Me and My House

Friend,

Perhaps your house is divided on this, and everyone in it knows, though nobody says so. One of you reads things like this, and the others are polite about it. Somewhere in the family a sign may hang on a wall with the words "as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD." It has hung there so long that nobody sees it any more.

I want you to see the place where those words were first spoken. It is Shechem, near the end of Joshua's life, and the whole nation has been called together: the elders, the heads, the judges and the officers. Before the famous line, Joshua gives them God's own account of their history. God tells it in the first person, and almost every verb is something 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 comes the demand, and it is aimed at God's own people. "Put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the flood, and in Egypt." They still had those gods with them; a few verses later Joshua speaks of "the strange gods which are among you." So the choice in front of them was between things they were already holding, and that is why it has a day attached to it: "choose you this day."

What Joshua does next is surprising. The people 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 presses them hard, and they insist anyway. So he makes them witnesses against themselves, and he sets up a great stone under an oak, because "it hath heard all the words of the LORD which he spake unto us."

Here is the prayer I would pray with you. Lord, we are choosing this day, and this day is all the verse ever asked for. There are gods in our house that came in with the furniture, and we would rather not name them in front of each other. You have given us a land we did not labour for. Take this day from us, and ask us again tomorrow. When we say yes too easily, send someone who will tell us to our faces that we cannot do this in our own strength, so that we have to lean on You. Thank You that, as Israel said that day, You have "preserved us in all the way wherein we went," and You will keep the house that chooses You. Amen.

Yours on the same road,

a fellow learner

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