Spiritism and the occult might seem rather remote to us, but they are not treated lightly by people who have lived in areas of the world where this is seriously practiced. It does take place in portions of America, and it’s going to become increasingly a problem for us in years ahead. But for those who have seen in it some way, it is very serious because the demonic is a terrible thing.
Spiritism and the occult might seem rather remote to us, but they are not treated lightly by people who have lived in areas of the world where this is seriously practiced. It does take place in portions of America, and it’s going to become increasingly a problem for us in years ahead. But for those who have seen in it some way, it is very serious because the demonic is a terrible thing.
I suppose it’s not really possible to preach through the book of Joshua without dealing at some point with what some people have felt to be a great moral problem. The moral problem lies in the fact that at the direction of God, the Jewish people were commanded by Joshua to exterminate large blocks of the country God had given them to possess. People would call it genocide. It’s a bad thing and people have asked with some perception how it can be possible that in a book that pretends to present to us the character of a good and loving God we could have stories which show God directing His people to do such a thing. This is one of a class of problems that we find in the Bible, and it is the task of apologetics, that is, the defense of the faith, to answer these.
We face spiritual challenges that are just as real. We go up against a different form of walled cities, strongholds of that one who is God’s and our enemy, the devil. Sometimes these are in the world. There are great bastions of evil power in this world. Sometimes they’re in the church. Sometimes they are within our own hearts. God is in the business of tearing down those strongholds, and He uses us as His soldiers.
There’s a third step in the preparation of the people for their victory, though it overlaps the one I’ve just given. First of all, be silent. Second of all, obey. But thirdly, obey in all things to the very end. I call this “total obedience to the very end.” This third point is important because obedience that is not total and to the end is not true obedience. It’s really disobedience.
During all this strange silence of the Israelites, I can’t imagine that as they went around this city day after day that the defenders within the walls were silent. Maybe the first day they were. They must have watched by their walls in awed silence at this vast host of invaders silently encircling their city. They must have wondered, “What is this army up to?” What a bizarre situation that must have looked like: a silent city defended by silent soldiers surrounded by a silent army. It must have been the strangest military invasion in history.
That’s a most unusual set of instructions for taking a city. One might even say that it was utterly unreasonable to think that the walls of Jericho would fall in such a manner. But Joshua obeyed the Lord, and the people obeyed Joshua. The city was encircled according to God’s precise instructions. And on the seventh day at the end of the seventh encirclement, the horns were blown, the people shouted, the walls fell down, and the city was taken as God told Joshua it would be. It was a great victory.
You notice that Joshua did not do what we would normally expect of a military commander. Joshua did not assemble his war council to determine the best way to attack Jericho. They did not try to take the city using the standard methods of the day. They did not try to construct siege ramps, nor did they try to cut off Jericho’s food supply and starve the city into surrender. Instead, the Lord specifically told Joshua how to go about the conquest of the city, as peculiar as the plan was from the standpoint of military strategy. And Joshua obeyed the Lord’s instructions.
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