The Deliverer (28 page)
For most of you, the desire for sensual ritual, which is prohibited to you, never rises to consciousness because God eagerly makes Himself available to you and you are satisfied with His love for you and yours for Him and you don’t place yourselves in situations where a forbidden desire can become aroused. Now, to be perfectly fair to the people of Canaan, it does seem to me that God is more accessible to you non-Jews now than He used to be.
Nevertheless, what God intended for all people was a holy longing for intimacy with Himself. For some, enticed by the seduction of the demon gods, that holy longing became warped and distorted into a perverse yearning for strange flesh, an erotic experience with the supernatural. In order to fill their escalating craving for more of the thrill, the people themselves became hunters of other human souls.
That’s what the people of Jericho and Canaan were like—locked into a frenzy of unspeakable worship of their gods and ravenous to bring others into it with them. The only way God could protect Israel was to destroy the predators of human souls by the hands of His worshipers.
And that’s why Achan’s thievery was so odious and why God’s punishment would be so severe. It was as if Achan had kept an engagement ring from the dark powers who ruled in Jericho. In his greed, Achan had taken the bait of Satan and put Israel within the devil’s grasp, but through the obedience of His servant Joshua, God would snatch them right out of his hand.
The worship of the demon gods made the people one with the demon, a marriage made in hell with no retreat, no repentance, and no escape for the humans who succumbed to the seduction. Eternal, irreversible damnation, and it would remain so for many more centuries until … but no, wait. I’m getting ahead of myself; that comes later in the story.
J
OSHUA WAS BLISSFULLY
unaware of the breach in his camp when he sent spies to the land of Ai. They returned and guaranteed him the city would be a piece of cake.
“You don’t need to send a lot of soldiers,” they assured him. “Two or three thousand men are enough to defeat Ai. There’s no need to wear out the whole army when there aren’t that many people there.”
Joshua was feeling so confident after Jericho that he didn’t bother to check in with God to get His take on the situation and, instead, relied solely on what the spies told him. He ordered three thousand men to go up and take care of business at Ai. But the army had no more than reached the edge of the city when the men of Ai attacked them and killed thirty-six of them as Israel turned and fled. Ai chased them from the city gate as far as the quarries, killing them all at the descent. When news of the slaughter reached Israel, the heart of the people sank, and all their spirit and confidence were knocked right out of them.
I could have told Joshua from personal experience how it was a big mistake to rely on somebody else’s judgment and take God’s approval for granted. He ripped his clothes and fell on his face before the ark of the covenant. He and the leaders threw dirt on their heads, as if that would help matters, and lay prostrate until evening.
Then Joshua cried out, “O God, why did You insist on bringing this people across the Jordan? To make us victims of the Amorites? To wipe us out? Why didn’t we just settle down on the east side of the Jordan? O God, what can I say to Your people after Israel has been run off by its enemies?”
“I’m sure you’ll think of something. Since you didn’t think it important to ask Me before you rushed off to war, you figure it out,” God answered. “And by the way, brush the dirt out of your hair. You’re a mess, and I’m not impressed.”
“Sorry, Lord.” Joshua stood to his feet and shook out his hair with his hands. “I know I jumped ahead of You. Please tell me what to do. When the Canaanites and all the others living here learn of this, they’ll gang up on us and make short work of us—and worse, Your reputation is at risk.”
“My reputation?”
“Won’t they say You brought us here but were unable to protect us?”
“Don’t grovel, and don’t patronize Me. Israel has sinned. They’ve broken the rules by taking the forbidden plunder from Jericho and then covering up their sin. The people of Israel can no longer look their enemies in the eye—they themselves are plunder.”
“But, Lord, who did such a thing? I didn’t know of such a sin. Neither did my men.”
“Did you examine your men after Jericho? Did you make sure the forbidden things were untouched by them?”
“Not exactly. But I told them not to do it before we invaded the city.”
“You were careless, Joshua. The stakes are too high, and I can’t afford for you to be careless. I can’t continue with you if you don’t rid yourselves of the cursed things and start paying attention.”
“O Lord, is there nothing we can do to repent of this awful sin?”
Joshua was obviously distraught and worried that he’d become lax in his leadership and let the people go too far with their freedom; maybe God would crush them all. Even though they were in real trouble, I could have saved him from his anguish. Joshua simply didn’t know God the way I did. Oh, He was angry—no doubt about that—and He would bring severe punishment to the guilty parties. But there was no possibility God would refuse to go forward with Joshua. It just wasn’t going to happen.”
“Even money says He’ll find a way to spare them.” I wagered with myself. As usual, I was right.
“Here’s what you must do. Tell the people to get ready for tomorrow by purifying themselves,” God said. “Then tell them there are cursed things in the camp and they won’t be able to face their enemies until you have gotten rid of the illegal booty.”
“We will obey Your every word, O sovereign God.”
“All right, then. Tomorrow morning call up the tribes whose names I will give you. They will pass by in front of you clan by clan, then family by family, and then man by man until the culprit is revealed. The person found with the cursed things will be burned, along with everything he has.”
Joshua hardly slept that night and early the next morning called all the people to assemble tribe by tribe until the tribe of Judah was singled out. Then he called up the clans and singled out the Zerahites. He called up the Zerahite families and singled out Zimri. Then he called up the family members one by one and singled out Achan.
Before the sifting of the tribes was done, Achan knew he was busted. Sweat poured from his forehead when Joshua stood face-to-face with him.
“Make your confession to God. Tell me what you did. Don’t keep back anything from me.” There was no emotion in Joshua’s eyes as he stared right through Achan.
Seeing no fire escape, Achan answered, “It’s true. I sinned against God. In the plunder I spotted a beautiful Shinar robe, two hundred shekels of silver, and a fifty-shekel bar of gold, and I coveted and took them. They are buried in my tent.”
Joshua’s soldiers ran to the tent, and there they were, buried in the tent with the silver at the bottom. They gathered all the treasure and brought it to Joshua, and in front of all the people, Joshua spread out the contraband before God. Then Achan was led outside the camp, where he was stoned. The soldiers set fire to his body along with the robe and all the silver and gold while the stunned people watched in disbelief. It would be a long time before anything like that happened again.
After it was over, God sent Joshua back to Ai where he and his men thoroughly routed the city. After Jericho, Ai was the beginning of the wars Joshua would lead until the entire land of Canaan fell to Israel just as God had said would happen. All in all, I counted thirty-one kings who fell before Israel’s sword. Year after year, nation by nation, God gave Joshua success in everything he did because he was faithful and never sinned again against God’s covenant with him. That’s not to say he never made a mistake. All humans make mistakes, even the chosen and anointed—like the time Joshua made a treaty with the Gibeonites without asking God about it. It was nothing but trouble for Israel, but he learned from his error and never got ahead of God again.
As I watched the kings tumble one after another, I knew I couldn’t postpone it any longer and had to report to Satan how Joshua was winning and taking away the land where Satan had enjoyed unfettered rule. I stood before him and tried to give the report in as matter-of-fact way as I knew how. At first, Satan simply sat on his throne and seemed unresponsive to the news that Israel was winning.
“So, that’s it, sir; in spite of how it looked there for a few decades, Israel has finally won.” I bowed my head and stepped back as I finished my report.
“Won?” Satan seemed startled at the word. I wondered if he had listened to me at all.
“Well, yes, they have the land God promised them. They’ve won.”
“They’ve won nothing but land, and I care nothing about the land.”
“You don’t care about the land? What is it you care about, then?”
“I want their souls.”
“But, sir,” I said out of reflex without weighing my words as I had long ago learned to do with Satan. I’d been deployed to the earth for such a long stint that I was out of practice, so the words tumbled right out uncensored by my experience or good sense.
“I don’t think you can have them.”
Satan leapt from his throne and rose to his full huge stature, body writhing and smoke rising up all around him as he glared at me. By now I was on my knees, trembling so hard my wings caught the air movement I was generating and I began to levi-tate right there in place. Fearing Satan would view this as a challenge, I forced my wings down and rolled up in a ball in front of him.
“I can’t have them?” He growled at me.
“No, no, that’s not at all what I meant to say. I just meant you can’t have them
now
. Of course, you’ll get them eventually.”
He didn’t respond, but his eyes told me to keep talking.
“When Joshua dies, sir, it’s just a matter of time. There’s no successor to Joshua like there was with Moses. No one’s waiting in the wings to take over.”
Satan ordered one of the guards, “Kill Joshua.” The guard jumped to attention, but I interrupted before he could leave the room.
“No, wait, sir. I know you don’t want to kill Joshua.” There I froze for a moment. He would expect me to tell him
why
he didn’t want to kill him. I dared not say the truth: Joshua was golden with God, and neither his minions nor Satan himself could lay a glove on him. I bought a little time by struggling to stand up.
“Let them win a few wars, live in peace for a few years, things like that,” I said as I tried to snap my wings back into alignment. “You know what will happen. They’ll grow complacent as they always have. They won’t be thinking they need a new leader after Joshua. They’ll be wide open when Joshua dies.”
Seeming to have no better idea of his own, Satan begrudgingly accepted what I said. I went to my perch, happy to be back to the closest thing I had as home and settled in to watch the earth. Since Satan wasn’t interested in the land issue and didn’t seem bothered about the conquered people either, there was no reason for me to wear myself out commuting from the earth to heaven with updates nobody cared to hear.
Waiting around for Joshua to die might take decades and wasn’t much of a mental challenge, so I decided to find a hobby to pass the time. That’s how I got into transcendental meditation. Yoga hadn’t worked out all that well for me, but it was mostly the physical challenge with my wings and hooves. When you’re trying to do a headstand and your wings keep falling down in your face, it ruins the experience.
But TM was different. I found my “ooohhmmm” right away. It wasn’t long until I could chant my way right into communion with the free-floating Vedas of the universe. Little did I know the Vedas were part of a telecommunication system between Satan and the lesser gods. Wouldn’t you know they tattled on me right off? Satan sent one of his henchmen to tell me to hang up and pay attention to the earth.
The army of Israel moved out, taking possession of all God had promised them. There were so many battles; after a while they began to run together in my mind. As each section of land was conquered, Joshua parceled out the property rights to the tribes by families. I tried to keep track of who got what, but after a while it became mind-numbingly tedious. I quit when I remembered Satan wouldn’t care a thing about who got a deed to what.
What I did find interesting was the day God came up with the idea of sanctuary cities and told Joshua to build them.
“Why?” Joshua wanted to know.
“So that if a person accidentally kills another person, he will have a safe place to go for justice.”
Joshua looked perplexed, as if he were not sure this was a good use of time, but being the good soldier he was, he built the cities without argument.
“Ask God how to tell an accidental killing from an intentional one since everyone in the area is sporting a weapon and is at war,” I urged Joshua from my perch but to no avail.
I thought this might be useful information for me later on—you know, when I get my day in court. It could be helpful if I could point out a time when God insisted on different treatment for those who intentionally erred versus those who were victims of circumstances.
Finally, after many long battles, God was satisfied and gave Israel rest from war and safety from all its enemies. Then it really got boring.
I waited and watched for many more years until I saw the sign I was looking for. All of Israel was coming together at the place where Joshua lived. It must be time for Joshua to die. I took off and flew quickly to his tent.
All the chiefs, judges, and officers filled the tent and spilled over to the outside to hear the words of Joshua.
“I’m an old man, and I’ve lived a long time. You’ve seen everything that God has done to these nations because of you. He did it because He’s your God and you are chosen and set apart to worship only Him.”
Joshua took a deep, laboring breath, and so did the people gathered around him.