The Gods

You might, by this point, be wanting to raise an objection to some of the conversation that we've had this week. That objection would be: the people of Jericho weren't the people of the Lord. (We could say they weren't "Christians," but neither was Israel at that point, so let's just be honest about where we are.) So all this stuff about them believing for forty years...it's a little weird, isn't it?

Remember that the touchpoint for this whole conversation was the fact that God acted on behalf of His people and the whole world heard about it. The non-God people heard about it. The non-God people not only heard about it, but they believed it. 

Then, we get to "they believed it for forty years." 

That's the point that I don't want to get lost in the rest of this discussion. I want us to remember that when God acts on behalf of His people, the whole world - even the world that doesn't believe in Him - hears about it, and they tremble. Point blank. That's it. Don't forget that. 

But I think it's also worth talking about the way that Jericho believed because this is really important for us in a culture that doesn't believe much in our God. 

The people of Jericho, just like all of the peoples we encounter in Scripture, were not godless, even though they were God-less. They had their gods. They had all kinds of gods. All of the non-God peoples in the Bible had all kinds of gods that they worshiped. The Bible tells us about some of them, especially in the places where Israel got sucked into worshiping them, too. 

That means that believing in one more god (in this case, God) wasn't really a foreign idea to them. It didn't strike them as odd. It wasn't a betrayal of who they were or the other gods they worshiped. It just...was. The Lord was the God of Israel the way that their gods were the gods of them, and it wasn't a stretch for them to believe that their God was acting on their behalf and to become worried about Him. 

It's the same way that Paul stood in the Areopagus and talked to the people of the Roman Empire about their "unknown god." He wasn't introducing an entirely new idea to them; he was just adding to the knowledge of gods that they already had. 

This is important because everyone has a god. A lot of persons have a lot of gods. We are created to worship, and worship, we will, even if what we're worshiping is not the Lord. And as much as the culture around us wants to be antagonistic to our God and pretend that they are godless, they aren't. Our world has their gods just like everyone else across all time has had their gods. 

They may not make graven images, but they don't have to; most of our world carries their gods around in their pockets. They may not put them on the mantle and proudly display them, but again, they don't have to; in fact, it's hard to engage with your god if he's on the mantle. They may not go to worship services, but they worship all the time. There may be no formal religious ritual around it, but it doesn't take much looking to see that, actually, that's there, too. Our culture worships all kinds of things; even the most devout "atheist" among us has his gods. 

This is both good news and bad news. It's bad news because it reminds us that we are strangers in a foreign land. But it's good news because it means that the concept of our God isn't as foreign to the world as the world claims it is. They have a structural, foundational knowledge for believing in our God. They have a framework for what it means to be a worshiper, even if they can't really articulate that. They have the capacity to believe when they hear rumors. 

And that's very good news. 

Because they will hear rumors. 

As we said at the very beginning of all of this, when God acts on behalf of His people, the world just can't help but hear about it.  

Old Testament Faith

We've been talking about the people of Jericho and how they believed for forty years that God was going to lead His people into their land, and then we talked about the people of Israel, who believed not once, but twice, for four hundred years each time that God was going to fulfill His promise to them. And then, we fast forward to today, and we have a whole bunch of pseudo-preachers out there claiming that the Old Testament has nothing to teach us about our faith any more. 

Let me be clear: the faith demonstrated in the Old Testament, by the people of God and by those around them, puts my faith to shame. 

Seriously. 

I don't know how you keep believing for forty years when absolutely all of the evidence points to the contrary. Did you know it's likely that the people of Jericho saw the people of Israel approaching? Maybe even more than once. Only to watch them turn around and go back into the desert to wander some more. 

Even if you still believe that God is going to bring them into your land at some point, this back and forth is enough to break anyone's confidence. Here they come...no, never mind....no, they're coming...no, never mind; they turned around again...but here they come.... 

None of us can live like that. We might try for awhile, but that tug of war in our hearts and souls is intolerable in the long run. We simply can't persist in it for very long at all or it becomes absolutely agonizing. 

But here we are with a people of Jericho who apparently never stopped living in that agony. They still believed, forty years later, after who knows how many close calls, that it was happening. Man, that's faith. 

Or think about Israel.

They had to hold that promise of a Messiah across a ton of generations. Dozens of generations. We were well at the point, by the time Jesus was born, that anyone who was around to witness it had only probably eighth-hand knowledge, at best, of the last prophet who ever spoke of it. This generation didn't know Isaiah. They didn't know Jeremiah. They didn't know Ezekiel. These were stories that their parents told them because their parents told them and their parents told them.

Sometimes, the stories your grandparents or great-grandparents tell you are cool. But sometimes, over time, when you don't see any evidence of them whatsoever, it's easy to think that grandma's starting to get dementia. That grandpa doesn't know what he's talking about. That these old folks are, decidedly, off their rockers. 

But Israel didn't think their ancestors were crazy. They didn't think their old age must be making them delirious. No. Generation upon generation upon generation of Israelites clang to the promise of God, believed it wholeheartedly, and shared it so convincingly with their children that when a baby was born in Bethlehem, a whole generation who had never heard a prophet speak it started to whisper, Could this be Him? 

That's faith. 

Does the Old Testament have anything to teach us? I think it does. It teaches me something every time I read it again. It teaches me, among other things, that my faith is not as strong as sometimes I think it is. 

Because I'm just not sure that I could keep believing for forty years. Let alone four hundred.  

Four Hundred Years

Jericho still believed in the power and purpose of God forty years after they first heard He parted the Red Sea for His people. That's tough. 

What's even tougher? Israel still believed in their God after four hundred years. 

And not just once. 

When I say "four hundred years," you might first start thinking about their captivity in Egypt, which would be a good place to start. But there were also somewhere around 400 years between the end of our Old Testament and the start of our New Testament. 

Four hundred years between the last authoritative word of the prophets and the birth of the promised Messiah. Then, Jesus shows up, and everyone is like, Could this be Him?

Let me be honest with you: there are times when God has answered my prayer, answered His promise in my life, within a matter of weeks, sometimes even days, and here I am, wondering if that's Him or not. Questioning whether that's the answer. Unsure about whether this is really the holy thing I've been waiting on or not. 

Convinced, if we're being confessional here, that it's probably not. 

I just have a hard time believing God for a long time. The longer I have to believe, the less it seems that I do. The more I have to trust that that thing He talked about is still happening, the easier it is to convince myself that it's not. Oh, I still believe it might be, but not in my lifetime. I start to conceptualize in my head all of the contorted ways that He might still fulfill that promise through me, even if I don't actually see it in my own life. 

I think a lot of us do these kinds of mental gymnastics. Heart gymnastics. It's hard for us to hold on to hope for very long at all. It's hard for us to keep believing that God is still working when we can't see that happening right in front of our faces. 

We know in our hearts that it's a journey that ought to take less than two weeks. We know that. So when that third week comes, we start to reconsider things. Certainly, by the end of the first year. Definitely by the end of the second. 

We can't fathom what four hundred years even feels like. To put that in perspective, four hundred years ago, America didn't exist as a nation. Not even as a colony. We were right on the edge of Jamestown, if my memory of history serves me right. There was no internet, no cell phones, no television. No radio. How about this one? The King James Bible was just starting to be printed. And not for everyone. 

Think about that. Think about how much the world has changed in the past 400 years. Then, think about how God's people were so convinced about what God was doing that despite four hundred years of change, they still looked at a little baby in Bethlehem, at a carpenter's son on the streets of Galilee, and whispered among themselves, Could this be Him? 

I'm telling you - I want that kind of faith.  

Forty Years

As I was writing yesterday about the rumors in Jericho about the God of Israel, how they all knew what He did for His people at the Red Sea, something struck me that is definitely worth thinking about: 

God parted the Red Sea, and Israel walked through. They were on their way to the Promised Land (read: to Jericho) when they got sidetracked by their disobedience and set to wander for 40 years in the wilderness. 

Now, I don't think someone waited 40 years to tell Jericho. I don't think that's the kind of message that you sit on. Most of what I've read says that the journey from the Red Sea to the Jordan should have taken just less than two weeks, if Israel had made it straight through, and that tells me that someone took off running from the Red Sea to warn the peoples of Canaan. They would have had to travel faster than the nation of Israel to get there in time, and they might even have had horses or camels to help them get there. But the point is - you want to get there well before the people of God get there so that the inhabitants of the land have time to plan. 

I think, then, that it is most plausible that the people of Jericho heard about what God did approximately a week after it happened. Maybe less. 

And then...nothing. 

The people of God for whom He just parted the Red Sea are nowhere in sight. They aren't coming. They aren't knocking on the door. No one sees them on the other side of the Jordan. There's just horizon. Just empty horizon. 

So you'd have to think that whatever the people of Jericho were thinking when they heard the news had to start to fade when Israel was nowhere to be found. When another week passed with nothing, then another, then another, that talk you hear so much about in Israel's account of the wilderness starts to sound a little true - maybe God brought them out there to kill them all. Maybe they're all dead. 

After all, they should be here by now. 

I would think that after awhile, whatever fear you've had of the Lord would start to fade some. Especially after the first year. Definitely after the second. By forty years, you'd think that whatever the people of Jericho thought and felt when they first heard about the Red Sea would have dissipated, at least a little bit. How scared can you be of a God who can't get His people across a two-week journey in a span of forty years? 

But the people of Jericho say that's not at all what happened. When the spies from Israel show up, what they hear is, "We heard, and we're afraid." 

Not "We heard, and we were afraid for awhile, but you're nothing now." No, "We heard, and we're afraid." Everyone is afraid. The people of Jericho have not stopped believing that the God who parted the Red Sea is the same God who is bringing His people into their land. 

Even if the people of God themselves seem to have stopped believing it. 

Isn't that amazing?  

God is Known

Something strange happens when Israel enters the Promised Land and comes to Jericho, but it's something that we often miss because in our culture, it doesn't seem like that big of a deal. 

When Israel sends spies to this land to which they have never been (or, at least, not in more than 400 years, since they have been slaves in Egypt for that long), they hear some interesting talking circulating among the locals. And Rahab confirms it for them: 

We've heard about your God and the things He has done, and everyone here is terrified because they know what's coming next.

Read that again - the people of Jericho, on the other side of the Jordan River, on the other side of the Red Sea, have heard about the God of the Israelites from Egypt. Not only have they heard about Him, but they've heard the things He's done - like part the Red Sea and drown the powerful Egyptian army in it. 

We read something like that, and we think...of course they've heard. Something like that doesn't happen every day, so it's big news when it does. Everyone had probably heard. 

But remember - this is before Google. This is before the Internet. It's before television and radio and even the telegraph. It's before there was a reliable mail service. The people of Jericho were not just one click away from hearing about this; they heard about it from messengers who traveled while Israel was wandering in the desert for forty years. 

Someone came into Jericho with this story. Then, I'm guessing, someone else came with the same story. I'm sure it probably took several individuals coming with the same story for Jericho to finally understand that this is actually what happened, but the point is - they got the point. Everyone in Jericho knew, but not only did they know, they believed it. 

They believed it so much that it terrified them for their own safety. 

Even the Jordan doesn't look like much protection when you hear that the Lord parted the Red Sea for these people. 

That's the thing I think we don't understand any more in a world of breaking news - where everything that happens goes global in an instant, and it all competes for our attention, and even the small things get blown up into the big things. I think we don't understand what it means when God acts and the whole world knows it. 

But that's exactly what happens. 

They can close their eyes. They can cover their ears. They can demand more witnesses. They can seek "scientific" explanations. They can attempt to demystify the mysterious. They can rationalize it away. But at the end of the day, they've heard what they've heard - God Himself has intervened on behalf of His people. 

It's why you can talk to almost anyone on this planet (save for the completely unreached tribal folks tucked away in their native lands), and they have at least heard about Jesus. God acted, and the whole world heard. 

That's our God.