This morning, I was reading Joshua 5, and crazily enough, verse
7 stuck out to me: “So he raised up their
sons in their place, and these were the ones Joshua circumcised. They were still uncircumcised because they
had not been circumcised on the way.” I know it is such a strange verse, but I
couldn’t help wondering why these men had not been circumcised. In Genesis 17, God gave Abraham the command
to treat circumcision as a sign of a covenant between himself and his people
(much the way we see baptism today). God
specifically stipulated that circumcision should occur when a baby was eight
days old. It was so serious that God
told Abraham that any male who had not been circumcised should be cut off from
his people. It was a practice that God’s
people took seriously and one that they even continued while in exile in Egypt
(see Joshua 5:5). But then, in this
journey to the Promised Land, they stopped practicing their part of the
covenant God made with them. They
stopped following his command.
But here is what struck me. God never left them. He went before them into every journey and
battle. He sent them manna to eat. He led them through the Jordan in Chapter 4 –
parting the waters so they could walk on dry land. He showed them his great power, and finally,
under Joshua’s leadership, they acknowledged it. I love Joshua 4:24 which says about the
parting of the Jordan, “He did this so
that all the peoples of the earth might know that the hand of the Lord is
powerful and so that you might always fear the Lord your God.” He parted the waters to show his power – to all
the nations, but also, certainly, to the Israelites. In this one act, he reminded them again that
he is God – that he is powerful and trustworthy. That he is who he says he is.
Immediately after crossing the Jordan, God commands Joshua
to circumcise all the men as none of them had been circumcised (except, of
course, Joshua and Caleb who were the only male survivors from Egypt). After everyone was circumcised and healed,
God says to Joshua, “Today I have rolled
away the reproach of Egypt from you” (Joshua 5:9). Most commentaries seemed to agree that the “reproach
of Egypt” was the shame of being uncircumcised.
Once God declares the reproach has been rolled away, the people
celebrate Passover and the manna stops arriving.
Ok, that is a lot of information, but it is about to get
exciting, so let’s recap:
1. The people cross the Jordan – an amazing display of the
power of God.
2. The men are circumcised (they had been disobedient in not
being circumcised prior to this point).
Circumcision now shows they belong to the Lord.
3. God declares he has taken away their shame.
4. They celebrate Passover.
Doesn’t this sequence of events sound just like the
gospel? Think about it! Without Jesus, we are like an uncircumcised
people wandering in a dessert. God is
there – he is sending us manna and protecting us and frankly, all around us,
but we are so lost. We don’t know where
we are going and there is nothing to celebrate.
But the beautiful part is that as God never wavered in his faithfulness
to the Israelites in the desert, he has not wavered in his faithfulness to us
today. In an amazing display of his
power, he sent Jesus. He sent his only
son to die on a cross for our sins – to take away our shame. And just as the Israelites set up stones from
the Jordan to remind them of God’s faithfulness, the cross continuously reminds
us of God’s faithfulness. Even when we
were lost, he was there. He was
protecting and providing and making a way to him – and that way was (and is)
Jesus.
In Acts 17, Paul is trying to get the Athenians to
understand that the world is not made up of many gods, but directed by one true
God. He says to them, “Then God who made
the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth…From one man he
made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked
out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so they would seek him and
perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of
us. For in him we live and move and have
our being.” According to Paul, God
is so close. He is close to us in the
same way he was always close to the Israelites in the desert, but Paul also says
that the time has come to acknowledge God.
In verse 30 he says, “In the past
God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to
repent.”
God is faithful and close and good, but there comes a time
when it is our turn to do our part and acknowledge him. If the Israelites wanted to move out of their
desert wandering, they had to eventually be circumcised – they had to become
God’s people again. They could not
experience God’s best and also remain in their rebellion. God is patient, but there comes a time for
each of us to stop walking around our own deserts.
It gets ridiculous anyway, doesn’t it? In the desert, the people didn’t know where
they were going. Sometimes they walked
in circles. They knew they were being
fed, but they didn’t know if there would be food for tomorrow. Does that sound familiar? Things are fine. We keep moving on, but we don’t really know
if we are moving forward. Sometimes we
see the same road again and again. We
are making it, but we don’t know if we will still be making it tomorrow. There isn’t much hope in that.
But there is hope in the cross. In the cross, we know whose we are. We know this earth is not our home. We know we have the hope of heaven one day,
and we know that even on this planet all things are working together for our
good – even when we don’t quite know how.
In the cross, we are claimed by God, just as in circumcision the Israelites
found a place to belong. The cross marks
us as a people set apart by God as circumcision marked those dessert wanderers.
And once we are set apart, the good stuff begins. Don’t you love that the Israelites celebrated
Passover after they were circumcised?
Passover was a meal that symbolized God’s absolute faithfulness. It reminded them of God’s provision for them
in Egypt when the angel of death spared their children because a lamb had been
sacrificed instead (Exodus 12). Jesus
redefined Passover for us when he ate it the night before his death with his
disciples and told them that in the future they would remember him when taking
Passover. On that night, what was
Passover became what we know as communion, and Jesus became the Passover lamb –
the sacrifice for sins that spared us from death. When we take communion, we remember God’s
faithfulness to us when he sent Jesus to die on the cross for our sins, we
acknowledge the ways God is blessing us now, and we look forward to the day
when Jesus comes again. We belong, and
we celebrate a meal that shows us just how much we belong.
The manna had nothing on Passover. The manna was God’s faithfulness in the day
to day to a people who barely acknowledged he existed. The celebration of Passover brought together
a God who had never been unfaithful with a people willing to remember and
engage. Communion does the same today.
God is so consistent.
He pursues us and shows us his power, and when we bow before him and
acknowledge him as Lord, he takes away our shame and invites us to engage with
him. I love his faithfulness. It could not be more beautiful – yesterday,
today, and tomorrow.
