“Adonai said to Y’hoshua, ‘I have handed Yericho over to you, including its king and his warriors.'”-Joshua 6:2
The divine commander of Hashem’s army now standing in front of Joshua informs him that Israel’s victory over Jericho is already a done deal.
Every inhabitant of the city is to be exterminated including even those folks who would normally be spared by a merciful enemy (in this case, the king and his warriors).
Here’s the deal.
This war has already been won in the heavens.
How do we know this is true?
Because of the explanation from the Commander of God’s armies letting Joshua know just how ridiculously easy it’s going to be for him and his soldiers to achieve victory.
From Israel’s perspective, this is going to be nothing more than a mop-up operation.
All Israel has to do is OBEY God’s easy peasy instructions and the city of Jericho will be their’s for the taking as effortless as taking candy from a baby.
There wasn’t gonna be a need for some shrewd man-concocted battle strategy.
All Israel’s soldiers had to do was prance around the city every day for a week doing nothing but blowing their shofars and the walls of Jericho would fall like a deck of playing cards.
Think about it folks!
The only weapons Israel had was their FAITH and their shofars.
No spears, arrows, battering rams or climbing up siege ladders.
In one fell supernatural swoop, the walls would come a tumbling down and all the soldiers would have to do is stroll across the debris and kill anyone who survived.
But this would only happen IF THE PEOPLE WERE OBEDIENT TO THE LORD’S INSTRUCTIONS.
There’s another point I want to tell you.
I know from our modern day perspective, the “war strategy” Israel was instructed to implement sounds absurd as all hell.
But here’s the thing.
It sounded absurd as all hell to Israel as well.
It went against EVERYTHING mankind knew about waging war at that time.
And folks that’s the takeaway for today.
The Lord’s Ways are NOT our ways and never will be.
Hashem’s ways will more often than not seem foolish, unreasonable and impractical.
Yet we are still called to have FAITH and OBEY.
So what were the “foolish” instructions the Lord gave to Joshua and the Israelite army?
Simple, they were to march around the city of Jericho once a day for 6 days.
During this time, 7 priests were to blow 7 shofars.
However, on the 7th day, things changed a bit.
On the 7th day, there was to be a litany of 7’s.
On the 7th day, they were to march around the city 7 times and on the 7th circling of the city they were to create a huge blast by blowing on 7 shofars.
The blowing of the shofars was to be accompanied by vigorous shouting.
And at that the walls of Jericho would collapse leaving the inhabitants inside exposed and unprotected.
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