The Preacher's Diary 
The experience of Balaam in the course of one business mission provides a handy illustration of circumstantial signs that God sometimes puts in our path to slow us down or altogether deter us from potential dangers, if we would hear. Unfortunately, many times, we think ourselves too ‘committed’ to a people or to a project to hear those signs and save ourselves. Only from hindsight do we rue our losses.
2 And the LORD said to Joshua: “See! I have given Jericho into your hand, its king, and the mighty men of valor.
3 “You shall march around the city, all you men of war; you shall go all around the city once. This you shall do six days.
4 “And seven priests shall bear seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark. But the seventh day you shall march around the city seven times, and the priests shall blow the trumpets.
Joshua 6:2-4, NKJV.
In the passage above, God was giving General Joshua the strategy for taking the fortified city of Jericho: seven priests with seven trumpets marching with armed soldiers for seven days around the city, making seven rounds on the seventh day.
Suppose there had been only six priests available for the assignment? Suppose there had been eight priests, all of them insisting that they had to be part of the Special Team of trumpeters, especially on the final day? Suppose Joshua had been forced to please everyone, and had allowed all eight or ten ‘volunteers’ on that prophetic march? Suppose, after the fifth day, everyone had become so tired that none could continue the march on the sixth day, or only four priests had shown up? Surely, God would have understood their human frailty and given them the city all the same … or don’t you think so?
If Jericho was already “given,” as God said to Joshua, why did he still have to go through those rigours for those many days? Are there times we miss what Heaven considers already “given,” because of a detail missed? What did God know about Jericho that the marchers did not? What did He know about the city that He did not tell even Pastor Joshua? Why does God sometimes give instructions without explanations? Why does God get particular (even legalistic) about details sometimes?
I have wondered what might have happened if any of those details had been missed or amended, ostensibly to ‘accommodate’ ‘understandable human conditions’? Would they still have had the breakthrough they had, the way and the time they did? Why do some Jerichos persistently defy the loud and long blasts of so many priests for so many days? I have been wondering, and you probably have an answer, what if there had been only six priests … or a mighty army of one million priests … screaming themselves hoarse at adamant fat walls, even when God said the land is already “given”?
From The Preacher’s diary,
October 16, 2017.
Date: Monday, August 5, 2024
Venue: The Conference Hall, Graduate Business School, St. John’s Campus, Aba Road, Port Harcourt, Nigeria
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Should priests of God receive instructions from politicians? Can a political leader provide spiritual leadership? Does every priest always know what spiritual interventions his land needs? Is every political leader inherently inferior in spiritual matters to every priest?
And moreover in time past, even when Saul was king …
1 Chronicles 11:2.
A while ago, the streets had filled with excited singers and dancers celebrating a new king. Music and colours everywhere. The oil was still fresh upon his humble head. Congratulations poured in from distant lands. Everyone was on his side, except the notorious few, the “children of Belial,” but he had been too honoured to care (1 Samuel 10:27). Saul was that king.
Religious Extremism?
Some Christians are persuaded that God is not a politician and does not get involved in politics or such human trivialities. They insist that it is entirely up to humans who rules them, and that it is ‘religious extremism’ to bring God or prayers and ‘spirits’ into political discourse. They envision God as a disinterested long grey-bearded grandfather, noise-proofed from juvenile distractions, who sits aloof at his quiet end of a restricted park engrossed with his creased and spectacled face half hidden behind the broad evening newspaper, while the children frolic loudly, pursued by their long sunset shadows at the other end of the family park. Okay, is politics an entirely natural affair, with the supernatural playing no part in it? The other side does not think so, and we shall soon hear what the Bible says on the matter.
THEME The Power of Punctuations and Effective Sentence Structures
DATE: Saturday, August 24, 2024
VENUE: The Conference Hall,
Graduate Business School,
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