As For Me And My House

The opening verse of the chapter tells us where Joshua gathered everyone: Shechem. That detail has grown on me. Shechem is bound up with the very beginning of the promise, the place where, in Genesis, God appeared to Abram and said this land would be given to his offspring. It is also where, generations later, Jacob’s household put away the foreign gods they had carried and buried them under the oak nearby. So when Joshua calls Israel to decide, he does it on ground already thick with memory: a place of promise, and a place where idols were once handed over.

I doubt that was an accident. Joshua is not picking neutral middle ground for a vote. He is standing them where the story started and where, long before, others in this same family had already faced the same choice and chosen well. Sometimes the most honest thing a leader can do is take people back to the spot where God first spoke, and let the ground itself ask the question again.

If you read the whole chapter rather than the single famous line, you notice it is not a rousing motivational speech. It is shaped as a renewal of the covenant. Joshua spends most of it retelling history: what God did with Abraham beyond the River, in Egypt, at the sea, through the long years in the wilderness. Almost every sentence has God as the one doing the verbs. Only after that long remembering does the demand land. Choose today.

I find that order quietly pastoral. The call to decide does not come cold or first. It comes after a careful account of what God has already done, so that the choice is not a leap towards a stranger. It is an honest response to someone they have watched at work for forty years. That still feels true to how real faith settles. I do not choose God in a vacuum. I choose him in the light of what I have actually seen him do, and remembering turns out to be a large part of deciding.

The verse sets out two rival options, and I had read past this for years before it stopped me. There are the gods the fathers served long ago beyond the River, the old idols from the world Abraham was first called out of (the chapter says plainly in verse 2 that the family on the far side of the river served other gods). And there are the gods of the Amorites in the land where Israel now lives, the local religion all around them.

So the pull comes from two directions: from the past and from the neighbours. I know both. There is an inherited faith a person can keep out of habit, never quite making it their own. And there is the steady gravity of whatever everyone nearby already worships, which in my case is rarely a carved idol and more often comfort or the approval of the room. Joshua will not let either count as neutral. To drift is only to be carried along by one of them. The word he keeps using is serve, the same word for the LORD and for the idols, because in the end a person is always serving something.

Joshua says ‘as for me and my house’, and it is a brave thing to say. I want to honour it without pretending more than it can bear. The same nation he is addressing broke this covenant before very long, as the book of Judges goes on to show. The resolve of one good man, even a great leader, cannot finally secure the faith of those who come after him. That is not a failure of love. It is the plain limit of being human.

Which is part of why I think this verse leans forward in the story. The name Joshua is the Hebrew form that stands behind the name Jesus. Where this Joshua could only call his household to serve, Christ serves first, lays his own life down, and gathers a people into a covenant that holds because he is the one holding it. I try to lead my home as faithfully as I can. But I am not its saviour, and on most days that comes as relief rather than defeat.

The piece of this verse I have sat with longest is the difference between deciding for a household and deciding for myself. A house is full of people who are free. I cannot choose for a husband or wife, for grown children, for whoever shares the roof. So what is Joshua actually promising?

Reading him closely, he does not say my house will serve, as though he could guarantee it from the outside. He says we will serve, and then he goes first. The only person he binds with certainty is himself. That has slowly reshaped what I aim at. I cannot manufacture faith in anyone else, and trying tends to harden them against it. What is genuinely mine is my own posture, made plainly and made again, without holding it back until others come along. Whether prayer quietly happens at our table or quietly dies out is largely down to me. I have failed at this often enough to distrust any neat account of it, but the decision is still mine to make today, and to make once more tomorrow.

Nobody here is desperate. The wilderness is over. There are houses they live in but did not build, vineyards they did not plant. By every outward measure Israel has arrived, and Joshua, near the end of his life, gathers exactly these settled people and asks them to choose again. I had pictured the great decisions belonging to crisis. This one comes to a people at rest.

That quietly rearranges who the verse is for. Comfort loosens a grip without ever announcing it, and the longer I walk with God the more I need an old man’s question put to me again: not whether I once chose him, but whether I am choosing him still.

What moves me about ‘me and my house’ is how small the keeping of it turns out to be. The saying takes a moment. But a house is not led by declarations. It is led in the unremarkable hours: what gets prayed over, whether a Sunday is protected or quietly let go, how an apology is made after a hard week.

I am better at the grand sentence than the daily out-living of it, and Joshua’s own people show how fast a fine vow fades when no one keeps tending it. A home where the Lord is served is not built by one brave line. It is built slowly, by small choices no one but God ever sees, made again on the days I least feel like making them.

Everyone quotes the back half. Read the front of it and you can hear the old man’s edge: if it seems evil to you to serve the LORD. That is not a neutral ballot paper being handed round. He has just spent the whole chapter reciting rescue after rescue, and now he says, near enough, fine, if you have decided you find him distasteful after all that, then say so out loud and name the replacement. Is it the ones your great grandparents left on the far side of the river, or the ones belonging to the people whose land you are standing on? He will not let them keep an unnamed god.

It took me years to admit that the needling first clause is the part I need most. I do all my drifting without once naming what I am drifting towards. Nobody on my street announces that their Saturdays are worth more to them than God is. We just get busy, and busy never has to sign anything. Joshua’s question is unkind in the best possible way. It drags the swap into daylight and asks for a signature.

Keep going past verse 15 and the chapter gets uncomfortable. The people answer instantly: far be it from them to forsake the LORD (verse 16). It is the perfect answer, the one any of us would take before closing the meeting. Then Joshua does something I have never once seen a preacher do at the end of an appeal. He argues against them. You cannot serve the LORD, he tells them, he is holy, he is jealous, he will not wave your sins through (verses 19 to 20). They insist anyway. He makes them say it a second time, then makes them admit aloud that they are witnesses against themselves (verses 21 to 22). Then he writes it down and stands a stone up under the oak, because that stone heard every word said that day and will never develop a convenient memory (verses 26 to 27).

Teaching the chapter, there is your third movement, and it is the one that gets dropped. Remembering, then the demand, then a leader refusing a cheap yes. Ask your group: who in your life is allowed to say, do you understand what that will cost you? Most of us have quietly arranged things so that nobody is.

Where I would actually reach for this verse: a house dedication, a covenant or membership renewal, and above all the moment in a hard church meeting when a congregation has to say plainly what it is for. Nobody is drowning in those rooms, there is time to think, and the choosing is still ahead of them.

Where I would not. A funeral, particularly for someone whose family know the faith never took. And never, under any circumstances, to parents grieving a child who has walked away. I have heard the line turned on grown children as an accusation, I raised this house to serve the LORD, so how did you end up here, and it lands as a verdict rather than a vow. Read as a warranty it becomes a stick, and people get beaten with a sentence that was only ever meant to be said, never aimed. So, before quoting it anywhere: is there still a choice in front of these people? If not, put it down and find them something kinder.

When Joshua points to the gods their fathers served beyond the River, he is not waving vaguely at some ancient error lost in the mist. Genesis 31 hands you the actual objects. Jacob’s household left Laban’s place in Paddan Aram, and Rachel took her father’s household gods with her, small enough to hide inside a camel’s saddle, and she sat on them while Laban turned the tents inside out looking (Genesis 31:19, 34).

I love how unglamorous that makes idolatry. Not a grand rival philosophy squaring up to the God of Abraham. A handful of carved figures, portable, kept for luck or inheritance or plain family habit, the sort of thing that gets packed without anyone ever quite deciding to pack it. And Laban rides seven days after them over it (31:23). Not over the wages, not really. Over the figures: why have you stolen my gods, he says (31:30). A grown man chasing a caravan across the hills for objects he keeps in a bag.

That is the family standing in front of Joshua a few generations on. He is not inventing a threat to make his speech land harder. He is naming what came in the luggage. Which is the part that gets me, because nobody in that story sat down and chose those gods. They just never got left behind, and things you have carried that long stop feeling like a choice at all. Joshua is asking them to notice what is under them.

Keep reading past the covenant and the stone under the oak, and the book closes in a way nobody preaches. Joshua dies at a hundred and ten and is buried in the hill country of Ephraim (24:29 to 30). Then, almost in passing, Joseph’s bones are finally buried at Shechem, on the patch of ground his family had bought long before, bones the Israelites had been carrying since Egypt because Joseph made them swear to take him home (24:32, and Exodus 13:19). Then Eleazar the priest dies as well. A book that opens with an army crossing a river on dry ground ends in five verses of funerals.

One line in there moves me and sobers me at the same moment. Israel served the LORD all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived him, the ones who had seen for themselves what the LORD had done (24:31). Not for ever. Not automatically down to the grandchildren. For exactly as long as somebody who remembered was still alive to keep saying so. The vow held its shape for one living memory, and then, a page or so into Judges, a generation arises who does not know the LORD or the work he had done (Judges 2:10), which is still the sentence I find hardest in the whole Old Testament.

I do not think the book is embarrassed about this. It simply declines to pretend. Joshua’s great line was true when he said it, and true for as long as there were eyewitnesses to keep it warm. The honest measure of it is not for ever. It is one generation, and then somebody has to stand up and say it again from scratch.

I cannot sit with ‘as for me and my house’ and quietly skip chapter seven, because this same book has already shown us a household bound together going the other way. Achan takes plunder from Jericho that had been devoted to destruction. Israel loses at Ai over it. When it comes out, Achan is taken to the valley and stoned, and so, on the plain reading, are his sons and daughters, along with his animals and his tent and everything he owned (7:24 to 25). I have read that passage more times than I am comfortable admitting, hoping it would soften on a later reading. It has not. People do argue over exactly who was standing there and who knew what, and I am not going to pretend to you that I can settle it.

What I cannot get round is that both scenes rest on the same idea: a household stands or falls together, and what the head of the family does reaches everyone under that roof whether they had a say in it or not. On Joshua’s lips it sounds like courage. In that valley it sounds like horror. And Deuteronomy says flatly that children are not to be put to death for their fathers, each one for his own sin (Deuteronomy 24:16), which tells me scripture itself is not comfortably settled on this ground.

I raise it not to spoil a lovely verse but because I think it should cost something to quote it. The same word, house, carries a blessing in chapter twenty four and a nightmare in chapter seven. I would rather say that out loud than pretend the book is gentle the whole way through.

I would not open with Amorites. I would start where a child already lives: everybody is on somebody’s side, the way you pick a team at playtime, the way you work out whose story to believe when two grown-ups say opposite things. Then Joshua is a very old man asking his whole family to say out loud, in front of everyone, whose side they are on. And he goes first, so nobody else has to be the brave one on their own. That is the bit worth landing. Not the gods. The going first.

Where I would be careful is the ending. I would not hide that Joshua’s own people forgot, because children can smell a story that has had its bad half taken out, and once they smell it they stop trusting the teller. But I would not make that the frightening part either. I would say it is exactly why we get to choose again every day, the way you say sorry again even though you said it last week, the way you brush your teeth again even though you did it yesterday. Children hold ‘we choose this every day’ better than adults expect them to. It is roughly how they already live.

What I would refuse to let a child carry out of the room is the idea that the whole family’s faith is resting on their small shoulders. Joshua said ‘me and my house’ as the grown-up in the house. It was never a job he handed down to the six year old sitting at the back.

Say this line over your own table for twenty years. Mean it every time. Keep the small unglamorous habits the covenant is actually asking for. And then watch one of the people you meant when you said ‘my house’ walk away from it as an adult, clear-eyed, no drama, just gone. I am not asking what that means. I know what it means, and it is written down further up this page, and I believe it. I am asking what it is like at two in the morning.

It feels like failure. It feels like failure while you are lying there reciting, word perfect, every reason it is not. There is a particular ache in having done the nobody-is-watching parts faithfully for years and still ending up looking at a chair at the table where you always prayed. None of the theology touches that ache. It was never built to. Anyone who hands you a tidy paragraph at that hour and expects the ache to lift has not been there at that hour.

What has kept mine from curdling into either despair or a cheerful lie is small, and it is not a solution. Joshua’s story ends in graves. It ends with an honest note about how long his people’s yes actually held, and it was not long. And none of that reached back and unmade what he said at Shechem. The choosing was real even though it did not secure every outcome he wanted. That is thinner comfort than I would like to be offering you. It is the only kind I have found that survives contact with an empty chair.

• If I am honest, what am I actually serving on an ordinary Tuesday, and have I ever named it?
• Which pull is stronger for me just now: the inherited religion I keep out of habit, or the gods of the people around me?
• Joshua remembered what God had done before he asked anyone to choose. What has God plainly done in my own life that I keep forgetting?
• What is one small thing I could change this week so that my home, whoever shares it, more obviously serves the Lord?

If you would like to stay with this a little longer, you could read more of the book of Joshua or browse verses by topic.