Wrestling with the Uncomfortable

Wrestling with the Uncomfortable: When Scripture Draws Hard Lines

There's a particular text message we all have sitting unread on our phones. You know the one. Maybe it's from a relative, maybe an old friend. Every time you pick up your phone, that little red notification badge stares at you, and you tell yourself: Not today. I'll get to it later. You can't bring yourself to delete it, but you can't quite open it either. So it just sits there, waiting.

The Book of Joshua is Christianity's unread text message.

The Setup: A Nation at the Threshold

Joshua picks up immediately where Deuteronomy ends. Moses has just died, barely in the ground, and suddenly Joshua—Moses' longtime assistant, the guy who carried the bags up the mountain and waited at the bottom—finds himself leading an entire nation. He didn't ask for this promotion. Forty years of wilderness wandering stretch behind him, and an entire nation's future looms ahead. The man he learned everything from is gone.

That's not really a promotion. It's a burden.

And the deal Joshua gets handed is deceptively simple: Keep the law, get the land. The first chapter of Joshua lays it out clearly: meditate on the law day and night, don't turn from it to the right or left, and you'll succeed wherever you go. Obedience in, blessing out. It's a transactional theology that feels remarkably familiar to modern ears.

For the first several chapters, it works exactly that way. Jericho falls. Ai falls. The land starts changing hands. Through obedience, God fulfills promises. If this were the whole book, we could wrap it up neatly: faithful leader, conquered land, God keeps promises, the end.

But that's not the whole book.

The Word We Can't Translate Cleanly

There's a Hebrew word woven throughout Joshua that doesn't translate neatly into English: herem. You'll sometimes see it rendered as "devoted" or "dedicated" or "set apart"—words that sound almost sacred, almost gentle. Which is exactly why they're misleading.

Herem means to ban something completely in devotion to God by destroying it. Not giving it away. Not setting it on a shelf as an offering. Wiping it out. Cities, livestock, people—all of it consecrated to God through total annihilation.

Most ancient warfare aimed to plunder. You conquer a city, take what's valuable, haul it home. Herem flips that on its head. Nothing is kept. Nothing gets sold. Nothing survives to be claimed by human hands because the claiming belongs to God alone. This isn't violence for gain. It's violence framed as worship.

And that's what makes it so hard to sit with.

The command in Deuteronomy 7 is chillingly plain: "When the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy."

No ambiguity. No poetic distance. Just the command.

The Mirror We'd Rather Not Look Into

It's easy to pick up Joshua and say, "Wow, that's awful. I can't believe ancient people thought that way." Easy to project all our discomfort onto a distant culture and move on with our day.

But here's the uncomfortable truth: every single one of us already knows how to do a smaller version of this every day.

We don't call it herem. We don't stand at borders with armies. But we draw lines constantly. Who's in and who's out. Who's safe, who's family, who gets the benefit of the doubt. Who gets held at arm's length until they prove themselves.

We don't beat war drums, but we make guest lists. We leave comments unsaid. We decide who gets invited back and who doesn't. We call it boundaries or wisdom or "just knowing our people." And from the inside, it always feels reasonable. It always feels justified.

That's what should unsettle us—not that ancient Israel drew lines, but that we recognize the impulse so easily.

Consider the mother who once asked a pastor to baptize her son. She wasn't ready to join the church herself, but she wanted this blessing for her child. The pastor said no. He could justify it—baptism is covenant, the church makes promises, doctrine and polity lined up neatly on his side. A defensible no. A theologically sound no.

Four years later, that same pastor stood watching his own son get baptized, watching grandfathers speak an identity over the child that he did nothing to earn or deserve. And in that moment, it hit him: he had denied another mother and son the exact same thing his family was receiving. He drew a line, said no, had good reasons for where he drew it. And a woman and baby ended up on the wrong side.

He doesn't know her name anymore. Doesn't know what happened to her son, whether he grew up in the church, whether anybody ever did for him what wouldn't be done that day. That not-knowing carries its own weight.

Living in a Season of Line-Drawing

We're living through a time that rewards drawing hard lines. Turn on the news, scroll for five minutes, sit at a family dinner table. Plenty of people will tell you exactly who belongs and who doesn't. Who counts as a real American, a real Christian. Who's inside the story of this country and who's just an obstacle standing in the way.

And Joshua has been picked up before by people who called themselves faithful and justified line-drawing in disastrous ways. Land taken in God's name. Nations conquered in covenant's name. Whole peoples treated as obstacles between somebody else and a promise they believed was theirs alone.

This isn't ancient history we can safely ignore. This is a pattern we're still living out.

The Human Book

Most scholars believe Joshua was compiled generations after the events it describes, likely finalized during the Babylonian exile. This isn't a battlefield transcript. It's closer to people rewriting their origin story generations later, under threat, wrestling with a desperate question: Who are we when everything that made us who we are has been taken?

Imagine being a scribe in Babylon, far from anything familiar. Your job is to keep telling your people who they are when every visible sign of who they were has been stripped away. No temple, no king, no land. Just stories.

That doesn't excuse the violence. The command still says what it says. But it changes what kind of book we're holding. This is also a people telling themselves why they mattered, why God hadn't abandoned them. The anxiety underneath isn't so different from the anxiety underneath much of our own line-drawing: fear of disappearing, fear of losing what made us who we are, fear dressed up as certainty because certainty feels safer than grief.

That doesn't make it right. But it does make it human.

The Question We Must Ask

Where in your life have you already decided who is in and who is out? Where have you drawn lines, othered people, created categories of belonging that leave someone standing outside?

We can pretend Joshua isn't in our Bible. We can bend over backwards explaining it away. But neither is the faithful option. The most faithful thing we can do is stay at the table with a text that unsettles us, refuse to leave it unread or sand it down into something easier to swallow.

Because the truth is, until we find ourselves in this story—until we recognize the human impulse to draw lines and declare some people worthy and others not—Joshua will remain something we rarely engage with.

And here's the hope: we follow Jesus, who is the antithesis of this. Jesus constantly crosses lines. Touches those seen as unclean. Invites the shut-out to the dinner table.

The work ahead isn't easy. But as we do the honest work of naming our own line-drawing, grace shows up. Abundant grace. The kind that helps us become better, more faithful people—the kind that teaches us to erase lines rather than draw them.