Joshua Intensive — Unit 5: Achan's Sin & the Restoration of Ai

You have heard of the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. That is certainly true. Job is the great Old Testament example: he did nothing wrong, yet lost his money, his health, and his children. His wife told him to curse God and die. His friends told him there had to be hidden sin in his life — that was the common sentiment in his day. Even the disciples were confused; they saw the man born blind from birth and asked Jesus whether it was the man's sin or his parents' sin that caused his blindness. Jesus said it was neither and just healed the man.

But the other half of the truth is just as biblical, and Joshua 7 is the textbook case for it: sometimes bad things happen to people who do bad things. Sin has consequences. Wayne tells of a couple in Canada when he served there as a pastor. Debbie was a charter member of the church. She came regularly and brought her children. Her husband Dave had actually attended a Bible college after high school, but he said church was unnecessary to be a Christian and that besides, there were hypocrites in the church. When their son was in the second grade, the Sunday school teacher was talking about Memorial Day — and remembering people who had died. The boy spoke up: "But they are not gone forever, because they are in heaven now." Over the years, Dave scheduled more and more activities on Sunday. Debbie stopped coming. None of the five children really attended after the third grade or so — they wanted to be like their father. Today the boy who knew about heaven in the second grade is involved in bad crowds and drugs. Debbie has started attending church again, but none of the children attend with her. Bad things sometimes happen to people who do bad things, and the things that fall on them often fall on the people they love.

You don't sin alone.

Joshua 7 and 8 work together as a single arc. Chapter 7 shows the defeat at Ai, the discovery of Achan's hidden sin, the public dealing with it in the Valley of Achor, and the restoration of the covenant. Chapter 8 shows the second attack on Ai — this time successful — and the building of an altar on Mount Ebal where the entire Law of God is read aloud over the assembled nation, blessings and curses both. The two chapters together teach a single lesson: God will not bless an army that is hiding stolen goods in its tent, and God will gladly bless an army that has dealt with the sin and gathered again around His altar.

This unit walks the same arc. Section I takes the three reasons for failure at Ai — pride, neglect of prayer, and disobedience. Section II walks the discovery and confession (the dying farmer who said, "Ring the bell"). Section III stands at the Valley of Achor with Achan's family and a more recent execution that mirrored it (Karla Faye Tucker, February 1998). Section IV listens to John Fischer's haunting refrain — "You don't sin alone". Section V picks up the New Guinea monkey trap. Section VI moves into chapter 8: God says, "Do not fear or be dismayed," and Israel takes the city it could not take a week earlier. Section VII climbs Mount Ebal where the altar is built and the Law is read aloud. The Closing turns the Valley of Achor into a door of hope (Hosea 2:15).

Joshua 7 begins with one of the most ominous sentences in the Old Testament: "But the children of Israel committed a trespass regarding the accursed things, for Achan… took of the accursed things; so the anger of the LORD burned against the children of Israel" (Joshua 7:1). One man took. The whole nation suffered. The text already knows what the army does not yet know — that the army marching toward the next city is marching with stolen goods buried in one of its tents. From the human side it looks like a failed military campaign. From God's side it is a covenant in trouble.

1. Pride — The Danger of Over-Confidence (Joshua 7:2–5)

Jericho had fallen without a sword being swung. Now Joshua sends scouts to look at Ai, the next town up the road. They come back with confident counsel: "Do not let all the people go up, but let about two or three thousand men go up and attack Ai. Do not weary all the people there, for the people of Ai are few" (Joshua 7:3). Joshua takes the spies' counsel. There is no record that he prayed about it. There is no record that he asked the LORD whether to attack at all. He simply nods at the report and sends three thousand men. The men of Ai come out, the Israelites flee, and thirty-six men are killed on the slope. The text says it plainly: "the hearts of the people melted and became like water" (Joshua 7:5). The same nation whose testimony had melted the kings of Canaan one chapter earlier now finds its own heart melting. That is what happens when a confident plan rests on a sin nobody has dealt with.

Wayne illustrates the deeper problem with the story of Dr. C. J. Fowler, a noted holiness preacher and for many years head of the National Holiness Association. Fowler was the pastor of a very fine church and felt he needed to be sanctified to please God. He attended a holiness meeting and went to the altar. God guided him in his consecration, and he laid on God's altar many things, including a gold-headed cane and his stovepipe hat. After saying amen to all this, he still did not get the witness that he was sanctified. Then he asked God if there was anything else he should lay on the altar. God showed him that he had a professional pride, that there was in his heart a desire to be known as the pastor of a large church, and that he loved to have places of prominence. He promised God he would be content to be unknown, and that God would have his reputation. Then peace came and he knew he was sanctified. And God gave to him a field of usefulness wider than he could ever have attained had he refused to take the despised way of the Cross.

That is the picture of pride that Joshua 7 is sketching at the army level. It is striking that Joshua instantly takes the counsel of the spies. The spies are confident, the camp is on a winning streak, and nobody asks the obvious question. Proverbs 16:18 walks into the room: "Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall." Pride is the first reason for the defeat at Ai. The flint knives have been put away too soon. The sandals are back on.

2. Neglect of Prayer

The second reason follows the first like night follows day. When the three thousand soldiers headed out for Ai, the text records nothing about prayer. They are silent before God. Maybe they thought this was so trivial they didn't need to pray about it. Sometimes we forget we need God for the big things and the little things. We have to learn again that we can do nothing without Him. Wayne says he sometimes finds himself praying about very small things — even about finding a parking space. James says, "You have not because you ask not" (James 4:2).

After the defeat, Joshua went straight to God. He even reproaches God: "Why have You brought us here? Why are You going to destroy us?" (cf. Joshua 7:7). God taught him that the blame did not lie at the LORD's door but at his own. The pattern is exactly backwards from how it should have been: pray before the battle, not just after the defeat. There is an old verse Wayne loves to quote about this:

"Restraining prayer, we cease to fight; / Prayer keeps the Christian's armor bright; / And Satan trembles when he sees, / The weakest saint upon his knees."

The weakest saint upon his knees has more authority in heaven than the strongest army on the slope of Ai. The three thousand had armor and weapons. They had no knees. They had no questions for God. They had only the spies' confident report. And so they ran.

3. Disobedience — Achan in the Tent

The third reason is the deepest and the hardest. After Joshua falls on his face before the LORD, God answers him with a flat statement: "Israel has sinned, and they have also transgressed My covenant which I commanded them. For they have even taken some of the accursed things, and have both stolen and deceived; and they have also put it among their own stuff" (Joshua 7:11). When Achan stole the Babylonian cloak, the silver, and the wedge of gold from Jericho, he surely never imagined there would be such terrible consequences. From Joshua to the whole camp, the one sin had a consequence. That is the way of sin. Like ripples on a stream, it spreads outward.

The Captain of the LORD's host, who in chapter 5 had stood before Joshua with His sword drawn, has now sheathed His sword. The covenant is broken because someone has taken what belonged exclusively to the LORD. The army fights with no covering, and so the army loses. Pride opened the door. Prayerlessness left it open. Disobedience walked through.

The LORD does not name Achan to Joshua at first. Instead He prescribes a process: the nation will come near tribe by tribe, then by family, then by household, then man by man, and the LORD Himself will single out the offender (Joshua 7:14). It is slow on purpose. Every Israelite has all night to think about whether the lot might land on him. By the time the lot finally falls on Achan, every man in the camp has had to ask himself the question Achan should have asked weeks before.

When Achan is finally identified, Joshua's words to him are remarkable. They are not the words of a furious general; they are the words of a pastor: "My son, I beg you, give glory to the LORD God of Israel, and make confession to Him, and tell me now what you have done; do not hide it from me" (Joshua 7:19). And Achan tells the whole truth. He saw a beautiful Babylonian garment, two hundred shekels of silver, and a wedge of gold weighing fifty shekels. He coveted them. He took them. He hid them in the earth in the middle of his tent. The progression is the progression of every secret sin: I saw, I coveted, I took, I hid. The same four verbs that ran through the Garden of Eden run through Achan's tent.

Wayne illustrates the power of confession with a story:

It is said that a farmer was sick and prayed earnestly for his recovery. Somehow he felt it was the will of the Lord. But, after much prayer, neither he nor any of his friends seemed to be able to have any faith for his healing, and he became resigned to go. He was expected to die at any time. However, as he lingered, his children and friends returned to their nearby homes. It was agreed that, when his attendants felt that the end was about there, they would ring the bell, and this was to be the signal to assemble for the last good-bye. Finally, one day he said to his wife, "Ring the bell." She replied, "Are you worse, and do you feel the end is near?" He simply said, "Ring the bell."

The bell was rung, and soon all the children stood weeping around the bedside. Then he began confessing his failures. He would address the children, one by one, and speak of his faults, and how he had been impatient, or wronged them in some way. There was weeping and confessing all around. It was like a camp meeting. Finally he was through, and amid tears and shouts of joy he said, "Now, just one more thing; please get my clothes and let me out of here, for the Lord has healed me." And out he came.

God does say, "Confess your faults one to another… that ye may be healed" (James 5:16). Sometimes this might go a long way toward physical healing, or toward bringing spiritual healing to a home or church. This might precipitate a revival. Achan would not get the farmer's outcome. But the spiritual mechanism is the same: confession is the only thing that puts hidden sin out in the open where God can deal with it. The bell has to be rung. The clothes have to come out from under the floorboards of the tent.

The execution of Achan in Joshua 7:24–26 is one of the harshest scenes in the Old Testament. Achan, his sons, his daughters, his oxen, his donkeys, his sheep, his tent, and the stolen goods are all taken to a valley and stoned. A great heap of stones is raised over the place. The valley is named the Valley of Achor — from the same Hebrew root as the name Achan — meaning trouble. The pile of stones is a covenant marker. It says three things to anyone who walks past: Sin in the camp is dangerous. The sin has been dealt with. God has restored Israel to a right relationship with Himself.

The hardest detail is the family. Why is the whole household punished for one man's theft? Two notes hold this in tension. First, the text strongly implies the family was complicit — the goods were buried in the middle of the tent, in plain sight of every member, for an extended period. Hiding stolen treasure under the floor of a Bronze Age tent is not a one-man operation. Second, sin always has consequences that travel further than the sinner. The lesson we learn is that sin always has consequences. There is a ripple effect like a stone cast on a lake.

A more recent execution sat in Wayne's notes alongside this passage. On February 3, 1998, Karla Faye Tucker was put to death by the State of Texas. She was thirty-eight. Tucker had killed a man and a woman with a pickax during a robbery after three days of taking drugs. She and a boyfriend had gone to steal motorcycle parts from an acquaintance, Jerry Lynn Dean. Her boyfriend, who was also sentenced to death but died in prison of liver disease, began beating Dean with a hammer. Tucker grabbed a pickax and finished Dean off, then turned on Deborah Thornton, who was cowering in the corner, killing her and leaving the pickax embedded in her chest. In prison Tucker became a born-again Christian. Before her death by lethal injection, she apologized to the families of her victims. "I am so sorry," she said. "I hope God will give you peace with this. I am going to be face to face with Jesus now. I love all of you very much. I will see you all when you get there. I will wait for you."

Tucker's case drew support from across the nation and around the world. Pope John Paul II, the European Parliament, the United Nations, and even religious broadcaster Pat Robertson called for mercy. The Texas Board of Pardons and Parole voted 16–0 against commuting her sentence. Governor George W. Bush did not grant the one-time thirty-day reprieve that was his to give. Richard Thornton, husband of Deborah, said he could not accept the apology and did not believe the conversion. Deborah's brother Ron Carlson opposed the execution, saying she was a perfect example of how rehabilitation in the penal system is supposed to work. Tucker's husband, prison minister Dana Brown, called her "a Christian who loved God with all her heart." In her final interview, Tucker urged Christians to get involved with prison ministry: "Because if God is literally living in somebody and his life is governed by His law, by His love, by His morals, and they walk out of here, they're not going to be a threat to our society."

Karla Faye Tucker's case is not Joshua 7. The legal questions are different. The covenant context is different. But the spiritual mechanics are the same. Sin has consequences that the sinner cannot stop, even when she has been forgiven by God. The blood of Christ removes the eternal penalty in a heartbeat. The temporal consequences of pickaxes and stolen goods and dead victims do not always lift in this life. The Valley of Achor in Joshua 7 and the gurney in Huntsville in 1998 say the same hard sentence over the same hard truth: your sin will find you out (Numbers 32:23).

In Joshua 7:14–18 God explains to Joshua what he is to say to the nation, and talks about the profound effect of the disobedience of even one person. A number of years ago when John Fischer was on the staff at Wayne's church as a musician, he wrote a song out of this story of Achan and Ai. It has the haunting refrain, "You don't sin alone." Whatever I do has an effect on the people around me. A church family can be defeated by the malignancy of an individual's unconfessed sin.

Wayne says: "I've been involved recently with a family that was literally destroyed fifteen years ago by the sinful choices of the father. He was unwilling to repent and deal with the sin, and the marriage exploded. It was an acrimonious divorce. As a result of this mess, the three children, all in late adolescence or early adulthood, ended up estranged from both their mother and their father, and embittered against the Lord himself. That estrangement has gone on for almost fifteen years now."

None of us sins alone. Sin has a corrupting influence. It rolls outward from the tent into the camp. It rolls outward from the marriage bed into the children's bedrooms and into the next generation. The thirty-six men who died on the slope of Ai never met Achan. They had no idea his tent contained the trigger that pulled their funeral. That is the part of sin we never quite want to look at: not what it does to me, but what it does to the people who happen to be in the same camp with me.

Achan's sin took out thirty-six soldiers, his own household, and almost the entire campaign of conquest before God interrupted the chain. The 1998 case Wayne mentions took out a marriage and three young adult lives. The pattern is the same pattern. You don't sin alone.

Some years ago Wayne read about how they catch monkeys in New Guinea. They take a big, dry gourd, hollow it out, and fill it up with nuts that the monkeys love. They cut a hole in the gourd just big enough for the monkey to slip his hand through. The monkey grabs the nuts inside, but cannot pull his hand out. All he has to do to get free is let the nuts go and slip his hand back out. But the monkey wants the nuts too badly and won't let go, and then he is captured.

That is the point of the Achan and Ai story for the nation Israel, and for us today as well. When we hold onto sin in our lives, we become slaves to sin. We think we can get away with just a little moodiness, a little selfish anger, a little resentment. The hand is in the gourd. The fingers are around the nuts. And the hunter is walking up the path. The instinct of the monkey is to grip harder; the instinct of grace is to open the hand. The whole battle of Achan and the whole battle of every believer who has ever sat over a hidden sin and asked, "Can I keep this and still serve God?" — the answer is the same answer the monkey never figures out. Open the hand. The nuts are not worth the gourd.

Joshua 8 opens with one of the most pastoral sentences in the book. After the discipline of chapter 7, the LORD does not leave Joshua under the cloud. He says, "Do not be afraid, nor be dismayed; take all the people of war with you, and arise, go up to Ai. See, I have given into your hand the king of Ai, his people, his city, and his land" (Joshua 8:1). The same past-tense word from chapter 6 is back: I have given. The covenant is restored. The Captain has unsheathed His sword again. Israel marches against the same city that routed it a chapter earlier — only this time everything is different.

Now the army is led by the LORD instead of by spy reports. Now the strategy is divinely given: an ambush. Joshua sends thirty thousand mighty men of valor by night to lie in wait behind the city (Joshua 8:3–9). The next morning he leads the main force toward Ai as if to repeat the previous attack. The men of Ai see the Israelites flee, and just as before, they swarm out of the gates in pursuit, congratulating themselves on a second easy victory. The city stands empty. Then Joshua, at the LORD's command, stretches out his spear, the ambush rises behind the city and sets it on fire, and the fleeing army wheels around. Ai is caught between the two forces. The city falls.

The textual detail to notice is the spear. Joshua holds it stretched out for the entire battle, lowering it only when the city is destroyed (Joshua 8:18, 26). It is a deliberate echo of Moses on the hilltop with arms raised over Amalek in Exodus 17. The same God who saved by Moses' raised hands saves by Joshua's stretched-out spear. The point is not the spear. The point is the leader interceding while the battle is fought below. Restoration after sin always involves a return to the posture of Moses and Joshua: arms up, eyes on the LORD, while the people fight the fight God has already won.

The contrast with chapter 7 is total. There: pride, prayerlessness, hidden sin, defeat. Here: humility before God, prayerful obedience, sin dealt with, victory. Same army. Same city. Different campaign. The difference is not the soldiers. The difference is the covenant. I have given.

Joshua 8 does not end with the smoking ruins of Ai. It ends with one of the most underrated worship services in the Old Testament. Joshua takes the entire nation — men, women, little ones, elders, officers, judges, including the foreigner who lived among them — and gathers them in the natural amphitheater between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim, exactly where Moses had commanded forty years earlier in Deuteronomy 27. There, on Mount Ebal, Joshua builds an altar of unhewn stones over which no iron tool has been raised. They offer burnt offerings and peace offerings to the LORD. Then Joshua inscribes a copy of the law of Moses on stones, in the presence of the entire nation. And then, with half the tribes standing on Mount Gerizim and half on Mount Ebal, Joshua reads aloud all the words of the Law — the blessings and the curses — "according to all that is written in the Book of the Law. There was not a word of all that Moses had commanded which Joshua did not read before all the assembly of Israel" (Joshua 8:34–35).

Read what just happened. The first thing Israel does after recovering from a sin-driven defeat is not to build a fortress, not to consolidate territory, not to plan the next campaign. The first thing they do is build an altar and read the Bible. Worship and the Word are the two posts that hold up the door back into the covenant after sin has knocked it off its hinges. Without the altar there is no atonement for sin already committed. Without the Word there is no warning against sin still tempting. The two go together. A church that worships without reading the Word will drift. A church that reads the Word without worshipping will harden. A church that does both, on the same morning, on the same hill, gets back what Achan tried to steal.

Notice also who is in the assembly: "with the women, the little ones, and the strangers who were living among them" (Joshua 8:35). The reading is not just for the priests or the warriors. The four-year-olds hear it. The foreign Gibeonite hears it — because by the next chapter of Joshua he will be there. The Word goes to the whole camp because the sin had infected the whole camp. The remedy travels as far as the disease.

This is also where Joshua's Joshua 5 lesson finally lands. The Captain who told him to take off his sandals because the ground was holy is now standing in the assembly while the whole nation hears the same Law that was given on Sinai. The same God. The same covenant. The same expectation. After the discipline, Israel comes back to the place it should have been all along: standing under the Word, with sandals off in spirit if not in body, with the altar smoking in front of them and the blessings and curses ringing across the valley between two mountains. That is the picture of restoration. That is what God does after Achan.

Centuries after Joshua, the prophet Hosea picks up the same valley and repurposes it into one of the great pictures of grace in the Old Testament. Speaking of unfaithful Israel, the LORD says: "I will give her her vineyards from there, and the Valley of Achor as a door of hope" (Hosea 2:15). The same valley where one man's sin had killed his family becomes, in Hosea, the doorway through which God will lead a broken people back to Himself. The pile of stones over Achan's bones does not have the last word. The door of hope does.

That is the gospel reading of Joshua 7–8. Sin in the camp is dangerous. Sin in the camp does not have the last word. The Captain still has His sword. The altar still smokes on Mount Ebal. The Law is still read over the assembly. And the Valley of Achor is still a door of hope for anyone willing to ring the bell, open the hand, drop the nuts, and come out from under the floor of the tent.

You don't sin alone. You also do not have to repent alone. The God who gave Jericho gave Ai the second time, after Achan was buried under the stones. He will do the same for any believer this week.