The Captain Who Would Not Take Sides

Joshua is near Jericho, sizing up the city he has been told to take, when he looks up and finds a man in his path, sword drawn (Joshua 5:13). A soldier meeting a stranger with bare steel has one thing to settle, and Joshua settles it aloud: "Are you for us, or for our adversaries?" It is the oldest question a fighter asks.

The answer is not on the menu. Joshua holds out two doors and the man takes neither: "No." One flat syllable in Hebrew; it refuses not an option but the question. Ask a soldier whether he is for you or against you and "no" is not an answer; it is a correction. Then the rest: "but I am the commander of the army of the LORD. Now I have come" (Joshua 5:14). He has not come to enlist, under Joshua's banner or Jericho's.¹ He is not shopping for a side; he is looking for people to fall in behind him. And Joshua understands at once: he drops face-down in the dirt and asks the only question left, "What does my lord say to his servant?" (Joshua 5:14).

The commander tells him to take off his sandals, "for the place where you are standing is holy" (Joshua 5:15)—Moses heard that at the bush (Exodus 3:5). When the speech continues, the narrator names him: "the LORD said to Joshua, 'See, I have given Jericho into your hand'" (Joshua 6:2). Some take him for an angel bearing the LORD's authority—a fair reading, though the echo and the narrator's naming point past a messenger to the One who sends. Either way the sword is already drawn, and it is drawn in judgment on a city.

Joshua is Iesous in Greek—Jesus—so Hebrews presses what the first one left unfinished: "if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day" (Hebrews 4:8). The land was never the destination. I used to read Hebrews 2:10—"the founder of their salvation," "made perfect through suffering"—as a champion who fights so I don't have to. But archēgos means pioneer, and the Greek Old Testament calls Joshua's visitor archistratēgos, chief commander. Both titles put him out front. A champion wins while we watch. The One who goes first is the one wounded in the war he leads us through.

At Jericho the blade was drawn against the city, and its walls came down to trumpets rather than siegeworks, so the victory would be God's and not the army's. At Calvary it was not drawn against us. He stood where it fell, and nobody came for him. That is how we got a side.

We keep bringing him the soldier's question: are you on my side? It is a question that protects something—our own cause, already settled as ultimate, waiting only for his signature. He refuses, gently, because a God small enough to join us on our terms is too small to save us. He has already come for us, at the head of the line. The only move left is Joshua's, and it is not much of a move: get the sandals off. The ground where we meet him—a battlefield, a sickroom, an ordinary Tuesday morning—was holy before we noticed.