Joshua 4
February 15, 2004
Lest We Forget
Memories are very powerful: Grade school field trips, our first home run, our third grade birthday party, our first romance, the times we got in trouble and were punished, when a loved one died. Those old enough recall vividly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news of the assassination of President Kennedy, or when the first astronaut walked on the moon, when the challenger exploded, when the planes went into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
For national events we build memorials so that we can remember great people and historic events: memorials to wars, to presidents, to courage and discovery. Memory plays an important role in any society. Without a memory a person loses identity, and without a history to sustain it a society and the world around it become a virtually phantom. Any society that hopes to endure must become, as sociologists put it, 'a community of memory and hope.'" (adapted from The Memory, J Hanneman, 6/29/97 PBCC)
Often our memories become clouded. We too easily forget. Forgetfulness is something we joke about as the years creep up. Whether it is the forgetfulness of a teenager not doing his chores, the employee neglecting the meeting, the spouse for whom Valentine’s Day is now a painful blur. Hollywood has touchedon this in the movie Grumpy Old Men, adding senior moments to our vocab and Finding Nemo introduced us to Dory, a blue tang whose forgetfulness is cute only because she is a computer generated fish.
God knew only too well that His people are very susceptible to bouts of amnesia, from memory loss. It has been said that the greatest enemy of faith may be forgetfulness. Just as in a marriage, the real threat may not be infidelity, but simply a slow process of forgetting and a gradual failure to remember the preciousness of the other person. In order to keep us from forgetting, God institutes reminders, signs, and symbols, placed before us to teach each generation what the gospel means, how we are to live, what we are to believe.
In Joshua 4 much space is devoted to retelling the crossing of the Jordan, an event we examined last week in chapter 3. The focus this time is not so much the crossing, but the gathering of twelve stones by twelve men and the construction of a memorial that is to instruct coming generations. READ Joshua 4:1-11; 20-24.
In Joshua 3:12 there is a brief mention of the 12 men, one from each tribe, but we are unsure what purpose they serve until this chapter. As the last wagon was pulled across the rocky river bed, the stray goat herded onto the shore, these men were to remove a stone from the place where the priests stood with the ark of the covenant and take those stones across to the camp at Gilgal. These stones were to serve as a memorial, so that when the families in the future would stroll through Gilgal National Park and see these stones, they would wonder who would make such a pile of rocks, and the parents would explain once again how the Jordan was parted for the Ark of the Covenant.
Those rocks are long gone, but the story remains. The benefit this passage for us today is its instruction as to the benefit and purpose of the signs God gives us in the church. Throughout the Old Testament God gave signs in the form of rainbows and circumcision, Passover meals and Sabbaths to instruct his people. Likewise today the gospel is made visible by the signs of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, so that we will not forget the gospel. The spiritual amnesia which so easily sets in is shattered when we see the sign and hear the explanation of what it means. What lessons about signs does this passage teach us?
God’s word institutes the sign
I found it interesting in reading through many sermons on this passage how often the writers would commend people to remember events of God’s faithfulness through reminders and visible memorials. While it is wise to commemorate God’s faithfulness so that we can teach our children to be thankful for grace, this passage makes it clear that the pile of rocks was not Joshua’s idea to make a memory. It was not group consensus to not forget God. Rather a biblical sign is instituted by God’s command.
The first verse makes this clear. God gave orders for the preparing of this memorial.
While not to impugn Joshua’s character, I can only imagine that if I were Joshua, the memorial I might erect would be more about me and less about God. That is my natural proclivity. A grand statute of me, an imposing pose, muscles rippling, pointing to the Promised Land.
God knew they needed not to commemorate Joshua, although in v14 the event did rightly serve the purpose of elevating Joshua in the sight of the people. What was needed was for there to be a sign that would point not to Joshua, but to God and simple stones would serve the purpose.
How we are to communicate God’s faithfulness to us from one generation to the next is by means of God’s command and not our own design.
There may be many fine ways for us to communicate God’s character, the goodness of the gospel, the power of his love for us. But if we think we can know how to better describe his grace than by the ways he has instituted, then we are gravely mistaken. Before Jesus ascended he commanded the apostles to baptize and teach, to communicate the content of grace both by word and deed. When Paul instructs the Corinthians on the proper understanding of the Lord’s Supper he is clear that he is only passing on to them what he himself has received. These signs are from God for us to be reminded, in tangible ways, for our children to inquisitively seek to know what this means.
The trouble is baptism, bread and wine are so pedestrian, so ordinary, so … church like. We want something more attention grabbing, more memorable. We can do much better than that if we put our techno minds to work … next week we’ll have a laser light show! But what is it God has commanded us? Would it not be any different at Gilgal. Couldn’t they come up with something better than a pile of rocks? What is God thinking? God gave them a message for their hearts via their eyes rather than ears. It was an enduring sermon in stone.
That simple pile of stones reminded them they had not crossed the Jordan on their own. The very presence of those rocks, carried from what was a raging river bed, screams at them God’s power to stop a river. So also simple water, common bread, foolish preaching – God uses these means to arrest us and point us again and again that salvation is not our invention, but his gift to us.
God’s promises are the focus of the sign
In verse 6 and 7 the reason for those stones is made clear. They are to spur children on to ask the obvious question – why, Dad? The response has a particular focus, what the sign points to is important. The central portion of v7 gives the answer: that the waters of the Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord.
What does the sign point to? That Israel was safe through the waters? That God was gracious to his people? Those are true, but not the focus. More important than the benefits received, the sign points not to God’s people, but God’s promise symbolized in the ark.
As we were reminded last week the ark is not some magical charm, but a gospel picture. Inscribing the demands of the Law in two tablets, God both enacts an impossible holiness from his people, but then he provides the answer. Covering the ark is the mercy seat, the place were the propitiatory blood was sprinkled, signifying the death of God’s own Son that would come. In that ark we see both our sin imputed to Christ and his righteousness imputed to us.
The rocks pointed to the covenant, not to the benefit. While in years to come the ark would be housed in the Holy of Holies, unseen, the truth would be seen in the rocks. The gospel provides protection.
With this in view – the signs God has given us should point not to our covenantal faithfulness, but God’s faithfulness to us. Baptism and Lord’s Supper is not about what I have done to merit God’s kindness, but it is our taking on ourselves the reminder that God is faithful no matter what. Baptism is not my personal pledge of obedience, not my public profession of faith. Partaking of the Lord’s Supper is not reserved for me due to my spiritual attainment.
Rather, God’s signs point to God’s grace. In baptism my attention is focused on Christ’s death is my death, his resurrection mine. Were it not for his grace the waters of baptism would drown me. Likewise the Lord’s Supper reminds me of my weakness to obey, but God nourishes me by faith, enabling me to obey. All the time, my attention is off me and on Christ.
God’s people are the recipients of the sign
The sign is for the whole body of God’s people.
There is a refrain in this chapter we must not miss. There is an emphasis on the nation, the 12 tribes, and the people. The events point to the corporate nature of God’s people. Why are there 12 stones chosen by a member from each tribe? The sign, a pile of rocks, will have very personal significance for people, but only in the context of the people as a whole. There is one altar of 12 stones, not a mound of pebbles, which each person picks up as they pass by.
We will see this corporate solidarity throughout Joshua. God’s people are seen as one. They will enter the land together, fight together, and worship together. But before they do that, they will acknowledge that God brought them into the land – together, as one people.
In the New Testament, there is one new man in Christ, one body of Jews and Greeks, slave and free, male and female. Christians are part of something much bigger than themselves. Our salvation is experienced in community. What happens to one happens to all. Unless we have a real sense of community, our life in Christ is diminished, our joy and hope is cut short. In the land, there is great strength drawn from community. This is what people are longing for today. They long to connect, to be accepted and loved, to be given the chance to be themselves. That is how the church is to function.
The trouble is, we have this unfortunate sense of self sufficiency, that spirituality is somehow inversely connected to community. When I come to believe that Christ died for me, I immediately must see that he died for us. My salvation is personal, but never private.
When it comes to the signs of baptism and Lord’s Supper that are given – they are given to us all, not just to me and mine.
1 Corinthians 10:17 speaks of one loaf of bread from which we all eat for we are of one body. The celebration of the meal takes place as we gather together. If I decide to grab a baguette and Chianti in the privacy of my home or family, the significance of the sign is lost. It is not about my individual relationship with Christ, but our relationship together.
We baptize our children before the entire covenant family. New believers come for the sign not in the privacy of an intimate ceremony, but before all. We all have a duty to these children.
The sign is for every generation of God’s people.
This corporate nature of the sign is not just for all of us, but for those of us who are not yet with us, but will join us later. The signs of baptism and the Lord’s Supper exist not just for my benefit but for my child’s, to spur them on to ask. In those whispered questions that come as the elements are passed, rather than an impatient hush so you can privately meditate on the death of Christ for you, make an effort to quietly explain then and later to clarify what we believe.
The very inquisitiveness of little ones affords us an opportunity to make known the wonderful works of God, that their minds may be informed and their hearts awed by his mercy.
Notice in v21 who is asked and who answers. You fathers have a role to play here. I trust none of you will relegate the teaching of your children to your wives as though it were beneath you, still less to Sunday School teachers.
When we have a baptism, remind your kids of their baptism as you remember your own, whether you were of an age to recall the event or not. The sign is repeated before us and we join in together in that event, all united to Christ.
God’s people must respond to the sign
There is nothing sadder than to pass by a monument to a famed person of the past and stop and wonder for a moment what the significance of such a person was and then move on without another thought. When a statute is nothing more than a haven for pigeons or a tablet for graffiti, the significance of the sign is lost.
But the idea of a sign, a memorial calls for a response. The Passover meal was a memorial that called people to action. So also the Lord’s Supper is participatory as we all take in our hands and mouths the elements. To remember we must engage our mind, consider the connection, recall God’s grace. That act of remembering for Israel at this pile of stones is made more clear in v19 when the date is given for their crossing: the tenth day of the first month. Exodus 12:2-3 sets this as the beginning of the Passover celebration. What God began forty years before that night when the lamb was eaten together by the households is not marked again as they enter the promised land.
The signs of baptism and the Lord’s Supper have no power in themselves to effect any change in us unless we respond to them in faith. It is not in the mere doing, the mechanical activity of sprinkling water or eating that we are affected, but only as we consider its significance, what it points to, that we will be changed. We must go beyond the sign itself to see what it points us to.
If you sit through a baptism or communion time without any sense of seeing your sin and need for Christ in your life, that sign will does your soul little good. Like the Israelites of old after settling in the Promised Land who would stroll past the pile of stones and forget God’s grace in the covenant, too often we are insensitive to God’s grace in the sign and seals of the covenant of grace.
In 1 Samuel 7 a similar kind of monument is erected when the Judge Samuel takes a stone and sets it up between Mizpeh and Shen can calls the memorial Ebenezer, meaning the stone of help. He explains the name by saying, “Till now the Lord has helped us.’
God’s memorials of baptism and the supper likewise point us to God’s grace to this point. It is a marker of grace to this point and an impetus for the future. It is a reminder that no matter how easy it is for me to forget, God in his grace will remind me that the grace which has brought me to this point, will take me to the next step. God will not allow me to forget.
It was the spring of `69 and I was once again on the ball fields of Schaeffer Elementary School trying my best to engage the great American pastime – baseball. The dreadful combination of my ineptitude and the impatience of a frustrated coach to bungling boys created an often unpleasant afternoon. But one day in particular was trying for me. My friend Mike Heimenz hit a ball to the outfield, but rounding first base he collided with Glenn Foreman. Mike, with his head tucked in to run, didn’t see Glenn, so he bounced off Glenn’s chest, and was sprawled on the ground. While out for a few seconds, in a matter of moments Mike was on his feet, dazed, but back in the game. I thought nothing of it. A short time later we were off on our bikes riding back to our neighborhood.
It started innocently enough. Mike asked what time it was once, then twice and a third time. Then he asked where we were going, which should have been obvious, but he asked again and again. Now nine year old boys, as all boys, young and old, can find ways to annoy each other, often by persistent, repetitive questions. I was sure that was Mike’s agenda and he was succeeding. By the time we reach my house, I had had enough. I told him to get off his bike, and there, in front of my house, within eyesight of my father, I began to pummel Mike as only a nine year old can do. He soon was back on his bike off to his home and I soon had to face a questioning father. It was with good reason that I soon felt horrible hours later when I learned that Mike was in the hospital suffering from a concussion and the side effect, amnesia.
Fortunately Mike never remembered my frustration and anger. But I still do. But as quick as I was to become agitated with his forgetfulness, how often do we forget. We suffer from a spiritual amnesia that would call down blows upon us again and again. Yet God in his tender mercy will not deny his promise to us, he gently reminds us that we are his, he tells us in word and sacrament where we are head and how we will get there. We stop again and ask him whether he loves us and he kindly responds that he does. We repeat the same sin, he convicts us to repentance and he loves us still. That is why, in our last hymn we sing: prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love, and then ask that he, by his powerful grace, take my heart, take and seal it for your courts above.
