We've been going through Joshua at Bible study (which I've only been able to sporadically attend lately). We covered the distribution of the inheritance last Friday, and I was struck by the contrast between Joshua and Jesus'. We read in Hebrews, for example:
For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God's rest has also rested from his works as God did from his (He 4.7–9).
And we see that Joshua didn't give the people rest:
Behold, I have allotted to you as an inheritance for your tribes those nations that remain, along with all the nations that I have already cut off, from the Jordan to the Great Sea in the west (Jo 23.4).
The Israelites had yet to dispossess all of the native tribes from the land upon Joshua's death, and his charge to them in the following verses is to finish the job and to keep the law. (We might digress on the latter for a little while, but I won't.)
I would think that part of the reason that Jesus can give us rest is because his job is actually finished (Jn 19.30). Unlike the children of Israel, there's nothing else more for us to do.
If we stop and think for a moment, I think we can find an atonement theme here. Joshua was victorious insofar as he defeated the enemies he faced, but Christ was utterly victorious; death is defeated. While there is a tension between the already and the not-yet, Hebrews 4.8 suggests that this rest is part of the already. (Naturally we also wait for the casting out of the Devil from heaven, too; cf Re 12.8.)
To connect the dots, let's look quickly at Leviticus:
Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean, and the land became unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants (Le 18.24,25).
God used Israel to judge the inhabitants of Canaan, to, as it were, make atonement for the land's iniquity. There is a connection between the people and the land that I think we often miss. The land itself required cleansing, and there was a relationship between the people and the land. So, for example, the people were to make a sacrifice even when the perpetrator of a sin was not known:
If in the land that the LORD your God is giving you to possess someone is found slain, lying in the open country, and it is not known who killed him, then your elders and your judges shall come out, and they shall measure the distance to the surrounding cities. ... And all the elders of that city nearest to the slain man shall wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley, and they shall testify, 'Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it shed. Accept atonement, O LORD, for your people Israel, whom you have redeemed, and do not set the guilt of innocent blood in the midst of your people Israel, so that their blood guilt be atoned for.' (De 21.1,2, 6–8)
I wonder if perhaps we see elements of the Christus Victor idea of atonement here. If the land is a type of our home to come, the idea that the death of Christ purifies the land (and the people to dwell in it) helps make some sense of Hebrews 9.23: "Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these." (In this context the purification deals with instruments of worship, not the land itself.)
There is a sense, too, in which we can map some kind of eschatalogical judgment to the scene in Joshua, and I suppose this also naturally falls into the assertion of Christ's kingdom and kingly authority. This reeks of Christus Victor (at least to me).
I have to develop my thoughts more (it seems like almost all of my articles are fits and starts of thought rather than their completion), but I think this would allow us a more complete view of atonement. I'm a PSA guy, but I recognize that this isn't the only way people think of atonement (and that other viewpoints provide important insight, too). Seeing atonement from an eschatalogically realized perspective may help to integrate them a little more effectively.
