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.
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.
We need leaders like that because what makes them leaders is that they are following the leader. Because they’re following Him, they lead us not to narrow views of God that revolve around one’s particular denomination. Instead they lead us to that great God who has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ and who will be the object of our learning, worship, and adoration throughout endless ages.
But now we need to say something else. All of that in a certain sense is preliminary, at least in my thinking, because the part of the story that really interests me is not so much the identity of this heavenly commander or the identity of the heavenly commander’s troops. What really interests me is what the commander said when Joshua issued his challenge.
This commander was no doubt the commander of the armies of Israel. And yet that phrase, “the army of the Lord” or “the hosts of the Lord,” in the Old Testament often means something much more than human armies. It has to do with those heavenly armies, the armies of angels which are there to direct, bless, and protect God’s people. So when this commander comes and says, “I am a commander of the army of the Lord,” we need to understand that identification in the fullest measure of the meaning of that phrase.
At this point, Joshua moves forward quickly and demands to know whether this man is for the host of Israel or for the nation’s enemies. The man replies, “Neither, but as commander of the army of the Lord, I am now come.” We’re told that upon hearing this, Joshua fell down on his face to the ground in reverence.
Canadian Committee of The Bible Study Hour
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