Most of us have heard about Jericho. But few have put the principles shown to work in their lives. People are publicly very boisterous about their great lives, but plain facts reveal something quite different about them. Millions of people are on drugs, many of them medically prescribed. Others live in horribly strained relationships. Still others privately fight against despair, loneliness and defeat. Jericho stands for all those things that we can’t get victory over on our own but

will hurt others and eventually destroy us if we don’t.

 

These are the things that we hide in our lives: our fears, defeats, anxieties, petty envying and outright deceit. God knows there is only one solution: lead them into battle against them. We live in a pretend age. And so marriages are falling apart but we pretend things are normal such as marriages falling apart. They pretend their families are fine when in fact the parents and children are in a constant state of war.

We live by ignoring our failures. We hope that they will never get big enough to erupt the normalcy of life. God knows better. If crossing the Red Sea or Jordan River stand for salvation, taking over the land of Israel represent sanctification: the process where God’s people are freed from their sins and find the fullness of life in living God’s way.

God led them directly into the fiercest of battles. God knows that we can overcome by trusting in Him. Once we see a great victory then our hopes are up. Our vision is clear. More typically, we start with the lesser battles on our own. We lose hope and just manage to retain some decent kind of life.

 

God is out for victory and success. He desires both to show His power and bring grace to our lives. He leads them straight into the hard battles and will do it in our lives too. When a person becomes a Christian, he will often face some big sudden challenges. He should not fear. God is with you to show Himself great. If they are not rightly dealt with at the beginning when our faith is strong, then it takes a long time to work them through.

Many of us do not understand how deceit, lies, fears, anxieties, lusts and anxieties are chains about our lives. We have grown so used to them that we just get use to them. God wants to give us genuine freedom from their influence in our lives.

The world boasts of freedom and choice, but are they not enslaved by their very desires? This is what Peter the apostle saw in the world about him,

“For speaking out arrogant words of vanity they entice by fleshly desires, by sensuality, those who barely escape from the ones who live in error, promising them freedom while they themselves are slaves of corruption; for by what a man is overcome, by this he is enslaved. (2 Peter 2:18-19).

Now is the time of true freedom. God has enabled us to break away from the chains of deception by leading us into victory. Jericho was and is meant to be for us an early victory in our lives that strengthens our faith in finishing the work God has for us, both personally as well as globally in missions.

 

Without these key lessons found in the Book of Joshua, we will never find success. The battle of Jericho might just sound like a fantastic story, but it provides for us one of the key lessons on battling with sin. It give us the knowledge of how God is alive and desires to lead us into victory over the very things that will enslave our lives. God is the Living God and desires to be writing new history books all the time with His Name boldly pronounced.