The command comes to the people, through Joshua's lips, unaccompanied
by any explanation or reasons. If Moses had called for a like obedience
from the people in their wilderness mood, there would have been no end
of grumbling. But whatever some of them may have thought, there is
nothing recorded now but prompt submission. Notice, too, the order of
the procession. First come the armed men, then seven white-robed
priests, blowing, probably, discordant music upon their ram's horn
trumpets; then the Ark, the symbol and token of God's presence; and
then the rereward. So the _Ark_ is the centre; and it is not only
Israel that is marching round the city, but rather it is God who is
circling the walls. Very impressive would be the grim silence of it
all. Tramp, tramp, tramp, round and round, six days on end, without a
word spoken (though no doubt taunts in plenty were being showered down
from the walls), they marched, and went back to the camp, and subsided
into inactivity for another four-and-twenty hours, until they 'turned
out' for the procession once more.
Now, what did all that mean? The blast of the trumpet was, in the
Jewish feasts, the solemn proclamation of the presence of God. And
hence the purpose of that singular march circumambulating Jericho was
to declare 'Here is the Lord of the whole earth, weaving His invisible
cordon and network around the doomed city.' In fact the meaning of the
procession, emphasised by the silence of the soldiers, was that God
Himself was saying, in the long-drawn blasts of the priestly trumpet,
'Lift up your heads, O ye gates! even lift them up, ye everlasting
doors; and the King of Glory shall come in.' Now, whatever Jericho and
its people thought about that, Israel, according to the commentary of
the New Testament, had to some extent, at all events, learnt the
lesson, and knew, of course very rudimentarily and with a great deal of
mere human passion mingled with it, but still knew, that this was God's
summons, and the manifestation of God's presence. And so round the city
they went, and day by day they did the thing in which their faith
apprehended its true meaning, and which, by reason of their faith, they
were willing to do. Let us take some lessons from that.
Here is a confidence in the divine presence, manifested by
unquestioning obedience to a divine command.
'Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why.'
Joshua had spoken; God had spoken through him. And so here goes! up
with the Ark and the trumpets, and out on to the hot sand for the
march! It would have been a great deal easier to have stopped in the
tents. It was disheartening work marching round thus. The sceptical
spirit in the host--the folk of whom there are many great-grandchildren
living to-day, who always have objections to urge when disagreeable
duties are crammed up against their faces--would have enough to say on
that occasion, but the bulk of the people were true, and obeyed. Now,
we do not need to put out the eyes of our understanding in order to
practise the obedience of faith. And we have to exercise common-sense
about the things that seem to us to be duties.
But this is plain, that if once we see a thing to be, in Christian
language, the will of our Father in heaven, then everything is settled;
and there is only one course for us, and that is, unquestioning
submission, active submission, or, what is as hard, passive submission.
Then here again is faith manifesting itself by an obedience which was
altogether ignorant of what was coming. I think that is quite plain in
the story, if you will read it carefully, though I think that it is not
quite what people generally understand as its meaning. But it makes the
incident more in accordance with God's uniform way of dealing with us
that the host should be told on the morning of the first day of the
week that they were to march round the city, and told the same on the
second day, and on the third the same, and so on until the sixth; and
that not until the morning of the seventh, were they told what was to
be the end of it all. That is the way in which God generally deals with
us. In the passage of the Jordan, too, you will find, if you will look
at the narrative carefully, that although Joshua was told what was
coming, the people were not told till the morning of the day, when the
priests' feet were dipped in the brink of the water. We, too, have to
do our day's march, knowing very little about tomorrow; and we have to
carry on all through life 'doing the duty that lies nearest us,'
entirely ignorant of the strange issues to which it may conduct. Life
is like a voyage down some winding stream, shut in by hills, sometimes
sunny and vine-clad, like the Rhine, sometimes grim and black, like an
American canon. As the traveller looks ahead he wonders how the stream
will find a passage beyond the next bend; and as he looks back, he
cannot trace the course by which he has come. It is only when he rounds
the last shoulder that he sees a narrow opening flashing in the
sunshine, and making a way for his keel. So, seeing that we know
nothing about the issues, let us make sure of the motives; and seeing
that we do not know what to-morrow may bring forth, nor even what the
next moment may bring, let us see that we fill the present instant as
full as it will hold with active obedience to God, based upon simple
faith in Him. He does not open His whole hand at once; He opens a
finger at a time, as you do sometimes with your children when you are
trying to coax them to take something out of the palm. He gives us
enough light for the moment, He says, 'March round Jericho; and be sure
that I mean something. What I do mean I will tell you some day.' And so
we have to put all into His hands.
Then here, again, is faith manifesting itself by persistency. A week
was not long, but it was a long while during which to do that one
apparently useless thing and nothing else. It would take about an hour
or so to march round the city, and there were twenty-three hours of
idleness. Little progress in reducing Jericho was made by the progress
round it, and it must have got rather wearisome about the sixth day.
Familiarity would breed monotony, but notwithstanding the deadly
influences of habit, the obedient host turned out for their daily
round. 'Let us not be weary in well-doing,' for there is a time for
everything. There is a time for sowing and for reaping, and in the
season of the reaping 'we shall reap, if we faint not.' Dear brethren!
we all get weary of our work. Custom presses upon us, 'with a weight
heavy as frost, and deep almost as life.' It is easy to do things with
a spurt, but it is the keeping on at the monotonous, trivial, and
sometimes unintelligible duties that is the test of a man's grit, and
of his goodness too. So, although it is a very, very threadbare
lesson--one that you may think it was not worth while for me to bring you
all here to receive--I am sure that there are few things needed more by us
all, and especially by those of us who are on the wrong side of middle
life, as people call it--though I think it is the right side in many
respects--than that old familiar lesson. Keep on as you have begun, and
for the six weary days turn out, however hot the sun, however
comfortable the carpets in the tent, however burning the sand, however
wearisome and flat it may seem to be perpetually tramping round the
same walls of the same old city; keep on, for in due season the trumpet
will sound and the walls will fall.
II. So that brings me to the second stage--viz., the sudden victory
which vindicates and explains the protracted trial of faith.
I do not need to tell the story of how, on the seventh day, the host
encompassed the city seven times, and at last they were allowed to
break the long silence with a shout. You will observe the prominence
given to the sacred seven, both in the number of days, of circuits
made, and the number of the priests' trumpets. Probably the last day
was a Sabbath, for there must have been one somewhere in the week, and
it is improbable that it was one of the undistinguished days. That was
a shout, we may be sure, by which the week's silence was avenged, and
all the repressed emotions gained utterance at last. The fierce yell
from many throats, which startled the wild creatures in the hills
behind Jericho, blended discordantly with the trumpets' clang which
proclaimed a present God; and at His summons the fortifications toppled
into hideous ruin, and over the fallen stones the men of Israel
clambered, each soldier, in all that terrible circle of avengers that
surrounded the doomed city, marching straight forward, and so all
converging on the centre.
Now, we can discover good reasons for this first incident in the
campaign being marked by miracle. The fact that it was the first is a
reason. It is a law of God's progressive revelation that each new epoch
is inaugurated by miraculous works which do not continue throughout its
course. For instance, it is observable that, in the _Acts of the
Apostles,_ the first example of each class of incidents recorded there,
such as the first preaching, the first persecution, the first
martyrdom, the first expansion of the Gospel beyond Jews, its first
entrance into Europe, has usually the stamp of miracle impressed on it,
and is narrated at great length, while subsequent events of the same
class have neither of those marks of distinction. Take, for example,
the account of Stephen, the first martyr. He saw 'the heavens opened'
and the Son of Man 'standing at the right hand of God.' We do not read
that the heavens opened when Herod struck off the head of James with
the sword. But was Jesus any the less near to help His servant?
Certainly not.
In like manner it was fitting that the first time that Israel crossed
swords with these deadly and dreaded enemies should be marked by a
miraculous intervention to hearten God's warriors. But let us take care
that we understand the teaching of any miracle. Surely it does not
secularise and degrade the other incidents of a similar sort in which
no miracle was experienced. The very opposite lesson is the true one to
draw from a miracle. In its form it is extraordinary, and presents
God's direct action on men or on nature, so obviously that all eyes can
see it. But the conclusion to be drawn is not that God acts only in a
supernatural' manner, but that He is acting as really, though in a less
obvious fashion, in the 'natural' order. In these turning-points, the
inauguration of new stages in revelation or history, the cause which
always produces all nearer effects and the ultimate effects, which are
usually separated or united (as one may choose to regard it) by many
intervening links, are brought together. But the originating power
works as truly when it is transmitted through these many links as when
it dispenses with them. Miracle shows us in abbreviated fashion, and
therefore conspicuously, the divine will acting directly, that we may
see it working when it acts indirectly. In miracle God makes bare His
arm,' that we may be sure of its operation when it is draped and
partially hid, as by a vesture, by second causes.
We are not to argue that, because there is no miracle, God is not
present or active. He was as truly with Israel when there was no Ark
present, and no blast of the trumpet heard. He was as truly with Israel
when they fought apparently unhelped, as He was when Jericho fell. The
teaching of all the miracles in the Old and the New Testaments is that
the order of the universe is maintained by the continual action of the
will of God on men and things. So this story is a transient revelation
of an eternal fact. God is as much with you and me in our fights as He
was with the Israelites when they marched round Jericho, and as
certainly will He help. If by faith we endure the days of often blind
obedience, we shall share the rapture of the sudden victory.
Now, I have said that the last day of this incident was probably a
Sabbath day. Does not that suggest the thought that we may take this
story as a prophetic symbol? There is for us a week of work, and a
seventh day of victory, when we shall enter, not into the city of
confusion which has come to nought, but into the city which 'hath the
foundations, whose builder and maker is God.' The old fathers of the
Christian Church were not far wrong, when they saw in this story a type
of the final coming of the Lord. Did you ever notice how St. Paul, in
writing to the Thessalonians about that coming, seems to have his mind
turned back to the incident before us? Remember that in this incident
the two things which signalised the fall of the city were the trumpet
and the shout. What does Paul say? 'The Lord Himself shall descend from
heaven with a _shout_, with the voice of the archangel, and with the
_trump_ of God.' Jericho over again! And then, 'Babylon is fallen, is
fallen!' 'And I saw the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven, like a
bride adorned for her husband.'