The American Martyr on Joshua, Parts 1 and 2
On Joshua
By Fr. Karl Hess
From his blog The American Martyr (check out his blog, and give it a follow)
Part 1
A soft confessional Lutheran is a contradiction in terms. We are people who have already died. Confessional Lutheran preachers are men who crucify people with Jesus. Men who wear soft clothes are in kings’ palaces. Men who make harmless tweets and go to harmless conferences and say, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace are not confessional Lutherans. If they are, they are men who are selling their birthright. We are called to much more.
The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on His throne. (Rev. 3:21)
The Church suffers with Christ and dies with Him.
The Church conquers with Christ and reigns with Him.
These two theses not only harmonize with one another; they are different aspects of the same thing. Two Sundays from now, on the feast of St. Michael, we will hear the loud voice from heaven, saying: “Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death.” (Rev. 12:10-11)
We should pay attention to how closely these words parallel one of the passages we use most frequently to comfort the sick, dying, and mourning. . “Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. 34 Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. 35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? 36 As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” 37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” (Rom. 8:33-37) No one, not even the highest angel, may bring a charge against us or condemn us, since Christ has justified us with His blood. It isn’t that we are saved in spite of tribulation and distress and death. It is in the very midst of being killed all day long that we are more than conquerors.
It is not an unusual thing when a Christian dies with Christ. Every last Christian in his final hour is being crucified with Christ, shouting in triumph with our Lord at His last breath. We died with Him in Baptism, and we die with Him daily in repentance. Or we save our lives in this world only to lose them, and death ceases to be a triumph and becomes eternal defeat. But if we suffer and die in our callings on earth, we should also expect that we will conquer—not just a difficulty or two, but the devil and the whole world.
In recent years, the Luther’s distinction between the theology of glory and the theology of the cross has been twisted into something it was never meant to be. The reason a theologian of glory looks for God in the things that are seen is because he boasts in his flesh and wants to strengthen his flesh. A theologian of the cross finds God in suffering and death not because weakness and losing are themselves good, but because the death of our sinful nature is good. In the death of our old Adam we live and reign with Christ by faith. But we have turned it into a perverse strengthening of our flesh. When our churches have declined in numbers and closed, instead of mourning over our failures, we have told ourselves this is a mark of our faithfulness. If that were true, the Reformation would have been a failure, and the apostles would have mourned in the early chapters of Acts as the word of the Lord continued to increase (Acts 6:7).
The book of Joshua is a helpful corrective for us. We should read it again. Pastors should teach it to their bible classes.
In the book of Joshua we see that only two men from the first generation of Israelites were able to go in and possess the inheritance promised to their fathers. That was because they were the only two who believed that God could not lie, and He would fulfill what He had promised hundreds of years before. They reached out and seized the promise of God.
And the rest of that great host that came out of Egypt died in the wilderness. The evidence of their unbelief was their fear to enter battle. Like the hosts of Saul’s army quivering before the giant, they looked upon what was seen, not what was unseen. So they perished in the wilderness.
We have been given a much greater promise by God, and begun to enter into battle to obtain it. Our battle is not to cross swords with a few tribes in the Middle East, but to die with Christ and conquer the world and the devil in so doing. And we say we want to win that prize, but we are afraid to lift up our voices to pastors and congregations whose practice is unfaithful to our Confessions? We are afraid of the hostility of our neighbors and the government—as we manifestly were during Covid—but we pretend we have no fear about the hostility of the devil?
I understand why it has come to this very well. Many of us are timid to begin with. Maybe we have never done anything bold or daring in our lives. Others have tried, only to find some other part of our life was not in order, so we backed away from being bold in public supposedly to get our private lives together, but found that they were never together enough to take the risk. Many pastors came out of seminary breathing fire, and quickly ran into resistance or immovable indifference. We told ourselves, as we made compromises, that our sloth was really the wisdom of experience. But then we limped along with a bad conscience, because the only joy in the ministry is found in going with Christ into danger to find the lost sheep. When we are not doing that, when we avoid everything difficult, we secretly feel ourselves to be priests for hire, and it saps all our joy in the ministry.
But we have forgotten that Christ calls us to more. He gave us the right to become sons of God, to share in His glory at the right hand of the Father. And the way to becoming sons of God in glory is to conquer the world by the blood of the Lamb and the word of His testimony.
Admittedly, it may or may not be given to us to see our synod made new. It may or may not be given to us to see our congregations renewed or our lost neighbors return in large numbers to Christ. But it is certainly given to us to make war on the devil and the world. The Spirit that is in us speaks like Caleb: “And now, behold, I am this day eighty-five years old. 11 I am still as strong today as I was in the day that Moses sent me; my strength now is as my strength was then, for war and for going and coming. 12 So now give me this hill country of which the Lord spoke on that day, for you heard on that day how the Anakim were there, with great fortified cities. It may be that the Lord will be with me, and I shall drive them out just as the Lord said.” (Joshua 14:10-12)
When Joshua had brought the people of Israel through the Jordan, circumcised them and celebrated the Passover, he saw a man standing before them with a drawn sword. And Joshua went to him and said to him, “Are you for us, or for our adversaries?” 14 And he said, “No; but I am the commander of the army of the Lord. Now I have come.” (Joshua 5:13-14)
When Christ appeared to Joshua with a drawn sword, He announced that He was neither for Israel nor for the Canaanites. He was present to carry out His own purposes. He had come to execute judgment on Canaan and to plant Israel as the garden out of which His incarnation would come to fruition. So it is with His remnant in the Missouri Synod. It is true that He is not for us, our egotistical goals, our desire for comfort or glory in this world. But He has a war that He wishes to fight. He rides out in His majesty victoriously for the cause of truth and meekness and righteousness (Ps. 45:4), He girds His sword on His thigh in His splendor and majesty (Ps. 45:3). One thing is certain: our Lord goes out to make war for His pure word and the salvation of souls. He makes war on those who corrupt His Word with the sword of His mouth (Rev. 2:16).
He is not for us if our desire is to have a soft, easy life.
And I have vowed to love and fear Thee
And to obey Thee, Lord, alone;
Because the Holy Ghost did move me,
I dared to pledge myself Thine own,
Renouncing sin to keep the faith
And war with evil unto death. (TLH #298 st. 3)
But if our desire is to fulfill our baptismal vow, we are with Him in His warfare, which He will surely win.
And what concern of ours is it if He grants us victories on earth, or we fall in battle? Either way we win. Since we must win, whether our earthly goals are achieved is only of secondary importance. “It may be that the Lord will be with me, and I shall drive them out, just as the Lord said,” says Caleb. It may be. It may not be, but either way I will be a loyal soldier under the Commander of the Armies of the Lord. This is the way that the saints always speak. They don’t know what the temporal outcome of their efforts will be, only that it is God’s will that they fight. So Jonathan says: ““Come, let us go over to the garrison of these uncircumcised. It may be that the Lord will work for us, for nothing can hinder the Lord from saving by many or by few.” (1 Samuel 14:6).
And Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego say: If this be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. 18 But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up.” (Daniel 3:17).
But David, the man after God’s own heart, with great faith says, “Your servant has struck down both lions and bears, and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be like one of them, for he has defied the armies of the living God.” (1 Sam. 17:36) If God has not given us the faith of David, let us at least speak like Caleb, Jonathan, and the three young men. The Lord is able to deliver us, but even if He does not, we will serve the Lord.
And we will surely find, as they did, that the Lord will be pleased with our warfare, even if we fall short in many things; that He grants us successes in time where we did not expect them. We should not use the Lord’s battles as an excuse to flee from our failures in other parts of our lives. Yet we should not excuse our timidity with the idea that it is for other people who are better than us to fight. For the battle is the Lord’s (1 Sam. 17:47), and we are the Lord’s. We have been enlisted as his soldiers, who are to die and rise again, in Holy Baptism.
Part 2
Joshua reminds us that to be a member of Christ’s Church is to be called to conquer with Him. We are not engaged in a battle against flesh and blood to conquer an earthly kingdom. We are called to much more—to triumph over the whole world, and its prince, the devil.
Yet though our warfare is not against flesh and blood, it is waged by us who are in the flesh in this world. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ (2 Cor. 10:5). The giants we must slay present themselves against us in our daily warfare against our own flesh and our efforts to conform our families and congregations to the Word of God. But they also appear in our synodical life and the life of our nation. Just as a refusal to engage in daily warfare against our fallen nature could not result in us winning the victory over the world and the devil, neither can we be passive before the giants that confront us in our Synod or in our nation. We can’t be silent and wait for another generation to call our Synod or our neighbors in the United States to repent of their departure from the Word of God.
And If He Shrinks Back, My Soul Has No Pleasure in Him
Christ has our host surrounded
With clouds of martyrs bright,
Who wave their palms in triumph
And fire us for the fight.
Then Christ the cross ascended
To save a world undone
And, suff’ring for the sinful,
Our full redemption won. (LSB 539 st. 2)
What encourages us to put our reputations and our lives at risk to try to conquer these giants in the land? God’s promise that we will not fail, that we have an inheritance that has been won for us by our Lord. Besides this, the courage of our Captain and our older brothers in the faith stand before us as examples. First our Lord and God left the comfort and safety of His throne in heaven, entered the world held hostage by the evil one, died as a witness to the truth, and conquered in His resurrection. Then the saints and martyrs went before us out of the trenches into no man’s land, loved not their lives unto death, and won an imperishable crown of glory.
In our time the men who should be first in following their example should be the pastors. Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ (1 Cor. 11:1). During Covid, it should have been the pastors who bravely led their congregations in resisting the pressure to make an idol of earthly life and comfort and in holding forth the Word of Life. Sadly, it was not so in most cases. We taught our people by our examples that faith in Christ is merely knowledge of what Christ has done, rather than a stretching forth to take hold of it even in the face of opposition. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen.” (Heb. 11:1) Because faith is this, it does things. Because we are persuaded that Christ overcame the world by His death, pastors are supposed to go forward and take hold of the victory He has won. This is what it was for the fourteen percent of Missouri Synod congregations who celebrated Easter in their churches in person in 2020. They celebrated and proclaimed Christ’s victory over death by receiving His body and blood when the world insisted that to do so was to spread death and contagion.
“But my righteous one shall live by faith, and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him.” (Heb. 10:38) The first generation of Israelites to come out of Egypt perished in the wilderness. They were supposed to take possession of the land God had promised to Abraham, but instead their bodies littered the wilderness. They were not able to take possession of the land not because they didn’t understand that God had promised it to them, but because they didn’t believe God. They didn’t believe because when they heard about giants in the land and fortified cities, they measured God’s ability to perform what He had promised by what they saw in themselves.
Faith goes into the land to fight. It doesn’t wait for God to fulfill His promises by a deus ex machina that allows it to escape all conflict and suffering. By faith Moses left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king, for he endured as seeing him who is invisible. (Heb. 11:27) Faith sees God promising a better country, and it goes forth to take it, even if it has to live there in tents, as sojourners. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city. (Heb. 11: 16)
The inheritance we have been given by God in Baptism is resurrection with Christ. But the battles in which we are called to engage and conquer are the ones we see in front of us—a heterodox synod and a world that is strangling the churches slowly, waiting for the hour when we are weak enough that it can proceed to more open measures.
If we shrink back in this conflict, we perish. But we have fought these battles before, as we often congratulate ourselves. The Missouri Synod, as we so often say, was the only church in America to have fallen ill with theological liberalism and then driven it out of our seminaries. This has been the cause of so much boasting among us, when it ought to have caused us to mourn. Yes, God granted us favor and prevented us from being swallowed up by the apostasy that we have seen destroy most of the mainline denominations. Yet if we had learned the lesson of Joshua, we would be mourning instead of boasting, because like the Israelites we did not follow the Lord’s commandment about how this victory fifty years ago was to be followed up.
If You Turn Back and Cling to the Remnant of These Nations
Under Joshua, the Israelites fought a number of hard battles and subdued the major kings of the Canaanites. But much of the land was still left for succeeding generations to conquer. God had told the Israelites that He would not drive out the Canaanites all at once, but bit by bit, as long as they were strong and continued to do all that was written in the Law, not mixing with the nations or invoking their Gods but clinging to the Lord. The Canaanites would remain in the land, and the Israelites would continue to make war on them until they were gone. But as Joshua was preparing to die, he warned them:
Be very careful, therefore, to love the Lord your God. For if you turn back and cling to the remnant of these nations remaining among you and make marriages with them, so that you associate with them and they with you, know for certain that the Lord your God will no longer drive our these nations before you, but they shall be a snare and a trap for you, a whip on your sides and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from off this good ground that the Lord your god has given you. (Joshua 23:11-13)
This is, sadly, what has happened in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in the last fifty years. After the initial victory in the seventies, people were content to associate with and tolerate those who did not want to return to the faith of our fathers. We tolerated feminism, as long as women weren’t ordained. We tolerated Seminex-trained pastors and open communion and the incursions of the Church Growth movement. Fifteen years ago, God granted us another victory, and President Kieschnick, who appeared to have it in his heart to drive orthodox Lutherans out of the Missouri Synod, was unseated. But we still had not learned the lesson of Joshua. We did not have it in our hearts to fight the Lord’s battles to the end. Perhaps we were willing to tolerate and associate with false teachers because we thought if we were too strict and unbending, we might uproot the wheat with the tares. Or maybe it was because it was easier to complain in private than to raise our voices and wield the sword of the Lord against the high places and Asherah poles that were set up in half or more of our congregations. But whatever the reason, we did not have the heart of Joshua and Caleb, who clung to the Lord alone and engaged in His warfare until their last breaths.
Now therefore fear the lord and serve Him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. (Joshua 24:14-15).
We cannot serve the Lord while keeping the idols we served in Egypt, or making concessions to the gods of the Amorites. In the end we will only serve one or the other. No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. (Matt. 6:24). You cannot serve the Triune God and mammon, or feminism, or American liberalism, or any of the other ideologies in the 21st century that demand their pinch of incense.
To serve the Lord is to go to battle. It is to suffer and die for our witness to Christ, to conquer the world, death, and the devil with Him. It Is to open our mouths and bear witness against the unfaithfulness in our midst—the unfaithful, promiscuous opening of our altars, the unfaithful closure of our churches during Covid, the unfaithful disorder in our practice of the liturgy and our teaching on the orders of creation, the unfaithful failure of our leaders to discipline the unfaithful. It is to open our mouths and preach repentance to the world outside the churches, and repentance to those in our congregations who are conforming to the world. And it is to go to battle with joy, knowing that the Lord fights for us, and that “the Word they still shall let remain, nor any thanks have for it.