Hebrews 11 portrays the miracle of Jericho in Joshua 6 as one of history’s greatest examples of faith.
Perhaps even more miraculous is that this is not just a record of what happened to Israel 3000+ years ago. The miraculous fall of Jericho becomes a template for our own day when we are linked in covenant with Israel’s God through the cross of Jesus Christ. It becomes a timeless model from a timeless God of how we can face our own “Jerichos,” those seemingly impossible foes and insurmountable odds, whatever they may be. Our weapon is our faith in Him.
We all know the story. The Israelites, led by Joshua, approach the walled, fortress-like and hyper-evil city of Jericho. They have no battering rams, catapults, ladders or anything else to break through city gates or scale those high walls.
In obedience to God’s command, the people march in silence around the city once a day for six days, seven times on the seventh day. At the sound of the priests’ trumpets, they shout a great shout, and the walls fall flat. The city is taken and all its unspeakably demonic inhabitants are slain.
This great act of faith did not just “happen.” It resulted from the Lord’s preparation of His people beforehand. It resulted from God’s discipline of His people. It involved remembering prior acts of God’s provision and taking account of the evidence. It involved parting with past sins, setting themselves apart for God alone, separating themselves from a victim mentality. We, too, must prepare ourselves ahead of time.
We often say that “God is in control,” but He does not choose to act alone. He did not make those walls crumble until His people got involved in the process. They were not just passive observers of God’s power. Also involved were the angelic armies. But they did not get involved either until God’s people first got themselves right with Him and became willing to obey God. Only then did He and the angelic hosts act.
To have faith meant they had to obey God even when His orders didn’t seem to make sense. Until the miracle at Jericho, no city walls ever fell, or were city gates broken through except with battering rams and other instruments of war. The Israelites could have resisted this seemingly irrational command, but they obeyed. Will we obey God’s sure orders to us when they appear foolish to our families, and even to other church people
and pastors?
In a sermon on Joshua 6, Charles Spurgeon boiled down the essence of faith to three words: work, wait, win. The “Jerichos” that challenge us in life are not the result of men but of our ultimate enemy, Satan. God gives to us weak and flawed people the privilege of joining with Him to defeat that evil one who enslaved us. He wants us to get involved in winning back our own lost “Promised Land.”
In 3000+ years, God has not changed. We are still made in His image. He still requires of us the same kind of faith He required of the Israelites at Jericho. When we prepare ourselves ahead of time as did the Israelites under Joshua, God will, in the words of Paul, “crush Satan under our feet” (Romans 16:20).
From the Desk of Valson Abraham 