Next: Remembering (Joshua 4:1-10)

Introduction

David Jackman writes that, “Our spiritual memories are very short, so that often in the busy flow of life we forget the spiritual realities on which we are grounded.” Do you ever feel that way? Feel forgetful? There’s a story of three sisters, ages ninety-two, ninety-four, and ninety-six, who were still living together. One night the ninety-six-year-old drew a bath. She put one foot in and then paused. She yelled, “was I getting in the tub or out?” The ninety-four-year-old hollered back, “I don’t know; I’ll come and see.” She started up the stairs but stopped on the first step, shouting, “Was I going up or coming down?” The ninety-two-year-old was sitting at the kitchen table having tea, listening to her sisters. She shook her head and said, “I sure hope I never get that forgetful,” and knocked on wood for good measure. Then she yelled, “I’ll come up and help both of you as soon as I see who’s at the door.” Personally, I often tell people that for as forgetful as I am, I almost look forward to the day I can finally start blaming it on old age.

Remembering the past helps us move into the future. On a personal level, I recently forgot a lot about something that was going on at home and life became much more challenging because of it. If only I had, remembered. Forgetting the past leads us to uncertainty about the future. But remembering the past can lead to nostalgia and stagnation. I sometimes think about high school and college when the biggest concern I had was passing the next exam. Our passage today from Joshua is all about remembering and moving into what is, Next. This book is about triumph and transition. It’s a book of moving forward as God’s People look to what is next for them. As we look at what God has next for the Israelites and for Joshua, we look at what God has next for us. What he has next for us both individually and corporately. Last week, we saw that mission flows the empowerment of Christ. This week, we see how we often forget what God has done, but Christ has given us the means of grace to remember and to follow. How does God provide us with remembers of where we have been and what he has done for us? God provides three responses to help us remember the work of Christ.

God provides the sacraments as tangible reminders of the work of Christ.

Joshua tells the twelve tribal representatives in verses 5-6, “Pass on before the ark of the Lord your God into the midst of the Jordan, and take up each of you a stone upon his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the people of Israel, that this may be a sign among you.” Why is God having Joshua and these twelve people do this? It’s in order to remember. The goal is to memorialize the work God has done for them and among them. David Jackman writes, “we need the visible, tangible reminder of what lies at the very heart of our salvation. We need to recall at what cost he opened the way into the land of promise for us, his redeemed people. We need to give ourselves to love and serve him forever.” So how do we remember Christ opening the way to salvation for us? What is our tangible reminder. At the Last Supper with his disciples, Jesus took bread, broke it, and said, “Do this in remembrance of me”

Our Westminster Confession of Faith is talking about the Lord’s Supper when it says in Chapter 29, section 2, “in this sacrament Christ is not offered up to his Father, nor is any actual sacrifice made for the remission of sins of the living or the dead. Rather, this sacrament commemorates Christ’s offering up of himself, by himself, on the cross once for all, and it spiritually offers up to God every possible praise for that sacrifice.” Every time we partake of the Lord’s Supper, we remember and we proclaim the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Author and theologian Alistair McGrath has given us an example of how he, personally, has experienced communion at work. He writes, “My aunt died some time ago, having lived to be eighty or so. She had never married. While clearing out her possessions, we came across a battered photograph of a young man whom my aunt had loved. The relationship had ended tragically. She never loved anyone else and kept for the remainder of her life a photograph of the man she had loved. Why? As she aged, she knew that she would have difficulty believing that, at one point in her life, someone had once cared for her and regarded her as his everything. It could all have seemed a dream, an illusion, something she had invented in her old age to console her in her declining years—except for the photo. The photo reminded her that she really had loved someone once and was loved in return. It was her sole link to a world in which she had been valued. Communion bread and wine, like that photograph, reassure us that something that seems too good to be true—something that we might even be suspected of having invented—really did happen.”

The stones that the Israelites erected served as an ongoing testimony to the work of God. For us, communion serves as an ongoing testimony of what Christ has done for us. When we are struggling with forgiving a person who did something so hurtfully, so deeply betraying, so harmful to a friend or a family member, we are reminded that Christ first forgave us. When we struggling with loving someone, maybe it’s that time when we love them but we’re finding it difficult to like them, communion reminds us of the greatest act of love. The first response God gives us to help remember the work of Christ is to partake int he sacraments, that is baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

God calls his people to pass the story to their kids.

Joshua continues in verse 6 telling them, “when your children ask in time to come, ‘What do those stones mean to you?’ then you shall tell them that the waters of the Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it passed over the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. So these stones shall be to the people of Israel a memorial forever.” When Israel crossed over the Jordan with yet another miracle from God allowing them to cross, it wasn’t simply God getting their back. It wasn’t only God empowering their mission, although this was important. This act of God was an act of covenant fidelity. It was God saying to them that because of their covenant with him, symbolized by the Ark of the Covenant, he would support them. Marten Woudstra puts it like this. “The ark is the very symbol of the covenant of the Lord. Thus the full light falls on the redemptive significance of the event.” God’s faithfulness to God’s people is symbolized in the Ark and sealed in his covenant.

A covenant is like a contract on steroids. In chapter 7 of our Westminster Confession of Faith, we learn that in his covenant with us, “he freely offers sinners life and salvation through Jesus Christ. In order to be saved he requires faith in Jesus and promises to give his Holy Spirit to all who are ordained to life so that they may be willing and able to believe.” God has not only enacted the covenant with promises of eternal life, hope, and faithfulness, he has placed a seal upon those who follow him. Acts 2:39 tells us, “the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.” So what is the seal on believers? What is the sign that God’s faithfulness and promises will come to pass. That sign is baptism. A moment at which Christ has claimed us as his own, and we are given the mark of Christ.

Here at Middle Sandy, one of the ways that we remember God’s covenant faithfulness and promise for the first two centuries of gospel ministry is right here, in what we call, “the Green Book.” On page 126, there is the order of worship for the service of dedication for this building. The service happened on March 15, 1964 at 3:00 PM. The closing praise song was, “Our God Our Help in Ages Past.” 58 years ago, this building was dedicated to the service of the Lord. As it was, they looked back on God’s faithfulness as they also looked forward to what God had for them in the months, years, decades to come. That’s what God was having Joshua do as they crossed the Jordan and erected 12 stones that memorialized the crossing. The first response God gives us to help remember the work of Christ is to tell the story.

They moved into what was next.

Verses 17-19 tell us that “Joshua commanded the priests, ‘Come up out of the Jordan.’ And when the priests bearing the ark of the covenant of the Lord came up from the midst of the Jordan, and the soles of the priests’ feet were lifted up on dry ground, the waters of the Jordan returned to their place and overflowed all its banks, as before. The people came up out of the Jordan on the tenth day of the first month, and they encamped at Gilgal on the east border of Jericho.” This is key point in the story. Joshua and the Israelites went into the Jordan and experienced a miracle. They came out of the Jordan. They set their stones, then they moved on to Gilgal. Why don’t we do that? Let me explain using a different passage.

In Matthew 17, Jesus takes three of the disciples with him to the top of a high mountain. While there, Matthew 17:2 tells us that, “he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light.” Imagine seeing Christ. Imagine seeing this great metamorphosis. Imagine what the disciples there must have been thinking as they observe it. In Matthew 17:4, Peter says to Jesus probably what we would say to him if we were there. He says, “Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” In other words, Jesus, this is amazing! Let’s camp out and enjoy this. Let’s take some selfies, put it on social media, and make all our friends jealous. Peter had explained something amazing, so he asked Jesus if they could stay there. And what happens? Matthew 17:5 says that “he (referring to Peter) was still speaking when, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” So then Jesus and the three disciples descend down the mountain and they move into what is Next for them.

The famous preacher, Charles Spurgeon, gives us perspective on this. He tells us “We are prone to cast a partial eye on some imaginary ‘good old times.” We love the good ole days. He continues by saying, “It is gone, and therefore it was good; it is here, and therefore it is dubious. In the middle of the summer, we feel that the heat is so relaxing that a frost would be the most delightful thing conceivable. We love, we say, the bracing air of winter; we are sure it is much healthier for us. Yet, usually, when winter arrives and the extreme cold sets in, we are all most anxious for the advent of spring, and we feel that somehow or other the frost is more trying to us than the heat.” Basically, Spurgeon is telling us about the grass is greener syndrome. We want to be anywhere except where we are today. He continues with, “Personally, I met with an illustration of this tendency the other day. I went down a steep cliff to the seashore, and during the descent every step tried my weak knees and I felt that going downhill was the most difficult traveling in the world. Soon I had to return from the sands and climb the steep path again. When I began to pant and puff with the difficult ascent, I changed my opinion and felt that I would a great deal sooner go down than come up. The fact is that whatever is with us we think to be the worse, and whatever was with us we conceive to be the better. We may, therefore, take some discount from our regrets. For, perhaps, if we were more conscious of the benefit of the present state, and if we made less prominent the difficulty of it, we would not sigh to be as we were in months past.” Summer is great, but I wish it wasn’t so muggy. Winter is great sleeping weather, but don’t you get tired of the sniffles? Spring is nice if only it didn’t rain so much. And fall means another 8 months until summer. We want to be anywhere but here.

In the finale of the hit TV show The Office, Andy Bernard may have one of my all-time favorite quotes. He says, "I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you actually left them.” This takes us back to the Green Book. On page 2 it says, “A church building is an inanimate object but I hope, through this book, you can catch a glimpse of the living, loving people who endured the hardships of pioneer life to found Middle Sandy Creek congregation in a Wilderness before the place even had a name, as well as those who followed, who kept the church moving ever ahead.” Did you catch that ending? Where God has us today is in large part because of how he moved over the decades and even the centuries. But remembering yesterday too easily turns into wanting to stay at the top of the high mountain with Jesus, preventing us from going into what is next. But that quote from the Green Book says that the book was to remind us how God kept the church ever moving forward. Do you ever feel stuck in the past? Wanting to go back to the good ole days? I know I sure do. But God is calling us to himself and calling us into tomorrow. The final response God gives us to help remember the work of Christ is to move with God into what is next.

Conclusion

God provides three responses to help us remember the work of Christ. The sacraments are tangible, physical of his work on the Cross and in our lives. God calls us to tell the story so that our kids know His story. Finally, rather than trying to go back to the good ole days, God calls us into what is next. Think of how much we do to remember events in life. We have pictures on our walls, in our smartphones, and on our Facebook. History books are written. Genealogy studied, and stories of long ago are shared with kids and grand kids. Holidays honor events of long ago. Here at Middle Sandy, we have a lot of good memories to look back on. The days when attendance was twice what it is now. Days of regular professions of faith and baptisms. Remembering the good times and the work of God is vital. Moving forward in light is also, vital. David Jackman writes, “Our spiritual memories are very short, so that often in the busy flow of life we forget the spiritual realities on which we are grounded.” We often forget what God has done, but Christ has given us the means of grace to remember and to follow.”