25 Powerful Lessons from Joshua 6: The Silent March, the Shout, and the Wall That Fell Flat

The loudest miracle in the Old Testament belonged to people who were not allowed to speak. That is the arrangement the lessons from Joshua 6 come out of, and it is the part the song leaves alone.

Most of us can quote the ending from childhood. What God gives most of this chapter to is everything before the ending: the stretch where obedience produced nothing anyone could point at, a warning that arrived at the exact moment of triumph, and one woman whose name was called out for mercy before a single stone had moved.

Brief Summary of Joshua 6

Jericho had locked itself down against Israel, and God told Joshua the city was already in his hand. The plan He gave used none of the usual ways of taking a fortified city. Israel circled the walls once a day for six days and seven times on the seventh, with priests carrying the ark and sounding rams’ horns.

At Joshua’s word the people shouted, the wall fell flat, and Israel took the city. Everything in it was devoted to the LORD, and Rahab, who had hidden the spies, was brought out alive with her household. Joshua then bound Israel by oath against ever rebuilding Jericho.

Lesson 1: A Closed Door Is Not the Same as a Safe One (Joshua 6:1)

Joshua 6:1: “Now Jericho was straitly shut up because of the children of Israel: none went out, and none came in.”

The city’s answer to Israel was to seal itself, and the seal worked in both directions. Nobody left and nobody entered. Jericho had made itself airtight, and the writer notes the reason without comment: it was done “because of the children of Israel.”

That is the strongest defence anyone puts up in this chapter, and it is a locked gate. The people inside were not ignorant.

Rahab had already told the spies what the whole city knew, that the LORD dried up the Red Sea and that their hearts had melted at the news (Joshua 2:9-11). They had the report. What they did with it was bolt the door.

A shut door can look like control while it is doing the opposite. There is a way of handling God that never denies anything and never opens anything either, where a person keeps the conversation short, keeps the Bible closed, and calls the distance peace. Jericho’s gates held for seven days and then stopped mattering.

Security that is built to keep God out is the least secure thing a person owns.

Lesson 2: God Speaks of a Victory in the Past Tense Before You Have Seen Any of It (Joshua 6:2)

Joshua 6:2: “And the LORD said unto Joshua, See, I have given into thine hand Jericho, and the king thereof, and the mighty men of valour.”

God has a way of describing settled things long before anything about them is visible. He does not say here that He will give the city. He says He has given it, while the walls are standing and no Israelite has taken a step, and the tense is doing that work on purpose.

Faith is what it is called when someone acts on a completed fact they cannot see, which is exactly how the New Testament looks back on this scene and says the walls of Jericho fell down by it (Hebrews 11:30). Joshua had nothing in hand except that sentence. No breach in the wall, no defector opening a gate, no siege engine.

Whatever God has spoken over you is not waiting on your evidence in order to be true.

Lesson 3: What You Fear Most About the Obstacle Is Named Inside the Promise (Joshua 6:2)

Joshua 6:2: “See, I have given into thine hand Jericho, and the king thereof, and the mighty men of valour.”

You can usually name the one part of a hard situation that makes it feel unbeatable, and you probably keep that part vague on purpose. It is easier to say the marriage is difficult than to say the sentence underneath it. Vagueness feels kinder and does nothing, because a fear nobody has ever said out loud has never been handed to anyone either.

God does the opposite here. The gift comes itemised: not just the city, but its king, and then its fighting men, called “the mighty men of valour” in the same breath as the walls. He lists the parts a soldier would lie awake over and puts them inside what He says He has already handed across.

That is not how reassurance usually works among us. We comfort each other by leaving the hard part unspecified. God names the garrison before He names the victory, and the naming is where the comfort actually sits, because a thing that has been named has been reckoned with.

What in your situation have you refused to say plainly, and what would change if you brought God that exact sentence instead of the general shape of it?

Lesson 4: God May Give You an Assignment That Uses None of Your Strength (Joshua 6:3)

Joshua 6:3: “And ye shall compass the city, all ye men of war, and go round about the city once. Thus shalt thou do six days.”

Notice who receives this order. The men of war. The trained ones, the ones carrying weapons, the ones whose entire preparation was for a moment exactly like this.

The order contains no fighting. There were two known ways to take a walled city in that world: you broke in, or you starved them out. God used neither. He asked the army to walk, the one activity in which their being soldiers made no difference.

Read also: What Does It Mean To Wait On The Lord

Something in us assumes God calls us mainly at the point of our competence, and He often does. He also does this, and Paul was content with it, glad to be weak so that the power of Christ would rest on him (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Being capable can make obedience harder rather than easier, because there is a sting in being asked to stand down where you are strong. The gifted teacher asked to sit and listen. The able one asked to do what any child in the camp could have done.

Take the assignment that is actually in front of you, even where it makes nothing of what you are good at.

Lesson 5: Obedience Does Not Come With an Explanation Attached (Joshua 6:3)

Joshua 6:3: “Thus shalt thou do six days.”

We want the reason before we move, and God gives understanding far more often on the far side of obedience than as the price of it. He tells Israel what to do here and never tells them why. Six days of the same circuit, and no reason recorded anywhere in the chapter to the people walking it. The account holds instructions and it holds compliance, and it never once holds anyone being talked into it.

That gap is one we are used to closing before we move. We want the logic first, we will obey once the sense of it has been supplied, and we call the delay discernment when it is often just negotiation. When God declines to explain Himself He is still telling you something, and what He is telling you is which part of this belongs to you.

Israel had a word and no rationale, and the word turned out to be enough. The seeing came on the seventh day, which is the ordinary order in Scripture rather than the exception.

Lesson 6: God Reaches for the Plain Instrument So the Power Is Clearly His (Joshua 6:4)

Joshua 6:4: “And seven priests shall bear before the ark seven trumpets of rams’ horns: and the seventh day ye shall compass the city seven times, and the priests shall blow with the trumpets.”

Israel owned better trumpets than these. God had told Moses to make two of beaten silver for calling the assembly and for sounding the alarm in war (Numbers 10:2). The horns carried around Jericho were not those. They were rams’ horns, the plain thing, hollowed out and blown.

Neither kind of horn could move a stone. That is what makes the choice of the humbler one worth noticing. When the wall came down, there would be no instrument anywhere in the story impressive enough for anybody to credit.

God’s habit of picking up unremarkable tools runs right through Scripture, and it is a mercy rather than a slight. He chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, Paul says, so that no flesh should glory in His presence (1 Corinthians 1:27-29). A ministry that only works because of the person running it has a ceiling and a short shelf life.

If the work you have been given feels too ordinary to matter, that may be the most reliable sign of who is going to get the credit for it.

Lesson 7: God Opens the Way in Front of Where You Are Standing (Joshua 6:5, 20)

Joshua 6:5, 20: “and the wall of the city shall fall down flat, and the people shall ascend up every man straight before him… that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him.”

Much of our anxiety in a waiting season is positional. We suspect we are in the wrong place, the wrong city, the wrong job, and that whatever God is about to do will happen somewhere we are not standing.

The promise and its fulfilment here use the same phrase, and it is a phrase about position: every man straight before him. No gate to locate, no funnel to squeeze through, no order to regroup on the eastern side and go in together. Wherever a man happened to be when the wall came down, that is where his way opened.

Read also: How To Be Still Before God When Your Mind Is Racing

Those men had walked thirteen circuits and ended up nowhere in particular, and nowhere in particular turned out to be exactly where God intended to make an opening for each of them. They had no way of knowing in advance where the wall would give, and it did not matter, because it gave in front of all of them.

Look at the ground you are actually standing on. That is where God tends to open things.

Lesson 8: How Soon You Move Is Part of What You Believe (Joshua 6:6)

Joshua 6:6: “And Joshua the son of Nun called the priests, and said unto them, Take up the ark of the covenant, and let seven priests bear seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark of the LORD.”

The verse immediately after the strangest military order in the Old Testament is a verse about Joshua passing that order on. No question is recorded, no delay, no council, no request for clarification. He heard, and the next thing in the account is him calling the priests.

He had every human reason to want a second conversation first. He was the one who would have to say it out loud to a nation, and the one who would look ridiculous if nothing happened by the sixth evening.

There is a kind of hesitation that never announces itself as refusal. It gathers more information, it prays about it a while longer, it waits for a more convenient season, and it is doing something other than believing. Delay is where obedience goes to be reconsidered, and the psalmist knew the alternative: “I made haste, and delayed not to keep thy commandments” (Psalm 119:60).

What has God already made plain to you that you have been treating as still under discussion?

Lesson 9: Your Strength Is Meant to Guard God’s Presence, Not to Replace It (Joshua 6:7, 9)

Joshua 6:7, 9: “and let him that is armed pass on before the ark of the LORD… And the armed men went before the priests that blew with the trumpets, and the rereward came after the ark.”

You can picture the shape of the column from these two lines.

Armed men in front. Priests with the horns. The ark. Then more men behind.

Israel’s entire fighting capacity is deployed, and it is deployed as an escort. The soldiers attack nothing. They walk in front of the ark and behind it, so that what God had put at the centre of the procession stayed at the centre of it. Their strength had a job, and the job was to protect the place where His presence went.

Ability in a believer is not a problem to be apologised for. It has a proper position, which is around the presence of God rather than in place of it. Trouble starts when the gifted person drifts toward the middle of the arrangement and the ark ends up somewhere near the back, still technically present, no longer at the centre of anything.

Israel’s swords stayed in their sheaths for seven days and were never once useless.

Lesson 10: God Keeps Something Sounding Even Where He Asks You to Say Nothing (Joshua 6:9-10)

Joshua 6:9-10: “the priests going on, and blowing with the trumpets. And Joshua had commanded the people, saying, Ye shall not shout, nor make any noise with your voice, neither shall any word proceed out of your mouth.”

If you have had a long silent season with God, you know how total it can feel. Prayer goes short, testimony goes thin, and you would not know how to describe what God is doing because as far as you can tell He is doing nothing.

Something worth catching in these two verses: the march itself was never silent. The people were. The trumpets sounded continuously, circuit after circuit, all seven days, and the only mouths that were stopped were the mouths of the crowd.

So the whole time Israel walked without a word, they were walking inside a sound they had not made and could not stop. The horns went ahead of them. The horns were carried by the priests, and the priests went before the ark.

Your silence is not the only sound in your situation. Scripture says the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered, and that God who searches hearts knows what that mind is saying (Romans 8:26-27).

The trumpets were still blowing on the days when nothing had changed.

Lesson 11: Every Silence God Commands Has an Ending He Has Already Named (Joshua 6:10)

Joshua 6:10: “Ye shall not shout, nor make any noise with your voice, neither shall any word proceed out of your mouth, until the day I bid you shout; then shall ye shout.”

How long is this going to last? The question does not appear anywhere in the chapter, and it did not need to, because the answer was built into the order Israel was given, stated in the same sentence that imposed the silence.

Joshua tells them when they will be told to shout, and he tells them that they will be told, in the breath that forbids them to speak. Not a hint of it, not a possibility held out. The release is written into the command.

So every wordless circuit was walked toward a day that had already been promised. Nobody is promised the date of their own seventh day, and it would be dishonest to pretend Scripture hands you one. What Scripture does say is that God’s restraints are never open-ended in His mind, however open-ended they feel in yours. Weeping may endure for a night, and the morning is named in the same verse (Psalm 30:5).

Hold the silence God has asked of you as a bounded thing, because that is what it is.

Lesson 12: Obedience That Changes Nothing You Can See Is Still Obedience (Joshua 6:11, 14)

Joshua 6:11, 14: “So the ark of the LORD compassed the city, going about it once: and they came into the camp, and lodged in the camp… And the second day they compassed the city once, and returned into the camp: so they did six days.”

You are probably living somewhere inside a stretch that nobody will ever describe. The praying that has changed nothing yet, the marriage you are still being kind in, the sobriety nobody has noticed.

Israel’s first day ends with everyone back where they started and the wall exactly as it was, and then the account does something striking with the days that follow. Six days of national obedience are handed a single clause: “so they did six days.” No entry for the fourth morning, when a man laced his sandals for the fourth time to do a thing that had not worked three times already.

Read also: Lessons From Exodus 14

God measured their obedience by their walking rather than by the wall, and He is patient with the parts of your life that produce nothing visible. Paul puts it as a promise rather than a mood: “let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not” (Galatians 6:9).

Lesson 13: The Last Stretch of Obedience Asks the Most of You (Joshua 6:15)

Joshua 6:15: “And it came to pass on the seventh day, that they rose early about the dawning of the day, and compassed the city after the same manner seven times: only on that day they compassed the city seven times.”

The seventh day brought no new method. “After the same manner,” the verse says, only seven times over, begun at dawn because seven circuits of a city takes what one circuit does not. The day the wall came down was also the day of the most walking in the whole account.

It would have been reasonable to expect the opposite. Six days of preparation and then something different at the end, something that looked like a battle. What they were given was more of the same thing, started earlier and carried longer.

God does not usually change an assignment as it approaches its point. He extends it. The last month of a long obedience often looks exactly like the first month, except that you are tireder and you have fewer reasons left to believe anything is coming.

Are you looking to God for a different instruction when what He has actually asked of you is another lap of the one you already have?

Lesson 14: Praise Answers What God Has Said, Not What You Can See Yet (Joshua 6:16)

Joshua 6:16: “And it came to pass at the seventh time, when the priests blew with the trumpets, Joshua said unto the people, Shout; for the LORD hath given you the city.”

We tend to treat worship and celebration as one activity, and this verse pulls them apart. Joshua gives a reason for the shout: the LORD has given you the city. Not shout so that He will give it, and not shout because you can see Him giving it. The wall is standing while that sentence is spoken.

His grounds are the same grounds God gave him in verse two, in the same tense. Israel’s praise at the highest moment of the chapter answers something God said, and it happens before anything visible has confirmed it.

Celebration needs an outcome. Worship needs a word, and it can be offered on a day that has produced nothing, by a person who is not pretending things are fine. Habakkuk sang while the fig tree failed and the stalls stood empty, and said he would joy in the God of his salvation anyway (Habakkuk 3:17-18).

Israel shouted at a wall that was still standing, and the wall came down while the sound was still in the air.

Lesson 15: God Settles Who Will Be Spared Before the Judgment Arrives (Joshua 6:17)

Joshua 6:17: “And the city shall be accursed, even it, and all that are therein, to the LORD: only Rahab the harlot shall live, she and all that are with her in the house, because she hid the messengers that we sent.”

The sentence on the city and the exception to it arrive together, in one verse, and both arrive before the wall has fallen. Rahab is named while the doors are still shut.

Her rescue was not a decision made in the confusion afterwards. The reason given is her own act: “because she hid the messengers that we sent.” The chapter says it here, says it again when Joshua sends the spies to fetch her out in verse twenty-two, and says it a third time in verse twenty-five. Three times, in a chapter that gives six days of a nation’s obedience one clause.

Nothing about her past is softened either. She is called the harlot in the same sentence that spares her. God does not rewrite what she was in order to save her, and He does not hold it against her.

Hebrews sets her among the people of faith and says she “perished not with them that believed not” (Hebrews 11:31), which is the whole difference between her and everyone else behind that wall.

The mercy of God toward a person is settled long before the day that person finds out about it.

Lesson 16: Faith That Saves You Is Meant to Gather the People Nearest You (Joshua 6:17)

Joshua 6:17: “only Rahab the harlot shall live, she and all that are with her in the house, because she hid the messengers that we sent.”

The exception has a shape, and the shape is a house. Rahab and everyone with her in the house. The spies had given her the terms plainly back in chapter two: whoever went out of her doors into the street carried his own blood on his head, and whoever stayed with her under the scarlet line would be safe (Joshua 2:18-19).

So the safety was real and the safety had an address. Her family were not covered at a distance because they happened to be related to a believing woman. They were covered because she went and got them, and because they came.

That is a sober word for anyone half-hoping their household is somehow included in their own faith. The people you love are reached by being told and by being brought in, which in Rahab’s case meant walking into the house of a woman with her reputation on the day the city was about to fall.

Tell the people in your house what you actually believe, plainly enough that they could act on it.

Lesson 17: The Moment You Are Handed Something Is a Moment You Need Warning For (Joshua 6:18)

Joshua 6:18: “And ye, in any wise keep yourselves from the accursed thing, lest ye make yourselves accursed, when ye take of the accursed thing, and make the camp of Israel a curse, and trouble it.”

When did you last expect to be tempted on a good day? Most believers brace for the hard season and are caught off guard in the kind one, because vigilance can feel like an insult to a gift you have just been handed.

Where this warning sits in the chapter is as instructive as what it says. It is folded into the command to shout, at the highest point of the account, with the victory already announced. God warns them on the way in rather than on the way up.

The danger He is guarding them against did not exist while they were still walking. You cannot take the spoil of a city you have not entered. Trouble waited for the moment their hands were free, and that is generally when it waits for us: after the promotion, after the healing, after the ministry finally grows.

What did you stop watching in yourself the last time God was kind to you?

Lesson 18: What You Take Unseen Does Not Stay With You Alone (Joshua 6:18)

Joshua 6:18: “lest ye make yourselves accursed, when ye take of the accursed thing, and make the camp of Israel a curse, and trouble it.”

The verse traces the damage further than the person doing it. First “yourselves accursed,” and then, without a pause, “the camp of Israel a curse, and trouble it.” A private hand closing over something in the ruins is said here to reach a whole nation.

The next chapter records precisely that. One man took, one man buried what he took, and Israel was routed at a town so small they had sent only a fraction of the army against it. Nobody in that defeat knew why they were losing.

Sin conducted in private is still not a private matter, because we are joined to people. What a father carries alone sets the temperature of a house. What a leader hides shapes what a church grows comfortable with. Paul told the Corinthians that a little leaven leavens the whole lump, and he said it to a church that thought one man’s business was only his own (1 Corinthians 5:6).

Whose life is currently being touched by something in yours that you believe nobody can see?

Lesson 19: God Has a Right to the First of Whatever He Gives You (Joshua 6:19)

Joshua 6:19: “But all the silver, and gold, and vessels of brass and iron, are consecrated unto the LORD: they shall come into the treasury of the LORD.”

Everything of value in the first city Israel ever took goes into the treasury. All of it. The men who had made thirteen circuits of those walls, who went in over the rubble and fought through the streets, came out of Jericho with nothing in their hands.

Later cities would be different and Israel would be permitted the spoil. This one was not theirs to keep. It belonged to God the way a firstfruit belongs to God, which is to say entirely and by right, and Proverbs states the same claim as a settled principle: “Honour the LORD with thy substance, and with the firstfruits of all thine increase” (Proverbs 3:9).

Read also: Lessons From Exodus 12

There is an old and useful discipline in giving God the first of a thing rather than what is left of it. The first hour of a day, the first portion of an income, the first claim on a new opportunity. What goes first says what is actually in charge, and everyone finds that out about themselves eventually.

Israel learned in their very first victory that the point of the gift was never the gold.

Lesson 20: God’s Giving Does Not Cancel Your Going (Joshua 6:20)

Joshua 6:20: “So the people shouted when the priests blew with the trumpets: and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city.”

You are looking at two true things sitting beside each other without either one shrinking the other. That is the arrangement this verse records.

God gave the city; He says so twice in this chapter. Israel took it; the text says so here. Both stand, and neither is a qualification of the other.

He did the one thing they could never have done and left them the part they could. Nobody in Israel could have moved that wall. Everybody in Israel could walk.

The Christian life keeps this same shape, and it gets pulled out of shape from both ends. One error works furiously at what only God can do. The other waits passively for what God has plainly told us to get up and do. Paul held both in a single sentence when he told the Philippians to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling, “for it is God which worketh in you” (Philippians 2:12-13).

Grace leaves your part standing and makes it worth something, which is a far better arrangement than being excused from it.

Lesson 21: God’s Patience Has an End, and Jericho Is What That Looks Like (Joshua 6:21)

Joshua 6:21: “And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.”

This is the hardest sentence in the chapter and it should not be hurried past. Every living thing in Jericho was killed. Scripture states it plainly and offers no apology for it, and a reader who finds it terrible is not reading it wrongly.

Two things the Bible itself says about it are worth having in hand. Centuries earlier God had told Abraham why the land was not yet being given: “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full” (Genesis 15:16). Judgment was held back four hundred years while the measure filled.

The second is that this came by a command God gave in advance and in writing (Deuteronomy 20:16-18), carried out by Israel as His appointed agent, at one point in redemptive history against one people under sentence. That is judgment by God’s direct word, not a pattern for anybody’s zeal in any century since.

Holding this verse means holding two things at once: that God is genuinely patient, and that His patience has a limit He alone sets. The mercy that spared Rahab and the judgment that fell on her city came from the same God on the same afternoon.

Lesson 22: A Promise You Made Is Still Yours to Keep After You Stop Needing the Person (Joshua 6:22)

Joshua 6:22: “But Joshua had said unto the two men that had spied out the country, Go into the harlot’s house, and bring out thence the woman, and all that she hath, as ye sware unto her.”

You find out what a promise was worth on the day the other person can do nothing further for you. Rahab had reached that day. The spying was long done, the information had been acted on, the city was falling, and she had nothing left to offer anyone in Israel.

Two details in this verse are easy to walk past. The first is “had said,” a small tense that puts Joshua’s order before the fighting rather than after it, so her rescue was arranged while the outcome was still in front of them.

The second is who gets sent: the same two men who made the oath, back into the house where they had given it. The psalmist describes the man who dwells in God’s hill as one who “sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not” (Psalm 15:4).

Keep the word you gave to the person who can no longer do anything for you.

Lesson 23: Being Rescued and Being Fully at Home Are Not the Same Day (Joshua 6:23, 25)

Joshua 6:23, 25: “and they brought out all her kindred, and left them without the camp of Israel… And Joshua saved Rahab the harlot alive, and her father’s household, and all that she had; and she dwelleth in Israel even unto this day.”

She is brought out alive, and then she is left outside the camp. Both are in the same verse. Rahab is rescued from the judgment and she is not yet living in the middle of Israel, and the account does not smooth over the gap.

Two verses later the position has changed: “she dwelleth in Israel even unto this day.” The distance closed. It closed after the rescue rather than at the same moment, and the record keeps both stages.

If you came to Christ out of a life you are ashamed of, you already know this ground. You are genuinely saved and you still feel as though you are standing at the edge of the camp, unsure whether the people singing inside would have you if they knew. That season is real, and Scripture does not pretend it away.

Read also: How to Accept Gods Forgiveness and Forgive Yourself

It also does not leave Rahab there. Where she ends up is inside, permanently, in a sentence written long after the fact, and eventually in the line that leads to Christ Himself (Matthew 1:5).

Lesson 24: What God Has Torn Down Is Not Yours to Build Again (Joshua 6:26)

Joshua 6:26: “And Joshua adjured them at that time, saying, Cursed be the man before the LORD, that riseth up and buildeth this city Jericho: he shall lay the foundation thereof in his firstborn, and in his youngest son shall he set up the gates of it.”

Joshua binds the nation by oath against rebuilding, and the cost he names is exact: the firstborn at the foundation, the youngest at the gates. Jericho was a good site, well watered and well placed, and refortifying it would have looked like the obvious decision for centuries.

Centuries later a man made it anyway. First Kings records that Hiel the Bethelite built Jericho in the days of Ahab and lost Abiram his firstborn and Segub his youngest, “according to the word of the LORD, which he spake by Joshua the son of Nun” (1 Kings 16:34).

There is something God does in a life that is meant to be permanent. The habit He broke, the relationship He ended, the version of yourself He put to death. Going back to lay those foundations again is not a neutral act, and the price of it is often paid by people other than the one doing the building.

God tore that wall down on purpose, and it was not knocked down so that anyone could have the stones.

Lesson 25: God’s Presence Comes First and a Reputation Follows It (Joshua 6:27)

Joshua 6:27: “So the LORD was with Joshua; and his fame was noised throughout all the country.”

Your reputation is one of the least reliable measures you can pick up, because it can be earned by work God had no part in and it can be entirely absent from work He is doing. The chapter’s last sentence puts the two in order. The LORD was with Joshua. Then his fame spread.

Consider what Joshua had actually contributed to the victory being celebrated. He heard an instruction, he passed it on, and he walked. No tactic of his brought down that wall, and his name went through the whole country on the strength of a thing he had not done. The sentence would say something quite different if its halves were reversed.

Of those two things, presence and reputation, only the presence is worth measuring your life by, and it is worth measuring whether or not anyone has heard of you. A name that spreads without His presence behind it is the emptiest success available to a believer.

Frequently Asked Questions About Joshua 6

Related Articles to Read Next

• Lessons From The Life Of Joshua In The Bible
• Summary of the Book of Joshua Chapter by Chapter
• Lessons from Genesis 15
• 10 Reasons to Have Faith in God

Conclusion: What the Lessons from Joshua 6 Ask of You

The wall came down in a moment, and the chapter is mostly about the days before it. That is the honest shape of a life with God. You are given a word you cannot verify, an assignment that makes nothing of your strengths, and a stretch of ordinary mornings in which obedience produces nothing you could point to. Israel walked that stretch, and what they were walking on the whole time was a promise God had already spoken in the past tense. He never told them which day would be the seventh. He told them what to do until it came. Do the thing He has actually put in front of you today, and let Him keep the wall.