Often the real impact of a person’s life is best seen after they die. That was true of Joshua, and Jesus, too.
What a thrilling book this has been! It has as many valleys and mountains as the land of Israel, just like your life and mine. But through it all, we have discovered a glorious truth about God. Later the Syrians would say, “The Lord is God of the hills, but He is not God of the valleys” (1 Ki 20:28), calling Jehovah to prove otherwise. Yet the Lord was as much for His people after Ai as He was after Gibeon. And so with us: “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Rom 8:31). Now as the book draws to a close, we not only read of the death of Joshua, but of the death of the high priest, Eleazar, to be replaced by his son Phinehas (Jos 24:33). Thank God, our Apostle and High Priest lives! No need for succession in His line. Then we are told that some unfinished business was attended to: “The bones of Joseph, which the children of Israel had brought up out of Egypt, they buried at Shechem, in the plot of ground which Jacob had bought” (v 32). Dear Joseph! He didn’t even want his bones in Egypt. Thus ended the longest funeral cortege in history. We’ll hear of this plot of ground again, when the true Joseph, a “fruitful bough by a well; His branches run over the wall” (Gen 49:22), ministers to a Samaritan sinner (see Jn 4:5). But there is no better way to conclude our studies of Joshua than to read what might well be his epitaph: “Israel served the Lord all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had known all the works of the Lord which He had done for Israel” (v 31). As someone observed, many of us hardly cast a shadow in our passing through life, but the influence of this man impacted three generations for God. How is it possible? Like Joshua, keep pointing, not to yourself, but to “all the works of the Lord.”