מָה הָאֲבָנִים הָאֵלֶּה לָכֶם

/Gilgal/(gil-GAHL)

Gilgal; a circle (of stones); from galal, to roll

The plainness matters. God does not ask for a monument of bronze or a carved pillar. He asks for twelve river-stones, the kind any child could pick up – ordinary enough that a child would have to ask what they were for. The whole point is the asking.

Two chapters later God says of this same ground, ‘Today I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt from you’ – so the place was called Gilgal (Joshua 5:9), a deliberate play on galal. The stones rolled out of the riverbed and the shame rolled off the people in the same place, by the same word.

The River That Had To Be Crossed

What Are the Stones For?

Memory is not automatic. God builds the asking into the landscape – plain stones a child can’t help but wonder about – so the rescue gets told and not forgotten.

Two Heaps of Stones

Read chapter 4 slowly and you find not one set of stones but two. Twelve are carried up out of the river and stood at Gilgal, where the people can see them (Joshua 4:8, 20). But there is another twelve: “Joshua also set up twelve stones in the middle of the Jordan, in the place where the priests who carried the ark of the covenant stood. And the stones are there to this day” (Joshua 4:9). One memorial stands in the camp, in the light, where it can be visited and explained. The other stands at the bottom of the river, in the exact spot where the priests held back the flood – and then the water came roaring back over it. “The waters of the Jordan returned to their course and overflowed all the banks as before” (Joshua 4:18). No one would ever see those stones again. Why mark a place no eye can reach? Because the deepest part of the rescue happens where no one is watching – down in the middle of the death-water, where the weight was actually borne. The stones we can see say a crossing happened. The stones under the water say it cost something to stand there. Salvation has a visible side we tell our children about, and a hidden side, sunk in the deep, that only God fully sees.

BRIDGE TO CHRIST

HONEST-EXAMINATION

What flooded river is standing between you and what God has promised right now – and what would it change to believe He is already standing in the middle of it?

1. Where in your life is God asking you to put your feet in the water before you can see the path? What is keeping you on the bank?
2. What are the ‘stones’ in your own story – the moments you could point to and say, ‘God brought me across there’? When did you last tell someone about one?
3. There are stones in your life no one will ever see, hidden under the water of what it cost. How does it sit with you that God sees those, and remembers?

TAKEAWAY

Set up one stone today. Write down, in a sentence or two, one specific time God carried you across something you could not cross alone – and then say it out loud to one person before the day is over. Make the rescue tellable.

CHECK YOUR UNDERSTANDING

FURTHER READING

The One Who Led Israel Across

Joshua son of Nun