Joshua 13
The fall of Jericho – 5:13-6:27
We are in the section of Joshua that is known as the book of the wars of
Yahweh, or the book of the wars of the Lord.
This book should forever settle the question that was asked me; it was a
question that we frequently get: do you accept everything the Bible says as a
command. And of course, this is a baited
question because you know the next question is going to be “well what
about….” So I say of course. The person said then could you kill
somebody. And I said of course I
could. And the person said how do you
deal with the fact that the Bible says thou shalt not kill? I said first of all the Bible doesn’t say
thou shalt not kill, the Bible says thou shalt not murder; there’s a difference
in the word. But I took the conversation
over and dealt with the discussion of the divine institutions of government,
and that basically this whole institution, and I just talked to my Dallas
Seminary professor about this same thing, and he’s come to the conclusion that
government cannot exist without capital punishment. In other words, capital punishment is a very,
very crucial point in Scripture. Capital
punishment is when God authorizes it; nobody can take life but God and those
whom God authorizes. So if God
authorizes an officer holder to take life, then He can, of course, go ahead and
take life.
And what we’re seeing in the wars of the Lord here in Joshua and
following is a set of gory, bloody, mass annihilations, and they are ordered by
God Himself. And this book, particularly
this section we are now in, has been used by critics of Christian to discredit
Christianity by showing an attempted moral contradiction between God as a God
of love and goodness and a God who orders the slaughter of thousands and
thousands of people. Now in Joshua 5:13
on to the end of Joshua 6 we have the fall of
But with the exception of that one set of believers, everybody was
slaughtered, butchered, just a mass slaughter, ordered by God. And you can’t get out of this by saying it
was Joshua’s idea. Not if you believe in
inspiration of Scripture. God ordered it. So what would you answer if someone brings
this up to you; you’re in a conversation and someone says ha-ha, you have
discrepancies. On the one hand you claim
that God is a good God and on the other hand the historical facts are that He
ordered the slaughter of infants. In
fact if you wanted to be emotional, one could even argue this further and say
well, now how does Joshua differ from Herod?
In Jesus day Herod ordered the slaughter of all infants two and below;
the soldiers just went from house to house and killed every one of them, he
wanted to make sure he got Messiah; he couldn’t tell who was Messiah so he’d
kill everybody, that way he’d make sure he’d get Him. Only one problem, Messiah immigrated. But the point was that he wanted a surefire
way of eliminating the problem, so he eliminated the babies. How then does Herod differ from God?
It goes back to a thing that we have to be careful of here in Scripture;
how does Herod differ from God? Herod
did it, God does it, so you’ve got a problem.
Well in Joshua we have the concept of holy war, and I want to take you
back to the three scenes of Joshua. When
I started the book I said there were three recurrent themes that you find over
and over and over again. One theme was
that God’s plan of salvation is continuous from generation to generation. There
are certain themes of continuity in this plan.
One of the themes of continuity is that God is the same God.
For example, if you look at chapter 5:15, if you know anything about
your Old Testament, that should ring a bell, what you read in verse 15. Here Joshua meets God, outside the city of
But thing about it is that evidently Joshua recognizes He is his
superior. Verse 14, we cannot infer that
Joshua recognizes His deity because in the Old Testament the word “worship” is
often used of subjects bound before an Oriental king. This doesn’t really mean worship; it just
means to bow down so that your forehead touches the ground. This is just a salute that you would do to a
sovereign. So by itself this does not
prove that Joshua at this time recognized His deity. It only says, “What saith my lord,” Adonai,
“unto his servant? Now he doesn’t
recognize his deity yet, necessarily; he might have, but the point is that the
Hebrew word Adonai is used here.
But now in verse 15 this mysterious figure, this Mr. X, his name is
never given here, Mr. X asks him to loose off his shoe. Now, if you turn back to Exodus 3 there’s
another scene very similar to this. In
verse 4 you have Moses going up into a mountain side, he sees this burning
bush, the famous burning bush incident of Moses. And as he comes to this, he looks out and he
notices a strange thing, it’s not consumed.
[3] “And Moses said, I will not turn aside and see this great sight, why
the bush is not burned.” Notice please
what is said in verse 5. “Draw not near
here: but off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou stand is
holy ground.” You see, there’s a
continuity; God manifested Himself to Moses and He manifested Himself to Joshua
in the same way, so Joshua could come to the firm conclusion that this is the
person that Moses met in the burning bush.
Last time we showed something peculiar about these, what we call
Christophanies. These are called
Christophanies or appearances of Christ before Christ actually became
incarnate. The peculiar thing about this
is that every time Jesus Christ shows up in Old Testament history He shows up
in a form that identifies Him with His believers. For example, here in Exodus 3 the form that
Jesus Christ appears in is a fire. This
is highly symbolic because what was
If you turn to Joshua 5 you see that Jesus Christ has come to take
command of the army. It’s going to be
Him that bears the sword. For those of
you who have been raised on a steady diet of Sunday school literature in which
you have the Lord Jesus Christ holding sheep, patting them on the head with one
hand and patting children on the head with the other hand, this is going to
strike you as a rather abnormal picture of Jesus Christ, because here He shows
up as a soldier with a drawn sword.
Swords were used to kill people.
He wasn’t waving a Kleenex at Joshua on this path. This is a sword that’s used to kill people,
mutilate them. And this is with a tool;
Jesus Christ has that tool in His hand.
And so He identifies Himself as a killing soldier, therefore the
Christian, as an office holder, can of course take life. And I hope none of you ever have any
objection to capital punishment; if you do, there’s something totally wrong
with your thinking, because if you’re against capital punishment you’re against
the whole fourth divine institution.
You’re against government and you’re essential anarchist, which bears
the condemnation of Rom. 13. So I hope
that none of you have this tendency to be a sob sister along with the liberals
and say that you don’t like capital punishment. It’s the whole basis for the fourth divine
institution.
Now in Joshua 6 we have the instructions given and I said I wanted to
review the themes to re-establish these in your thinking. We’ve established one of the things is the
continuity of God’s plan. We see this is
the way God shows up. He shows up to
Joshua the same way He showed up to Moses; different form but He says the same
thing. It’s continuity, there’s a
diversity but there’s a continuity too.
And the continuity is sufficient to tip off Joshua that I’m talking to
the same person my predecessor talked do.
In Joshua 6:1ff, we come across another thing. The second theme of this book is that the
Bible is now becoming the authority. The
Bible is the authority. Moses did not
have a Bible because Moses was in the process of writing the Bible. Joshua is the first book in the Bible that
talks about the Bible, because the other books weren’t in existence. They all came into existence together, the
first five books of the Bible. Joshua is
the sixth book of the Bible and it is the first one to talk about the other
five. So this is the first book in the
whole canon of Scripture that talks about the canon of Scripture, that talks
about itself in other words.
And as I’ve showed you in chapters 3 and 4 we have over and over again,
I was impressed upon this again as I studied the text, we have the same text,
whoever wrote Joshua, we don’t know for sure who wrote it but we know that this
is what we call prophetic history. What
do I mean by prophetic history? There
are three presuppositions that every historian has to make before he can write
any history. One of those
presuppositions is that he has to have a concept of man’s nature, what it is
that motivates men because a historian has to write and analyze events, and he
has to say, why for example did Napoleon choose to go into Russia in such and
such a year, why did Napoleon choose that particular strategy when he knew the
Russian winters were bad, etc. So every
historian has to make a presupposition about man’s nature, and he either is
going to make them up from the Bible or he’s going to make them up from
something else, but he’s going to have to make them up. This is why I argue with people about my
statement that nothing is neutral.
People keep saying no, you’re wrong, because there are classes in the
public school that are neutral. There
are no classes in the public school that are neutral. This shows you that the history class isn’t
neutral because the history is being told from a perspective, and that’s not
neutral, it’s either the Christian perspective or the non-Christian
perspective.
So we have man’s nature, that’s one presupposition that is made. The next presupposition is the story has to
have value. For example, if I give you
ten different dates and I ask you to pick the most important date, those of you
who are taking the framework course, the dates concern two key points, Augustus
Caesar’s death and the death of Jesus Christ.
And if I gave you a list and I gave the non-Christian a list and they
included both these dates, the death of Augustus and the death of Christ, the
Christian would undoubtedly pick the most important date was the death of Jesus
Christ. The non-Christian would
undoubtedly pick the most important was the death of Augustus Caesar. So what was the basis of your picking those
two dates? It was your presupposition,
which was most valuable. So the historian
comes to his history with a set of presuppositions.
The third thing is his viewing point, in other words, where does the
historian stand to view all of history?
A finite person has problems doing this.
Where do you stand to get the overall picture of history? So there’s my answer, those of you who think
there’s still neutrality in the public schools; there is no neutrality in the
public schools, there never has been, never will be, not in any education
system. Just like there’s no neutrality
when I teach the Word; I’m teaching from the Bible perspective and I make no bones
about it. I just wish my counterparts in
the public school were as honest, at least admit the presuppositions, admit
where you start. But somehow they still
think they’re neutral.
So we have these three presuppositions.
Every man has to make these. The prophetic historian who wrote the book
of Joshua made these, and right here we see one of these presuppositions
operating in the way he relates the narrative to you. He is analyzing God’s actions in history from
the divine viewpoint, and therefore over and over again he writes this history
with a three-fold purpose or a theme.
The first thing is the Lord speaks.
The second thing is that Joshua speaks. The third thing is that the
people do it. Now watch how this pattern
works out. Turn back to chapter 3, verse
7, what do you see? “And the LORD said
unto Joshua,” that’s the Lord speaking.
Verse 9, “And Joshua said….”
Verse 14, “And it came to pass…” etc. the people did. See the three cycles. Look in 4:1, “…the LORD spoke.” Verse 4, “Joshua called.” Verse 8, “And the children of
In 5:13, he meets Jesus Christ on the road, chapter 6:1 is a
parenthesis, there should not be a chapter break there, that’s wrong, chapter breaks
are not part of the inspired Scripture, they were added a thousand years later,
the chapter break should be between verses 12 and 13 of chapter 5. That’s the proper chapter break. So 6:1 is a parenthesis. Verse 2 who is speaking? “The LORD said.” Verse 6, “Joshua said.” Verse 12, they “rose up early in the morning
and the priests” were performing what Joshua said. See this three-fold cycle, over and over and
over and over again you see this. This
historian that is writing this has something in mind that he’s trying to tell
you here. Learn to read the Bible not
just as a chronicle of history, at 2:45 a.m. the alarm clock went off; at 3:30
the priest got up; at 4:30 they went out with the ark; at 5:30 the people
assembled; at 6:30 they marched around the city; at 4:00 in the afternoon they
retired. That’s just sheer mechanical
recounting of history, but that’s not the way the man writes this. The Holy Spirit has set up the form of this
book to teach us something even by the way its presenting the action. So therefore what it’s presenting is a chain
of command. And later we can make up our
typology by replacing Joshua with Jesus Christ, and replacing the LORD with the
Father, and replacing the people with the Church. That’s how you make up your analogy to use
these principles over into the New Testament.
So watch this.
You have a chain of command; God the Father tells His Son and His son
told the church. And you have this chain
that goes Father to the Son to the church; Jehovah to Joshua to the
people. And this goes over and over and
over again. What do you think the
historian is trying to tell us here?
He’s trying to tell us that the Bible, the second theme of Joshua, the
Bible is the absolute authority. The
Bible is the absolute authority! And you
have to see the whole flow here and the content of what flows down is the Word
of God. And this is one of the second
great themes of this book, the Word of God, the Word of God, the Word of God,
it becomes a monotonous repetition, over and over and over again. Now there’s no accident that this is stressed
here because as I have said again and again, no generation in the history of
Israel accomplished what this generation did.
Remember this generation has forty years training in the wilderness and
when they came out of that wilderness they did a job that had to be done. They cut and slaughtered their way across the
land until they occupied that land in obedience to God. And no other generation of Israel will ever
do that again. Not one. These people had their training and they
showed it, and it’s shown right here in their obedience to the Word of
God. The Word of God is their absolute
and they bow before it and carry it forth into all areas of their life.
Now the third theme that recurs again and again in this book is that
between phase one, the time we receive Christ, and phase three, the time we go
to be with Him, or if you want to put it in more theological language, between
the time of redemption and the time of glorification, this whole time interval
is filled with something called holy war.
Holy war, that’s the concept of the Christian life. War, not peace! You don’t get peace until phase three. It came to my attention one time, when a
church took all the hymns that mentioned anything about war out of the hymnal
simply because they didn’t like to talk about conflict, battle and war. What are you going to talk about? During the Christian that’s all we have is
war. So it’s holy.
Now this is going to involve a means of claiming the promises of God but
I want you to see something that some of you may have gotten the wrong
idea. You have heard over and over again
that God gives us certain promises that we are to claim. But I want you to notice something and I’m
going to bring this out, I want to introduce these principles then we’ll go
through the text so you’ll see how these principles work out. When we go through here I want you to see
something. A promise is given from God
but it’s qualified, and the promise is qualified in that in order to rightfully
claim the promise you have to be engaged in holy war. The promise is there, the promise is to be
claimed, but the promise is for the soldiers; not the believers in the
barracks, the believers on the front lines.
Those are the believers to whom the promises are given. The promises are given to those who are in
holy war, not to those who are sitting in the barracks having a good time
“fellowshipping” (quote end quote).
Let’s look at some of these.
Let’s look first of all at the concept of holy war once again that we
will get a proper image of our role as being identified with God. Whose war is it, yours or God’s? It’s God’s.
And this should be criterion by which you can distinguish things that
are just nonsense things in your life and things and sufferings that are there
that are truly from God. Some things we
cause ourselves by our own foolishness; they’re there because we’ve just done
something wrong, we just goofed up. And
we’ve got a problem, we can’t blame it on the Lord. However, there are other sufferings in our
life that aren’t part of this that are there because of what we stand for and
moving on with the Lord. If you’re
moving on with the Lord and you encounter a problem then that problem is part
of the holy war problem. If you go on
and make a mistake and you goof up some place, that’s really not in the
mainstream of the holy war; it’s part of it but it’s not the center of it. So you can analyze some of the pressures and
some of the obstacles that come into your life and ask yourself, are they there
because I made a mistake and it’s simply a goof, or are they there because I
have been actively seeking God’s will and moving toward that will and in the
process of moving toward that will this thing has come up in the way. And if it’s come up in the way, then it’s
part of these promises.
Now let’s look at how God looks upon this whole struggle. I want to start in Exodus 14; we’re going to
go through a chain of references, because if there’s one image of God you’ve
got to have this image. Too many of you
have the image of God as a redeemer only; you don’t have the image of God as a
fighting general under which you serve.
You don’t have a militant concept of Jesus Christ. You’ve got to get this image of Christ; He’s
not just your redeemer, He’s a fighter, He’s a man of war. In Exodus 15 we have one of the greatest
hymns I have ever read, a tremendous hymn.
Someday somebody with some musical ability can put music to it and
really have a good hymn. Verse 3, “The LORD
is a man of war; the LORD is His name,” clearly defining Him as an armed
warrior. We’ve just seen Joshua 5; He’s
there in the path.
Turn to 1 Samuel 17; I want to show you the context of a famous promise,
dealing with holy war. Keep in mind,
Jesus Christ, not just as your redeemer but Jesus Christ as the one who fights
and kills and struggles against evil. In
1 Sam. 17:47, right in the middle of the David/Goliath incident, and this is a
famous promise, but look at the context of the promise. It’s not just promiscuously distributed to
any ole believer who has a sore toe. In
verse 47 it’s a believer who is involved in a great struggle, the holy
war. And in that context, then verse 47,
, this is David’s reply back to Goliath, “And all this assembly show know that
the LORD saves not with sword and spear; for the battle is the LORD’s and He
will give you into our hands,” a famous promise of David, “the battle is the
LORD’s.” David could rest assured that
God would supply his needs because David knew he was fighting God’s
battle. It’s not the case that you’re
fighting the battle and God is cooperating with you. If you’ve got that image you’re completely
wrong. It’s not that you are in a battle
and God helps you. It is that God has a
battle and you’re in it for Him. It’s
His target, the weapons are His and the victory is His, and you’re just on His
side fighting for Him. It’s God’s
battle, not yours. So 1 Sam. 17, “the
battle is the LORD’s” and He will fight for us “and He will give you into our
hands.”
You see the same thing in Isaiah 11, again notice how God appears; not
as the redeemer but as the fighting soldier.
Verse 4-5, “But with righteousness shall He judge the poor, and reprove
with equity for the meek of the earth; and He shall smite the earth with the
rod of His mouth, and with the breath of His lips shall he slay the wicked. [5]
And the righteousness shall be the girdle of His loins, and faithfulness the
girdle of His reins.” What is it talking
about here? That there’s a battle between
good and evil and God is actively fighting the evil… actively fighting the evil
by choice. And He appears in
judgment. Now if you do any thinking at
all, somewhere along the line here in this series a little light should come
on, a little bell should ring and you say now wait a minute, and you’ll be back
to the age old problem, how come God’s fighting the evil when God made it. In other words, isn’t this ironic: here you
have God with a sword raised, chopping down the evil, and yet He is the sovereign
Creator of history. Doesn’t it look
like….
I mean, if you thing about this
you should say to yourself wait a minute, doesn’t this look like God’s fighting
God here? No, the answer is the literal
fall of man that we discussed in the morning service. If you do not have a literal Genesis 3 you’re
going to have this problem right at this point.
Here it comes up again, same issue.
If you get away from a literal Genesis 3 you make God the author of evil
and if you make God the author of evil then you can’t fight evil without
fighting God. And therefore when God
fights evil God fights God. So this
automatically flows if you deny and drop the literal fall of man in Genesis 3
the net result is that God turns around and fights Himself. Every time God says that’s wrong, I don’t
like it, I’m going to fight it, every time He says that He’s saying that’s Me,
God fighting God. So that’s what you are
going to get if you decide you want to compromise in Genesis 3, you’re going to
have God fighting God. There’s no way
around it, there’s absolutely none.
There’s not one person in this room that can get out of that
dilemma. I don’t care who you are, how
brilliant you are, I don’t care how many hours you put into thinking about it,
if you drop the literal fall of Adam you’re going to wind up in the end of God
having to fight Himself. It’s got to be
that way; either evil came from God or it came by His permission through a free
agent. It’s one or the other, there’s no
other choice. And if it came by God then
God fights God.
Let’s go to the New Testament; you see this holy war again. 2 Cor. 10, this is part of the same theme as
holy war. Those of you in college may
have read a famous work by Kamu called The
Plague and this comes out in that novel very well; here you have a
situation where a plague comes on the village and you have two people in the
novel; one is a doctor and one is a priest.
What does the priest have to do with it?
Remember, everybody is dying; this is a real life situation. You have a plague come into the city and the
priest says I cannot fight the plague because God is the Lord of history and if
I fight the plague I fight God, so the priest says I will have nothing to do
with it, let the people die. The doctor
says I love my people, I have to heal them and he goes out with his medicine
bag and he goes from person to person and he heals the people, and he says I
will fight evil if I have to fight God.
And that’s the way Kamu sees it, you either have to take the side of the
priest, sit back and let evil go on, or take the side of the doctor and begin
to fight God. You have no choice, that’s
the only thing you’re left with, unless the Bible is right; if the Bible is
right then you can fight evil without fighting God because the evil is a result
of the fall of man, it’s a result of our fall and we can fight our mistakes and
the result of our mistakes.
In 2 Cor. 10, this is another area where we face the same thing. Here’s the battle, the holy war when it comes
to mental attitude. Keep in mind we’re
still discussing phase two of the Christian life, or if you want to call it by
a technical word, sanctification, the time between the time you become a
Christian and the time you die, the fight isn’t over until you draw your last
breath. Verse 3-5, “For though we walk
in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh. [4] (For the weapons of our
warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of
strongholds), [5] Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalts
itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought
to the obedience of Christ.” A total
war, it involves every area of life.
This includes how you act on the outside and how you act on the
inside. It includes the mental attitude,
it includes the overt activities; it includes every area of life.
This is why we go back again and again to the divine viewpoint where you
have God at the center, you have Bible doctrine around it and you have every
other subject, science, history, philosophy, art, music, literature, you have
your relationship with friends, loved one, society, etc. All the details of life, not one detail is
omitted from this side; every area is a struggle. This is why I cannot, for the life of me,
imagine someone coming into Lubbock Bible Church, as some do, and hear the Word
of God and then walk out and it doesn’t seem to make any difference. I don’t understand that, they didn’t get mad
at me or something and leave, but I don’t see how you can keep coming back and
listening to me when you don’t really take it seriously. I’m not that kind of a pleasing person to
listen to, but evidently some people have some weird value systems. This is ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous
when you’re in a fight and there’s area where you’re neutral, you can’t hide,
there’s not an inch of ground where you can be neutral, not a fraction of an
inch.
In every area you’re constantly, every moment of the day making
decisions one way or the other, to join God or to fight Him in this holy war
that’s going on. If you’re in the bottom
circle when you accept Jesus Christ God puts you in union with Christ, He also
lays out the will of God for you and for your life and at any given time you’re
either in that circle or out of the circle; if you’re in the circle you’re in
His army fighting on His side, fighting for His battles in every area. And by the way, to fight requires effort, and
this is one of the things in the Christian life where some people have got kind
of a zombaic attitude toward these promises; I’m going to claim a promise, and
what they really mean is I want a nice soft mattress to lie down on and by
repeating the promise over and over I can hypnotize myself into doing nothing
and just lying on the mattress. Now that
is not faith; if you think that is faith, that is nothing more than what Norman
Vincent Peale did, The Power of Positive
Thinking, nothing more than that, except you’ve dressed it up in
fundamentalist words. Now you’ve got
nothing more than that, and that is not faith, it is not claiming the promises,
it’s just hypnotizing yourself. But
claiming the promises means an active conflict where you have to choose against
obstacles and there’s something there that prevents you from doing it. You should feel pressure against you when you
claim these promises; you should feel it’s hard to do this, if you’re in a real
fight.
Let’s turn to Eph. 6, then we’ll come back to Joshua. But I want you to see this before we hit the
walls of Jericho. Verse 10f, this is
addressed to Christians but the same theme carries over, from Old Testament to
New Testament, the same thing. “Finally,
my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of His might. [11] Put on the whole armor of God, that ye
may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” Emphasis: it’s God’s armor, not the “whole”
armor. People have read Eph. 6 and think
it’s the whole armor; the whole armor of the Roman soldier is not there, for
one thing his spear isn’t there so it’s not talking about the whole armor, it’s
a general word that means basically the whole armor in a general sense. But the emphasis is not on fleshly armor but
on spiritual armor, that’s the emphasis, the “armor of God.” “…that ye may be able to stand against the
wiles” or stratagems “of the devil,” Satan.
It requires again, just like the literal Genesis we have to believe in a
literal Satan that literally goes around and literally influences people. If you don’t have that you don’t have the
concept of a holy war, you’re just fighting your own shadow, that’s all you are
doing, it just becomes shadow boxing unless there’s somebody really there
claiming the shadow and we say there is, Satan.
Then verse 12, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against
principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this
world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” Notice that, literal
angelic forces operating in history against you if you are identified with
Jesus Christ. [13] “Wherefore, take unto
you the whole armor of God, that ye may be able t withstand in the evil day,”
that means resist, “and having done all,” that means having put all the armor
on, “to stand,” to hold your ground literally.
It means to hold your ground.
Again, in terms of this diagram of this bottom circle it means that
Satan is interested in bumping you out of that bottom circle and in particular
taking over part of that bottom circle.
He wants ground and he wants you to give him ground because if he can
destroy the base of the Holy Spirit’s operation in your life he wins, and
that’s why he wants ground, and that’s why we have to do all to take and hold
this ground.
Then verse 14-15 you’ve heard many times, and finally verse 17, which is
the next imperative, “Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the
Spirit,” and while you do that pray.
Verse 18 is a phrase that jacks onto verse 17 in a contemporaneous
sense. In other words, verse 17 gives
you the main verb but verse 18 tells you what accompanies verse 17. So while verse 17 is going on verses 18 gives
you the conditions, praying and watching—praying and watching all the time,
that’s how you take the sword of the Spirit, that’s how you take the helmet of
salvation. Those are the two things,
praying and watching.
Now let’s go back to Joshua and see how all these principles come
together in the fall of Jericho. Joshua
6:6, “And Joshua, the son of Nun, called the priests, and said unto them, Take
up the ark of the covenant, and let seven priests bear seven trumpets of rams’
horns before the ark of the LORD.” And
of course seven is used again and again. Again, so you’ll understand the
narratives, they are to operate on day 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and then day 7 is
going to be a special day, it’s going to hit the city 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
times, each other day they go around only once.
So we have seven, sevens all over the place here, you’ve got seven in
verse 8, seven priests bearing seven trumpets, etc. And you’ve got seven days and then on the
seventh day you’ve got seven times around.
Do you get the impression that seven is important? Yes; seven is always
the Biblical number for perfection; it means completeness and every time the
word seven or the number seven occurs in Scripture it usually is emphasizing a
work of God and its completeness. So what
we’re saying here is this is going to be a total and a complete work of God.
In verse 7, however there’s an interesting thing. Joshua talked to the priests, he says get the
ark up, “And then he said unto the people, Pass on, and compass the city, and let
him who is armed pass on before the ark of the LORD.” They had a little parade, and here’s the ark,
the parade is moving from right to left.
Ahead of the ark they had the armed men and in back of the ark they had
armed men. It looked this; the ark was
in the middle. Does something strike you
that’s something’s happening different this time than from the time when they
crossed Jordan. Remember what happened
then? People had to keep one thousand
yards away from the ark when they crossed Jordan. The priests had to be out
with the ark alone; the people had to be a thousand yards away from the ark at
all times. Now why do you suppose, right
at this point, in the middle of the battle, the ark now is packed right in the
middle of the soldiers. Answer: it’s
what the ark stands for; the ark is the throne of Yahweh. In ancient Israel they saw God as sitting
between the cherubs on that ark. That
wasn’t just a little parade running around with a box, that box represents
Jesus Christ. And that box is actually
representing the throne of Jehovah. Jehovah was actually thought to be there in
His person, and this was His throne; it was like they were taking their king on
their shoulders and marching with their king around the city. Now catch this because this is explains why
all this parade is going on here.
There’s a definite reason why we have the horns blowing, why we have
seven, why we have the ark, and why we have the soldiers packed around the ark. There’s a method in all of this.
Notice in verse 9, “And the armed men went before the priests who blew
with the trumpets, and the rear guard came after the ark, the priests going on,
and blowing with the trumpets.” Now
that’s a crude translation of the Hebrew which means they were continually
blowing the horns. Now what is the
significance of the horn blowing? The
significance of the horn blowing is that it announces the advent of
Jehovah. Everywhere you have a horn or
this kind of a trumpet in God’s Word it announces the fact that Jehovah has
come. For example, in Exodus 19 when
Jehovah comes to Mount Sinai what do the people hear? They hear a blast as of a might trumpet and
then God descends to Mount Sinai. What
is it that we’re going to hear? “At the
sound of the last trump the dead in Christ shall rise” again. Why?
Because God is coming into history again. Every time God comes into
history He announces it, there’s a parade, there’s either His angels or men
blow horns. And so the reason why these people are blowing horns is not just
physiological, this is not just physiological warfare on the inhabitants of
Jehovah, this is a parade in which they announce that God has come to set up
His kingdom, and you Canaanites inside there that have disbelieved in Jehovah,
watch carefully, our God has come. And that’s
why he goes around seven days, to announce the fact that God has come with His
kingdom.
Now another thing to notice about 10 is that when Joshua tells the
people, “And Joshua had commanded the people, saying, Ye shall not shout, nor
make any noise with y our voice, neither shall any word proceed out of your
mouth, until the day I bid you shout; then shall ye shout.” Now Joshua knew what was going to happen, but
please notice, Joshua did not tell the people what’s going to happen. Why do you think he does this? Here you have these people; they have to get
up every morning. You’d imagine after a
while they’d think it’s kind of foolishness, get up every morning and what’s supposed
to happen, they still don’t know that the walls are going to fall down. So the people get up every morning and they
walk around this thing blowing horns, and all their mouths are shut up, verse
10, there’s a time to keep your mouth shut and this is one of the times.
Now why do you suppose all the mouths have to be shut? Because as always in Scripture, people who
open their mouth at 90 mph usually get in the Lord’s way. And He wants this to be a clear testimony and
it introduces a principle. If you can’t
say something clearly then shut up; that’s the whole point in the apologetics
that we’ve covered in the framework course.
If you can’t give an answer to every man that asks you a reason of the
hope that is you, then shut up. That’s 1
Peter 3:15. That’s the whole point, and
that’s what Joshua is saying, I want a clear testimony, I want those Canaanites
so they can hear those horns. This is
important; this is going to be a sign that Jehovah has come into history and I
don’t our horns drowned out, there were only seven of them, and you had
thousands of people, it’d drown the horns out and he says so just shut up, just
go around there and keep your big mouth shut for six days. This is the greatest miracle of all, that
people could keep their mouth shut for six days while this was going on, it’s
not the walls at all that’s the problem.
I have much more problem with people keeping their mouth shut for six
days than I have with the walls of Jericho.
So we have this going on and the reason is to focus attention on the
ark. There’s this Jehovah, He has come,
the horns are blowing, He has come into history. Now Joshua omits to tell them the promise,
and this is going to be an explanation of what faith really means in the Bible
and claiming God’s promises. The promise
wasn’t even given. I want you to see
this. The promise is not given until the
seventh day. The promise was not given;
how could the people walk around the city by faith then? Do you know why? Because their faith was grounded in God’s
character independent of any specific promise, and when you get in your Christian
life to the point where you can take God at His character, and you know the
essence of God, when you can look at God and say I know He is sovereign, like
Abraham could in Romans 4, I know that He’s righteous, He’s just, He’s loving,
I know that He’s omnipotent, I know that He is able to do that which He has
promised and I know He loves me and He will do what He promised. And if you can operate off of the base of
just God’s character, apart from the promises, you’ve really come a long
way. In fact, by the time you get to
that point you really don’t need promises, although they are there and they’re
important.
So here to develop their faith a promise is not really given until
finally down to the seventh day, verse 16, “And it came to pass at the seventh
time, when the priests blew with the trumpets, Joshua said unto the people,
Shout; for the LORD has given you the city,” and the Hebrew word for “shout”
here means proclaim the victory. That’s
the point. In other words, right now
proclaim the victory. These people,
probably you had some guys think Joshua is off his rocker; he has us go around
this thing once a day for six days, today he’s panicking, he says going around
seven times and that isn’t enough, now he’s going to have us shout. You can just hear some skeptics say this is
ridiculous. This is the most ridiculous
thing I’ve ever heard; this is a fine way to start our conquest of the holy
land. We’ve got an army and we’re
running around these walls quiet, blowing horns; we’re the laughing stock of
the Canaanites. And now he wants us to
shout a little bit, add some cheers.
In verse 16, however, Joshua gives a reason for it, and says “Shout, for
the LORD has given you the city.” That’s
perfect tense which means it is an accomplished act. It means that God has already given it to
us. Now that is a promise that God gave
to Joshua back in the first part of this chapter, but Joshua is just now
telling the people about it. It shows
you the fantastic faith these people had.
Now in verse 17 we get into the problem.
Here we get into the charem principle,
you should remember this word from the Deuteronomy series, that’s not “harem,”
it’s charem, it’s a hard “h.” By the way, that is the word from which you
get harem, the kings had all their girlfriends, they wrapped them up to keep
them all away from the other guys, so this is how the word charem came, it means you have some precious thing and you wall it
up and it’s private property. Now the
word “accursed” in verse 17 is “let that city be charem,” let it be charem,
it’s a verb form. What that means is let the city be God’s. Now what does this mean? An army in the ancient near east when they
moved into conquer, they looted; this is how an army operated, they just
looted. They had to; this is how they
got their supplies. So when an army was
told in verse 17, “let the city be accursed, it was a tremendous loss to that
army because it meant that everything in that city had to be devoted to God. It meant that everything, they had to go in
there and destroy property, they had to destroy people, they had to destroy
everything. This wasn’t just vengeance,
this was dedicating the whole city to God.
This was the first Canaanite city they had conquered and now they were
going to devote it to God, the first fruits go to God. So therefore this first city, Jericho, goes
to God, everything.
This is why in verse 17 it says, “And the city shall be accursed, even
it, and all that are in it, to the LORD; only Rahab, the harlot, shall live,
she and all who are with her in the house, because she hid the messengers that
we sent.” Rahab is a believer, she is
the only believer, and the family.
So in verse 20, “the people shouted when the priests blew the trumpets;
and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the
people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat,” literally in
the Hebrew it fell down upon itself, “so that the people went up into the city,
every man straight before him, and they took the city.” And I want you to see, there’s another
miracle right there and the miracle is not the walls falling down. That’s one miracle, there’s another miracle
and I hope you catch it. If you read
verse 20 and verse 17 together you should see that there’s another miracle
there. It has a lot to do with your
living a Christian life.
The miracle is how did Rahab survive?
Where was her house? It was in
the wall and the miracle is this, that when God lowers His judgment, He can
always do it with infinite accuracy.
It’s not the case of God trying to kill a fly with a sledge hammer and
so He kills the fly and ruins all the furniture in the room. That’s not the way God judges in
history. God judges in history so He can
reach down and pinpoint His judgment.
This is what Jesus is getting at when He said a sparrow cannot fall to
the ground except God willing; the hairs on your head are numbered. And this is fine tight-lipped control over
history that God had and it’s something that some of you who are working inside
a 20th century mentality are going to have a terrible time trying to
think this through. And if you haven’t
thought this through yet you’d better start thinking, because you’ve been
brought up to think of history as just statistical processes, just a set of
statistics thrown around and to you God can’t work this way in history, that He
can’t specifically touch an individual.
When this wall crumpled down He would hold the very pieces of the wall
so when that wall crumpled, the section of Rahab’s house would be perfectly
secure. There would be no danger of
Rahab’s coming down. God gave His
promise that He would protect Rahab and He keeps it.
And then finally it concludes with the fact, verse 26, “And Joshua
charged them at that time, saying, Cursed by the man before the LORD, who rises
up and builds this city, Jericho; he shall ay the foundation of it in his
firstborn, and in his youngest son shall
he set up the gates of it.” What he
means here is not that Jericho wouldn’t be occupied but it wasn’t until 850 BC…
in 850 BC a man decided he was going to fortify Jericho. By fortifying it, we don’t mean building, we
mean the town was here and he built walls around it, and when that man built
walls around it some six centuries later the curse of verse 26 operated and he
lost every son he had. Verse 26, the man
who is going to be the contractor for the walls, form his firstborn to his
youngest son, they will all die. He’s
going to lose every son he ever had, a terrible curse on him who will build the
walls of Jericho again. God again shows
that He can operate in history, that a curse made back in 1400 BC came to pass
in 860 BC, six centuries later. It shows
you God never forgets His Word.
And the net result of this whole Jericho incident, verse 27, “So the
LORD was with Joshua, and his fame was proclaimed throughout all the country,”
an empirical demonstration that God was with Joshua.
But I want to tie this together and end it on this note; why are the
walls the issue? We introduced this last
time but I want to conclude with it so that when you leave this narrative there
will be something to tie it together in your mind. Why is it, when I think of Jericho,
immediately I think of the walls? Why
are the walls the issue in this whole story, from beginning to end? They’re not an issue in any other city and
the other cities had walls. So it isn’t
because Jericho had walls and the other cities didn’t have walls. There’s something peculiar about this
city. The reason why the walls have
become an issue is because of both the believers and the unbelievers. The walls are the issue because first of all
the believers panicked when they saw the walls.
What were the spies looking at in Numb. 13? Oh God, the problem is too big for you? Oh God, do you see those tall walls up there,
we’re never going t get these cities. So
believers had a hang-up, the walls were the believer’s hang-up. They saw the walls and the walls caused them
to say this wall, this problem is greater than God’s resources, and so therefore
God can’t do it. So they start operation
crybaby, God can’t do it and all the rest of it. This is one reason.
The second reason is even more than that. The unbelievers had a hang-up on it. Do you know why? The unbelievers knew they couldn’t match
Jehovah’s armies in the field but Joshua 6:1 states clearly that they were
shutting the city up because they trusted in the walls. So you have the believers panicking over the
walls, the unbelievers are trusting the walls, so guess what God is going to
make the issue? The walls. He says I’m going to take that problem that
seems so great to you as a believer and I’m going to take that thing that the
unbeliever places his confidence in and I’m going to blow it right out of the
tub. And not only that, I’m going to do
it in such a way that neither of you have anything to do with it because all
you’re doing is just running around the problem, just going around the
problem. You yourself aren’t going to
touch the problem; I’m going to do it all.
So if you want a closing application in your life as a believer, just
think of any problem in your life as a wall. What is your wall? What is your hang-up? And I want you to notice how God solved this
problem. God solved it by having
believers simply trust Him for the solution.
He told these believers what to do, they obeyed, they followed out God’s
Word as far as they knew, which is what you are going to have to do. You are going to have some obstacles in your
life as a Christian and God is going to tell you to do something and if you
follow God’s will some time you’re going
to come right to that wall and you’re going to take just a collision path, you
are staying… over here there is human viewpoint, over here there’s divine
viewpoint, just a narrow path where you can move and the tendency is going to
be when you come up to that problem you hit the wall and you’re going to say the wall is too big, I’ve
got to go around it, and the minute you go around you get in human viewpoint
territory. You’re using some energy of
the flesh technique to solve that problem instead of waiting there like these
people waited there for six days, until they finally saw the wall topple. And they were obedient to the Lord. You move in your divine viewpoint as far as
you can move and when you get to a critical point you stay there, stubbornly
trusting the Lord to remove the problem and the walls will come down. And it
may require that you have to around the thing six or seven times.
Incidentally, one of the reasons why I think they went around six or
seven times is for the same reason that God kept Israel over the banks of
Jordan for three days, and the reason is this:
God wants the believer to make sure he understands the magnitude of the problem. He wanted these people as they walked around
to take notice, you guys think this wall is tough, I’m going to give you a
guided tour for seven days and you’re going to really see how tough it is. You’re going to memorize every rock in that
wall so you will know how tough that wall is and when it crumbles you’ll know
it was I who did it. So this is why
oftentimes God will have your life, and why it seems so frustrating to you as a
believer, why God will guide you and it seems like you’re faithful to the Lord,
you obey everything you know that He’s told you, you stay in the bottom circle,
and you still get the problem and you bounce off the problem, you keep bouncing
off of it, you’re still there, you’re like these people going around the
wall. Why? God wants you to see, He wants you to
understand the problem enough so that when He solves it you will know He solved
it, you didn’t. This is a cardinal way
that God operates. He operated in Jordan
this way and He operates that way here, so you might do some thinking about
what your walls are and whether you’ve trusted the Lord for them.