The Longest Day

Joshua 10:1-15 | Andrew Murch | One thing to keep in mind as we read through Joshua is that the Lord is carrying out his judgment on the people in the land. Sometimes God uses man as his sword, but he is more than capable of carrying out his offensives without us. The focus of this passage is not on the martial might of Israel calling in the heavenly artillery by summoning a deity to fight for them. The Lord himself throws hailstones down on the Amorites, and most of the fallen were from his hand, not Israel’s. Whatever the Amorites did, it must have been pretty bad for God to make fresh stones just for their stoning. His ways are higher, and his knowledge is greater than ours. We must trust His righteousness in that time, also the text itself says that “there has been no day like it before or since, when the Lord heeded the voice of a man, for the Lord fought for Israel.” This makes it clear that ascribing something this clear-cut of God’s “smiting” of a people is something that we can’t do in our modern context.