Josue 6 - The Fall of Iniquity

Josue 6 tells of the incredible destruction of Jericho.  How the walls crumbled, fell to the earth in dramatic fashion, as the trumpets of the priests blared and shrieked, and the people shouted.  What an extraordinary scene.  The magnitude of it, the awe-inspiring scale and scope, illustrates God's magnificence so profoundly.  The Israelites don't enter Canaan quietly, in the night.  They enter with thunder and vivacity.  The walls of Jericho fall so dramatically to warn the other cities of Canaan of God's power and might.  The land is to be swept clean of sin and Godlessness.  The land of Israel, through promise made, is to be authoritatively and staunchly established.  That much is made clear in Josue 6.  And there is a beautiful, figurative sense to be had of this chapter, amid all the destruction.  For the walls of Jericho are like iniquity, and they are built up over generations, and they go deep, and are hard to move.  Such is sin.  Human power, as frail as it is, cannot bring down Jericho's walls.  Sin is too great a barrier to us.  But lo, what happens when God's Word is proclaimed?!  The priests' trumpets are sounded and the Ark of the Covenant presented before the walls, and like sand they are brought low to the ground, turned to dust.  And so sin is obliterated by the powerful and divine Word!

Of last mention in Josue 6 is the beauty of Rahab's fate.  Rahab's tale is found in Josue 2, when she so charitably saved some of the Israelite spies and declared her faith in God.  She was afforded God's mercy for her acts, and spared when the city was destroyed.  She went on to marry into the tribe of Juda, and thus became a human ancestor of David and even Jesus Himself!  And there is a passage in Paul's epistle to the Romans that speaks to Rahab's tale so beautifully:  "...thou wert cut out of the wild olive-tree, which is natural to thee, and, contrary to nature, wert ingrafted into the good olive-tree" (Romans 11:24).  So Rahab the pagan, taken from the wilds that exist outside of God, was "ingrafted" into the chosen ones, just as, eventually, all the wild Gentiles will be "ingrafted" into the heavenly Church of Christ.