What Is The Big Deal?

By: Duane Kelderman

Scripture Reading: Joshua 7-8

July 20th, 2008

What’s the big deal? What’s the big deal about taking a robe, a little silver, and a little gold from a city that’s going to be destroyed anyway? That is the sin that Achan committed and that got him and his family stoned to death. Why did God make such a big deal out of this, and seemingly punish Achan out of all proportion to what the sin deserved?

Well, first, the big deal was that God had commanded his people not to do what Achan did. This was the law of HAREM—the law that prohibited taking for your personal gain anything from the city being destroyed (since this was God’s battle, not merely a human, political battle). God commanded it.

Now of course that’s not nearly a good enough answer for us enlightened people of the 21st century. We live in an age where the language of command is quaint language, where we obviously see through that kind of authoritarianism. Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena California, has written a book on this subject entitled The God Who Commands in which he acknowledges that divine directives and commands in Scripture are generally assumed by the modern mind to be morally irrelevant to us today (John Courtney Murray p. 7). Obviously all of that kind of talk in the Bible (the modern mind has concluded) needs to be recast into a different voice.

Nowhere does the collapse of authority (which is what we’re talking about here) and of the legitimacy of command show up more clearly in this culture than in our approach to parenting. Most of the secular parenting books that my wife, Jeannette, and I read almost 30 years ago said, "You can’t just tell your kids to do something or not do something. You must reason with them and explain to them why they shouldn’t do this or should do that." Well, certainly it is good to try to explain to children or anyone else the rationale behind our rules and commands. But parents who don’t want to ruin kids know that it is crucial to their children’s development that they learn that there is in the world this mysterious force called authority. When a three year old is standing on a busy street corner and his parent says, "No, don’t go in the street," it’s very important that the three year old obey that command, whether he understands all the reasons for it or not. Beyond that, if a child is going to grow up and survive in a marriage, a family, a job, a neighborhood, a church, a nation, he or she must come to grips with authority. As a culture we are so apologetic for authority, for having authority, for exercising authority, for believing in authority. . . so apologetic that we look silly.

What’s the big deal about Achan taking a few things from Jericho? The big deal is: God said, "Don’t do that," and God is God, and when God commands, we must obey.

Now, in the Christian religion that is a sufficient answer to the question. The language of command and obedience may be a foreign language in our culture; in fact it clearly is—but it is not a foreign language to Christians. Or at least it shouldn’t be, and the degree to which it is, is a reflection of how much we are shaped by our culture.

Having said that, though, I want to quickly go on to press the question a step further: What’s the big deal? God commanded it. But why did God command this? What’s the reason, the rationale for this command? That’s a good question, a fair question, and a question that I think we not only may ask but should ask of any of God’s commands. While God has the right to command whatever he wants, God in fact only does command things that make sense that fit with how he made us and the world. And we do well to try to understand the reasoning, the wisdom of his commandments. One of the reasons I like to teach or preach on the Ten Commandments is that they are so wise; they make so much sense; they fit exactly with how God made us.

Another reason I think it’s important to ask the why question at this point is because it will also help us understand the answer to another why question this passage presents: namely, why all this violence toward Ai in the first place? What is it with a God who destroys an entire city—men, women and children? everything that breathes?

Deuteronomy 20:16—18 helps us get some perspective on both of these questions:

16However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. 17 Completely destroy them . . . as the LORD your God has commanded you. 18 Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the LORD your God.

You see, the occupants of the land before the Israelites came were not exactly God—fearing, moral upright, model citizens. The land of Canaan was teeming with idol worship, the worship of false gods. And the idol worship of the Canaanites had many troublesome and seductive qualities to it. It was a religion with many gods—it’s always nice to have a menu of gods to choose from. It was a religion of trinkets, things you could touch and see—who wouldn’t want a religion where you could have a god in your pocket, or your back yard? It was a religion of sensual worship in which you could get carried away and even indulge some of your wildest sexual fantasies and call it worship. God knew that the line between these false religions and the religion of Israel, the religion of the one true God . . . that line had to be clear and firm. And so God commands that all the trinkets and all the things that go with this culture and this religion, everything, be destroyed. He wants no seepage from the culture of the Canaanites to the culture of Hebrew religion.

At one level, nothing has changed from the days of Achan to today. God’s call to us to "be holy as I am holy" and to "not love the world" or "be conformed to the world" or be "of the world" is a call to radical obedience to Jesus Christ which makes us very different from people in the world. And just like in Achan’s day, today too, if we allow ourselves to live very close to things and people and ideas that we know are contrary to the truth, that are sinful, if we constantly live on that edge, chances are very good that we will fall over the edge and get swallowed up by sin. That’s the issue.

OK, you say, I see that. But taking the life of Achan and his sons and daughters, and causing 36 people to die in battle because Achan walked too close to that line (a line, incidentally, that didn’t even get applied in the battle of Ai!) . . . isn’t that a bit extreme? Certainly to our modern sensibilities, this is extreme. Granted, God doesn’t seem very pro—life sometimes. Life seems pretty cheap in the O.T. I can’t deny that. All the more reason, then, given how extreme God’s judgment is here, that we should try to catch the all important message of this awful judgment: namely: I am God, you must obey me. You must trust me enough to obey me. And you must obey me completely, without reservation. That’s the positive message of the story of Achan. The big deal here is the call to unflinching obedience to God.

It’s important to clarify that Christians today cannot use the Bible, particularly these conquest stories of the Old Testament, to justify killing or any such violence today. These stories of God’s people taking over the land of Canaan are unique events in the whole redemptive plan of God, events that set the broader stage for God to save the world, not condemn the world. Put another way, Christians don’t go (can’t go) to the conquest stories of the book of Joshua and justify any violence today. That’s misinterpreting these stories. The Christian religion is not a conquest religion. God’s plan, in fact, is the opposite. As the Apostle Paul says in Ephesians 1, "And God made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment—to bring all things in heaven and on earth together, under one head, even Christ." God’s overarching plan is to reconcile all things to himself, not to destroy. Our God is a saver!

Well, back to the story, there is a positive note even within this difficult story. This story doesn’t end with God’s people being crushed by Ai and Achan and his family being stoned by their own people. It ends with God’s people once again consecrating themselves, purifying themselves, and committing themselves anew to God and his kingdom. It ends with this single—minded obedience to God that is still the only kind of obedience that God knows. And then, when they do that, what happens? They are given the victory over Ai. Joshua Chapter 8 is another interesting battle story if you want to read it sometime. God comes up with this great battle plan, in which the army of Joshua comes just close enough to Ai to get the army of Ai to see them and then come running after them. Joshua’s army draws the army of Ai right out of the city and down the road a few miles; and then the reconnaissance unit that was hiding behind some rocks slips into the city and burns it down. The soldiers of Ai turn around and see their city going up in smoke; they are stunned, demoralized, and quickly surrounded, and cut down.

The positive point is: when we follow God and God alone, when we live single—mindedly, not double—mindedly, and when we do things God’s way and not our own way, then we experience the victory, the blessing, the shalom (the peace) of God; we are in the groove of God and his ways. To put it in the words of Psalm 1, we prosper.

I remember years ago a middle aged man who had lived a rough life starting coming to the church I was pastor of and became a Christian. He came before the elders of our church to join the church. He gave his testimony. He said, "Yeah, ever since I became a Christian, I’ve had better luck." Well, we didn’t correct him then and there, but he wasn’t having better luck, he was simply experiencing the reality that when we live the way God made us to live, life goes better.

In the words of Psalm 1, we prosper. Joshua 7 & 8 show us in dramatic fashion just how things snowball in life—both ways, either for ill or for good. Achan steals a robe, a little silver, and a little gold, his unfaithfulness becomes this spiritual virus in the whole community and before you know it the whole community is so out of tune with God that they think they can whip Ai with just a few thousand soldiers. One act of disobedience throws everything off, and before you know it, they’ve lost a battle. The opposite is also true. When the people purify themselves, consecrate themselves, get back in the groove with God, straighten out their life, when they’re on the path, then with less human effort than before (there are no Hebrew casualties in this battle), they defeat the city of Ai.

The big deal in life is God, God’s kingdom and yes, the commands, the obligations, the calling, the duty that go with being followers of God, subjects in his kingdom; a kingdom once and for all established by the life and death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. When that’s the big deal in our life, we’ll be fine—God’s Word guarantees it. But if that’s not straight in your life, if that’s not the big deal, if you flinch at the idea that God has a claim on your life in which he can say "Come," and you must come; and "Go" and you must go, if God and his kingdom aren’t the big deal in your life, I don’t know how to tell you this, but you’re dead. You are dead in the water. You will go from one train wreck to the next in your life. One defeat by Ai after another.

And what’s so ironic is that everything we’re trying to get by going our own way, by fudging on God’s commands, by shortcutting God’s designs . . . what’s so ironic is that all the needs we’re trying to fill, all the hungers we’re trying to satisfy—they’re all filled when we finally lose our life, quit trying to find our life, lose our life in Christ, for Christ and his kingdom.

And God, the hound of heaven, loves us enough that he will keep after us even when we go astray. Sooner or later, we will get the message that the big deal in life is not our petty fortunes and dreams and pleasures; it’s a kingdom that God has created, a victory that he has won in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ his Son and our Lord, it’s a city that God is building and whose foundation is Christ and of which we are citizens by the blood of Christ. Believe that. Give your life to that. And experience the blessing of God.

About the Author

Duane Kelderman

Rev. Duane Kelderman is the Vice President for Administration and an Associate Professor of Preaching at Calvin Seminary in Grand Rapids. Before his current position he served as pastor in Christian Reformed congregations in Toledo, Ohio; Denver, Colorado; and Grand Rapids, Michigan. Rev. Kelderman is married to Jeannette and has three children and two grandchildren. He was born and raised in Oskaloosa, Iowa and attended Calvin College and Calvin Seminary. He enjoys reading and carpentry.

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