The Wrong Question

When Joshua was near the town of Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with sword in hand.  Joshua went up to him and demanded, “Are you friend or foe?”

“Neither one,” he replied.  “I am the commander of the Lord’s army.”

At this, Joshua fell with his face to the ground in reverence.  “I am at your command,” Joshua said.  “What do you want your servant to do?”

The commander of the Lord’s army replied, “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy.”  And Joshua did as he was told.  -Joshua 5:13-15

Do you ever ask a question and realize, somewhere in the waiting, that you asked the wrong one?  My wife and I do this more than I would like to admit.  Our children are grown, and you would think the raising is behind us.  What we have found is that the work only changed shape.  We are now more confidants than parents, and the questions we trade reflect it.  One of us wonders whether we should step in or let the struggle run its course.  The other asks whether to cover the cost or let the cost do the teaching.  Those are fair questions, and they are almost never the first one.  Underneath them sits the question we started with decades ago and never actually retired: what helps them grow?

We do the same thing with God, only with more awe and less honesty.  We bring Him the situation, the history, the names.  And often what we want is not an answer but agreement; confirmation of the conclusion we carried in with us.  We ask Him to defeat the person standing in our way without asking whether that person is meant to be defeated, befriended, or simply endured.  It is a small shift, nearly invisible from the outside, and it decides something bigger: whether we are running our lives and asking God to bless the route or handing Him the route entirely.

Joshua made that mistake at a key moment, and we got to see it in today’s verses.  He is near Jericho, a city promised to Israel and not yet taken, when he looks up and sees a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword.  His question comes fast and sounds, by every human measure, like good instinct: “Are you friend or foe?”  He is on the edge of a battle.  He needs to know which column this man belongs in.  Ours or theirs.

The answer refuses the question.  “Neither one,” the man says.  “I am the commander of the LORD’s army.”

That is not a correction of Joshua’s information.  It is changing his map.  He had drawn the field with two territories on it, his and the enemy’s, and assumed everyone standing on it belonged to one of them.  He is told there is a third position, and it is the only one that ever mattered.  The commander had not come to take a side.  He had come to take command.

Joshua’s response is the turning point.  He falls face-down and asks something entirely different: “What do you want your servant to do?”  In a single verse he moves from strategist to servant.  He stops assigning roles and starts receiving one.

What comes next should slow us down.  The commander tells him to take off his sandals, “for the place where you are standing is holy,” the same words Moses heard at the burning bush in.  And notice the sequencing.  Not one instruction about Jericho has been given yet.  No walls, no trumpets, no seven days.  Submission comes before the plan.  God is not withholding the strategy from Joshua; He is settling who Joshua will be while he carries it out.

We tend to want it the other way.  Give us the plan, and we will worship on the far side of the victory with feeling, a testimony, and a story we tell well.  But worship after a win is easily confused with relief.  Worship before the walls is the only kind that requires us to serve and not be served.

Notice what this passage does not do.  It does not cancel the battle.  The sword stays drawn.  Jericho still stands, still fortified, exactly as large a problem as it was a verse ago.  Nothing about Joshua’s circumstance improved when he hit the ground.  What changed was the command structure and that turned out to be the only thing that needed to.

Which brings me back to my home and children we no longer raise but still love enough to want to fix.  The honest question was never whether to step in.  It was what helps them grow and beneath that, quieter and more significantly still, whether I trust God with the growing more than I trust myself with the fixing.

Most of us are standing near a wall right now with the wrong question ready.  It is worth sitting with this before the week gets loud: where am I asking God to take my side instead of asking what He wants?  And what would change today if His answer came back, “Neither”?

My prayer is we can discern when we mistakenly come to God with our situations already sorted and our conclusions already drawn.  God, loosen our grip.  Teach us to ask what You want before we ask You to want what we want.  Help us take our sandals off in the dirt, outside the walls, and trust that You are enough there.  Amen.