The Bible Binge: This isn't your fight (Joshua 5:13-6:21) version 2

Call of Duty

One of the most popular games in history is call of duty. There are numerous other war games that popular the video game genre. I grew up with Battleship and Stratego. And of course, the oldest of our war games is chess, which goes back about 1500 years. Now, the goal of a lot of these games is simply capturing the opponent. The subjugation of a people through the elimination of the military. But the larger broader idea of many of these games is conquest, a reflection of the goal and purpose of war. Conquest is usually defined as the military acquisition of land, and implied there is land that does not belong to you. In the conquest of land, then, there is the conquest of people. And that is our history of war.

War almost always involves loss of life. The use of force to take something that doesn’t already belong to you is never pretty, and almost always involves some kind of evil.. even when war is waged as a defense, that defense is set over against an aggressor up to no good. There was a time when there was no war.. but once man sinned, man was at war with God and all that is right, and throughout history, that war shows up in the wars of the world, humans fighting because of sin.

We’re continuing our Bible Binge today. This week we are in the book of Joshua. The book of Joshua has typically been understood as a book of conquest. Israel taking the Promised Land that God was giving them. Here’s a preview of Joshua from our friends at the Bible Project:

Video

Today’s story is one of the most popular stories of the Bible. Joshua and the battle of Jericho… or “Joshua fit the Battle of Jericho”, one of the most well known African-American spirituals from the pre-Civil War days. But as with everything else in pop Christianity, a close inspection of today’s story indicates there’s a lot we’ve missed and get wrong about this popular story.

As we saw in the video, the book of Joshua actually has its beginning in Deuteronomy, the last book of the five books of Moses. Joshua is commissioned to lead the people into the Promised Land. Deuteronomy ends with a big cliff hanger: Israel is still not in the Promised Land. And this book of Joshua opens with Israel making preparations to go into the Promised Land.

The first city Israel comes to is Jericho. Jericho is not the biggest city in the Promised Land, but it is a strategic city and a well known city in what was known as Canaan. This city functioned as the eastern entrance into Canaan and was heavily fortified. Jericho was known as the city of palms… and the name itself is associated with an ancient word meaning moon, probably because it was the center of moon worship.

Jericho was known for its heavily fortified walls and considered, in those days, to be virtually indestructible. This is what is facing Israel when they come to the land. And as we heard in the video, Israel marches around the city for seven days.. and on the seventh day, as they are marching, they shout, the trumpets blow, and the walls fall down. And they take the city. It’s a remarkable story. A miraculous story. Marching around a city, acting for all intents and purposes, like they don’t know what they are doing. And the walls fall down. And they credit God for the victory.

This is God’s gift

But this story isn’t about Joshua and it’s not about Israel. There’s more going on here than just a fun story about how Israel captured a city by walking around it. The book of Joshua begins with this line that is repeated over and over:

Joshua 1:13 The Lord your God will give you rest, and he will give you this land.

The phrase “give you the land” or some variant is mentioned 7 times in the opening chapter of Joshua. This is the story of God giving Israel the Promised Land. The word used about what Israel is doing in the book of Joshua is conquest. But this isn’t so much conquest as God gifting them the land. In fact, it shows up in the Jericho story.

The seventh day, the last time around the city, Joshua says this:

Joshua 6:16 “After the seventh time, the priests blew the rams’ horns, and Joshua said to the troops, “Shout! For the Lord has given you the city.”

This land and this city is God’s gift. There is nothing here to suggest that Israel earns any of this. It’s not about how great they are militarily. This is God’s gift to them in his grace.

At this point though, it’s probably good to say this. There are a few myths about this book and Jericho that show up and we do well to mention them:

Myth #1: The gift of land is eternal

That the land here is God’s gift, doesn’t mean that the gift is eternal. While it is true that Israel can claim that what is now Israel and Palestine once belonged to them, it is not true that they have an eternal claim to the land. All of the land promises have been fulfilled in Christ and his work on the cross.

This is God’s fight

The next thing we can say about the battle of Jericho is that this is God’s fight, not Israel’s. The book of Joshua begins with God’s promise to be with Israel:

Joshua 1:5 “I will be with you, just as I was with Moses. I will not leave you or abandon you.”

God promises that he will be with Israel and with Joshua, just like he was with Moses. And it’s very easy to read that promise through our lens, as a nice promise that God is always with me… even though I can’t see him. But then we get to chapter five and look who shows up:

Joshua 5:14 The man who came to Joshua said, “I have now come as commander of the Lord’s army.”

This is none other than God himself, the second person of the godhead and the pre-incarnate Christ. “I will be with you” literally means, I will be with you. I’m going to bring the walls down myself. And when you walk into the city, I’ll be right there leading the way.

This Commander of the Lord’s Army is the key to understanding the Jericho story. The Commander, God himself shows up in bodily form, and he’s the One who is going to handle Jericho. It’s His fight. It’s not Israel’s fight. In fact, Israel “doesn’t do anything” to take the city… the Commander has them walking around the city for seven days and the walls finally fall down… as if to make the point that Israel isn’t lifting a finger to take the city. They aren’t attacking the walls… they’re too busy marching in circles. This is God’s fight.

This is God’s salvation

Because this is God’s fight, this warfare being waged really isn’t about conquest. It’s about redemption. We didn’t read it, but the rest of the story is the story of the rescue of a woman named Rahab.

Joshua 6:25 Joshua spared Rahab the prostitute, her father’s family, and all who belonged to her, because she hid the messengers Joshua had sent to spy on Jericho.

We could spend a lot of time here but we won’t. Rahab is a big deal. In fact, Rahab is a bigger deal here than we give her when we tell this story. In fact, the way this story is told here in Joshua is that we could say this:

The Jericho story is really the story of Rahab

Rahab is not an afterthought here. It’s the point of the story. Jericho’s walls fall down so that Rahab can be saved. This is her salvation. Divine warfare is waged on her behalf. The story of Rahab saving the spies is recounted earlier in Joshua chapter 2. Hers is the story of remarkable faith, but it is faith in God to save her… and the Commander of the Lord’s army shows up himself to do the saving.

But what the Commander knows, Rahab probably doesn’t, at least to its extent… in saving Rahab, the Commander is saving the messianic line. Rahab is mentioned in Matthew chapter 1 as one of the women noted in the physical lineage of the baby in the manger the Messiah himself. You have to wonder if there was this moment in Jericho where the Commander and Rahab have a Marty McFly moment where the Commander is meeting his great great great great grandma a thousand years ahead of time?

But Rahab’s story is our story. This Divine Warfare in the Old Testament is the pre-incarnate Christ intruding into history to do two things:

One: preserve the physical Messianic line.

Two: Providing salvation for His people.

God is constantly intervening in history on behalf of his people and on behalf of the messianic seed or posterity.

This is God’s judgment

But that leads to this: this is God’s judgment. Here’s where we get a bit uncomfortable. What do we do with the extermination piece of the story. Israel is to wipe out Jericho and its people. Again, The Commander of God’s Army is key. All of this is divine initiative. That means this is not Israel’s fight. This is not Israel’s conquest. This is a divine warfare, not human. God is constantly promising that He will fight for his people, and in these stories we see him physically showing up to do just that. This isn’t Israel’s doing. This Divine Warfare is Divine judgment against evil, not genocide. The problem is sin and evil in Jericho and the Promised Land, not ethnicity.

And that means then that the following is a myth:

Myth #2: Israel was to wipe out ethnicities

The story of Jericho has been used by bad people to do bad things. It was used in New England by early settlers for justifying the extermination of Native Americans. It is still used by various religious groups to call for the extermination of a variety of ethnicities. Such a reading of this story is itself evil. The story of Jericho is not about Israel’s quest for genocide. This is Divine Judgment initiated against evil and sin that are documented in the book of Joshua.

This anticipates the cross

All of Divine warfare in the Old Testament anticipates the war between God and Satan and evil at the cross.

The ultimate act of Divine Warfare is the cross

The ultimate act of Divine warfare is the cross.

All of these Old Testament stories are telling us our story. They are showing us what judgment against evil and sin are like. They are telling us what judgment against our sin at the cross looks like. You see, Jericho shows us:

What happened to Jesus at the cross (he was “exterminated” FOR US)

What will happen at the last judgment (sin, sinners, evil, Satan, all judged)

But it is also a picture of our salvation. As Jesus is dying the death of judgment at the cross, he is saving us from all of it. He wages war at the cross for all of our sin, all of our evil… everything that deserves extermination. It happens to Jesus, so that it will never happen to us.

Divine Warfare is waged with the Gospel

That God is the One fighting for Israel at Jericho not only means that this is about salvation not conquest, it also showing us what Divine Warfare looks like now. And this is another myth prevalent in our culture:

Myth #3: Our primary enemy is evil in the culture and we wage spiritual warfare against Satan in the culture using the law

Divine Warfare is waged with the gospel. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t warfare in the culture in the battle for hearts and minds. The main question is how is this warfare primarily fought: Law or Gospel? Satan has already been defeated. Christ is the Divine Warrior who conquered Satan once and for all. It is finished. That hasn’t stopped Satan from railing against Christ’s authority. But our answer to that railing and the war that Satan thinks he is waging against us is fought using the gospel… using Word and Sacrament.

The gathering and this preaching moment right here this morning is Divine Warfare. The Gospel going in our ears and being received in faith. Because conquest is not the goal of Christ’s warfare: redemption is the goal. Peace is the goal. We are not people who are pursuing conquest… much of the culture war has bought into this lie that we must conquer our enemies. We are to love our enemies.... those who don’t look like us, talk like us, spend like us, think like us, believe like us. That is the biblical definition of “neighbor”. Am I pursuing the redemption of my neighbor waging war with Word and Sacrament and the Proclamation that Jesus died FOR them?

That’s what the story of Jericho is telling us. The walls fall down. The enemy is defeated. Rahab is rescued. That is our story every time we come through those doors to receive Word and Sacrament. The walls we put up are destroyed. Sin is defeated. We are rescued. Again.

Let’s Pray.

The Table

This Table is God’s war against sin, evil, the Devil. Everything that happens here in Christ’s body and in Christ’s blood is aimed at everything wrong with us, everything wrong with the world. Here we find Jesus giving us forgiveness, life and salvation… grace… everything that the devil doesn’t want us or the world to have. We get it here. We are rescued here, at this Table. Again.

Benediction

Numbers 6:24–26 May the Lord bless you and protect you;

may the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you;

may the Lord look with favor on you and give you peace.