The people had been prepared and Joshua had been prepared. Now it was time to bring it all together and put the plan into action. Now and only now were they ready to face Jericho, and to move out and take the Promised Land. Now only is the Joshua apostle in a position to start fulfilling his mandate.

Has God called you to be a Joshua? That is good. Have you been trained?

You say, "Yes."

"Has your Moses released you to go?"

"Yes."

"Have people identified and recognized your ministry? Have the signs been there?"

"Yes, people respect me and they recognize that God has called me. I'm ready to go and take the land."

Okay, the number one task then is to prepare the people. The second task is to allow God to bring you to final preparation, and to deal with everything in you that still needs to be dealt with.

Then you will take God's part, your part and the people, and you will bring them all together and put the plan in motion. Then and then only are you ready to go and take that Jericho.

Once you have taken Jericho it is the first step to the rest. There are more steps and we will learn about them later.

Three Part Process

There are three parts that work together. Joshua 11:23 says:

So Joshua took the whole land, according to all that the LORD [Yahweh] said to Moses; and Joshua gave it for an inheritance to Israel according to their divisions by their tribes. And the land rested from war.

God has a vital part to play in this whole thing. He originates the plan. God gave the original pattern to Moses. It was God's idea from the beginning, not Moses'.

God gave him the original pattern, and Moses then gave that entire pattern and blueprint to Joshua. Then God gave Joshua additional specific instructions to go with the blueprint.

Joshua was not so dumb that he only just did everything that Moses told him. Joshua could still hear the voice of God. He still had specific additional instructions to implement the plan.

The Joshua apostle must hear the voice of God and must be able to discern by the Spirit. He must be able to flow in the Spirit and know what God is saying.

So God implements the plan and puts it together and gives the instructions. Joshua then implements that plan and he has these various things at his disposal that he must use.

The first thing that he has is the blueprint or the principles that Moses gave him. In those principles Moses told him firstly how to take the land. Good old Moses, he had never been there before, but he knew how to take the land. Trust him. You might think,

"What does Moses know. He's never been there."

You need to trust him. He knew what he was talking about. His plan was right. He got it from the Lord. He was a man of wisdom and experience and there is no substitute for experience.

So don't think that you are such a hotshot because you are young and full of power and modern capability, and this stupid old man is old-fashioned. Listen, he has experience and you don't, so trust his experience.

Moses told him how to go in and how he must destroy every single thing. He told him exactly how he was to go about taking the land and what he must do in every stage.

It was all laid out for Joshua already. The whole battle plan was there. All he needed to do was implement it.

More Instructions

Now in addition to that, Joshua had specific instructions that God had given him. As we look now at Jericho God said,

"Go all around the city once for six days and then seven times. Seven priests must carry the Ark and blow the seven rams horns. When the priests blow a long blast everybody must shout and then the walls will fall down."

Those were God's simple instructions to Joshua. God didn't give Joshua detailed instructions about exactly how the people were to march or how many ranks there were to be.

Joshua was a general. He knew how to mobilize men and put them together, so he added specific elements that were based on his own wisdom, knowledge and experience. So what he did is he put the Ark in the middle.

He said, "We'll have the front guard going ahead first of all with the men of war. Next we will have the priests coming with the Ark. Then we will have the rear guard behind them."

That is good military practice. You don't want to lose the Ark. If the Ark gets attacked you had better have men covering it on all sides. It was not likely that they were going to attack, but still you were not taking any chances. It was good military strategy.

There is nothing wrong with using your own wisdom, knowledge and experience. God has not taken that away from you.

There is common sense that must be applied at times. After all, God has made you a leader and trained you to be a leader. There are natural leadership skills that must be used in fulfilling that call and Joshua used those.

Joshua told the people to wait for his order before they shouted. God had said,

"When the priests give a long blast you must shout."

Now translate that to the people and you will have everybody shouting at the wrong time.

"But I thought that was a long blast. Didn't that sound like a long blast to you?"

"No."

"I'm sure that sounded like a long blast."

Take Control

You will have half the people shouting and half of them not shouting, and half the wall falling down and half not. You can't have a mess-up like that, so Joshua took control. He said,

"Shut up until I tell you to shout. I'm in charge of this thing. I know what the long blast sounds like, okay? If I mess up you can kill me, but I'm the boss here. Now you wait until I give the word. When I give the word, then you shout altogether."

That is leadership; it controls. Leadership is like the head. There is not a single part of my body that does anything without communicating with the brain. The brain knows what my hand is doing while my foot is doing something else, because the brain is in control of both of them at the same time.

There is no conflict. My left foot is not fighting my right hand. They are not going for the same thing at the same time because they have the same brain controlling them.

So as a leader in God's army you must direct the operations. Yes, God has given you the instructions. Yes, you have the principles. They have been laid out. They have been given by your master; your Moses.

You have that all together. But you must take control and direct the operations in the way that they must go. Joshua directed the operations at each stage, a step at a time. Again there was full and total control as a leader.

There is a move today to get rid of leadership. People have been so abused by false and selfish leadership. Pastors of churches have at times been too dominating, and people have veered to the opposite end of the pendulum. They have swung away from leadership, and they want to try and get very spiritual and say,

"Well the Lord is our leader and we will obey Him."

That would be great if you could all hear Him properly. But from my experience of putting a bunch of prophets together, I am amazed at how several different people could hear the same thing and yet interpret it differently.

This is why God raises up leaders in the Body of Christ. And this is why the apostles are put there to bring the church to structure and order, and to lead the End Times church into that which God has for them.

Joshua is one of the big players in this game. He is a strong leader. He directed the operation step by step. He was there, in control and in touch with the people on every single thing they did. So when it was time for the wall to come down, he gave the shout and the walls came down.

Complete Enemy Destruction

Then he directed it and he said to them,

"Now when you go in, you go and destroy everyone and everything. You destroy man, woman and child."

Why did they do it? It was because they were cursed. They were demonized right down to the smallest child. They had to destroy everything, otherwise the curse would have been continued. Even a baby, though it may be innocence, its spirit has already been contaminated by the parents.

This happened before Calvary. It wasn't possible to deal with that evil power and that curse. The child would have grown up and brought a curse into the camp. Every child and every animal; every living creature had to be killed.

Animals can also be demonized. They were destroyed. Every bit of property and material that they had was destroyed. There was just one set of materials that were kept. It was the gold, the silver and the vessels of brass and iron.

You say, "What made them different?"

They were dedicated to the Lord and purged of their curse. They were specifically dedicated to the use of God. As a result they were purged from the curse because they were dead objects.

Anything else that had come into the possession of the people would have not been purged. But in the presence of Almighty God the curse was removed, because God's Spirit would saturate those things and purge the curse out of them.

Joshua gave instructions that when they went in to take the city that only one group of people were to be saved. That was Rahab the harlot, whom the spies had promised that they would save. This is because she had helped them - she and all of her family members that had gathered together in her home. He said,

"You go and get Rahab and her family, bring them out and don't touch them. Save them."

Ending with Prophetic Decree

Then when it was all over, Joshua stood up and made a prophetic decree and he issued a curse. He said,

"Cursed be anyone who tries to rebuild the city of Jericho. He will begin building it with the death of his firstborn, and he will end it with the death of the other child."

As a matter of interest that curse was carried out later on when somebody tried to rebuild Jericho. It is exactly what happened to him.

Joshua was a prophet and he spoke a prophetic decree. And so he closed the thing. He had led and directed each step of the operation, and when it was over he brought it to a close. He was the leader. He spoke forth the decree and closed it off and said,

"That's it; this is Jericho. It is destroyed, it is burnt. It will never be rebuilt again. Now let's get out of here and go to the next step that the Lord has for us."

That was Joshua's role. The people were the main players in the game, even though they were the pawns. They were the ones who did the job. They were the ones who went out and took the place, and they are the ones who destroyed everything in it.

They were the ones who carried out every bit of instruction. They were the laborers who did all the hard work that made the building come up. But without Joshua's direction it would never have come up. All that the people needed to do was to obey orders. It was quite simple.

God's part is passed down to His leaders. His leaders then take His instructions, add to it their own knowledge and experience, and use wisdom to control each step of the operation. They pass down to the people the instructions of what they must do and what they must not do.

When everything flows perfectly together; when each person finds their place and does it God's way, success is always the result. When you do it correctly it always works perfectly. The only question that remains now is,

Are you ready Joshua?