“Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, ‘Are you for us or for our enemies?’
‘Neither,’ he replied, ‘but as commander of the army of the Lord I have now come.’ Then Joshua fell facedown to the ground in reverence, and asked him, “What message does my Lord have for his servant?”
The commander of the Lord’s army replied, ‘Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy.’ And Joshua did so.” — Joshua 5:13-15 (NIV)
Great week for fans of spring and sport. The Final Four was decided Monday night (hat tip to former Louisiana Tech assistant and now Michigan head coach and national champion Dusty May), the Masters will be decided this week (holla!), and big-league baseball is just beginning. Collegiate spring sports are in full bloom.
Sensory overload.
And everyone is trying to come in second, right? Every crowd chants like pigs in slop, “We’re No. 2! We’re No. 2!”
Aaaaaaand … of course not.
We want to be No. 1. And that’s good. No one practices to lose or to finish second.
But in the divine realm, it’s a bit of a different ballgame. The only way to win is to submit to second place.
Joshua did, and it won for God and for him and for the Israelites the Battle of Jericho.
The text from Joshua 5 is on the eve of the Battle. Joshua has replaced the late Moses as leader of the Israelites. The gates of Jericho are securely barred. Joshua is not secure at all, until God shows up. And God shows up because Joshua was spiritually prepared.
In 1840, Scottish preacher Robert Murray McCheyne wrote this to a missionary friend: “It is not great talents God blesses so much as great likeness to Jesus. A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God.”
Joshua was a holy minister. When he asked the man before him — Joshua is about to discover the man is a pre-incarnation appearance of Christ — if he is “for us or our enemies?” the man replies, “Neither, but as commander of the army of the Lord I have now come.”
First of all, the man says he is here to fight a Divine Battle. Not the Israelites’ battle or the battle for the people of Jericho, but His battle. To paraphrase, I think what he is saying is, “I’m on my side and I’m in charge. Whose side are you on?”
Whoa …
To clarify, the man says he is the commander of the army of the Lord. And then Joshua knew what the outcome would be, because this was the commander he’d been following all along.
God fights for his own holiness and purposes. If we want to be on the winning team, we have to get our shoes off by taking time to be holy and respecting the ground the leader is standing on.
Like Joshua, we can love second place, even embrace it, when in first place is the commander of the army of the Lord.
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