Joshua 7:1-5

TROUBLE IN THE LORD’S CAMP

CRITICAL NOTES.—

Joshua 7:1. Committed a trespass] Lit., “deceived a deceit” The meaning of the verb is to cover, as with a garment, thence to act deceitfully or treacherously. The sin of this single member of Israel is put as the transgression of the whole body. Achan] Called, in 1 Chronicles 2:7, Achar, the troubler of Israel. “Josephus also calls him” Ἄχαρος for the same reason; the Vat. Cod. of the LXX. reads “Ἄχαρ, the Alex. Ἀχάν” (Keil). Son of Zabdi] Zabdi, in 1 Chronicles 2:6, is given as Zimri, which latter form is thought to be an error of transcription.

2. Ai] The same as Hai in Genesis 12:8; Genesis 13:3, usually mentioned with Bethel. A small population returned to Ai from the captivity (Ez. 2:28; Nehemiah 7:32). In Nehemiah 11:31, it is called Aija; and in Isaiah 10:28. Aiath; while in Joshua 18:23 it is apparently the same place which is called Avim. Bethaven] The situation is uncertain. From this verse, it cannot, as some have thought, have been “another name for Bethel.” Kitto thinks that in Hosea 10:5, Bethaven, “the house of emptiness,” is put in derison for Bethel, “the house of God.”

3. They are but few] The number is given in chap. Joshua 8:25, as twelve thousand. Judging by the small force sent against the city, the spies seem to have been mistaken in their estimate of the inhabitants.

5. Unto Shebarim] “Probably stone quarries; it is evidently a proper name, as the Vulgate, Arabic, and most commentators agree, belonging to some locality between Ai and Jericho” (Keil). “Or, by translation, to the broken places, i.e., to the steep broken sides of the Mutyah” (Crosby).

MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Joshua 7:1

THE FIRST REPULSE

I. The separation which comes through sin. “The anger of the Lord was kindled against the children of Israel.” Jehovah, who till now had been in alliance with them, “was turned to be their enemy.” Their sins had separated between them and their God. The separating power of sin is one of its chief and most disastrous features. Sin is disintegrating; where holiness tends to join together in the blessedness of a beautiful unity, sin rends, and divides, and isolates, and thus desolates all through God’s fair world. Sin is that ingredient from the devil’s laboratory, which, thrown into the cup of creation’s happiness, precipitates all that which otherwise would hold men and things together in the solution of a perpetual joy. It disturbs at once the unity, the beauty, and the peace of a world.

1. Sin separates between men, irrespective of character. It rends society, and revolutionises kingdoms; it breaks up families, divides churches, brings to an end partnerships in business, discharges the servant from his master, and has no more regard for unity in a palace than in a cottage.

2. Sin separates between good men and bad. It is a kind of perpetual judgment, through which, already, the sheep are being set on the right hand and the goats on the left. The sinful man withdraws himself from the righteous by preference, and the righteous from the sinful for protection, lest, standing in the way of sinners, he should become as one of them. Each, being let go, joins his “own company.”

3. Much more mwst sin separate between God and the wicked. The polar regions cannot be reconciled to the tropics; the night cannot make the same hours a common home, and dwell together within them in amity with the day; spotless purity cannot be at one with defilement; much less can He who is the source of all warmth and light and love and goodness and truth have fellowship with the powers of darkness and evil.

II. The blindness which comes through sin. God was not with the spies to enlighten and guide them, and therefore they were deceived (Joshua 7:3). In the next battle the strength of the people and place is very differently estimated. Instead of sending three thousand, Joshua selects at least thirty thousand men, five thousand of whom are detached to form an ambush on the west side of the city, while he himself appears to lead the remainder into the midst of the valley. While the former defeat would induce extra precautions, God had evidently suffered the judgment of both Joshua and the spies to become obscured when about to make this first attack on Ai. No such mistake was made in the matter of Jericho, either by the spies whom Rahab sheltered, or by any of the leaders of Israel. This is but an incidental illustration of an ever-recurring fact: sin is ever leaving men in obscurity, or actually deadening their perceptive powers.

1. God still refuses to grant His light to such as choose to walk in the darkness of sin. Those only does He guide with His eye, who have learned to say, “Our eyes are up unto Thee.”

2. Sin, in itself, works blindness. They who do God’s will shall know of His doctrine, and also of His ways.

III. The weakness which comes through sin. The conflict at Jericho is an exposition of the words of Paul, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me; “the conflict at Ai is an exposition of the utterance of the Lord Himself, “Without Me ye can do nothing.” We learn in one battle that nothing is too hard for the Lord; in the other, that little is sufficiently easy for men. When God departed from the Israelites, that clause entered most naturally into the history, “They fled before the men of Ai.”

IV. The wide-spread suffering which comes through sin. “The men of Ai smote of them about thirty and six men,” and presently Achan and his family fall by the hands of their own brethren. The entire camp of Israel was made to suffer by reason of Achan’s transgression.

1. Sin brings loss and ruin. All its gains have presently to be returned.

2. Sin produces fear. This is not only so among those who know not God, but equally so among God’s people. They have but to transgress, and their hearts, also, “melt and become as water.”

3. Sin works shame. The Israelites are humbled before their enemies, Joshua is humbled before his brethren, Achan’s family have the shame of knowing that their deadliest foe is of their own household, and Achan himself is humbled in the deepest shame of all. This thief has to feel that he is bankrupt for his pains; this father, that he is childless by his own folly; this soldier, that he has brought defeat on his country; this Israelite, that his name must do worse than perish out from among his people—that he must henceforth be known as “the troubler” of his nation.

4. Sin, let it work what it may previously, has its ultimate issues in nothing less than death. “Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.” It ends thus with Achan and his family, thus with the thirty-six men who were slain, thus with myriads more; and but for Him who redeems souls from the power of the grave, it would have this for its ultimate issue in every member of the human race.

OUTLINES AND COMMENTS ON THE VERSES

Joshua 7:1.—CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY.

Achan sinned, and it is said, The children of Israel committed a trespass; for some time, no man out of Achan’s household knew of his wickedness, yet it is written, The anger of the Lord was kindled against the children of Israel. The act of this one man brings penal consequences on all the host, and Jehovah is said to have regarded the sin of the one as the transgression of all. However difficult it may be to satisfactorily define and illustrate the principle on which accountability of this kind rests, there can be no doubt of its almost universal acceptance by men. It is easy to clamour against it theologically, and to demand a philosophical explanation of its basis and working; but no man should rail against religious people in general because some religious people fail to enlighten him, lest he lay himself open to the charge of blaming a whole community because of the offence of some, and thus shew that his own sociology has the same dogma as the theology which he so readily vilifies in others. The explanation of the difficulty must not be sought in any arbitrary dogma imposed on men from without, but in that inherent and essential oneness which every one practically believes to pertain to every form of organic unity. It is just because it is impossible for it to be otherwise, that it becomes foolish to inveigh against this principle. Let a body be made up of limbs or individuals, let it be held together by joints that are physical, by interests that are pecuniary, or by ties that are social, responsibility cannot be disbursed between its particular joints or ties so as to fall singly on the culpable member, but must be attached to the body as a whole. In practical life, men find absolutely no alternative from this law. It can hardly be other than weak to stigmatise as an arbitrary dogma that which all men find to be inherent and unavoidable. Because it so pertains to bodies, as such, it may be better to term it corporate than representative accountability. It will be sufficient, here, to indicate its wide-spread adoption by men for the purposes of daily life.

I. Corporate responsibility is adopted in the intercourse of nations. It is recognised between civilised nations. Let one of our ambassadors abroad offer an insult to the government to which he is accredited, and that government would interpret it as the insult of England, reparation for which would be counted due from our country. If violence were committed by the vessel of a foreign nation to a vessel, or to any person on board a vessel, sailing under the English flag, England would hold herself to have suffered that violence, and would look for apology and acknowledgment, not from the officers or crew of the offending vessel, but from the government from which they came. In the Alabama case, America held herself to have suffered loss by England, and did not concern herself with the firm which built the vessel; nor could this country, without some intervention, have suffered any harm to have been done to members of that firm, even though they had been found travelling in America prior to the settlement of the claims; for, just as offending children must be dealt with by strangers through their parents, so must offending subjects be dealt with through their governments. Nor are these principles in any measure the outcome of an overwrought civilization; they are of equal force among barbarians, and assert themselves with the same emphasis in the intercourse of savages. Every missionary and inoffensive European, who has been slain by natives in the South Sea Islands, and elsewhere, because of the wicked wrongs perpetrated by Europeans who have preceded them, furnishes an instance in point. Failing to reach those actually guilty, the savages have sought to avenge themselves by punishing men of the same community. Let a man in one tribe of North American Indians have offered in past years insult and injury to the member of another tribe, and the fierce war whoop would have proclaimed that in creeds savage as well as in creeds civilised there stood for an article of faith that ineradicable dogma of the universal conscience—The sin of a member is the offence of the body. It is not the sin of the body, excepting indirectly, unless the body condone it in the member, or refuse to make reparation to those who are injured. Indirectly, the body may also have moral participation in the guilt; it may be a remote party to the sin, through not having done its duty in training the member, through not having exercised sufficient care in selecting that member for the service under which he was tempted to sin, or through not having restrained him in some stage prior to the commission of the sin. Yet, although there may be little moral participation by the body when a member of it sins, the body must be, and is universally held to be, responsible for the consequences of the wrong done. It is perfectly in harmony with the world’s own practice that, when Achan sins, God should be angry with Israel.

II. Corporate responsibility is admitted in family and social life. If the servant of a master, or firm, or company drive recklessly, and cause an accident, the employers of that servant are held by law to be responsible. Here the liability is pecuniary, though there might still be a measure of moral guilt, such as would arise from employing the servant without taking reasonable care to ascertain his efficiency, before employing him in a service which might prove dangerous or injurious to others. If however-a child grow up a thief, or is presently executed for murder, society holds all the family to be disgraced. The penalty exacted from the father and mother of the murderer is far more than pecuniary; nor does this arise merely from the supposed neglect of such parents in training the child who ultimately committed murder, for the very children of such a murderer would also be held by society to be disgraced, and they would feel that disgrace themselves, whether society were lenient to them or harsh. If a man were to join for a single hour a party of ten burglars, and one of the burglars during that hour were to commit murder, each man would be held in law liable to capital punishment, not excepting the man who became merely for the hour a member of the nefarious body.

III. Corporate responsibility is the foundation of many exhortations and reproofs which are addressed to the Church of Christ. Every appeal made to Christians not to disgrace the Church, or to bring shame on the name of Jesus, and every reproof to any who have thus sinned, is based on the universal conviction that the sin of a member is rightly held to disgrace the entire community. Even the sacred name of the Saviour is held not to be exempt from these inexorable and far-reaching penalties. Peter and Judas, in the days of the ministry, could bring dishonour upon Him; and we, who live now, are exhorted not to become of them who “crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put Him to an open shame.”

IV. Corporate responsibility is made the basis of deliverance in the case of every one who is spiritually saved. “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. Through the first head of the race, sin and death came upon all, and the former of these penalties is no less severe than the latter: through Him who became by His own grace and righteousness the second head of the race, holiness and eternal life are given for a heritage to every member of His body. Only those are lost who detach themselves from Him by sin and unbelief. Coming into the race as its second head, it is not merely those who accept Him that are saved, but all who do not reject Him, that is, little children. The first head carried its penalty of death to all belonging to the body; the second head carries, no less, to all who do not reject Him the gift of life. In each case, the body follows its head, and for those who choose to renounce Christ, after they have entered into this natural life under His headship, there remains nothing but the old head and the old doom.

THE ANGER OF GOD

“God’s anger is not an ebullition of blind passion, but a holy displeasure against the unrighteousness of men. When this unrighteousness is removed, God’s anger ceases, as Joshua 7:26 shews. All which has been injuriously said concerning the blood-thirsty and wrathful God of the Old Testament rests on a failure to apprehend this holy displeasure of God against the unrighteousness of men. That brings upon them indeed judgment and penalty, but never goes so far as to shut up His compassion.… Eternal justice, which belongs as a constitutive element to the nature of God, without which we cannot conceive of any government at all of the world, is constantly limited by His love. But, conversely, His love towards men is not a blind love, but rather a truly paternal affection which leaves no fault, no transgression of His commands, unreproved. Both justice and love co-exist in God, and are mutually blended in Him with an interpenetration of the most intimate, highest, absolute kind. Hence the jurists may say: Fiat justitia pereat mundus! God never has and never can.” [Lange.]

“There is a community amongst men that are of the same society, every one being a part of the body, so that what evil he does, he does not as one alone by himself, but as a part of the body whereof he is a member.” [Augustine.]

God not only knows every transgressor’s name, but each transgressor’s history. The fathers, the tribe, the training, and all the surroundings of a sinner are naked and open to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.

Joshua 7:2.—MAN’S UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF GOD’S ABSENCE.

I. Here are men working together for God, but not with God. God had withdrawn Himself from the Israelites. Even if still present in the camp, the Lord had ceased to work with any of the people. I. To be doing God’s work is not a sufficient guarantee of having God’s help. The people were as much engaged in doing the work of the Lord when they attacked Ai as when they destroyed Jericho; yet the Lord, who was with them in the one case, refused to accompany them in the other. We see (a) Joshua sending out spies, while he himself is not moved to do this by God; (b) the spies searching in God’s cause, but without God’s guidance; (c) the three thousand Israelites fighting God’s battle, but none of them having God’s assistance.

2. God’s presence with us in the past is no sufficient guarantee of His continual presence. The marvellous passage of the Jordan, and the magnificent triumph at Jericho, were but things of yesterday, and indisputably God was with them there; yet neither the one nor the other, nor both, prevented God’s absence and Israel’s defeat at Ai. We need manifest grace for each day of our lives. Yesterday’s mercies may have been large, and should be long and gladly borne in mind, but we need also the assurance of to-day that God is with us. Yet let no one think that these temporary withdrawings of God furnish an argument for the doctrine that He withdraws from His people perpetually. The truth or falsity of that must be settled elsewhere, not here. The history at Ai distinctly shews that God does but forsake Israel for a time, that He may again come to them in even more than the closeness of the former union. The very design of the absence is to provide for Jehovah’s future presence.

3. The godliness of any part of a body of the Lord’s people is no sufficient guarantee of the Lord’s fellowship and co-operation with that body. Joshua, and the rest of the leaders, and the general multitude of the people probably loved God more than ever. Their hearts were warm with gratitude for the wonderful help of the past, and filled with hope in the Lord as to the future. We can think of no time in all their previous history when the people were likely to be so close in union and ardent fellowship with God as after the fall of Jericho. Yet because one man, and perhaps his family, had broken covenant with God, God had turned against all Israel. One offender in a church may prevent the Divine blessing from resting on that church. When a church altogether walks in holiness, it may confidently expect abundant blessing from on high; but the piety of any part of that church, although it be a large part, may be insufficient to secure God’s manifest presence. The sin of one member may still be held to corrupt the entire body.

II. Here are men working together for God, and utterly unconscious of God’s departure from their midst. One of the most solemn aspects of the narrative is its revelation of the complete ignorance of all the people that the Lord was no longer with them. Joshua was ignorant of this. Apparently he sent out the spies, and formed his plans for the overthrow of Ai, with as much confidence as when he proceeded to lay siege to the City of Palm Trees, albeit on that occasion he took his instructions from the Prince of the host of the Lord in person. The spies were ignorant of the Lord’s departure. Comparing their conduct with that of the spies who went to search out Jericho, they were as prompt to undertake the work, as ready in forming an opinion, and perhaps even more confident in the judgment to which they came. There is an assurance, a definiteness, and a precision about their recommendation to Joshua, given in the third verse, which has nothing to correspond with it in the recorded utterance of the spies who returned from a similar mission to Jericho (cf. chap. Joshua 2:23). The army, also, seems to have been ignorant of this terrible change that had come over the camp. The people who waited in their tents remained quietly, and the three thousand who went up to the battle seem to have gone confidently. No one seems to have had the least suspicion that Jehovah had withdrawn from Israel. It is, perhaps, even more possible for us to suffer the withdrawal of the Lord’s presence, and to remain for some time ignorant of our loss. Just as the Ark still remained in the camp of Israel, and Eleazar the high priest, with his assistants, still ministered in the service of the tabernacle, thus enabling the people to think that all things continued as before; so may we, as we retain our Bibles, and continue our religious worship and service, satisfy ourselves with the outward signs of religion, while God Himself is absent from us. There is no more solemn feature in the sad history of Samson than that brief chronicle of a similar ignorance, in which we read, “He awoke out of his sleep, and said, I will go out as at other times before, and shake myself. And he wist not that the Lord was departed from him.”

III. Here are men working together for God, and learning through defeat and shame and death that God is not with them. This ignorance is, and can be, only for a time. Samson was not long in discovering his loss. Saul, also, learned to cry, “God is departed from me.” The fathers of these very Israelites would not believe Moses when he said, “Go not up, for the Lord is not among you,” but they speedily learned how true it was, when the Amalekites and Canaanites came down from the hill, “and smote them, and discomfited them even unto Hormah.” So, in their very first battle after the Lord’s departure, the Israelites learned at Ai what they had failed to discover when encamped around the Ark. Yet some only learned this as they fell slain in the battle. Happy is he who so walks and talks with God as to promptly feel the loss of Divine fellowship when God is no longer present; on the other hand, terrible is the lot of him who only makes the discovery as he knows death to be drawing nigh, and then, like Saul, learns his loss too late.

Joshua 7:5.—THE CHANGELESSNESS OF GOD AND THE MUTABILITY OF MEN.

I. The apparent vicissitudes of God’s changelessness. God here appears to have altered His mind, and to have turned completely round in His relation to the Israelites. From being Israel’s friend, “He turned to be their enemy, and fought against them.” What the swellings of Jordan could not do, the tides of wicked feeling in Achan’s single heart did but too effectually,—they turned aside the power of Jehovah, and made it work in another direction. The majestic strength which the walls of Jericho were unable to resist for a moment, this single man both resisted and reapplied. The history reveals Achan as the morally weakest man of all the host, and yet as the man who reverses omnipotence, making it to work in the direction of seeming enmity instead of in the way of manifest love. So great is the power of a traitor friend beyond the might of an open foe, and so infinitely beyond the force of physical things is the strength of things which are moral.

Thus it is that we are abruptly brought face to face with what has been called the seeming vicissitudes of God’s changelessness. In plainer words, God’s changeless way with men is made up of apparent and well-regulated changes. But these changes are only apparent; they are not real and actual. In this instance, before Ai, although it may sound paradoxical, if God had not changed, He would have changed, and by changing He preserved His glorious immutability. If God had continued to fight for Israel, He would have been helping men who had gone over to the side of sin; He would have been found in alliance with men who had done an act of rebellion against holiness and against Himself. In a word, it was Israel who had turned, representatively, against God, hence the apparent turning of God against Israel. Life is full of these seeming changes on the part of God. They are all to be brought to this one explanation: God alters His outward relation to men, that He may sacredly preserve His own immutable way in the interests of truth and righteousness and mercy. When God seems to have turned against us, it is because we have changed our ground. If He followed us, He would change also. He keeps on in the way of mercy and truth, saying, as only He in all the universe can say, “I am the Lord, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.” Take an illustration. The ship alters its course, and the compass changes at once; it traverses just as many points over the deck of the ship as the ship itself turns away from its previous bearings. And thus it is that the compass remains true to itself, and continues to be known as

“That trembling vassal of the Pole,
The feeling Compass, Navigation’s soul.”

It is exactly because the compass moves in its relation to the veering ship that it continues to be so abiding in its relation to the pole. Thus it is that when Israel alters its course, and actually turns back on its former path, it must needs come into collision with an undeviating God. Thus, too, in another and more pleasant instance, when Nineveh repents and turns to the way of the Lord, the Lord is said to “repent of the evil that He had said He would do unto Nineveh.” The outward relation is but altered that God’s eternal way of love and goodness may stand firm and abiding.

1. When God is against us, it is because we have got where we are against Him. If we find Him “hedging up our way with thorns,” it is because we are in the wilderness. As Bunyan puts it, if we are in the hands of Despair, it is because we are out of the King’s highway.

2. Where God is seemingly against us, He is really for us. It would have been a curse on Achan, indeed, if all things had continued prosperous; not less would it have cursed Achan’s family and all Israel. The people would have learned that they could sin with impunity, and yet conquer triumphantly as ever. It was Mercy that pleaded for defeat, and for judgment on Achan; and just because God’s love was so deep and true, the warning became so solemn and bitter.

II. The mutability of human life.

1. The entire prospects of a man’s life may be suddenly altered by himself. While God remains thus true, the reversal of our prosperity will be as sudden as our departures from Him. This may not always be manifest. God does not always reveal His changed attitude in our altered temporal life. For other reasons than those appearing in this battle before Ai, He sometimes lets “the wicked flourish.” Yet just as abruptly as men turn aside into ways of sin, will God ever turn aside their real prosperity.

2. The position and prospects of a man’s life may be as suddenly changed by others. Achan brings defeat on all Israel. So long as we participate in the profits of fellowship with men, we must also suffer the penalties. Every corporate body, with an identity of interest, is a kind of firm; the members associate and unite in view of certain advantages, and they cannot do this without a joint responsibility common to them all. Thus may an individual bring shame and loss on a host.

III. The unswerving influence of man’s sin.

1. Sin ever tends towards defeat. It may not seem to do this, but it at once begins to work in that direction, and in that only.

2. Defeat which comes through sin invariably works fear. All defeat does not bring fear. Sometimes it stimulates. But when men have to trace failure to their transgressions against God, fear is the certain result. In such a case, it matters not whether they are Canaanites or Israelites, unbelievers or Christians, the same record serves for the history of all, “Wherefore the hearts of the people melted, and became as water.”

“At Jericho, Jehovah had shewn Himself to be merciful. At Ai, He magnified Himself as the just One, who will not allow His laws to be broken with impunity.” [Hävernick.]

“It is not good to contemn an impotent enemy. In the second battle the Israelites are beaten. It was not the fewness of their assailants that overthrew them, but the sin that lay lurking at home. If all the host of Israel had set upon this poor village of Ai, they had been equally discomfited: the wedge of Achan did more fight against them than all the swords of the Canaanites. The victories of God go not by strength, but by innocence. [Bp. Hall.]