_ACHAN'S TRESPASS._
JOSHUA vii.
A vessel in full sail scuds merrily over the waves. Everything
betokens a successful and delightful voyage. The log has just been
taken, marking an extraordinary run. The passengers are in the highest
spirits, anticipating an early close of the voyage. Suddenly a shock
is felt, and terror is seen on every face. The ship has struck on a
rock. Not only is progress arrested, but it will be a mercy for crew
and passengers if they can escape with their lives.
Not often so violently, but often as really, progress is arrested in
many a good enterprise that seemed to be prospering to a wish. There
may be no shock, but there is a stoppage of movement. The vital force
that seemed to be carrying it on towards the desired consummation
declines, and the work hangs fire. A mission that in its first stages
was working out a beautiful transformation, becomes languid and
advances no further. A Church, eminent for its zeal and spirituality,
comes down to the ordinary level, and seems to lose its power. A
family that promised well in infancy and childhood fails of its
promise, its sons and daughters waver and fall. A similar result is
often found in the undertakings of common life. Something mysterious
arrests progress in business or causes a decline. In "enterprises of
great pith and moment," "the currents turn awry, and lose the name of
action."
In all such cases we naturally wonder what can be the cause. And very
often our explanation is wide of the mark. In religious enterprises,
we are apt to fall back on the sovereignty and inscrutability of God.
"He moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform." It seems good
to Him, for unknown purposes of His own, to subject us to
disappointment and trial. We do not impugn either His wisdom or His
goodness; all is for the best. But, for the most part, we fail to
detect the real reason. That the fault should lie with ourselves is
the last thing we think of. We search for it in every direction rather
than at home. We are ingenious in devising far-off theories and
explanations, while the real offender is close at hand--"_Israel hath
sinned_."
It was an unexpected obstacle of this kind that Joshua now encountered
in his next step towards possessing the land. Let us endeavour to
understand his position and his plan. Jericho lay in the valley of the
Jordan, and its destruction secured nothing for Joshua save the
possession of that low-lying valley. From the west side of the valley
rose a high mountain wall, which had to be ascended in order to reach
the plateau of Western Palestine. Various ravines or passes ran down
from the plateau into the valley; at the top of one of these, a little
to the north of Jericho, was Bethel, and farther down the pass, nearer
the plain, the town or village of Ai. No remains of Ai are now
visible, nor is there any tradition of the name, so that its exact
position cannot be ascertained. It was an insignificant place, but
necessary to be taken, in order to give Joshua command of the pass,
and enable him to reach the plateau above. The plan of Joshua seems to
have been to gain command of the plateau about this point, and
thereby, as it were, cut the country in two, so that he might be able
to deal in succession with its southern and its northern sections. If
once he could establish himself in the very centre of the country,
keeping his communications open with the Jordan valley, he would be
able to deal with his opponents in detail, and thus prevent those in
the one section from coming to the assistance of the other. Neither Ai
nor Bethel seemed likely to give him trouble; they were but
insignificant places, and a very small force would be sufficient to
deal with them.
Hitherto Joshua had been eminently successful, and his people too. Not
a hitch had occurred in all the arrangements. The capture of Jericho
had been an unqualified triumph. It seemed as if the people of Ai
could hardly fail to be paralysed by its fate. After reconnoitring Ai,
Joshua saw that there was no need for mustering the whole host against
so poor a place--a detachment of two or three thousand would be
enough. The three thousand went up against it as confidently as if
success were already in their hands. It was probably a surprise to
find its people making any attempt to drive them off. The men of
Israel were not prepared for a vigorous onslaught, and when it came
thus unexpectedly they were taken aback and fled in confusion. As the
men of Ai pursued them down the pass, they had no power to rally or
retrieve the battle; the rout was complete, some of the men were
killed, while consternation was carried into the host, and their whole
enterprise seemed doomed to failure.
And now for the first time Joshua appears in a somewhat humiliating
light. He is not one of the men that never make a blunder. He rends
his clothes, falls on his face with the elders before the ark of the
Lord till even, and puts dust upon his head. There is something too
abject in this prostration. And when he speaks to God, it is in the
tone of complaint and in the language of unbelief. "Alas, O Lord God,
wherefore hast Thou at all brought this people over Jordan, to deliver
us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us? would to God we had
been content, and dwelt on the other side Jordan! O Lord, what shall I
say, when Israel turneth their backs before their enemies! For the
Canaanites and all the inhabitants of the land shall hear of it, and
shall environ us round, and cut off our name from the earth: and what
wilt Thou do unto Thy great name?" Thus Joshua almost throws the blame
on God. He seems to have no idea that it may lie in quite another
quarter. And very strangely, he adopts the very tone and almost the
language of the ten spies, against which he had protested so
vehemently at the time: "Would God that we had died in the land of
Egypt, or would God we had died in this wilderness! And wherefore hath
the Lord brought us unto this land, to fall by the sword, that our
wives and our children should be a prey?" What has become of all your
courage, Joshua, on that memorable day? Is this the man to whom God
said so lately, "Be strong, and of good courage; as I was with Moses,
so I will be with thee. I will not fail thee nor forsake thee"? Like
Peter on the waters, and like so many of ourselves, he begins to sink
when the wind is contrary, and his cry is the querulous wail of a
frightened child! After all he is but flesh and blood.
Now it is God's turn to speak. "Get thee up; wherefore liest thou
thus upon thy face?" Why do you turn on Me as if I had suddenly
changed, and become forgetful of My promise? Alas, my friends, how
often is God slandered by our complaints! How often do we feel and
even speak as if He had broken His word and forgotten His promise, as
if He had induced us to trust in Him, and accept His service, only to
humiliate us before the world, and forsake us in some great crisis! No
wonder if God speak sharply to Joshua, and to us if we go in Joshua's
steps. No wonder if He refuse to be pleased with our prostration, our
wringing of our hands and sobbing, and calls us to change our
attitude. "Get thee up; wherefore liest thou thus upon thy face?"
Then comes the true explanation--"Israel hath sinned." Might you not
have divined that this was the real cause of your trouble? Is not sin
directly or indirectly the cause of all trouble? What was it that
broke up the joy and peace of Paradise? Sin. What brought the flood of
waters over the face of the earth to destroy it? Sin. What caused the
confusion of Babel and scattered the inhabitants over the earth in
hostile races? Sin. What brought desolation on that very plain of
Jordan, and buried its cities and its people under an avalanche of
fire and brimstone? Sin. What caused the defeat of Israel at Hormah
forty years ago, and doomed all the generation to perish in the
wilderness? Sin. What threw down the walls of Jericho only a few days
ago, gave its people to the sword of Israel, and reduced its homes and
its bulwarks to the mass of ruins you see _there_? Again, sin. Can you
not read the plainest lesson? Can you not divine that this trouble
which has come on you is due to the same cause with all the rest? And
if it be a first principle of Providence that all trouble is due to
sin, would it not be more suitable that you and your elders should now
be making diligent search for it, and trying to get it removed, than
that you should be lying on your faces and howling to me, as if some
sudden caprice or unworthy humour of mine had brought this distress
upon you?
"Behold, the Lord's ear is not heavy that it cannot hear, nor His arm
shortened that it cannot save. But your iniquities have separated
between you and your God." What a curse that sin is, in ways and
forms, too, which we do not suspect! And yet we are usually so very
careless about it. How little pains we take to ascertain its presence,
or to drive it away from among us! How little tenderness of conscience
we show, how little burning desire to be kept from the accursed thing!
And when we turn to our opponents and see sin in them, instead of
being grieved, we fall on them savagely to upbraid them, and we hold
them up to open scorn. How little we think if they are guilty, that
their sin has intercepted the favour of God, and involved not them
only, but probably the whole community in trouble! How unsatisfactory
to God must seem the bearing even of the best of us in reference to
sin! Do we really think of it as the object of God's abhorrence? As
that which destroyed Paradise, as that which has covered the earth
with lamentation and mourning and woe, kindled the flames of hell, and
brought the Son of God to suffer on the cross? If only we had some
adequate sense of sin, should we not be constantly making it our
prayer--"Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my
thoughts; and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the
way everlasting"?
The peculiar covenant relation in which Israel stood to God caused a
method to be fallen on for detecting their sin that is not available
for us. The whole people were to be assembled next morning, and
inquiry was to be made for the delinquent in God's way, and when the
individual was found condign punishment was to be inflicted. First the
tribe was to be ascertained, then the family, then the man. For this
is God's way of tracking sin. It might be more pleasant to us that He
should deal with it more generally, and having ascertained, for
example, that the wrong had been done by a particular tribe or
community, inflict a fine or other penalty on that tribe in which we
should willingly bear our share. For it does not grieve us very much
to sin when every one sins along with us. Nay, we can even make merry
over the fact that we are all sinners together, all in the same
condemnation, in the same disgrace. But it is a different thing when
we are dealt with one by one. The tribe is taken, the family is taken,
but that is not all; the household that God shall take shall come MAN
BY MAN! It is that individualizing of us that we dread; it is when it
comes to that, that "conscience makes cowards of us all." When a
sinner is dying, he becomes aware that this individualizing process is
about to take place, and hence the fear which he often feels. He is no
longer among the multitude, death is putting him by himself, and God
is coming to deal with him by himself. If he could only be hid in the
crowd it would not matter, but that searching eye of God--who can
stand before it? What will all the excuses or disguises or glosses he
can devise avail before Him who "sets our iniquities before Him, our
secret sins in the light of His countenance"? "Neither is there any
creature that is not manifest in His sight; for all things are naked,
and opened unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do." Happy, in
that hour, they who have found the Divine covering for sin: "Blessed
is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed
is the man to whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit
there is no guile."
But before passing on to the result of the scrutiny, we find ourselves
face to face with a difficult question. If, as is here intimated, it
was one man that sinned, why should the whole nation have been dealt
with as guilty? Why should the historian, in the very first verse of
this chapter, summarise the transaction by saying: "But the _children
of Israel_ committed a trespass in the devoted thing: for _Achan_, the
son of Carmi, the son of Zabdi, the son of Zerah, of the tribe of
Judah, took of the devoted thing; and the anger of the Lord was
kindled against the children of Israel"? Why visit the offence of
Achan on the whole congregation, causing a peculiarly humiliating
defeat to take place before an insignificant enemy, demoralizing the
whole host, driving Joshua to distraction, and causing the death of
six-and-thirty men?
In dealing with a question of this sort, it is indispensable that we
station ourselves at that period of the world's history; we must place
before our minds some of the ideas that were prevalent at the time,
and abstain from judging of what was done then by a standard which is
applicable only to our own day.
And certain it is that, what we now call the _solidarity_ of mankind,
the tendency to look on men rather as the members of a community than
as independent individuals, each with an inalienable standing of his
own, had a hold of men's minds then such as it has not to-day,
certainly among Western nations. To a certain extent, this principle
of solidarity is inwoven in the very nature of things, and cannot be
eliminated, however we may try. Absolute independence and isolation of
individuals are impossible. In families, we suffer for one another's
faults, even when we hold them in abhorrence. We benefit by one
another's virtues, though we may have done our utmost to discourage
and destroy them. In the Divine procedure toward us, the principle of
our being a corporate body is often acted upon. The covenant of Adam
was founded on it, and the fall of our first parents involved the fall
of all their descendants. In the earlier stages of the Hebrew economy,
wide scope was given to the principle. It operated in two forms:
sometimes the individual suffered for the community, and sometimes the
community for the individual. And the operation of the principle was
not confined to the Hebrew or to other Oriental communities. Even
among the Romans it had a great influence. Admirable though Roman law
was in its regulation of property, it was very defective in its
dealings with persons. "Its great blot was the domestic code. The son
was the property of the father, without rights, without substantial
being, in the eye of Roman law.... The wife again was the property of
her husband, an ownership of which the moral result was most
disastrous."[11]
[11] See Mozley's "Ruling Ideas in the Early Ages," p. 40.
We are to remember that practically the principle of solidarity was
fully admitted in Joshua's time among his people. The sense of
injustice and hardship to which it might give rise among us did not
exist. Men recognised it as a law of wide influence in human affairs,
to which they were bound to defer. Hence it was that when it became
known that one man's offence lay at the foundation of the defeat
before Ai, and of the displeasure of God toward the people at large,
there was no outcry, no remonstrance, no complaint of injustice. This
could hardly take place if the same thing were to happen now. It is
hard to reconcile the transaction with our sense of justice. And no
doubt, if we view the matter apart and by itself, there may be some
ground for this feeling. But the transaction will assume another
aspect if we view it as but a part of a great whole, of a great scheme
of instruction and discipline which God was developing in connection
with Israel. In this light, instead of a hardship it will appear that
in the end a very great benefit was conferred on the people.
Let us think of Achan's temptation. A large amount of valuable
property fell into the hands of the Israelites at Jericho. By a
rigorous law, all was devoted to the service of God. Now a covetous
man like Achan might find many plausible reasons for evading this law.
"What I take to myself (he might say) will never be missed. There are
hundreds of Babylonish garments, there are many wedges of gold, and
silver shekels without number, amply sufficient for the purpose for
which they are devoted. If I were to deprive another man of his
rightful share, I should be acting very wickedly; but I am really
doing nothing of the kind. I am only diminishing imperceptibly what is
to be used for a public purpose. Nobody will suffer a whit by what I
do,--it cannot be very wrong."
Now the great lesson taught very solemnly and impressively to the
whole nation was, that this was just awfully wrong. The moral benefit
which the nation ultimately got from the transaction was, that this
kind of sophistry, this flattering unction which leads so many persons
ultimately to destruction, was exploded and blown to shivers. A most
false mode of measuring the criminality of sin was stamped with
deserved reprobation. Every man and woman in the nation got a solemn
warning against a common but ruinous temptation. In so far as they
laid to heart this warning during the rest of the campaign, they were
saved from disastrous evil, and thus, in the long run, they profited
by the case of Achan.
That sin is to be held sinful only when it hurts your
fellow-creatures, and especially the poor among your fellow-creatures,
is a very common impression, but surely it is a delusion of the devil.
That it has such effects may be a gross aggravation of the wickedness,
but it is not the heart and core of it. And how can you know that it
will not hurt others? Not hurt your fellow-countrymen, Achan? Why,
that secret sin of yours has caused the death of thirty-six men, and a
humiliating defeat of the troops before Ai. More than that, it has
separated between the nation and God. Many say, when they tell a lie,
it was not a malignant lie, it was a lie told to screen some one, not
to expose him, therefore it was harmless. But you cannot trace the
consequences of that lie, any more than Achan could trace the
consequences of his theft, otherwise you would not dare to make that
excuse. Many that would not steal from a poor man, or waste a poor
man's substance, have little scruple in wasting a rich man's
substance, or in peculating from Government property. Who can measure
the evil that flows from such ways of trifling with the inexorable law
of right, the damage done to conscience, and the guilt contracted
before God? Is there safety for man or woman except in the most rigid
regard to right and truth, even in the smallest portions of them with
which they have to do? Is there not something utterly fearful in the
propagating power of sin, and in its way of involving others, who are
perfectly innocent, in its awful doom? Happy they who from their
earliest years have had a salutary dread of it, and of its infinite
ramifications of misery and woe!
How well fitted for us, especially when we are exposed to temptation,
is that prayer of the psalmist: "Who can understand his errors?
cleanse Thou me from secret faults. Keep back Thy servant also from
presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me: then shall I be
perfect, and I shall be clear of great transgression."