Joshua 24:23 contains a detail easy to miss but impossible to ignore once seen.
Israel stands in Shechem. They have crossed the Jordan and watched Jericho’s walls dissolve into dust. They are living in cities they did not build and eating from vineyards they did not plant. Every promise God made has materialized in their hands.
And yet Joshua says to them: “Now therefore put away the foreign gods that are among you, and incline your heart to the LORD, the God of Israel.”
Among you. Present tense.
Not the gods their ancestors worshiped in Egypt. Not the idols that tempted them in the wilderness. The foreign gods are here, now, in the promised land, among a people who have just received everything God promised.
This presents a sobering pattern. God proves faithful, the people retain their idols, and the relationship remains fractured even in the presence of fulfilled promises.
This reveals a truth modern discipleship often overlooks. Experiencing God’s hand does not automatically produce trust in God’s heart. When we confuse the two, we form believers who know God’s blessings but do not know God Himself relationally. We create disciples who can testify to what God has done without being able to rest in who God is.
This matters pastorally, not just theologically. Many believers feel confused or even ashamed when trust does not immediately follow blessing, or when doubt resurfaces after answered prayer. Scripture does not portray this tension as abnormal faith. It portrays it as honest humanity. The Bible names this dynamic not to condemn it, but to invite us into deeper formation.
Why Experiencing God's Hand Doesn't Guarantee Knowing His Heart
This pattern of experiencing provision without developing trust appears throughout Israel’s story.
In the wilderness, Israel saw God part the Red Sea. Three days later, they complained about bitter water. God provided manna every morning, yet they grumbled for meat. They drank water from a rock, then immediately asked: “Is the LORD among us or not?”
Miracles were often followed by renewed doubt rather than deepening trust. They experienced God’s power and provision, yet their trust in His character remained shallow and unstable.
The root issue is that we can receive from God’s hand while remaining distant from His heart. Israel wanted rescue, and God wanted rescue too. But God also wanted relationship. Israel gladly received the provision while resisting the deeper intimacy God offered. Their desire was divided, not absent.
When we relate to God primarily as a source of benefits, prayer becomes mechanism and blessing becomes metric. We know what He does, but we do not know Him relationally. We recognize His acts but do not encounter His heart.
This disconnect is intensified by our instinctive desire for control. The gods of Canaan were psychologically attractive because they offered predictability. Fertility gods promised results through specific rituals. You could manage a Baal. Yahweh, however, offered blessing through covenant faithfulness, which required dependence and surrender.
Trusting Yahweh means relinquishing explanations, timelines, and guarantees. It means following God into seasons where obedience does not immediately resolve tension and where faithfulness does not always feel rewarded. This is precisely where trust in God’s heart is either deepened or quietly replaced with something more manageable.
This pattern also works in reverse. For those in seasons where blessing feels absent, the disconnect can be especially destabilizing. If faith has been formed primarily around visible provision, suffering feels like abandonment. The silence of God’s hand gets interpreted as the silence of God’s heart, and those two silences are not the same thing.
The remedy in both cases is the same: a deeper encounter with who God is, not merely with what God does.
By Joshua 24, the victories are complete. Joshua rehearses the entire narrative: Abraham’s call, the Exodus, the crossing of the Jordan, the defeat of thirty-one kings. The record is undeniable. Yet Joshua does not assume devotion has naturally followed blessing. He does not say, “Surely you are fully devoted now.”
Instead, he exposes what still lingers. Foreign gods, whether active idols or lingering loyalties never fully renounced, remain among them. After everything.
The Solution Joshua's Generation Could Not Yet Access
Joshua understands all of this. He knows the pattern. He has watched it repeat. And his response cuts to the heart of the problem.
He does not offer Israel a new strategy. His response is not a program. It is a call: “Incline your heart to the LORD.”
The Hebrew word translated incline means to stretch toward, to bend in affection, to orient oneself deliberately. This is not mere compliance. It is reorientation of desire and allegiance.
When the people insist they will serve the LORD, Joshua offers a sobering diagnosis. They are not able. God’s holiness demands a devotion they cannot produce through willpower alone.
Joshua is exposing the core problem. They can possess the land through God’s hand. But they cannot incline their hearts through their own effort.
This is the tension Joshua cannot resolve in his generation. But the Old Testament itself points forward to the solution.
Deuteronomy 30:6 speaks of God circumcising the heart. Jeremiah 31 promises a new covenant where God’s law is written on the heart. And Ezekiel gives the fullest vision:
“I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes” (Ezekiel 36:26–27).
What Joshua’s generation could not do, the Spirit does.
The inclining of the heart is not achieved through human effort. It is the work of God within us. The Spirit writes God’s law on our hearts, transforms our desires, and makes obedience possible not through external compliance but through internal change.
Paul names this clearly: “It is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13). The willing itself, the desire to incline toward God, is His work in us.
We are not left straining to produce devotion we cannot manufacture. We are invited to yield to the Spirit who is already at work, forming what willpower alone could never create.
This changes everything.
God’s Heart: The Only Constant
This is what the Spirit does: He forms us to know God’s heart, not merely to experience God’s hand.
God’s hand varies by season. Some are healed. Others are not. Some experience abundance. Others are called to sacrifice. If we know only God’s hand, His actions will appear inconsistent.
But God’s heart is constant. His love, holiness, justice, and faithfulness do not fluctuate. When we know His heart, we can trust Him even when His hand feels absent or confusing.
Many believers encounter crisis not because God has changed, but because their understanding of Him has been incomplete. When trust is built primarily on outcomes, unanswered prayer feels like rupture. When trust is rooted in God’s character, even silence can become a space where faith remains intact.
The Gospel is not merely about receiving benefits from God. It is about receiving God Himself. Jesus defines eternal life as knowing the Father (John 17:3). This distinction becomes clearest in suffering. When God’s gifts are delayed or stripped away, what remains reveals what we were truly clinging to. Those formed only to expect God’s hand may feel betrayed. Those formed to know God’s heart may grieve deeply and still remain anchored.
A Warning and an Invitation
Israel possessed every promise, yet lingering loyalties remained among them. This warns modern faith, especially where comfort, access, and biblical knowledge are abundant. We can hold orthodox beliefs and remain spiritually divided. We can experience answers to prayer and still remain strangers to God’s heart.
The antidote is not more information. It is deeper formation.
Every promise in Scripture finds its fulfillment not in isolated experiences of God’s action, but in the Person of Christ, in whom all of God’s promises find their Yes. In Christ, we are not merely given blessings. We are brought near.
May we be discipled not merely to claim His promises, but to know His heart.
God’s heart does not eliminate suffering, delay, or ambiguity. But it does give them meaning. And when faith is formed around who God is rather than what He gives, even unanswered prayers can become places of encounter, and even waiting can become holy ground.
A personal note:
I came to the Book of Joshua studying it like a field guide. I was in a season where I believed God was bringing me into something He had promised, and I wanted to understand how possession actually worked.
What I did not expect was to be stopped by the foreign gods.
These were people who had watched the Jordan open. Who had seen Jericho collapse. Who were literally living inside answered prayer. And yet Joshua speaks as though idols are sitting quietly in their tents.
I sat with that longer than I anticipated. Not because I felt above it. Because I suspected I was not.
The gods we carry into the promised land are rarely loud. Control disguised as wisdom. Reputation framed as stewardship. The need to be seen as faithful rather than the desire to actually trust.
I realized I had been far more attentive to discerning God’s hand than to examining my own heart.
Joshua’s words forced a question I had not been asking: If the promise arrives, what else arrives with it?
That felt uncomfortably relevant.
Joshua 24 no longer read to me as ancient history. It read like pastoral mercy. A leader refusing to let a victorious people mistake arrival for devotion.
I am still sitting with that.