Devotions

There are various ways that the league between Joshua and the Gibeonites can be viewed. One way is to see it as a type of the everlasting covenant of grace, the basis of peace between God and His people. Joshua here makes peace with the Gibeonites and establishes a covenant of life, “to let them live” (v. 15).

These people, like all the other Canaanites, were condemned to die, doomed to destruction. Yet God chose, out of His own good pleasure, to spare and deliver a people from among them. He did so by a league, a covenant sworn and sealed in solemn oath. Once made, it could not be broken.

So God in His tender mercy has chosen a people out of the great mass of humanity to be His own peculiar people. He has chosen them in Christ and entered into a covenant with them, as He views them in union with His Son from all eternity. That covenant is a covenant of peace and life. We, like the Gibeonites, have hearts that are deceitful and desperately wicked; yet the terms of the covenant of grace must stand. In Christ those given to Him by the Father in eternity must be redeemed and saved through the grace and blood of that everlasting covenant.

The Gibeonites were given to Joshua in service. So we are committed in service to the Lord. The bonds of Calvary’s love constrain us to serve Him and to submit in willing obedience to His revealed will.