Sixes and Sevens
Joshua 6:2-5
And the LORD said to Joshua, “… You shall march around the city, all the men of war going around the city once. Thus shall you do for six days. Seven priests shall bear seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark. On the seventh day you shall march around the city seven times, and the priests shall blow the trumpets. And … when you hear the sound of the trumpet, then all the people shall shout with a great shout, and the wall of the city will fall down flat.”
The obvious and most striking aspect to me of the LORD’s battleplan here is His reiteration of those enormously significant symbols in biblical teleology that seem to represent the gospel in numerical terms: six representing the toil and flux of the human struggle, and seven representing the Sabbath rest of divine completion. Yet, because I’m a dunce when it comes to numbers, I can only recognize the shimmering arithmetical strands without being able to unravel them. In other words, I see that six and seven are imbued with theological significance, and I recognize their constant appearances through biblical symbols, laws, and mandates—from a seven-day rest in Genesis 2 to the seven spirits around the Throne in Revelation 3; from a six-day toil of creation to the false trinity of sixes that marks the Beast of the Apocalypse—yet why these numbers are so integral in God’s eyes is beyond me. And, truth be told, it was beyond Einstein and Tesla and Newton and Copernicus and Pythagoras as well.
Despite the mystery, there are two points of application we can draw from this sequence here. First, that God is meticulous in His providence and has a marvelous purpose for everything; and second, that our job isn’t to exegete what we don’t understand but to simply obey what we do. Think of it, friend: not a man among these Israelite priests has ever taken a single seminary class on biblical numerology. Not even the eldest, most seasoned saint understands how this little battle on the plains of Jericho is a strand in a greater cosmic war. In fact, not even Joshua can parse out the meaning behind God’s method here.
But that’s just it: exegesis of God’s Word isn’t about spelling it all out, but living it all out.