Great Things He Has Done

Great Things He Has Done

These days we have plenty of ways to capture moments and preserve them for future generations. Take YouTube, for example. From a baby’s first steps to a crazy BMX stunt to a girl lip-synching into her hairbrush, people can record and post just about anything for the whole world to see. And it’ll be there forever! But immortalizing slices of life hasn’t always been that easy. In fact, the Israelites had a low-tech version of YouTube called “stack of rocks.”

Early in the book of Joshua, God decided it was time for his people to enter the land promised to them. First stop: Jericho. But they had to cross the Jordan River to get there. Following God’s instructions, the priests who carried the Ark of the Covenant stepped into the swollen river, and the water stopped flowing downstream. Those priests stood in the middle of the dry riverbed as the entire nation of Israel passed through.

Before restoring the waters to normal, God told Joshua to have twelve men (one per tribe) grab twelve large stones from around the priests’ feet and carry them to their camp. Joshua stacked them as a memorial to what God had just done (see Joshua 4:20-22). God wanted that moment captured for memory. For generations to come, whenever kids asked, “Hey, what’s with the stones?” parents were reminded to replay the story of how the Lord protected Israel and guided the nation to a new home.

There’s a lot of silly stuff on YouTube, isn’t there? Practical jokes. Wedding cake disasters. Large people crawling through doggie doors. It’s enough to make you wish that folks in the Bible had owned helmet cams for capturing the good stuff. No one’s sure how many “views” Joshua’s stack of rocks received over the years, but we can confidently say that God got the glory, which is what the best memorials are all about.

Daddy-Daughter Time

Talk about times you knew that God was looking out for you, personally or as a family. Did you record those experiences in a scrapbook or a journal? Consider doing that. Or, like the Israelites, each of you can find a special stone and paint it as a memorial to the Lord’s goodness (put small stones in a planter, larger ones in a garden).

What’s The Word?

It was there at Gilgal that Joshua piled up the twelve stones taken from the Jordan River. Then Joshua said to the Israelites, “In the future your children will ask, ‘What do these stones mean?’ Then you can tell them, ‘This is where the Israelites crossed the Jordan on dry ground.’”   Joshua 4:20-22