I’ll just be honest. My mind is blown. It’s blown that I’m here. It’s blown by the sights I’ve seen. It’s blown by the community that I have experienced with my fellow travelers. It’s blown about the things that I am learning. I can hardly absorb it all. As we’ve heard Jim say multiple times on this trip, “You can’t make this stuff up.” In other words, it’s so good that it seems unbelievable, but it’s true.
It was another amazing day in the land of Israel. We started our morning by taking a walk into the wilderness. Seeing the rocky and desolate land reminds me of how remarkable it is that, although the Israelites walked this place for 40 years, God did not allow their clothes or shoes to wear out. The wilderness in Scripture represents a number of things in our lives; danger and death, rebellion and discipline, sin and temptation, testing and humbling, quiet and refuge, a place to encounter God and experience His provision. Above all, the wilderness is associated with PRIDE. Whether we think of ourselves too high or too low, the problem is that we too often take our focus off of God and put it on ourselves. God often leads us into the wilderness so that we will come face to face with our own insufficiency. There’s no place to run. No one to rescue. Everything is stripped away and God reminds us where our focus and our dependence must be. What is your wilderness and how would God like to meet you there?
Other sites that we visited today are the Jordan River, Jericho, and the Jerusalem-Jericho Road. I’d love to give the details for each place but I am just going to focus on our visit to Jericho. Our guide through Jericho was a Christian archaeologist named Joel Kramer. Joel has a pretty interesting story. He spent his childhood in the Middle East as the son of a man who worked in the oil business. He went to boarding school in Arizona, went to college somewhere in the US, and was a pastor in Utah before he decided to pursue Biblical archaeology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Joel’s Biblical explanation of the Jericho ruins was a powerful testimony to the inerrancy of God’s Word. There’s no way that I can restate his detailed explanation so I’ll just list a few of the facts.
1. When the Jericho walls were built, there was a foundation wall of stone upon which was built a mud brick wall. The foundation wall would have been 20-25 ft. high and the mud brick wall would be an additional 20 ft. high. The part of the wall that needed to be knocked down for the enemy to enter was the upper part of mud bricks. People’s misunderstanding of the structure of the walls leads them to say that the Biblical account must be wrong because the Jericho walls are still standing. The lower part is still there but the upper part has obviously collapsed outward.
2. The Jericho ruins do indeed have piles of mud bricks which run along the outside of the foundation walls indicating that the walls fell outward and could not have been the result of an earthquake. Official archaeology reports indicate that they “came tumbling down”. Sound familiar?
3. When the mud brick walls fell outward, they formed a ramp by which the Israelites could walk up and into the city to conquer it.
4. There is a burn line in the ruins indicating that the city was burned during a time of history that aligns with Joshua and the battle of Jericho.
5. All archaeologists, believers and non-believers alike, agree that all of the above facts are true and yet the connection between the archaeological findings and the Bible is being suppressed, mostly for political reasons.
Joel was very passionate when he spoke and at one point, he threw his hands up to show his incredulity that a person, when presented with the Biblical evidence, would choose not to believe it. That’s when he uttered the phrase that we’d been hearing from Jim all week, “You can’t make this stuff up!” If you would like more information, you can read articles that Joel has written for Associates for Biblical Research or order Joel’s DVD, Jericho Unearthed. If you google his name, I believe he also has some video clips on you tube.
After touring the Jericho ruins, we moved into a nearby restaurant and I got to chat with Joel personally. When I told him that I had been a missionary in Papua New Guinea, he said, “You’ve got to be kidding!” He said that he had traveled there in the early nineties and wrote about it in a book called Beyond Fear. He asked, “Were you with New Tribes Mission?” I said yes and he named off several of his friends that I also am acquainted with. A God ordained meeting, do you think? One thing I do know is that God’s fingerprints are all over this trip and some things are just too good to make up.
At the end of the day, we made our way to Jerusalem where we will stay for the last three days of our tour. Next up: Church of the Nativity, Shepherd’s Field, Ein Karem – Church of the Visitation, all of which are in Bethlehem.
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