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.

• 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.