“The LORD said to Joshua, ‘See, I have given Jericho into your hand, with its king and the valiant warriors. You shall march around the city, all the men of war circling the city once. You shall do so for six days. Also seven priests shall carry seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark; then on the seventh day you shall march around the city seven times, and the priests shall blow the trumpets. It shall be that when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, and when you hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city will fall down flat, and the people will go up every man straight ahead'” (Josh 6:2-5).
Everywhere else in Scripture we find this pattern of doing something for six days and a seventh day doing something different, the seventh day refers to a Sabbath (Exod 20:9, 11; 23:12; 31:15, 17; 35:2; Lev 23:3; Deut 5:13; 16:8; Josh. 6:3, 14). In addition to the surprising fact that God commanded the priests to “work” on the Sabbath, the overthrow of Jericho is depicted as a renewal of God’s seventh day rest (see Gen 2:1-3). To achieve total victory, Israel’s soldiers do not need to do anything on the seventh day other than to enter into God’s finished work.
Israel’s seventh-day victory over Jericho offers an incredibly valuable lesson for all of us today. Yeshua invites us to come to him for rest (Matt 11:28-30). But if our lives are an endless routine of doing, we won’t have the time or the bandwidth to enjoy that rest. As followers of Yeshua from every tribe, tongue, and nation, there is absolutely no need to argue over the specific day of rest (Rom 14:5-8). That said, healthy spirituality requires us to stop all the important things we’re doing for God once a week to consider all the infinitely greater things God has already done for us. We will never truly appreciate our redemption if we don’t make the time to think about it!
“You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out of there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to observe the sabbath day” (Deut 5:15).
