Sermons from Past Years

Joshua 5:13-6:27 "Neither" Scott Hoezee

A promiscuous grace and a surprising providence: that's how we summed up the story of Rahab when last we were in Joshua a few weeks ago. In the famous story of Rahab and the spies we were startled to see God's clever providence turn a prostitute into a prophet. The spies Joshua had sent in to size up the military lay of the land--and particularly the strengths and defenses of Jericho--did an absolutely lousy job from a military point of view. For they had made a beeline for Rahab's brothel and then, while there, were found out by the king of Jericho. So the spies never did have a chance to check on rampart location, troop strength, and topography.

Instead they got from Rahab the one piece of information it turned out they needed: the knowledge that God had already gone ahead of them, filled the Canaanites with dread, and had even communicated to the likes of Madam Rahab that Jericho was as good as in Israel's hands already. When the spies reported Rahab's sermon, the people were so happy to hear the news that no one even thought to chide the spies for presenting such a poor reconnaissance report. Because any God who could deliver a powerful sermon through a foreign prostitute was surely going to take care of everything else, too.

Tonight's story shows what an apt preview the incident with Rahab was. For again, by following God's instructions, the people of Israel do it all wrong from a military point of view. Rahab was right about the Jerichoites and their fear of Israel: we are told in verse 1 that by the time Israel approached the city, it had already been sealed up tight. The people of Jericho were clearly hunkering down for a long and ugly siege.

But then, for a whole week, the Israelite army suddenly turns into a marching band! Once every day for six days straight the people march around the city to the tune of a trumpet song. Just once each day: no more, no less. Then they saunter back to their campground, have a weenie roast, and call it a day.

You can only imagine one of two reactions on the part of the Jerichoites as they watched this from behind their shuttered windows: either they started to laugh or they started to quiver in their boots still more. Either they concluded that Israel was not near the threat they had thought or they concluded that not only was Israel powerful but it was a little psychotic, too! Bad enough to have a fierce enemy with a powerful god behind them, but now to find out that Israel was half-a-bubble off level made things worse!

Either way, from a military standpoint, Israel's horn-tooting tactics could not have been more wrong or odd. But we know how the story turns out: on the seventh day things changed. Having watched the Israelites do their little marching band routine for six days straight, the Jerichoites were perhaps getting a bit bored with the whole thing. Every day is the same song and dance: once around the city and then back to the camp for supper. So on the seventh day when the people began a second circuit of the city, and then a third, and a fourth, and so on, I imagine that the people in Jericho sat up a bit straighter in their chairs. Granted, it still did not look very threatening--there still were no siege-works built against their walls, still no sign of a ramming rod to bust down the main gate. But on this seventh day something was clearly up. Finally the Israelites broke their silence, gave a marrow-chilling shout, and in the blink of an eye Jericho's famously impregnable walls more or less melted in place.

In the end Rahab and family are rescued but the rest of Jericho is utterly destroyed in this first instance of Joshua's total war, the scandal of which we dealt with in our first sermon in this series. But as with our introduction to Jericho a few weeks ago in the Rahab story, so again in Joshua 6: God proves mighty surprising and highly unorthodox in how he gets things done. But how important it was for the Israelites to learn through this first Promised Land battle that all of this is a gift of God. Important though it was for Israel to possess the requisite skills and hardware of ordinary military combat, in the long run whatever victories they gained--including the ultimate victory of winning the whole land--would be a gift of grace, not the fruit of their own military efforts.

For most of us, this story of the fall of Jericho is so utterly familiar. It is the stuff of gripping Sunday school flannel graphs and colorful Miriam Schooland Bible Story Book illustrations. If you are like me, then you cannot remember a time when you did not know this story in all its details.

But if you are like me, then there is, as a matter of fact, one element of this story you probably do not know. I refer to the exceedingly queer, somewhat problematic, and highly enigmatic little incident recorded at the end of Joshua 5. Most scholars think this is part of the larger Jericho story, which is why the NIV includes it under the sub-heading "The Fall of Jericho."

Joshua 5:13 tells us that Joshua is near Jericho and so the battle is about to be pitched. He looks up and suddenly sees no less than the commander of Yahweh's divine army, sword in hand. Joshua wastes no time in asking the question that always occupies the forefront of a military man's mind: "Are you for us or for our enemies?" We all know what we expect God's emissary to say, but he doesn't say it. When asked if he was for Israel or for Jericho, the commander of Yahweh's army oddly enough answers, "Neither."

Joshua is so stunned by this answer that he falls face down in the dust. He then asks if this mighty divine warrior has any message for him, and he does, but again, hardly the one you would expect. No hints are given on how to proceed against Jericho, no battle plans are detailed--not yet anyway. Instead Joshua is told the same thing Moses was told at the burning bush half-a-century or so earlier: "Take off your sandals for you are on holy ground." Joshua does so and then the incident jarringly ends.

Most commentators admit they haven't a clue as to what this could possibly mean. So at minimum this is yet one more odd jolt in a book that, as we reviewed a few minutes ago, has already featured some surprising twists of providence. But what could this mean? How could a leader of Yahweh's divine army essentially declare a stance of neutrality in the war of God's people versus the Canaanites? After all, as the subsequent narrative makes abundantly clear, Yahweh is as a matter of fact fighting for Israel--indeed, in the fall of Jericho God pretty well does it all for them. So why couldn't this angel have told Joshua what appears to be the plain truth; namely, he fights on the side of Israel?

I cannot answer that question any better than the commentators I consulted. So all I can do is what most of them do and that is to go out on an educated limb and make some guesses as to what may lie behind this cryptic narrative incident.

So consider: there is no doubt that Joshua is currently doing Yahweh's bidding. There is no doubt that he is striving to be faithful at what we now know was a key juncture in salvation history. We also know that Joshua is God's hand-picked successor to no less a spiritual luminary than Moses (and many rightly think that the parallels of this incident with the burning bush help to authenticate the fact that Joshua is the new Moses). In short, there can be no doubting that Joshua is properly about holy business. So how stunned he must have been to have his black-and-white, "are you for us or against us" question answered with "Neither." If Joshua is working for God and if this angel also works for God, then how could it possibly turn out that these two are not on the same page?

Perhaps the answer to that has something to do with the fact that God is always busy with far more than we can possibly grasp. Joshua was a military man with a single-minded devotion to one thing and that was winning the next battle. That was his agenda, and so don't go crowding Joshua's mind with a lot of other stuff. Ultimately, God also desires mainly one thing and that is the salvation of his beloved creation. But in the accomplishment of that grand goal God is at any given moment busily active doing all kinds of things in all kinds of people. We saw that with Rahab and we'll see it again many times before the Bible is through.

As God works out our salvation by grace, things cannot always going to be reduced to simple black-and-white scenarios. In this case Joshua thought he was in pagan territory pursuing a single-minded objective of such great importance as to block all else from view. But then he found out that even the commander of God's army was pursuing goals bigger than the narrow ones Joshua had before him. More startling still, Joshua found out that where he was standing was not pagan land but holy ground and he'd better slip off his sandals before he muddies up God's territory!

But, of course, that means that oddly enough Jericho was on holy ground, too, though the Jerichoites didn't know it. And maybe all of this means that despite the bloody carnage that soaks the pages of Joshua red, even the Jerichoites and all of the other Canaanites may occupy a niche in God's plans--a niche that is so surprising it would take our breath away were we to catch so much as a glimpse of it. Perhaps if we really knew what God was doing and in whose hearts he was working at any given moment, perhaps we would join Joshua in falling flat on our faces. Maybe there are a lot of places also in our society where we need to slip off our Nikes and loafers because we, too, are on holy ground.

Maybe that holy ground is our unchurched neighbor's backyard, maybe it is the sidewalk in front of an abortion clinic, maybe it's the AIDS ward at the local hospital, maybe it's the pool room at Degagé downtown, maybe it's the bench in the middle of Woodland Mall where we eat our cookie from Janie's and watch the world go by. And just maybe in all of those places, if God's servant were to appear to us and if we were to ask, "Are you for us or for them?", maybe the answer then, too, would be, "Neither"--at least not in the narrow sense in which we would probably ask that question.

What a bracing truth may lurk behind this odd event in Joshua 5! Again and again these days the hot rhetoric of the culture wars reduces everything to black-and-white. Some years ago James Dobson and John Woodbridge sparred in the pages of Christianity Today over Dobson's repeated use of warfare language to describe our stance over against the larger American culture. Woodbridge believed that such language blinds believers to the places where God may be lurking while also doing violence to the gentleness, humility, and love demonstrated by Jesus and listed in the New Testament as spiritual fruits.

Dobson replied that there is little if any ambiguity in our wider culture such that not to use fighting words would be the equivalent of remaining silent. True to his own word, in recent months Dr. Dobson has ratcheted up his own rhetoric and, according to a cover story in a recent U.S. News & World Report, is increasingly training his verbal fire on some of his closest friends and allies. Even a columnist as conservative as Cal Thomas has publicly worried that at this rate Dr. Dobson may soon come to believe that he is the only true believer left.

"Are you for us or our enemies," Joshua asked the angel. And Christians everywhere ask the same question today. But what would we make of an angel who answered our simple question by saying, "Neither"? Would such an answer appropriately widen our eyes to see the larger scope of God's work? Of course, as with Joshua so with us, God was as a matter of fact working through Joshua even as he is working through us. It's just that what we're doing may not be the only thing God is up to at the moment and we may not be the only people through whom God is accomplishing his purposes.

All of which is why we need, in the words of Philip Yancey, to look for God in unexpected places. Sometimes finding God in such places is the best way to insure that we will be able to join in on his holy work. Conversely, not looking for God in surprising places may mean that we could inadvertently end up opposing those through whom God is accomplishing his endlessly large cosmic work.

But I guess that's what we've been seeing all along in Joshua. How ironic to discover that even in this book--a biblical narrative where things look about as simple and black-and-white as in any book of the Bible--even here there are surprises skulking about in narrative nooks and crannies, if only we take the time to find them. But then, perhaps that fact serves as a mini-parable for the whole of life.

The good news is that the whole earth is basically holy ground. "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof," Psalm 24 declares. It is our privilege to witness to and to work for God on this his good earth. But Joshua 5's little set-up for the fall of Jericho reminds us that we are not God's only game in town; we are seldom the only ones through whom God is working at any given moment.

In that there is more than a little hope, and it often seems that especially among Christians hope is in short supply these days. One of the fallouts of the recent proliferation of warfare rhetoric in the church is that some Christians are starting to fear that the church could lose. Wars have winners and losers, after all, so what if we lose this culture war? Then what? As that fear grows, rhetoric intensifies and, here and there, this leads some already unstable person to start spraying bullets at abortion clinics. Desperation in times of war has that effect on people.

So perhaps what we need is a little gospel hope. Perhaps what we need is the fall-on-your-face wonder at a God who refuses to stay in the little boxes we make for him. What we need is a fresh appreciation for the holy ground on which we work and walk every day. Biblical commentators may not know exactly what to make of Joshua 5's funny ending. But Joshua knew what it meant: God was everywhere and so was with him, too.

Small wonder he got up, brushed himself off, and happily went back to work with a renewed sense of hope. The answer the angel gave Joshua was not the one he was looking for, but it was the one he needed. And that's grace: we don't always get what we expect or deserve, but in God's rich mercy we get what we need, and that ought to be enough for all God's children as they walk the holy ground that is this good creation. Amen.