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          Then the Lord said to Joshua, “Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged. Take the whole army with you, and go up and attack Ai. For I have delivered into your hands the king of Ai, his people, his city and his land. You shall do to Ai and its king as you did to Jericho and its king, except that you may carry off their plunder and livestock for yourselves. Set an ambush behind the city.”

So Joshua and the whole army moved out to attack Ai. He chose thirty thousand of his best fighting men and sent them out at nigh4 with these orders: “Listen carefully. You are to set an ambush behind the city. Don’t go very far from it. All of you be on the alert. I and all those with me will advance on the city, and when the men come out against us, as they did before, we will flee from them. They will pursue us until we have lured them away from the city, for they will say, ‘They are running away from us as they did before.’ So when we flee from them, 7 you are to rise up from ambush and take the city. The Lord your God will give it into your hand. When you have taken the city, set it on fire. Do what the Lord has commanded. See to it; you have my orders.” (Joshua 8:1-8)

 

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28)

 

In yesterday’s passage, because Achan sinned, Israel was punished. In today’s, God instructs Joshua again. This time, the idea is to use Israel’s failure to bolster Ai’s arrogance in roughly the same way that Israel’s had been. Ai had roundly defeated them yesterday, and the Israelites were doing the same stupid thing. “Time to go rout them again, the fools!” Just as Israel’s arrogance tripped them up, so Ai’s would on this day.

Yeah, we all make mistakes. And even if we don’t think they’re mistakes, there’s Murphy’s Law, gravity, and entropy. And sometimes, God works very quickly to correct us, as with Israel in this instance. Other times, we may not come back to the same thing for years. And we may not recognize that this and that are the same events. We may even fail repeatedly, but God makes use of our successes and our failures, and the successes and failures of others to accomplish His purposes. It may not be pleasant, but we learn better from mistakes than we do from victories. If only we would pay attention and learn. 

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