Mike's Meds - The Ark and the Trumpets
Joshua brings us over the river Jordan and into the Promised Land. At last we have arrived, and with dry feet! Now we can enjoy the local food and rest up after all those years in the wilderness. Peace descends.
Then, suddenly, we turn a corner and walk into Jericho. Nasty. Right here, in the land that god has promised us, sits a solid city swarming with enemy, bristling with the spirit of battle, ready and waiting to cause any havoc it can in our ranks.
What changes? Our human lives today are strangely the same as this. We enjoy life as it runs smoothly for a while. Our jobs, our families, our homes. All goes well until one day, out of the blue, we turn a corner and run straight up against the high walls of a Jericho. Illnesses, deaths in the family, financial disasters, breaking relationships, all these are Jerichos thrown across our paths.
But back to the scene before us. Will Joshua know how to handle this? There are certainly a number of solutions he can try, all to hand and all used to great affect by many others. He can learn from many other examples; siege forts, siege catapults, ladders for storming walls, battering rams to attack the main gates, everything is possible. The world knows how to do this thing! It's worth our trying any of these solutions in turn, until one proves victorious.
We look at our own Jerichos today in this very same way. After the initial panic we then look around to take professional or common-sense advice from anyone who might have seen a Jericho like ours before. We'll try anything, take any advice. In passing we might ask someone else to pray in case it helps but then we get all practical again and get on with our own battle.
But Joshua is a balanced man of God. He takes advice from the One knowing everything. And he takes up God's answer. He gathers the priests around him and says to them,
"Take up the ark of the covenant of the LORD and have seven priests carry trumpets in front of it."
Then he turns to us and gives the order, "Advance! March around the city, with the armed guard going ahead of the ark of the LORD."
As Joshua finishes up speaking to all of us, the seven priests carrying the seven trumpets before the LORD move forwards, blowing their trumpets, and the ark of the Lord's covenant follows us around the city.
Out and around we go! And what of the watchers on the walls? How they are laughing at us!
"Look at this!" they jeer to each other. "All these idiots can do is go once around the town with their little box and then run home! At least it's pretty music!"
How they laugh at us. But Joshua knows something that God knows, something that Jesus always knew, something the gospel writers knew, something that Paul knew, too. And this something is being worked out in the little encircling procession, this little group of box carriers fronted by trumpeters.
We all know that trumpeting like this, heralding the living Word of god, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, these things are the wheels on which god moves the kingdom forwards. So look out Jericho, nasty piece of trouble! There's nothing man-made in this solution, it is an effective design of God to overcome Jerichos.
And so we persistently apply this God-method of wall-tumbling. Round and around we go, proclaiming the kingdom of god. And every time we circle the walls the heralded kingdom bites deeper into this unwanted blemish on our abundant kingdom horizons.
The watchers on the wall go on with their mirth and their mocking shouts till the seventh day and the seventh trip around the walls below them. Then, suddenly, their tone changes as the glory of the Lord is manifest. They get a real shock!
May the god of wonders bless you!
