Joshua 4:1-9 Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke
WELS 175th Anniversary Series, Reformation Sunday, October 26, 2025 “What Do These Stones Mean?”
What does this mean? That’s a very Lutheran question. Many of you recognize what I mean by that. If you are familiar with Martin Luther’s Small Catechism, you know that the Reformer used that question as a teaching tool. For each part of the Catechism, a book for instructing people in the truths of Christianity, Luther and the students using his Catechism would ask that question. The First Commandment: You shall have no other gods. What does this mean? We should fear, love, and trust in God above all things. Each part had its own, succinct answer to the question. Every commandment, every petition of the Lord’s Prayer, each article of the Apostles’ Creed. What does this mean? That seems to be an appropriate comparison to a teaching tool that God had his people set up just across the Jordan River in the Promised Land many years before. It wasn’t a book. It was a monument. It was twelve stones set up in a prominent position. And these stones, this monument, served one purpose. They were to get people to ask, from generation to generation, “What does this mean?” Maybe you already know some of the context of these stones. Our reading from the book of Joshua certainly hinted at it. Let’s make sure we understand. The Promised Land was the special destination for God’s people. God had promised it to Abraham and his descendants centuries before. The people were not in the Promised Land because that family, those descendants, had gone down to Egypt. They had become slaves. And around forty years before this incident, God had rescued them. He brought them out of their slavery and out of their land of opression. He brought them to a special mountain that he had made holy with his visible presence where he gave them his law. They were told how to conduct themselves not just as his people in the way that he wants from all people at all times, but also how to conduct themselves as his particular nation. How they were to organize and function. How they were to worship. Forty years had passed because many of the Israelites had not trusted that God would bring them into the Promised Land successfully. They saw the powerful inhabitants of that land and their fortified, walled cities. They forgot the miracles that had rescued them from Egypt. So God had them wait and wander. God saw nearly that entire generation, including his servant Moses, pass away in the wilderness. It was the next generation under Joshua that would enter the Promised Land and take hold of it. There was still one more obstacle in their way, though. The Jordan River at many times and in many of the places through which it flows, is a small stream. But at the time when Israel approached it intending to cross over to the Promised Land on the other side, it was a powerful river. It was flowing from bank to bank and beyond. It was one more challenge that needed to be overcome. It was not the people of Israel who would overcome the challenge. It was their God. The priests were to carry the Ark of the Covenant, the special box that sat in the inside part of the tabernacle and the temple, the special reminder of God’s presence with his people. When their feet touched the waters of the river, the river would stop. Just as God said, it happened. The priests came to the river. They stepped one step into the waters, and the river stopped flowing. Upstream from where they were, the waters piled up in a heap. From that point all the way to where the river had flowed into the Dead Sea, no water moved. And every Israelite could walk from the one side of the river to the Promised Land on the other side. This was an event to remember. This was God once again rescuing his people. It was God keeping his promise, bringing his people into the land he was giving them. Everything about this event screamed that it was all because of God’s grace. He was doing the impossible again for people who did not deserve it. The people memorialzed it. They set up a reminder. When children would ask, “What does this mean?” They would hear not so much about the monument but about the event, about the grace of God. And a reminder of God’s grace was so necessary because people like us so easily forget it. For the people who followed Joshua across the Jordan, the temptation would be to forget how God had brought them powerfully across the river. They might come to think that they had earned that land by their conquest.