I do not know how you feel as you approach a chapter like Joshua 23. Joshua, 'waxed old and stricken in age', was gathering the congregation around him for almost the last time and giving them these words of exhortation and encouragement.

I wonder if you feel as I do — possessed with a sense of wistful longing and of fear? Will I persevere in my calling? Will I finish my course? We long to do so. But then we recognize our awful weakness and sinfulness. Yet we are encouraged in remembering that Joshua was a man subject to like passions as we are, and the only passing references to himself in this section are his words, 'I am old and stricken in age ... this day I am going the way of all the earth'. His great concern was to exhort the people to cleave to Jehovah their God (v 8). Consider firstly:

The God to Whom They Were to Cleave⤒🔗

He is the God who acts. He protects his people, and overthrows his enemies. He is the God who rules the world and who has a purpose for it. This is not a world dominated by chaos; it is a universe dominated by God. Nor is it a world cringing in the shadow of cosmic malevolence; it is a world made by God.

He is the God of mighty acts, and Joshua can appeal to them: 'Ye have seen all that the Lord your God hath done'. That is the great theme and foundation of Joshua's entire message. Of course it is our great theme too. The beginning of the gospel is the living God. The God who is. Rabbi Duncan was for many years in the depths of atheistic despair and then one day the Lord showed him in his grace all the glory of this whole universe, as it resided and rested in the hands of God. Duncan says: 'I danced for joy'. That is where the gospel begins, that this world is in the hands of a divine, benevolent, wise, loving, gracious Ruler, and so this life of mine has meaning, and history has meaning.

When I am old and stricken in age I shall look back on my story and I may see the plan of a wise providence; his hand was upon me leading and guiding. I shall look ahead to the end of my life knowing it could be just a few years more, and aware that the grave is not the meaning of life. My explanation is not reducable to that, because my life is in God. It is in God it has meaning, and it has the meaning of his grace and of his love.

So Joshua reminds them that God is, and of all that Jehovah has done for them in driving out their enemies and in giving them an inheritance. 'Cleave unto the Lord your God' he says. They are to cleave to this God who has been so faithful to them, to this God who chose them not because they were more in number than any other people (for they were the fewest of all people) but because he loved a sinful people (Deuteronomy 7:7). He is the God of grace, the God of Jacob, the God of the covenant who says, 'I will be your God and you shall be my people'. He is absolutely faithful, absolutely trustworthy, absolutely reliable and of absolute integrity. He is the God who cleaves to his people through thick and thin, as a bridegroom cleaves to his bride.

You remember the way Paul uses the analogy of marriage in Ephesians 5:22-33. He says that there is a mystery here (v 32). The great mystery is this: as a man leaves father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and she becomes bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, so Christ was ready to leave all in order to cleave to his church. That is what makes the mystery so great. It is the marvel of Christ's love for his church. He became one with us in order that we might become one with him. The wonder of Christ's love is that he did not only take human nature and fulfil all righteousness for us, but he became one with us in his death. He forged that eternal union between himself and us in the heat of God's wrath upon Calvary; he is cleaving to us in his ascended glory now in the presence of God. He is saying, 'I will never leave them, I will never forsake them, I will never stop loving them, I will never forget them.'

I was talking some time ago with a minister in the USA who told me how, many years ago, his daughter had ceased to profess the Christian faith. He was greatly burdened about this. One day he had been speaking to Professor John Murray who happened to ask him how his family was, and he had opened his heart and told him about his daughter and this concern. He asked the Professor to pray for them and so at that very moment Professor Murray prayed. Many of you know how Mr Murray prayed, with authority, simplicity, and an awesome earnest­ness. It totally overwhelmed my friend. He told me it was one of the peak experiences of his life, and he would never forget Mr Murray committing the whole family to the Lord in a prayer full of the compassion and sympathy of Christ. Then later, upon reflection he thought, 'I could be so moved by the praying of a man, but in heaven I have Jesus ever living to pray for me'. Our Lord Jesus Christ sitting on heaven's throne as the King of heaven who is a friend of publicans and sinners, and this friend prays for me: this friend is God! He commands blessings on the life of the church and the lives of his people. He is touched by my pain at the behaviour of a prodigal child. Because Jesus lives we live. He is ascended, and we are united to him in glory; we have the assurance of his unfailing compassion. Who can separate us from that love? This is the cleaving of the King of grace. Where would we be today but for that? How would we be spiritually? What state would our lives be in? In what hopelessness and fear? What would ever have happened to us if people had not told us about Jesus, and if ministers had not preached the gospel to us? 'O happy day that fixed my choice on Thee my Saviour and my God'! And since that day, where would we have been if there were not a King in heaven whose mercy knows no bounds, whose longsuffering was immeasurable, whose patience is infinite and who has cleaved to us in grace? 'O love that will not let me go'! It is to him, the cleaving God, that Joshua points.

Their Obligation to Cleave to Him←⤒🔗

Now you must cleave to him, Joshua says, to the cleaving God; not to the idols, and not to the world (v. 12). Leave those, he says, and cleave to Jehovah, as you cleave exclusively to your wife and 'have her only unto thee' until death parts you.

The Lord calls us as he called his disciples, 'Follow me and I will make you fishers of men', and we read, 'they forsook all and followed him'. Once the fishing business had been the centre of their lives but now Christ had become the centre. They followed him as the One above everything else, the One above everyone else, the incomparable Christ. All our loyalty and all our devotion is to be to him. It is a summons to total abandonment.

Trust in the Lord with all thine heart and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he will direct thy paths.Proverbs 3:5-6

We cannot hold anything back. We are to be absorbed in him; our lives are to revolve around him. We are to be passionately committed to him. He is to be our total fixation and our absolute and magnificent obsession. This is so different from human relationships. One cannot do that with any mere creature. That would be idolatry, and we see lives completely ruined by such destructive infatuation that lives for and idolises another person. But to God we bring total dedication; we hunger for him and we thirst for him. We have him: but we want more of him; we are never satisfied.

We taste thee, O thou living bread,
And long to feast upon thee still;
We drink of thee, the fountain-head,
And thirst our souls from thee to fill.

This word 'cleave' is found in 2 Samuel 23 where it is used to describe the experiences of one of David's mighty men Eleazar. He was fighting the Philistines all day long in a certain field. He just stood there, a tremendous warrior, and took on the best of the Philistines, parrying, thrusting, cutting, without a rest, fighting through the whole day. We are told that as it came to a close when Eleazar stood alone, the battle over, his enemies dead, the victory won, his sword was sticking to his hand. The skin had hardened and callouses had formed, blisters burst and the blood congealed as he fought all those hours with that sword, never able to relax his grip of it. At the end of the day the story circulated among David's troops how Eleazar let go of the sword, and the sword did not let go! So Joshua exhorts us to cling to the Lord.

Do we know the meaning of a desperate grip on God? Perhaps you have had to let go of so much: loved ones gone from you, children grown up and moved away, a dear one taken away in death, your own health slowly going, your youth gone, and at times all the comforts of the gospel seem to have gone away, leaving no joy in believing, no peace in trusting, and desperately you cling to God.

Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee. My flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.Psalm 73:25-26

The Results of this Cleaving←⤒🔗

They are twofold:

Growth in Mission←↰⤒🔗

'If ye will cleave unto the Lord your God, as ye have done unto this day, then the Lord will drive out from before you great nations and strong' (Joshua 23:8-9, A.V. margin). What is the context in which one sees the mighty acts of God? Where does he drive out great nations, and no man stands before the church? When shall one of us chase a thousand? It is no secret. It is when we cleave to Jehovah.

There was a man in the church in Jerusalem named Barnabas. We meet him first in Acts 4 where we read how he sells his land, brings all the money and lays it at the feet of the apostles. He is a man devoted to the cause of Christ and revolutionized by the gospel. Here are some people whom he did not know the previous year, poor widows and hungry beggars. Now he is selling his very land and giving the money for others to give to them. He is cleaving to the poor. Then in Acts 9 he is the first man in the Jerusalem church to befriend the converted Saul of Tarsus when he comes to Jerusalem. All the others cannot forget the past and are suspicious and afraid of Saul, wanting to put him on probation so that he can prove himself, and saying, 'let him show he is a real Christian'. Yet Barnabas takes the lead and cleaves to Saul. He is the one who introduces him to the circle of the apostles. Then in Acts 11 the church in Jerusalem hears that amazing things are happening in Antioch. Multitudes of Gentiles are believing on Jesus Christ. What should they do? They send somebody to investigate, and that trusted man is Barnabas who soon ascertains the divine origins of this occurrence. We read, 'When he came, and had seen the grace of God, he was glad, and exhorted them all, that with purpose of heart they would cleave unto the Lord' (v 23). That was his great concern. That is what the life of grace is all about; that is the essence of true godliness; that is the life of happiness; that is the way that glorifies and enjoys God. Cleave to the Lord! What is the effect of this? 'Much people was added unto the Lord' (v 24). You see that connection? The 'cleaving unto the Lord', and the 'adding unto the Lord' go together. If we began to cleave to the Lord as we should, our congregations would be growing congregations. One man would chase a thousand and who could stand before the church? I hardly need to look beyond my wretched distance from God and my lack of cleaving to the Lord for an explanation of why my own church has so little growth. I do not blame anyone else. Cleave! Our cleaving, that is, our devotion to the Lord, would be matched by an increase in the church of those whom the Lord would add to us.

But there is another result of our cleaving to the Lord.

Growth in Fellowship←↰⤒🔗

2 Samuel 23 records a beautiful story in the life of David when he was exiled and a fugitive for the first time. Three of his men heard him express his longing for some water from Bethlehem's well. The problem was Bethlehem was a Philistine garrison in enemy territory. But David wanted that water, and so the three took an empty pitcher, fought their way through enemy lines, got the water and fought their way back bringing the water to David. They said, 'Here it is! Water from Bethlehem', David's home town! The well he had gone to as a child! Now he was a stranger in his own land, yet here was water from home in a pitcher in his hand. Do you remember what David did? He took the water and poured it out on the ground: 'I could not drink this water; it would be like drinking the blood of my men. I pour the water out as an offering to the Lord. I pour it out in devotion to him'. Do you see in that incident the bonds of loyalty that united David and his men? Do you see how they were cleaving to one another? Do you see why David's men were so loyal to him? He took their loyalty and he made it the ground for worship. He said, 'Praise God for men like this! Praise God for devotion like this!' He said, 'I do not deserve this kind of devotion. I offer it to God.'

In the New Testament the Philippian church heard Paul was in need and they sent a gift to him. Paul said, 'What you sent me I appreciated receiving so much and it was a great help to me, but more, it was an odour of sweet incense to God'. O men and brethren, how our devotion to God affects our relationship to one another! How life in our congregations would be transformed and how the church would be added to if we began to cleave to the Lord and thereby to one another! All David wanted was a little drink from the well of Bethlehem. It was just a wistful longing, just a little hireath we would say in Wales, but three men were ready to die for it. Now here is the Captain of our Salvation, great David's greater Son, and he is not capricious or whimsical. He does not drop hints or day-dream about his wishes. He wants from us our love and fellowship, our loyalty, our willingness to give all for him, and to present our bodies as living sacrifices. Jesus Christ tells us, 'Love one another as I have loved you. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples that ye love one another'. Cleave to one another, he says, as I have cleaved to you.

If men would do that for David, what would we do for our Lord? What should we do for Jesus?

What a transformation there would be in the churches and among the nations if we cleaved to the Lord and to one another like this. Cleave to the Lord!