June 18, 2020
FROM YOUR PASTOR’S DESK:
ACHAN’S INDIVIDUAL SIN AFFECTED THE WHOLE NATION (THE CHURCH THEN)
“To establish his guilt beyond question, leaving no ground for the charge that he had been unjustly condemned, Joshua solemnly adjured Achan to acknowledge the TRUTH. The wretched man made full confession of his crime: ‘Indeed I have sinned against the Lord God of Israel…When I saw a GOODLY Babylonian garment [high-fashion, expensive], and 200 hundred shekels of silver and a wedge of gold of 50 shekels’ weight [the currency then], I COVETED them and took them; and behold, they are HID in the earth in the midst of my tent’ [as in hidden in my heart and imaginations].
“Messengers were immediately dispatched to the tent,… and ‘behold it was in the tent…and they took them out of the tent and brought them to Joshua….and laid them out BEFORE the Lord.”
“Sentence was pronounced and immediately executed.’Why have you troubled US?’ said Joshua, ‘the Lord shall TROUBLE you this day.’ As the PEOPLE had been held responsible for Achan’s sin, and had suffered from its consequences, they were, through their representatives, to TAKE PART in its punishment. “All Israel stones him with stones.”
“Then there was raised over him a great pile of stones, a witness to the sin [of covetousness] and its punishment [a monument of infamy, like Mrs. Lot turning into a pillar of salt].’Wherefore the name of that place was called the Valley of Achor,’ i.e., ‘trouble.’ In the book of Chronicles his memorial is written,–‘Achar, the troubler of Israel’ (1 Chon. 2:7).
“Achan’s sin was committed in defiance of the most direct and solemn warnings and the most mighty manifestations of God’s power. ‘Keep yourself from the accursed thing, lest ye make yourselves accursed.’
Let spiritual Israel remember the Valley of Achor! NMF