Me and My House

Your house is divided on this and everybody in it knows, though nobody has said so. One of you reads things like this. The others are polite about it. Somewhere in the family a board on a wall says as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD, and it has hung there long enough to say nothing.

I want you to see the room it was spoken in. Shechem, at the end of Joshua's life, the whole nation called in: elders, heads, judges, officers. Before the famous line comes God's own account of their history, first person, almost all verbs he did. I took your father Abraham. I sent Moses also and Aaron. And afterward I brought you out. And I have given you a land for which ye did not labour, and cities which ye built not, and ye dwell in them.

Then the demand, which is not aimed at atheists. Put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the flood, and in Egypt. They still had them, in the camp, that morning. The choice set in front of them is between things they are already holding, which is why the sentence carries a date on it: choose you this day.

What Joshua does next is the least evangelistic move in the Bible. They answer well, and he tells them they cannot do it: Ye cannot serve the LORD: for he is an holy God; he is a jealous God. He argues them down. They insist anyway. So he makes them witnesses against themselves and stands a stone under an oak, because it hath heard all the words.

We are choosing today, God, and today is all that sentence ever claimed. There are gods in this house that came in with the furniture, and we would rather not name them in front of each other. You have put us in a land we did not labour for. Take this day from us, and ask us again tomorrow. And when we say it too easily, send somebody who will tell us to our faces that we cannot do this, so that we have to answer.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 294 is All Grace Abounding (2 Corinthians 9:8).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two