Joshua and St. John stand out as if in direct hostility to each other. We know that the Book of Joshua must have been read by the Apostle in his childhood, his manhood, his old age. Let us inquire how at different times of his life he must have regarded it.
I. We find him first as a Galilean fisherman. At that time the book of the wars of the Lord may have had some attraction for him. He would receive it as coming from Divine authority, but there was nothing which bound it to his actual human sympathies. What was there in what he saw and heard that could make any Jew feel that he belonged to a chosen, vigorous, triumphant people?
II. It is a common notion, suggested by his own words, that the Apostle was a hearer and disciple of John the Baptist. The immediate appeal of John's preaching was undoubtedly to the individual conscience. Each man was awakened to a sense of his own evil. He wished, first of all, for a baptism for the remission of sins. Such a thought absorbs for a while a man's being. The disciples of John would not in general have found leisure to think of the Book of Joshua.
III. Another period came. John was called to be Christ's disciple. Christ said that He was come to establish a kingdom, and His followers were sure that He did not deceive them; and now all that they had heard in the old Scriptures of a kingdom that was to put down the tyrants and giants of the earth came to life in their minds. They would dwell on the battles of Joshua and David with an earnest delight, with a confidence that they were battles fought on their behalf, in the like of which they might one day be permitted to engage, with a prospect of a more complete and permanent victory.
IV. But there came a fourth stage in St. John's life. After he had leant upon his Lord's breast at the Last Supper and had stood beside His Cross, his strong belief in Christ as a Conqueror through suffering may for a time have made him unable to understand the triumph with which the old Israelite leader records the discomfiture and extinction of the Canaanitish hosts. But this feeling would be accompanied by two others: (1) with a distinct acknowledgment that Joshua's battles were tending to the establishment of a righteous kingdom upon earth; (2) that the Christian man is in as literal a sense a warrior as the Jew ever was.
V. In his old age, as he sat alone in the island of Patmos, may not St. John have found in the old leader of his country's hosts a teacher and a friend? He could learn from him that there is a Divine and gracious purpose in that which looks darkest and saddest: he was told that nations are not swept out of the earth for nothing, that the earth is God's, and that He will reclaim it from those who lay it waste and make it a den of robbers.
F. D. Maurice, Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the Old Testament,p. 305.