📖 Joshua Intensive — Unit 3: Crossing the Jordan / Memorial Stones

Orientation

Joshua chapters three and four belong together. Chapter three tells us how Israel crossed the Jordan. Chapter four tells us what they did to remember the crossing. The two chapters are a single act in two scenes — the act of crossing, and the act of memorializing. The crossing happened once. The memorial was meant to last for generations. The crossing was a miracle in time. The memorial was a sermon in stone, designed to preach to children not yet born.

The Jordan River at flood stage could be a mile wide and a hundred and fifty feet deep. Two and a half million people, with women and children and livestock and tents and tabernacle, were about to walk across it on dry ground. The Egyptians had seen the Red Sea opened a generation earlier. The Canaanites were about to see the Jordan opened in their own back yard. How do you fight against a God who can stop a river? When the kings of Canaan heard what had happened, the text tells us their hearts melted (5:1). The conquest of Canaan was won, in a real sense, the day the Jordan stood up.

I. Three Days at the Bank (Joshua 3:1–6)

Joshua moves the camp from Acacia Grove to the very edge of the Jordan and waits there three days. The text gives no reason for the delay, but the pattern is striking. Israel is told to look at the river. Look at the priests. Look at the ark. Wait. Watch. Sanctify yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do wonders among you (3:5). Sometimes God brings His people right to the edge of impossibility and asks them to stand and look. The waiting is not wasted time. The waiting is part of the preparation. It is in the three days at the riverbank that faith hardens into obedience.

Joshua's first instruction is striking. The priests, carrying the ark of the covenant, are to go ahead of the people. "When you see the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, and the priests, the Levites, bearing it, then you shall set out from your place and go after it" (3:3). The order of march is theological. The ark — the visible throne of the unseen God — leads. The priests bear it. The people follow. This is not a military formation. This is a worship procession. Israel does not invade Canaan. Israel walks into Canaan behind the presence of God.

II. Feet First, Then the Miracle (Joshua 3:7–17)

Notice carefully the sequence in Joshua 3:13. "And it shall come to pass, as soon as the soles of the feet of the priests who bear the ark of the Lord, the Lord of all the earth, shall rest in the waters of the Jordan, that the waters of the Jordan shall be cut off." The miracle does not happen before the priests step in. The miracle happens when the priests step in. As long as the priests are still on the bank, the river is still flooding. The water does not part until human feet are wet.

This is the rhythm of biblical faith. Faith is not standing on the bank waiting for the miracle. Faith is stepping into the water and trusting that the miracle will meet your feet. Peter walked on water only after he climbed out of the boat. The lepers were healed only after they started walking back to the priest. The widow's oil multiplied only after she started pouring. The Jordan opened only after the priests' soles were wet.

The priests step in. The water from upstream stops in a heap at a town called Adam, miles to the north. The flow downstream toward the Dead Sea drains away. And while two and a half million people cross over on dry ground, the priests stand in the middle of the riverbed with the ark on their shoulders, motionless, until the last Israelite has reached the western bank (3:17). The whole nation walks past the priests. The priests do not move until the people are safely across. That is a picture of pastoral ministry that the centuries have not exhausted.

III. Two Sets of Stones (Joshua 4:1–9)

When the crossing is finished, the Lord gives Joshua an unusual command. He tells him to choose twelve men, one from each tribe, and to have each man pick up a stone from the riverbed where the priests had stood, and carry it across to the western bank. These twelve stones are to be set up at Gilgal as a memorial.

That is the well-known set of stones. There is a less-noticed second set. Joshua himself, the text tells us, sets up another twelve stones in the middle of the Jordan, in the dry riverbed, where the priests' feet had stood (4:9). Two memorials, not one. One on the western bank, where every traveler could see it. One under the water, where only God could see it.

Imagine someone standing at the riverbank watching Joshua do this and grumbling, "Joshua, what are you doing? Once you let the river go again, no one will ever see those stones. Let's get on across this thing while we can. The water is rising." But Joshua is not stacking stones for the people. Joshua is stacking stones for God. He is leaving a marker that no human eye will ever read again, but that God Himself will know is there. Some memorials are public. Some memorials are private. Both matter. Some of God's most precious witness is in the things He alone sees us do.

IV. The Children Will Ask (Joshua 4:6–7, 21–24)

The whole point of the memorial stones, the text tells us twice, is the question of the next generation. "That this may be a sign among you when your children ask in time to come, saying, 'What do these stones mean to you?' Then you shall answer them..." (4:6–7). And again: "When your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, 'What are these stones?' then you shall let your children know, saying, 'Israel crossed over this Jordan on dry land...'" (4:21–22).

The stones are designed to provoke the question. They are deliberately strange. A pile of twelve oversized boulders dragged out of a riverbed is unusual. A child walking past Gilgal a hundred years later sees them and asks his father, What are these stones? And the father has the obligation, the privilege, and the joy of saying, Son, let me tell you what God did for our family.

This is one of the central duties of every Christian household and every Christian church. We must leave stones for the next generation. We must build into our families and our congregations the kind of unmistakable, unexplainable, deliberately strange witnesses to the work of God that will provoke the children to ask What are these stones? If our faith looks like the world's life, our children will not ask the question. If our marriages, our worship, our giving, our priorities, our way of handling suffering — if any of these stand up like a pile of unmistakable stones, the children will ask, and we will be ready to answer.

V. The German Lamb on the Roof

In an old German city there is a sight that catches every traveler who passes through. High up on the peaked roof of one of the old houses, carved in marble, is a statue of a lamb. The traveler asks the local resident what it means. The story comes out. When the original owner of the house was building it, he was working high up on the roof, near the very spot where the marble lamb now stands. He slipped, lost his balance, and fell. He should have been dashed to pieces on the ground below. But at that exact moment, his pet lamb happened to be lying on the green grass below the eaves. The man fell with all his weight onto the lamb. The lamb was crushed. The man stood up unscratched. Not a bone broken. Not a bruise. The lamb lay there in its blood, beneath the body of its master.

The owner carved the marble lamb and lifted it up onto the highest place of his house. Every time he passed under it, he remembered. Every time a stranger asked him about it, he had an opportunity to tell the story. The lamb on the roof was his memorial — a perpetual sign in stone that his life had been spared by the death of an innocent creature taking the fall in his place.

Memorials matter. They keep alive what the rush of life would otherwise let us forget.

VI. Forty Years to the Day

The text gives one detail in chapter four that is easy to miss. The crossing of the Jordan takes place in the first month, the tenth day of the first month (4:19). That is the same day, forty years earlier, that Israel had been told in Egypt to set apart the Passover lamb (Exodus 12:3). The Jews enter the Promised Land on the precise calendar day they had begun the journey. There are no coincidences with God. Just as God planned for Jesus, fifteen hundred years later, to spend forty days in the wilderness mirroring the forty years Israel had spent there, God planned the day Israel would arrive in the Promised Land down to the calendar square. What God intends, God times. What God times, God brings to pass on the appointed day.

VII. Christian Memorial Stones — The Lord's Supper and Baptism

When Jesus gathered with His disciples on the night before He died, He left them a memorial. He did not leave them a stone monument. He did not commission a building. He could have asked for a temple, a pyramid, a basilica. The Great Pyramid at Giza covers thirteen acres of base, contains two and a third million blocks weighing between two and fifteen tons each, and took a hundred thousand men twenty years to build. Jesus could have asked for something like that. He did not.

What He did ask for was bread and a cup. Frequently meet together. Eat a meal with the bread that will remind you of My broken body and the cup that will remind you of My blood. Look into the faces of one another, and love one another as I did when I was with men. While you remember My cross, remember that I am coming for you. And wherever you thus meet, I will meet with you. Stone monuments crumble. Pyramids erode. The Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem becomes a tourist stop. But this simple meal, repeated for two thousand years across every continent and language, is as fresh and as inspiring today as it was the night He gave it. The Lord's Supper is the Christian's memorial stone in the Jordan — a memorial we set up to remember a crossing that has already taken place, the crossing of the Son of God through death and out the other side.

And then there is baptism. Romans 6 tells us that when we are baptized, we are joined to the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. The water is not the salvation. The water is the marker. We go down into the water and we come up out of the water as a public memorial of the day we crossed our own Jordan and entered our own Promised Land. Years later, when temptation comes, when the old life calls, when we wonder whether we really belonged to Christ, we can look back on that day and say, I was buried with Him there. I was raised with Him there. I have already crossed.

This is also why I have a habit, when I lead someone to Christ, of having them kneel down to pray. They could pray sitting in their chair. They could pray walking down the road. The kneeling does not save them — Christ does. But the kneeling is a marker. Ten years later, when the doubt comes, when the question comes, did I really mean it? — they can look back to the day they knelt by the chair, and the kneel itself is a stone in the riverbed they can return to. Markers matter. Memorials hold.

VIII. The Lock of Hair

An old man once received a visitor in his home, and during the conversation he produced a lock of hair from a small box. The visitor said, "I imagine that is a curl from the head of some dear child long since gone to be with God." The old man said, "No. That is a lock of my own hair, and it is now almost seventy years since it was cut from my head."

Then the old man told the story. When he was a little boy of four, he was standing near his father in the yard watching him chop wood. As the splinters flew, the boy bent down to gather some at his feet. As he bent, he fell forward, and his curly head landed on the chopping log just as his father swung the axe. It was too late to stop the blow. The axe came down. The boy screamed. The father fell to the ground in terror, certain he had killed his only son. They both sat there shaking. When the father finally took the boy in his arms and searched him from head to foot, there was not a scar, not a drop of blood, not a wound. Only a lock of hair sliced off cleanly by the blade of the axe. The boy was untouched. The angel of the Lord had stood between the axe and the child.

The father saved that lock of hair for the rest of his life. It became his memorial of God's care. When he died, he passed it to his son. The old man held it up to his visitor and said, "I have many tokens of my heavenly Father's love through these long years. But somehow this one speaks most plainly to my heart. It used to speak to my father's heart. It now speaks to mine."

That is a memorial stone. That is a sermon in a small box. That is the kind of thing every believer ought to have somewhere — a tangible reminder of a moment when God's hand stopped the axe. We all have such moments if we will pay attention. The night we should have died and did not. The phone call we should have gotten and did not. The temptation we should have fallen into and did not. The financial collapse that should have buried us and did not. Find your stones. Pile them up at your Gilgal. Tell the story to your children when they ask.

IX. The Plaque in the Wrong Place

Memorials can also be misunderstood. A pastor once gave a tour of his church auditorium to a young family. He pointed out the various memorial plaques that lined the walls — the window in memory of one family, the organ in memory of another, the pulpit in memory of a third. Finally he stopped at a small plaque on the back wall and said, "And this plaque lists the names of those who died in the service." A little boy looked up at his father with wide eyes and asked, "Mister, which one? The morning service or the evening service?"

Some memorials need explaining. That is the whole point of a stone. The stone provokes the question, and the answer is the gospel. If a believer's life produces no questions, then no answer is ever called for. Live in such a way that people ask you about the stones.

Closing

The chapter ends with Israel camped at Gilgal, the twelve stones standing as a witness, the memory of the priests in the riverbed fresh in everyone's mind, and the walls of Jericho standing about two miles away in plain sight. The crossing is finished. The memorial is built. The next obstacle is already on the horizon. But Israel will fight that battle from a different position than they had at the start of the chapter. They have been on the eastern bank. Now they are on the western. They have been a wandering people. Now they are a people of the land. Between the two stands a pile of twelve stones, the marker of a moment when God did the impossible and they walked through the place where the river used to be.

Whoever you are, build your memorials. Mark the places of God's deliverance in your life. Tell the stories. Pass them down. Set up the bread and the cup. Walk through the waters of baptism. Kneel to pray. Save the lock of hair. Lift the marble lamb to the highest place on your house. The God who carried you across once did not do it for you alone. He did it so that the children, three generations from now, would ask What are these stones? and someone would still be alive who knew the answer.

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