There are strongholds in the Promised Land. All of us, in our lives, have impossible situations. Every hope that we have that has any value at all has obstacles to it. Every promised land has strongholds that must be dealt with to truly claim the land as our own.
The Israelites have been wandering in the desert for forty years. One of the reasons they are out there is that when they sent spies in so many years ago, the spies came back with word of giants in walled cities. Well, that is too much to even think about dealing with. So those people made a decision that they wouldn’t. They just wouldn’t. They’d rather go back to slavery in Egypt or wander around the desert until they die. And they did it.
All of us, to claim the promised land, must face impossible situations. Each of us has our own. All of us have some in common, too. Let me just mention a couple of examples. This church faces a hard reality, a walled fortress, that we fish from a pool of diminished resources. People in this neighborhood simply have very little to maintain an old edifice as well as the rising costs of ministry and complexities of a different world. It is an impossible situation. This city faces an impossible situation. The infrastructure has been mismanaged and is aging, costs are going up, resources, tax base, businesses, and morale have been declining. Some of us face circumstances that are impossible. There is one person that I hope doesn’t mind me mentioning her situation in the context of this sermon. I know many of you have been praying hard for her, for she is in an impossible situation. Ruth Westenfelder has been struggling with her health. She has been living with severe pain in her back, and nothing has alleviated it. She’s lived alone since her family has all passed away. Even her tenants who live downstairs and help keep an eye on her are going to be moving soon. Ruth has looked for a retirement home to move to, but it is a struggle to have lived in one house all her many years and conceive of ever having anyplace else meet her needs, especially her needs of being a part of this family.
When I preach, I say all sorts of spiritual things that may sound really nice and lift our hearts a little. But I am very aware of the realities in our lives – in Ruth’s life – that our faith is challenged with. The most impossible situation that we face is our own propensity to sin – to be self-centered and not God-centered. Our habits, our attitudes, our addictions, our pride, our fear, all these different faces of our sin, they all are like walled fortresses in our hearts that are called to be pure for God.
They’ve been walking in the wilderness forty years before they crossed the Jordan in miraculous fashion to enter their Promised Land. It has been a long haul, and this is what they’ve been waiting for. They’ve finally made it. But all they get when they finally get there is to have to deal with those things that kept their parents out.
The picture I have in my head is of the youth going to a great event like Niagara. They have an incredible time, they hear the gospel for the first time in a way that makes sense to them, and they accept Christ. They walk across that Jordan River into the Promised Land of the Kingdom of God. And for a day, a couple of days, it is ecstasy. There is so much joy.
But then we drive them back up to the front doors of their houses. They walk in those doors. And at that point, it becomes clear that if they are going to live in the Promised Land of the Kingdom of God, they are going to have to go up against some strongholds that they have avoided all their lives. They are going to have to face their broken relationships, their sinful habits, their inappropriate means of getting through the day. They have impossible situations, walled fortresses standing right in the way of their inhabiting the Promise.
This is the last sermon before we start over again with the life of Christ. It is fitting that we pause in going through the Old Testament right as we get into the Promised Land and find out that the first order of business is to fight impossible battles. That is exactly what our life in Christ is all about – about fighting impossible battles, impossible battles just like this one at Jericho.
But here are a couple of things we find out from this instance at Jericho. We’ll find out we will win. We will win. We’ll win not because we are better, but because the battle belongs to the Lord.
If we were to read the story of the next battle, the battle of Ai, then we see that it is not guaranteed that we’d win under all circumstances. But what we see at Jericho is an instance where victory is won by the Lord through the radical obedience of his people.
It has been interesting reading about this passage in preparation for this message. People have all sorts of explanations for why this strategy worked. What could possibly have been the purpose for these people walking around the walls each day for six days, and then seven times on the seventh day climaxed by shouting and blowing horns. I’ve heard all sorts of explanations. I’ve heard about the harmonics of the noise shattering the walls. I’ve read that the quiet walking around the walls lulled the defenses until the shouting shocked them into submission.
I’ve also thought a lot about what that strategy would mean to our impossible circumstances as a church, as a city, and as individuals. I haven’t seen or heard any great correlations to exactly what we should be doing. The closest I’ve come to a prophetic word from this passage, and I do think it has some validity, is that we are called to quietly remain faithful and present in this community until we are called on our seventh day to shout out our faith and watch the walls of faithlessness crumble.
But there is one picture that I have not read, so call me crazy for thinking this is the most important thing that God was doing with this strategy, and with ours. There is absolutely no good reason for this strategy to work. There is no earthly, human reason to choose it. There is nothing about this strategy that the people of Israel could call their own. They would not have made it up. And if it works, they can’t claim that the victory was anyone other’s than God’s.
I think when we are really, truly following God, listening to where his Spirit is leading us and the strategies He is giving us to face impossible situations, it is exactly in those circumstances that we may ask ourselves, “what in the heck are we doing? …What could God possibly have in mind for me to be doing this?” I think the people of Israel walked around those walls for six days, seven days, thinking all the way, “my, what big walls you have there.” It don’t think those walls looked any smaller after six days. When we stare at our problems, it just makes them seem bigger. Yet they remained there in faith.
I read a lot of church growth stuff. I’m the chair of the church growth committee for the Presbytery. Our church is better off than most of our 67 churches in Western New York. Most of them are really struggling. The church growth specialists that I read typically have one of two strategies for turning churches around. The most prevalent strategy is to have the church decide what it would want to look like, and then figure out how it can get there. It is pretty common-sense, worldly stuff. I think it has some real value, but only when it is mixed in with the other stuff. For our church, it would mean that we’d do a survey and, with our polity, have the session work from the survey to decide what we want to look like and put together a strategy for getting there. It’s not bad stuff, of course. But I think if that is all there was in Jericho, this is not the strategy they would have come up with.
The other church growth stuff has a different twist to it for the impossible situation for growing a church. One pastor puts it this way, “If you are to navigate your obstacles, if you are to defeat your enemy, you must use God’s plan, not your own. What is God plan? Trust His power, not your power. Believe His Word, not your idea. Rely on His strength, not your human weakness. (Coy Wylie, “Navigating Your Obstacles”, Sermon Central.Com).
And Paul puts it this way: “"We do live in the world, but we do not fight in the same way the world fights. We fight with weapons that are different from those the world uses. Our weapons have power from God that can destroy the enemy’s strong place…” (2 Cor 10:3-4 NCV).
This is the picture of Jericho. It really begins in chapter 5, before we started reading. In verse 13, Joshua was near Jericho when he met a soldier with his sword drawn. The man identified himself as neither friend nor foe, but the commander of the army of the Lord. All the impossible situations of our lives, the church finances, the aging city, the failing health, the youth having to walk back in the front door and face their lives, the sin in our own lives that we just keep uncovering, …all of the impossible situations of our lives are fought by the commander of the army of the Lord.
The world teaches us many different means of dealing with impossible situations. “do a better job” the world says. “be smarter, work longer, dust yourself off and keep throwing yourself at that wall. It’s bound to come down sometime.” Or we can learn to simply live outside those walls and do our level best to ignore them, …even deny that they are there. Getting busy, medicating, distracting ourselves, they are all good means to that.
But there is only one Christian response to the walls. Trust God. The Promised Land is not ours to take. It is Christ’s to give. Today is Christ the King Sunday. Jesus is in charge here. This Promised Land of peace, of joy, of hope, gratitude, love, it is his to give us. Those obstacles, the enemies, the strongholds, the great walled cities, they are his to conquer. He is the commander of the Army of the Lord. It is ours to follow His command.
