Joshua 7:10-26

Why is it that the hidden things in our lives cause the most trouble?  One of the big lies we tell ourselves is that if no one else knows, it isn’t causing harm to us. Deep down we all know that isn’t true but it feels easier at the time to try and bury the problem rather than hauling it out into the light.

The story of Achan is not an easy read but it can serve as a good reminder that while we do live in the light of Jesus’ victory over sin, we can’t just ignore it.  Grace means forgiveness and faithfulness!

Transcript

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Why is it that the hidden things in our lives cause the most trouble? One of the big lies we tell ourselves is that if nobody else saw it or knows about it, then it actually isn't causing any harm to ourselves or anybody else. Deep down, we all know that that isn't true, but sometimes it feels easier, more convenient to bury those things rather than to haul them out into the light. On that happy note, welcome to Meet Me in the Word. I am so glad that you've joined in on our little study here of Joshua. By the way, you're invited every Monday through Friday, and you get to jump in on this weekly rhythm that has certainly been helpful for me. We're in Joshua chapter 7, verses 10 through 26 today. So go ahead and turn there. You can follow along a lot easier that way. But by the way, if you're driving, uh keep your eyes on the road, and then you can keep the shiny side up, and we all kind of want that for you. We're going to go ahead and pray, and then I'll just kind of catch us up a little bit and we'll dive into the text for today. Jesus in heaven, thank you for this wonderful day that you've given us. God, thank you for Fridays. Thank you that we get to study your word, and today to take a look at the story of Joshua and the people of Israel and what happens when dark, ugly things get hidden. Help us, God, to be open and receptive to everything that you have for us today. We love you. Amen. All right, so just to quickly recap, uh, the people of Israel under Joshua's leadership have taken care of business in Jericho. That went super well. Uh, but God gave them very clear instructions about what to do and what not to do, specifically not to take anything from uh any of the spoils, basically from the city of Jericho. Uh and and then uh that all happens, and we we move into the next battle, which is against uh a city called Ai, and apparently not a lot of people were living there, so they send uh fewer of their forces, but they lose and they lose badly. And the people's response, uh Joshua and the elders, is to to get on their faces before God and to seek out what happened. And that brings us into today's story. And uh, we're starting at verse 10. I'm gonna read the first uh kind of four verses here, and then I'll summarize some stuff because there's a lot of just sort of like logistical stuff that happens along the way, and then we'll pick it up and carry on through. So Joshua chapter seven, starting at verse 10. The Lord said to Joshua, Stand up, what are you doing down on your face? Israel has sinned. They have violated my covenant, which I commanded them to keep. They have taken some of the devoted things, they have stolen, they have lied, they have put them with their own possessions. That is why the Israelites cannot stand against their enemies. They turn their backs and run because they have been made liable to destruction. I will not be with you any more unless you destroy whatever among you is devoted to destruction. Go, consecrate the people, tell them, consecrate yourselves in preparation for tomorrow, for this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says. They consecrate themselves, and then they kind of work the thing through. Each clan, each tribe, each family comes forward, and they boil it all down until they find the person who is guilty of doing the thing that the Lord has brought to their attention. Verse 19. Then Joshua said to Achan, he's the culprit, My son, give glory to the Lord, the God of Israel, and honor him. Tell me what you have done, do not hide it from me. Achan replied, It is true, I have sinned against the Lord, the God of Israel. This is what I have done. When I saw in the plunder a beautiful robe from Babylonia, two hundred shekels of silver and a bar of gold weighing fifty shekels, I coveted them and took them. They are hidden in the ground inside my tent with the silver underneath. So Joshua sent messengers, and they ran to the tent, and there it was, hidden in his tent with the silver underneath. They took the things from the tent, brought them to Joshua and all the Israelites, and spread them out before the Lord. I'm going to stop our reading there. The stuff that happens afterwards is simply that the the people of Israel uh they do respond in the way that the Lord wants them to respond, and they they take care of things. It's it's pretty harsh. Achan loses his life as well as every person in his family. They're all put to death. It's a pretty brutal uh thing that happens as a result of this sin. Let's take a moment now to just be quiet and listen to the Lord and see what he has for us, and then we'll continue together. All right, how should we understand this text, this story? It is, you know, like it's a heavy one, isn't it? It's one of those stories that that I think should compel us into a certain kind of wrestling it out with God. And so often uh we need to feel free to ask the questions rather than to just be like, I don't get it, and this feels maybe unfair in some way. But let's move into this together and and ask ourselves some good questions and make some observations. The first thing I wanted to point out is that uh God says to Joshua after he tells him to stand up, he says, Israel has sinned in verse 11. And that should catch our attention. It's a reminder that God's covenant was with a nation, a whole group of people, not an individual. And so while we learn through the context of the story that one man, and perhaps his family was involved as well in the act of uh doing of what he did, but one man did this thing, but it's not, you know, God's uh displeasure or wrath against just him, it's it's with everybody. Why? Because his covenant was with all of them, right? And so there is a difference between that old covenant and what we experience now in the context of Jesus. So Israel has sinned, and then the next instruction that I wanted to highlight comes in verse 13. Uh, consecrate yourselves, right? Take time right now to make yourselves clean, set it aside this day, you know, the next day basically, be uh be set apart and be ready to basically to come and meet with God and to kind of sort this really awful thing out. Uh basically, uh the people of Israel, Achan in particular, they took things that weren't theirs to take, and that needed to be dealt with and extracted out of the people. This process reveals Achan, and he does take ownership of it. It turns out it was really just greed. Plain old-fashioned greed. He wanted something that wasn't his, it didn't belong to him, he knew that, right? And still he took it, and he he confesses that. Uh his confession is then proven to be correct, and the people make things right before God. That part of the story is is really graphic, isn't it? It's it's in all if you kind of let yourself, you know, in your imagination sort of move into that space, it's it's hard. It just is hard. And and that's the part I think for for myself, and I think for a lot of us, that we're like, okay, how does how do I understand this as a as a Jesus follower? Well, let's kind of move into that a little bit more here. You know, that moment before they uh take him to the valley of uh of disappointment, really, you know, that where they stone them and they it's valley of trouble, actually, is what the translation turns out to be. There's that moment when all of those stolen items are brought out and spread before the Lord. Make no mistake about that moment. Like all of that silver and gold, that robe from Babylonia, they had all lost that allure. Like, you know, when when Achan saw those things and he was like, oh, I want that, initially that's what it was, right? But now he's looking at them and they're they're spread out before the Lord, and it's like, no, that's not something anybody wants, and and they're not desired. The the people don't keep them, you know, they're not taken. Like sometimes I think we can read this what was devoted for the Lord, and that meant somehow it went into the you know, the uh, I guess the tabernacle coffers at this point. No, not true. Uh they were intended to be destroyed uh in that way, devoted to the Lord. Don't take it for yourself. And now, as they're spread out, they're just a representation of of bad choices, of guilt, of sin, of of condemnation, really, and just uh brutal, a brutal reality. Uh, you know, it's not usually great to speculate too much uh when we think about these sort of situations, but I think this one is is fair. Can you imagine being one of the family members of the men who died in the fight against AI, right? I think it says about 36, being, you know, uh a child of that of that man or the the wife of that man, and and you're seeing this, and you're thinking, My husband, my dad, he died because this guy took this stuff. Man, just all because he got greedy. And just uh what a what a reckoning that was that was taking place there. So the consequence, right, of this sin had already been felt by the nation. They felt it in their loss against AI. That's what prompted them into seeking the Lord. And now the consequence will be meted out for Achan and his family. And it is harsh. It's death, it's the destruction of all his property, and uh there's just no denying the brutality and the harshness of that. But a couple of thoughts as we think about this in the context of our faith journey, just reminding us that God's instructions were super clear. They weren't vague. This wasn't a case of like, oh, I didn't understand, or any of those sorts of things. No, God's instructions were clear. And again, Achan's sin cost men their lives. They were in a covenant relationship with God, the whole nation. And part of that nation violated God's law, and there was a consequence to the nation, right? And directly the people connected with it. And so there's all of that that's going on in the context of this. I want to make it even just a little bit more personal for us as we reflect on it. For me, this passage points out the seriousness of God's holiness contrasted with our sin. Both of those things are a pretty big deal. And sometimes we forget that. We do live in the age of grace, right? In the age of mercy, in the mate, in the age of of relationship, where Jesus looks at us and says, Hey, I I call you friend, and and we're invited into this incredible thing that we get to have with with the Lord. But back then that just wasn't the case. And and so the story of of Achan, the story of what happened here, really points to our need for Jesus. And not just for forgiveness. It's not just about that, it's for faithfulness. We need Jesus to say no to the shiny thing. You know what I'm saying? Like to have victory before the consequence takes place. A couple of other quick thoughts for us. Sin is better confessed than discovered. Somebody much wiser than me uh said that, and it was at some kind of a, I think probably a pastor's prayer retreat, you know, 15 years ago. I I'm not sure. But I just I remember we were just talking about stuff, and he was like, Yeah, sin is better confessed than discovered, and that's true. Now, I don't know if that, you know, if Achan had come back from from Jericho and and you know, his conscience had stricken him, and he'd gone to Joshua and said, Hey, look, I I violated God's instruction. If things would have turned out differently for him, we can't really kind of go there too much, but it certainly would have been better for the people of Israel. And in our lives, it's true, right? We have a tendency to want to bury things that we're not proud of. But what needs to happen in order for us to just get healing, to become whole again, to be made complete again, is to get those things out in the open. And I get it, it's a fearful thing to confide in somebody that you care about and who cares about you, that you've done something against them, but sin is better confessed than discovered. And then finally, temptation is real and it's common. If you're struggling with something, if you're struggling with whatever that shiny object is for you, right? Whatever that temptation is, just don't think that you're alone in that because you're not. We all have our stuff. We all have our stuff that we struggle with, and we need more people in our lives that'll help us walk away from that temptation, to walk away from that shiny object without piling on the shame. Like that's the thing that we're worried about, isn't it? That if they knew, then they would think less of us. But the truth is, if we're on the same side, if we care about each other, then then we want to help each other not just know that we're rotten, but to help each other succeed and to live a life that's different, that's actually changed. So just some encouragement in that. I hope that you have somebody in your life that you can be totally open and honest with. That's a great way to do this following Jesus thing. I hope that you're encouraged, even with the just really challenging content of today. Let me pray for us. Jesus, thank you that you you're wanting to meet with us, God, that you that you care about us. And God, as we just kind of hold this story of of Achan and and his sin and the consequences to both himself, his family, and as well to to Israel, uh God, we we want better things for ourselves. So God help us to choose that. God, where we have stuff that we need to confess, give us the courage to do that rather than hiding it. But help us to walk in the light as you are in the light. Amen.