The new Start (6)

Following on from the barbaric destruction of Achan, his family and his livestock we were really unsure what to do. The whole affair had really tested us as a community yet at the same time caused us to wake up to the fact that this God of ours was some how different than all the other gods that were around. Our God really appeared to be visible whilst invisible. There was a real sense that He was not going to let us down even though through the sin and disobedience of one man we had all failed.

Joshua our leader (we called him that in our Hebrew language but other languages, I learnt later, called him Jesus. His name means “Jehovah my Salvation”) was not giving up, he seemed determined to encourage us and began to see beyond where we were in the present and began to lay hold of the promises and prophecies that our previous leader, Moses had given us. The encouragements were in the form of you can overcome because I have overcome (see Lessons from Deuteronomy). 


What was evident was that we could no longer wallow around in our failure and misery, we had been through the wilderness and had languished there for far too long, we had to have hope and belief that God Almighty wanted to bring us into something that far exceeded our expectations and our hopes and dreams, despite our failures and miscalculations of life. We had just witnessed and been party to a most barbaric thing but we were coming to the conclusion that God, our God was a holy God and needed to be worshipped with all holiness and purity.

As we contemplated Joshua's leadership we began to have our faith in him re-kindled and started to listen to him again. What I found amazing was that when I tuned in my spirit, that is the inner most part of me to what Joshua was saying I really began to have peace that this man was appointed of God for such a time as this. It was as if he was our saviour sent from God, this God who we had chosen to follow, to bring us into a new found freedom, a place of unknown yet a place of peace and rest, a place where we could worship and be thankful, a place where we could begin to really be those people that our God had created us to be. It was with this assurance that we found ourselves moving into a position where we wanted to claim ground for Jehovah, places that were not currently His. I reflected on this and found myself asking “were there places in me that God needed to have control over?”. To me it was not just a battle for physical ground it was a battle for spiritual ground, no matter what the outcome of our battle with Ai the real issue was whether my life was justified, centrally aligned to what God required of me. Yes I had encountered experiences and I had seen God do amazing things, dry up a river bed, enable us to defeat a stronghold, lay us low and yet still protect us, cause us to confront failure head on, yet I still had not fully given myself over to this God, there was still something in me that wanted my own thing. Wealth, success, happiness, a stable income so that I could support my family. What I realised that although these were good things, things that society wanted me to achieve and have, they were not fulfilling in themselves. God wanted me, my ambitions and dreams for His glory not my own. We were to learn many more lessons as individuals and as a community. We were to experience compromise and failure along with success.