Up, and At ‘Em!
Up, and At ‘Em!
Joshua 7:10-12a The LORD said to Joshua, “Get up! Why have you fallen on your face? Israel has sinned; they have transgressed my covenant that I commanded them; they have taken some of the devoted things; they have stolen and lied and put them among their own belongings. Therefore the people of Israel cannot stand before their enemies.”
In one sense, Joshua is doing the right thing here. Perplexed and dismayed by Israel’s shocking defeat at Ai, and grieving the loss of thirty-six good soldiers, he falls at the feet of Almighty God, removing his sandals and covering his face with dust, awaiting some glimpse into the meaning of this unspeakable tragedy, begging Heaven by the contrite motion of his limbs to answer in a whirlwind or in a whisper or in any manner. I get the sense here that Joshua isn’t getting back up again until the same hand that parted those Jordan River waters reaches down again in miraculous fashion to lift him up. And, in that sense, Joshua is exactly where he should be as a leader, as a saint, and as a man: on his knees.
But judging by the confrontational nature of God’s imperative to “Get up!”, I sense a secondary issue at work here. For the LORD to scold Joshua in this instance suggests that lying prostrate in the dust isn’t the correct response after all—not here at least. Because, in fact, Joshua has missed something obvious. Only a chapter earlier, God put this stern warning on Joshua’s very tongue: “Keep yourselves from the things devoted to destruction, lest when you have devoted them you take any of the devoted things and make the camp of Israel a thing for destruction and bring trouble upon it.”Joshua just delivered that word to the congregation before the battle at Ai. Note that, friend. The dust has barely settled on that very speech when 3,000 mighty warriors start running for their lives before an inferior army. Joshua should’ve immediately gathered the congregation together to weed out the culprit, recalling at once the sermon he’d just preached. Oh, but even godly men are guilty at times of proclaiming God’s words without taking them to heart.
Friend, sometimes we don’t need a new word from God to eradicate our perplexity; we just need to remember an old one, and believe it, and then live it out.