The priests had faith, real faith. They had guts!
The men who carried the Ark of the Covenant into the water of the Jordan trusted God for a miracle. They believed He would give a repeat performance of the astonishing Red Sea event which took place forty years earlier. The waters divided and “rose up like a dam” when the priests “came to the edge of the Jordan River and set foot in the water” (Joshua 3.15-16).
If the waters rose up, they could also come crashing down. The priests grasped the precarious nature of their situation. Death by drowning was a real possibility with the slightest shift in the wind or will of God. But these leaders valiantly faced danger and “remained standing in the middle of the Jordan” until “everyone had crossed” to the other side.
