So I was listening to the book of Joshua and the Holy Spirit gave me this really awesome insight/ revelation. I hope this edifies you guys....
God is HOLY!
25And Joshua said, "Why did you bring trouble on us? The LORD brings trouble on you today." And all Israel stoned him with stones. They burned them with fire and stoned them with stones. Joshua 7:25
So imagine that at your church things are going amazing people are coming in and hearing the Word repenting and growing in faith, when you guys worship the presence of God is there and the whole congregation is edified. God is blessing your evangelism efforts, every time your church goes out to evangelize people get saved, healed, baptized and go bring all their other friends and family to hear the gospel. No one in the church is in need of anything because everyone is caring for on another. The fellowship you share with your brothers and sisters is sweet and rich. You look forward to regular meetings with the saints.
One day all that just stops. The pastor isn't getting any insights from scripture, the worship is dead and monotonous, people are apathetic to the gospel and feel sorry that your a Christian, discouragement and fear come over the whole church, people stop going to regular meetings, the church starts to enter in debt...
And you guys pray God help us and He answers THERE IS SIN IN THE CONGREGATION.
You guys quickly start to find out who it is.....and you find out that its your best friend. He was secretly stealing money from the church.....
God says He must die stone him and his family and then burn him and all his possessions...
You guys all take him outside the church along with his family and you VIOLENTLY STONE HIM. You are crying and mourning. THIS CAN'T BE HAPPENING YOUR KILLING YOUR BEST FRIEND or even your own BROTHER OR SON......
But deep inside this you know this is right. There is a cry inside you that screams: this is good, this is just, this must be done. God is Holy and the sin must be purged from among us......
So the above is a little bit of a stretch I admit and its not a good representation of what the Israelites were really going through during that time as a whole. The point of it was to try to help us understand the reality of the situation in the passage.
The closest parallel I could come up with to Achan's sin is stealing money from the church because if you read the passage before all the things were to be devoted to destruction (Joshua 6:21) So as an act of worship.
This story does give us an idea of the HOLINESS OF GOD and how that was a very REAL thing to God's people during that time and STILL is.
We are God's people today and we need to have the same attitude towards God's holiness, however we also have something greater: The revelation of GOD's LOVE through Jesus and how His mercy triumphs over judgement.
God's grace is poured out on us abundantly on us because of Christ so that We (personally) do not need to kill someone in our congregation who sins, however what does happen is that God's blessings can be withheld because of sin both corporate and personal.
I believe that one of the main reasons why we don't see God working the way we read about in the bible is because we are not fully obedient to Him as the church and harbor many other idols above Him.
Just like the Israelites failed in defeating their enemies so we are failing in winning people to Christ and many people are apathetic to God. In fact many sit in the pews week after week without even being moved a little by the love of God or their own sin.
With that in mind let us also remember that when God was moving in the early church in the book of Acts, there was also a case where people in the church were killed for their sin Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1) There have been cases recorded during powerful workings of God that people were also struck down for pretending to be filled with the Holy Spirit when they were not.
