Reading Joshua for God’s Mission

Is there a more troublesome and unsettling book of the Old Testament than Joshua? What do you do with a book that on the surface appears to be all about divine-sanctioned violence? How do you square this God who appears in Joshua with the God who shows up in the Gospels? When we slow down and see the many ways the book of Joshua fits into the epic story of the Bible, we see it as a critical piece in understanding God’s mission in the world.

One of our challenges, right off the bat, is Joshua just isn’t an easy read. Life application isn’t quite so easy in these texts. Apart from the repeated encouragements “Be bold and courageous” that we find in chapter 1, there’s not a lot in Joshua that fits our modern need for a quick devotional fix. The book of Joshua challenges our need to “get something out of” our reading the Bible. Perhaps there are some better strategies for reading Joshua in order to help shape our minds and souls to respond to the God revealed in these chapters.

We need to remember how ancient this document is. This doesn’t come to us from our world. This book is not about us. Here we find a story of God leading a nation of former slaves in the ancient world into a homeland.

Lean into the otherworldliness of Joshua

Reading the book of Joshua is a cross-cultural experience. There are events throughout the book of Joshua that modern readers find shocking and revolting. If God is love, how can God advocate such violence? But these are stories that come from a very different world than ours. In fact, the New Testament neither dismisses nor refutes what happens in Joshua. When Stephen preaches before the high council in Acts 7, he includes Joshua in his telling of Israel’s history. When the writer of Hebrews lists heroes of faith, two events from the book of Joshua are listed alongside prophets and patriarchs. Also significantly, the action in Joshua happens only here. Never again is Israel, or the Church for that matter, ordered to take up arms in “holy war.”

Imagine yourself as Joshua. Or any of the other characters. You live in a brutal and violent world. You don’t have the book of Romans. You don’t know any stories of Jesus. There’s not even a temple or book of Psalms. You know the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and you know the story of Exodus and the wilderness wandering. Your Bible is the book of Deuteronomy. And that’s it. How would you imagine God if that’s all you had? How would you relate to God? How would you respond and live in the world? And if you were God, how would you reveal yourself to these people?

We do the stories a disservice when we judge the characters by our own modern standards of behavior. Israel is an ever-evolving character in the story of the Bible. Israel is on a journey with God. It’s unfair to judge Israel in Joshua by the standards of our own experience of God today.

See Joshua in the big picture of God’s story

Our story is the story of the Church. The story of the Church is the story of Jesus. The story of Jesus is the story of Israel. The story of Israel is the story of the God who made the world and is re-making it. The book of Joshua represents one chapter in the story of Israel.

There’s a continuous story running from Joshua all the way through 2 Kings. Joshua tells the story about how the people settle into the land promised to Abraham. By the conclusion of 2 Kings, we see why they were exiled from the same land.

There’s a rhythm to the story of Israel in the Old Testament. God acts. Humanity rebels. God does stuff. Humans undo it. God makes the world in Genesis 1 and 2. Human beings reject God in Genesis 3–11. God acts to rescue the slaves in Egypt, brings them to Sinai, provides the Law, and makes them his people. The people make their own golden statue and worship it, saying that’s the god that saved them. God does stuff. Humans undo it.

God acts. People rebel. Order. Chaos. In the book of Joshua, God acts, fulfilling the promise made to Abraham about a permanent land for Abraham’s children. We should be able to tie a ribbon on the story at the conclusion of Joshua with a “and they all lived happily ever after.” But we don’t.

In the book of Judges, the people living in the Promised Land rebel, and this nation that God had acted on behalf of so gloriously spirals into terrifying anarchy. In 1 and 2 Samuel we see God taking this chaos, and through people like Samuel and David, crafting good order again. But in 1 and 2 Kings, we see Israel yet again undoing all of God’s work to the point that they are evicted from the land. The story of Israel in the Old Testament is a roller coaster, and the book of Joshua is one of the highs.

Consider how place matters in Joshua

In contemporary Western culture, we are largely people who live above place. I made a trip from Tulsa to Chicago last week, and there are no more placeless places in our world than airports. Everything about the airport experience is designed to remind you that where you are doesn’t matter—only where you’re going.

There are ways of telling the Christian story that emphasize that where we are doesn’t matter—only heaven, where we’re going. But the telling of the story in the New Testament, and throughout the Bible, and especially Joshua, is that the ground beneath our feet matters. This world that God made matters. In the creation story in Genesis 2, the very first human being is called adam, made from the adamah, or the soil. Humans and land are significantly linked in the way the Bible tells its story.

In Joshua, twelve geographic places are carved out for the sake of twelve tribes coming from the twelve sons of Jacob/Israel. The land bears the same name as the people. There’s a thru line from Jacob blessing his twelve sons in Genesis 49 to Moses blessing the twelve tribes in Deuteronomy 33 to the distribution of land in Joshua 15–19. God’s people are rooted in place. Geography is theology.

A theology of place is crucial as we live our lives on mission. The ground beneath our feet—our neighborhoods, our communities, our sidewalks, our homes—matters in the kingdom of God. When Jesus says, “Look! I’m making everything new!” everything means these places.

There is so much more to the stories in Joshua that we don’t know than what we know. Our work is not to figure out what really happened. Rather, we need to consider why the biblical writer chose to capture this story this way. It serves a deeper purpose than simply reporting history. Joshua represents one more chapter in the story of God’s undoing all the corruption of humanity, redeeming all of creation.

The book of Joshua is not the final word about what kind of god God is. But it is an essential word about God. This is a God who keeps promises. The same God who promised a homeland to Abraham and to Moses is the same God who has promised to make all things new. This a God who is trustworthy and faithful.

If you want to dig deeper into Joshua, be sure to check these out:
Joshua, Judges, and Ruth for Everyone by John Goldingay
Joshua, Judges, Ruth by Joseph Coleson, Lawson Stone, and Jason Driesbach

And for how Joshua fits into the bigger picture in the Old Testament story, these are also helpful:
The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry into the Old Testament by Sandra Richter
God Behaving Badly: Is the God of the Old Testament Angry, Sexist and Racist? by David Lamb
The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith by Walter Brueggemann