The mysterious commander

My sons are history buffs. They will argue into the night about whether First or Second World War Germany had the better military, why Prussia was able to defeat Napoleon, or the ­relative strengths of the Achaemenid ­versus Macedonian empires. They pick apart military strategies, leaders’ personal vulnerabilities, nations’ comparative weaponry, and armies’ numerical advantages, all to understand why wars are won or lost.

But is not something missed in this attempt at quantification, some causality that slips their nets?

On the verge of entering the Promised Land, Moses’ successor is visited by a mysterious Man with drawn sword (Joshua 5:13). “Are you for us or for our adversaries?” Joshua asks. “No,” comes the reply, ignoring the binary choice, “but as Commander of the army of the Lord I have now come.” The Commander is the preincarnate Lord Himself, which we know because when Joshua summarily falls to the ground and worships, he is not rebuked (cf. Revelation 22:8–9).

The Visitor’s message is clear: Fall in behind me, for the battle is the Lord’s.

Earthly commanders need to understand that heaven’s stakes in wars on earth (see Daniel 10:10–21) go a long way in explaining strange turnings of fortune of armies under the sun. Up yonder are contending angels, demons, territorial principalities—and the strangest weather events: great hail stones that rout a coalition of kings (Joshua 10:11); the sun that stands still till the battle is done (Joshua 10:12–13); thunder spooking attacking Philistines (1 Samuel 7:10); the glint of morning sunlight mimicking blood on water pools to lure the Moabites into a trap (2 Kings 3:22); Arameans hearing the phantom sound of chariots and horses so that they flee (2 Kings 7:6–7); the forest trees themselves turning on mutinous Absalom and his accomplices (2 Samuel 18).

This is deus ex machina, except not as cheap literary device but actual heavenly intervention. Many are familiar with the timely fog that rolled in during the Battle of Long Island on Aug. 27, 1776, that allowed Washington’s army to evacuate by boat across the East River to Manhattan without being detected by the British.

Perhaps no stranger tide-turning events have been recorded than those having to do with Israel. In 1948 the day-old nation is attacked by a coalition of five Arab nations. Outnumbered and making do with highly inaccurate (but tremendously noisy) “Davidka” mortars, it scares away the British-trained Arab league. In 1967, through a series of freakishly unlucky coincidences for their enemies, Israel prevails against the combined might of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. On Yom Kippur in 1973, its tanks outnumbered 10 to 1 at the start, Israel survives a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria when Syrian troops inexplicably retreat just as Israel is on the verge of collapse in the Golan Heights.

American Christianity is tearing itself limb from limb over the question of Israel and foreign policy. One cites God’s words to Abraham: “I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you” (Genesis 12:3). The other camp counters, “What does modern secular Israel have to do with the true Israel of God? Treat it like any other nation.” One camp calls Israel’s Gaza operation genocide and invokes the Jesus of peace. The other calls it the reasonable self-defense of a nation of 8,000 square miles surrounded by 5 million square miles of Arabs who mostly wish her ill.

This is all above my pay grade. But Scripture has at least told us what the end looks like: The Lord will gather all nations together against Israel, where He will deal with those nations, fighting against them Himself from Jerusalem (Zechariah 14; Ezekiel 38). It is during this existential crisis in the nation of Israel that the “partial hardening until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in” (Romans 11:25) will be removed. “They will look on Me whom they pierced” and “mourn for Him as one mourns for his only son” (Zechariah 12:10). No longer hardened in over 2,000 years of unbelief, Israel will be grafted in once more, even as Paul prayed they would (Romans 11:23).

Now we see the trickles (zero Messianic congregations in Israel in 1950, 300 in 2025) and are impatient for the showers (Zechariah 13:1; Ezekiel 36:25). Soon comes a wholesale embrace of the Messiah in the land of His own birth. Don’t you love a happy ending?

As for the Mysterious Commander, He was clear in His own cryptic way: the battle, and the glory, and the story are the Lord’s.