Mike’s Bible Reading Journal
March 31, 2026 — Days 76–77 of 365
The Amen We Could Not Mean
Joshua 22–24 & Judges 1–2 — Five Verbs, Two Mountains, and the Faith That Was Never There
The Texts
“But be very careful to observe the commandment and the law that Moses the servant of the LORD commanded you, to love the LORD your God, and to walk in all his ways and to keep his commandments and to cling to him and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul.”
— Joshua 22:5
“And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers. And there arose another generation after them who did not know the LORD or the work that he had done for Israel.”
— Judges 2:10
“Whenever the LORD raised up judges for them, the LORD was with the judge, and he saved them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge… But whenever the judge died, they turned back and were more corrupt than their fathers.”
— Judges 2:18–19
The Observation
Joshua sends the two and a half tribes home with a remarkable charge — love the LORD your God, walk in all his ways, keep his commandments, cling to him, serve him with all your heart and with all your soul (Joshua 22:5). Five verbs. Everything. And they go.
Then I read Judges 2 and watched it unravel within a generation. The generation that knew Joshua died, and the next generation did not know the LORD or what he had done for Israel (Judges 2:10). And then the descent begins. They were more corrupt than their fathers. Each cycle worse than the one before. They did not drop any of their practices or their stubborn ways.
I recognized that rhythm. It is the rhythm of my own heart.
What does it actually mean to obey? And why couldn’t Israel do it?
What Came Out of Studying It
The word translated “obey” in Joshua 22:2 is the Hebrew shama — one of the richest words in the Hebrew Bible. Hebrew has no separate word for obey. Shama means to hear, and to hear in Hebrew means to respond. To truly hear is to act on what you have heard. A child who hears a parent’s instruction and ignores it has not, in the Hebrew sense, truly heard it. The hearing and the doing are one movement.
This is why the great confession of Israel — the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4, “Hear O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one” — is a call to whole-person response. Jesus is drawing on exactly this when he closes the Sermon on the Mount: everyone who hears these words of mine and does them is like a man who built his house on the rock (Matthew 7:24). The hearing is in the doing.
Joshua’s five verbs — love, walk, keep, cling, serve — are the unfolding of what genuine shama looks like in a life. Love is the root. Walk is the direction of daily movement. Keep is the attentive guarding of what has been received. Cling — davaq, the same word used in Genesis 2:24 for a husband cleaving to his wife — is the tenacious refusal to let go. Serve is the whole life freely offered. Together they describe a person whose hearing has gone all the way down.
But underneath all five verbs is something Joshua does not list because it is the ground the list stands on. Faith. Love grows from trust. Clinging grows from believing he is there and is good. Walking in his ways grows from believing they lead somewhere. Habakkuk 2:4 names it: the righteous shall live by his faith. It is quoted three times in the New Testament — Romans 1:17, Galatians 3:11, Hebrews 10:38. The life Joshua is describing — love, walk, keep, cling, serve — grows from trusting the one who commands it. The effort of faith is real — but it is effort in dependence on God, not self-effort apart from him.
Which means Judges is a book about faith failure. Each cycle — rest, forgetting, falling away, oppression, crying out, deliverance, rest again — is the rhythm of faith rising and collapsing. The people stop believing that God’s ways lead somewhere worth going. They look at the Canaanites around them — present, visible, tangible — and they choose what they can see over the God who calls them to trust what they cannot yet see. That is unbelief — the quiet practical conclusion that the visible is more trustworthy than the invisible promise.
And the text says something sobering about what God does with this. He left the nations — did not drive them out quickly — to test Israel, whether they would walk in the way of the LORD or not (Judges 2:22). The test is to reveal what is actually there. And what is revealed, cycle by descending cycle, is that the heart of Israel is as corrupt as the heart of the nations they were meant to displace. By the end of Judges — everyone doing what is right in their own eyes — Israel has become more like Canaan than Canaan ever became like Israel. They were in the world and became of the world.
The Two Mountains. What makes this pointed is that Israel said amen to all of it before it happened. In Deuteronomy 27–28, before the conquest began, Moses commanded that half the tribes stand on Mount Gerizim for the blessings and half on Mount Ebal for the curses. Joshua carried it out in Joshua 8. The Levites read the curses aloud and all Israel said amen. Every tribe. Every person. Amen to the exile. Amen to the consequences of turning away. Amen to the curses they would eventually deserve.
If they had truly heard — truly shama’d — that amen would have broken them before they ever started. They would have known from that moment that they were people who needed God’s strength to sustain covenant faithfulness. They would have known, as Jack Miller put it, that they were far worse than they knew — and that they desperately needed a grace far greater than they could imagine. The curses on Ebal would have driven them to exactly what Deuteronomy 30 describes — the circumcised heart, the return, the word near in the mouth and heart — because they would have known they needed something only God could produce in them.
But the amen on Ebal was formal before it was personal. They said the words. The words stayed on the surface. Genuine shama produces the broken acknowledgment that we are far worse than we knew and far more dependent on grace than we imagined. They said amen as orphans performing a liturgy. They needed to say it as sons who meant it.
And the difference between those two amens is faith.
What This Means for Me
The altar called Witness in Joshua 22 is one more piece of this picture. The two and a half tribes, returning to the east side of the Jordan, built an altar to testify to future generations that they still belonged to the LORD even across the river. The western tribes saw it and nearly went to war. What was meant to preserve faith across distance and time was misread as rebellion.
The church has been fighting over altars called Witness ever since. Baptism. The Lord’s Supper. Worship forms. Church government. Every visible sign meant to witness to invisible belonging has at various points become a battleground among brothers who assumed the worst about each other. The deeper problem is always the same one the eastern tribes had — we are trying to preserve in visible form something that only faith can actually hold. The sign cannot do what only the Spirit can do.
What Judges is waiting for — what the whole Old Testament is waiting for — is the one in whom faith finds its permanent object. Every judge delivers and then dies and the people turn back. The one Judges points toward dies and rises and lives to make permanent intercession. He sends his Spirit — the circumcision of the heart that Deuteronomy 30 promised — so that the Judges cycle can be broken from the inside.
The cross is the ultimate answer to the two mountains. Christ stood on Ebal for us. He took the amen of the curse so that we could receive the amen of the blessing — because he kept the covenant for us and absorbed its penalty in our place. And the resurrection is the Gerizim side — the blessing pronounced over the one who perfectly kept what the covenant required, now shared with everyone united to him by faith.
The verbs Joshua lists — love, walk, keep, cling, serve — are the fruit of being accepted. The just shall live by faith. And living by faith, working through love (Galatians 5:6), the love and the walking and the keeping and the clinging follow — imperfectly, with failure along the way, but as the genuine direction of a life whose root has found its permanent object.
Israel said amen to the curses on Ebal and did not mean it deeply enough. Christ meant it for us. That is the gospel Judges points toward. And the fact that I see my own stubborn heart in the Judges cycle is the beginning of the honest amen that Israel never quite managed — the son’s amen, not the orphan’s. I am worse than I knew. And the grace is greater than I imagined.
Key Scriptures
Joshua 22:1–5 • Joshua 8:30–35 • Deuteronomy 27–28 • Deuteronomy 6:4 • Deuteronomy 30:6 • Judges 2:10–23 • Genesis 2:24 • Habakkuk 2:4 • Romans 1:17 • Galatians 3:11 • Galatians 5:6 • Hebrews 10:38 • Matthew 7:24
Prayer
Father, I recognize my own heart in Judges. The cycle of rest and forgetting and turning away — I know that rhythm from the inside. I have said amen to your word without meaning it all the way down. I have heard without the hearing producing what genuine hearing always produces. Forgive me. Thank you that Christ stood on Ebal for me and took the amen of the curse I deserved, so that I could receive the blessing I could never earn. Thank you that the just shall live by faith — by trust in your faithfulness. Circumcise my heart. Make the amen real. Let the hearing go all the way down this time. Amen.
Pray for someone you know who goes through the motions of faith — who says the right words but knows the words have not gone deep — that the Spirit would make the amen real.