S38P7 – God’s miraculous power for today: The Walls of Jericho

Joshua 6: 2-5

Then the Lord said to Joshua, “See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands, along with its king and its fighting men. March around the city once with all the armed men. Do this for six days. Have seven priests carry trumpets of rams’ horns in front of the ark. On the seventh day, march around the city seven times, with the priests blowing the trumpets. When you hear them sound a long blast on the trumpets, have the whole army give a loud shout; then the wall of the city will collapse and the army will go up, everyone straight in.”

God has a habit of calling things as they are, not as they seem.  If you have ambitions of becoming a doctor, there would be a certain point at which it would be acceptable for you to refer to yourself as such.  As an applicant to medical school, that point has not been reached yet.  Neither can you call yourself a doctor while studying medicine or upon graduation.  If you have scored a residency, congratulations, but you still cannot call yourself a doctor.  It takes a license, the determination that you have the requisite minimum competence as determined by a board with authority, for you to call yourself a doctor.  In this world, what you will become in the future is not necessarily what you are now.  In God’s world, linear time is no factor.  This is why God did no tell Joshua that He would deliver Jericho into his hands.  Instead, God tells him that it already has been done.

The concept of things simply being as they are even before they appear that way to us pervades scripture.  This is why Gideon was confused when the Angel of the Lord addressed him as a mighty warrior.  To Gideon, he was too small and too young and from too small a tribe to be that.  He only saw what was evident to him at that point in time.  God, however, saw what He had ordained Gideon to be all along.  To God, Gideon had always been a mighty warrior, and Jericho had already been delivered into the hands of the Israelites.  The natural or physical manifestation of these things did not bring them into being.  To God, that is how they always had been.  We often take the story of Jericho’s walls to illustrate God’s miraculous power over his enemies and his faithfulness to empower his people.  We cannot forget, however, that God’s empowerment and his grace to his people are not events that occur on a linear timeline.  He has already extended his grace to us and has already empowered us.

The physical manifestations of God’s truths, and the moments at which we come to know them, do not make them so.  If you are a child of God today, you always have been one.  You may not have known it in the past, and you may have spent years running from God or just ignoring him, but you were destined to come to know him.  You were destined to be his.  In his eyes, you were his child all along.  He had you on his mind before anyone ever roamed this earth, and He already had a plan for your life.  Before you were born, He knew you, and He knew that you would come to know him.  If God had addressed me as his child years before I came to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, He would have been right.  I might not have known it at the time, but I was already his.  Father, help us to see your truth and what you have ordained to be so even if it is not how things appear to us today, and give us faith to believe today for that which we may not see until tomorrow.