The people had experienced a great victory by faith over Jericho. It was a
victory that really only God could be given credit for. Joshua sought the LORD,
and the LORD gave him the instructions, and as strange as they were, Joshua and
the people obeyed them. God miraculously made the great walls fall flat and all
the people had to do was claim what God had promised as they marched forward
into the city.
How often we might experience a great spiritual victory in
our lives and churches only to be overtaken with a great defeat shortly
afterwards! It is so easy for pride to sneak into our hearts, and we take
credit for the victory. What was Israel's sin? The sin of Israel was the sin of
carelessness, marked first of all by pride (v. 3). They thought they could defeat little Ai,
because they had defeated Jericho. You see, they forgot that Jericho wasn't
their victory, Jericho was God's victory, God's victory. But somehow in their
mind they had the idea that they had done it.
Pride is the mother of all sins. Pride gives birth to every
sin in our lives, and in the human race for that matter.
Pride leads us to become careless. Carelessness leads to
prayerlessness! You know why we don’t pray? Because we don’t think we need to
pray! We can do it ourselves without the Lord’s help! Maybe if Joshua had
prayed before he sent the spies out, God would have told him then about the
“sin in the camp”. Pride always leads to presumption and that is we think we
can do it without God’s help.
We first should be encouraged to know that there is no
stronghold of Satan, there is no power of sin that the child of God cannot
overcome in the strength of the Holy Spirit. Isn't that wonderful? No power of
Satan is so great that can stand against you. There is no Jericho of sin that
can withstand you when you are filled with the Holy Spirit. That's
encouragement. There is no power or sin so great you cannot overcome it. (1
Corinthians 10:13). But, there is no power of Satan so small that you can
overcome it in the strength of your flesh. And, that's exactly where God has
put you. Nothing can stand before you in the power of the Holy Spirit, but
there's nothing that you can overcome in the strength of your flesh. Israel
overcame Jericho in the power of the Lord, but they failed at little Ai in the
strength of their flesh. They presumed that God would be with them.
It's not the Jericho’s that defeat the average Christian,
it's the Ai’s. It's not the big things, it's the little foxes that spoil the
vine. It's the things we think, "We can handle that, to take care of Ai,
we can handle that. Oh, don't send everybody up to take care of Ai, after all,
aren't we known as the great military warriors and victors?"
The sin of pride, and the child of pride is presumption,
and the grandchild of pride is prayerlessness because once we presume we can do
it then we don't pray any more. Pride, presumption, prayerlessness, Joshua
wasn't praying.
Do you know what we do? We wait until we make a mess of
things and then we come to God in prayer. Prayer needs to be our first thought,
not our last resort. We need to wake up in the morning and put on the whole
armor of God through prayer. All of our failures are really prayer failures
that root in our presumption that roots in our pride. We can’t afford to get
careless in our prayer life and our Bible study, or any spiritual discipline.
Today we should not forget these verses in Proverbs
16:18-20, “Pride goes before destruction, And a haughty spirit before a
fall. Better to be of a humble spirit with the lowly, Than to divide the spoil
with the proud. He who heeds the word wisely will find good, And whoever trusts
in the LORD, happy is he.”
God bless!
