Part 1: The Secret War for the Body
My name is Jackson. You might know the stories, but you didn’t feel the ground shake that night.
It started when the Old Man—Moss—climbed Mount Nebo. He knew the rules: he could look at the Promised Land, but his feet would never touch the grass. He walked up there to d*ie alone, breaking a law so ancient that God Himself had to step in.
See, in our world, nobody is supposed to die without a witness. An unwitnessed dath creates a loophole—a crack where darkness can crawl in. While 3 million of us slept peacefully in the camp below, unaware, a supernatural legal battle erupted over his corpse.
Moss wasn’t just a saint; he was a man with a record. Forty years ago, he k*illed a man—an overseer beating a slave. That act created a “blood debt,” a contract written in violence that the Enemy was ready to cash in on. Satan climbed that mountain with a legal claim to Moss’s body.
It wasn’t a physical fight; it was a cosmic court case. The Enemy had the facts: Moss was a m*rderer, and the law demanded justice. But then, the sky cracked open. Not with lightning, but with Presence. The Archangel Michael crashed down like divine thunder.
He didn’t argue the facts. He argued the Person. When the Enemy quoted the law, Michael simply said, “The Lord rebuke you”. The mountain exploded with light, melting the accusations into ash. God buried Moss with His own hands—a burial so secret, so deep, that no map will ever find it.
When the news hit the camp, it shattered us. 3 million people screaming “No” at the same time. Our deliverer was gone. And suddenly, I wasn’t just an assistant anymore. I was the guy who had to lead them.
I felt like I’d been punched by invisible fists. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t him. But the voice that spoke next didn’t care about my insecurities. It said: “Moss is d*ad. You are alive. That’s all that matters”.
I had 40 seconds to become what Moss spent 40 years becoming.
Part 2: The Day Gravity Forgot Us
Three days. That’s how long we sat there, staring at the only thing standing between us and the land we’d been promised for forty years. Three days of silence where the only sound was the roar of a river that wanted to kill us .
You have to understand the logistics here. We aren’t a small hiking group. We are a nation on the move—three million people . That’s the population of Chicago, homeless, hungry, and grieving, camped out on the edge of a disaster. And the disaster had a name: The Jordan.
If you’re picturing a gentle stream or a nice place to dip your toes, erase that image. This was flood stage . In the spring, the Jordan isn’t a river; it’s a weapon. It was brown, angry, and absolutely hungry for bodies . I stood on the ridge those first few mornings and watched entire trees—massive oaks with root systems the size of cars—get ripped from the banks like they were weeds . I watched boulders the size of houses tumble underwater, crushing everything in their path with a sound like grinding teeth .
The current was moving so fast it looked like it was vibrating. It was liquid death moving at the speed of rage . If a man fell in there, his spine would snap before he even had time to scream . And this… this was the path?
I sat in my tent, the canvas flapping in the hot wind, looking at the maps Moss had left me. They were useless. Maps don’t tell you how to walk three million people across a meat grinder. I could feel the eyes of the people on me. They were waiting for the “New Moss” to do a magic trick. They were waiting for me to lift a staff and split the sea like the Old Man did.
But I didn’t have a staff. I had a sword, and you can’t fight a river with a sword.
The command I received was so insane I had to ask for it to be repeated. I wasn’t told to build bridges. I wasn’t told to build boats. I was told to send the priests—the guys in the white robes who carried the Ark of the Covenant, the gold box where God lived—straight into the water .
Not over the water. Into it.
“Walk into the river,” the Voice had said. “Lord,” I whispered back, “that’s suicide.” “Step where the water is deadliest. And wait.”
I remember walking out to the line of priests on the morning of the third day. These weren’t soldiers. They were religious men, scholars, guys who spent their days dealing with incense and ancient texts. They were barefoot, wearing linen robes that would drag them down the second they got wet . Their faces were pale, washed out by the morning sun. I could see their hands shaking as they gripped the poles of the Ark.
“We go in?” the head priest asked me. He had to shout to be heard over the deafening roar of the rapids. The ground under our feet was literally vibrating from the violence of the water .
I looked at him. I looked at the three million people behind us—mothers clutching babies, old men leaning on staffs, warriors gripping their spears with white knuckles. They were terrified. They knew physics. They knew that water drowns people.
“We go in,” I said. My voice sounded steady, but my knees were water .
“If we die, we die,” one of the younger priests muttered. He was sweating, his eyes locked on the brown sludge churning just ten feet away. “But if the water stops… then God is still God” .
“Together,” the lead priest shouted. “On three!”
One. My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. Two. I gripped the hilt of my sword, though I don’t know who I planned to fight. Three.
They stepped.
I flinched. I think we all did. I expected the splash. I expected the scream. I expected to see the heavy gold Ark tip over and drag them into the brown darkness.
But the splash never came.
When the soles of their feet touched the surface, reality broke.
It didn’t happen like a movie. There were no sparkles, no choir of angels singing. It was violent and instantaneous. The river didn’t just slow down; it stopped. It stopped like God had reached down, grabbed the throat of the river, and squeezed .
The water coming from upstream—millions of gallons of heavy, crushing liquid—slammed into an invisible wall. It hit a barrier that wasn’t there and started to stack.
You have to understand the terror of what I’m describing. Water is heavy. A cubic meter of water weighs a ton. And suddenly, millions of tons of it were defying gravity. It started building upward . It rose up like invisible hands were constructing a skyscraper out of liquid.
Twenty feet. Forty feet. Sixty feet. Eighty feet of brown, swirling water standing completely vertical .
The roar of the river was cut off instantly, replaced by a silence that was worse than the noise . It was a wrong silence. A terrestrial silence. The kind of silence that happens when the laws of nature are suspended and the universe is holding its breath.
Downstream, the water that had already passed us drained away toward the Dead Sea. The riverbed, hidden for centuries, was suddenly exposed to the sunlight. It cracked and split, the mud hardening in mere seconds as the wind of God blew across it . Fish were flopping on the suddenly dry ground, gasping, just as confused as we were .
I stood there, paralyzed. I looked at the wall of water towering over us. It was shaking, trembling, like a living thing fighting against a leash. Suspended death .
“Don’t look up,” I heard myself shouting, snapping out of the trance. “Don’t look at the water!” .
“Why?” someone screamed back.
“Because it’s waiting to fall!” .
That was the truth. It hung there, a massive, towering hammer made of liquid, waiting for the invisible hand to let go. If that wall broke, it wouldn’t just wash us away; it would crush us into paste.
“Move!” I ordered. “Step exactly where the priests stepped! Exactly! The mud is hardening!” .
And then began the longest walk in human history.
You can’t move three million people quickly. It’s not a sprint; it’s a migration. The column of people was miles wide. We had to go down into the riverbed—this alien landscape of drying mud and river rocks—and walk under the shadow of that impossible dam.
The priests stood in the middle of the riverbed, the Ark on their shoulders, acting as the anchor. As long as they stood there, the wall held. They were human statues, statues of flesh and bone, holding back the apocalypse with nothing but obedience.
I walked among the people, urging them forward. The smell was overpowering—the scent of ozone, rotting vegetation, ancient mud, and the metallic tang of pure fear .
Every step squished in mud that shouldn’t exist . Every breath tasted like fear mixed with a desperate, frantic faith. I saw warriors, men who I knew had killed giants, men who had scars from fighting Amalekites, trembling like little children . They kept glancing sideways at the wall of water towering hundreds of feet above us now.
“What if it falls?” a woman whispered, clutching her child so tight the baby was crying.
“Then we meet Moss today instead of tomorrow,” her husband said, his face grey as ash .
It took hours. Hours of walking under hanging destruction . The sun beat down on us, baking the mud, while the cool spray from the suspended wall misted our faces. It was a sensory nightmare. The heat of the desert mixed with the chill of the deep river.
Some people couldn’t handle it. The psychological weight of the water was too much. I saw men drop to their knees, paralyzed by the sheer impossibility of it . They just froze. We had to carry them. Soldiers grabbed them by the tunics and dragged them, screaming at them to move their legs.
“Don’t look at it! Keep your eyes on the west bank! Look at the land!”
I kept checking the priests. They hadn’t moved. Their muscles were spasming from the weight of the Ark, sweat pouring down their faces, but they didn’t budge. They were the pin in the grenade. If they moved, we all died.
“What holds it?” I heard a child ask.
“The same hand that holds the stars,” his father answered, though his voice shook .
As I walked through that dry canyon, looking at the exposed roots of the trees that usually lined the banks, I realized something. This was different from the Red Sea. When Moss split the sea, they were running away from something. They were fleeing slavery.
We were walking into something. We weren’t refugees anymore. We were invaders. We were claiming ground. And God was showing us that the barriers we thought were impossible—physics, nature, logic—were nothing to Him.
I saw a family struggling with a cart. The wheels were stuck in a patch of soft mud. Without thinking, I threw my shoulder against the wood. “Push!” I yelled.
The father looked at me, shocked to see his commander in the mud. “Joshua!”
“Push, man! The water is hungry!”
We heaved the cart free. The family scrambled up the western bank, their clothes dripping with the impossible mud .
Finally, the sun began to dip low. The shadows of the water wall stretched long and terrifying across the riverbed. The tail end of the column was coming through—the stragglers, the elderly, the livestock.
I stood on the western bank, counting them. Watching the stream of humanity emerge from the needle’s eye. Three million souls threading through a miracle .
Not one drowned. Not one was swept away. Not one drop fell .
When the last sheep scrambled up the bank, and the last soldier set foot on the Promised Land, I turned to the priests. They were still there, alone now in the vast, empty scar of the riverbed. Tiny white specks against a looming blue monster.
“Come out!” I signaled.
They moved. Slowly, painfully. They stepped out of the riverbed and climbed the bank.
The moment—the exact split second—the last priest’s foot left the mud, the world ended.
It didn’t just fall; it exploded.
R O A R E D. .
The sound detonated across the valley like a bomb. The invisible hand let go. Millions of tons of water, held back for hours, slammed down with the force of mountains falling .
The ground shook for miles. I was knocked off my feet by the shockwave alone . Waves erupted fifty feet high, crashing over the banks, ripping at the land we had just stood on .
The river reclaimed its territory with a vengeance. It swirled, hissed, and tore at the earth, angry that it had been held back.
We stood there, three million of us, drenched in sweat and river spray, staring at the violence of the water. We were on the other side. The Western Bank. Canaan.
The silence that followed wasn’t the silence of the water stopping. It was the silence of shock. We looked at each other. Our clothes were still caked with mud from a riverbed that was now buried under twenty feet of raging floodwater .
We had just walked through physics breaking. We had walked through nature kneeling. We had seen God flex the muscles of creation .
I looked at the faces around me. They weren’t just relieved; they were changed. You can’t walk through a suspended ocean and remain the same person. The fear was still there, but it was different now. It was the fear of being close to something too big to comprehend.
But as the sun set, painting the sky in blood-red hues over the enemy cities in the distance, a cold realization hit me.
We were across. The river was raging behind us again. There was no going back. The bridge had been burned, or rather, drowned. We were trapped in enemy territory now.
And there was something else. Something I hadn’t told the people yet.
For forty years, we had woken up every morning to white flakes on the ground—Manna. Angel food. Free bread from heaven. It was the only reason we were alive. It was our lifeline.
But tonight, as we set up camp on the plains of Jericho, I saw the smoke of Canaanite fires. I smelled the barley fields of the enemy.
The miracle of the river was the opening act. But the era of being spoon-fed was ending.
I looked at the muddy boots of my lieutenants. “Tell the people to eat well tonight,” I said quietly. “Why?” one asked. “Because,” I looked at the grain fields in the distance, “I have a feeling the bakery is closing.”
We had just survived the water. But tomorrow, we would face the hunger. And hunger… hunger changes a man faster than any river can.
The sun vanished. Darkness took the camp. And for the first time in forty years, we slept on ground that we had to fight to keep.
(To be continued in Part 3…)
Part 3: The Day the Bakery Closed
The scream started in the eastern corner of the camp .
It wasn’t a scream of pain, or the kind of terrified shriek we heard when the river wall loomed over us. This was different. It was the sound of pure, unadulterated confusion that rapidly curdled into panic. It spread like a virus, jumping from tent to tent, row to row, until the low hum of three million people waking up turned into a roar of disbelief.
“It’s gone! There’s nothing here!” .
I was already awake. I hadn’t slept much. The adrenaline of the river crossing had worn off, replaced by the cold, hard ground of enemy territory. I sat in my tent, cleaning the mud from my boots—that impossible mud from the dry riverbed—when I heard the commotion.
I knew. deep down, I think I knew.
For forty years—fourteen thousand mornings in a row—we had lived by a miracle . Every single dawn, without fail, without a missed delivery, without a supply chain issue, God had covered the ground with white flakes. We called it Manna. It tasted like wafers made with honey. It was perfect nutrition, perfectly portioned. It was the ultimate welfare system. You didn’t work for it. You didn’t plant it. You didn’t hunt it. You just walked out of your tent, picked it up, and ate.
We were the only nation on Earth with a divine catering service. We were Heaven’s babies, fed directly from God’s hand .
But this morning, I stepped out of my tent into the pale light of dawn, and the ground was naked .
Just dirt. Dry, brown, Canaanite dirt.
I watched a woman near me. She was on her knees, clawing at the dust. She looked frantic, like she had lost a diamond ring. She was sweeping her hands back and forth, digging little trenches, looking for the white flakes.
“It has to be here,” she was muttering, her voice hitching. “It’s always here. Check under the dew. Maybe it’s late. Maybe the delivery is late.” .
Her child, a little boy maybe five years old, was standing behind her, rubbing his eyes. “Mama, I’m hungry,” he whined.
“Hush,” she snapped, panic edging her voice. “I’m finding it. I’m finding it.”
But she wasn’t finding anything.
The panic exploded through the camp like a shockwave . You have to understand the psychology of this. Imagine if you woke up tomorrow and every grocery store in the world was gone. Imagine if the water stopped coming out of the tap. We had zero food storage. We lived day-to-day because the Manna spoiled if you kept it overnight. We were entirely, 100% dependent on that morning delivery.
And now, with three million stomachs waking up, the ground was empty.
People were running out of their tents, baskets in hand, stopping dead in their tracks. They looked at the sky. They looked at the ground. They looked at me.
“What did you do?” a man shouted at me. He was a tribal leader, a guy who had been a pain in my side since the desert. He marched up to me, his face purple. “Where is our food, Jackson? You led us across the river to starve us?” .
“Look around you,” I said, my voice calm, though my heart was hammering.
“I am looking!” he yelled, gesturing at the barren dirt. “I’m looking at empty ground! We’ll die! Our babies will starve!” .
“Look harder,” I said.
He stared at me, trembling. “I see desert. I see enemies. I see death.” .
I grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him toward the west, toward the rolling hills of Jericho and the plains beyond. The morning sun was just hitting them, turning the green fields into gold.
“What do you see out there?” I asked.
He squinted. “Fields.”
“What else?”
“Grain,” he whispered. “Barley. Wheat.” .
“What else?”
“Orchards. Vineyards. Gardens.” .
“Exactly,” I let him go. “God hasn’t stopped providing. He just changed how He provides.” .
The truth crashed down on him, and I saw his knees buckle. It crashed down on everyone within earshot.
For forty years, we had been guests. Now, we were adults. The era of the free lunch hadn’t just ended; it had been executed . Terminated. Cut off. No warning, no weaning period, no transition phase . Yesterday, we ate because we were loved. Today, if we wanted to eat, we had to fight.
“But… but we don’t know how to farm,” someone cried out. “We’ve been wandering for two generations! We are shepherds and gatherers!” .
“The Canaanites know how to farm,” I said, pointing toward the enemy city. “And those are their fields.”
“So we take their fields?” .
“We take everything,” I said. “That means war.” .
“That’s always what it meant,” I continued, my voice rising so the crowd gathering could hear. “The Manna kept us weak. It kept us dependent, like babies nursing at a bottle. And now… now you become what God always intended. Conquerors.” .
The implications shattered through the camp .
No more Manna meant no more wandering. It meant no more walking in circles waiting for the next meal. From this moment on, we would eat what we conquered, or we wouldn’t eat at all . Every single calorie we consumed from this day forward would cost blood. Theirs, or ours .
The camp erupted into chaos . It wasn’t the unified grief of Moss’s death. This was fractured, angry, terrified chaos. Some people raged at me. Some raged at God, screaming at the empty sky. Some just sat down in the dirt, stunned silence, staring at the bare ground where miracles used to appear . They looked like they were waiting for a show that had been cancelled.
But I saw the shift happen. It started with the young men.
While the older generation—the ones who remembered Egypt, the ones who were used to complaining—sat and wept, the young warriors were moving. They were the ones who had been born in the desert. They were lean, hungry, and tired of the taste of Manna.
I saw a group of them gathering near the edge of the camp. They weren’t holding baskets. They were tightening the straps on their sandals. They were sharpening bronze swords and checking the fletching on their arrows .
Hunger is the oldest motivator . It is the sharpest teacher and the cruelest master. And right now, three million people were realizing that breakfast wasn’t coming unless they went and got it.
“Scouts!” I barked.
Three young men snapped to attention. “Sir!”
“Mark the visible fields. Anything within a two-hour march. I want to know where the barley is ripe. I want to know where the vineyards are heavy.” .
“Sir, those fields are guarded,” one of them said. “Canaanite patrols.”
“Good,” I said. “That means the food is worth protecting. Take a hunting party. A battalion. Go.”
By noon, the hunting parties had left the camp . The atmosphere was electric. It was terrified, yes, but it was also aggressive. For the first time in history, Israel wasn’t waiting. We were hunting.
I walked the perimeter of the camp, watching the dust clouds rise in the distance where our men were engaging the enemy foragers. This wasn’t a full-scale battle; it was a raid. It was a grocery run with swords.
The shock of the morning was morphing into something dangerous . The helplessness was turning into resolve. I saw mothers checking the water supplies, rationing what was left. I saw fathers teaching their sons how to hold a spear, not just to defend the herd, but to kill.
“Why did He do it like this?” Caleb asked me later that afternoon. He was the only other one left from the old guard, the only other man who had seen Egypt. We stood side by side, watching the sun dip lower.
“Do what?” I asked.
“Stop the Manna. Cold turkey. He could have phased it out. Given us a harvest first.”
I shook my head. “If the Manna kept falling, we would never take Jericho. We would sit here, on the edge of the promise, and eat our free bread until we died of old age. Comfort is the enemy of conquest, Caleb.”
“We’re going to lose people,” he said quietly.
“We might,” I admitted. “But the ones who survive will be warriors. They won’t be refugees anymore.”
By evening, the first parties returned .
They didn’t come back in orderly lines. They came back running, laughing, shouting. And they were carrying sacks. Heavy, bulging sacks thrown over their shoulders.
They dumped the spoils in the center of the clan gatherings. It wasn’t white flakes. It was golden grain. Rough, unrefined barley. Wheat that still had the chaff on it. Pomegranates that were bursting with red juice.
“Fire!” someone shouted. “Get the fires going!”
The smell that drifted through the camp that night was different than anything we had smelled in forty years. It wasn’t the sweet, delicate scent of Manna. It was the smell of roasting grain . It was the smell of char, and smoke, and earth.
I sat by a fire with a group of soldiers. One of them handed me a handful of the roasted grain. It was hot, hard, and crunchy. I put it in my mouth and chewed.
It required effort to eat. You had to grind it with your teeth. It wasn’t soft. It wasn’t easy.
It tasted like victory.
It was stolen grain, conquered grain . It was grain that belonged to our enemies this morning, and now fueled our bodies tonight. It tasted like the future .
“This is better,” a young soldier said, wiping grease from his chin. “The Manna was… it was good. But this? This fills you up.”
“It’s the bread of warriors,” I told him. “Not the bread of wanderers.” .
That night, three million people went to bed with full stomachs, but with a fundamentally different understanding of their place in the universe .
The psychological safety net was gone. The parent-child relationship with Heaven had shifted. We were now partners. God had promised us the land, but He wasn’t going to hand it to us on a plate. He was going to empower our hands to take it .
The Manna was dead . The miracle of the river was behind us. The miracle of the bread was gone.
I laid back in my tent, listening to the sounds of the camp. The weeping had stopped. The panic had subsided. Now, there was the sound of sharpening stones against metal. The sound of plans being made.
We had crossed the line. We were no longer a protected species in a terrarium. We were an invasive species in a hostile ecosystem.
And tomorrow… tomorrow I had to go to Jericho. Not to fight, not yet. But to see what we were up against.
I closed my eyes, but the image of the empty ground burned behind my eyelids. It was the scariest thing I had ever seen, and the best thing that could have happened to us.
God had taken away our crutch so we would learn to walk. And soon, we would have to learn to run.
Because Jericho was waiting. And the King of Jericho wasn’t going to just hand over the keys because we were hungry.
The conquest had begun .
But as I drifted off, I had no idea that the physical war was the easy part. I thought the hunger was the test. I thought the river was the test.
I didn’t know that the real Commander of this operation hadn’t even shown his face yet.
I didn’t know that while we were sharpening our little bronze swords and roasting our stolen grain, there was an army assembling that would make our three million people look like a chaotic ant farm.
I didn’t know that in a few days, I would meet a Soldier who would make me question whose side God was actually on.
The Manna was gone. The River was closed. But the Captain was coming.
(To be continued in Part 4…)
Part 4: The Commander of the Zero Hour
The silence of the desert is a liar. It tells you nothing is happening, that the rocks are just rocks and the wind is just air moving from high pressure to low. But after forty years in the wilderness, you learn that the silence is usually holding its breath before a scream.
It had been days since the Manna stopped . The shock of the empty ground had faded, replaced by a gnawing, low-level anxiety that vibrated through the camp of three million people . We were eating the grain we had taken from the Canaanite fields—”conquered food,” I called it to keep morale high—but every mouthful felt like a countdown .
I sat in my tent, the canvas walls rippling in the hot afternoon breeze. My armor was in the corner, gleaming dully. Moss’s staff—the one that had turned the Nile to blood—was gone. He had taken it with him to the mountain, or maybe God had buried it with him. Either way, I didn’t have a magic wand. I had a bronze sword, a map of a city that was considered impregnable, and a nation of ex-slaves who were looking at me like I was supposed to be a god.
“Jericho,” I whispered the name. It tasted like dust and iron.
The city was a monster. It sat on the horizon, mocking us. Double walls. Stone ramparts that rose fifty feet into the air. Gates that were reinforced with iron bands thick enough to stop a charging bull . It wasn’t just a city; it was the lock on the door to the Promised Land. If we didn’t break it, we starved in the foyer.
I couldn’t breathe in the tent. The expectations were suffocating. I needed to see the enemy. Not on a map, not through the reports of my scouts. I needed to look the beast in the eye.
I strapped on my sandals. I took my sword. I told my guards to stay back.
“Sir, it’s dangerous,” my lieutenant, Caleb, warned. “There are patrols.”
“If I can’t walk a mile without getting killed, I have no business leading this army,” I snapped. It was harsher than I intended, but the stress was turning me into something brittle.
I walked out into the heat. The sun was a physical weight, hammering down on the plains of Jericho. The heat waves shimmered off the hard-packed earth, making the distant city walls look like they were melting.
I walked until the sounds of the camp faded—the bleating of sheep, the crying of babies, the clang of pots. I walked until there was only the sound of my own breathing and the crunch of dry grass under my feet.
I was maybe a mile from the city. I could see the sentries on the walls, tiny figures pacing back and forth. I could see the glint of sunlight on their spears. I was calculating. If we attack the north gate… no, too fortified. If we try to undermine the western wall… no, bedrock.
Every tactical simulation in my head ended with thousands of my people dead in the dirt.
I looked down to check my footing, and when I looked up, he was there.
He hadn’t walked up. He hadn’t ridden a horse. He hadn’t emerged from a ravine.
He was just there.
Standing directly in my path, maybe twenty yards away. A man.
But my brain immediately rejected the word “man.” Men have rough edges. Men have posture that sags under gravity. Men twitch and shift.
This figure was absolute geometry. He stood perfectly still, his feet planted wide, his shoulders broad enough to block out the view of the city gate. He was wearing armor, but it didn’t look like the bronze plates my soldiers wore. It looked like woven light that had been cooled into a solid state. It shifted colors as the sun hit it—silver, then gold, then a terrifying, deep blue.
And he had a sword in his hand .
It was drawn.
In the ancient world, you don’t approach a stranger with a drawn sword unless you intend to use it. It is the universal sign of imminent violence.
I froze. My hand dropped to the hilt of my own weapon. It felt like a toy. It felt like a toothpick against what this figure was holding.
I took a step forward, squinting. “Halt!” I barked. “Identify yourself!”
He didn’t speak. He didn’t move.
I walked closer, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. As the distance closed, I saw the detail that made my stomach turn over.
The sword… it was wet.
Fresh, bright crimson blood was running down the fuller of the blade. It pooled at the tip and dripped.
Drip. Drip. Drip. .
I watched a drop fall. I waited for it to hit the dust. I waited for the splash.
But the blood never hit the ground. It vanished in mid-air, inches above the earth . Like reality itself refused to accept it.
“I said identify yourself!” I shouted, trying to mask the tremor in my voice.
I was ten feet away now. I could see his face. It was a face that stopped my breath. It wasn’t old, it wasn’t young. It was ancient. It was a face that had watched stars ignite and burn out. His eyes were not looking at me; they were looking through me, dissecting my soul, weighing my spirit on a scale I couldn’t see.
And he wasn’t breathing .
His chest didn’t rise. His nostrils didn’t flare. He was an statue of living energy, occupying space in a way that felt like a violation of physics.
My nerve broke. I ripped my sword from its scabbard. The metal hiss sounded pathetic in the vast silence.
“Are you for us?” I screamed, the question tearing out of my throat. “Or are you for our enemies?” .
It was the only question that mattered. In war, the world is binary. You are either my brother, or you are my target.
The figure finally moved. He tilted his head slightly, as if the question was absurd. As if I had asked a hurricane if it was a Democrat or a Republican.
“No,” he said .
The word hit me like a shockwave.
No?
My brain scrambled to process it. “No” wasn’t an option. You have to be on a side. You have to be…
“No,” he repeated, his voice sounding like the grinding of tectonic plates deep underground. “But as Commander of the Lord’s Army, I have now come.” .
The sword in my hand slipped. My fingers went numb.
Commander of the Lord’s Army.
This wasn’t an angel. This wasn’t a messenger sent to tell me to be brave. This was the General. This was the Arch-Captain. This was the Authority that even Michael and Gabriel saluted.
I looked at the bloody sword again. “The Lord’s army?” I whispered, my arrogance draining away into the sand. “Where are they?” .
I looked around the empty plain. Just rocks. Scrub brush. Heat waves.
“All around you,” he said. “Weapons drawn. Waiting.” .
“I can’t see them,” I pleaded. I felt blind. I felt stupid.
“The Assyrians couldn’t see us either,” he said, and I knew he was speaking of battles that transcended time. “Until we killed 185,000 in one night.” .
I fell.
I didn’t kneel; I collapsed. My legs simply refused to hold me up in the presence of that much gravity. I face-planted into the dirt, the hot dust filling my nose.
“What… what does my Lord want?” I choked out into the ground. .
I expected orders. I expected a battle plan. I expected him to tell me where to dig the tunnels or where to place the archers.
“Remove your sandals,” the voice commanded from above me. .
“Why?” I asked, my fingers clawing at the straps.
“Because this ground is holy,” he said. And then he added the part that Moss never told me about. “I’ve been killing here.” .
I stripped my feet bare. I stood up, feeling the heat of the earth against my skin. But it wasn’t just heat. It was electricity. The ground was vibrating. A low, hum that went up through my soles and rattled my teeth.
“Commander,” I said, trying to stand tall before him, though I felt like an insect. “Jericho… the walls. They are too thick. We have no engines. We have no way to breach.”
“You are thinking like a man,” he said.
“I am a man!”
“You are a weapon in my hand,” he corrected. “But Jericho’s walls will fall in seven days.” .
“How?” I begged. “Tell me how. Catapults? Battering rams?” .
He looked at the city, and for a second, I saw a flicker of something terrifying in his eyes. Contempt.
“Trumpets,” he said. “Marching. Shouting.” .
I stared at him. “That’s… that’s a parade. That’s not warfare.”
“That is human warfare,” he said, turning his gaze back to me. The intensity of it burned. “You are in my war now.” .
Suddenly, he raised the bloody sword.
“See,” he commanded.
The air exploded.
It wasn’t a sound; it was a visual detonation. The sword flashed with a light that was brighter than the sun, a light that seared through my retinas and burned directly into my brain .
I screamed and covered my eyes. But the light didn’t stop. It peeled back the layer of reality I was used to. It stripped away the camouflage of the physical world.
When I opened my eyes, the world was on fire.
I gasped, stumbling backward, tripping over my own feet.
They were there.
The hills around Jericho—the empty, brown, dusty hills—were gone. In their place were ridges of burning sapphire and gold.
And standing on every inch of ground, hovering in the air, filling the sky like a swarm of locusts made of stars, were the warriors .
Millions of them .
They were twelve feet tall. They held shields that looked like slices of the moon. They held spears that crackled with lightning that didn’t move like natural electricity. They were beautiful, and they were absolutely terrifying.
I saw entities with faces like lions, faces like eagles. I saw wheels of fire spinning within wheels, covered in eyes that saw everything . I saw creatures that shouldn’t exist, creatures that were geometry and fire and wrath woven together.
And they were all frozen, statues of potential violence, their faces turned toward Jericho.
“They… they’re everywhere,” I whispered, tears streaming down my face. I couldn’t process the scale of it. .
“We’ve been here forty years,” the Commander’s voice came from everywhere at once. “Waiting for Moss to die.” .
“Why wait?” I asked, looking at the silent, burning legions.
“Moss was Law,” the Commander said. “You are War.” .
“Different tools for different times,” he continued.
I looked at the city of Jericho. It looked so small now. So pathetic. A little pile of stones sitting in the shadow of a cosmic tsunami.
“Jericho’s king hasn’t slept in seven nights,” the Commander said. “He sees us in the shadows. He feels the pressure in the air.” .
“You’re already attacking,” I realized.
“We’ve been attacking since you crossed the Jordan,” he said. “Breaking their minds before you break their walls.” .
I looked back at the Commander. He had grown. He was towering over me now, his form shifting between the man I had seen and something made of pure glory.
“Your sword,” I said, pointing to the blade that was still dripping the blood that never hit the ground. “The blood… whose is it?”
He looked at the blade. “I have been killing since the first rebellion,” he said softly. “In heaven, and earth, and places between.” .
“The blood never stops fresh because the war never ends,” he said.
Then he leaned down. The pressure was immense. It felt like standing under a falling building. Fear crushed me flat—not the fear of injury, but the primal fear a rabbit feels when the shadow of the hawk passes over . The biological imperative to flee from a predator that is higher on the food chain.
“In seven days,” he commanded. “March around the city. Blow the trumpets. Shout.” .
“That’s all?”
“When those walls fall,” he said, and his voice dropped an octave, becoming the sound of a closing coffin, “kill everything that breathes.” .
I blinked. “Everything?”
“Everything,” he confirmed. “Men. Women. Children. Animals. Everything.” .
The order hung in the air like a guillotine blade.
“Children?” I choked out. “Commander… we are not monsters. This isn’t conquest. This is… this is slaughter.”
The Commander’s eyes flared. “This is not conquest, Joshua. This is cleansing.” .
“Cleansing?”
“You are burning out the poison before it spreads to your people,” he said. “The sin of the Amorites is complete. Their cup is full. I am tipping it over.” .
“I… I understand,” I lied. My stomach was churning.
“No, you don’t,” he said, his voice almost gentle for a second. “But you will.” .
He straightened up. The army on the hills flared brighter, a blinding flash of celestial phosphorus.
“Do not take the accursed things,” he warned. “Do not touch their gold. Do not touch their idols. If you bring their poison into your camp, I will turn this sword against you.”
The threat was clear. He wasn’t for us. He was for the Agenda. If we aligned with the Agenda, we won. If we stepped out of line, we were just another obstacle to be removed.
“Go,” he said. “The city is already dead.”
And then, the air snapped.
Like a rubber band breaking.
Pop.
He was gone .
The army was gone. The fire on the hills was gone. The lightning spears were gone.
I was standing alone in the desert. A slight breeze was blowing dust across my bare feet. The only sound was the distant cry of a hawk.
I stood there for a long time, shaking. My body felt light, hollowed out, like I had been struck by lightning and survived. The image of those burning millions was seared into my brain, branded onto the back of my eyelids .
I looked at Jericho.
Before I walked out here, I saw a fortress. I saw a problem. I saw a threat that could destroy my people.
Now?
I felt… pity.
I looked at the sentries pacing the walls. They were checking their armor. They were watching the horizon. They thought their stone walls could save them. They thought their iron gates could protect them.
They had no idea that they were already ghosts.
They had no idea that the execution warrant had been signed, sealed, and delivered by a Being who bled light.
The battle wouldn’t happen in seven days. The battle was over. We were just the janitors sent to clean up the mess .
I picked up my sandals. My hands were still shaking, but my spirit was steel. I put them on and turned back toward the camp.
As I walked, the fear of leadership evaporated. The imposter syndrome that had plagued me since Moss died? Gone. I wasn’t the leader. I was just the voice. The real Leader was invisible, and He had brought backup that could crack the planet in half .
I reached the perimeter of the camp as the sun was setting. The fires were being lit. The smell of roasting meat and baking bread filled the air.
Caleb was waiting for me. He looked worried. He had gathered the tribal elders.
“Joshua!” he called out, running to meet me. “Where have you been? We were about to send a search party.”
I walked past him, heading straight for the center of the camp, toward the Ark.
“Joshua?” he grabbed my arm. “What did you see? Is there a weakness in the wall?”
I stopped. I looked at Caleb. I looked at the elders. I looked at the three million faces turning to watch me. They looked so small. So fragile. Their little bronze swords. Their wooden shields.
I smiled. It was a cold smile. A dangerous smile.
“We don’t need a weakness, Caleb,” I said, my voice carrying in the evening air.
“What do you mean?”
“I met the Commander,” I said.
A hush fell over the group.
“Is He with us?” an elder asked.
“No,” I said. “We are with Him.”
I climbed up onto a cart so I could be seen.
“Put down your battering rams!” I shouted. “Put away your siege ladders! We won’t need them.”
“Then how do we fight?” a young soldier yelled.
“We don’t,” I said. “We walk.”
“Walk?”
“We walk around the city,” I said. “We blow the trumpets. We shout.”
Confusion rippled through the crowd. It sounded insane. It sounded like suicide.
“And then?” Caleb asked softly.
“And then,” I pointed toward the darkening silhouette of Jericho, “God is going to step on it.”
“Prepare the priests!” I ordered. “Get the Ark! We march at dawn!”
The energy in the camp shifted. The fear broke. It was replaced by something manic, something electric. They didn’t understand what I had seen. They couldn’t see the millions of fire-warriors on the hills. But they saw my face. And they saw that I wasn’t afraid anymore.
As I walked to my tent, I looked back at the mountain where Moss had died.
You knew, I thought. You knew who was waiting for us.
The Manna was gone. The River was crossed. The Commander was here.
And tomorrow, the world would learn what happens when heaven’s armies join earth’s battles .
I laid down, but I didn’t sleep. I just listened to the wind, waiting for the trumpets to sound.
Jericho was a dead city walking. It just didn’t know it yet.
(The End)
