Joshua 10

must overcome the enemy in order to claim it for ourselves and enjoy it.

When Joshua met the Lord, he discovered that the battle was the Lord’s and He had already overcome the enemy. All Joshua had to do was listen to God’s Word and obey orders, and God would do the rest. God had already given Jericho to Israel (Josh. 6:2); all they had to do was step out by faith and claim the victory by obeying the Lord.

In a meeting with a small group of missionaries in China, James Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission (now Overseas Missionary Fellowship) reminded them that there were three ways to do God’s work: “One is to make the best plans we can, and carry them out to the best of our ability … or, having carefully laid our plans and determined to carry them through, we may ask God to help us, and to prosper us in connection with them. Yet another way of working is to begin with God; to ask His plans, and to offer ourselves to Him to carry out His purposes.’’

Joshua followed the third plan, and that’s why the Lord blessed him.

The main lesson of Joshua 5 is that we must be a spiritually prepared people if we are going to do the Lord’s work successfully and glorify His name. Instead of rushing into the battle, we must “take time to be holy.”

In a letter to his missionary friend Rev. Daniel Edwards, the saintly Scottish preacher Robert Murray McCheyne wrote: “Remember you are God’s sword— His instrument—I trust a chosen vessel unto Him to bear His name. In great measure, according to the purity and perfections of the instrument, will be the success. It is not great talents God blesses so much as great likeness to Jesus. A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God.”

That letter was written in 1840, but its admonition applies to God’s people today. All of us are His ministers, His servants, and we want to be holy instruments that He can use successfully.

An anonymous wit reminds us that a dentist’s mistake is pulled out, a lawyer’s mistake is imprisoned, a teacher’s mistake is failed, a printer’s mistake is corrected, a pharmacist’s mistake is buried, a postman’s mistake is forwarded, and an electrician’s mistake could be shocking. The novelist Joseph Conrad wrote, “It’s only those who do nothing that make no mistakes.”

In Joshua’s case, however, doing nothing was his mistake, and this chapter explains what happened. It records the three stages in his second failure (after Ai) in the conquest of the Promised Land. It also tells us how Joshua turned his mistake into a victory.

When you make agreements with the enemy, expect to end up paying a price and having to defend them in order to protect yourself. This is why God’s people must remain separated from the world (2 Cor. 6:14–18). I wonder whether Paul had Joshua in mind when he wrote, “No one engaged in warfare entangles himself with the affairs of this life, that he may please Him who enlisted him as a soldier” (2 Tim. 2: nkjv).

The king’s call to the armies (vv. 1–5). The king of Jerusalem, whose name means “lord of righteousness,” heard what the Gibeonites had done and announced that these traitors had to be punished. If a great city like Gibeon capitulated to the Jews, then one more barrier was removed against the advancement of Israel in the land. It was important for the Canaanites to recover that key city, even if they had to take it by force. Four other Canaanite kings allied with Adonizedek, and their combined armies encamped before Gibeon. The poor Gibeonites had made peace with the invaders and were now at war with their former allies!

As this confederation of armies and kings assembled, God in heaven must have laughed (Ps. 2:1–4), because unknown to them He was using these events to accomplish His own purposes. Instead of having to defeat these five city-states one by one, He would help Joshua conquer them all at one time! Just as God used the defeat at Ai to form a battle plan for victory over Ai (Josh. 8), so also He used Joshua’s mistake with the Gibeonites to protect Gibeon and accelerate the conquest of Canaan.

The mistakes we make embarrass us, especially those mistakes that are caused by our running ahead of the Lord and not seeking His will. But we need to remember that no mistake is final for the dedicated Christian. God can use even our blunders to accomplish His purposes. Somebody defined success as “the art of making your mistakes when nobody’s looking,” but a better definition would be “the art of seeing victory where other people see only defeat.”

The Gibeonites’ call to Joshua (vv. 6–7). In spite of their paganism, these Gibeonites are a good example for people to follow today. When they knew they were headed for destruction, they came to Joshua (“Jehovah is Savior”) and obtained from him a promise of protection. Would that lost sinners realize their plight and turn to Jesus Christ by faith! When the Gibeonites found themselves in danger, they believed Joshua’s promise and called on him for help. That’s what God’s people need to do when they find themselves facing the battles of life. The Gibeonites turned the whole burden over to Joshua and trusted him to keep his word, and he did.

Joshua’s call to the Lord (vv. 8–15). Three factors combined to give Joshua success in this attack: believing a divine promise (v. 8), using sound strategy (v. 9), and calling on the Lord in prayer (vv. 10–15).

The promise. Joshua’s actions here illustrate two important verses: “Whatsoever is not of faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23) and “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (10:17). Whenever we believe the promises of God and obey the commands of God, we act by faith and can expect God’s help. The Jews didn’t have to be afraid because God had already promised them victory. God’s promises of victory had encouraged Joshua when he became leader of the nation (Josh. 1:5–9), when he anticipated attacking Jericho (6:2), and when he attacked Ai after a humiliating defeat (8:1). God’s promises would be fulfilled because “there has not failed one word of all His good promise” (1 Kings 8: nkjv).

The strategy. But faith apart from works is dead, and Joshua proved his faith by using wise strategy. He ordered an all-night march and a surprise attack on the enemy army, strategy he had used before when attacking Ai (8:3ff.). It was a long trek from Gilgal to Gibeon, and the road was uphill, but Joshua assembled his troops and made the journey as quickly as possible. No doubt the men were weary when they arrived, but the Lord was with them and gave them victory. What kept the soldiers going? They believed God’s promise and knew that the victory was assured.

God assisted the weary Jewish soldiers by killing the enemy army with large hailstones. The timely occurrence of the storm was itself a miracle, but an even greater miracle was the fact that the stones hit only the enemy soldiers. God took His special “ammunition” out of His storehouse and used it to good advantage (Job 38:22–23). When God’s people are obeying God’s will, everything in the universe works for them, even “the stars in their courses” (Judg. 5:20). When we disobey God’s will, everything works against us. (Read Jonah 1 for a vivid illustration of this truth.)

The prayer. But the miracle of the hailstorm was nothing compared to the miracle of extending the day so that Joshua could finish the battle and secure a complete victory over the enemy. His men were weary and the task was great, and if night came on, the enemy could escape. Joshua needed a special act from God to enable him to claim the victory the Lord had promised.

This is the last miracle recorded in Joshua and certainly the greatest. Joshua prayed for God’s help, and the Lord answered in a remarkable way. This event is questioned by those who deny the reality of miracles and look only to science for truth. “How could God stop the rotation of the earth and extend the length of a day,” they ask, “without creating chaos all over the planet?” They seem to forget the fact that days are normally of different lengths in various parts of the world without the planet experiencing chaos. At two o’clock in the morning, I read the newspaper by sunlight in Norway.

But how do you explain a miracle, any miracle? Of course, the simplest answer is the answer of faith: The Lord is God and nothing is too hard for Him (Jer. 32:17, 27). Day and night belong to God (Ps. 74:16), and everything He has made is His servant. If God can’t perform the miracle described in Joshua 10, then He can’t perform any miracle and is imprisoned in His own creation, unable to use or suspend the very laws He built into it. I have a difficult time believing in that kind of a God.

An Old Testament expert, Gleason L. Archer, points out that the phrase “hasted not to go down” in verse 13 indicates “a retardation of the movement” and not a complete cessation. The sun and moon didn’t stand still permanently and then suddenly go down but were held back so that the daylight was lengthened. God stopped the sun and moon and then retarded the rotation of the planet so that the sun and moon set very slowly. Such a process would not create chaos all over the globe.

A corollary to this view is that the sun and moon remained on their normal course and it only appeared that the day was lengthening because of the way God caused their light to be refracted. But verse 13 states twice that the sun “stood still” and once that the moon “stayed.” However, these verbs need not describe a permanent situation but only the beginning of the miracle. God stopped the sun and moon in their courses and then controlled their gradual descent, all the while causing the light to be refracted for a much longer period of time.

Since verses 13b-15 are poetical in form, a quotation from the unknown book of Jasher (see 2 Sam. 1:8), some students interpret the words symbolically. They say that God so helped Israel that the army was able to accomplish two days’ work in one day. But Joshua’s words sound very much like a prayer that the Lord would intervene, and the description of what occurred doesn’t read like the report of an efficiency expert.

Why try to explain away a miracle? What do we prove? Certainly not that we’re smarter than God! Either we believe in a God who can do anything, or we must accept a Christian faith that’s non-miraculous; and that does away with the inspiration of the Bible, the Virgin Birth, and the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. Certainly there’s room for honest questions about the nature of the miraculous; but for the humble Christian believer, there’s never room for questioning the reality of the miraculous. C. S. Lewis wrote, “The mind which asks for a non-miraculous Christianity is a mind in process of relapsing from Christianity into mere ‘religion.’”

You find seemingly contradictory facts stated in Joshua 10: and 21. Why would the army go all the way back to Gilgal when the battle wasn’t over? The best explanation is to see verse 15 as the completion of the quotation from the book of Jasher, beginning at verse 13b. The temporary Jewish camp was at Makkedah, which was near Libnah, and the army didn’t return to Gilgal until they had established their control over central Canaan.

Joshua’s call to his army (vv. 16–28). At the end of an incredible battle, Joshua performed a public ceremony that gave encouragement and strength to his soldiers. Their past victories had given them control over the central part of the land, but now they faced campaigns in both the south and the north of Palestine. “Divide and conquer” was Joshua’s strategy, and it worked. Joshua wanted to remind his men that the Lord would give them victory throughout the land.

Knowing that the five kings were trapped in a cave, Joshua temporarily left them and led his men in the “mopping up” operation, which verse 20 describes as “slaying them with a very great slaughter.” Only a few of the enemy soldiers escaped to the cities, but since those cities would eventually be destroyed anyway, those fugitives had no hope.

Returning to the camp, probably the next day, Joshua ordered the kings to be taken from the cave and put on the ground, their faces in the dirt. This humiliating posture announced that Joshua had won a total victory and their end had come. But there was more. He called for his officers to put their feet on the necks of the kings, symbolic not only of the past victory but also of the victories the Lord would give His people in the days ahead. The kings were slain and the five corpses hung on five trees until sundown. Then their bodies were put into the cave, with a pile of stones closing up the entrance. This pile of stones was another monument in the land speaking of the power and victory of the Lord.

In verse 25, Joshua’s words must have thrilled the hearts of his brave soldiers. They echo the words God spoke to him when he began his career (1:6–9). Since Joshua is a type of Jesus Christ, we can apply this scene and these words to Christ and His people. Jesus has defeated all His enemies and will one day return and destroy them forever. No matter how they may rage and rebel (Ps. 2:1–3), our Lord’s enemies are only the footstool at His feet (Ps. 110:1; 1 Cor. 15:25). Through Him, we can claim victory and put our feet on the necks of our enemies (Rom. 16:20).

As you review the whole episode of Joshua and the Gibeonites, you can’t help but be both warned and encouraged. These events warn us to be alert and prayerful lest the enemy deceive us and we start walking by sight instead of by faith. Then we’ll find ourselves making decisions that are wrong and getting into alliances that are dangerous. But there’s also a word of encouragement: God can take even our blunders and turn them into blessings. This isn’t an excuse for carelessness, but it is a great encouragement when you’ve failed the Lord and His people.

“And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith” (1 John 5: nkjv).