Joshua’s Theology (1)
“to love the LORD your God and walk in all His ways and keep His commandments and hold fast to Him and serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul.” Joshua 22:5
Love – Joshua uttered those famous words, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” It’s a powerful and noble declaration. What it means, however, is not always so obvious. To know how Joshua intended to serve God, we must take a look at Joshua’s theology, and there is no better place to do that than right here. If you want to be one of those who can stand with Joshua and declare your service to God, you will first have to know what Joshua means by the verbs that precede serving.
Love the Lord your God. The Hebrew is ahav. One of three Hebrew words for love, this verb is carefully distinguished from the other two (something we do not see in English). Ahav expresses a passionate desire to be fully united with another in every aspect of living, both inwardly and outwardly. Consequently, it has both emotional and behavioral results. In fact, it is so unique that the translators of the Old Testament into Greek could not find a parallel Greek verb in either eros or phileo. They chose agape in order to capture the full meaning of ahav. What this means is that ahav demands the full use of all of our energy and faculties. It is a verb that is only found in relationship, whether between two people or in community. Its direction is always toward another, expressed in real actions, not merely feelings. It is determined benevolence on behalf of another person.
When Joshua exhorts his listeners to love the Lord, he is not encouraging private, inward sentiment. He knows that ahav means action – toward God and toward God’s people. It is impossible to love God and mistreat His community. To withhold from another follower any action or affection that would be appropriate for service and worship of God is to deny your love of Him. The second great commandment cannot be divorced from the first, even, as Jesus made abundantly clear, when you are faced with an enemy. Jesus did not invent that requirement (compare Proverbs 25:21). He merely drew our attention to the proper venue of ahav. We can go so far as to say “love and action are two sides of the same coin” (Wallis).
Now what does this mean for you and me? It means that we must stop claiming that we love God if we are not exhibiting acts of grace, compassion, benevolence, forgiveness and restitution. We must re-examine our lives for those seeds of hypocrisy; the tiny discrepancies between our behavior and our proclamations. We must be able to straightforwardly answer the question, “Do I treat him as God would treat him?”
Make your list. There will be names on it that require a new way. Apply ahav. God will smile even if no one else notices a thing.
