CRITICAL NOTES.
Joshua 4:20. Pitch in Gilgal] “Heb., erect, rear up” (Bush). “It is very likely that a base of mason-work was erected, of some considerable height, and that the twelve stones were placed on the top of it” (A. Clarke).
Joshua 4:24. All the people of the earth] The Israelites and the various peoples of the land. Even the idolatrous Canaanites, and any of the heathen who might in after years see these stones, were to learn from them that Israel’s God was a God of might. To the close of the twenty-third verse, the parents are represented as speaking to their children; in the twenty-fourth verse Joshua gives the reason for this instruction, and points out the object for which the memorial was to be erected.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Joshua 4:20-24
RELIGIOUS TEACHING
I. Its inspiring topics.
1. The glory of God in His works. Not merely in His works in Nature; in such also as are contrary to Nature.
2. The love and mercy of God in His works FOR HIS PEOPLE. The Lord “doth put a difference” between these and others. God loves all men. Under the Gospel, He invites all men into His family. It is simply cruel and sinful to teach that the Lord works for and defends everybody alike. If the Bible be true at all, God’s merciful works are as distinctively given to the Church now as of old. He has always caused His rain to descend, and made His sun to shine, on the fields of the just and the unjust; for by His goodness and in His all-reaching love He would lead the unjust to repentance; nevertheless, “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness.” Every page of the Bible reveals this. These old typical nations were specially meant to set forth the truth that distinctive mercies here, and salvation hereafter, were the heritage of only such as feared the Lord.
3. The efficiency of God’s works to make a way for His people through any and all obstacles. The sea and the flooded river are two of the strongest symbols of force which the world presents. In His hands, neither can hinder for an hour the free movement of His people.
4. The comfort which the Lord can give, and loves to give, to those who walk in His paths. No matter where the paths lie, He loves to shew His people that through sea or through river He can make the way as “dry land.” Such are some of the themes which this one work and its memorials were to set to music.
II. Its unlimited aims. Religious teaching is to aim at the benefit:
1. Of our own children. Home should be our first care. Some earnest people in the present day seem to think that religious life and zeal must be very poor unless they spend four or five evenings in the week at religious meetings. Some can hardly avoid this, and to these it may be a duty which they dare not neglect; may those who can avoid it never have to say, “They made me the keeper of the vineyards, but my own vineyard have I not kept.”
2. Of neglected children. The Jews were all supposed to teach their own children. Religious instruction among them was to be parental. The heads of each family were supposed to fear God, and, fearing Him themselves, were to teach their households to fear Him also. Still, some parents would be careless, and, from various causes, some children would be neglected. These were to be carefully instructed by others. At the feast of tabernacles in the year of release, special attention was to be given to any who were ignorant of God (Deuteronomy 31:10-13). So carefully did the Lord provide against the leaven of ignorance that might in time leaven the whole lump of the nation.
3. Of neglected men and women. Opportunity was to be taken to let “all the people” of the land know of God (Joshua 4:24).
4. Of the generations to come. It was said of Achilles, that he was vulnerable only in the heel. However fictitious that may be as to the ancient Greek, there is only one place in which the sin and ignorance of the future can be attacked; it is as some one has said, “The children of this generation are the only point at which the generation to come is vulnerable.” If it be asked, as some have asked, “Why all this care about the coming generations? What do we owe to future society?” it would be enough to reply as the late John Stuart Mill replied to the same question, put in our British parliament,—“What have we received from society?” Let us count but a little of that, and even from this human point of view our duty will be clear. But every Christian must also ask, “What have I received from God? What does God demand of me in return?” Our fathers have been the channel through which a thousand mercies have come to us, and the generations to come are calling upon us by our most sacred obligations to the generations that are past.
III. Its lofty and holy purposes.
1. To help men to know God.
2. To help men to fear God.
3. To help men to live as in the presence of God for ever. F. W. Faber beautifully said, “The more we know of God, the more our complacency increases; because, to fill our minds and engross us, the simple thought of God must be multiplied and repeated from a thousand objects. It is like the sun lighting up a mountain chain. He is not multiplied in himself, but as his golden magnificence lights up peak after peak, we become more and more surrounded by His effulgence. It is thus with God: each attribute to which we give a name, though His attributes in truth are His simple self, is to us a separate height crowned and glowing with His glory, and so reflecting Him upon our souls; while the multitude of nameless perfections, for which we have neither ideas, words, nor standards, are to us like the consciousness of the glorious sea of mountain tops which are beyond our ken, but which we know to be resting in that furnace of golden light, and adding to the burning splendour which is circumfused over earth and sea and sky.” So, too, as we learn to see God in His many works which are about us, especially in those works which make part of our personal experience and life, His name will be repeated to us as from a thousand points instead of one or two. Our grateful remembrances of His mercies will make them so many upstanding points, rising far above the low and poor levels of a natural life, and catching and retaining for our vision something of the brightness of His majesty and the glory of His love, which will thus be suffused over us from all our personal history, and hardly less from the history of the whole Church of Christ.
OUTLINES AND COMMENTS ON THE VERSES
Joshua 4:20-22. SUNDAY SCHOOL INSTRUCTION
The principles involved in the work of our Sunday-schools are repeatedly enforced even in the O. T.
I. The duty of this work. To whom does the duty belong? Given that time and opportunity are at command, surely it belongs to all who love Christ. Our Lord, on receiving the assurance of Peter’s love, said, “Feed my lambs.” Many feel that they are not worthy to engage in labour like this. The thought of personal sin keeps many back, albeit they claim to be Christians, and could not bear to think themselves without love to the Saviour. Is not that scene at the sea of Tiberias specially meant to assure such? We are usually told that our Lord there rebuked Peter three times, because Peter had thrice denied Him. The reason of our Lord’s threefold utterance lay far deeper than that. Possibly rebuke was intended, but mercy and the forethought of Divine love were far more prominent. Would-not the day be likely to come in Peter’s future when he should say, “Can I who have denied Christ dare to teach Him to others?” Peter might come to feel that he who had thrice disowned his Lord was utterly unworthy to engaged in work like this. So three times, once for every denial, does the Saviour tenderly recommission him to the work of feeding both the sheep and the lambs. It seems as if our Lord had not only thus anticipated what might be the future feeling of His apostle, but the feeling of many of His disciples now. To love Him is to become responsible for doing all that we have opportunity to perform.
II. The necessity of adaptation in this work. God adapts Himself to the minds of children, now in the imposing rites of the Passover, and now in this cairn of stones at Gilgal. What is here indicated in the way of a general principle, a wise teacher will endeavour to carry out in detail; he will try and meet each child where he finds him; he will study even individual dispositions. One child will be loving and warm-hearted; excite his love, meet him where he is accessible, tell him something which has pathos. Another boy will be strong in integrity, and honesty, and truthfulness; tell him of Joseph and Daniel, and the three Hebrews. A third will be quiet and gentle; speak low to him. One will hate hard; give him fit subjects for his idiosyncrasy, tell him of Herod and Judas, and presently he will hear you on higher themes. Another will be the stupid boy of the class; on him, most of all, lavish kindness, attention, and gentleness. Our aim in Christian work is to win others to love the Saviour; and God, who comes to men where they are, and brings pictures into the nursery of the infant world, teaches us adaptation.
III. The nobility of this work. Addressing, a few years since, a convention of Sunday-school teachers, the Right Hon. John Bright said, “I may be in a more conspicuous, but I am certainly not in a more noble field than that in which you are engaged.” Peradventure the statesman was right, for there are few labours more exalted than this. We look at Rembrandt’s picture of Christ stilling the tempest, and as we see the storm-tossed waves dashing over the prow of the boat, and behold the agitated faces of the disciples, we love to think of the majesty of Him who with His mere word hushed both sea and men into calm and peace. But Over-beck’s subject of Christ with the little children is even more sublime. In the one case you see power controlling power; in the other you have the loftier spectacle of power blessing weakness. It is this which makes the ministry of the Saviour so glorious; all through it, His perfect power and spotless holiness are seen healing and helping sinful men in their weakness and necessity. Whatever of greatness was manifested in the work of Knibb and Clarkson, Sturge and Wilberforce, in nothing were they so great as in using their power to take off the fetters from the last of England’s slaves. Howard and Cobden won all their fame in helping the weak and the oppressed. It is this which makes the work of Sunday-schools so truly noble. In that work, Christian men and women give their time and strength, not only for children, but for neglected children. Many of these, in their weakness and guilelessness, would be taken captive by the wicked on every hand, and dragged low as perdition; this work hopefully proposes to make them “heirs of God and joint-heirs with Jesus Christ.”
Joshua 4:23. New mercies should lead us to call to mind mercies that are past. If we compare those which our fathers had with those which God gives to us, great as theirs undoubtedly were, ours will often be found to be even greater.
The mercies which came to our fathers should also be counted among our own; they too made way for the heritage on which we daily enter.
God’s mercies to us should be so turned to account, that they may become an inheritance to our children.
Meditation on the ways of God in past mercies will serve to assure us that the mercies which we now have will be continued so long as we need them: sea or river, it matters not which, each is divided till the Lord’s people have “passed over.”
Joshua 4:24. MIGHTY WORKS AND THEIR MIGHTY PURPOSES
I. The mighty works of God are never meant to be self-contained. They invariably reach out to things beyond the actual work, and beyond those to whom it seems confined. No Divine miracle is ever complete in itself. Though it may sound paradoxical, the miracle ever appears to be the smallest part of the work which the work contemplates. For once, the less is made to contain the greater. Divine works are seed-forms which are sown from the hand of Omnipotence; they are meant to swell and germinate and grow, and to bring forth fruit through the years and centuries which follow. Who knows but that during the ages which have since fled, more souls have not been brought by this miracle into the heavenly Canaan, than even the number who, through it, entered the goodly land on earth? Our works, like those of our heavenly Father, should ever contemplate results beyond those which are immediate and present. He works well, and after the pattern of God, who works
(1) for others,
(2) for time to come, and
(3) for eternity.
II. The mighty works of God are meant to teach us the knowledge of God.
1. All work is declarative of the worker. Some persons profess to read a character in the handwriting of a letter; they might read more perfectly if, to the manner in which it were set down, they added a study of the letter itself. What a man does is a photograph of what a man is; it is the outward expression of his inward self. Perhaps we need our works to know ourselves; certainly others need them in order that they may know us. Our features and bearing reveal much of our disposition to others; but our works, most of all, seem to be the glass through which men look into our consciousness and life. If works are needed to declare to us men whom we have seen, much more must we study Divine works if we would know God, whom we have never seen.
2. Even aimless work proclaims the character of its author. So far as such work goes to make up the life, it shews a worker who is willing that power should be thrown away. Aimless work tells of no to-morrow in a man’s mind, of no consciousness of the woes and wants of men around, of no longings and yearnings to help them. Aimless work tells of nothing but the corresponding blank in the worker’s heart, out of which it was born. It is the outward and empty “amen” to the inward and empty life.
3. The design of work reveals the character of the worker. Is the work selfish or generous; for the hour only, or for time to come? What a magnificent study, taken in this light, is presented by the works of God!
4. The execution of a work no less proclaims the worker. It tells us of the measure of his power, and writes down the character of his patience; it tells us whether there is a love of effect and display, or whether the energy which performs is animated mainly by the generosity that desires to help. The best works of the best of men shew failure in purpose, failure in capability failure in patience; it is only before the results of Divine wisdom and energy and love that we can dare to say, “ALL Thy works praise Thee, O God!” If God’s works do not teach us of Himself, though they may bring us temporary relief, the chief purpose of them is lost.
III. The mighty works of God are for all men, and whether men will or not, they will be for all men for ever.
1. They are designed to teach His people.
2. They are wrought and perpetuated before the heathen and the stranger, so that whosoever will may see, and fear, and turn to the Lord.
3. They will be for ever a cause of self-reproach to the lost.
4. They will be eternally a theme of praise for the redeemed. As though in allusion to the rejoicing at the Red Sea, we are told of the host above who have gotten the victory—“They sing the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, Great and marvellous are Thy works, Lord God Almighty: just and true are Thy ways, Thou King of saints.”