Jericho

The sound of Rams horns fill your ears as you trudge around Jericho following the priests. They walk slowly under the great weight of the golden Ark. The piercing wail of their horns bounces and echoes from the walls; dulled by the sound of a thousand foot falls as a whole nation walks once around a city. Once.

For days you have done this. Risen, washed, dressed and walked around high walls that remain every bit as foreboding and impenetrable as they did when you first saw them.

Yet Jericho still stands.  Like a defiant red cancer on the landscape. Testament to a culture that has long since abandoned morality in favour of child sacrifice and bestiality. The walls glare down at these shabby pilgrims, urging them to return to their endless dessert. Civilisation does not want them. After days of circling the walls in response to God’s word, nothing has changed.

All that has been achieved is a weariness in your body and an ache in your legs that is threatening to spread to your soul.

But you have to make a choice today. You have to make a choice in each moment. Will you choose to look at the walls with their grim message of discouragement? Mocking your people who dare to attack the reality of the situation with something as insubstantial as faith. Or will you keep your eyes fixed unwaveringly on that golden throne, the ark of the covenant? The promise that it represents of Gods government being established in the midst of broken, fallible human beings.

Will you look over to Jordan at the piles of stones heaped up at the rivers edge. Twelve hard, heavy, real things. Testimony that; yes, the waters really did part under Gods direction and , yes, you really did walk across on dry ground. Your mind reels and fights to make scientific sense of it. It tries to tell you that it couldn’t have happened because today life seems so…..normal. But one look at the stones silences the storm in your mind. God is real and his word is faithful.

Where will YOU look today as YOU wait for  the obstinate walls of your problems to fall down? Will you concentrate on the walls. The problem that does not fall down despite your faith? Or can you lift your head and look to the throne of God in your life and encourage yourself in the fact that  He has never ever failed to do what He has promised? Eventually the shout of praise will rize and the walls will fall. Until then we follow the commander of the Lords army because His battle plan is beyond understanding and His timing is perfect.

Keep on walking my friends.