Day 52: November 5, 2025 – Joshua 7-9 and Acts 7-9

We find Joshua commanded by God to do things that in our modern day sensibilities just might offend us. He was commanded to invade lands and to destroy all things within the cities except for the livestock and the plunder. So all men, women, and children were to be killed. There is one city in our reading where we see that 36,000 people are killed by the sword. One of you just might say, enough is enough, you made your point. But the point is that as we see even in our reading, the worship of other gods was so prevalent that the Israelites had a hard time turning away from that temptation. The entire family of the Israelite who buried the treasure and the gods of a foreign land was destroyed because it could be considered a cancer among them. If the people were allowed to live who worshipped other gods then without a doubt they would have influenced the Israelites even more to worship other gods. Does it bother me, of course it does, but it also makes sense. For us today it means to get rid of anything in our lives that would drive us towards that which takes us away from God.

In Acts we see the first martyr of Jesus’ sake after Jesus dies. Stephen is stoned to death because he tells the history of the people of God, the new people of God. As a result he is stoned to death. We see some of my favorite stories in the Bible in this reading. The conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch is powerful because God is presented to him on his own terms and he asks the question: what is to prevent me from being baptized. We see the conversion of Saul to Paul as he makes his way to Damascus and the ensuing confusion by the disciples because they remember him as being scary and one that you could not trust. But then he becomes the one who plants the churches and writes the theology of the church. You see, God is able to use anyone, even, or especially, those who at one time opposed him.