23 “Now therefore,” he said, “put away the foreign gods which are among you, and incline your heart to the Lord God of Israel.”
24 And the people said to Joshua, “The Lord our God we will serve, and His voice we will obey!”
25 So Joshua made a covenant with the people that day, and made for them a statute and an ordinance in Shechem.
Now that the people have pledged to serve the Lord, Joshua immediately directs them to demonstrate that with a challenging form of obedience. “Put away the foreign gods.” For us this might seem like an easy decision, but these other gods represented the currency of life in Canaan. Their connection with such things helped them function among the foreign people. They “needed” them in order to have lives like others around them.
We face the same challenge. We don’t have little statues of deities we can’t do without, but we serve gods of position or wealth and give our greatest efforts to attain them. It’s just the way one lives in our culture, right? We live like the others around us and struggle when God wants us to live in a completely different way.
How do you “put away” the gods of this culture? How does your life reveal that you’re chasing a different way to live? The Israelites’ decision wasn’t an easy one, and they would fail in it many times. We face the same kind of challenge and must give our best to this central point of obedience.
– Dr. Mike Clarensau serves as Senior Director of the Healthy Church Network of the Assemblies of God.
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