Now, what about these devoted things, these doomed things, all the things that God said had to be absolutely destroyed? In the analogy, they represent the so-called valuable things of this world. Those are the things that Satan desires or wants us to desire. They are things like a lot of money or a fine garment or whatever it was that in the story was there in Jericho, free for the taking.
But God said, Don't. I'm going to conquer before you. Don't take any of your conquered people's things. They're to be destroyed. They're not for you. Jesus in Matthew 6:19 calls them treasures on earth. Or in verse 24 He calls them mammon, in that same chapter.
The overall picture of the fall of Jericho is that God will ultimately destroy everything that opposes Him. And He wants us to have nothing to do with the sinful things of the world that He has put under a curse. Do not touch them. Do not use your journey to the Kingdom of God for selfish reasons. Do not touch the things of this world that He says not to touch.
We could say, do not be a hypocrite and say you are following God, but all you are trying to do is accumulate things. I mean, we all want to be successful, or we want to have plenty so that we will have easier lives, have something for our retirement or have something for our grandchildren when we die. That is fine; that is fine. But He is talking here about living our Christian lives with one foot in the world and one in the church. And we are going against God even though He has made all of these things possible for us.
And so He makes a very big statement here at the beginning of this conquest that the world and its things are off limits. You do not want them. You do not want to bring them into your tent.
Now we are not going to go through Joshua 7. That is where Achan is found out that he had taken a few things from Jericho. And what we learn from that is that he did it out of lust. He did it out of covetousness. And the end result was condemnation and death.
What is most sad about all of this, about Achan's sin, is that it was not just the covetous person who died. Everyone around Achan died. God cut off the family of Achan for Achan's covetousness. What He is saying here, if we transfer this then to spiritual Israel, is that the sins we bring in from the world into our families and into the church contaminates the body of Christ. We do not want that because we all have connections here. And ideas like that and sins like that cause additional destruction.
And so we take a lesson out of this that when God gives us a victory, we are not supposed to take the spoils of that victory - worldly spoils - and bring it into the church because it is going to cause problems. That sin will begin to multiply. And so we have to protect the Body of Christ by leaving the cursed things in the world. Let them be destroyed.
So there is a two-fold lesson here in the fall of Jericho. 1) obey God carefully and exactly as possible. Follow His footsteps, march behind Him, and He will fight your battles for you. And 2) do not secretly, hypocritically, take to yourself the things, the ideas, the behaviors of the enemy which God has already doomed to destruction.
