THE CAPTAIN OF THE LORD’S HOST
‘And it came to pass, when Joshua was by Jericho, that he lifted up his eyes and looked, and, behold, there stood a man over against him with his sword drawn in his hand.’
I. There is a lesson here, not inappropriate to the present times, in the fact that Christ appeared to Joshua as a ‘man of war.’ Would that image have been used, would Christ have assumed that form, if all war were out of the question?
II. It is still more important to remark how strikingly the manifestations of Christ accommodate themselves to the various circumstances of His people.—To Abraham, a wanderer and sojourner in Canaan, He manifests Himself as a wayfaring man. To Jacob, on the eve of an expected conflict with his brother, Christ shows Himself as a comforter. To Joshua, a soldier and an officer, Christ, too, is a soldier in command.
III. Joshua stood before the heavenly Captain, with the shoes from off his feet, to receive orders about the conducting of the siege.—So let it be with us all. As soon as a providence, a word, a will, of God shows the special presence of Deity, let it have supremacy, and every human authority, however high, stand in the posture of silent obedience.
—Rev. Jas. Vaughan.
Illustrations
(1) ‘I believe, as the vast majority of careful students of the course of Old Testament revelation and its relation to the New Testament completion believe, that we have here not a record of the appearance of a created superhuman person, but that of a preliminary manifestation of the Eternal Word of God, who, in the fulness of time, “became flesh and dwelt among us.” ’
(2) ‘The angelic hosts are conceived of as an embattled host, comparable to an army in the strictness of their discipline and their obedience to a single will. It is the modern thought that the universe is a Cosmos and not a Chaos, an ordered unit, with the addition of the truth beyond the reach and range of science, that its unity is the expression of a personal will. It is the same thought which the centurion had, to Christ’s wonder, when he compared his own power as an officer in a legion, where his will was implicitly obeyed, to the power of Christ over diseases and sorrows and miseries and death, and recognised that all these were His servants, to whom, if His autocratic lips chose to say “Go,” they went, and if He said, “Do this,’ they did it. So the Lord of the universe and its ordered ranks is Jesus Christ. That is the truth which was flashed from the unknown, like a vanishing meteor in the midnight, before the face of Joshua, and which stands like the noonday sun, unsetting and irradiating for us who live under the Gospel.’