Joshua 5
Faith of a Prostitute – 2:1-14
I’d like to begin by reading the entire chapter because it seems to me
the only way to handle this particular chapter is to deal with the entire
chapter 4 times because there are four great problems with this chapter and no
matter how I work it out I can’t seem to present it unless we work with the
whole chapter four times in a row rather than do it verse by verse in this
situation. This is just to give you the
overall flow of the entire chapter because it is one complete group.
“And Joshua, the son of Nun, sent out of Shittim two men to spy
secretly, saying, Go view the land, even
[8] And before they were laid down, she came up unto them upon the rook,
[9] And she said unto the men, I know that the LORD hath given you the land,
and that your terror is fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the
land faint because of you. [10] For we have heard how the LORD dried up the
water of the Red Sea for you, when ye came out of Egypt; and what ye did unto
the two kings of the Amorites, who were on the other side of the Jordan, Sihon
and Og, whom ye utterly destroyed. [11] And as soon as we had heard these
things, our hearts did melt, neither did there remain any more courage in any
man, because of you’ for the LORD your God, he is God in heaven above, and in
earth beneath. [12] Now therefore, I pray you, swear unto me by the LORD, since
I have shown you kindness, and ye will also show kindness unto my father’s
house, and give me a true token; [13] And that ye will save alive my father,
and my mother, and my brethren, and my sisters, and all that they have, and
deliver our lives from death. [14] And the men answered her, Our life for
yours, if ye utter not this our business.
And it shall be, when the LORD hath given us the land, that we will deal
kindly and truly with thee.”
[15] Then she let them down by a cord through the window for her house
was upon the town wall, and she dwelt upon the wall. [16] And she said unto
the, Get you to the mountain, lest the pursuers meet you; and hide yourselves
there three days, until the pursuers have returned; and afterward may ye go
your way. [17] And the men said unto her, We will be blameless of this thine
oath which thou hast made us swear. [18] Behold, when we come into the land, thou
shalt bind this line of scarlet thread in the window by which thou didst let us
down; and thou shalt bring thy father, and thy mother, and thy brethren, and
all thy father’s household, home unto thee. [19] And it shall be, that
whosoever shall go out of the doors of thy house into the street, his blood
shall be upon his head, and we will be guiltless; and whosoever shall be with
thee in the house, his blood shall be on our head, if any hand be upon him.
[20] And if thou utter this our business, then we will be free of thine
oath which thou hast made us to swear. [21] And she said, According unto your
words, so be it. And she sent them away,
and they departed; and she bound the scarlet line in the window. [22] And they
went, and came unto the mountain, and abode there three days, until the
pursuers were returned; and the pursuers sought them throughout all the way,
but found them not. [23] So the two men returned, and descended from the
mountain, and passed over, and came to Joshua, the son of Nun, and told him all
things that befell them. [24] And they said unto Joshua, Truly the LORD hath
delivered into our hands all the land; for even all the inhabitants of the
country do faint because of us.”
This entire chapter takes up about four days. This was the first thing that Joshua did
after receiving the commission from the Lord to conquer, and this whole sequel
of events which we have just read is days number 2, 3, 4 and 5. So it’s a series of four days that are
crucial in this entire episode. There
are basically four problems with this chapter.
We covered partially the first one last time; the first one is the
problem of sovereignty and free will or why did Joshua bother to send out the
spies. If God commanded him to do
something isn’t it a lack of faith for him to kind of check up on God by
sending spies out? So that’s the first
thing. The second problem is the problem
of how Rahab believed, on what basis?
It’s very obvious that Rahab was a believer before the spies came to her
house. How did she understand the gospel
before the spies came to her house? The
third thing is the problem of Rahab’s lie and situation ethics. And finally there’s the problem of Rahab’s
background versus the high position that she holds in God’s salvation
history. This woman is ranked with
Abraham in her faith; she ranks above all women of all Scripture, and how does
this happen, how does this come about that Rahab is picked out as a woman of
faith comparable to Abraham. She is
above all of the great women, Sarah, etc. that have come down to us in
salvation history. Why is it that this
woman is the one that ranks number one so we have to deal with that?
Last time we dealt with divine guidance and the two prerequisites for
divine guidance because we want to give background to solve the first problem
or the problem of why did Joshua send out the spies in verse 1. We said that divine guidance requires study;
it requires two prerequisites, it requires illumination to the will of God or
the establishment of the bottom circle.
When you receive the Lord Jesus Christ, God the Holy Spirit puts you in
union with Him forever; that’s the top circle, the legal sphere of your
relationship. The second circle or the
bottom circle is that which is the will of God for you now, present tense,
individual. So that bottom circle has to
be established and the only way it can be established, to establish the sphere
in which you are to walk has to be established by gracious illumination. So that’s the first prerequisite for divine
guidance, you have to have some known information. You have to have known absolute truth from
the Word of God.
The second prerequisite to find out God’s will is you have to have in
this one single moment of the present submission to the bottom circle, you have
to be walking in that bottom circle. In
other words you know a certain amount of information about God’s will for your
life and at this one moment, never mind what happened two days ago or what
happened twenty years ago… all these Christians that are busy living in the
past are miserable and will always be miserable as long as you fail to grasp
the point it is the present tense that you must use, NOW, and so therefore you
are in submission. These are the two prerequisites
for divine guidance.
We studied how Joshua implemented these in his day. Joshua basically utilized the concept, first,
of starting with the known. Secondly he
moved to the unknown; day by day, each day was new, he had a new situation, so
Joshua recognized the principle, you have to go from that which you know to
that which you do not know and you have to observe two restrictions all the
time. One of them is that you have to
operate within the divine viewpoint framework; you can’t stray outside of
this. That’s the rules of the game, and
if you try to generate a solution that violates a divine viewpoint of the Word
of God then you are disqualified, you are out of the bottom circle.
The second thing is that you have to take into account all truth; that
includes the Bible, man and the world, in other words your circumstances. So you have to combine these together for
divine guidance. Then we found that
often times, though this may be sufficient, there is a third problem and that
is the problem of the critical point, the so-called critical point and that is
reached when you’ve used these first two techniques, you move out and you come
slamming against the wall, where there doesn’t seem to be any solution to your
particular problem. Regardless of how
much you know, you’ve studied this out, regardless of how much you’ve thought
through you can’t move from the known to the unknown and come up with anything,
you’re stymied. Either circumstances,
lack of information, something is interfering.
At the problem of the critical point, this is the trial of Joshua, and
it is the trial of every one of us because occasionally we’ll run into these
critical points in divine guidance. What
do you do? You wait. The tendency is to run ahead at forty miles an
hour and generate some human viewpoint solution. And this, of course, always results in less
of a blessing or no blessing. When you
reach a critical point like Joshua did when he came with his armies up to the
Jordan River, he had a problem: no boats, no bridge. People might be able to swim across in small
numbers but you can’t move an army of hundreds of thousands of people across
this kind of a river, not at flood season; you can walk across normally but at
flood season you’ll have a problem. So
how do you do it? Joshua had no means
whatever of doing this. God told him to
do it but he didn’t tell him how to do it and Joshua didn’t have any means to
do it. The only solution he could try
would be a human viewpoint one and that is to postpone it, wait till the water
goes down. That would be operating
outside of God’s will, disqualified solution.
Joshua’s only problem is to trust the Lord to provide something, which
he does. That is basically divine
guidance.
So we can say there are four reasons why the spies were sent out, and
these are all important because they show us something and if you don’t ever
remember anything about divine guidance remember Joshua’s spies because they
show a principle that many Christians neglect and that is the principle that
you have to have means of accomplishing God’s will. In other words, God may tell you what to do
but He doesn’t always tell you how to do it. So therefore you have to do your
own research on how to do it.
Now we have in many Christian circles a misreading of that promise in
Prov. 3:5-6, “Trust the Lord with all thine heart, lean not unto thine own
understanding but in all thy ways know Him and He shall direct thy paths.” And what many Christians do when they hear
that is they read it as though it means no effort; it means, for example, all
Joshua had to do was come jumping across the Jordan and move in, no spy, no
reconnaissance, nothing. In other words,
abandon all normal military means. What
Joshua is doing here is following one of the great principles of warfare, the
principle of security, namely that before a commander moves his troops he has
to have intelligence on the enemy’s position.
No commander in his right mind will ever do this unless he has certain
reliable intelligence of the enemy.
Intelligence is a method the military has and always must have and
Joshua is simply following out a normal standard military procedure.
So the first thing we find then is that the spies are needed for divine
guidance. The spies are the research
team and they were geared to provide information to Joshua, on the basis of
which information he would chose and he would decide which way to play the
ballgame. Please notice that the Lord’s
direct revelation in verses 5-9 does not preclude personal research. This is crucial because a lot of Christians
forget this. They’ll take some promise
in the Bible and go with it at forty miles an hour and never stop to think
through circumstances. This means, for
example, a businessman that’s actively seeking God’s will in his business, that
means he will find every piece of information possible about his business, the
economics, the employment problems, etc.
If he’s in a profession he will follow all these details; it is not a lack
of faith. This is one of the great historical
examples of Joshua sending out spies for information, even though God had given
him a direct verbal command to move. So
research is always needed for divine guidance.
The second reason the spies were sent across is to confirm God’s
promises. We have to get the background
for this. Part of it is found in verse
1, “Joshua, the son of Nun, sent out of Shittim two men to spy secretly,” now
when you read that in the King James it sounds like what he’s doing is that you
secretly spy. In other words, “secretly”
is an adverb that goes with “to spy.”
There’s only problem with that; in the Hebrew it’s not an infinitive,
“to spy,” it’s a participle; adverbs don’t go with participles, adverbs go with
main verbs. The adverb here in this
sentence goes with the verb, it means to send out. So it should read, “Joshua, the son of Nun,
sent out secretly from Shittim, two men, spies, saying,” so that he said this
thing and he sent this whole thing as a hush-hush mission.
Do you notice something different from this mission than the mission
about forty years ago? Remember Moses in
Numbers 13, back there Moses commissioned a group of spies, one from each
tribe, to move up and to survey the whole land of Canaan and he did it
publicly, and when the spies came back it was a public report and everyone hit
the panic button and they had moaning and groaning, and crybaby tactics for the
next two or three days. Remember how
millions of people, the men, the women, everybody screamed all night. And Joshua, Moses and Caleb were the only men
that tried to get some sleep that night because they weren’t moaning and
groaning, they recognized God’s promises, no problem. There were problems there but they had the
main problem licked; God was on their side and so they just moved ahead and
relaxed and everybody else was yelling and screaming and carrying on, a big
scene all night, operation crybaby on a mass scale. And this was a tremendous falling apart of
the whole camp.
Now Joshua learned from this; he said I don’t care what you guys come
back with but you come back and you tell me privately. And so this whole spy thing is a hush-hush
operation and here you can see Joshua operating on past knowledge. He knew what happened last time when the
spies came back and they made public the report. The spies are going to come back and report
but it’s going to be to him, not to the people.
So this is why he does this secretly.
Now God has a hidden means here; in Joshua’s conscious mind he just
wanted information, he wanted to find out what is the condition of the fortress
of Jericho. In particular these men were
to move into the situation, Jericho had a wall, a double wall around it, a
small city of several thousand people, and Rahab’s house was inside these two
walls. Their job was to kind or
circulate; this is why they went to the house of prostitution. You wonder what’s going on here, the first
place they show up in the land is a whore house and it doesn’t look too good
for the troops. Well, the reason they
went there was to get lost. It’s an easy
place to get lost, just kind of mill in and not be too spectacular and where
else are you going to go. You’re not
going to sign in at the Hilton Hotel some place in the middle of Jericho where
everybody is going to know that they’re there.
And they’re not going to sneak around from house to house because
they’ll obviously be suspicious, so they just take a trip to the prostitute’s
house and that’s a good place to just get lost.
So their job is to kind of get lost and then in the night time to kind
of circulate and go in between these two walls and find out what fortifications
they have in these two walls, note the positions of the fence and note the
weapons that the troops have inside the city.
So they are to get this report and bring it back.
But God in His wondrous way, in His sovereign way, has quite another
thing in mind for these men; they have gone in there seeking specific military
information. They’re going to come back
with a report from this prostitute, Rahab, and she is going to give them a
piece of information that these spies themselves may not have caught the
significance of. It appears that they
must have caught some of the significance but to see the background for the report
that they bring back you have to go back to Exodus 15:15. God had been promising Israel a certain thing
would happen when they began to take over the land of Canaan. By the way, the whole chapter of Exodus 15 is
a hymn, a tremendous hymn. In Exodus
15:15 God promises or prophesies through this song, “Then the princes of Edom
shall be amazed; the might men of Moab, trembling shall take hold upon them;
all the inhabitants of Canaan shall melt away.
God predicts a psychological disaster on a mass scale; a mass panic will
hit the area. This is a prophesied
event.
If you turn to Exodus 23:27 you see the same thing, except unfortunately
the King James has been influenced by a bad translation at this point. God prophesies, “I will send My fear before
you, and will destroy all the people to whom thou shalt come, and I will make
all thine enemies turn their backs unto thee. [28] And I will send hornets
before thee, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite
from before thee.” What are the
hornets? This is a great mystery, who
are the hornets? Nowhere else in
Scripture are the hornets mentioned except in these other passages, Deut.
7:20. Let’s turn to Deut. 7:20 and see
if we can solve the mystery of the hornets.
“Moreover, the LORD thy God will send the hornet among them, until they
who are left and hide themselves from thee, are destroyed.” Again, the hornet; what is this. You have a further amplification of this in
Deut. 11:25 and Joshua 24.
Here we have an illustration of what your King James translation has
done with the original. As you know, the
original Old Testament was written in Hebrew.
Somebody asked what was the language used between Rahab and the two
spies; it was proto-Hebrew that was the language of communication. Proto-Hebrew we don’t know exactly what it
is, it’s part of the northwest Semitic languages. It may be Amorite or it may be a northwest
Semitic dialect but out of this came Ugaritic, later on Aramaic, especially
with a larger area, and you have Phoenician and you have Biblical Hebrew all
coming out of this same corpus of language.
It was kind of a similar type of language. This is why when you study Hebrew and you
study Aramaic, you can study Arabic, you can study Ugaritic, and although the
scripts are different and you have to learn cuneiform if you’re going to
translate Ugaritic literature, how they took the little spike and they put it
in the clay and each letter looks like this in Ugaritic; it was just made by
indentations of wood splinters in the clay.
You just have to learn the script but once you learn the script
basically it’s the same, a very similar language to Hebrew, the structure,
syntax, etc. Well, the language was this
kind of dialect that preceded Hebrew.
But that evidently the way in which the Old Testament arose. Well, along about two or three hundred years
before Christ, often times when you’re reading you’ll see the Roman numeral 70,
and that is the Septuagint. The Septuagint
is a Greek translation; the Jews as they were dispersed throughout the world
began to lose their Hebrew and so they said look, we can’t have God’s word in
Hebrew, we don’t even know how to read Hebrew any more, we’ve forgotten
it. If you have ever tried to read
Hebrew you can understand why they’d forget it.
And so they learned Greek; Greek was the language of the day, it was
like the English language is in many areas today, and so they said let’s get a
contemporary translation. And so they
had it translated to Greek over a period of time in Alexandria and surrounding
areas.
However, the people that translated the Septuagint started a precedent that has
been followed all the way down through your English translations, even to the
RSV, the Revised Standard Version which is reputed to be one of the great
scholarly translations of our day. But
there’s been a translation tradition set up and you have to break out of this
translation tradition if you’re going to communicate God’s Word. And here’s a beautiful example of it. The people who translated the Septuagint
didn’t understand what this Hebrew word meant and so the nearest thing they
could think of was hornets. And so they
started it way back, 200-300 BC by translating the Hebrew unknown word by the
Greek word for hornet. And from that
point on every English translation just picked it up, hornet, hornet, hornet,
all the way down to today. But we now
know from research in ancient times that this is not the word; the word is not
hornet, the word means discouragement.
And it means a psychological disaster; a panic situation will hit the
nation, and this of course fits the context of these passages perfectly. So this is what God has prophesied.
So the second reason why the spies were sent in that when they would
come back they’d say, hey Joshua, do you know what? This woman told us that the whole place is in
a panic because of us. Now this would
ring a bell if Joshua is conscious of the Law on which he was told to meditate
day and night because if he had been meditating on this and meditating on this
he would have been sensitive to the fact that God promised man’s psychological
discouragement before they went in. You
ask how did God supernaturally affect the battle so that Israel would always
win? How did He do this? Well, He did it
a number of ways. We’re going to see in
Joshua the various ways, He made the sun stand still one time, and you say it
can’t happen, you wait till we get there, I’ll show you how in the western
hemisphere the sun did stand still, we have Indian legends to prove it. In the
western hemisphere you have a long night at the same time in the eastern
hemisphere you have a long day.
So there was this discouragement.
There was God’s working for them through natural elements; God working
through them psychologically and this was one of the great things. So the thing that God promised Joshua was
there would be this discouragement and the spies verify this. So there is a second reason, not only are the
spies there for divine guidance of a specific military situation in Jericho,
but when they come back they verify one of God’s prophecies. It has come true in space/time history.
The third reason why the spies were sent into the city actually turns
out to save a believer. Out of the two,
three, or thousands of inhabitants of this city of Jericho, every person was a
non-Christian; every person was an unbeliever except one lady. This lady was a believer, and this should be
an exciting and comforting principle to you if you are a believer in Jesus
Christ because it means that in the middle of catastrophe, in the middle of
calamity, God has His eyes on His children, and this woman was His child, and
this woman had believed in Jesus Christ and although she was the only woman in
the entire city as far as we know who was a believer, she was saved. And it may seem incredible that God can move
into history and you’d think boy, if He’s going to level a city, how can He
save one person when the walls come toppling down and everything else. Well,
when those walls can come down… in fact, this is one reason why God toppled the
walls, it was to save Rahab, her house was on the wall, and evidently what
happened when these walls toppled her section was left and when the troops
leave here in chapter two they don’t know that the walls are going to topple
down, all they know is Rahab, you put that scarlet cord in your window and when
we raid the place, the shock troops that hit your section of the wall have
their instructions from the CO, save the people inside that house where you see
the red cord. But the troops don’t have
to do it, God does it. And the walls are going to come tumbling down, probably
except for Rahab’s section. So Rahab is
going to be saved and all these other people are going to be crumbled under the
wall but Rahab will be saved.
And here’s another illustration of God’s tremendous sovereignty. He is able to reach down into the middle of
what looks like to us chaos and able to pull out His children from the
chaos. And this is a tremendous promise
from you and this is a living demonstration that you can be in the middle of a
disaster after disaster after disaster and yet God has His eyes on you and He
doesn’t treat you as part of a statistical envelope; He doesn’t say well, the
probability of her getting injured in this was is 30% or 40%, oh no! It’s 100% certain nothing will happen to
her. And so we have a tremendous promise
here as far as God’s concern for His children.
The fourth reason why the spies were sent in is conjecture on my part,
because of a tradition that has developed about Salman [sp?], Salman was the
man who later married Rahab. She married
one of these Jewish princes and it was through this marriage that she became
one of the great-great-great-great-great grandmothers of Jesus Christ. We know the doctrine of right man/right woman,
that for every man God has a woman and for every woman God has a man, so we
have the right man/right woman doctrine. And evidently, from extra-Biblical
tradition we learn that Salomon was one of these two men who were the spies,
and it turns out a very interesting kind of situation, that these two men, the
spies sent into the land, this man meets his wife on a spy mission, she’s a
prostitute when he meets her, later on that woman will become his wife. And so we have the fourth possible reason why
the spies are sent in; so that Salman could get his woman.
Now we come to the second great problem of the chapter. We’ve dealt with the problem of why the
spies. Now we come to the fact, how did
Rahab believe? How did Rahab
believer? What kind of information did
Rahab have, and here is a case… you want to be careful of this because
oftentimes you’ll be faced with the question, what about people dwelling in a
Gentile nation around Israel, they weren’t in the nation Israel, how were they
saved in the Old Testament. Well, this is going to show you how they were
saved.
First let’s look at the problem so you can get firmly in your mind just
what the great problem is here. Rahab
lived in the land of Canaan. She is
involved in a large section of real estate dominated by Canaanite
theology. There’s an entire culture that
is rotting. God has promised in Gen.
15:16, Abraham, by the time your descendants get into that land the iniquity of
the Amorites will have come full. And by
this God means that there will be such great negative volition in this area
that all the people, except this one, will be unbelievers. They will not only be unbelievers but they
will be beyond redemption.
Now we theologians do not understand enough about this problem of
“beyond redemption” but it seems to be at certain times in the history of the
human race that segments of the human race actually become so apostate that
they are beyond redemption. In other
words, they have rejected and hardened their hearts, anesthetized themselves so
that salvation is impossible. Through
their own rejection of the truth they have turned back and turned back and
turned back. We have a glimpse of it in
Pharaoh; we have a glimpse of it here; we have a glimpse of it later on in
history and we have a glimpse of it in the Tribulation when antichrist controls
the world people will have the mark of the beast. And the mark of the beast means that there
will come a time when the world’s population, as the population, will have to
be annihilated by Jesus Christ. This is
why you’re going to have blood and guts in this book and why you’re going to
have some horrifying atrocities committed, and why you’re going to have to have
people torn limb from limb and slaughtered.
If this bothers you you have failed to understand the history of this
thing and you fail to understand the righteousness of God. There comes times in history when a country
has to fall; God is being merciful to the rest of mankind to destroy an
apostate culture.
This is the reason, I think, why Tibet fell to the Chinese communists,
etc. because there was no more demonically influenced culture on the face of
the earth than the red hooded monks of Tibet.
They had this whole culture down until the communists took over. You say what a tragedy, the communists taking
over. Yes, but they smashed that
culture. You have the same thing in
Vietnam, one of the reasons of the sovereign moving of God in Vietnam has been
the breaking down of apostate Buddhism in South Vietnam and the replacing with
it by viable evangelical segments of Christians in that country. And this is one of the things that has come
out of the Vietnam War. So there are
many reasons in the background for these great movements of history and
remember this principle: no nation has ever fallen unless it more than deserved
it. Every country that has ever gone
down in history has deserved it and well deserved it. God always has patience with every national
entity and a nation that is destroyed, God has had it and it is a sign that God
is judging it, etc. and nations deserve to go down.
There’s never been a nation which you have to feel sorry for; every
nation that has been destroyed in history has deserved to be destroyed. Every group, every segment of the human race
that has been destroyed has deserved to have been destroyed. This is how the sovereignty of God works in
history. There are atrocities and these are wrong and you have to fight against
the atrocities, yes; but as far as the overall working of history this book
gives you one case where God ordered the annihilation of an entire segment of
the human race. Why? Because you and I are here tonight as
believers. If God had not destroyed the
Canaanite religion when it was in budding form we would not be here today;
Israel would have died, Israel’s culture would have died out, Messiah would
never have come and we would be without our so-great salvation. But you can thank God as you look at the guts
and as you look at the slaughter of this book, you can turn and say thank you
God for annihilating these people because by annihilation of these people I
obtained my salvation.
So what is Rahab’s faith? She’s
faced a tremendous cultural problem; she faced a pantheon built around the god
El, which we believe actually was the god, Elohim from the Bible, and He was
known as El, but during this time in history another god came in called
Baal. God evidently had deteriorated; El
had a girlfriend called [not sure of word] and Baal, that’s the wrong translation
but that’s the way you’ll find it in the King James Version, and Baal had his
consort and they went around with all their girlfriends and they had a
pantheon, both of them. By this time,
Baal, known as Dagon, son of Dagon, had conquered a lot of the Mediterranean
cultures and a lot of the Middle East. He was replacing this god [El] at this
time; he is more apostate and there’s more of an emphasis on Baal than with the
old god, El. So now we have Rahab
enmeshed… picture this woman in a town of several thousand, surrounded on all
sides without any light, totally dark culture, totally without any light,
enmeshed in a worldview that dominates everything, and this woman has to
struggle through. How does she
believe?
Turn to Romans 10”17 for the principle is given there. “Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the
Word of God.” Obviously before you have
faith you have to have the message of revealed truth transmitted into the
culture. But verse 18 says, “I say, Have
they not heard? Yes, truly their sound went into all the earth, and their words
unto the ends of the world.” It’s a
quotation from Psalm 19 and refers back to God-consciousness. This means that we have a situation in
history where a woman, enmeshed as she is in a total dark culture, has light
available to her by several means. These
means are through God-consciousness and other means which we will explore. But Romans 10 gives us the principle that
every man has this background of God-consciousness to start with. He may have apostatized from it but that is
the starting point originally.
Now turn back to Joshua 2:9-11, we will study Rahab’s statement to see
what is it that she learned, we will examine Rahab’s confession of her
faith. This woman had a tremendous
amount of information; the only problem we have is where did she get it
from. Remember she got all this before
the spies came, before the spies came
she was a believer. “She said unto the
men,” this is after the king’s men leave, she goes up on the roof and she pulls
up the flax and says hey, I want to talk to you for a few minutes, and this is
what she tells them. “She said unto the
men, I know,” knowledge, “that the LORD has given you the land, and that your
terror is fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the land faint
because of you.” Three things she says
she knows: she knows that the Lord has given Israel the land. She obviously observed that the inhabitants
are all shook up. Points 2 and 3 are
reasonable, but if you think, in you read verse 9 you ought to ask yourself,
wait a minute, how did she know the first one.
Points 2 and 3 she obviously could know, she lived in a city and as a
prostitute she probably had to deal with a lot of men and she knew what was
going on in the town. So what do you say
about this woman?
She knew the last two, that’s easy to find out how she knew that, but
how did she ever come to the first conclusion that “the Lord has given you the
land.” The first thing to notice about
solving this problem is that notice she grouped them together; she grouped it
together, not like the modern people do, not like 20th century
thinkers do today, they would say the first thing that you see in verse 9 is
theological truth, that’s something else, that’s spiritual, we’ll put that way,
way, thousands of miles away, the second and third points are historical
fact. So over here you have theology,
over here you have historical facts and they separate and bifurcate the two. Rahab doesn’t do that; she just puts it all
together and says the whole thing is true.
How did she get to this point?
This involves a process of illumination; she explains it in verse 10,
“For,” this is the explanation of how she came to the three conclusions she
came to in verse 9, “For we have heard how the LORD dried up the water of the
Red Sea for you, when ye came out of Egypt; and what ye did unto the two kings
of the Amorites, who were on the other side of the Jordan, Sihon and Og, whom
ye utterly destroyed.” Now there’s a
fine weaving of vocabulary here that gives us the tip off on what she’s
thinking. Let’s continue and get the
whole thing, verse 11, “And as soon as we had heard these things, our hearts
did melt, neither did there remain any more courage in any man, because of you;
for the LORD your God, he is God in heaven above, and in earth beneath.”
Now there are several things that we are to notice about this. The first thing in verse 10 is the
alternation of the subject. In verse 10
you have the first part, “the Lord dried,” there’s your noun and there’s your
verb, “the Lord dried,” but then notice the last part of verse 10, “what you
did.” The first thing happened 40 years
ago; this one happened very recently, “you did” a Transjordania campaign. Notice she alternates between the two, “The
Lord dried up the water” and “you did” this to the Amorites. Here again you have this woman grasped
historical theological truths together as one bundle. She doesn’t say this is a fact, the water
somehow dried up and I interpret it to be that the Lord did that. She doesn’t separate fact from
interpretation, she ties it all together here and she says the Lord did this
and you did that.
But the last statement in verse 10 she says “you did unto the two
kings,” etc. etc. etc. and then she adds, “whom ye utterly destroyed.” And the word “utterly destroyed” is charam, it means to devote to God in
holy war. It means that they devoted
these two kings, that’s what the word means, to devote, from which we get
harem, it means you just have something of a cherished possession and you draw
a circle around it so nobody can get it; that’s why all the kings had their
girlfriends behind curtains. It was
something they wanted and they didn’t want anybody else to mess with them so
they put curtains around it, that’s called a harem; that’s how we get the
word. But harem originally meant you
draw a circle about that which is a peculiar treasure and the treasure is
something in holy war, the enemy; you draw a circle around it and you devote it
to God and annihilate it and offer it to Him for a sacrifice.
So she has very clearly grasped something here and this tips us off as
to how Rahab puts this all together. She
grasped three important principles that are obvious in verses 10-11. The first one is that she grasped the concept
of monotheism, notice this statement in the last of verse 11, “that the LORD
your God, He is God in heaven above, and in earth beneath.” This implies that this woman had
God-consciousness before she became a believer; it implies that she had the
concept that there was a God over all and it turns out that the God of Israel
was that God. But you have to watch this
line of thinking; she first held monotheism left over from her God-consciousness. She knows there must be a God somewhere in
heaven above and earth beneath. She
doesn’t know what His name is, she doesn’t know anything about Him, but she is
aware that there must be a God. Now she
commits this second deduction; the second deduction is that Yahweh is that
God. How do you suppose she does
that? She does it by piecing together
the testimony of the believer’s of her day.
She has the testimony of Israel.
What is the testimony of Israel?
The testimony of Israel is given in verse 10, in other words, she was a
student. In the house of prostitution
she obviously… that was the place where the newspapers were and the rumors
circulated, etc. she knew everything that was going on, anything that would
happen the men coming through the house there would bring the news and so she knew
exactly what was happening and she began to put two and two together and
started getting four. She began to say
now just a minute, here’s a nation that claims covenant relationship with its
God. Now there’s no problem, many
nations had their national god, that wasn’t the problem, Moab had their god and
Israel had her God and Egypt had its god.
But here’s the peculiar thing about Israel and here’s probably some of
the testimony that she picked up. Israel
was the only, and has been the only nation in history to make a written
contract with its national God. W. F.
Albright says this: “Contracts and treaties were common everywhere, but only
the Hebrews, so far as we know, ever made covenants with their God or gods.”
And what is said here is that she was aware of this testimony; this is
how she got her divine viewpoint, it was through the testimony of this thing,
straight historical facts, and she began to say now just a minute here, this
nation Israel, do you know what they’re claiming? They’re claiming that they have a personal
relationship with the God of the universe and the proof of their personal
relationship is that every time they get in a war they clobber somebody, and
they do it in the most miraculous way. I
want you to see this so that you won’t draw the wrong conclusion from verse
10. I don’t want you to draw this
conclusion: Rahab did not see the miracles and say oh, God was there. It wasn’t that simple; Rahab just didn’t see
some odd historical event and say oh, that must be God. If she didn’t first have a monotheistic
concept… you could have all the miracles you wanted to and she could just wave
her hand and say well, it’s a freak of nature, it’s just luck here, luck there,
just a freak thing over here, accident over here, and you can mask out any
miracle that way.
Miracles alone don’t prove anything, not a thing; the resurrection alone
doesn’t prove anything. I, as a
non-Christian could accept the resurrection of Jesus Christ perfectly, it
wouldn’t bother me a bit, just say we just scientifically discovered the thing,
that’s all, we don’t know how flesh can resuscitate, etc. I could explain the resurrection away very
easily, but there’s one thing I couldn’t explain away, and that is when you take
the resurrection as a miracle and then on top of that set inside a prophetic
framework of history that is prophesied and prophesied and prophesied, then it
comes true, then you’ve got me. Then I
can’t get away from it. That’s what
Rahab had, she just didn’t reason from the miracles of verse 10 and see these
things and jump to the conclusion that God was there. She saw the miracles and at the same time
mentally she began to get this concept, there must be a God of the universe,
and then she put the two together; she put together the concept of an absolute
truth and she put together the concept of the covenant God that was verbally
revealing Himself, in other words, in our generation it would be the
Bible. She put all these things together
and came up with the answer and that’s how she got the conclusion she did in
verse 11. But she didn’t get this
automatically by jumping at things.
So we find here Rahab is involved in a process of the illumination. We’ll review the five points of illumination
now; how does illumination occur. First
we face truth; truth is always three parts in Scripture. There are three areas of revelation from God:
first the Bible, then the nature of man, and then the world around us. All three of those parts have to agree. Parts two and three are called theologically
general revelation, part one is special revelation but please notice, the Bible
by itself doesn’t prove a thing, any more than the miracles of verse 10 proved
a thing. It’s got to be set inside the
overall framework to prove something.
That’s how you prove Christianity.
You have all together and you come up with the answer; everything has to
fit together. That’s how you do it. So she has all three of these. In Rahab’s case, what does she do with
it? I think Rahab, as far as the Bible,
she didn’t have a Bible but she did have tradition and she had testimony. She had tradition from her forefathers about
El, remember when Abraham went through Jerusalem he came to Melchizedek; what
was Melchizedek? He was in charge of the
[can’t understand word] there in Jerusalem, in charge of the Most High God so
it was obviously… El had to be taken on tradition. And then she had the testimony of
Israel. She had the fact that this nation
that claims a written revelation, a written connection to God, and God fulfilled
prophecy; she had all of that information.
Then she had point two. Now there
are some things in this whole narrative that lead me to believe that Rahab was
a very sensitive woman. This may strike
you as a little odd, a woman of her type, but it happens very often in fact;
you see this repeated in the Gospels.
Who is it that is most sensitive to Jesus Christ but Mary Magdalene, and
what is her background? A prostitute! Why is this?
Because these particular kinds of women have the ability to read character. In some areas of their life they are
completely gross, correct; but in another area of their life they know how to
read people and they’re not put on by phonies.
A prostitute is never put on by a phony; they know all the phonies in
town because they know all the businessmen, all the rest of the big shots that
visit them at night. They know who the
phonies are in town and you couldn’t find a prostitute that would be impressed
by a phony. So this is one tremendous
thing in their favor is that they are the kind of women that will never be
impressed by phonies, and they recognize a real, genuine person when they meet
one and that’s Mary Magdalene with Jesus Christ, etc. and you have the same
thing with Rahab.
Now there’s a certain thing in this passage that leads me to this belief
and that is in 2:12, notice what she does, her first thought. She could have just dropped her business and
went out of the city with the spies, couldn’t she? She could have disappeared; no problem, Rahab
could have disappeared with the spies, why did she hang around the city? Because she loved her family; look at verse
12, “I pray you, swear unto me by the LORD, since I have showed you kindness,
that you will also show kindness unto my father’s house, and give me a true
token. [13] And that you save alive my father, and y mother, and my brethren,
and my sisters, and all that they have, and deliver our lives from death.” Notice not a word about her own life; she
loves her family. She doesn’t have a
husband, which fits her background; she doesn’t have a husband but she does
have a father, a mother, she does have brothers and sisters. Here’s a woman, very sensitive in this
area.
So I draw the conclusion that she is using the nature of man as part of
her evidences of the validity of Christianity.
In other words, she recognizes that every man is of significance and
value, and she recognizes that the pollution, this religious glop that she’s
getting from the Canaanites doesn’t give dignity to the human individual. And it doesn’t give value to the human
individual, any more than non-Christian religions today can give any value
whatever to man. If you are one of these
people that believe in evolution you’ve got problems. The impersonal plus time plus chance equals
zero; no other solution. The human being
has no value, and evidently Rahab was very sensitive in this area and in her
life this was something that meant a lot to her. And this was something where probably the
Holy Spirit was the first place the Holy Spirit began to work in her life. When God the Holy Spirit began to point out
in this woman, look woman, look at all the world view, the culture that you’ve
been raised in, look at the education you got here as a girl in Jericho, look
at it all, did it give you value, did it give you a base to love your father
and your mother, did it give you a value to be looking upon your brothers and
sisters as some valuable people, does it really? No; no it doesn’t at all. And I suspect in this area of her life she
thought through this thing and began to work with it. So that area of facing the truth; the first
step in illumination.
The second step in illumination is grace; you have to have grace. God the Holy Spirit has to open eyes, not
that He adds truth but He does open our eyes to the truth that was there. We do
not know how God the Holy Spirit opened Rahab’s eyes. Maybe it was through guilt; maybe as a
prostitute she had a tremendous guilt and maybe she meditated upon this guilt
and she struggled with how do I deal with my own guilt and how do I work and
consider my family here, it may be that this woman had to go into prostitution
to support her family, we don’t know, but however she grappled with this she
was a real wise woman and she had these problems. She must have a problem of guilt, she had the
problem of love toward her family and these things must have kept her in
tension all the time. And in place of
this the Holy Spirit probably began to open her eyes and open her eyes and open
her eyes, and did something fantastic in this woman’s life that He didn’t do in
any of the other lives in Jericho. Out
of the thousands of women, everybody in Jericho had heard about the
Israelites. They all knew about the
Israelites, they all knew about Pharaoh getting killed, they heard about Og and
Sihon and all the rest of the kings getting annihilated and wiped out;
everybody heard it but what made the difference in Rahab’s life? God the Holy Spirit was working in her life
and so when she heard it, bang, her eyes were open; wait a minute, this thing
connects, and in her life the light went on.
All the men around her, all the women around her, probably in her own
family, by the thousands in Jericho had heard the same thing Rahab heard but in
her case it made a difference because inside it all fit together.
The third step in illumination is this fitting together; she struggled
with it; maybe she struggled with this for years, we don’t know. It may be that all forty years, we don’t know
how old Rahab was, it could be that she’s a young woman and that she’s just
heard this tradition from her parents forty years ago, maybe she [can’t
understand word] it, we don’t know. But
she must have been grappling with this for some time. So the third point in the doctrine of
illumination is that she struggled with this thing and she didn’t get this over
night. And notice how God’s timing is so
tremendous; can’t you just see the spies start out and the probably must have
prayed for protection, as the spies went across they probably swam across
Jordan, they came through the land and they must have prayed for journey’s
mercies, Lord, protect us because we’re going into enemy territory, etc., and
so the first thing they do, they exercise their wisdom, they go to the
prostitutes house to get lost in the crowd, etc. and they go there and what
should happen but God has been working for years in the life of this woman and
that woman and they come together; sovereignty working in history. God has been preparing this woman, God has
been preparing the spies, and if that extra-biblical tradition is true we have
even a heightened contrast for one of those spies is going to be the man that
marries this woman. So all of this plays
together and you have the tremendous sovereignty of God working in history, the
timing is all from God.
And then the fourth thing, Rahab must come to the point where she
eliminates the error and she comes to a definite epignosis, she comes to a knowledge of the absolute truth. And she realizes, as she says in verse 11, she
makes the deduction that Israel’s national God is more than a national God;
Israel’s national God that has done these things and answers His prophesy,
Israel’s national God is not just a national God, but “He is the God in heaven
above, and in earth beneath.” He’s the
God I’ve been looking for, not Dagon, not Baal, not El, not all these other
gods of the pantheon, but this God, He is the one, He is the One! And she makes the equation in verse 11.
And then finally the fifth point in the doctrine of illumination is that
epignosis is the basis of faith. This woman is going to do, as we’ll shortly
see, the most marvelous acts but they are acts in faith. This woman is going to behave in a certain
way now because she has a ground of truth; she has thought this through, it is
absolutely true, it is certain, and she believes it. Some of you have been raised in homes where
you have been taught that faith is a leap in the dark. Some of you have been taught that faith is if
you don’t know enough, believe; it’s a weak form of knowledge. If you have this knowledge of faith I feel
sorry for you because that’s not Biblical at all. The Biblical concept of faith is that you
KNOW, it is absolute and certain truth.
And knowing this you submit to it and built your life on it; it’s a
platform for you to walk on.
In 2:12, here’s where the acts flow from her faith, and here we see her
salvation is secured by her faith, her physical salvation. Her spiritual salvation has been decided some
time before the spies come. Now comes
her physical salvation, and in verse 12 she says, “Now therefore, I pray you,
swear unto me by the LORD,” now here’s another added piece of information. If you look at this carefully and sensitively
you’ll notice that verse 12 tips you off to another thing about this
woman. She knew that God was a covenant
God because when she made them swear she didn’t make them swear on the name of
Baal, she didn’t make them swear on the name of El, she made them swear in
their God’s name. Now isn’t that interesting;
it’s customary to the woman’s faith. She
made them swear by their own God’s name, and she says you take your God and you
swear to me in His name, “since I have shown you kindness, that you show” my
family kindness.
Now we’ll go to the New Testament commentary on Rahab. We’ve read through the rest of this so you
know what happened after this. Heb.
11:31, looking at the New Testament evaluation of Rahab’s faith. This is the
hall of fame in God’s Word. I want you
to see if you can find another woman in the list. Look at the list carefully; it starts back
with Abel in verse 4. Look down through
the list and see if you can find another woman in the slit. Rahab is one of the greatest women of all
times. You have to catch this, a woman
with the background she had and yet look, look at how tremendous she’s written
up in the New Testament. “By faith the
harlot, Rahab,” notice the New Testament preserves her designation to show you
what the background was with this woman. “By faith the harlot, Rahab, perished
not with them that believed not, when she had received the spies with
peace.” Notice “them that believed
not,” here you have a clear indication by the infallible New Testament that
every person in Jericho was an unbeliever.
So don’t think it’s bad news when you happen to be 1% in some area. You may be the only believer for miles
around, don’t think this is something new in history. Here you had one woman all alone in the city
of Jericho, all by her lonesome; didn’t have any other believer to have
fellowship with, didn’t even have a Bible to read and yet she was a
believer. And she survived and God
rewarded her faith because He got her out of there and He protected her when He
would judge that city.
And so “she perished not with them believed not, when she had received
the spies,” but it’s not “when,” it’s because.
In other words, her physical salvation was conditioned on her act of
faith. In faith she received the spies,
the word “received” is welcomed. Now you
have to again put your thinking back into the time of this feudal city,
thousands of people dominated by a total anti-Christian, anti-Biblical
worldview, and this woman opens her door and deliberately, against all the
authorities of her day, against the King of Jericho, against the police, the
secret police who must have known what was going on and who did because where
did they go first? They went to Rahab’s house; they knew what was going
on. The King of Jericho had his spies
too, and his spies are just as proficient as the spies of Israel. And this woman defies her king, she defies
her culture, she goes against it and tosses it overboard and lets the spies
in. This is a tremendous act of faith
this woman is doing. It’s an act of
total rebellion against the world in which she lives. It’s nothing less than that, a total
rebellion against everything she knows; a rebellion against the god she was
taught in her education, a rebellion against everything, what she was taught in
her home, everything was turned over by this act of letting the spies in
because she had grown up in an apostate culture. And because she “received the spies with
peace,” therefore God saved her.
Turn to James 2:25 for justification by works. After dealing with Abraham notice who else
comes into the picture—Rahab. Isn’t that
fantastic? Of all the people God could
have picked, who is He picking? Here
this woman is listed in the hall of faith, Heb. 11; here she’s listed as equal
with Abraham as a tremendous example of faith, a tremendous woman, this woman. In verse 25 it says, “…was not Rahab, the
harlot, justified by works, when she had received the messengers, and had sent
them out another way?” If you are
sensitive to what we see in Romans you say wait a minute, don’t we have a
conflict of Scripture, here is justification by works; Romans, justification by
faith without works. What is going on,
how do you reconcile this?
Go back to James 2:17, “Even so, faith, if it has not works, is dead,
being alone. [18] Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works; show
me thy faith without thy works, and I will show thee my faith by my works. [19]
Thou believe that there is one God; thou do well. The demons also believe, and tremble. [20]
But will thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead? [21] Was not
Abraham, our father, justified by works, when he had offered Isaac, his son,
upon the altar? [22] See thou how faith wrought with his works, and by works
was faith made perfect. [23] And the scripture was fulfilled which said,
Abraham believed God and it was imputed unto him for righteousness; and he was
called the friend of God.” Verse 23 is
Genesis 15:6; Gen. 15:6 means that man is saved by faith alone without
works. Wait a minute, doesn’t James
contradict? Martin Luther thought so,
that’s why he threw this thing out of the canon.
But the solution is easier than that and it’s found in verse 22-23. James’ thinking is this: “the Scripture was
fulfilled which said, Abraham believed God.” Let’s go back to Abraham and then
we can understand Rahab. Abraham
believed God, Gen. 15; that was back when God confirmed the covenant and by
faith he accepted it. Later on, way down
in Gen. 21 and following you get into the whole complex of stories about Isaac
and offering up Isaac. The pronouncement
of Abraham’s justification was back in Gen. 15:6 and so then James says in
verse 23 when he quotes Gen. 15:6 “the Scripture was fulfilled.” Now what does he mean by that? It means that God’s pronouncement of
justification was now historically and empirically vindicated. It means that God pronounced Abraham to be
righteousness back in Gen. 15. In
chapter 21-22 and all the rest of this whole complex, then Abraham historically
is shown to be righteous.
Remember when God justifies what has to happen. God the Father declares you to have +R. What do you have to have before you have
justification? You have to have
imputation. So God the Son gives you +R,
absolute righteousness and then God the Father says you have absolute
righteousness, that’s justification. But
absolute righteousness is always conformity to the Law. So if God’s sentence of justification is to
be valid, sooner or later that righteousness has to show itself in
history. In other words, if God has
pronounced me righteous it’s initially true by Christ’s imputation, but at the
time that I receive imputed +R God also regenerates and He causes a new nature
to develop which will produce the fruit of +R.
And as this new nature grows, if it’s there, and it has to be there or
God’s sentence is wrong, when God pronounces sentence He also means that that
person is destined to be conformed to His standards and there’d better be some
historical evidence of it after it’s done, otherwise the sentence is never
vindicated.
This is why James says, back in verse 18, “Thou hast faith … show
me.” Show me! That’s James’ point. The justification that James is talking about
in chapter 2 is the justification in historic space/time. It’s an empirical justification of God’s
prior justification. In other words, it
has to be played out into the realm of history where it can be observed. God’s [can’t understand word] of
justification had to be tested. For
example, you could argue this way: in Genesis 15 God pronounced Abraham
righteous. But as a thinking person I
have every question, now just a minute, is Abraham righteous, where’s the
evidence. And if you say well, he
doesn’t have to show it, fruit isn’t necessary, well then I have all the right
in the world to call into question God’s sentence in the first place of
pronouncing the man righteous. Now it
doesn’t mean that the man is going to be perfectly righteous, but it means that
somewhere along the line there has to be an empirical evidence of the faith of
the new nature that God gave back when He pronounced sentence on the person
who’s justified. And that’s why we have
the right to expect to look for fruit. A
person has signs of fruit and should have signs of fruit and that’s the point
that’s made here in chapter 2.
Now some people obviously take this to mean that you are saved by works
and that is not what James is talking about.
Go back to the illustration: you have a child without an arm, born
congenitally deformed; here’s a child without an arm. You have the concept and the standard of
normal; you have a vision of a healthy child with a full completed arm. The child is given an arm through surgery,
healing from outside, that’s grace.
After the child has received the arm, if it is a real healing, shouldn’t
we expect the child to be using his arm normally? That’s the point and that’s what James is
saying, that if it’s really a saving faith, it’s grounded on something that’s
true and it works; and if saving faith is really present in the individual’s
life sooner or later it’s got to show itself and that’s what he’s pointing out
in this epistle.
Rahab was a believer, sometime, we don’t know when, but before the spies
came. Here’s the timeline of her life;
somewhere back here Rahab was a believer, at this point she was justified
before God. But now she has not yet been
justified in space/time history. It
hasn’t flowed out, [can’t understand words] so you can take a picture of this
righteousness as it flows out into history, and so later on God sends the spies
and now this woman has the opportunity to show forth her righteousness and she
does it. And then James says she’s
justified. In other words at this point
she was vindicated in space/time history.
So one is a legal justification and the other is an empirical
justification; the two have to go together.
It doesn’t mean you’re saved by works.
Anything more than the boy with the arm; he doesn’t get the arm because
he exercises his old arm; he’s given the arm but after he’s given the arm the
arm should work normally. So after we’ve
been justified then we should show the fruit of this righteousness and that’s
the point with Rahab. This woman got
into a crisis situation and she reacted in a righteous fashion.
Now let’s summarize the whole point tonight. We are in a Jericho; we are in a culture
that’s apostatizing. We, like Rahab, are
on doomed ground. The only reason why
this country has survived as long as it has is two reasons: one, there’s been a
moral remnant of believers in this country that have sacrificially given to the
Lord, who have witnessed, who have been faithful in their areas of
responsibility, and don’t kid yourself, that is the only reason why the United
States is going today, not because of our natural resources or anything else;
it’s because we have a sizeable segment, still, of believers in this
country. And when that segment
deteriorates this country is going down.
The second reason why this country has not gone down is because we have
not engaged, yet, in anti-Semitism. We
have not violated the terms of the Abrahamic Covenant; the moment we do we’ve
had it. So there are two reasons,
basically, why the United States has survived in history, even though we have
made the most nitwit decisions any nation has ever made, we have progressed
further along the lines of decay faster than practically any culture that has
ever come. Rome survived us by ten times.
Just think of how young this country is in the span of history. 1776, we aren’t even 200 years old as a
nation and we’re all ready to fall apart. Economically we are ready to fall
apart; militarily we are ready to fall apart and in our foreign policy we are
ready to fall apart. We live in a
Jericho. We live surrounded by
corruption. And just as God was able to
deal with Rahab in the middle of it when she was alone against everybody, with
no fellowship, she had nobody’s shoulder to cry on, and she had nobody to go
to; faith was there, she had only one thing, the truth, and she sat on that
truth day and night. And she put that cord,
as we’re going to see, in the window and she sat there with absolute confidence
in what God was going to do.
We also have other things that parallel Rahab and ourselves and one of
the things that to me is very interesting is that Rahab had time to think
through to the truth and after she had thought through and got this thing
stabilized God brought the crisis situation into her life. This is why God may not be ready to use some
of you as believers, because you still are not yet trained properly. You do not have background. If you were faced with the kind of situation
that Rahab was faced with you’d have the spies executed or something, you’d
just panic and everybody would get fouled up, etc. because you have not yet
trained yourself into the position of Rahab. Rahab was a woman who was prepared
and when she reached the level of preparedness God used her.
A final point about Rahab is this, that the God who was her savior was
the God who was the executor of all of her friends. Jesus Christ is not the loving little thing
that holds lambs that you see in some Sunday School pictures. Jesus Christ is going to be the deliverer of
hellfire on your friends, your loved ones who have rejected Jesus Christ. I’m not preaching hellfire and brimstone
tonight; I don’t believe in that kind of thing, trying to scare people into
heaven. But I’m here to say this, that
Jesus Christ has two roles and don’t ever forget it. One is a God of grace as He takes His
children out of the judgment. The other
is a God of destruction and He’s the angel of death and this is what He was
here, the captain of the Lord’s host which we’ll meet in a few chapters is none
other than the preincarnate Jesus Christ.
He is the One who kills and He is the One who makes alive. You must come to terms with Him.