Read
1The Amorite kings west of the Jordan River and the Canaanite kings along the Mediterranean Sea lost their courage and their will to fight, when they heard how the Lord had dried up the Jordan River to let Israel go across.
Israel Gets Ready
2While Israel was camped at Gilgal, the Lord said, “Joshua, make some flint knives and circumcise the rest of the Israelite men and boys.”
3Joshua made the knives, then circumcised those men and boys at Haaraloth Hill. 4-7 This had to be done, because none of Israel's baby boys had been circumcised during the 40 years that Israel had wandered through the desert after leaving Egypt.
And why had they wandered for 40 years? It was because right after they left Egypt, the men in the army had disobeyed the Lord. And the Lord had said, “None of you men will ever live to see the land that I promised Israel. It is a land rich with milk and honey, and someday your children will live there, but not before you die here in the desert.”
8Everyone who had been circumcised needed time to heal, and they stayed in camp.
9The Lord told Joshua, “It was a disgrace for my people to be slaves in Egypt, but now I have taken away that disgrace.” So the Israelites named the place Gilgal, and it still has that name.
10 Israel continued to camp at Gilgal in the desert near Jericho, and on the fourteenth day of the same month, they celebrated Passover.
11-12 The next day, God stopped sending the Israelites manna to eat each morning, and they started eating food grown in the land of Canaan. They ate roasted grain and thin bread made of the barley they had gathered from nearby fields.
Reflect
Identity is an obsession with western people and has been for much of the past century. Everything – from the existential philosophers, Bourne’s many passports and Lady Gaga’s multiple costumes to the perennial “identity crisis” of forty-somethings – speak of this underlying confusion: Who am I really?
There is a solid foundation for our identity. It is found in God who made us and called us to himself. It is this foundation that the people of Israel are called to, and to which we are also called.
In Egypt the children of Israel knew who they were – they were slaves. They were the nobodies of the land, but God had given them a sign, circumcision, which said: you are not just a bunch of nobodies, you are mine. You, the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, are my people. So the “reproach of Egypt” (5:9) was to be a non-people, just something owned by the Egyptians. Rolling away the reproach by being circumcised was, by faith, to be God’s people, and thus to be free.
When you answer the question “Who are you?” what do you say? And is your answer an answer that identifies you as being free, or as being owned – by a company or country, or a past, or even by a language or your ancestry? Decide to be free, join yourself to Christ, and say: “I am a follower of Jesus, I am a free person.”
Respond
Father in heaven, we so easily become just objects for mass marketing, people without a true core identity. Today I want to give myself to you and to Jesus Christ and ask that by the Holy Spirit I might know that I am your child, loved, and with an eternal future with you.
Franklin Pyles
Franklin Pyles was a pastor of churches that served inner city neighborhoods, taught theology at Canadian Theological Seminary, and then was a pastor in a medium sized Ontario city. He then served his denomination, The Christian & Missionary Alliance as President for the full time allotted. He has written on C.S. Lewis and on a variety of ministry and church concerns. He continues a preaching and teaching ministry, currently at McMaster Divinity College. Publications: Most electronic and in house for the Alliance.