David Bahn – Reflections

Joshua 6:2-5

Then the Lord said to Joshua, “See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands, along with its king and its fighting men. 3 March around the city once with all the armed men. Do this for six days. 4 Have seven priests carry trumpets of rams’ horns in front of the ark. On the seventh day, march around the city seven times, with the priests blowing the trumpets. 5 When you hear them sound a long blast on the trumpets, have the whole army give a loud shout; then the wall of the city will collapse and the army will go up, everyone straight in.”

If every battle was as easy as the battle of Jericho, we might be less worried when entering into battle. And while the “Shock and Awe” approach of the first Gulf War made for a decisive victory for the coalition forces to expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait. The shock and awe of the battle of Jericho was a march around the the walls of the city for seven days, culminating in the walls of the city coming down and the army of Israel taking the city.

But Achan’s sin and the follow-up foray into Ai was a debacle. And when Israel did conquer Ai, the battle was not only brutal, but the extreme violence would gain an “R” rating for any film that would accurately portray the events of Joshua’s victory there – as well as other battles and conquests as the children of Israel took the land that God had promised to them.

On the one hand, we must realize that those were dramatically different times. Violence, scheming, and a general lack of stable governments and social justice were the order of the day. In the second place God is doing something very dramatic to establish his chosen people in their land. Israel is becoming a nation. There will be a great price to pay in this conquest – both by Israel’s enemies as well as by Israel itself.

Today our battles are different. We don’t fight against flesh and blood (cf. Ephesians 6:10-12). Some have suggested that – secondary to preparing the way for the Messiah to come into the world – the Old Testament is a giant object lesson on what won’t work. In this case the conquest of the Promised Land, and the establishment of a chosen nation on earth never really worked. Read on through the Old Testament; you will see many examples of failure on the part of God’s chosen people. Their abandonment of the ways of God lead them to become weak and vulnerable to the point that God withdraws his protective hand from time to time and they are even conquered by foreign enemies (the Babylonians and the Assyrians, to name just two).

But the battle is always for the hearts of God’s people. And God wins our hearts by the power of his love and the work of the Holy Spirit. We are called to go to war against every power that would undercut God’s reign in our lives and communities. That will bring a more complete victory than even the battle of Jericho.