Those were Israel’s three choices if they did not want to worship the Lord. Joshua says, “Make your choice. You’ve got the gods of Egypt, the gods of Babylon, the gods of Canaan, or the God of Israel. What will it be? You have to choose. You have to go on choosing. But as for me and my house, we are going to choose God.” Now the people made their choice, which seemed easy. After all, God had given them the land. Why shouldn’t they worship God? That’s the way they reply in verses 16-18: “Far be it from us to forsake the Lord to serve other gods! It was the Lord our God himself who brought us and our forefathers up out of Egypt, from that land of slavery, and performed those great signs before our eyes. He protected us on our entire journey and among all the nations through which we traveled. And the Lord drove out before us all the nations, including the Amorites, who lived in the land. We too will serve the Lord, because he is our God.”

Joshua’s challenge to them is to choose God. I mentioned when we were talking about Joshua 22 and 23 that this has been his challenge all along. “You must make a decision,” he’s saying. “You must choose to serve God.” For the first time here in chapter 24, the word “choose” occurs: “Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether it’s the gods your forefathers served beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord” (v. 15).

Paul wrote that no one does good and no one seeks after God. That’s the way God sees the human heart. And if, when God looks down from heaven upon the heart of man, all He sees is that the heart of man is only deceitful and practicing wicked all the time from His perspective, how could God possibly find a little bit of human faith upon which to build unless He Himself had first put it there? This, of course, is what He did in the case of Abraham.

The point at which this sermon begins is with a reminder of what God had already done for the people in the past. Now that’s the pattern Joshua had used earlier in chapters 22 and 23. But here in chapter 24 we have the lengthiest rehearsal of all these great works of God on behalf of the people in past days. Joshua goes all the way back to Abraham, the father of the people, and even beyond Abraham, to Abraham’s father, Terah, and his grandfather, Nahor, when in those far distant days they worshipped other gods.

Now Joshua was not a preacher; he was a soldier and a great administrator. And yet, Joshua must have thought about the nature of preaching, because towards the end of his life this great general, whose campaigns and whose life we’ve been studying, became something of a preacher. I suppose the reason for this was his deep knowledge of human nature and his anticipation with some foreboding of what was likely to happen to the people after his departure, and perhaps also after the death of those who had lived with him through the great miracles and victories of the Canaanite campaign.