Bible Commentaries
Joshua 24

Verse 15

As for Me and My House

As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.— Joshua 24:15.

1. It is an impressive experience to stand round the bed of a dying veteran whom we have followed and loved. Viewed from that vantage-ground, the mighty things of the world seem weak, and the gilded and glorious to be but hollow tinsel. The life of that man, spent as it has been in the service of God, casts a halo around this scene which cannot be described. The life may have been unpretentious, utterly lacking in the show and outward glory which brings earthly renown; but we feel his life has been good in a way which will bear the searching light of the Great White Throne, and we are satisfied. With what interest and anxiety do we listen to every word that falls from his failing lips. There are reminiscences of the past, and the eyes sparkle at the remembrance of God’s goodness in times of storm and stress. Then come wise counsels for the future. And as the sons and daughters who have come from distant parts stand round, linked by the strongest of all ties—the tie of mutual grief—some such prayer as Bickersteth’s ascends for them—

Let not one of these

Be wanting in the day Thou countest up

The jewels in Thy diadem of saints.

I ask not for the glories of the world,

I ask not freedom from its weariness

Of daily toil; but, oh Lord Jesu Christ,

Let Thy omnipotent prayer prevail for them

And keep them from the evil. In the hour

Of trial, when the subtle tempter’s voice

Sounds like a seraph’s, and no human friend

Is nigh, let my words live before Thee then,

And hide my lambs beneath Thy shadowing wings,

And keep them as the apple of Thine eye.

My prayers are ended if Thy will be done

In them and by them. Till at last we meet

Within the mansions of our Father’s home,

A circle never to be sundered more,

No broken link, a family in Heaven.

2. Our text expresses the resolution of the great captain Joshua, when God had given His people rest from their enemies round about, and all the good things had come upon them which the Lord their God had promised them. Such were the words which he was not ashamed to utter in the assembly of Israel, when he had summoned them together at Shechem. He had called on them to make a deliberate choice between idolatry and the service of Jehovah. On this point, his own mind was made up. “Choose you this day whom ye will serve; but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” It must have been a noble sight to see the well-tried champion of Israel, ripe in years and in honours, adding to all his proofs of courage this greatest one, of standing out before the armies of his people and owning himself a godly man; crowning the exploits of a heroic life by a boldness no less heroic, on His behalf on whom life depends. And it must have been a remarkable sight, too, to witness that day the gathering of the tribes to Shechem. Veterans who had fought in the wars of the Lord once more embraced their aged captain. Long-severed friends in arms and danger once more greeted one another. Round these were the assembled multitudes of Israel. They stood and listened to him who reminded them of the age which was gone by, and took pledges of them for the age which was to come.

Give thanks, O heart, for the high souls

That point us to the deathless goals—

For all the courage of their cry

That echoes down from sky to sky;

Thanksgiving for the armed seers

And heroes called to mortal years—

Souls that have built our faith in man

And lit the ages as they ran.

Give thanks for heroes that have stirred

Earth with the wonder of a word.

But all thanksgiving for the breed

Who have bent destiny with deed—

Souls of the high, heroic birth,

Souls sent to poise the shaken earth,

And then called back to God again

To make heaven possible for men.

I

As for Me

1. This short phrase occurs again and again in Scripture. “As for me, I” (unlike the enemies of God) “will come into thy house in the multitude of thy mercy” ( Psalms 5:7). “As for me, I” (unlike those whose portion is in this life) “will behold thy face in righteousness” ( Psalms 17:15). We might add to such quotations many others where the same or similar Hebrew occurs, but is otherwise rendered in our Version. Such a passage is Psalms 73:28, where we may read, “As for me, nearness to God for me is good.” Others may, if they will, go wandering from Him, devoting themselves to the world, to self, to sin, as their life and choice. My preference and resolve are otherwise. “Nearness to God for me is good.”

The one thing needful—whether we seek the love of God or of man—is unfaltering courage, that quality which alone places great things within our reach. 1 [Note: Lady Dilke, The Book of the Spiritual Life, 164.]

When William Wilberforce was brought to Christ, he went with fear and trembling to his friend, the great statesman of the day, William Pitt, to tell him of the change. For two hours his friend endeavoured to convince him that he was becoming visionary, fanatical, if not insane. But the young convert was steadfast and immovable. He had spent his twenty-fifth birthday at the top wave and highest flow of those amusements—the racecourse and the ballroom—which had swallowed up a large portion of his youth. He had laughed and sung, and been envied for his gaiety and happiness. But true happiness he had never found till he found Christ. And now he laid his wealth and wit and eloquence and influence at the feet of his Lord, his motto being—“Whatsoever others do, as for me, I will serve the Lord.”

2. The phrase thus tends to put before us a certain contrast and separation. The speaker places himself, in some respects, aside and apart. He looks around him, and sees other men following this or that line of thought and action. Their numbers are large. Their action, their spirit and sentiment, have all the weight and force of a fashion. He cannot help it. He must take another line. However singular he may make himself, so must it be. “As for me, I will serve the Lord.”

Light words they were, and lightly, falsely said;

She heard them, and she started,—and she rose,

As in the act to speak; the sudden thought

And unconsidered impulse led her on.

In act to speak she rose, but with the sense

Of all the eyes of that mixed company

Now suddenly turned upon her, some with age

Hardened and dulled, some cold and critical;

Some in whom vapours of their own conceit,

As moist malarious mists the heavenly stars,

Still blotted out their good, the best at best

By frivolous laugh and prate conventional

All too untuned for all she thought to say—

With such a thought the mantling blood to her cheek

Flushed up, and o’er-flushed itself, blank night her soul

Made dark, and in her all her purpose swooned.

She stood as if for sinking. Yet anon

With recollections clear, august, sublime,

Of God’s great truth, and right immutable,

Which, as obedient vassals, to her mind

Came summoned of her will, in self-negation

Quelling her troublous earthy consciousness,

She queened it o’er her weakness. At the spell,

Back rolled the ruddy tide, and leaves her cheek

Paler than erst, and yet not ebbs so far

But that one pulse of one indignant thought

Might hurry it hither in flood. So as she stood

She spoke. God in her spoke, and made her heard. 1 [Note: Clough, Poems, 11.]

3. Joshua, like his friend Caleb, “followed the Lord fully”; he might have taken for his motto the word “ thorough.” He belonged to Jehovah, heart, and soul, and mind, and strength. As the successor of Moses, and the type of the Lord Jesus, he put on zeal as a cloak, and girded himself with fidelity as with a garment. His appointed duty was fulfilled with martial strictness and unswerving steadiness; he had a single eye and a firm hand. He was strong and of good courage, and the Lord was with him. It was no idle boast when the old warrior and prince in Israel said, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

Among modern soldiers there is not a more honoured name than Henry Havelock. In the words of the Governor-General of India, “He was every inch a soldier, and every inch a Christian.” From the time of his religious decision he was not ashamed to own his heavenly Father, but was concerned only to walk worthy of Him. Show him the path of duty, and he held consequence as light as air. He had only one object of fear, and that was sin. Personal danger was as the idle wind. When the deliverance of our Indian Empire from a fearful rebellion seemed to depend on the success of the army which he led, he could find time before the earliest march to commune with his God in prayer, and in the reading of His word, and thus to strengthen himself for the terrible work he had in hand. His motto was, “As for me, I will serve the Lord.”

Sir Walter Scott, quoting a Scottish proverb in his journal says: “Hain your reputation, tyne your reputation,” i.e. to be very careful and timorous about reputation is the way to lose it. Is it not he also who testifies: “I never knew name nor fame burn brighter for over chary keeping”?

4. Never for a moment is the Christian called to isolation, peculiarity, opposition, for their own sake. “Let every one of us please his neighbour for his good, to edification.” It is the believer’s business to be the most considerate, sympathetic, courteous, and companionable of people, within the lines of the will of God. Let this be well remembered, with reflection, and sanctified good sense, and prayer. Otherwise, we may be merely disagreeable, and mistake this for fidelity to principle. We may be justly avoided for our own sakes, and think that this is “bearing the reproach of Christ,” and “going forth to him without the gate.” But when all this is said, how great and sacred is the place in our hearts and wills which must be kept for “as for me”! Considerateness and sympathy are as different as possible from drift and compromise. They should be, and often are, most conspicuous in lives which are all the while governed absolutely by personal surrender to the will of God, such surrender as can lay quietly down at His feet all that is most cherished in reputation and ease, when it comes to a real alternative between Him and the world.

Independence and isolation may be nothing better than stoic egotism. A man may separate himself from his fellows through self-conceit alone. Pope has a couplet which says of certain persons—

They so despise the crowd, that should the throng

By chance go right, they purposely go wrong.

Again, the effect is hardly less injurious of the inflexibility of those who in simple ignorance oppose the public way. Men get into their minds all sorts of distorted views, half-truths, and opinions which they call “conscientious convictions,” and they protest that nothing shall move them from their faith or purpose. Their stubbornness arises from no unsociability of disposition, but simply through imperfect light. There is a good deal of emphatic personality and dogged independence in the world which is thus only a distortion. You see it in very marked development in present-day religious enterprise and Christian work. Men are every day rushing out of the orderly ranks, discarding long-established methods, and originating all sorts of infallible expedients for doing what the wiser Church is unable to do, or is not doing fast enough to satisfy their enthusiasm. And so these persons choose to toil alone, or to force their own crude theories and ill-considered schemes on their unwilling neighbours. All this is but a perverted egotism and a public hurt, though there is in it, as in most evils, an element of good.

There never was a more thorough Christian, or a more decided, than Tyndall’s predecessor in the presidency of the Royal Institution—Michael Faraday. And while there are two or three eminent and prominent scientific men who are numbered with doubters, and whose names are regarded by those who wish it so as a sufficient justification of doubt, one of our greatest astronomers says he could appeal to the great majority of living men who are devoting God’s noblest gift of genius to the elucidation of God’s works, to prove that the pursuit of science has no inherent tendency towards religious scepticism. “As for my own part,” he adds, “and I hope I say it without affectation—I am sure I say it with no reserve—from the results of modern research I have gathered additional reason for resting in the simplicity of the Christian Faith, and in modern discoveries I have found many a new and unexpected trace of the Creator’s Majesty, of His power, His wisdom, and His love.”

II

As for Me and My House

1. “As for me and my house,” says Joshua; not “as for me” only. He carries his household with him, as the head of the house, and as the servant of God in the family circle.

(1) He is the head of his house.—He clearly signifies that he is the head over his family, that its oneness of decision is due to his ruling. There is to be no hesitation on this point. The Bible never permits the position of husband, as director of the family, to be trenched upon. His is the order which is to decide the course to be followed, his the firm hand which is to hold the reins, his the final word that is to bring differences to a settlement.

An ideal picture of the father as the high priest in the home is given by John G. Paton, the South Sea missionary, in the story of his childhood’s days in the south of Scotland: “Our home consisted of a ‘but’ and a ‘ben,’ and a ‘mid room,’ or chamber, called the ‘closet.’ … The ‘closet’ was a very small apartment betwixt the other two, having room only for a bed, a little table, and a chair, with a diminutive window shedding diminutive light on the scene. This was the Sanctuary of that cottage home. Thither daily, and oftentimes a day, generally after each meal, we saw our father retire, and ‘shut to the door’; and we children got to understand by a sort of spiritual instinct (for the thing was too sacred to be talked about) that prayers were being poured out there for us, as of old by the High Priest within the veil in the Most Holy Place. We occasionally heard the pathetic echoes of a trembling voice pleading as if for life, and we learned to slip out and in past that door on tiptoe, not to disturb the holy colloquy. The outside world might not know, but we knew, whence came that happy light as of a new-born smile that always was dawning on my father’s face; it was a reflection from the Divine Presence, in the consciousness of which he lived.” 1 [Note: John G. Paton. 10.]

But let us not mistake the nature of his authority. It is not that of a lord over slaves. It is not that of a superior race over an inferior. It is not that which needs to be constantly parading itself as if it had no real foundation. It is an authority which recognizes fully and cheerfully that a wife is one with her husband, that the children have rights which no man gave to them and which no man should presume to take away. Thus the unity which resides in the head will be pervaded with sympathy for all the members of the house, and complete and tender harmony will prevail. It will be plain that the father does not need to claim authority; it will be dearer to the others than to himself. The mother and children will not need to take roundabout means to secure their rights; they will be acknowledged and carefully guarded by the father. And when, under the spell of this unity, a man speaks in his own name of the religious life which he and his house will choose, he does so in the assurance that they will agree with him—that he can, with the fullest decision, give utterance to the resolution, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

Joshua’s words have had a long and active life. Not only are they enshrined imperishably in the Book of God; they are frequently to be seen as a watchword in our modern homes, amidst the stir and movement of our life to-day, inscribed perhaps on card or tablet, and hung where the visitor cannot help seeing them, in an entrance hall, in a dining-room, or where not: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” The way of the world may run otherwise, and my choice may be out of the mode altogether. It does not matter; this is my choice: “we will serve the Lord.” Happy the home where the motto is realized in the household life, and happy the heart and character where it lies deep at the springs of individual thought and action every day. 1 [Note: H. C. G. Moule.]

(2) He is a man of God at home and in the midst of his family.—No resolution to serve Christ, no profession of serving Him can be genuine on our part if they do not lead into a position like that which Joshua took. How could I be counted a truthful man if I spake truthfully in the street and told lies in the house? Who could regard me as a friend if I shook hands with them when we were by ourselves and turned my back on them when in company? And what right have I to consider myself a servant of Christ if I say I will be loyal to Him, but do not endeavour to carry my family with me into that service? In the family we put off certain kinds of restraints which we put on when we engage in business or mingle in society. We feel that we have no need to be other than we are there. If we ought to be the same men everywhere—true to what we believe—then, assuredly, if there is any place in which we should be more pronounced Christians than in another, it is in our home. If we are to walk worthy of Him whose we are and whom we serve, that straight walking ought to be shown in its most perfect development, not in prayer-meeting or church, not in pew or pulpit, but where every word tells, every habit makes a stamp—in the free circle of family life.

The epitaph Ruskin inscribed over his father’s grave in the churchyard of Shirley, near Croydon, is beautiful and characteristic: “Here rests from day’s well-sustained burden John James Ruskin, born in Edinburgh, May 10th, 1785. He died in his house in London, March 3rd, 1864. He was an entirely honest merchant, and his memory is to all who keep it dear and helpful. His son, whom he loved to the uttermost, and taught to speak truth, says this of him.” 1 [Note: A. C. Benson, Ruskin: A Study in Personality, 102.]

One of Principal Rainy’s daughters writes: “I feel it difficult to write of these things, for I have no words to tell you of them. To us he was just ‘Father.’ I suppose most children begin by thinking their father the most wise and strong and tender of beings, and with us that went on to the very end, with an always increasing sense of how unusual such wisdom and strength and tenderness were. For myself, it is to him I owe all my earliest ideas of what the Fatherhood of God might mean. They all came translated to me so inevitably, so securely, through that dear and familiar medium that never once failed me all my life—never once came short of my hopes or my needs. And it was so with us all. I remember how a sister once wrote to me, ‘I know you read the thirteenth verse of the 103rd Psalm as I do—Like as my Father pitieth his children—and that means just everything.’ ” 2 [Note: The Life of Principal Rainy, ii. 93.]

He never made a fortune, or a noise

In the world where men are seeking after fame;

But he had a healthy brood of girls and boys

Who loved the very ground on which he trod.

They thought him just a little short of God;

Oh, you should have heard the way they said his name—

“Father.”

There seemed to be a loving little prayer

In their voices, even when they called him “Dad.”

Though the man was never heard of anywhere,

As a hero, yet you somehow understood

He was doing well his part and making good;

And you knew it, by the way his children had

Of saying “Father.”

He gave them neither eminence nor wealth,

But he gave them blood untainted with a vice,

And the opulence of undiluted health.

He was honest, and unpurchable and kind;

He was clean in heart, and body, and in mind.

So he made them heirs to riches without price—

This father.

He never preached or scolded; and the rod—

Well, he used it as a turning-pole in play.

But he showed the tender sympathy of God

To his children in their troubles, and their joys.

He was always chum and comrade with his boys,

And his daughters—oh, you ought to hear them say

“Father.”

Now I think of all achievements ’tis the least

To perpetuate the species; it is done

By the insect and the serpent, and the beast.

But the man who keeps his body, and his thought,

Worth bestowing on an offspring love-begot,

Then the highest earthly glory he has won,

When in pride a grown-up daughter or a son

Says “That’s Father.” 1 [Note: Ella Wheeler Wilcox.]

2. One of the ways in which we may serve the Lord in the family circle is by setting up His worship in our house, by taking care that we have our whole house join day by day in serving Him with prayer and thanksgiving and praise.

All of us, even the least learned, may offer up some short prayer to God in the name of His blessed Son; or we may sing or repeat some psalm or godly hymn together; and some one of the family may read a few verses out of the Gospels to the rest. Let this be done daily. First let us rouse and calm our hearts—calm all worldly thoughts in them, and rouse them to heavenly thoughts—by reading some of our Saviour’s blessed words; and then, when our hearts have been thus quieted and stirred, let us offer up a prayer. It is not many words, or fine words, that Christ cares for, any more now than when He was on earth. The widow’s mite, if it be offered up from the heart, is still, as then, more precious in His eyes than all the costly offerings of the rich.

Whatever we wish others to practise, we must practise ourselves, and nothing is so well calculated to impress the young with a conviction of the importance of prayer as the being called together, morning and evening, to unite in family worship. Christians who neglect this duty will have a great deal to answer for in the day of final account. I have a boyish recollection of the shudder which crept over me on hearing a playmate say of his father, who was a member of the Church, “My father never prays!” 1 [Note: J. N. Norton.]

Every Christian family should be a little church. In Scotland this thought blossomed out more abundantly after the bitter experiences of the seventeenth century, during which so many families were obliged to furnish their own religious ordinances. So the Christian father became the pastor or minister, and his family met, either alone or along with others like-minded, for such simple rites as laymen could transact. When the storm had passed, the habit of family worship had become firmly fixed in all pious homes. Especially the houses of the clergy were associated with this daily prayer, and sometimes the parishioners resorted to a godly minister’s house to join in these domestic services. This was the survival of that habit of daily public prayers, which soon vanished from the life of the Scottish Church, and is only now being restored here and there in the large towns. 2 [Note: H. M. B. Reid, Lost Habits of the Religious Life, 45.]

Dr. Paul, in his Past and Present of Aberdeenshire, says: “In my early days family worship was, in this quarter, much neglected, even among the clergy: among the laity it was seldom heard of.” In agreement with that statement, Dr. Kidd found that his house, for years after he came to Aberdeen, was a centre of wondering interest to the neighbourhood, when, in the course of family worship, the psalm was sung. People gathered round the door to hear the unfamiliar sounds on a week-day, and in a private house. With characteristic hospitality and readiness to seize any opportunity of doing good that came in his way, Dr. Kidd opened the door and invited them to come in. 1 [Note: J. Stark, Dr. Kidd of Aberdeen, 242.]

3. What are the difficulties in the way of having family worship?

(1) The want of time for it. The father is obliged to hurry off to his work in the morning, and he comes home weary at night, and this is often considered a sufficient excuse for allowing his household to grow up without the blessing of family prayer. But the whole exercise, including the reading of a chapter of the Bible, or the Psalter for the day, need not occupy more than fifteen minutes. Will any one venture to declare that he cannot afford this amount of time for attending to so important a duty?

(2) There is the fear of exciting surprise among family and friends, and of being thought “righteous overmuch.” But is it right to give way to such apprehensions? Ashamed to follow the example of the Patriarchs of old—of David, when seated on the throne of Israel—of Joshua, a general of unequalled courage and success? Ashamed to do what the greatest and best of all ages have done before us? The only thing to be ashamed of is that we have neglected this duty so long.

III

We will serve the Lord

And who is the Lord whom Joshua and his household are ready to serve? Joshua names two points in His character. They are unexpected. They seem to repel rather than attract the worshipper. They are chosen that the reality and sincerity of the worshipper may be tested.

(1) He is a holy God.—The Scriptural idea of the holiness of God has a wider sweep than we often recognize. It fundamentally means His supreme and inaccessible elevation above the creature; which, of course, is manifested in His perfect separation from all sin, but has not regard to this alone. Joshua here urges the infinite distance between man and God, and especially the infinite moral distance, in order to enforce a profounder conception of what goes to God’s service. A holy God cannot have unholy worshippers. His service can be no mere ceremonial, but must be the bowing of the whole man before His majesty, the aspiration of the whole man after His loftiness, the transformation of the whole man into the reflection of His purity, the approach of the unholy to the Holy through a sacrifice which puts away sin.

(2) He is a jealous God.—“Jealous” is an ugly word, with repulsive associations, and its application to God has sometimes been explained in ugly fashion, and has actually repelled men. But, rightly looked at, what does it mean but that God desires our whole hearts for His own, and loves us so much, and is so desirous to pour His love into us, that He will have no rivals in our love? The metaphor of marriage, which puts His love to men in the tenderest form, underlies this word, so harsh on the surface, but so gracious at the core.

The jealousy exercised in the interests of others must be holy and beneficent. God will brook no intrusion into His work, no division of His authority, no departure from His laws. He alone can guide us through the rocks and whirlpools, and bring us to the far-off goal. That He should be supreme is the very salvation of the universe.

In the darkness of a blustering winter’s night I was once coming down the rapids of a Chinese river. There were several scores of market people in the same boat returning to their homes. The boatmen, who made their journey ten or a dozen times a month, were versed in the swish of every eddy and the roar of every separate whirlpool, the boom of the current on each obstructing rock, and the hurly-burly of the waters as they spread themselves out over the broad gravel beds, and were at home on almost every square inch of the water-way. Sometimes we came down full swing between chasms of rock where we had not more than half a foot of margin. A mistaken tug at the rudder, too energetic a use of the oar on the wrong side at the wrong moment, failure to calculate the margin of the water-way to a shade, and we should have been dashed to bits on the rocks. Now if I, a stranger, had laid a hand upon the rudder, or had snatched an oar from one of the boatmen, and had begun to make proof of a skill I had cultivated on English rivers, the boatmen would have been profoundly jealous of my intervention. And rightly so; for they possessed a special knowledge in which I was wanting. Their common humanity, a sense of their responsibility for the souls on board, the dread of a more formidable form of trial for manslaughter than that of European courts, compelled them to a temper of keen and passionate jealousy, and the temper did them all honour. 1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Lesson of a Dilemma, 118.]

Literature

Alford (H.), Quebec Chapel Sermons, iii. 423.

Hare (J. C.), Sermons Preacht in Herstmonceux Church, i. 369.

Maclaren (A.) Expositions of Holy Scripture: Deuteronomy, etc., 183.

Morgan (G. H.), Modern Knights-Errant, 225.

Moule (H. C. G.), Thoughts for the Sundays of the Year, 224.

Norton (J. N.), Short Sermons, 414.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxi. (1875), No. 1229.

Christian World Pulpit, vii. 289 (Kennedy); xxvii. 11 (Watt); xxxvii. 55 (Stevenson).

Preacher’s Magazine, vi. (1895) 418 (Ingram).