JOSHUA 7:1-12
A failure to pray always makes us insensitive to sin. If we do not take time to pray, we will often
not recognize sin for what it is. When we pray in the time of victory, we will not have to plead in
the time of defeat.
When Joshua bowed his head in prayer following Israel’s defeat, the Lord told him to get up and
do something. This may sound like a contradiction to all the teaching we have had on prayer, but
it is not.
God was simply telling Joshua that it was not the time to pray in the way he was praying. Israel
had sinned; it was Joshua’s responsibility as leader to erase this sin from Israel’s life. The fault for
this military reversal did not lie with God but with Israel.
How often we, like Joshua and the elders of Israel, are inclined to blame God when things go
wrong. We sometimes say when reverses come that God has forsaken us. Some people harden
their hearts against God and blame Him that things are not going as they thought they should go.
Yet had these individuals gone to God in the first place, they would have been directed in the
proper way. God knows from the very beginning what He is doing and why He is doing it. He
knows all the underlying causes that are related to all the incidents in our lives. There is nothing
hidden from Him.
He did that which was right in the sight of the Lord, but not with a perfect heart (2 Chron. 25:2).
Theodore Epp
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