CRITICAL NOTES.—
Joshua 6:17. The city shall be accursed] Heb. Cherem. Absolute devotion to God is here meant. Every devoted thing was to be set apart as consecrated to Him, and every devoted person was to be put to death: neither could be redeemed (of. Leviticus 27:28-29; Deuteronomy 7:25-26).
Joshua 6:19. But all the silver and gold, etc.] These had to pass “through the fire,” and probably to be molten and re-cast (Numbers 31:21-23).
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Joshua 6:17-19
DEVOTED THINGS
The word “accursed,” which is used in this passage, does not so well represent the meaning of the Hebrew “cherem” as the word “devoted,” given in the margin. To our English ears, the former word is apt to convey an idea of anger and cursing, which is not contained in the original. The “devoted” persons or things, among the Israelites, wore persons or things doomed to destruction, or cut off from common uses in perpetual consecration to the use or service of God. The idea of votive offerings was not confined to the Jews; it runs, more or less conspicuously, through all human history, and is particularly prominent in that of the Romans. The ancients believed that the life of one man might be ransomed by the death of another, or that even a national boon might be purchased by such a sacrifice; hence such legends as that of Curtius, who is said to have “devoted” himself for the good of Rome by riding into the chasm which had opened in the Forum. It is said that devotion to any particular person was unknown among the Romans till the time of Augustus. “The day after the title of Augustus had been conferred upon Octavius, Pacuvius, a tribune of the people, publicly declared that he would devote himself to Augustus, and obey him at the expense of his life, should he be so commanded. This example of flattery was immediately followed by all the rest, till at length it became an established custom never to go to salute the Emperor without declaring that they were devoted to him.” It may thus readily be seen through what process the idea of devoting one’s self lost its former sacrificial, or at least solemn, import, till it became a mere hyperbole of social flattery, and presently, also, a form of speech to indicate strictness of attention to any business profession or pursuit. To this day, the very word of the Israelites is perpetuated in the East, the Turkish word harem coming, through the Arabic, from the Hebrew cherem. The Old Testament has many allusions to the practice of devoting things or persons to the Lord; and even in the New Testament, we find Paul devoting his hair at Cenchrea, saying that for the sake of his kinsmen in the flesh he could wish himself accursed (ἀνάθεμα) from Christ, and proclaiming any preacher of “another gospel,” and, elsewhere, any man who should “love not the Lord Jesus Christ,” to be anathema. Much obscurity gathers round the whole subject. The following questions will indicate some of the difficulties. Who was authorised to put men and things under the ban of devotion; might God alone do this, or might men also do it? If men might devote things, what men were qualified to pronounce the ban? Could a man pronounce the possessions of another to be devoted, or could he merely place his own under ban? Could one person devote another? What was the effect of the ban? Did it invariably involve the death of persons, and the destruction of all things not indestructible? Might the devotion be partial, as is seemingly the case in the instances of Samuel and Samson, and if partial, would this still be called cherem? These are some of the questions raised by this solemn and involved subject.
JERICHO DEVOTED
The claim that this city should be devoted was made by God, was most solemnly enjoined on all Israel, and was still more solemnly enforced by the death of Achan. What did God intend to teach men by this claim? The mere surroundings of the case are local and temporary; the principles of deep spiritual teaching, which are indicated by the solemnity of the case, were surely meant to be eternal.
I. In the wars of the Lord, the only right which there may be to any spoils is the right of the Lord Himself. The Israelites, and all God’s people subsequently, were to learn that. God puts out His Hand, in this very first battle, and says, in effect, “The spoils of victory are all Mine.” Israel was to take nothing, and the stern penalty of disobedience was death. Such is the measure of the Divine claim on the Church of Christ. Like the Israelites, we are but redeemed slaves, they having been delivered from Egypt, and we from a harder bondage. Everything which we may win in the spiritual conflict belongs to the Lord. To each one of us He says, “Ye are not your own; ye are bought with a price.”
1. We are not to Serve the Saviour merely for what we can get. Archbishop Secker used to say, “God has three sorts of servants in the world: some are slaves, and serve Him from fear; others are hirelings, and serve for wages; and the last are sons, who serve because they love.” How are we putting our hands to the work of Christ? IS it from fear? Do we merely seek to gain a name, a place, a measure of the world’s respect, and a possession in personal peace; or do we love Him to whom we owe liberty and all we have? He has devoted Himself for us. Look into the cradle at Bethlehem—that manger cradle—and you see there a devoted body; it is the cherem of His humanity, in which He gave Himself for us. See Him in the ministry, toiling now, and now saying, “The Son of man hath not where to lay His head;” that ministry is the cherem of His devotion in service. Regard Him as one “who did no sin;” and this cutting off unto manifest holiness has reference to His disciples, of whom he says, “For their sakes I sanctify Myself.” Contemplate Him in the sorrow of Gethsemane, when “being in an agony He prayed more earnestly, and His sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground;” that was His devotion of Himself to men in spiritual suffering. Think of Calvary, where He poured out His soul unto death, and crowned even His sacrifice in the cry, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” there, says His apostle, He was “made a curse for us; for it is written, ‘Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.’ ” Surely when we see the Saviour’s gift of Himself for our redemption, we might serve from some higher motives than those of fear and gain, and freely own that what we are, what we have, and all we may win through His power and love, belong not unto us, but unto the Lord.
2. Where God causes us to triumph, we are not to claim the glory. The rights are all God’s. He does but put His Hand on the whole of Jericho as indicating the measure of spoil and honour which ever belong to Himself. When Nebuchadnezzar exalted himself, and said, “This is great Babylon which I have builded,” he was driven out among the beasts to become as one of them: it was but God’s other way of saying, “The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib, but this man doth not know, neither doth he consider.” The man who was more ungrateful than the beasts, God drove forth among the beasts. It is said that Pope John 21. built for himself a noble chamber in the palace of Viterbo, and that he was crushed to death by the falling in of the roof, which he vaingloriously admired. Dean Milman says of the occurrence: “John was contemplating with too great pride the work of his own hands, and burst out into laughter; when, at that instant, the avenging roof came down upon his head.” That is ever the result, when we are foolishly taken up in our own work, and are found glorying in it as something which we have done. Our very self-esteem, like Achan’s selfishness, has a way of making us cherem. When we can come to the knowledge of what belongeth unto God in no better way, the very consequences of our misappropriation become vocal, and say, “He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.”
II. God, to whom all the spoils in life’s conflicts belong as a matter of right, gives us much for ourselves, and claims only the firstfruits.
1. God does not claim all. He puts no other city under ban like this, but simply requires Jericho. God has thought for the homage due unto His name, but more thought still for His people’s welfare: He would claim one city, they should have many. This has ever been the way of Divine mercy. God has thought for the poor. He only claims from men according to their ability (cf. Leviticus 27:8). God has thought for the busy. He merely demands one day in seven. God has thought for men in the weakness which leads them to serve in view of rewards. He does not shut men out from these lower motives. The Saviour, who is “touched with the feeling of our infirmities,” graciously stimulates men by thoughts of the pain and loss which they can avoid in being His disciples, and by thoughts of peace and joy and heaven which they can make their own by cleaving to Him. There is a legend of Bishop Ivo in which he is described as meeting one day a figure in the form of a woman, of a sad and earnest aspect, like some prophetess of God, who carried a vessel of fire in one hand, and of water in the other. He asked her what these things were for. She answered, “The fire is to burn up Paradise, and the water is to quench Hell, that men may henceforth serve their Maker, not from the selfish hope of the one, nor from the selfish fear of the other, but from the love of Himself alone.” The Lord, who knoweth our frame, neither burns paradise nor quenches hell; knowing the weakness and poverty of our love, He mercifully plies us with fear, and entices us with hope. How graciously He answers Peter’s poor commercial question, in Matthew 19:27-29. He says at one time, “Fear him who is able to destroy both body and soul in hell;” at another, “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.” So God thought for the Israelites of old: in the siege of Jericho He claimed all; yet might they fight, even there, with the thought of other cities in which the sp il should be entirely their own.
2. God, who does not everywhere claim all, nevertheless claims the firstfruits. This was so in warfare, and it was so in the matter of harvest. Men too often give God only the remnants of their life: they pour their strength out in business, and call Sunday a rest; they serve the world in youth and in the prime of life, and become religious in old age. God complains of this: He requires “the first of all the firstfruits of all things.”
III. Our services and offerings to God are not to enrich Him, but to bring more wealth to ourselves. Jericho was nothing to God: all its riches were nothing; and He who abhors human sacrifices, and has no pleasure in the death of the wicked, could have no delight in this shedding of blood.
1. God does not command our offerings to meet any sense of want in Himself. He cannot but be independent of all that we can bring. He who created us, and all that we have, cannot suffer need where our service fails.
2. That which we can give, or be, or do for God, is commanded because it will help us. The giving of money for the poor, or for religious work, is but the Divine way of cultivating our compassion, our sympathy, and our sincerity. Our deeds and our worship are required not merely for the honour of God and the help of our fellows, but for the exercise of our spiritual faculties. As without exercise our limbs and our physical powers would fail and die, so it is with our faith, and compassion, and love. Think of the heritage of unselfishness, and of loving God so as to cost us something. If we are giving nothing and doing nothing for the Saviour, we are robbing no one so much as ourselves. The fraudulent railway passenger may say to himself, “I have travelled all those miles, and paid nothing.” He forgets how much he has paid out of his self-respect and his integrity; he little thinks that he has been spending a vast amount of his manhood, and of his moral life. That man had better have opened a vein and given blood for his fare; he has cheated a railway company at the cost of draining away the life of his soul. The people who try to get to heaven by the process of avoiding all collections, and all forms of work, seem to reckon on having a very inexpensive journey: they may get to heaven; let us hope so; but they forget how very little of themselves will be left to enter in when they arrive. The man who goes on for forty years spending himself in order to save his belongings, may, when he dies, leave a great substance behind him; he will carry very little with him; so little, it may be, that the angels will not find enough of him left to take home at all. No man can withhold that which he ought to give, or do, for Christ, without being fined very heavily in his soul’s life.
IV. God’s claim on men is for a reasonable measure of devotedness in them, or for the utter devoting of them.
1. Those who love God are not taxed unreasonably. God only asks Jericho for winning all Canaan; He does but ask of us a “reasonable service.”
2. Those who love not God enough to devote themselves to Him, are ever tending to the time when they must be devoted by Him. The end of idolatry is to be made cherem. It matters not whether our idols are rude as those of the ancient Canaanites, or take more modern forms. It makes no difference whether we bear the name of the Lord’s people, or men call us worldly (cf. Deuteronomy 13:6-18). Even in the New Testament, the end of not being the Saviour’s disciples indeed is to be made cherem: “If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be anathema when the Lord cometh.”
OUTLINES AND COMMENTS ON THE VERSES
Joshua 6:17. (I.) THE MEMORY OF THE LORD.
I. The Lord’s remembrance of man’s sin. This command to slaughter the Canaanites was not given in order that room might be made for the Israelites. God’s eye looked back over the eight or nine centuries in which these children of Canaan had been strewing the short path of their national history with many and aggravated sins. They had been heaping up wrath against the day of wrath, therefore was it that God said, “The city shall be devoted.” Many years later the Divine voice is heard saying to the ten tribes, “They consider not in their hearts that I remember all their wickedness: now their own doings have beset them about; they are before My face.”
1. God remembers sin in all its forms, and not merely conventional sin. Men agree to call certain trangressions sinful, to the exclusion of others; God deals with all sins alike. He has no favouritism in iniquity.
2. God remembers, nevertheless, the different degrees of sin. Some men are “sinners before the Lord exceedingly,” as were the Sodomites, and God remembers the excessive forms which sin has taken. Men like Jeroboam and Ahab are singled out for prominence in wickedness.
3. God remembers sin till it is forgiven, and not till then does He say, “Their sins and iniquities will I remember no more.” The only Lethe of forgetfulness for the guilt of men is “the fountain open for sin and uncleanness” by Jesus Christ. Till sin is washed away there, God will remember it and men must.
4. God remembers no man’s sins in vain. Moses dies on Nebo because God has not forgotten; and, notwithstanding the lapse of four hundred years, God says to Saul, “I remember that which Amalek did to Israel.… Now go and smite Amalek” (cf. 1 Samuel 15:2-3).
II. The Lord’s remembrance of His own promises. In this slaughter at Jericho, Joshua is seen acting, not alone, but working together with God for the salvation of Rahab. In the covenant made with this woman:
1. The fulfilment is equal to the promise. In point of value the one is as the other.
2. It is a fulfilment in detail: “She and all that are with her.”
3. The fulfilment has regard to the conditions which were made—“all that are with her in the house” (cf. chap. Joshua 2:19).
III. The Lord’s remembrance of human faith and service. No one believes in the Lord ever so little, and then has to find that his trust is disregarded. Rahab in Jericho, the Syrophenician woman in the borders of Tyre and Sidon, or the thief upon the cross, it matters not which; none is too lowly, too vile, or too much a stranger to the covenants of promise, to believe in vain. Even the feeble faith of the woman who stole through the crowd to touch the hem of the Saviour’s garment could not be kept secret: she too had to see that faith could not be hidden. God sees the smallest act of faith, let it come whence it may. So does God see the smallest act of service done for His people. Not only did Joshua know that Rahab “hid the messengers,” but Jehovah knew it also, and kept the woman’s house from falling. God would not suffer even the vain Nebuchadnezzar to serve against Tyrus, without noticing how “every head was made bald, and every shoulder was peeled,” and then giving him Egypt as wages for himself and his army. Certainly we cannot give even the cup of cold water in His name, and for His people, and then lose our reward.
Joshua 6:18. (II.) THE FORETHOUGHT OF THE LORD.
I. Divine knowledge of the force of temptation. The gold and the Babylonish garments might be solemnly devoted, but the Lord knew they would glitter temptingly notwithstanding. He who taught us to pray, Lead us not into temptation, well knows how much such prayer is needed by us each.
II. Divine acquaintance with human weakness. “Keep yourselves from the devoted thing.” The Lord accurately measures not only the pressure from without, but the power of resistance also.
III. Divine anticipations of human sin. Men may say, “Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?” but God loves us enough to speak plainly. He shews us that in His estimation our danger is real. If the warnings of Scripture were not inwardly felt to be so necessary, they might awaken our indignation; but the silence of even the infidels on this point is given in contribution to a general faith that the Bible is right.
IV. Divine solicitude for man’s salvation.
1. God is solicitous for men individually. He is concerned for each of us, lest we should make ourselves accursed.
2. God is solicitous for men collectively. He is concerned lest the camp of Israel should be made a curse. No man is so isolated as to be away from God’s thought and care, and no host is so large as to outreach His love.
Joshua 6:19. (III.) THE CLAIMS OF THE LORD.
I. God literally asserts His right to claim all that which is His due. At Jericho He demands everything. This is not usual; it was done to impress men with the vastness of God’s rights, and to remind them of the grace of His ordinary dealings.
II. God symbolically asserts His claim to man’s holiness in everything. Gold would naturally be looked upon as one of the most carnal of possesions. It was to be shewn that even this could be set apart, and made to be “holiness unto the Lord” (cf. Zechariah 14:20).
III. God graciously shews that His most exacting claims are made from a generous interest in men. These things were to enrich the treasury of the Lord, that the house and service of the Lord might be more precious in the sight of men.