PreacherMike

I understand the Marcionites well! They couldn’t reconcile the God who is revealed by Jesus Christ (”turn the other cheek” . . . “love your enemy”) with the vicious God of the OT, so they insisted these were two different Gods.

And it wearies me that people have a way of reading Jesus through the OT stories like these — rather than let Jesus be the center of scripture through whom we understand redemption history.

I plead ignorance. At the end of the day, I am a follower of Jesus who puts my trust in him and his ways — including his confidence in the story of Israel.

These stories are not the high points of the Old Testament, for sure.

But what if . . . God had been pleading with the people of Jericho to yield to him, to turn from their ways of violence and oppression (as in Sodom)?

What if we read this story like the flood — God’s attempt to create a fresh start? He has chosen a people to held restore the world. He, in his sovereignty, offers them a land that has been promised. And through that beachhead, he intends to bless all people — ever country, every group, every family.

I know. I know. It doesn’t solve everything for me, either.

The longest man-made structure on earth is a wall: the Great Wall of China, begun in the 5th century before Christ to keep out the Mongol hordes. Then there’s the wall the Emperor Hadrian built in the 2nd century after Christ across Northern England, to keep the out the Scottish hordes. And there’s Offa’s dyke, built in the 8th century along the boundary of Mercia and Wales to keep out the Welsh hordes. And then there’s the 7-foot privacy fence we put up in our back yard this summer, to keep out the neighborhood hordes. And if I asked for a show of hands here today, I bet most of you would have to admit you have a fence in your yard, whether you need it or not. We just like our walls. We like our space. We like to control our own territory.

Jericho was a city famous for its walls. Every one of us learned the song as kids: “Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, and the walls came tumbling down.” Now that I’m older, I don’t have the same easy view I did as a child of that story. I don’t know that I understand all of the complexities of the situation; I don’t know that I can explain the violence of what happened there. But something there was that didn’t love that wall around Jericho. God wanted to show his people entering that promised land that walls might keep out men, they might keep out an army—and the people living inside might feel safe, self-sufficient, in charge of their own fates. But walls crumble before the will of God, and the wall around Jericho didn’t stand a chance before him. Joshua’s army didn’t even have to touch the walls. They just obeyed God, marched around the city, blew their horns, and the walls came down.

God has this thing about knocking down walls. Walls bother him, for some reason. So hundreds of years after Joshua marched around the walls of Jericho, another Joshua, God himself in human flesh, visited Jericho and knocked down another kind of wall. Zaccheus, that wee little man from another childhood song, lived in Jericho, and he had built a great big wall in his life. Like most walls, it was about keeping some things out and some things in, about reassuring himself of his own power and control. His wall wasn’t made of brick and mortar, though. Zaccheus had walled up his heart. He had convinced himself that things were more important than people and that being rich was more valuable than being righteous. But maybe because he felt safe inside his wall or maybe because his wall was starting to crumble, he climbed up in that tree to see Jesus—Joshua, in Hebrew—when the Teacher came to town. Jesus saw the man hiding safe and self-satisfied behind his wall, and he knocked the wall right down. Zaccheus’ barriers collapsed: all the barriers he’d built between himself and others, and between himself and God. He invited Jesus inside his house, but more importantly, he let him inside his life. He went from being a guy who keeps people out to a guy who lets people in.

That’s what God does. Walls bother him. And they’re not part of his original plan: there were no walls in Eden—just God walking with his people who were caring for and cultivating his creation, plants, animals, the world itself. If you think about it, the first consequence of the fall was the building of a wall: they realized their nakedness, their vulnerability, and they sought to hide it, to separate themselves from God. The story of much of the rest of human history is a story of walls. But one moment changed all that—a moment whose season we’re preparing to celebrate. It was a moment of the tearing down of all walls, a moment when the barrier between spirit and flesh, Jew and Gentile, male and female, God and human—a moment when all of these walls collapsed before God. Paul admits as much when he says to the Ephesians, “For Christ himself is our peace, who has made us one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.”