“If it does not please you to serve the Lord, decide today whom you will serve, the gods your fathers served beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose country you are now dwelling. As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).
This passage comes from the Book of Joshua, the sixth book of the Old Testament, according to the website Bible Gateway. It’s named after Joshua, the leader of the Israelites.
The 24th chapter of Joshua “has often been cited as a seminal passage of Scripture, where ancient ritual fractures modern routine to re-establish faithful worship for God’s people,” Carlos Campo, PhD, told Fox News Digital.
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Campo serves as CEO of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.
“What makes the passage powerful for me is its formal call for a response and its emphasis on how we are a ‘forgetting people’ in nearly constant need of reminding of what God has done for us,” he said.
In the chapter, Joshua gathers the Israelites for a “covenent renewal ceremony” in a place that was “fraught with meaning for them.”
Shechem, where Joshua had everyone meet, “is the place where Abram (even before he became Abraham) first encounters the Lord and enters into a covenental relationship with him in Genesis 12,” Campo noted.
It is also the same location in Genesis 33 where “Jacob ‘pitched his tent for 100 pieces of money'” and “where Joseph asked to be buried as he lay dying in Egypt” in Genesis 50, Campo said.
“As one commentator has said, Shechem is ‘Lexington and Plymouth Rock and Independence Hall all in one,'” Campo noted.
Location aside, “the ritual itself is a remembrance and a call to action,” he said, noting that Joshua “likely shocks his audience by proclaiming that ‘your ancestors … worshiped other gods,’ a fact only implied in earlier narratives.”
Joshua told those assembled about God’s faithfulness to other prophets “right up to the present day.”
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“They have all ‘crossed the Jordan’ together, but now the fateful choice remains for all,” Campo said. “Will the Israelites continue to worship the gods of their ancestors or, like him, ‘serve the Lord?’”
“Joshua requires the people to affirm their choice three times — just as Jesus requires of Peter after the resurrection — emphasizing the solemnity and finality of this ultimate, binary choice: ‘Whom will you worship?'” Campo said.
But before anything can be said, Joshua leads with his declaration, one that has “become a mantra for God-followers throughout the ages,” he said. “‘As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.'”
This declaration “stands in contrast to the vacillation of the Israelites,” Campo said, “who seem given to azab or ‘forsake’ as easily as they would abad or ‘serve’ the Lord.”
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“In their spiritual equivocation, the Israelites establish a pattern that history has repeated endlessly: God’s people renewing their faith only to stray and then be ‘revived’ to serve him once again,” Campo said, pointing to the many revivals that have occurred in the United States throughout the centuries.
These revivals “have served to awaken the slumbering faithful, punctuating the forgetful nature of a fallen people, given to mammon instead of manna, to Babylon instead of Bethlehem,” he said.
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“Joshua’s people had passed into the promised land but had also forsaken the edicts of the Lord. They had become assimilated with the neighboring people and are now distracted by ‘foreign gods’ and the allure of the new and exotic,” Campo said.
Joshua knew it was apt to “gather and collectively remember God’s faithfulness and renew the covenant, pledging to be faithful,” he added.
The U.S., Campo said, may be in need of “that same reminder and call to action.”
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“In the face of increasing rancor and divisiveness is some new return to faithfulness waiting to be birthed to a somnambulant nation,” he said.
“Time will reveal all things, but Joshua’s covenantal call seems as relevant as ever.”
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