Bible Commentaries

The Lord's Artillery

Joshua 10:11

WE have seen how Gibeon made peace with Joshua. Adoni-zedec, king of Jerusalem, was exceedingly displeased with the men of Gibeon for making peace with the enemy. He sent, therefore, unto the mountain kings of the Amorites, inviting them to smite Gibeon, saying, "It hath made peace with Joshua and with the children of Israel." So the five kings of the Amorites went up; and the Lord said unto Joshua 10:12-43

WE are now travelling in the midst of wars and rumours of wars in our progress through these sacred pages. The reading is very exciting and distressing. Every page is a battlefield, and every sentence is like a stain of blood. Our distress can only be mitigated by taking in great breadths of time and viewing the course of Providence, not in detail, but in entirety, as a stupendous and well-composed unity. This is the law of just judgment in all life, so we are not creating a law for special application to exceptional circumstances. We do not fully know why this waste of human life was made. But why say "was" made, as if referring to an exhausted history? We need not speak in the past tense, but in the present, for this same waste of life is made, in some form or other, every day, and seems to be part of the very law of progress. We cannot understand it. We are not called upon to defend it. We must seriously stop and consider it. But there is the law: peace comes through battle, and life through death. Every garden is only a planted cemetery. Wherever you set your foot, you set it upon death. Who can understand the philosophy of destruction, the apparent wastefulness of God? It is a mistake to suppose that destruction is unnecessary. Every day slays its countless thousands. War is not a term definable by one word, nor is it confined to one set of circumstances; it is at the very heart of all imperfect and yet developing things. Life lives upon life. Blood is renewed by blood. A great mystery this and a tragedy that expresses infinite pain. But such is the devouring rapacity of life. It cannot live upon dead things. Life must live upon life,—cannibalism, not regulated, directed, and brought under some law of sanctification,—a great fact, a solemn and terrible thing! What a hunger it is that gnaws our being; it would soon develop itself into cruelty if civilisation did not limit it, and supply it with what it wants. No fire could deter it; no force could restrain it; it must be appeased from heaven. Which is to be uppermost? is the question of all life. What is to be uppermost? is the question of Heaven, and God has declared for the righteous. So righteousness will win, and purity will sit upon the throne that is everlasting. We know all this, in part, without the Bible. There are many bibles upon this subject Men have written revelations who never suspected what they were doing. They described their exercises by quite other and inferior terms, namely: they were observing, collating, laying down a basis of induction; but do what they may, they all end in law, and the law would seem to be: destruction necessary to life, the out-crowding of some by others,—"the survival of the fittest." This is not the day of judgment upon which we can settle all these things, giving fully-matured opinions upon them and disposing of them decisively and finally. Thank God, we are permitted to speak as we think,—that is to say, God permits speech to relieve thinking; so men publish immature books, speakers deliver immature speeches; but their books and speeches are not to be regarded as final and unchangeable. Revelation is a growing quantity. Biblical interpretation is a progressive science. The observation of human life expands and clears and enlarges. Who, then, shall bind any man to his own punctuation, or search the foregone pages to charge him with inconsistency? No man thinks two days alike. To-morrow is not responsible for this day, forasmuch as it will bring its own evil and its own good, its own light and its own darkness. It is needful to remember these things in reading the ancient books of Scripture, for they are full of terror and battle and cruelty and destruction and oppression and wrong, in many a detail, showing how easily the best men were tempted, how soon the noblest men fell into miserable humiliations, and how even women and children and innocent persons were borne down by a tremendous rush, as if the impulse were from heaven.

What use, then, can we make of these ancient instances? We can make great and profitable use of them if we be so minded. Before attempting to make some use of this incident, let us be thankful that the mystery of the sun standing still, and the moon being stayed until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies, has been cleared up. What battles have been fought about these words! How astronomy has been subpoenaed as a witness, and all nature been forced into court! It was quite needless—as is much of the clamour and debate raging round strange things in the Bible. The writer himself asks, "Is not this written in the book of Jasher?—So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day." It was written in a poetical book as a grand instance of sublime imagining. It was as if it had been so. It appeared as if this battle must be fought out before eventide, and as if, strangely, men had so fought and so won that the great issue was completed before the setting of the sun. The instance is specially referred to even upon this page as a quotation from a poetical book; so there need not be any solemn summoning of astronomic science to contradict what has never been asserted.

Now we come to the slaying of the kings—the king of Jerusalem, the king of Hebron, the king of Jarmuth, the king of Lachish, and the king of Eglon. They were immured in a cave; they were kept for further uses: they were hanged upon a tree; they were burnt and condemned. Are there not five kings—yea, fifty, yea, countless hundreds—with whom we can do this very same thing—kill them, hang them, bury them? We have come to spiritual battlefields. The weapons of our warfare are not carnal; we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and spiritual powers—invisible, but tremendous in strength, nor less tremendous in subtlety. We are not straining the instance by pausing to consider the meanings of the names of the places connected with the names of the king,—such as the king of Jerusalem, the king of Hebron, the king of Jarmuth, the king of Lachish, the king of Eglon. The names of the places may help us to consider the nature of their respective kings.

"The king of Jerusalem." That such a king should have been slain works violently in our memory and whole thought, for "Jerusalem" means peace—the city of peace, the restful city, the sabbatic metropolis, the home of rest. But is there not a false peace? If we could not bring some good words into our use and qualify them by bad names, the case of the wicked man would be simply intolerable: the little truth he does tell, makes way for the much falsehood he wishes to propagate. Is there, then, not a false peace? Do we not hear men crying, Peace, peace, where there is no peace? Is it not possible to daub the wall with untempered mortar? Do we not create a wilderness, and call it peace? By banishing all anxieties, by stifling the voices within us that call to righteousness and truth and purity, by occupying the mind with other things, do we not suppose that we have entered into peace enough and realised all the rest we need? Have we not shut out the light, and said, There is none? Have we not given an opiate to conscience, and then said our life is going forward without rebuke? Have we not declined to discuss certain things, and therefore imagined that the things are not open to discussion? We have wronged our own souls in this matter. It is pitiful, yea, heart-rending, to mark how prone we are to close our eyes and consider that, because we have excluded the sense of danger, we have destroyed its presence. The king of false peace must be slain. He has ruled over some of us too long. He has lived upon us, plundered us with both hands, and all the while flattered us, until we have lost all power to criticise his baleful sovereignty. When men are not real with themselves, the case is hopeless. And who is real with himself? Who can take out his very heart, as it were, and analyse it, sift its motives, cross-examine its purposes, and test its half-spoken words? On all subjects of this kind we can but ask the piercing question; it lies with every man to return the honest answer.

"Hebron" means conjunction, joining, alliance. Is not the king of false fellowship to be killed? What concord hath Christ with Belial? Why these ill-assorted marriages in life,—not marriages of a merely human and social kind, but all kinds of unions, fellowships, alliances, partnerships, that are founded upon rottenness, and are meant to mislead and deceive? What fellowship hath light with darkness? Yet we are beguiled into such associations, and we enter into them so gradually and in some cases so unsuspectingly that we hardly realise our relation to the false and the abominable until it is completed and sealed. God has always been against unholy alliances. Many a man he has, so to say, arrested with the words, Why this conjunction? What right have you to be here, pledging your character to sustain a known dishonesty? Why do you throw your respectability over this rottenness? But who can be true to himself and to God in this matter? Because we unite at certain parts or points of character, therefore we imagine that we do not include the whole line, and we decline responsibility in proportion to the number of points which our closure does not include. This is trifling with life; this is making a fool of conscience; this is giving to the moral power within us a dread narcotic: and we know it, and to pray after it is to crown our profanity with a lie. "Come out from among them, and be ye separate," saith the Lord. It is very difficult to be associated with some men merely for a temporary purpose, and then to leave them as if the association had never existed. Oftentimes that cannot be done. A certain contagion has operated, and although the formal association may be dissolved, the results of it may abide and express themselves in many insidious, but emphatic ways. Here, again, detail is out of the question. It is only possible to put the inquiry sharply, unflinchingly, and to leave every man to find out where he Joshua 10:42

Israel was an undivided name betokening a complete whole.—The Israelite, as an individual, had no existence from Israel, the whole number.—If one man wandered away from Israel, the whole body felt itself in a state of incompleteness, and was inspired by a spirit of solicitude and yearning after the absent one.—There is a nationality as well as a personality.—We miss a good deal by supposing that life is wholly a question of individualities.—In a very important sense it is so, but in another equally important sense it is not so.—England has a character as well as every Englishman.—We speak of the health of a country and say it is good, at the very moment when thousands of persons are lying without ability to walk or work: we speak of the wealth of a country, and call it exceedingly abundant, at the very moment that workhouses are crowded with inmates; we speak of the intelligence of a country, and may describe some countries as the most intelligent in the whole world, notwithstanding the fact that there are within them uncounted numbers of illiterate persons.—Thus there is another life beside the merely personal.—God is here represented as fighting for nations.—God never fights for any nation simply because it is a nation, but because as a nation it is on the right side of the controversy.—God has no partiality for any land, except in the degree in which that land is marked by righteousness of purpose and action.—Patriotism is folly unless it be based upon moral considerations as well as upon kindred and sentiment.—Throughout the whole Bible the Lord has always shown himself as ready to give up one nation as another when moral fidelity was impaired or perverted.—Men cannot be permitted to unite themselves with Israel on the ground that God always fights for that particular denomination. This would be selfishness, not piety.—God searches the heart, and judges absolutely by the motive.—No nation then must pride itself upon being a particular favourite of Heaven: God hath made of one blood all nations of men: God is the Father of the whole world: God is only on the side of the righteous man, be that man black or white, great in wealth or mean in poverty.