What is the book of Joshua all about? 

“Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Joshua 1:9)

What is the book of Joshua all about? Here we’re picking up the story where we left off in Deuteronomy, with God’s people having been rescued from slavery in Egypt, having been sustained through 40 years of wilderness wanderings, and now camped on the edge of the Promised Land. Now is the time to go in and receive God’s wonderful promise. But first there is the small problem of the enemies who already live there!


What do we need to know to read Joshua?

On the face of it, the book of Joshua is a story of violent conquest, some miraculous victories, and a hefty dose of ethnic cleansing. So what is it doing in the Bible? The answer is that this book teaches us some vitally important things about God:
 

First, God loves to keep His promises.

This is the big message of the book: that God will provide. At the beginning, Joshua is given a stirring pep talk: “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Joshua 1:9.) This is a great memory verse, and I even have it on the wall in my study! And the best part is that the rest of the book underlines the full reliability of that promise of God to be with His people. Every time they remember to rely on Him, to follow His ways (even the bizarre-sounding instructions about marching around Jericho!), they find that He fights for them and wins through for them. And every time they forget to trust God and try to do things their own way, it goes horribly wrong (see e.g. chapters 7 and 9)!
Although we often think of the book of Joshua as just full of battles, that’s only really the first half. The majority of the second half of the book (chapters 13-21) give minute and painstaking detail as to which tribes get which parts of the land and which towns are given over to the Levites. It’s heavy reading(!) but it serves a vital purpose in the narrative: God has come through on His promise to settle all of His people in the Promised Land. So these chapters are much more than a boring geography lesson: they are an extended joyful recognition of the promise-keeping God. And at the end of this long section we find another wonderful underlining of the truth that God loves to keep His promises: “Not one of all the Lord’s good promises to Israel failed; every one was fulfilled.” (Joshua 21:45.)
 

Second, God hates sin.

The book of Joshua makes difficult reading for modern people who are rightly concerned with abuse of power, oppression and ethnic cleansing. As such, this book is one of the reasons that people suggest that the violent and capricious God of the Old Testament jars with the gracious and loving God of the New Testament. But those critiques don’t take into account the consistency of God’s stance against sin throughout the Bible (e.g. in the fact that Jesus talks about hell more than any other person whose words are recorded in Scripture!)
The reality is that the Canaanites (the occupants of the land) had been consistently sinning for centuries, and therefore “filling up” God’s wrath against them. This is what God says to Abraham (more than 400 years before the events of the book of Joshua) back in Genesis 15:16. And the book of Joshua makes it clear that it was God’s action to destroy the Canaanites because of their sin (see Joshua 11:20). If this seems overly harsh or bloodthirsty, it’s a sign not that God is unjust but that we don’t take sin seriously enough.
On that note, there is a stark reminder in these pages that it is vital for God’s people to take sin seriously too. The story of Achan and his family in chapter 7 is a cautionary tale that should rightly give us a bit of a knot in our stomachs. He decided that it wasn’t all that important to keep God’s command fully, so he helped himself to a bit of the plunder from Jericho (which was all meant to be burned up and totally destroyed) and hid it in the ground under his tent. He then proceeded to play the innocent, pretending he knew nothing about it. As a result of his sin, a number of soldiers died in a failed attempt to attack the next town, and eventually he was found out and at God’s command he and his whole family were executed. That’s how seriously God takes sin! Do we?

Both of these themes come together powerfully in the fascinating conversation between Joshua and the angelic commander of God’s heavenly armies in chapter 5:
“Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, ‘Are you for us or for our enemies?’
‘Neither,’ he replied, ‘but as commander of the army of the Lord I have now come.’ Then Joshua fell facedown to the ground in reverence, and asked him, ‘What message does my Lord have for his servant?’” (Joshua 5:13-14.)
Is God on our side, or on the side of our enemies? Neither! That’s the wrong question. We should ask, are we on God’s side? If so, you can rest assured; you can “be strong and courageous…for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.”