“Remember these things,” he says quite naturally. I say “naturally” and yet, that is true in one sense and false in another. It’s true in that it was natural for Joshua to remind them of the things that had happened. But it’s most unnatural in the sense that it’s natural for us to forget. God does great things for us, and God has done great things. Still we find ourselves drifting away from the memory of what God has done and so falling away from a following after God as we should do.

There’s always something poignant and stirring about the last words of great men, particularly when those words are in the form of a charge to their successors. In American history, we think of Washington’s farewell to the Continental Army, or General Douglas MacArthur’s final address to the U.S. Congress, when he concluded by describing himself as “an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty.  Good-bye.”