Achan Over Justice

Joshua 7 is one of those passages that I wish wasn't in the Bible. In brief: the Israelites conquer Jericho and are instructed to give to God all of the spoils. They were to keep none of the articles of gold or silver or anything of value for themselves.

Achan doesn't listen. He keeps some gold and silver for himself. So the next battle that the Israelites take on they get routed and about 35 of their men are killed. God tells Joshua that there's sin in the camp. Eventually they find out that it's Achan, and they stone him and all his family--women and children.

Yuck.

Monday I told God that this was a hard passage for me. I told him I didn't really like it, and asked him to help me with the image of my wife and kids getting stoned (a nasty way to die) by God's orders on account of my sin.

Tuesday, I went back to the same story and realized that my problem with the passage was due at least in some part because of my own problem: I don't take sin very seriously.

See, my assumption with sin is that it is there to be excused, forgiven, winked at, shrugged off, disposed of quickly and easily and painlessly. My assumption is that sin is not a big a deal.

My presumption upon God, therefore, is that he is there to dismiss sin, ignore it, clean up the mess and not allow us to deal with the consequences or reality of it.

But the reality is that sin is death. It is corrosive, destructive, vile. Sin is not something to take lightly, dismiss, laugh off or pretend that it never happened.

Sin is a cancer on the beauty of humanity, a plague, a parasite, a tyrant, a despot that destroys people and relationships and families and governments and churches and communities and cultures and ultimately, if left un-checked, would collapse in on itself and consume all the world.

I want Achan to be let off the hook easily because I want to be let off the hook easily. But Easter will not let me do that. Good Friday will not let me skim over the depths and the horror and the seriousness of my sin.

And so I need Achan today. I need Achan to teach me new and holy appetites. My sin is not to be ignored or excused or shrugged off--I must learn to hate the thing that would hijack my life and destroy me, body and soul.

And I'm tentatively praying a new prayer this week: to see sin for what it truly is. I'm afraid of what that might mean, what I might see in my own heart as well as what I might have to see in the world around me. But I think my response to Achan is showing me that I need a bit of a reality check as to the true nature of sin.

I must learn to embrace the hard-earned forgiveness offered to me in Christ without arrogant presumption that "of course" God would die a bloody tortured death for me. My sin puts my Maker on a wooden beam with nails in his hands. Good Friday is when Jesus becomes Achan for me.

This doesn't quiet all my internal objections to Achan and his family and the judgment passed on them. I love mercy. I fear justice. I don't always understand how God is both just and merciful.

But for today, I can embrace the lesson of my tendency to downplay my sin and my need to repent of it. And I pray that God might use this repentance to lead me more fully and deeply into the wonder and mystery and power and awe of Easter.