Joshua 7:6-9

CRITICAL NOTES.—

Joshua 7:6. Rent his clothes … put dust upon their heads] Both are ancient and common signs of mourning. They were practised among the Greeks and Romans, as well as among the Jews. With Joshua and the elders they were indicative of humiliation before God.

MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Joshua 7:6

DEFEATED AND PRAYING

Defeat is very painful when it comes to us as a first experience. The child, the business man, the soldier, each is troubled to bear his first humiliation of being beaten. When Adam was overcome for the first time, he hid himself. When Robert Hall failed in his early efforts to preach Christ, he cried, “If this does not humble me, the devil will have me.” When Joshua was beaten back before the men of Ai, he, and the elders of Israel with him, fell before the Ark in humiliation and prayer.

I. We see the Lord’s servant acknowledging defeat. Joshua felt that he had been sent on Jehovah’s mission, that he had the prestige of former help from on high and of previous victories, and that he had gone up to this fresh conflict in the strength of Divine promises which hitherto had never failed him.

1. Think of the connection between the defeat of the godly and the confession of such defeat before God. The first Napoleon is reported to have said of our soldiers, “The worst of those English fellows is, they never know when they are beaten.” That may be a good thing to say of bravery in earthly service and conflicts, but it must not be said of the soldiers of Christ. When the Lord is gone over against them, and defeat succeeds separation from Him, they can have no more fatal trait of character than that proud stubbornness which refuses to own that the battle has resulted in their overthrow. (a) All actual defeat, to a Christian man, is from God. God permits it, or occasions it. This is so in business life; in family life; in Christian life; in Christian work. (b) Defeat being always from God, should ever be carried to God. Joshua falls before the Ark. Low at their Father’s feet; that is the place for His beaten children. They will learn the reason of defeat as they lie there. Thus, when the beaten disciples at the foot of the mount of transfiguration fail to heal the boy with the dumb spirit, and confess their failure before the Saviour, they soon learn the cause of their humiliation. They had only to ask, “Why could not we cast him out? “and the answer came at once, “Because of your unbelief.”

2. Think of the relation of defeat to humility. Joshua rent his clothes, and fell on his face, and put dust on his head. Thus he, and the elders of Israel, fasted and humbled themselves all the rest of the day until the evening. They took the way common to the time and country in which to express their humiliation. These usual forms were merely the vehicle in which they came with humbled hearts to God. We need not take the same forms. It does not matter what the vehicle is, if it only be sufficient to carry our hearts in true humility to the mercy-seat. But all defeat in the Lord’s war should work lowliness of mind. It is for this that each defeat is sent. Grosart has noticed that there was “a kind of ascending scale” in our Lord’s temptations in the desert. This seems to have been the case. The temptations both in physical position and moral intensity seem to lie successively on higher ground. For the first temptation, “Jesus was led up of the spirit into the wilderness;” the second temptation was higher still,—it was “on a pinnacle of the temple;” the third was highest of all,—it was “up into an exceeding high mountain.” And with this idea of physical elevation there is a concurrent gradation of intensity in the temptations themselves. The first temptation is to work a miracle on the stones to satisfy bodily hunger; the second is to make a sensuous demonstration in order to secure speedy success to His work; the third is to take the short road to universal power by meeting sin and the devil half-way. Our temptations, also, intensify as we go up. Let us not refuse to take the lowly position to which God ever invites us by our defeats. He puts us low on the ground at His feet, just because in our present state we could not bear the greater ordeal of the higher position to which we should be brought by further success. When God brings us down, we should learn to lie down; that is the safest place for the present, and the quickest way up as concerning the future.

3. Think of the effect of defeat upon Joshua’s faith. When defeat came, Joshua was utterly surprised. His faith in God was so simple, and yet so strong, that he had no room for a lost battle. The chief feeling, perhaps, which impresses us on reading his prayer, is his utter astonishment at the repulse. We think our faith great when we believe in a victory that comes. “My husband is to be converted to-day,” said an American Christian woman to her minister. “How do you know that?” asked he. And then the believing wife told how she had been praying, and how, although her husband shewed no sign of repentance, the assurance had taken firm hold of her heart that he would that day be brought to Christ. Her minister testifies that the man was converted on that selfsame day, and, in an exposition of some verses in the previous chapter, narrates the incident, as it would probably strike most modern believers, as an instance of great faith. Joshua’s faith had room for nothing but victories. We are surprised at one success; he was overwhelmed with shame and confusion when he was not triumphant everywhere. How this trust of the men who knew not a verse of our Gospels, and who had no Cross in which to glory, should put our small faith to shame! We ought to live so in the faith of Him who died for us, that defeat should make us stand aghast with astonishment, and then fall low in the dust with humiliation. It is said that a few years ago a young engineer was being examined for graduation, when his examiner proposed the following question: “Suppose you have a steam pump constructed for a ship, under your own supervision, and know that everything is in perfect working order, yet, when you throw out the hose, it will not draw. What should you think?” “I should think, sir, there must be a defect somewhere.” “But such a conclusion is not admissible; for the supposition is that everything is perfect, and yet that the pump will not work.” “Then, sir,” replied the student, “I should look over the side to see if the river had run dry.” We profess to believe in the omnipotence of the Spirit, and that the Spirit has been poured out from on high in a baptism of holy power. When our children are not given to us in Christ, when no spiritual victories follow our spiritual efforts and conflicts, is it not time to look for the cause of failure? Everything on God’s part must be perfect, but may it not be that we have let go our union with Him? Surely it must be so, if in all these things we are not more than conquerors through Him that loved us.

II. We see the Lord’s servant praying that defeat may be turned into victory.

1. Prayer may have much infirmity, and yet be heard and answered by God. (a) Joshua’s petition shews a spirit akin to murmuring and reproach. It seems to partake too much of the tone of some of the previous rebellions, as we hear it said, “Wherefore hast Thou at all brought this people over Jordan, to deliver us into the hand of the Amorites to destroy us?” (b) Joshua loses sight of God’s past leading of the people, or else he questions the wisdom of Divine guidance. He peevishly cries, “Would to God we had been content, and dwelt on the other side Jordan!” He speaks as though the past had been a mistake. (c) Joshua shews us the nearness of faith to unbelief. He whose former faith had been so great as to leave no place whatever for defeat, now shews a distrust which can hardly find room to hope for any future victory: “The Canaanites shall environ us round, and cut off our name from the earth.” So poor, in some aspects, seems the spirit of Joshua’s petition before God. Yet this prayer prevailed; if it did not bring an immediate reversal of defeat, it made the way clear for future victory. Our prayers may be moved by an imperfect spirit, and may be poured out in unseemly words; if, like Joshua, we have a heart earnest with holy longings, and desirous of God’s honour and His people’s welfare, they will not be poured out in vain.

2. True prayer throws its principal stress on the glory of the Divine name. “What wilt Thou do unto Thy great name?” Just as Moses had done before him, Joshua felt truly and deeply concerned for the Divine honour before the heathen nations. This is the true spirit of prayer, and one to which God ever has regard. The Saviour said repeatedly, before leaving His disciples, “Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, He will give it you.” Yet prayer is not merely the formal mention of the Divine name, for, if that were so, the Lord’s prayer itself would be imperfect. The suppliant who would prevail indeed, must come in that spirit which God loves, and which makes the Divine name the glorious name which it is; he must come, as the Saviour Himself loved to plead, having no will or wish that stands opposed to that Sovereign will which by prayer he seeks to move.

Joshua 7:6.—GODLY SORROW

I. The sorrow of the godly is deep and unfeigned.

1. It is involuntary. It is independent of any act of the will. It comes as suddenly as its cause, answering to the blow that smites as the echo answers to the call, or as the thunder responds to the lightning. Godly sorrow flows naturally and freely, not stiffly and artificially. True humiliation has no onion tears.

2. It is continuous as the necessity. It is not satisfied with a prescribed amount of tears and shame. Such sorrow has no thought of any intrinsic merit in humiliation. It has no regard to penance. It does not set itself a given lesson in grief, thinking that so much grief is equal to so much guilt. Joshua fell upon his face, not merely until eventide, but till the Lord said, “Get thee up.”

II. The sorrow of the godly is not so much the sorrow of selfishness as sorrow with God. Joshua has fears for Israel, and he is not free from the sense of the personal pain which will come to himself and the people through shame and loss. This is only human and natural. But Joshua’s great grief is that the enemies of the Lord will find opportunity to blaspheme. He thinks it less that Israel’s name shall be cut off from the earth than that the great name of Jehovah shall be dishonoured. The late F. W. Robertson has said on the subject of sorrow for sin: “God sees sin not in its consequences, but in itself: a thing infinitely evil, even if the consequences were happiness to the guilty, instead of misery. So sorrow according to God, is to see sin as God sees it. The grief of Peter was as bitter as that of Judas. He went out and wept bitterly; how bitterly none can tell but they who have learned to look on sin as God does. But in Peter’s grief there was an element of hope; and that sprung precisely from this—that he saw God in it all. Despair of self did not lead to despair of God. This is the great peculiar feature of this sorrow: God is there, accordingly self is less prominent. It is not a microscopic self-examination, nor a mourning in which self is ever uppermost: my character gone; the greatness of my sin; the forfeiture of my salvation. The thought of God absorbs all that.” Such is the hopeful feature in Joshua’s sorrow for the defeat at Ai. Though he may suspect some wrong, he does not, at the time of this prayer, know how fully the defeat is owing to actual sin. Yet the grief of this godly man for himself and Israel is comparatively lost and absorbed in his concern for the honour of his Lord’s name. So, if our sorrow be really holy, it will ever gather round the name and truth of God, rather than around our most sacred personal interests.

III. The sorrow of the godly is sometimes impatient and unreasonable. Without, on the one hand, taking the seventh verse to be an “irreverent remonstrance,” and without reading it, on the other, merely as the utterance of what the heathen would “infer from the event,” it is almost impossible not to discern in the language something of the peevishness of pain,—something of that bitterness of impatience which is rather the sharp outcry of a wounded heart than a remonstrance with Jehovah. The words are more subjective than objective; we must read them rather as words escaping from the man, than as words addressed to God. Some men feel pain more keenly than others. Thus a finely wrought spirit has cried out the enquiry:—

“Is it true, O Christ in heaven! that the highest suffer most?
That the strongest wander farther, and more hopelessly are lost?
That the mark of rank in nature is capacity for pain,
And the anguish of the singer makes the sweetness of the strain?”

It is even so. As the author of “Ecce Deus” has told us, “Suffering is a question of nature. The educated man suffers more than the uneducated man: the poet probably suffers more than the mathematician; the commanding officer suffers more in a defeat than a common soldier. The more life, the more suffering; the billows of sorrow being in proportion to the volume of our manhood. The storm may pass as fiercely over the shallow lake as over the Atlantic, but by its very volume the latter is more terribly shaken.” It is this volume of manhood, this capacity for pain, this sensitiveness to shame and wounding, that, to superficial gazers, makes the very strong sometimes seem so very weak. The pain of the jelly-fish may be hardly perceptible, the agony of the lion is terrible. Moses and Daniel and Paul stand conspicuous above their contemporaries, not only in ability to work, but also in power to suffer. So Joshua, with his great nature, his fine feeling, and responsible position, is bowed down by this calamity to the very dust, the prostrate form of his body hardly serving to express his greater prostration of spirit.

1. Those who have greatness enough to be Christians must not wonder if they suffer more than those who have not. The man who is sensitive to sin, to the commandments of God, to the power of truth, to the pain of conscience, to the love of Christ, must not wonder if he suffers more than those, many of whom are morally “past feeling,” and the remainder of whom are more or less advanced in this most terrible of all the forms of insensibility. Not only as from the lips of the Saviour, but as the very outcome of the Christian condition of the conscience, true disciples must expect to find it stated as their heritage in the way of life, “Through much tribulation ye must enter into the kingdom.”

2. Those who are great enough to be greatly Christian must expect to suffer conspicuously even among the suffering Church. The greater tribulation of men like Moses, and Joshua, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and Daniel, and Peter, and Paul, is no more an arbitrary regulation than it is an arbitrary regulation that the Church should suffer more than the world. Christ’s word about the necessity of suffering is not to be read merely as the decree of a sovereign; though it be the assignment of His will, it is even more emphatically the heritage of life that is in Him; and the larger the measure of that life, the keener will be the sensitiveness to the suffering which, in this world of sin, is inflicted on every hand.

IV. God is very tolerant of such impatience as is merely the expression of His children’s pain. A child may call out sharply under the touch of the hand that tends him in some infirmity, but a mother never mistakes the cry of her child’s distress for the utterance of dislike to herself, or for the expression of rebellion against her authority. Patients under the hand of the surgeon have been heard to heap words of insult and threatening on the man who was engaged in setting a broken limb, but no wise operator would interpret words like those as being more than the expression of pain. Thus God ever discerns between the outcry of a wounded heart and the irreverence of a rebellious spirit. Joshua may speak, not as it is becoming that he should speak, but in the hastiness of disappointment and the bitterness of pain; God has not so much as a word of rebuke for this; He simply proceeds to say, “Get thee up; wherefore liest thou thus upon thy face?”

OUTLINES AND COMMENTS ON THE VERSES

Joshua 7:6.—MAN PRAYING AND GOD SILENT.

I. The ignorance of man in prayer. The defeat before Ai seems to have been in the morning. During all the remainder of the day, Joshua and the elders of the people were bowing in humiliation and fasting and prayer before God. Joshua was ignorant of Achan’s sin, ignorant of God’s deep anger, ignorant of the fact that victory at Ai would have been one of the greatest evils that could have befallen Israel. Human prayers are ignorant from various causes.

1. There is the ignorance that results from carelessness. Men fail to study themselves, sin, the Bible, God.

2. There is the ignorance consequent on our limited capacities and our straitened powers of obtaining knowledge. Joshua could not watch an army to see that none transgressed. It required infinite knowledge to mark the conduct of every man in the hour of battle and confusion. Only omniscience could see every man. Only omniscience, too, could see the evil of the sin which had been committed.

3. Ignorance sometimes stands connected with the thing for which prayer is made. Joshua wanted victory restored to Israel. He did not know, during these hours of prayer, how much richer Israel was to be made through defeat.

4. Ignorance often has to do with the way in which prayer is to be answered. God gave Joshua victory after all; but the way to victory lay through further shame and a yet profounder humiliation. Israel was to be discovered as guilty of breaking the covenant, and one family in Israel was to be utterly destroyed out of the camp.

II. The wisdom of God’s silence. We are not told of the way in which God generally communicated with Joshua, neither are we informed how long God usually kept His servant waiting ere He answered. Commonly Divine counsel seems to be given to Joshua at the time and place where it is needed. It might be expected that in a grave emergency like this God would have responded to His servant’s cry at once. Yet the Lord kept silence, although for hour after hour Joshua lay pleading to be heard. Yet, now that we have the entire account before us, the wisdom of Divine silence is manifest. God’s silence would gradually prepare the mind of Joshua

(1) To suspect that something was wrong in the camp;

(2) To realise the severity of the Divine anger;

(3) To acquiesce in, and presently execute, the solemn sentence against Achan;

(4) To understand, when the people were again purified, that victory when in alliance with sin, would be the most ruinous defeat of all.

III. Man’s misinterpretation of God’s silence. The seventh, eighth, and ninth verses seem to be only uttered when the day of humiliation and prayer had well nigh closed. Perhaps the sixth verse is meant to epitomise the history of hours of patient pleading for light, and in that case the three verses which follow would tell the tale of the impatient outburst of Joshua’s broken heart when he finds himself unheard.

1. Failing to obtain God’s answer in the present, men despondingly misinterpret God’s mercy in the past. “Wherefore hast Thou brought this people over Jordan?” One would have never expected to hear any question as to the mercy and love of God in the passage of the Jordan. Apparently Divine goodness was indisputably manifest there. In times of darkness men question God’s greatest mercies, doubt their own richest experiences, blot out and re-write in hard terms the noblest parts of their personal history.

2. Failing to obtain God’s answer in the present, men unbelievingly doubt God as to the future. Hast Thou brought us over Jordan “to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites to destroy us”? Defeated and distressed minds see everything through the disorder and confusion of the present. With so many examples in the Scripture of the noblest servants of God who have proved themselves utterly unfit for calm judgment of their hope in the Lord during times of sorrow, we might well refuse to be led by personal feelings in the hours of our own distress.

3. Failing to obtain God’s answer in the present, men are tempted to think any part of their lives more profitable than that. “Would to God we had been content,” etc. In after days Joshua would come to look on those hours of weary agony in prayer as some of the most notable and useful in his life. They were a time of crisis, in which, amid intense suffering and doubt, this good man waited for the salvation of Israel. They were one of those times of trial in which so many who are but superficially pious begin to go eternally wrong. They were one of those judgment days of the Lord which even here on earth go to separate between the sheep and the goats. Happy was it for that generation of Israelites that, in this crisis of trial, they had a leader whose piety was deep enough to wait before God, and too deep to turn to anything else than to prayer for a solution of this mystery of darkness, and in order that a way might again be found through which he and they should again walk forth into the light of the smile of God.

With those who are truly devout, outward forms are the suitable expression of inward feelings. God never has to say to such, “Rend your hearts, and not your garments.”
The devout heart alone is qualified to pronounce on the religious ceremonial in which its own sense of woe, or want, or joy can best be told out to God.
So long as human hearts and experiences differ, and men are true to themselves, so long will the forms through which they tell out their life to each other and to God be various and unlike also.

Joshua 7:8.—

I. The human weakness of the Lord’s people. They too can turn their backs (cf. Psalms 78:9).

II. The Divine prerogative of the Lord’s people. They need not turn their backs. Let them but walk with God, and they have omnipotence on their side. It is their privilege alone to say, “If God be for us, who can be against us?”

III. The pious shame of the Lord’s people. “O Lord, what shall I say?

1. There are no logical words in which to account for a Christian’s defeat. If Omnipotence says, “Lo, I am with you alway,” there is no making out of a reasonable case for the overthrow of a child of God.

2. The only words in which to speak of such a defeat, are words of shame. We can but say, “I confess that there are no words.” 8. The best place for words of shame, on account of such defeat, is low before God.

Joshua 7:9, first clause.—

I. The effect of faith and victory. All the time Israel believed and prospered, the hearts of the Canaanites did melt and become as water. “This is the victory that overcometh the world, even your faith.”

II. The influence of fear and failure. “They shall hear, and shall environ us round.” Every increasing thing tends to increase, and every decreasing thing to decrease. The impetus of success. The retarding influence of failure. “Nothing succeeds like success.” Doubting Christians, who morbidly encourage doubt, think far too little of the depressing effect of their ceaseless discourse about fear and failure.

“The heart of man can nowhere observe a just proportion. In prosperity it is too proud, in adversity too pusillanimous.” [Cramer.]

In times of unusual prosperity we are apt to unconsciously trust our success rather than God from whom all success must come. Thus, Elijah was bold and undaunted when he had no victory upon which to lean. Then came the triumph on Carmel, in which the prophet heard the multitude with one voice confess Jehovah. Forthwith Elijah hoped for Israel; he seems to have trusted the prospect of a spiritual harvest rather than the God of the harvest. After that, it only needed Jezebel’s threat to fill him with a despair which made him cry, “O Lord, take my life.” So, after Jericho, Joshua finds it hard to endure Ai.

Joshua 7:9, last clause.—THE GLORY OF GOD’S GREAT NAME.

I. God’s delight in His name is not in any measure akin to self-praise and vanity. The Scriptures constantly bid us to seek the glory of God. God does not desire glory as men desire it. With men, the pursuit of glory is selfish and vain; God’s way to glory is through self-sacrifice.

II. God’s delight in His name is delight in those things which make His name glorious. His name and Himself are alike The Good. He delights in helping the helpless, in comforting the wretched, in vindicating the cause of the oppressed, in sanctifying the sinful, in saving the lost. He hates sin, in the very attributes of His being, with deliberate and eternal enmity; He loves holiness and truth in the same infinite degree. His name, taken as such, is no mere centre around which His interest perpetually and eternally revolves; His name is Himself, and He is the everlasting embodiment of all that is lovely, and of all that makes His intelligent creatures happy and good.

III. God’s care for the honour of His name is also a care for those who need that name for a refuge and a joy. If God’s name were to lose its glory, heaven would lose its lustre, and the universe its brightness; angels would have no home, man no rallying centre, and devils no restraint: the universe would be as a huge solar system without its sun; confusion, and darkness, and ruin, and death would be everywhere. If but a stain were found on the character of God to-day, the power of that evil would uproot the cross, abolish the Church, blast every better human hope, banish the redeemed, make heaven into hell, and hell riotous in the fierce fury of a newfound and malignant joy. “The name of the Lord is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe.”

IV. Where men are seen most concerned for the honour of the great name of God, God is seen most taking care of that name. It is precisely where Joshua is found crying, “What wilt Thou do unto Thy great name?” that God is found taking such solemn measures to reassert His antipathy to sin. All His Divine sympathies for His people are crossed, the majestic tide of events which was flowing so fast to fulfil His covenant with Abraham is suddenly stayed, a temporary encouragement is even permitted to the idolatrous workers of iniquity, that God may have, and may be seen to have, no collusion or connection with sin. So it was where Moses feared for the Divine glory, that God was even then vindicating the honour of His name (cf. Exodus 32:11; Numbers 14:11). Let us learn:

1. How impossible it is for God to favour him who persists in sin;
2. How abiding is the refuge of the righteous;
3. How encouraging is the hope of the penitent;
4. And that there is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we can be saved, but the name of God as it stands revealed in Jesus Christ.

“Joshua’s humble prayer before God. God withstands the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble.
“Joshua’s grief for his people compared with the lamentation of Moses and Ezra.
“Joshua as an example of mourning before God.
“Comparison between Joshua’s penitence and that of Ahab.

“Rending the garments a significant symbol of rending the heart (Joel 2:13).

“How God hears prayer.” [Lange.]