Dropping the Jawbone

** This post has been heavily influenced by a teaching given by Rob Bell at Mars Hill Bible Church.

**** (this note added on 9/9/2015) As you will see from the comment thread below, I am feeling the need to add that when I say "heavily influenced", what I mean to say is that this teaching given primarily by Bell (in addition to some other teachers) was given in a sermon which can be heard here. The teaching had a profound impact on my life and settled in my consciousness. When I crafted this post, I did it from memory and after receiving the accusation below, I searched to find the teaching. Please know that I have no desire to take credit at all for Bell's work and claim it as my own.

****** (this note added on 9/29/2015) Just in the heart of full disclosure, it could/should be noted that Rob repeated this teaching yet again on a recent podcast ("RobCast" Episode 39) that was published today.

The last post summarized the walk through the book of Judges. Before we moved on, I did want to jump off on one brief tangent found in the story of Samson. It’s hard not to talk about all of the stories in the book of Judges; how does one skip the stories of Gideon, Deborah, Jephthah, or others? But, much like the author of Hebrews, we need to keep this conversation moving.

But there is one rabbit hole that’s worth jumping down. It really is a sidebar to the larger narrative we’ve been talking about; but every time I have spoke on this lesson, God does some incredible things.

The story of Samson gets complicated when Samson gets tied up with a Philistine wife. This causes tension with the people of Israel as he lives separated from her in the hills of Dan. One night, as he goes to visit his wife, he is told by his father-in-law that, since Samson is never around, he has given his daughter in marriage to another man. In a rage, Samson takes a hundreds of foxes, ties flaming torches to their tails and burns entire fields worth of grain.

Yeah, because that makes sense.

The Philistines come asking about why such an event has taken place and, after finding out the reason for Samson’s actions, kill the father and the daughter. Samson responds by killing “a multitude” of Philistines. Sheesh, this is getting complicated.

The Philistines respond by calling forth their army and marching against the tribe of Dan. The neighboring tribe of Judah brings their army out to see just what is going on. They find that the Philistines are looking for Samson and retribution. Their comment is, “We’re only doing to him as he did to us!” Samson, found hiding in a cave, responds to their accusations by saying, “I only did to them what they did to me.”

Because this is what retribution and revenge look like.

It started with a man and his wife. It then became about grain. Then people died. Then more people died. Now armies are involved.

Revenge always escalates. And revenge is always cloaked by a false conviction that “I’m only doing to them what they did to me.” (By the way, is the “eye for an eye” law making any more sense here? I hope so.)

So, in a sense, it seems to me that the story of Samson is a story about forgiveness.

Samson will be brought, bound by ropes, to the Philistines for judgment. But Samson breaks free from the ropes, grabs the jawbone of an ass, and slays a thousand Philistines.

The story keeps getting worse. And the story will not end will. Who will stop the madness?

Somebody needs to drop the jawbone.

The first step of forgiveness is simply being the one who stops the cycle of revenge. The one person who is willing to say, “No more. No more paybacks. No more killing. No more ‘they deserved it.’ Enough…” is the person who is willing to begin the process of healing. Because the cycle has to stop somewhere. Retribution will know no end until somebody is willing to forgive.

But far too often, we in the Christian world have spoken of forgiveness in similar terms and stopped there. But true forgiveness demands more.

The second step of forgiveness is making the choice that you are going to stop making that person carry that burden around anymore. You can’t just drop the jawbone; that isn’t forgiveness. You have to decide that when you see that person in your mind, you aren’t going to let them have the dark cloud of bitterness hanging over their head in your heart. You have to chase the dark clouds away and allow them to come into the light. Because really, that dark cloud isn’t about their freedom — it’s about yours. Ever since the day you decided to drop the jawbone, that dark cloud does nothing to the other person. It simply builds up in your heart like a cancer, eating away at your soul from the inside out.

Jesus tells this incredible parable in Matthew 18:21–35 about a king who goes to settle accounts and finds a man who owes him well over a lifetime’s salary of debts (which begs the question: What kind of a King lets a man rack up that kind of debt?). He calls the man in, only to have him fall at his feet and beg for forgiveness. In an amazing move, the king forgives the debt and wipes the slate clean. The man then does the unthinkable; he goes out of the presence of the king and runs into a man who owes him three months of wages. He demands payment, and when the man begs for leniency, he throws him in prison. Jesus closes the story by saying that this is how we should forgive our brother.

The king is willing to stop the cycle and drop the jawbone.

The king is not willing to let the debt follow the man around for the rest of his days.

But we’re still not done yet. One final question: In the story of the king, where did the debt go?

If you are like most people, you just said, “It went away. It disappeared.”

But that’s not correct. Debt just doesn’t go away. In order for a debt to be forgiven, the person that is owed the money must absorb the debt. The king had to absorb that massive debt that he was owed. And this is the painful truth about forgiveness. The forgiveness we never talk about — true forgiveness — comes at a hefty price.

And it’s not fair.

Here’s a quote from Timothy Keller in The Reason for God:

“Forgiveness means refusing to make them pay for what they did. However, to refrain from lashing out at someone when you want to do so with all your being is agony. It is a form of suffering. You not only suffer the original loss of happiness, reputation, and opportunity, but now you forgo the consolation of inflicting the same on them. You are absorbing the debt, taking the cost of it completely on yourself instead of taking it out of the other person. It hurts terribly. Many people would say it feels like a kind of death.

“Yes, but it is a death that leads to resurrection instead of the lifelong living death of bitterness and cynicism. … No one “just” forgives, if the evil is serious. … Everyone who forgives great evil goes through a death into a resurrection, and experiences nails, blood, sweat, and tears. … Everyone who forgives someone bears the other’s sins. …

“Forgiveness is always a form of costly suffering.”

How true that is.

As a side note, it is probably worth noting all the things that forgiveness is NOT:

Forgiveness is not admitting that what they did was OK and doesn’t matter.
Forgiveness is not saying that there isn’t a place for boundaries.
Forgiveness is not always forgetting.
Forgiveness is not saying that there won’t be consequences.
Forgiveness is not ignoring the fact that some people are destructive (e.g., if he’s beating you, get out!).
Forgiveness is not saying that they won’t have to answer to the law.
Forgiveness is not calling good what God has called evil.

But forgiveness is letting the jawbone drop to the ground. It is refusing to let the bitterness take root in your heart. And it is deciding that you will shoulder the pain and absorb the debt.

Because it’s the only way that the world gets put back together.

And I believe it’s the truest form of trusting the story.

The Redemption Cycle

The last two posts describe the tension that plays out in the book of Judges. God has asked His people to partner with Him in putting the world back together. He has placed them in the crossroads of the earth (the shephelah of the earth?) in order to show the world that their God is different — their God is not angry, but loving. But in order for this mission to be realized, they are going to have to live in the shephelah, and living in the shephelah is dangerous.

This is a tension that God doesn’t seek to resolve. Not in the book of Judges and not in life. This is the partnership that God invites us into. The book of Judges is simply one place where we see this story play out. Sometimes we see people (like the tribe of Dan) run from the dangers, vowing a life of devotion in the mountains; however, this devoted life is also void of the mission of God. Other times we see the people of Israel in the book of Judges falling into the temptation of being swallowed up by the broken world they are seeking to redeem; we see this in the ruins of Beth Shemesh and numerous stories where the people take on the gods of the nations that surround them.

We even see this in the story of Samson. Samson is a man set apart for God from birth. Destined to be a Nazarite (see Numbers 6), Samson’s role in the community (the tribe of Dan, actually) is to remind the people that they are to be different than the nations that surround them in the shephelah. Samson is a walking billboard that advertises God’s mission to his brothers. However, the tragedy of Samson is two-fold. First, while Samson is a Nazarite (albeit not a very good one), he misses the calling on his life by being so influenced by the Philistines. Constantly tempted by lure of Philistine women, Samson will lose the potency of his calling. Second, Samson does all of this alone. You cannot impact the shephelah alone. The Jews have often pointed out that Samson has no community. He is in Philistia alone. He travels alone. He fights the Philistines alone. He is in the cave alone. This is a recipe for shephelah disaster.

God will eventually use the life (more accurately, the death) of Samson to rescue His people, but I would argue it was not the way it was designed to work. The idea is that the tribe of Dan would be positioned in the shephelah, led by a dynamic leader (Samson), called to impact the world of the Philistines and show them a better way — a better God. But they lose the gravity of their message by becoming lost in the culture of the ones they are seeking to influence.

And whether they are running away from their call or getting lost in the culture, we keep seeing the Israelites struggle throughout the book of Judges.

Scholars and Bible teachers have for ages described the book of Judges using the phrase “Sin Cycle.” The idea is that all throughout the book of Judges, we keep seeing the people go through the same cycle: things are going great, they start to rebel, they become oppressed, they cry out, God raises up a leader, God rescues the people — and the cycle starts all over again (see below).

I have always taught my students that this cycle (more or less) is completely accurate and obvious in the story of the Judges. However, the fact that we refer to it as the “Sin Cycle” betrays our initial assumptions about the truths that lie at the heart of the story. It presumes that the story is about the depravity and brokenness of humanity. But we have, since the beginning of this journey, insisted that the story is about God’s good creation, His insistence that we are accepted and loved, and an invitation to trust the story that God is telling and live in true “rest.”

But the “Sin Cycle”?  It would seem to me that we aren’t listening to God’s story.

Time and time again, we have encountered a God who insists that our sin doesn’t keep Him from loving and accepting us. Despite our failures, we are not defined by our deficiencies. We are defined by our identity as God’s creation, made in His image, created with incredible potential. No matter our past, we are invited in each moment to partner with God in His great Kingdom work.

So, is it about a “Sin Cycle”?
Or is it about a “Redemption Cycle”?

Is it about my brokenness or God’s goodness?
Do I read Judges and find myself amazed at the foolishness of God?
Or do I stand in awe at His unbelievable patience and faithfulness?

I continue to assert that God is inviting us to trust a good story. As I said before, I believe God has endless, bottomless patience for the person who is trying to walk the path of life well. We will encounter God’s wrath when we start to see people crush the marginalized and downtrodden.

But God has better things to do than let your sin get in the way of what He has in store for you. And the book of Judges proves it.

And I’m glad.

Because I’ve found that the story of the Israelites is my story. I find that as I examine that diagram of the “Sin Cycle,” I see a pretty good representation of what my life looks like. There are days when I feel like the worst chapter of the book of Judges could be a journal entry about my day.

But thankfully, the cycle keeps coming around.

And you’re right, Mr. Bible Teacher — it is about my sin.

But apparently, it’s not.

Because the wheel in the sky keeps on turning (to quote Journey) and God’s rescue keeps coming around.

So at the end of the day, what amazes me is not my stupidity, but God’s bigger, better reality. His amazing grace. His profound patience.

I’m going to call it the “Redemption Cycle.” It’s a truer true.

No Pig Bones

While some folks struggle with the idea of having to interact with the shephelah, preferring instead to take a more separatist approach to the culture around us (this is my struggle, by the way), others will have the opposite struggle.

As for the folks who are more missional, they started back down the mountain and into the hills of the shephelah before they even finished reading the last post. And this is a good thing, because God needs His people in contact with the broken world around them — He needs them to be shining light in dark places. As one of my co-workers put it the other day: “You cannot be a rotem if you aren’t in the desert.”

Well said.

The dig at Beth Shemesh in 2008

But those who are rip-roaring to find themselves an adventure will need to take heed of the findings at the archaeological site of Beth Shemesh. The ancient city of Beth Shemesh sits down in the shephelah at the edge of the Soreq Valley. If you were to look at a topographical view of the land of Israel, you would notice that you cannot penetrate the land of Israel from the coastal plains without traveling through the many valleys that head up into the mountains. This meant that the people who lived there had to establish fortified cities to protect the vulnerability of the valleys of the shephelah.

Beth Shemesh was one of these fortified cities guarding the way into the Soreq Valley. Archaeological excavations have made some very interesting discoveries. As they uncovered the remains, they would often run into evidence of the diet of the people who lived in the city of Beth Shemesh — according to the Text, a city inhabited by the Israelites. Excavations of the time period of the Judges revealed that their meat diet consisted primarily of pork.

And yes, for an Israelite city, this is a very telling problem. They are letting the culture around them influence their walk, rather than the other way around.

One would expect that in David’s day this problem would be much less of an issue, but excavations showed that, while improving, about 20% of the bones in the food waste were pig bones. But the Text will end up telling us that a king named Hezekiah leads reforms in the land of Judah, from boundary to boundary. As it was told to me in 2010, they have yet to find a pig bone in the excavations from Hezekiah’s era.

Because it’s hard to live in the shephelah without the shephelah living in you.

It’s going to be difficult to live in the chaos and bring shalom. So you better remember the desert. And you better remember to take a community with you. But you have to be there in order to partner with God’s great project. You have to be a kingdom of priests for the people of the shephelah.

But you can’t have any pig bones.

The rabbis teach that you don’t defend Jerusalem at the gates of Jerusalem; you defend Jerusalem at Beth Shemesh. And they mean this as a metaphor. If you think you’re going to fight the hard battles of your life and of your will when it gets to the heart, you are a fool. You don’t wait to fight the work of evil when it finally arrives at your door; you fight evil with all of the small decisions you make every day.

To say it another way: Jerusalem falls when you have pig bones at Beth Shemesh.

But it’s hard to live in the shephelah. It’s dangerous and full of temptations. But you can’t run off to the mountains of Ephraim, either. Because God is not interested in abandoning the people of the coastal plains.

The call to be a priest is not without cost, discipline, adventure, and peril.

The Mountains of Ephraim

The first side of the tension mentioned in the last post is deciding whether or not we are going to heed the call of God to be people of the shephelah. There is a great tendency to want to completely separate ourselves from “the world.” We are to be different — to be holy — and that requires an utmost devotion to God and His ways.

There’s a temptation to see the coastal plains as a place of danger, something that will only tear us down, tempt us to sin, and corrupt our souls. We begin to think that the coastal plains must be avoided at all costs.

It is too dangerous. It’s so much easier to be devoted when I separate myself from the darkness.

One of the stories in the Bible that illustrates this most clearly is the story of Dan. It is actually a collection of stories that take place in the backdrop of the story of the Old Testament. When the Israelites entered the "crossroads of the earth,” God gave each tribe a piece of ground and told them to bring shalom to their portion. Each tribe had a different piece of ground and each tribe had a different calling from God — to play their own part in God’s great project.

And Dan has always had a tough call from God.

In the book of Numbers, Dan gets the job of bringing up the rear as Israel travels through the wilderness. This couldn’t have been a fun task, but one that was essential in taking care of God’s people.

And then, when Israel finally makes it “home,” Dan is assigned their plot of ground. The map below shows you where’s Dan’s piece lies:

If you remember the geography, you have probably already noted that Dan lands smack dab in the shephelah. Their land butts up against the land of the Philistines. This is a unique call for the people of Dan — they get to be God’s hands and feet to the Philistines. This will be an incredibly difficult calling, as the impressive and intimidating Philistines outmatch the tiny tribe of Dan on their best day. But God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness (so hang on to those Red Sea moments!), and He hasn’t left Dan on her own. In fact, Dan is protected by the mighty presence of Judah to the south. Dan will never have to fight alone or be hung out to dry.

But it’s too dangerous, right? It’s so much easier to be devoted when I separate myself from the darkness.

But God isn’t trying to run from the darkness. He’s trying to shine light into it. He’s trying to redeem the darkness. And He wants your help.

But Dan backs out on their calling from God and heads to the hill country of Ephraim to eventually settle far away from the temptations and dangers of the darkness (see Judges 18). This map shows where the Danites end up settling:

They don’t trust the story. They don’t accept the partnership God is offering.

And this doesn’t bode well for their future. Even ignoring some other ugly stories (like Jeroboam installing some golden calves at Tel Dan) and just looking at the big picture, what happens to Dan is that they choose to run from God’s plan and settle in the land that looks good. (Does that remind you of Lot and Abram?) What happens is that they settle right on the via maris, the road that runs into the land of Israel, and they will be the first place that gets attacked EVERY TIME an army marches on Israel. Dan will get pummeled time and time again because they choose not to trust God’s story.

And they’ve ran from the community that God provided for them. Judah is not with them in the north. They don’t have the protection of their brothers there.

And in the meantime, God has to find some other way to impact the Philistines.

The rabbis have pointed out that when the Scriptures speak of Dan, in almost every story they are accompanied by Judah. They teach that this is an intentional juxtaposition meant to raise an interesting question:

Are you Dan or Judah?

Are you here to accept the call and mission of God or are you here to take the easy way out? Because God has put you at the crossroads of the earth for a purpose. He desires to use you to shine light in the darkness.

How is your shephelah?

By the time the story of Dan is over, they will be utterly destroyed by the conquering armies. Tel Dan will be seized and everything will be destroyed.

When you read about the tribes of Israel in the book of Revelation, Dan is always missing.

They are no more. Their unwillingness to trust the story ended up costing them their very existence. Will you be Judah or Dan?

Of course, being Judah and storming the shephelah will have its own set of struggles…

The Crossroads of the Earth

So now that we’ve wrestled with the story of the conquest and sat in the uneasiness, maybe it’s time to start asking some questions about this little piece of ground in the Middle East. Why all this fuss over what seems like such an insignificant chunk of real estate? To this very day, the region of Palestine and Israel continues to be one of the hottest pieces of earth on the planet.

In the ancient biblical world, it’s important to realize that the nation of Israel geographically sits in what was called the “crossroads of the earth.” With the exception of the ancient Orient, the major world civilizations (Egypt, Chaldea/Babylonia, Persia, Assyria, the Hittites, etc.) all sat around the piece of ground that we would refer to as biblical Israel. What this meant was that all global commerce and cultural interaction happened by traveling through that small chunk of land. The major highway for their day, known as the “via maris,” travelled right through their land. Whoever controlled the crossroads of the earth heavily influenced world trade.

So was God’s desire to bless His people with incredible wealth and power?

Not exactly.

When we remember the beginnings of this story, we remember a covenant between God and a man named Abram. We remember God’s words that He would bless Abram and Abram would be a blessing. God said that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through Abram and his descendants.

We hope at this point in the story that we haven’t forgotten God’s great project: to restore peace and wholeness to the earth and brings all things back together.

God is trying to put the world back together.

And God found a partner.

And how is God going to bless all nations?

By putting His partners at the crossroads of the earth.

One of the ways that we understand this concept is by understanding geography — not just the larger geography of where Israel sits in relation to the other nations, but the geography of the land of Israel itself. To look at the nation of Israel is to see five zones that run north/south through the land. Starting at the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, we would see what’s called the Coastal Plain; pretty self-explanatory, the coastal plain was the region where all the pagans live. While the Israelites were desert people, the pagans, like the Philistines, for example, were often sea-faring people of the port cities. The region sitting to the immediate east would be called the Shephelah. This word shares a root with the word that means “to bow” and refers to the land that comes off of the Judah Mountains and bows down to meet the coastal plain — it’s the in-between. Then, to the east, lies the Judah Mountains, where God’s people settled. You rarely settled in the valleys, because of the high value on farmland. You would live in the mountain region. Then came the Judea Wilderness, the barren wasteland to the east of the mountains. And finally, the Jordan River ran through what is called the Rift Valley.

The entire story of God’s project in the world is seen through the eyes of shephelah.

Shephelah is where God’s people meet the broken world. Will God’s people go into the shephelah? Will they bring shalom to the chaos? Or will they settle in the mountains, seeking to lives lives of luxury?

The rabbis have a statement they use: How is your shephelah?

It’s a way of them asking, “How are you doing in partnering with God in His great work to restore the world?”

Because God has supposedly found some partners.

And He’s trained and shaped them in the desert.

But now He’s brought them into the Promised Land.

And the great question is whether or not they’re going to go down into the shephelah or settle in the mountains. The question is whether they are going to settle down and build a tower or build altars and pitch tents.

Because God is up to something in the world. And it’s going to be difficult to convince His partners that there’s still work to be done.

And it’s really not that old of a story is it? Because I still have a shephelah today, don’t I? And the call of the mountains is as strong as ever.

But it’s not easy to live in the shephelah. In fact, it’s quite dangerous and messy down there with the Philistines.

And this leaves us with a tension…

The Hardest Story in the Bible (for me)

All right. It’s time.

It’s time for a long post about the conquest of Canaan that I REALLY don’t want to write. I think it’s safe to say that with every true student/teacher of the Bible, there are problems in the story that make us uneasy. We may reason them away with trite explanations, we may choose to ignore them, or we might deny their existence altogether, but they are there. There have been some famous religious leaders throughout the centuries that have made comments about what books of the canon they wish were removed. Some have complained about Jude. Others, Revelation. Martin Luther thought James should be done away with. Well, if I could choose one of the 66 books to throw out, I’d get rid of Joshua in a heartbeat.

But I can’t. So here we go.

I hope that it goes without saying that I have a problem with the mass killing of entire people groups. I find the story of the conquest to be inconsistent with the character of God and what He’s been asking His people to do. And that creates a problem for me. So, I need to say that before I begin this post, I’m just going to be throwing out lots and lots of observations. Some I like; some I do not. I won’t be drawing conclusions in this post, merely peeling the conversation open. This is because I think the problem needs to be recognized. This isn’t trite; it isn’t easily resolved or ignored.

But I won’t be offering answers today — my apologies, I’m not that good. Some others have offered great thoughts for the conversation. Greg Boyd spoke on the conquest here and I thought he made some great observations. My buddy Aaron Couch posted this not too long ago, linking to some interesting studies.

And there are other thoughts, ranging from the liberal textual critics to the biblical literalists.

Some have suggested that the conquest never really happened. That the book of Joshua is a dramatic narrative-based allegory about how the people of God came into the land they possess throughout the story. To support their theory, they point out that there has yet to be found a piece of archaeological evidence of the conquest (at least, evidence that has been evaluated and validated by the scholastic, archaeological community). This is very odd, as a historian would expect to have found proof of these many battles that are explained in the book of Joshua. They also point out that the language of conquest in the ancient eastern world is always incredibly hyperbolic, exaggerated, and rarely true. Is the book of Joshua borrowing this genre of “historical record” to tell us a larger story?

It’s also interesting to note what God does and doesn’t say. Oftentimes, when our English Bibles translate “destroy,” the word in the Hebrew is often “consecrate.” Now, destruction is often a way of consecration, but one could argue that God was leaving room for grace, that He wasn’t commanding mass genocide. This explanation works in many cases, but not in all of them.

It’s also worth noting that God is constantly meeting people on their own terms. It is true that this ancient biblical world spoke the language of war. It was one of the few ways that countries made statements about their gods. Our God consistently meets people where they are at, uses the language of their day, and speaks His better truth into their lives. Was the conquest a part of that?

These are possibilities that intrigue me. This year, I began a deep study of the book that bothered me so much. At this moment, I’m only halfway through, and I haven’t found any answers to my toughest questions, but I have made some observations:

There are an awful lot of stories where God is pretty quiet. Joshua does an awful lot of planning, strategizing, and pep-talking, but God really doesn’t say much. I find this to be interesting. We always assume that Joshua is acting with the authority of God, yet I’m noticing how often the Text does not connect those dots. I think these instances are up for grabs — what’s truly going on here?

Joshua seems to be acting very much like the pagan commanders of the world around him. He impales the bodies of the conquered on poles for all to see. This has long been a move of war, victory, and conquest for pagan nations. This action is never commanded nor condoned by God.

At the very same time, Joshua is quite different than the pagan kings around him. He doesn’t mock or chide inappropriately. He disposes of the bodies by nightfall (unheard of in their world). While it seems hard to comprehend, Joshua is one of the “softest” conquerers the land of Canaan has ever seen. Consider the story of the Gibeonites and their deception (chapter 9). They trick the Israelites into forming a military treaty with their people. This kind of ancient agreement is called a Suzerain-vassal covenant. It is where the lesser party (Gibeonites) serve the greater party (Israel) and in return they receive the military protection of the Suzerain. The problem is that this isn’t a covenant between two equal parties; the lesser party holds no rights in the agreement. Therefore, a vassal never enters an agreement through deception. The Suzerain always proposes the treaty because of what they will gain from the relationship (taxes, resources, servants, etc.). Once any other king learned of deception on the part of the vassal, they would be destroyed. Yet, Joshua and the elders do not. Are we seeing “a different kind of conquest”?

In the midst of the stories of conquest, the greater stories — the ones that rise to the top — are stories of people being saved and redeemed. The story of Rahab reminds many of the story of Passover. I have often thought of the destruction of Sodom, where God agreed to spare a city for ten righteous people, as I read the story of Rahab. However, there were not ten, and only Lot and his family are saved. Is it possible that Rahab and her family were the only ones righteous in Jericho? The story of the Gibeonites is again a story of escaping destruction. It seems as if the author wants to highlight the stories of salvation, not destruction.

And, I always have to remind myself of what was taking place in the land of Canaan. In all of the forms of pagan Amorite worship, in whichever country we examine, we find horrific, inhumane abuses taking place — not only at the present time, but over the course of centuries — in the land of Canaan. Amorite worship, without exception, involved child sacrifice and shrine prostitution.

We always want to be upset about a God that wouldn’t hear the cry of the Canaanites while they were being destroyed.

But don’t you think that God heard every cry from every child offered to the fires of their gods?

Don’t you think God heard the cries of the wives as their husbands went off to the shrine prostitutes for the second time this week, the tenth time this month?

How long does God let this happen before He acts? How much patience from God is enough? Or too much? How many babies are too many? 10? 100? 1000?

We’ve found ancient Canaanite “baby graveyards” with tens of thousands of infant corpses.

Listen to what God told Abraham back in Genesis 15:

In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.

Their sin hadn’t reached its full measure?

You mean to tell me that God had been patient and waited for over 500 years of this garbage?

You see, it’s interesting how we never think that God’s doing His job right. When we read the story from one perspective, we’re mad that God doesn’t do something sooner. When we read it from the other, we’re upset that He does something about it and wants it to be over, completely — now.

One of the things I’m trying to learn from the conquest is that I’m glad I’m not God. Because I wouldn’t do His job well. I wouldn’t know when to show grace and patience and when to call in the armies of heaven (and earth) to stop the madness.

But I’m glad that I’ve had the books of Moses to read up to this point.
I’m glad that I’ve been impressed with God’s character over and over again.
I’m pretty confident that God is love.

So I’m going to let Him do His job and I’m going to wrestle with the killings done in His name.
And I’m going to trust that He works through us and partners with us.
And sometimes, in our really dark days of conquest, He works in spite of us.

I’m still trying to learn how to trust the story.
And I wonder if Joshua was, too.

Standing Stones

Before we leave Deuteronomy, we want to make sure that we don’t skim over this idea of remembering where we come from.  This is an important concept.  There’s an image that God employs — a tactile practice — that helps us remember our stories.

They are called standing stones.

The stones you see above are found at Tel Gezer in southern Israel.  The concept behind a standing stone is that you erect a monument where a big event happened.

An event you will need to remember.

One of those Red Sea moments.

The idea of a standing stone is that the stone itself demands a witness.  It is different than a ‘stele,’ which will actually have writing on it, describing the event in detail.  A standing stone is simply an out-of-place installment and causes the youth or the foreigner to say, “What is that?  What happened here?”  You are then forced to stop and tell the story.  Not only does this cause you to remember the story of God in your life, but it also forces you to share that story, spreading it to the next generation.

Because it’s important to pass the stories of God onto our children.  The book of Judges will make this stunning statement over and over again: “They did not remember the LORD their God and what He did for them…”

Because we have to tell our kids about what God has done.  Do you?  Did your parents?  Could you tell the stories of your family, about how God showed up for your grandfather?

This idea comes up again and again in the Scriptures.  Remember Jacob?  When he had that amazing dream from God, he took the stone he was sleeping on and stood it up, anointing it with oil.  A standing stone.  Then later, in Genesis 35, Jacob takes his whole family to Bethel, where the story took place.  Why?  To tell them the story.  When the Israelites cross the Jordan, what do they do?  They take rocks and pile them up to remember the story.

It’s important to remember where we come from.  It’s just as important to pass where we’ve come from on to our children — or they’ll probably go back.

What standing stones do you have in your life?

On my desk sits a collection of rocks that I’ve brought back from Israel.  Each one reminds me of a different story I brought back from my time in the Middle East.  There’s a piece of rope that I brought back from Hadijah’s house; she was a Muslim woman who gave everything she had in her cupboard to show me hospitality.  I have a dirty old sprinkler head on my shelf that reminds me of the day that I decided to give up on the American dream and follow God’s dream for humanity instead.  And a belt that I stole from my football uniform in high school, marking the decision I made to pursue the call of God into the ministry.

As my children grow older, they will hear these stories of mine.

Because I need to remember where I’ve come from.

Because my children need to know where I’ve been.

Because we need to know and remember what God has done.

These stones continually call us to trust the story.