I invite you to connect with the voices of the Bible, and today that voice belongs to Joshua, standing before the whole nation of Israel with one final challenge. He is old. The years of leading Israel into the promised land are behind him. And before he dies, he calls everyone together one more time, not to celebrate what they have won, but to ask a question that still lands hard today: whom will you actually serve?
This scene comes from the very end of the book of Joshua, chapter 24, and the setting matters as much as the speech. Joshua gathers the people at Shechem, a place already thick with covenant history. This is where Abraham first built an altar when he arrived in the land generations earlier. It is where Jacob later buried the foreign household gods his family had been carrying, under an oak tree. Joshua is not picking a random field for a farewell address. He is standing his people on ground that already remembers what it means to choose God over every other loyalty.
What follows is a covenant renewal, a form the ancient world would have recognized immediately. A great king would remind a smaller nation of everything he had done for them before asking for their loyalty in return. Joshua uses exactly that pattern, but the great king in this speech is God. Watch how the whole middle section of the passage is God speaking in the first person, through Joshua, retelling the story: I took Abraham. I gave you this land. I brought you out of Egypt. I rescued you from Balaam’s curse. I gave you cities you didn’t build and vineyards you didn’t plant. Verse after verse, the subject of nearly every sentence is God, acting on Israel’s behalf, long before Israel had done anything to earn it.
That recital is not incidental. It is the whole argument. Before Joshua ever asks Israel to choose, he spends most of the speech reminding them that the choosing they are about to do is a response, not an initiative. They are not being asked to decide whether some new God deserves a chance. They are being asked whether they will keep serving the God who has already carried them this far, through slavery, through the wilderness, through wars they did not win by their own strength.
Only then, in verse fourteen, does Joshua turn the history into a decision. Revere the Lord, he says. Serve him honestly and faithfully. Put aside the other gods your ancestors carried with them, the ones from beyond the Euphrates and the ones from Egypt. And if serving the Lord seems wrong to you, then choose today whom you will serve. He names the alternatives plainly: the old household gods, or the gods of the people whose land Israel now lives in. There is no pretending the choice isn’t real. And then Joshua makes his own answer public, in front of everyone: as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
Notice what Joshua does not do. He does not force the decision or hide the cost of it. He lays out the whole history, names the real alternatives, and then simply declares where he and his household stand. The choice stays theirs. That is worth sitting with, because most of us are not choosing between God and some obviously foreign idol. We are choosing, the way Israel was, among loyalties that have quietly moved in over time: comfort, achievement, the good opinion of people who do not actually know us well. Those loyalties rarely announce themselves as competition for God. They just slowly take up the time and trust that used to belong somewhere else. Joshua’s question is not really about whether we believe God exists. It is about who gets our actual loyalty on an ordinary Tuesday, when nobody is watching and no speech is being made.
There is also something in the word household worth noticing. Joshua does not answer only for himself. He answers for everyone under his roof, because he understands that the choice he makes shapes the choices available to the people watching him make it. Children learn what their parents actually trust long before they can put it into words. Neighbors notice what steadies a household when things get hard. That is still true now. Whatever we choose to serve, the people closest to us are the first ones to find out, whether we say it out loud or not.
So return to that ground at Shechem, thick with memory, and hear the question again: choose today whom you will serve. The history behind the question is not a burden. It is the reason there is even a choice worth making. Go back to Joshua chapter twenty-four, sit with the whole speech, and let it ask you the same thing it asked Israel.
This is part of the Voices of the Bible series from Andrew Conard. Each week we explore the scripture passage for the upcoming sermon, helping you encounter the text before Sunday morning.