Secure the Victory

“Now the children of Judah had fought against Jerusalem, and had taken it, and smitten it with the edge of the sword, and set the city on fire.” (Jud 1:8 AV)

We understand this city was not fully conquered and inhabited by Judah until David went up against it in the first part of his reign.  This city would be burned and the king conquered about three hundred years before David conquered it again.  The city would lose its name until David arrived.  Called Jerusalem here, when David invades, it would carry the name Jebus after the Jebusites who inhabited it.  We don’t know why Judah never inhabited the city three hundred years earlier.  All we know is they had a victory that went to waste until David claimed it for his capital city.  After David conquered it the second time, the city was renamed Jerusalem, the City of David.  There is a lesson here.  A lesson we can learn and LORD willing, apply.  God gives victories all the time.  It might be prudent to take the time to secure the victories He gives before we go on and try to gain more ground.

The success of Germany’s war effort during World War II was also its downfall.  Hitler and his generals practiced a war doctrine called Blitzkrieg.  The idea of the blitzkrieg was to throw everything at the enemy as fast as you can and take territory before the enemy could adjust and take up defensive positions.  For the first few years of the war, it worked amazingly well.  Western Europe was conquered and occupied in a matter of a few years.  There was little resistance from what would become the western bloc of the Soviet Union.  Poland collapsed quickly.  Belgium and France didn’t stand a chance.  The Netherlands barely gave a fight.  At first glance, it looked as though Germany was unstoppable.  However, there was a major downfall of moving that fast.  In one such instance, the artillery was advancing so fast, their support could not keep up and they lay waiting, vulnerable to enemy attack because they did not pace themselves.  The weakness of this doctrine is eventually, they spread themselves too thin they could not successfully occupy the territory they had gained.  They didn’t take the time to shore up their conquests before they went on to another.  This was their ultimate downfall.  Germany lost the war because of logistics.  Rather than wage a methodical and well-planned war, Hitler made the mistake of over-committing.  Praise the LORD for the rest of the world!

We fail in areas of our lives because we have too many fronts open.  Rather than concentrate on a particular area of weakness until the victory is secure, we open multiple fronts so they all fail.  We overcome a stronghold, then ignore it because we think overcoming it the first time will keep it defeated.  This is no true.  Had Judah established Jerusalem three hundred years earlier, David would have never had to retake it.  The Jebusites would have been a distant memory.  What ended up happening was a mockery on the part of the Jebusites as David approached the city.  We cannot win every battle all at once.  We have to pick and choose our battles.  We have to wage warfare over the long haul.  We have to plod through and establish the ground we have been given before me move on to the next enemy.  Dieting is a great example.  Ninety-one percent of diets fail.  They fail because once the target weight is reached, the dieter thinks the victory is forever won not realizing the object of dieting is a healthy lifestyle and not the loss of weight.  It is a lifetime commitment.  A permanent lifestyle change.  This is how we need to view our Jerusalem.  It is not a victory until it is occupied.  Anything less results in a reoccupation of the enemy.