A New Twist in the Tale
A Twist in the Tale
Joshua 8:4a, 5-6a & 7a And he commanded them, “Behold, you shall lie in ambush against the city, behind it. … And I and all the people who are with me will approach the city. And when they come out against us just as before, we shall flee before them. And they will come out after us, until we have drawn them away from the city. … Then you shall rise up from the ambush and seize the city …”
Truly, this battleplan is a stroke of divine comedy at its finest, transfiguring the scowling hue of Joshua 7 into a side-splitting laugh that shakes all of heaven and earth. To borrow the slang of younger generations, God is “trolling” the devil here.
Think of the fact that the devil’s trademark move is to throw our failures back in our face, right? But, here, God gets him at his own game. Just look at the battle plan. God tells Joshua and the soldiers to effectively retrace those fatal steps that still haunt them, the very ones that marked their previous demise, and to assume the same vulnerable positions that led to their knockout punch—as if they’re method actors acting out their own biopic. Don’t overlook the significance of this, friend. These soldiers will replay their crucial failure step for step, feign the very fearful cries that marked their previous loss, and re-run the now-atoned-for failure of yesterday as a way of drawing out the enemy. Why? Because God wants to literally change the script of their worst ever loss into one of their most memorable triumphs.
Oh friend, marvel at the way God metamorphosizes the memories of our failures into greater glories! Marvel at how He transfigures even our most devastating defeats into weapons against the devil! See, it strikes me that God could’ve told these soldiers to march around Ai for seven days as He’d done to Jericho, or He could’ve struck the city with fire and brimstone as He’d done to Sodom, or He could’ve drowned Ai’s soldiers in a flood of seawater as He’d done to Pharoah, but with this strategy He gets the final laugh over the devil. No longer can hell scoff at these pilgrims with jeers like, “Remember that time you ran away at Ai?!” Oh no—God turns that taunt into a trophy.