For nearly two months, a very shaky ceasefire with Iran has held. Although Hezbollah has not stopped firing rockets from Lebanon, Iran itself has gone quiet – at least with regards to Israel. Until Sunday night, June 7th. when Iranian missiles lit up the Israeli sky. By Monday morning, the Israeli Air Force had struck back. If you believe the Hebrew Bible is not just ancient history but a living word, open the book of Joshua today. You will not find it dated. This month, Israel365 is going through all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, one book a day, every day in June. For Joshua, Rabbi Mark Fishman sat down with Pastor Scott Thomas of Free Life Chapel in Florida, a man who has been coming to Israel since 1992 and loves this land and its people with everything he has. Their conversation is one of the most compelling in the entire series. I am writing this after our third siren of the morning, and it is not yet 10am Israel time. But what Rabbi Fishman and Pastor Thomas uncovered in the opening chapters of Joshua has the most remarkable resonance with what is unfolding outside my window right now.
Here is the question at the heart of their conversation, and at the heart of this book: What changes when Israel crosses the Jordan River and enters the land?
Everything.
Pastor Thomas described the forty years leading up to that crossing this way: “There’s a process of working through and then discovering who God was during those 40 years in the wilderness, the manna and his caring, and then learning what this covenant was going to be like.”
Think about what that process looked like. It was constant, obvious, physical. Manna on the ground every morning. The Tabernacle, God literally dwelling in the middle of the camp. A pillar of cloud by day, fire by night. God was not asking Israel to take anything on faith that He had not first shown them with their own eyes. It reminds me of the way we parent small children. The love does not diminish as they grow, but the physical hands-on care does. A toddler needs you to show up in ways a teenager does not. The desert was Israel’s toddler years with God. Constant presence, constant provision, every need met visibly and directly.
And then they crossed the Jordan. And the manna stopped.
Not as punishment. As graduation. As Pastor Thomas put it: “In the first crossing, God is getting the people out of Egypt. In the second crossing, God has brought Egypt out of the people.” The forty years in the wilderness were never the destination. They were the curriculum. And now Israel is in the land, the hand-holding has eased, and the question becomes: have you actually learned to hear the voice? Because the voice is still there. The love has not changed. But you are no longer a toddler. You are in the Land of Israel, there are real enemies at the gate, and God is asking something different of you now.
Which brings us to Jericho.
Jericho is the first test of whose voice Israel actually listens to once the desert is over. The city is fortified, walled, shut tight. The surrounding nations are watching. And God’s battle plan is, there is no polite way to say this, strategically confounding. March around the walls once a day for six days. On the seventh day, march seven times, blow the ram’s horns, and shout. No siege weapons. No strategy. No explanation.
Pastor Thomas did not soften it: “God gives illogical instruction regarding Jericho. He wants to make sure that you are more committed to your obedience than to your own understanding.” It is the same message God delivered to Joshua at the very start of the book:
This past Sunday night, the world watched to see if Israel would listen. The call came from the highest levels to stand down. Israel struck back anyway. Was it coordinated? Was it calculated? Only those in the room know. But from where I sit in Israel, the more relevant question is not who told Israel what to do. It is who Israel ultimately answers to. That has never changed.
This is the defining tension of the entire book of Joshua, and if we are honest, it is the defining tension of Jewish history. Israel has always lived surrounded by nations who do not share our covenant with God. Nations whose counsel, however well-meaning, comes from a completely different frame of reference. They see walls. They see military logic. They see diplomatic calculus. They do not see what we see: a God who has a track record, a God who splits seas and stops rivers and brings down walls with a ram’s horn blast, a God whose instructions have confounded the surrounding nations from the very beginning and have proven right every single time.
The world has opinions about how Israel should fight its wars. It always has. But Jericho did not fall because Israel followed the advice of the surrounding nations. It fell because Israel followed God. And that trust, hard-won through forty years of desert training, manna and fire and the slow learning of a people finding their footing, is precisely what the Jordan crossing was preparing them for.
We are still learning it. The sirens remind us every time. The enemies change their names across the centuries, but the test is always the same. Whose voice are you listening to? Whose instructions are you following? And do you trust, even when the strategy confounds everyone watching, that the God who brought Israel out of Egypt and into this land has not changed, has not looked away, and has not forgotten His promises?
Joshua knew the answer. Three thousand years later, in a land that still trembles with sirens, so do we.
To watch the full conversation between Pastor Thomas and Rabbi Fishman, on the book of Joshua, click here.
Bible Month is Israel365’s invitation to open this book and let it speak. Every day this June, a new video drops on The Israel Bible YouTube channel, Orthodox rabbis and leading Christian voices going through all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible together, free, for anyone who wants to go deeper.
On June 14th, join us for Open the Book: A National Conversation on Biblical Literacy, a free live event bringing Jewish and Christian leaders together around the question of what we lose when we stop reading this book. And if you are ready to go further still, Bible Plus is waiting, hundreds of hours of Torah teaching from Israel-based scholars, this June at the lowest price of the year.
