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Fight, Flight

Joshua 5:13

When Joshua was by Jericho, he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, a man was standing before him with his drawn sword in his hand. And Joshua went to him and said to him, “Are you for us, or for our adversaries?”

The more a saint seeks after the face of God the more he’s able to look his enemies dead in the eye without fear. 

Joshua doesn’t tell us whether he charged at this stranger with his own sword drawn, expecting to meet steel with steel, assuming this to be the first fray in an impending battle, or whether he walked forward nonchalantly, disregarding the stranger’s threatening stance, unmoved by the flash of steel. But we can still glean from this exchange the fact that Joshua goes immediately on the offensive rather than the defensive. His piercing question to this armed stranger is sharper than any blade forged in the fires of men, and it effectively adds up to the quintessential choice of human existence: “Have you come to join God’s envoy, stranger, or have you come to die?”

Life is full of complex questions of right and wrong, good and bad, healthy and unhealthy, politically correct and incorrect, vain and virtuous, from sports to dietary preferences to musical tastes to denominational differences to educational methodologies, and no two people in a church or in a family, no matter how unified in Christ they are, share all things perfectly in common. Life in Christ isn’t monochromatic. It isn’t like those housing developments being thrown up left and right near me where every house looks exactly the same and has the same .10 acre lot. It isn’t cookie cutter. Nevertheless, the ultimate truth—the gospel truth—the reality of our fall from grace and our need for divine mercy, is not debatable. And when that battle is before us, when there’s a sword drawn before our eyes, or a line drawn in the sand, between the fear of God and the fear of man, between the Kingdom of Heaven and Sin City, we better know where we stand! 

People of faith don’t flee from strangers with weapons, whether those strangers are men or angels. They just keep on preaching, knowing that God’s Word is sharper than any two-edged sword.

 

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