PREPARATION FOR THE LORD’S WAR
CRITICAL NOTES.—
Joshua 5:1. Amorites] Deriv. from Amar = “high,” “lofty.” The people were “dwellers in the mountains” (cf. Numbers 13:29, and chap. Joshua 11:3). Kurtz and Fürst think that the word has an allusion to the large stature of the race: “lofty, high-towering, gigantic” men. Sometimes, and apparently in this verse, the term Amorites is applied to the inhabitants of the land generally. In chap. Joshua 10:5, the king of Jerusalem, who ruled over Jebusites, is mentioned as one of five kings of the Amorites. Spirit] Lit. “breath.” The stopping or taking away of the breath is indicative of the extreme astonishment and fear by which they were overwhelmed.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Joshua 5:1
THE FEAR OF THE UNGODLY
In the facts of which this verse assures us, and in the history to which it refers us:—
I. We have conviction coming through the manifest working of God.
1. The occasion of man’s idolatry and sin is ever found in low and poor thoughts of God. Let God be distant and remote from a man’s consciousness, let Him be thought of infrequently and feebly, and the result will soon be seen in a following after “other gods.” Joshua’s predecessor, through whom God was so manifestly present before the Israelites, had not left the people six weeks ere they said unto Aaron, “Up, make us gods which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, we wot not what is become of him.” The history of these Canaanites must have contained a similar experience. Sons of Noah though they were, and intense as must have been the religious remembrances of their fathers, Ham and Canaan, the power and goodness and justice and the very being of God had become a mere tradition. On the basis of the Usherian chronology, barely nine hundred years had elapsed since the awful deluge. In the antediluvian age this was only about the period of a lifetime, and if in the subsequent generation the sons of Ham lived as long as the sons of Shem—a term of some four hundred and thirty years—Canaan himself would possibly have been living, to teach the fear of the Lord among his descendants, for nearly half the period between the days of the flood and the crossing of the Jordan. Nor had the Canaanites been left without at least one solemn intervening remonstrance. Just about midway between the time of the flood and the entrance of the Israelites into their land, and possibly not fifty years after the death of Canaan, another and an awful judgment had told these people of an all-seeing and omnipotent God, who was determined to punish sin. It was on the families of the Canaanites that God poured out the terrible fire of Sodom and Gomorrah (comp. Genesis 10:19 with Genesis 19) God ought not to have been so absent from the thoughts of these men; but they had long suffered His very name to become merely a story of the past, and on neither name nor story did they trouble themselves much to think. Hence they went after idols, the idols being, as idols always are, the embodiment of the wicked and corrupt desires which ever follow forgetfulness of God, With no consciousness of God’s presence, they had long been led to unrestrained idolatry and unchecked wickedness. He who, in these days, loses the sense of God’s presence and power and goodness and purity, loses all that can keep him from idolatry and its consequent degradations. The very name EMMANUEL—God with us—tells where our danger most lies, and wherein the blessedness of following Christ so much consists.
2. The manifest interposition of God, in great works for His people, brings conviction to the most hardened and abandoned of men. So long as men only hear of God, they can disbelieve Him, and more or less undisturbedly pursue their own way; but when God works in a manner for which no human hand or name is a sufficient explanation, immediately the unbelieving are arrested. The great cause of all that is different between the disciples of Christ and the unbelieving in the present day is given in the Saviour’s own words—“Yet a little while, and the world seeth Me no more, but ye see Me.” The one effort of such modern scientists as are virtually atheists seems to be to account for such works as are too great for man by some other name than that of GOD. If “protoplasm” could only account for life; if “development” would but be sufficiently agreeable to stand as an equivalent for its various forms; if the movements of life would only allow themselves to be called “automatic;” and if human consciousness, which will keep looking upward, and lisping that great word GOD, could only be taught to pronounce the obscure and ugly compound “anthropomorphism,” then, surely, the world, and even its more wicked sons and daughters, might have peace. True, some of us might still want a long word to explain fulfilled prophecies, and shew us how Nature taught some of her more reverent children to “shew us things to come,” and to shew them in marvellous fulness of detail seven or eight centuries—not to say more—before they came to pass. The more anthropomorphic of us might require a good many Greek vocables, and tax rather tiresomely the patience and scholarship of the learned sons of science to put them pleasantly together, ere we could keep that great word GOD from speaking within and echoing through our consciousness, when we read together, as making one chapter, the well-authenticated works and CLAIMS and CHARACTER of Jesus Christ. There might be a few other things which, in the event of insufficient explanation, we should require to read of in awkward and unnatural phrases ere we could persuade ourselves that they were the outcome merely of Nature. Meanwhile, like the Amorites and Israelites before the divided Jordan, we behold many wonderful works around us in life and behind us in history, for which we can only find one equivalent cause, and that cause GOD.
3. History shews us that when standing immediately before the greater and more manifest works of God, men hare ever felt that from them there was no appeal. At the Red Sea the long enslaved Israelites sang, “The Lord is my strength and song.” Their history but too sadly proves their readiness to forget Jehovah; they could not but own Him there, and on many similar occasions afterwards. The assembled people on Carmel waited all day in the spirit of judgment; we feel their indecision and unformed conclusions in their very silence. The whole attitude of the host was one of expectancy and waiting. The very act of pronouncing their verdict tells us that they were at least not biessed before it was given. It was only after the laboured failure of the Baalites, the scorn and confidence of Elijah, and after seeing the fire of heaven lick up the water and attack the sacrifice, that they cried with one accord, “Jehovah, He is the God.” However much he might have doubted before or after, amid the solemn darkness, the rending earthquake, and the awful words of Calvary, the centurion could only feel and say, “Truly this was the Son of God.” The arrogant Sanhedrin, who thought they had disposed for ever of the Master, and could do as they would in contemning the work of the disciples, “when they saw the lame man healed, could say nothing against it.” It is easy enough to try and dismiss numberless cases like these by saying that such conclusions of men are not spoken in calmness, but under the influence of excitement and awe. That is the very difficulty. How is it that ever, when the heart stands in awe before unusual power, it remembers God, and is troubled? We can understand the relapse into the normal unbelief when the sounds of the call to faith have died away in the distance. How is it that whenever the supernatural is present, men invariably stand convinced of the unseen God? It is no answer to this question to talk of superstition; when all the talk about superstition is ended, it still remains to be asked, “Why should superstition ever lead men into the presence of God, and never choose to leave them elated or abashed before the majesty of Nature? There can be only one answer: The soul is responding to the voice of its Maker, and that Maker is God.
II. We see conviction invariably working fear. Insensibly and instantaneously, as these Canaanites behold the river divided, and remember the overthrow of Sihon and Og, and the miracle at the Red Sea, they are filled with fear of the Lord God of Israel. It is ever thus with those who have forgotten Jehovah, and turned to devices of their own.
1. The fear which comes from ignorance. Not “seeing Him who is invisible,” men cannot endure the works which declare His presence.
2. Fear as intensified by sin. Sinful Adam heard the voice of God, and, for the first time, so far as we know, he was afraid. When guilty Herod heard of the fame of Jesus, he said, “John the Baptist is risen from the dead.” Conscience, as Trench has pointed out, is, in its very structure, a solemn word. “It is from ‘con’ and scire.’ But what does that ‘con’ intend? Conscience is not merely that which I know, but that which I know with some one else.… That other knower whom the word implies is God.” So, when we transgress, we have only to be brought by some of His works into the consciousness of the Lord’s presence, and sin intensifies fear at once. We feel that the guilt which we know, He knows also. And from this law none escape:
“What art thou, thou tremendous Power,
Who dost inhabit us without our leave;
And art within ourselves another self,
A master-self, that loves to domineer,
And treat the monarch frankly as the slave?”—Young.
3. Fear as a Divine provision and ordinance. God had determined and appointed this very melting of heart which the Amorites now suffered. Forty years previously God had said to Moses, about this very trepidation, “I will send my fear before thee.” The fear of the wicked is no less God’s ordinance now than it was of old.
III. The fear thus wrought by God is seen becoming helpful to speedy salvation, or accessory to sudden destruction. Rahab feared, and believed, and sought deliverance, and was saved; the Canaanites feared, and resisted, and were destroyed. Montaigne said, “Fear sometimes adds wings to the heels, and sometimes nails them to the ground, and fetters them from moving.” Happy is he in whom the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Where this is not so, fear is often immediately preliminary to overthrow. It is the awful gloom of coming destruction which is seen overshadowing those whom it hardly waits longer to involve, and the very fear of the coming calamity hastens the end which it so solemnly predicts.
OUTLINES AND COMMENTS ON THE VERSES
Joshua 5:1.—RELIGIOUS CONVICTION.
I. The essence of true religious conviction is conviction of the presence of God. For want of that, these men had turned idolaters. Had they always felt the God of Israel as near as they felt Him now, the worship of their idols would have been an impossibility. When we get and continue to know and feel that God is round about us, all else in religious life will follow.
1. Assured of God’s presence, we shall immediately feel the reality and guilt of sin. Job said, “Now mine eye seeth Thee, I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” Isaiah in his vision saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and cried, “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.” Peter, beholding the Deity of Christ through His mighty working, started back abashed, saying, “Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man.” So it has ever been: to see God present is to feel that sin is very real and very offensive.
2. Assured of God’s presence, we have no peace till we feel that sin is put away by forgiveness. With deep and true insight Milton tells us how the prince of darkness was troubled in the presence of holiness—
“Abashed the devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is.”
So must unforgiven men ever feel troubled by the presence of God. When Peter first saw the Deity of the Saviour, he had no peace in that holy and to him awful presence; after he had been a long time with Jesus, and had learned of Him, and when he was in the rapture or a diviner mood, he cried as he beheld the glory of the transfigured Son of God, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three tabernacles.” It is only when we have learned the love and forgiveness of the Saviour, and come ourselves somewhat into the mind of Christ, that we are able to endure His presence. Then that presence is no longer our keenest pain, but becomes our deepest peace.
3. A growing sense of God’s presence is the essential accompaniment of a religious life. When Nathanael came to Christ, he came sceptically, nor did he care to conceal his doubts. With that frank guilelessness on which he seems to have prided himself, and which, as far as it was good, even Christ admired, he bluntly told out his unbelief in the question, “Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?” How did the Saviour convict this man of the Divine presence? Christ told him his secrets; He looked into his heart, and exposed this conceit of an open and transparent nature, on which this guileless Jew prided himself, as being so unlike many of his nation. “Behold,” says the Saviour, “an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile.” Nor was this all; Christ told the honest Jew how he had been praying under that secluded fig-tree, as pious Jews were wont to withdraw for prayer—praying but a short time before, and praying, it may be, about this very matter of the coming Messiah, to which the thoughts of his more godly countrymen were at this time so earnestly directed. It was enough: Nathanael felt that God was there. Very much under the influence which, in a similar case, had made the Samaritan woman exclaim, “He told me all things that ever I did,” Nathanael cried out, “Rabbi, thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of Israel.” Did the Saviour intimate that this conviction was sufficient, and that the matter of this man’s new-found faith might rest there? Quite the contrary. Belief was to go on. Christ Himself might withdraw; but to this, as to every truly religious soul, conviction of the Divine presence was to become a growing thing. When Christ as manifest in the flesh was far away, when no one was near, this belief should go on till he could say with his great countryman, “Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.… Thou hast beset me behind and before.” Conviction of a present God was to be a growing thing; so Christ says, “Your faith now is only the beginning of the faith of the future; you shall see greater things than these. Through my mediatorial work you shall see heaven and earth united. Hereafter ye—you and such as believe with you—shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.”
Thus conviction first feels God near through some extraordinary manifestation; and, given that God’s mercy spares, and His grace still plies the convicted one, the religious life goes on to all its future developments in the consciousness that God is round about it. The first feeling arising from a sense of that Presence is fear, the after feelings are love and joy, while the culmination is peace, even in the grim presence of death: “I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.” These Canaanites only knew that sense of God’s presence which precedes judgment and destruction: every living man, in the one way or the other, must awake to a sense of that presence sooner or later.
II. The medium of this conviction of God’s presence is God’s working. The Canaanites heard that the Lord had dried up the waters of Jordan, and forthwith they believed in a “God nigh at hand.” (Cf. instances in previous outline.) Jacob beheld the wonders of God in his dream, and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not.” The centurion at the cross, and the jailor of Philippi, looked each on supernatural things, and each at once told out his faith. The chief priests consulted that they might put Lazarus to death, because “by reason of him many of the Jews went away, and believed on Jesus.” The present attempts which are being made in the name of Science to banish God’s working from the faith of men, touch the question of religion in a point most vital and important. Where “the arm of the Lord is not revealed,” God’s servants still have to ask, “Who hath believed our report?” Give the name of “eternal laws” or “evolution” to account for the works of God; get men to believe that which the terms imply, and then there is no need for God at all. How much we lose, if the arm of the Lord is not revealed to us! Think of Belshazzar and his lords, when they held high carnival in Babylon. It may be that some among the thousand courtiers at the feast only saw the writing on the wall, and not the hand that wrote. But “the king saw the part of the hand that wrote: then the king’s countenance was changed.” To him the words would have an awful meaning. It makes all the difference, in our reading of life around us, whether the arm of the Lord which does the writing is hidden or revealed.
In view of the somewhat lofty tone of some modern scientists it may be allowable to ask, How much right have these who speak most dogmatically to speak on this question at all? It may be remarked:
1. Every man is born with the faculty, or capacity, of spiritual perception. We each come into the world with powers which, if cultivated, will presently enable us to see God. Men are born with capacities for seeing mathematics, poetry, and music; yet the work of a senior wrangler, of Tennyson, or Beethoven, would be utterly incomprehensible to an ordinary farm labourer.
2. Of all human powers of perception, the God-seeing sense is the most refined. Other faculties must be trained by a suitable experience, but this most of all. Let a man live forty or fifty years as if there were no such things as arithmetic, poetry, or music, and, practically, there will be no such things. May it not be so in the matter of these spiritual perceptions? Untaught men cannot look over and read a music score of a dozen staves like Costa and Barnby, or Stainer and Best. Can a man who ignores God year after year be in a position to see God?
3. If not, how utterly incompetent unspiritual men are to pronounce on spiritual things! Some men act as if mental and spiritual insight are identical; why should they be identical, any more than physical and mental perception? Each kind of eve is only good for its own sphere. Some men seem to think that scientific culture and spiritual culture are one and the same thing. They have mistaken spectrum analysis for spiritual vision. It is like using the microscope to find out if there is any music in the Old Hundredth or the Twelfth Mass. It is much the same as climbing to the top of the Matterhorn, where there is a wide outlook, in order to see through a mathematical problem. It is as though a man should take a telescope to try and perceive if his friend loved him, or seize on an opera glass to discover the exquisite pathos of the twenty-third Psalm. The philosophers appear to have forgotten what they of all men should remember,—the eye and the world must fit; the power of perception, and the sphere in which it is exercised, must be appropriate. Meanwhile we may feel thankful that men who have given a lifetime to find out God do not pronounce against His existence. We might be alarmed if Abraham and Moses and Isaiah, if John and Peter and Paul, if Luther and Baxter and Wesley, if Newton and Simpson and Farraday joined to say, “We have thought on this question reverently and devoutly for many years, we have tried to live in that spiritual purity which is said to be, and which, from the nature of the case, must be necessary in order to see God, and we come to the conclusion that while there may be a God, or may not be, we have no data by which to form any conclusion.” Without judging others, it is a matter for devout gladness that in all the pages of history we have no names of men who, having followed after God throughout life in that reverence which alone becomes such a pursuit, and which alone could hope to succeed in finding Him, have turned round at the close of life, and pronounced their faith mistaken. It is at least significant that history as well as Scripture always shews the path of such as one that “shineth more and more.” This world has tempted many to deny the faith; we cannot recollect that the grave has so tempted one.
“A candle wakes some men, as well as a noise; the eye of the Lord works upon a good soul, as well as His hand; and a godly man is as much affected with the consideration, ‘Thou God seest me,’ as with ‘The Lord strikes me.’ ” [Dr. Donne.]
“Fear is entirely based on a consideration of some possible personal evil consequence coming down upon me from that clear sky above me. Love is based upon the forgetfulness of self altogether. The very essence of love is that it looks away from itself and to another.”
“Fill the heart with love, and there is an end to the dominion of fear. The love of God entering into a man’s heart, destroys all tormenting fear of Him. All the attributes of God come to be on our side. He that loves has the whole Godhead for Him.” [Mac Laren.]