Bible Commentaries

Joshua 10:40-42

I. The Book of Joshua is part of the history of the Christian Church. However strange it may seem, the work of Joshua in the Old Testament did lead to the work of the second Joshua in the New; He who declared that God is love was the Descendant of him who slew the five kings of the Amorites; the one was the forerunner of the other, and each in his own day was acting, as he fully believed, under the influence and inspiration of the same God.

II. The burden of the whole book, the lesson which it would teach an Israelite, the lesson which it ought to teach us, is this: that God was the real Disposer of events, and that the Israelites triumphed because God had determined that they should triumph.

III. As for the heathen people whom the Israelites destroyed, is it not well that we should know that God is offended when His world is polluted by abominable crime and wickedness? We know that these people did pollute the earth, and the Israelites were appointed to sweep them from it. It was a great act of Divine vengeance. The Israelites could not mistake it for anything else: they saw sin punished, and they were told as plainly as possible that as the heathen sinners had suffered, so should they also suffer if they forsook God's law. The Book of Joshua teaches us that God does indeed govern the world; that He takes the land from one and gives it to another; that He causes the wickedness and folly of man to work out His great designs.

Bishop Harvey Goodwin, Parish Sermons, 5th series, p. 93.

Reference: Joshua 10:42.—Parker, vol. v., p. 278.