. From there the conquest continues. Years later, Joshua is growing old. God tells Joshua to divide the land among the tribes of Israel as an inheritance. When Joshua dies, Judah becomes Israel’s leader. According to the book of Joshua, the occupation of the land of Canaan is the story of a mostly obedient people led by a faithful leader.
In a slightly different version of the story, the book of Judges describes a very disobedient Israel with promised land still unconquered. God scolds Israel and tells them that the peoples of the unconquered land will remain Israel’s enemies. Israel had turned to the worship of Baal and abandoned the God of their ancestors. And they no longer had success in battle.
Israel then enters a period in its history when without a solitary leader like Moses or Joshua, they are led by judges. There was Deborah, the first female Hebrew prophet appointed by God who ruled over Israel as a judge. And there was Gideon with his famous trumpet. And Samson, whose hair was his strength, alongside his infamous wife Delilah.
The book of Judges tells the story of a seemingly endless cycle in Israel’s history of disobedience, despair, and deliverance. Life in the Promised Land ain’t always grand. Canaan and the Promised Land are not images of heaven, as our hymns sometime lead us to believe, but are intended to be earthly places of blessing for God’s people living in covenant relationship with God.
A decisive moment in Israel’s history begins with the birth of a boy named Samuel, born to a woman named Hannah who had been barren. Hannah then gives her son back to the Lord and Samuel grows up in the temple under the tutelage of Eli the priest. Samuel grows to become the last great judge and the first great prophet of Israel. He travels like a circuit judge throughout the country administering justice.
The word of the Lord was rare in those days, the Bible tells us. Samuel’s message to Israel is simply this: If with all your heart you return to the Lord and put away idols and direct your heart to the Lord and serve only God, Yahweh will deliver you. If with all our hearts we direct our lives toward God, serving only God, then God will guide us in the way that we should go. A divided heart is our downfall. As Jesus will say centuries later: “You cannot serve two masters.”
As Samuel grows older, his sons become judges. They sadly follow after other gods and lead Israel down the path of idolatry. So one day the elders of Israel come to Samuel and say, “Give us a king to govern us.” They are feeling the ever-present threat of the Philistines. And when we feel threatened we reach for something with which to arm and protect ourselves. The people believe that if they have a strong king like other nations they will be safe.
Samuel is not at all pleased with the request and goes to talk with God about it. And God says to him, “Samuel, they’re not rejecting you as their leader, they are rejecting me as their king.” To ask for a human king, to pledge unquestioned allegiance to any human leader, is to reject Yahweh as our only Lord.
So God tells Samuel he will give them what they think they want. Samuel goes back to the elders and tells them, “God will grant your request but first God gives you this warning regarding the ways of a king: He will “take” your sons and make soldiers of them. He will form huge armies and use your sons to work his fields and make instruments of war. He will “take” your daughters to be perfumers, cooks, and bakers. He will “take” your best fields, vineyards, and orchards and give them to his officials. He will “take” a tenth of your grain and livestock. He will “take” your servants and the best of your cattle and put them to work for him. And “you shall be his slaves”.
The king will take, take, take, take. And this people set free from slavery under Pharaoh will now accept a new kind of slavery under a human king. “And in that day,” Samuel said, “you will cry out to Yahweh because of this king but Yahweh will not answer you.”
Upon hearing that dire warning, you would think they would change their minds. But no, they cry out all the louder for the legendary strong man to protect them: “We want a king over us so that we will be like all the other nations of the world, a king to govern us and go before us and fight our battles.” When Samuel hears these things he asks God: “What should I do?” And God solemnly answers: “Give them what they want. Make for them a king.”
Sometimes what God keeps out of our reach turns out to be a blessing. And we sing with Garth Brooks, thanking God for unanswered prayers. But sometimes God gives us what we want even when it is not for our own good. There’s a line in the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy that says something like: “The judgment of the gods is that they give us what we ask for.”
Sometimes the judgment of God is that we get what we think we want. God doesn’t control the events of our lives. But in the mysterious workings of God intertwined with our human choices, God sometimes gives what God does not approve. God simply allows the consequences of our choices to play themselves out. Sometimes the judgment of God is that God gives us what we ask for.
In the search for a king, Samuel is led by God to anoint a man named Saul. Samuel anoints him and sets him before the people. And all the people shout, “Long live the king!” Saul then gathers 300,000 soldiers to fight Israel’s enemies, the Ammonites. They defeat the Ammonites, and the people make Saul king at Gilgal.
But Saul’s popularity doesn’t last very long. Not only do some of the people grow disgruntled with Saul, but Saul often disobeys the law of God. And the word of the Lord comes to Samuel saying, I regret that I made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me and has not carried out my commands.
Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death, but Samuel grieved over Saul’s passing, likely mourning over what could have been. And so another king must be found. He will be the most famous and well-beloved of all of Israel’s kings. We’ll hear about him in a couple of weeks.
But what do we make of this part of Israel’s story? Where does it connect and how does it inform our story?
The crossing of the Jordan into the Promised Land, like the crossing of the Red Sea out of Egypt, is in a sense a story of baptism. Later in Israel’s history a prophet named John the Baptist will be baptizing in that same Jordan River, preparing the way for Messiah. This can be the story of our own baptism: a journey out of slavery into freedom, out of wilderness into God’s delight.
From our baptism in the Jordan we enter life with God in the Promised Land. Though the Promised Land is not an image of Heaven, filled as it is with much evil and disobedience, for the most part it is better than the wilderness. The Promised Land is a land flowing with blessing and great possibilities. Our life in the Promised Land is life lived on earth in the presence of God with the choice of obedience or disobedience to the ways of God. We are commanded to follow God’s ways, to teach our children God’s ways, to love God with all that we are, and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.
But what about loving our neighbors the Canaanites? What about all this violence? I cannot speak for you, but I must admit that reading Genesis through Esther in less than a month, I found myself overwhelmed by all the violence, especially when much of it was done in the name of God. As Christians, our faith is centered in the compassionate life and non-violent teachings of Jesus Christ, who we believe to be the highest revelation of God, the perfect image of God.
I cannot speak for you but as I read these stories of violent conquest in the name of God, questions come to my mind: Did the same God revealed in Jesus Christ really command the genocidal slaughter of entire nations, including infants and animals? Did Israel honestly believe God had told them to carry out this massacre? Or did Israel use God to justify their own violence?
It would not be the last time people of faith chose to do so. Violence in the name of religion has always been around. Judaism, Islam, Christianity – we have all done our share of marching to war wiping out groups of people in the name of God. Or if not wiping them out, enslaving them instead. Our ancestors led by Moses and Joshua and David often believed God sent them into the world in conquest, to show no mercy to their enemies, to defeat and kill them all. Was this the way God worked in the ancient world? Or did the way God’s people understand God evolve over time?
What about us? Does God want us to pursue our enemies with bombs and guns and kill their children? Does God want our safety no matter the cost?
I think as Christians we must always read scripture with another Joshua in mind, One whose name we pronounce “Jesus,” whom the Bible says is the Word of God made flesh, the One we Christians believe to be the highest revelation of God given to us, who tells us to love our enemies and bless those who curse us. Jesus calls us to a higher way than the slaughter of those we do not like or the killing of those who have land we desire. In Jesus Christ we have been taught that God sends us into the world not in conquest but in compassion, to show mercy, to do justice, to heal, to feed, to nurture and protect life rather than take it. According to Jesus, there is to be no more killing in the name of God, no more conquering lands by human slaughter carrying the cross before us. The way of Jesus is the way of compassion and peacemaking. It is to be our way too.
At the end of his life, Joshua called all the people together in a covenant renewal ceremony, and like his predecessor Moses, he issues this challenge: Choose you this day whom you will serve – the God who brought you out of slavery OR the gods of Egypt and Canaan and every other human empire who promise wealth and pleasure, but in the end do nothing but divide and enslave. “Choose you this day whom you will serve,” Joshua said, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord!” How about you, this day, you and your house, whom will you serve?