10/18/2026 - "Choose This Day Whom You Will Serve" (Joshua 24:1-15)

For the past few weeks, we have jumped through Genesis and Exodus, talking about different moments in the origin story of the Hebrew people.

We talked about God’s covenant with Abraham to be the ancestor of a people that God would use to bless the entire world.

We talked about Joseph and how his family ended up in Egypt, and how Moses led his descendants, the Hebrew people, out of slavery in Egypt and into freedom.

Today we skip forward a few generations, to the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the people who left Egypt. We meet up with the Hebrew people and their new leader, Joshua, at the end of Joshua’s life. Our passage today is a summary of everything we’ve talked about and some of the things we didn’t, including Joshua’s role in the overall story.

Joshua is probably most known for walking seven times around the walls of Jericho and shouting and blowing trumpets to bring the walls down. We often end his story there, because there is a lot that comes after it that can be really difficult to read and talk about. Especially because we believe in a loving, gracious God, and God’s characterization is anything but in this passage.

Scripture: Joshua 24:1-15

Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel at Shechem. He summoned the elders of Israel, its leaders, judges, and officers. They presented themselves before God. Then Joshua said to the entire people, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: Long ago your ancestors lived on the other side of the Euphrates. They served other gods. Among them was Terah the father of Abraham and Nahor. I took Abraham your ancestor from the other side of the Euphrates. I led him around through the whole land of Canaan. I added to his descendants and gave him Isaac. To Isaac I gave Jacob and Esau. I gave Mount Seir to Esau to take over. But Jacob and his sons went down to Egypt. Then I sent Moses and Aaron. I plagued Egypt with what I did to them. After that I brought you out. I brought your ancestors out of Egypt, and you came to the sea. The Egyptians chased your ancestors with chariots and horses to the Reed Sea.Then they cried for help to the Lord. So he set darkness between you and the Egyptians. He brought the sea down on them, and it covered them. With your own eyes you saw what I did to the Egyptians. You lived in the desert for a long time.

“Then I brought you into the land of the Amorites who lived on the other side of the Jordan. They attacked you, but I gave them into your power, and you took over their land. I wiped them out before you. Then Moab’s King Balak, Zippor’s son, set out to attack Israel. He summoned Balaam, Beor’s son, to curse you. But I wasn’t willing to listen to Balaam, so he actually blessed you. I rescued you from his power. Then you crossed over the Jordan. You came to Jericho, and the citizens of Jericho attacked you. They were Amorites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hittites, Girgashites, Hivites, and Jebusites. But I gave them into your power. I sent the hornet before you. It drove them out before you and did the same to the two kings of the Amorites. It wasn’t your sword or bow that did this. I gave you land on which you hadn’t toiled and cities that you hadn’t built. You settled in them and are enjoying produce from vineyards and olive groves that you didn’t plant.

“So now, revere the Lord. Serve him honestly and faithfully. Put aside the gods that your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates and in Egypt and serve the Lord. But if it seems wrong in your opinion to serve the Lord, then choose today whom you will serve. Choose the gods whom your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you live. But my family and I will serve the Lord.”

~

Over the past year I have talked with many of you about how you don’t like the Old Testament, and I’m going to guess passages like this are why.

I think we can often want to just skip past all of this and get to the New Testament with Jesus and a God that’s a lot easier to believe is loving and gracious, because it seems like there’s a lot less of this violence going on.

So why is that? Why does Joshua say the Lord took credit for all of this violence?

Like many things with Scripture, we have to look at the context that the book was written in, and see if can give us some hints about why.

To start with, the Bible was not written in a divine vacuum. While I believe it’s divinely inspired, I also believe it was written by humans. And it’s that interaction between divine and human that creates such a rich text that helps us learn more about ourselves, God, other people, the rest of creation, and how it all relates together. Scholars believe that Joshua, and in fact many of the Old Testament texts, were not written contemporaneously, they weren’t written as the things they were writing about were happening. While there’s some debate about when exactly it was written, most scholars agree that Joshua was finalized around the time of the Babylonian Exile. This was hundreds of years after Moses, Joshua, and the time period being written about. This was after the Israelites had founded the kingdom of Israel, and then that kingdom divided into two; the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern the kingdom of Judah. The northern kingdom of Israel was conquered by Assyria, and a few hundred years later the southern kingdom was conquered by Babylon. So it is a time of violence, death, and destruction. It is a time where it looked like the covenants that they had learned about from their parents and grandparents, the covenant that they were God’s people meant to bless the entire world, had been broken.

And they’re trying to figure out why.

So Joshua is not a record of history, of exactly what happened when the Hebrew people crossed into Canaan and committed a ton of violence to take over the land. It is a telling of the kingdom of Israel’s origin story, with the focus on trying to figure out how the Israelites ended up in exile.

We all have these origin stories, in our families, in our communities, and in our churches. Nowadays with how much recorded history we have, with our ability to study archeology and with the technology to learn more about the past than we ever have before, we focus on trying to figure out the truth of what happened. Or as close as we can get to it. But there are still these stories that get passed around where we’re not quite sure if they're true or not, but they still makes for a good story. And oftentimes, those stories emphasize values that a group holds, whether that group is a family, a club, a community, or even a church.

For example, my family has always valued hard work and taking care of your family. So a lot of my family’s stories revolve around how my grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents worked hard to make sure that their children and grandchildren had a better life. And how we were responsible to take the next step forward in education and opportunities so that the generation after us had more opportunities than we had. That shows up in how my family tells the stories about how we went from working in logging camps in Oregon, coal mines in Appalachia, and farms in Texas, to their kids and grandkids serving in the military to afford college, to now their kids and grandkids even getting masters degrees and PhDs in some cases.

And when I was interviewing here, one of the first stories I was told was that UCLB was founded because members of the church wanted to drink, dance, and play cards, and the Methodist ministers didn’t like that very much.

It’s a funny story, but the fact that we keep telling it that way shows that we value community and having fun together, and we don’t feel beholden to denominations or traditions. We value genuineness, we want everyone to come as they are.

So with all that being said, what does our passage today tell us about how the Israelites viewed their exile in Babylon, and what they think of themselves and their values in the midst of it?

What immediately jumps out is just how little agency the Israelites have in our passage. The writers push everything onto God; from the Israelite’s rescue from slavery to all of the violence. God is responsible for all of it; the Israelites are responsible for none of it. The only thing they’re responsible for is setting aside other gods and only following the Lord.

The fact that Joshua in his monologue tells the Israelites to follow God twice in quick succession hints to us that the writers of Joshua thought that turning away from God was the reason that the Israelites had ended up in exile. Because they’d broken their end of the covenant; they hadn’t followed God, therefore God had returned them to exile and captivity.

But that’s the only thing they’re willing to take accountability for. They’re not willing to take accountability for all of the violence they’d perpetrated against the people of Caanan. Instead, they push it all onto God.

Which, to a much lesser extent than here I hope, how often do we do that? How often do we try to minimize our own agency, our own actions, in the stories we tell about our lives? How often do we push blame to others in our lives; family, friends, bosses and co-workers, our parents or children? Or God, fate, or even dumb luck? It’s tempting to do this; to ease our internal discomfort by reaching for other explanations and minimizing our own agency in a situation. But we’ll always get stuck repeating cycles, just like the Israelites, if we don’t own our agency and actions and do the hard work to break those cycles and move forward in healthier ways.

Here the Israelites continue their cycle by justifying the violence they have committed by saying God ordered it, even though the very foundations of their covenant involved God blessing the other nations through them, not killing them. In their own retelling of their origin story, the Israelites show they believe, to an extent, in a violent, vengeful God, rather than one of love and grace.

To be clear, I am not talking about Jews and Judaism here. I am specifically talking about the Israelites in the time period in which this was written, whose writings Jews today have to wrestle with just as much as Christians do. Unfortunately passages like this one have been used to justify some horrific antisemitism over the years, since Judaism’s primary text is the Torah, which we call our Old Testament. Taken to its extreme, it’s used as a way to justify Christianity being a better, more peaceful and loving religion than Judaism, since we have the New Testament and, yes, often prefer the portrayal of God written there.

I’m not doing that here. The Old Testament was a Jewish text long before it was a Christian one, and we can learn a lot from midrashes and rabbinic scholarship on these texts. A lot of how I interpret the Old Testament comes from how rabbis and Jews wrestle with these texts, looking past what’s on the surface to find the deeper truths underneath and learning just as much from what is not said as what is said - like we’re doing today.

So with that being said, the Israelite’s characterization of God makes more sense when you remember that they’re in captivity in Babylon. Because they are probably hoping for that vengeance to be unleashed against the Babylonians to free them. They don’t want the God of love and grace to give their captors mercy. They want the God that they’ve heard will send plagues down on Egypt to convince the Pharaoh to let them leave. They want the God that they’ve heard cleared out the land of Caanan and handed them cities to live in and farmland to tend.

Because it’s clear that they think both of those were a critical part in them obtaining their freedom and receiving God’s blessings from the covenant, so of course God had to be involved. Because to them God was obviously on their side, not the side of the others who were against them.

Whereas we can look at the full story arc now and see that the Israelites conquering of the land of Canaan was continuing the same cycle of violence that was perpetrated on them in Egypt. Violence they don’t want to take accountability for continuing, so they justify it in God’s name.

Which, how often do we see that today? How often do we see people who call themselves Christian say and do things that leave us questioning whether or not we’re reading the same Bible and following the same Jesus? How often have we seen people say that somebody isn’t a true Christian, doesn’t actually follow Jesus, because they don’t believe the exact same things that another Christian does?

In the past few years, we’ve seen a significant increase in the amount of political ads and military recruitment ads that cite Bible verses or use explicitly Christian language in their social media posts and their TV spots. Not an insignificant number of our political disagreements have a faith aspect to them, disagreeing with how we view God and Jesus and what values we prioritize and how we live them out. And above all else, we have seen our faith used as an excuse to create that “us vs. them” dichotomy. Because if God is on our side, and God obviously is, then God is against everyone else and their thoughts, opinions, and even their lives, aren’t worth as much.

And that is how you get a God whose characterized more by violence than by love.

It’s a reflection more of our values than of God’s.

Joshua is a complicated book that can leave us more uncomfortable than divinely inspired or comforted. But we can see the ways that God is characterized and described in here reflected in how God is characterized and described in our world today.

There are people who look at Scripture and see not a way to reflect on how we may sometimes attribute things to God that we shouldn’t, or that we can minimize our own agency and actions when we do something wrong to help ourselves feel better about a situation, but instead see a God they want to follow.

A God of violence and of vengeance, one who thinks only certain people justice, and almost nobody deserves mercy.

A God whose power is demonstrated through might and strength, because that is what they value.

A God who is on the side of the powerful and those who conquer others, because they want to be in that kind of power over others.

But there are others who look at this passage and see a God they don’t want to follow.

A God who they don’t recognize as being the God who said that all nations would be blessed through God’s people.

A God who isn’t loving and merciful, who doesn’t remain faithful even to the thousandth generation like God promised when God gave the Ten Commandments to the Israelites.

A God who would not have even rescued the Israelites from Egypt because God would’ve been on the side of the Egyptians since they held the power.

At the end of our passage today, Joshua asks the new nation of Israel whom they will serve. Will they serve the gods of other nations, of other people? Or will they serve the God they know?

It’s the same question being asked of us today, tomorrow, and every day to come. Will we serve the god of power, of might, who is on our side no matter what and supports us getting our way no matter the cost?

Or will we serve the God of love and mercy, who is on the side of those who are weak, who are vulnerable, who are sick, who are depressed and scared, who live on the margins, who most need God’s love and care?

A God who calls us to love our neighbor, whoever and wherever they are, because they are just as beloved by God as we are?

Choose this day who you will serve. But as for this church, we will serve the God of love and grace.