Year 7, Day 201: Joshua 16

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The division of the land for Joseph’s son’s will occupy the next two days.  We’ll focus on Joseph tomorrow.  Today, I’d like to talk about the way that this chapter ends.  The people of Joseph are granted land.  The possess it, occupy it, and subdue it.  Notice, however, that they don’t occupy it completely.  There are still pockets of Canaanites that they cannot root out.

Whether they can’t root them out because it is hard work or because the people of Joseph aren’t committed to doing the job to its fullest extent we cannot know.  What we can know going forward is that this is a very important reality.  Those Canaanites who are left cause trouble to the Hebrew people from now until the Babylonian occupation.  They band together and plague them in a military sense.  They marry the sons and daughters of the Hebrew people and bring their foreign gods among them.  They teach the Hebrew people to behave in ways that are not pleasing to God.  The fact that these Canaanite people are left behind is bad news.

I’ve toyed with the thoughts of this passage and things like it for several years now.  It seems far too easy to take passages like these and make them about building walls.  It’s far too easy to take a passage like this and talk about why we should be building walls and keeping other people out.  It’s easy to take passages like this and pave the way for genocide, racial turbulence, class systems, etc.

I don’t think that is God’s point here.  I believe that these passages are more about the need to fulfill God’s will and to be obedient than to destroy the people around us who are sinful.  After all, does not Jesus Himself assert that the one who is without sin can cast the first stone?

Remember that these Canaanites were being obliterated at God’s will as God’s judgment.  They weren’t being obliterated because they were Canaanites and not Hebrew, they were being obliterated because they brought themselves under God’s wrath.  God ordered their destruction.  The reason that these Canaanites will cause so much trouble in the future isn’t because they are any worse sinners than the rest of the world.  They will cause trouble because God’s will was not carried out.

What I can learn here is that it is vital to obey God.  When He desires a task to get done, we need to focus on accomplishing it and listening to Him.  It isn’t about doing it well enough to where we are satisfied.  It is about obeying Him and listening to Him.

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