Jericho and Achor, Or, Privilege and Responsibility
Overview
The story of Jericho’s walls crumbling is immortalized as the moment when God delivered Canaan to the Israelites, thereby fulfilling his promise to Abraham and ending the Israelites’ forty years of desert wandering. But what comes next is telling. The months and years that follow the battle of Jericho are filled with squandered blessings, a mix of victory and defeat, and a tenuous relationship between the Israelites and God. The Promised Land seemed to contain more hardships than promise.
In Jericho and Achor, Mackintosh provides an exposition of the events immediately following the ruin of Jericho, and uncovers important lessons from the successes and trials of the Israelites. In particular, Mackintosh shows how the sins of a few affect the lives of the whole of Israel—exposing a latent form of evil as deadly then as it is dangerous now. God’s call entails responsibility and an account of corporate sin, since the sins of a few affect the lives of everyone.
All told, the presence of God depicted in Jericho and Achor prefigures the presence of God in the New Testament. In the same way that the Church is altered at Pentecost, the Israelites are altered as God dwells with them in the newly discovered Promised Land. The journey of the Israelites in the Old Testament mirrors the Spirit’s work in the Church in the New Testament—and the present.
Man’s complete ruin in sin, and God’s perfect remedy in Christ, are fully, clearly, and often strikingly presented [in Mackintosh’s writings].
—Andrew Miller, a leader of the Plymouth Brethren movement
- Title: Jericho and Achor, Or, Privilege and Responsibility
- Author: C. H. Mackintosh
- Series: C. H. Mackintosh Collection
- Publisher: Loizeaux Brothers Publications
- Pages: 39