Joshua 4:1-9
Pastor
Nathan P. Kassulke
“What Do These Stones Mean?”
Sunday, October 26, 2025
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.
They had built the houses in which they lived and plowed fields they farmed. It wasn’t that they couldn’t remember that God had been so gracious to them. It wasn’t that they couldn’t teach their children this good news. The reality was that they were unlikely to do these things because it would be so easy for them to be distracted by other things. They could easily view even their worship in the tabernacle and the temple as their service to God instead of a celebration of what God had done for and promised to them.
Do you see how this account offers us encouragement? How easy is it for us to think of coming to church or attending a Lutheran school or giving offerings or so many other things as something we do for God? How easy is it for us to forget our absolute unworthiness of everything he has given us and everything he has promised to us? That’s why he wants us to have reminders, memorials. He wants us to stop and ask, “What does this mean?” and hear the answer: “This is a reminder of the great things God has done for you.”
These reminders are not always physical things. A synodical anniversary is not something we see. But it helps us consider how God’s grace is the only thing that has seen us through. Even a brief study of our synod’s history will reveal many times the synod could have come to ruin. But it is still here today testifying to the truth that we are unworthy sinners who have been saved by grace alone. Each year about this time our churches tend to recognize another anniversary for the same reason. At Luther’s time, the church had obscured the truth of God’s grace and had reinforced human ideas of works and worthiness. God used the German monk to bring his gospel message to light again. What does this mean? It means that people saw Jesus as Savior for the first time through Luther’s teaching and preaching, and that of his colleagues. We can go even further back in history to find another anniversary, maybe a bit overshadowed by the ones already mentioned. 1700 years ago, the Nicene Creed testified that Jesus is true God, of the same substance as the Father from eternity. It did so when a false teaching threatened to rob Christians of their certainty of salvation.
Of course, some memorials of God’s grace are physical things. We are meeting in a church building dedicated to God’s glory 75 years ago. Our guests attend school in buildings some forty years old and in a handful of classrooms now less than a week past their first use. Why these buildings? What do they mean? They stand as testimony to God’s grace. They are reminders. They are teaching tools. They are conversation starters. They are for all of us to realize and recognize the great things God has done for us.
From the crossing of the Jordan to new classrooms at Arizona Lutheran Academy, every highlight of God’s grace in the face of our sin and unworthiness is a small picture of the preeminent highlight of God’s grace in the life and death and resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Nothing speaks as loudly as the cross of our unworthiness as all our sin was laid on him. Nothing speaks as loudly as the cross of God’s grace to us as Jesus takes our punishment and announces its completion.
One day the time will come for us to cross the metaphorical river into the land God has promised to us. When that time comes, we will stand where Jesus did first. And because he did, the waters that would have rolled over us have stopped flowing. We will walk safely in his footsteps to the glorious, heavenly promised land.
And because you know that, because you believe that, all you do may be a memorial to God’s grace in the face of your unworthiness. Your offerings in support of church and school. Your prayers and praises. Your assistance to neighbors and kindness to strangers. What does this mean? It means that Jesus Christ has been with you up until now. It means that you can trust him to be with you throughout this life. It means that you can be confident he will take you to be with him forever.
The Text: Joshua 4:1–9 (NIV)
When the whole nation had finished crossing the Jordan, the Lord said to Joshua, 2 “Choose twelve men from among the people, one from each tribe, 3 and tell them to take up twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan, from right where the priests are standing, and carry them over with you and put them down at the place where you stay tonight.”
4 So Joshua called together the twelve men he had appointed from the Israelites, one from each tribe,
5 and said to them, “Go over before the ark of the Lord your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, 6 to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’
7 tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.”
8 So the Israelites did as Joshua commanded them. They took twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, as the Lord had told Joshua; and they carried them over with them to their camp, where they put them down. 9 Joshua set up the twelve stones that had been in the middle of the Jordan at the spot where the priests who carried the ark of the covenant had stood. And they are there to this day.