Week 11 Joshua 3
The last roadblock to Israel getting into the Promised Land was the Jordan River. The Jordan wasn’t exactly the Amazon. But it was flooding its banks right then…so not the freeway either.
The Lord told Joshua to get twelve priests to carry the Ark of the Covenant into the river. He forecast that when they did: the flow of water will be cut off upstream, and the water will pile up there in one heap.
Joshua footnoted that the river would be dammed-up at the town of Adam. I check a map and see that Adam is about thirty kilometres upstream. One practical thing that concerns me is how long the priests are left standing in the Jordan. If the water is travelling at – let’s say – ten kms./hour they’d be standing for about three hours before the water already below the dam had stopped flowing past.
But that’s a side issue. Joshua makes the real point pretty clear at the end: the Lord your God dried up the river right before your eyes, and he kept it dry until you were all across, just as he did at the Red Sea when he dried it up until we had all crossed over. He did this so that all the nations of the earth might know the power of the Lord, and that you might fear the Lord your God forever.
Note: quote from Joshua 3:13 & 4:23-24 (NLT). The story is in Joshua 3:6-17.