Joshua 6
Lie of a Prostitute – 2:2-8
We go through for the third time this second chapter of Joshua. Joshua 2 has four problems in it and the best
way of covering these is to go through the chapter four times, each time
stressing one of these points because it’s so interwoven you can’t possibly
sort out the various verses. That’s why
we’ve chosen to approach the second chapter in a rather unusual way. These four problems that we find here that
are crucial for us to answer, first of all deal with the problem of sovereignty
and free will, or the problem of divine guidance, how it is possible that
Joshua, having had verbal revelation from God, actually sought out by human
means and did human research to gather material, other than that which was in
Scripture, put together to form his basis for divine guidance.
The second problem was the problem of how Rahab believed. The third problem is the problem of Rahab’s
lie and the fourth problem is the problem of Rahab’s background and her
consequent elevation in salvation history.
While these first two areas that we dealt with, the problem of
sovereignty and free will, in 2:1 we find Joshua sending out these spies. And some commentators would say that this was
a lack of faith on Joshua’s part, since the Lord had already told Joshua how to
handle the problem, etc. Nevertheless,
Joshua sends out spies and we showed that there were many reasons for this;
there were actually four that we pointed to.
One was that Joshua needed divine guidance and divine guidance only
comes by combining the Bible, special revelation, with man and the world,
general revelation. These two must be
combined to get divine guidance. You can
have the principles in the Bible but you have to explore your own situation and
the circumstances, etc. a very obvious principle, there shouldn’t be any
problem. But you cannot be guided, in
other words, by the Word divorced from your concrete situation in life; nor can
you be guided by just looking at the situation without the Word. The two fit together. So here we have Joshua sending out a set of
spies to gather informational material.
That’s the first reason.
The second reason he sent them out was to confirm God’s promises. Remember the hornet, and God had promised to
send this strange thing called “hornet” which is not hornet but was translated
as such by the Septuagint translation before Christ and has come down through
the English translation as “hornet.” But
in the Hebrew the original word doesn’t mean hornet, it means discouragement
and panic. So the second reason for
sending the spies is to confirm the promises of God that God would conduct
psychological warfare on a massive scale and He would so dishearten the
inhabitants of the land that they had practically won the battle before they
even crossed the
The third reason for sending the spies is to get back the one believer
who was in a city marked for destruction.
And from this we derive the same principle you find again and again in
Scripture, God knows His children and no matter how chaotic the situation may
be and when God goes to judge and destroy He will always lift His children out
from it. This happens in the Tribulation
in part; it happens in history partly; it happened in Sodom and Gomorrah
perfectly; it happened with Noah and the ark perfectly, and it happened at
Jericho perfectly, that God has a means of saving and preserving alive those
who have received Christ as Savior when judgment falls on the whole kit and
caboodle, which happened here.
So when Jesus Christ, as the captain of the Lord’s host, came to the
city of
Then the fourth thing that we said was pure extra-Biblical tradition and
it’s not authoritative, it’s not inspired, but there is an extra-Biblical
tradition that Salmon, who eventually became the husband, the Jewish prince who
became the husband of Rahab was one of the spies, so here you have right
man/right woman, God sends a spy in and there in the middle of this city he
meets his future wife and together they are incorporated in the line of
Messiah.
Last time we dealt with the problem of Rahab’s faith. We saw in 2:9-11 how Rahab believed before
the men came. This is important, she
believed before the men came. Rahab was not led to the Lord by the spies;
she had been led to the Lord by the Lord before the spies ever got to the city
and how she was is a very good example of how God can evangelize without human
means, and how He can reach people who need the gospel without our butting into
the process. This is not an excuse for
lack of evangelism; it just says that God can do it if He has to. So in verses 9-10 she testifies, she says “I
know,” and with that we realize that she doesn’t have a 20th century
concept of faith, it’s not this “I hope” it’s true, or it might be true and it
might not be true, or I wish it were true, or something else.
With Rahab, she said “I know” it is true, I know without a doubt that it
is true and this is why; these are the three things I know. I know that the Lord has given you the land,
that’s the first thing. I know that your
terror has fallen upon us, that’s the second thing. I know that all the inhabitants of the land
faint because of you, that’s the third thing.
Notice the last two things that she knew, the terror in the land and the
inhabitants fainting, are things that she could empirically observe, no question
about this. But if you’re an alert student
of Scripture you should ask: how did she know the first thing. How did she know it was the Lord that was
doing this; how did she know this wasn’t just a series of accidents that
happened in history and
Then in verse 10 she gives the source of her information, “For we have
heard,” (1) “how the LORD dried up the water of the Red Sea for you, when ye
came out of Egypt, and” (2) “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.” The word “utterly destroy”
is charem, and charem is the Hebrew word that is used for a holy destruction. You set apart a city and you devote it to
God, the word means devote; and then you are to go into that city and slaughter
every living thing for God. You’re not
to take any captives, not to take any prisoners, nor are you to loot. This is something that most people don’t see
about this charem principle; it was
actually hard for an army to obey. You
say well this is a grizzly way of running a war. Actually it wasn’t because in the ancient
world an army lived off its booty and here they couldn’t touch anything because
this was charem. So we have the charem principle, it’s modified many times in Scripture, of course,
not this strict as I’ve just said but that is the strictest form of charem principle.
Now let’s put this together again so you are clear as to how Rahab, who
is looked upon in the New Testament as one of the two greatest believers in
history; you have Abraham who was a Gentile and Rahab who was a Gentile; both
are looked upon as two examples of faith.
Both of them fought an entire cultural worldview that pressed in upon
them. Both of them were absolutely
alone, they had no fellowship; they had to fight this thing out all by
themselves without any help from any other believer. In one case you have a man, Abraham, dwelling
in
This basically is how they did
it, and how they did it, the mechanics of how they did it, actually if you are
a Christian you did this. You may not be
able to articulate it as well as this but nevertheless, this was the process
that you must have some way gone through.
Let’s look at the first three areas that she had. She had the world, she had men and she had
the Bible. Now I’ll explain those three
terms but no person can believe without all three operating. This is why theologians call the first two GR
or general revelation and the Bible SR or special revelation. They both must be combined, and this is why
it is wrong for Christians to say that the Bible alone, uninterpreted by
history or anything else, is sufficient; it’s not sufficient. The Bible is given to you presuming you
already know general revelation.
And this is why we have to start as Paul did in Romans 1 with the
unbeliever surrounded by that which he already knows. GR is the basis of condemning the man who has
never heard. “What about those who
haven’t heard?” Here’s about those who
haven’t heard, GR, that’s the basis of which they are condemned. They are condemned because they know this
truth. Therefore, when anyone, for
example as a Christian goes out in psychology, mathematics, physics, chemistry,
biology or any of these fields he’s dealing with absolute truth, he is dealing
with some phase of general revelation and it’s not to be looked upon as some
sort of second hand excuse for earning a living. This is a high calling of God to circulate
over into these areas of general revelation and bring them into submission to
the Word of God. So don’t discourage
people who may operate here and (quote) don’t have “full time Christian
service.” You can have people in full
time Christian service who study all sorts of subjects and they are just as
much in full time Christian service.
Rahab had these four aspects of revelation. The first was the world. What did she have that she could point to in
her world? Forget the Bible for a
moment. Here’s a lone woman in the middle
of the land of the Canaanites, she doesn’t know personally Moses, she doesn’t
have a copy of Scripture because it’s being written on the desert south of
where she lives so she doesn’t have any Scripture. She doesn’t have anybody to come to her and
knock on her door and tell her the gospel.
How then is this woman going to believe?
She is going to believe by a series of deductions. The first one comes off in this area of the
world. What does she know about the
world? She knows that historical events
are happening around her in her generation.
So the first thing she knows is historical events. There are certain crises that are occurring
in her generation that are open to observation by Christian and non-Christian
alike. What are some of these
crises? The first crisis she tells you
in verse 10, the crisis of the destruction of
The second thing that she had in the area of the world was apparently,
as we learn from archeology, we have a series of catastrophes that destroyed
ancient civilizations all over what is now western Middle East, that is along
the eastern side of the Mediterranean, and Crete, etc. There are destruction levels in these cities
as archeologists have dug down and it’s apparent that many of these cities
experienced catastrophes during this time.
So besides the Red Sea you had numerous other crises that were occurring
all over the ancient world. And don’t
you think this started shaking things up, this kind of thing would be going on
and all the people would begin to ask questions, what is going on here. We also have evidence that the Nile dropped
22 feet in this particular time, the water gauges before this era registered 22
feet higher than they do after this era so therefore something radically
happened to the whole Nile valley at this time.
So there are all sorts of things that went on in her generation and this
is what began to wake her up—something is going on in my generation. Just as if you are astute today and you look at
the Middle East and how it’s developing and how Israel has come back as a
nation and how Russia is one of the key nations that is being oriented against
the nation Israel, this should key you to certain things that are happening in
your generation that you’d better look at carefully.
So we have things going on in history, not part of the Bible, part of
history. Then we have things going on
inside Rahab herself. Rahab, as all
other members of the human race, has volition, she has conscience, she has personal
affection and she has mentality. And
this means that she has these functions and it means that as a member of the
human race she has a natural craving to have these functions fulfilled. For example, her volition: Rahab has a
craving to have some view of life, a philosophy of life that will give her
significant choice, so that she becomes somebody that makes significant
decisions in her life and she’s not just on a treadmill, same old thing day
after the day, doing the dishes, etc. this kind of thing, with no progress,
just this same old dreary life. And as a
human being she finds that her existing situation, she was brought up as a
young girl, is insufficient; this is crazy, this Canaanite religion, it doesn’t
give me any significance, I’m just going on as a machine, as a victim of the
processes of nature and that’s all that I am.
And then you look at her conscience, she’s a prostitute and don’t you
think that didn’t bother her at times just a little bit, and so she began to
look around and she said now look, there must be a problem to my guilt, there
must be a solution to my guilt; am I guilty or am I guilty and if I try to
suppress my guilt it keeps popping up somewhere, and so she struggled with the
problem of guilt inside her own soul.
Then she had the problem of personal affections, her own value, and she
apparently was a woman who deeply loved her family by what went on in chapter
2. Rahab stayed behind in Jericho when
she could have left with the spies. She
could have walked out of that city with the spies when the spies took off. Why did she hang around? She hung around because, as we’re going to
see next time, she had to lead her whole family to Jesus Christ before the
judgment came. She had to get her
father, her mother, her sisters and her brothers won to Christ and in that
house before that judgment came, so she had a job of personal evangelism that
she had to take care of at home. And so
she stayed around and tried to do this.
So as far as her values were concerned, she was a woman very sensitive
to the lives of others and so she had to find some way in which this could be
satisfied.
And then mentality, she had to have something, she thought very
logically as is indicated in chapter 2, she was a woman who thought these
things through and realized that this Canaanite religion was just fluff, it was
just chaos, it didn’t give her mind any base to operate on. So out of these things you can see this
disturbs her. And this is a witness,
this is God-consciousness. Now if the
gospel had never gotten to Rahab, on what basis do you think God would have
judged her? Well, He would have judged
her on these two bases; this was sufficient to condemn Rahab to hell. She knew the truth, in other words, the
problem she had here was suppression of her God-consciousness.
Now how did she get information?
We do now know from Scripture except by the actions of chapter 2 this
woman had latched on to the fact that Israel was making a claim that she had
never heard before, never in all of ancient history had she ever heard this
claim made and the claim that she heard, probably through tourists, and
visitors to her house of prostitution, etc. she heard this, that we’ve got a
nation out there east of Jordan that makes this strange claim; they claim that
they are in verbal contact with their God and that He is the Lord of history,
and that He is guiding them to victory after victory after victory. That’s what she faces; she faces the claim of
Israel.
Now put yourself in Rahab’s shoes for a moment. Here you are facing all of these things. How did she believe? She believed when she realized that this
claim of Israel to have contact with her God which was called Yahweh or
Jehovah, that that claim and that claim alone was the solution to the world’s
problems and her personal problems. The
external world and the internal world were solved by this whole concept that
grew out of a personal God communicating to the nation. And she put this all together and she said
this is right and this is the truth and I believe it. We don’t know when this happened, it could
have happened years before the spies came, but Rahab at some point in time
believed and became a believer in Jesus Christ.
You say how could she become a believer in Jesus Christ when Jesus Christ
wasn’t around.
Well how she became a believer in Jesus Christ is the same as all Old
Testament saints became believers in Christ.
First of all they had as their object of faith the Son of God; God the
Son is the only person out of the Trinity that has ever been revealed so man
can see Him. So God the Son was being
revealed, it was He who triumphed over Pharaoh and the things, the heel of
triumph is located in Exodus 15. The
means of salvation was the same, faith.
The basis of salvation was the same, a future cross of Christ, although
they didn’t know it was going to be a cross, nevertheless they trusted that
Jehovah would make up for their sin problem.
And so in a moment of time Rahab was translated into the kingdom of
light out of the kingdom of darkness.
And this one woman against her whole culture, against a snotty remark of
probably hundreds of her friends and family and loved ones, this woman became a
believer in Christ and she rebelled en
toto against her generation and the values and the concepts it held, and
she put her whole weight on Jehovah and His claims with Israel.
Now, this woman we said is a believer.
She acts out her faith, her faith is true and real because as we said,
she opened the door and when she opened the door to the spies we get introduced
to the third great problem of this chapter, the problem of her lie. Let’s look at 2:2, “And it was told the king
of Jericho,” you see the spies have come in, they come in at night, this is a
military intelligence they’re sending in to get information on the enemy, and
the king of Jericho has a tremendous counterspy system. Those spies aren’t in the city an hour that
his counterspies know they are there and they know where they are. So they report back to the king, King, there
are two men that have come in from the sons of Israel and they have come into
this house, they’re located on such and such street, in such and such
address. We saw them go in there and
what do you want us to do.
So the counterspies of the king of Jericho make a report back to him
immediately, and they say, “Behold, there came men in here tonight of the
children of Israel, to search out the country.”
They know what these spies are after.
“Search” is the verb to search intensively, it means literally to dig
down, dig deep, and it means these spies have come in here not only to case out
Jericho but they have come in to find all our defenses, they have probably note
papers, etc. on their person and they’re writing down how many guards we have
at each gate, they’re writing down how many weapons they can see in the street,
what kind of reaction we have inside the city, how we’ve planned our defenses,
etc. So the spies, we know what they’re
here for and they’ve come to find out what our defenses are.
In verse 3, “And the king of Jericho sent unto Rahab,” and so
immediately the police come, and these people say to Rahab, “Bring forth the
men who are come to thee, who are entered into thine house; for they have come
to search out all the country.” This
last phrase, “for they come to search out all the country,” is a very
terrifying phrase to Rahab. This means
that she is now faced with either treason or patriotism. At this point Rahab is faced with an
accusation that these men are declared enemies of the country, they are enemies
of the nation and the police knock on the door and they say we know that you
have spies and people who are in this country who are going to destroy us and
if you don’t let them out, implication, you are a traitor. And I need not go into the details of how
they handled traitors in that day. They
gave them one way tickets out to the gate and then they hung them on the gate
and that was how they solved the problem of treason.
In that day they dealt with traitors this way so you can imagine, here’s
this woman, all alone; no other believers.
A woman all alone, no husband to turn to, nobody to turn to, and the
police knocking on her door. You’ve got
to catch this and if you want a vivid way of visualizing this maybe some of you
have read The Diary of Anne Frank, or
you can visualize what the Dutch Christians must have done in Holland in
1941-42, when the Nazis came in and took over Holland and some of the
Christians would hide Jews in their attics, in their homes and the Nazi police
would knock on the door at night and say we’re coming in here to search your
house, from top to bottom and if we find any Jews in here you’re going out to
the gas chambers with them. And you
can’t imagine people living in this suspense night and day, night and day, with
the click of the heels outside the door always fearing that some day that knock
will come in the deep of night and the secret police will be at the door, and
now you’re faced with a problem.
I say this because you’ve got to get the analogy, to feel the tension
that was upon Rahab. This is not just a
sweet little knock on the door, it was a horrifying thing, something she must
have feared from the moment those men came into her house. We might also think, for example, of the
Arabs who harbored Christians during the days of the Islamic persecutions and
when the Islamic Arabs would come and they would slaughter and torture
Christians, and many of the Arabs harbored Christians. We see this halfway during the Tribulation
when thousands and thousands of believers will be hunted and hounded by the
secret police of the Beast and he will be in every nation and you will have
believers of that day who are going to show their face, the Gentiles who are
going to show their face by harboring Jewish evangelists in this house, all
this defying the secret police of the antichrist. So this is a very real thing. We might say that we can’t go on beyond verse
3 to realize that there are believers tonight, in January 1971, many places on
the globe that are faced with the same kind of trial that Rahab is faced with,
a trial of life and death, whether you’re going to be a patriot or whether
you’re going to be a traitor to your nation.
And here the police challenge you, for when they say this, there is no
turning back, Rahab has no other choice, at this point, this lone woman, a lone
believer, trapped in a city with the gates shut, must make a decision, is she
or is she not a traitor; is she a patriot, is she one who will bow her knee to
the divine institution number four, the institution of government and say I
willingly obey the government authority and thereby hand over these believers
to the secret police or does she turn the other way and say no, these are men
in the army of the Lord and I defy the divine institutions, I defy the police,
and I defy the authority of my country.
And she is facing a tremendous decision.
One way she’s turning against the men that are God’s army; she turns the
other way and she is defying the nation and in rebellious authority against
it. Therefore which choice does she have
to make.
Now this is the tension with which we enter verses 4-5 where she tells
her lie. In verse 4 she said, “And the
woman took the two men,” verse 4 is a parenthesis, in other words, this tells
you what had happened, maybe the men were in the back parlor or something and
the police were at the front door and they knocks and she says just a minute or
something and she gets them up on the roof somehow. And she “took the two men, and hid them, and
said thus, There came men unto me, but I know not from where they came.” Now this is a lie, it’s the first part of her
lie; she knew where they came from because she wouldn’t have harbored them in
her house if she didn’t know where they came from. She was very clear where they came from; they
were the sons of Israel. And she
wouldn’t have taken the pains to harbor them unless she did realize where they
came from.
Verse 5, “And it came to pass,” she continues her lie, “about the time
of shutting of the gate, when it was dark, that the men went out; and where the
men went I do not know. Pursue after
them quickly; for ye shall overtake them,” or you can overtake them. And she sends the secret police out on a wild
goose chase after the spies that are there in her house. So here a very flagrant lie is told. So we have to come face to face with this
problem. In this situation is this
believer or is she not justified in telling a lie? Is she or is she not justified in the cause
of holy war to set aside one of God’s moral imperatives? Does this represent an exception to God’s
absolute law? So we have to look at
this. In our generation people say yes,
no trouble at all, our generation has no trouble whatever saying Rahab is
justified at this point; none whatever.
We have something called situation ethics, made popular by a book
written by Joseph Fletcher in which he says on page 72, “in the situation,
under extreme pressure, we could make a formal but false apostasy under persecution
for the sake of dependence or the life of an underground church.” In other words what Fletcher was saying at
such and such a situation, such as this one, believers would be justified in
lying and falsely saying I do not believe in Jesus Christ to get the police
away from your door. And this is
situation ethics.
Now you’ve got to, in order to make this realistic and not an abstract
theoretical argument, just think of your house in a situation that could easily
come in this country, where you have an absolute totalitarian dictatorship,
where you have police on every corner and where they are looking for people and
you harbor these people in your house.
Put them in uniform if it makes it more visual to you and imagine them
knocking on your door at night, and you’re all alone, and you’ve got to make a
snap decision, you’ve got to realize the pressure on this woman. Now under this kind of condition is the woman
or is she not justified in telling a lie?
Fletcher obviously says she is.
We can cite precedence with Scripture.
Turn to Exodus 1:15 where we have a problem when is often the case, when
you have a race that threatens a civilization, one of the policies that has
been traditionally used in history to solve the problem is genocide. So in Exodus 1:15, “And the king of Egypt spoke
to the Hebrew midwives, of which the name of one was Shiphrah, and the name of
the other Puah. [16] And he said, When
ye do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew woman, and see them upon the
stools; if it be a son, then ye shall kill him: but if it be a daughter, then
she shall live. [17] But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of
Egypt commanded them, but saved the male children alive. [18] And the king of
Egypt called for the midwives, and said unto them, “Why have ye done this
thing, and have saved the male children alive? [19] And the midwives said unto
Pharaoh, Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are
lively, and are delivered before the midwives come in unto them. [20] Therefore
God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied, and became very
mighty.” So you could say that God
blessed them because they lied, God blessed them because they broke his
commandment and deceived. This would be
one support that you might try if you would say that Rahab was justified.
Turn to 2 Samuel 17 and you can see a similar incident, in which a woman
again is involved. Notice, by the way,
all of the examples I am showing you are women.
There’s a reason for this. In the
ancient world the woman was in a worse off position as far as her power and
authority is concerned than today. So
therefore these women were faced with male authority and they had nowhere to
retreat; it would be very easy for the woman in this situation to lie; it’s the
easiest way out, so you see this recurrent pattern. You see it in Exodus 1; you see it in 2 Sam.
17:16, David and his gorilla band are fleeing from Absalom in the revolt, and
so his prophet says “send quickly, and tell David, saying, Lodge not this night
in the plains of the wilderness, but speedily pass over, lest the king be
swallowed up, and all the people that are with him. [18] Now Jonathan and
Ahimaaz stayed by En-rogel; for they might not be seen to come into the
city. And a wench [maidservant] went and
told them, and they went and told King David.”
Verse 19, :Nevertheless, a lad saw them, and told Absalom,” Absalom is
the man who is chasing David, it’s his own son, Absalom has seized the throne,
it’s a coup de etat and he has seized
the throne and he is now chasing down his father to kill him because Absalom
wants to be king.
And so Absalom gets this information from this lad, “but they went both
of them away quickly, and came to a man’s house in Bahurim, who had a well in
his court; they went down to it. [19] And the woman took and spread a covering
over the well’s mouth, and spread ground grain on it; and the thing was not
known. [20] And when Absalom’s servants came to the woman to the house, they
said, Where are Ahimaaz and Jonathan? And the woman said unto them, They are
gone over the brook of water. And when
they had sought and could not find them, they returned to Jerusalem.” [21] And
it came to pass, after they were departed, that they came up out of the well,
and went and told King David….”
Here again you have a woman lying and deceiving to protect God’s
people. Is she or is she not
justified? Finally, you could go to
another passage, 1 Kings 22:19 and you could see a similar incident, where it
seems that almost God Himself lies to protect believers. This is a vision of one of the great prophets
and he reports his vision and he says, when I looked and I saw, [“Hear thou,
therefore, the word of the LORD:] I saw the LORD sitting on His throne, and all
the host of heaven standing by Him on his right and on his left. [20] And the
LORD said, Who shall persuade Ahab, that he may go up and fall at
Ramoth-gilead? And one said on this
manner, and another said on that manner. [21] And there came forth a spirit,
and stood before the LORD, and said, I will persuade him. [22] And the LORD
said unto him, Wherewith [By what means]? And he said, I will go forth, and I
will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And he said, Thou shalt persuade him, and
prevail also; go forth, and do so. [23] Now, therefore, behold, the LORD has
put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets, and the LORD has
spoken evil concerning thee.” So we have
the Lord Himself employing the methods of deceit and lie to destroy and to
laugh at the forces of evil.
Is this or is this not justified.
And you can see the force of the whole situation ethic approach,
utilizing this line of reasoning that yes, given enough pressure in the given
situation you can rationalize away even God’s most powerful absolute
imperatives. What are we to say back to
this? To say this we have to go back to
the time of Jesus Christ, John 8. When
in doubt about a command or a behavior pattern, do a study of the life of Jesus
Christ and see what He did and see how He reacted in pressure situations, then
having seen this, you have your pattern of perfect obedience. There is never any question that whatever
Jesus Christ does or is reported to have done in the Gospels, whatever the
report, you can bet that it’s absolutely correct, otherwise Jesus Christ is not
God. So therefore if we can study the
life of Christ, watch how He reacted, then we have our model for behavior.
In John 8:44, the Lord Jesus Christ turns to the Jews of His time, who
were in rebellion against Him and He says, “You are of your father the devil,”
Satan, “and the lusts of your father you will do.” Jesus Christ must turn, in love, to this
generation and say that “you are of your father the devil, and the lusts of
your father ye will do. He was a
murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no
truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he
speaks of his own [nature]; for he is a liar, and the father of it.” And here Jesus Christ makes clear that in no
uncertain terms that lying is characteristic of the satanic nature and it is
characteristic because Satan is in rebellion against the truth and a person in
rebellion against the truth will always crank out lies, and therefore Satan
becomes the father of all lies. His
very, very nature, his own person, if we could draw his essence you might say,
is that of a lie. If you want to
summarize Satan he’s called a murderer and a liar and a deceiver. Why is this?
Because that is his nature, satanic.
You say well why is this satanic, why is lying this bad? Because lying always destroyed the
credibility of the character of the liar.
You cannot lie once without dismantling your credibility. One lie is enough to dismantle your
credibility, and lying is always looked upon as a form of suicide in
Scripture. It is a way in which a soul
has of killing itself because you dismantle your own very character every time
you tell a lie. Satan has dismantled
himself in this sense. He has
emasculated is own character by lying, habitually lying.
But you say wait a minute, isn’t this unrealistic to say that in every
situation, in EVERY situation, regardless of the pressure, you mean to tell me
it’s God’s absolute will never to lie.
Let’s take a pressure situation in the life of Jesus Christ and let’s
see if we can find some time during the ministry of Jesus Christ where He faced
a very similar situation. And let’s
study how Jesus Christ reacted. We have
such an incident in John 19, Jesus Christ in judgment. All Jesus need do here, just look away from
this judgment; all He need to do is to tell one slight lie. He can say yes, I am the Messiah but I’m not
the Son of Man. That’s all He needs to
say… all He needs to say because in this day apparently the Son of Man wasn’t
just referring to His humanity; it was referring to the image in Daniel of
Jehovah coming out of the clouds. And so
that’s all Jesus would have to say, yeah, I believe I’m the Messiah, but
because He’s interrogated from the court, we want to know are you the Son of
Man.
We find this in the study of the Gospel narratives, are you really the
Son of Man. And so they go back and
forth, back and forth in this trial and the heat gets stronger and stronger and
finally in verse 8, “When Pilate, therefore, heard that saying, he was the more
afraid; [9] And he went again into the judgment hall, and said unto Jesus, Form
where art thou? But Jesus gave him no
answer.” Now watch the ensuing dialogue
that happens here because this gives you the tip off to the divine viewpoint in
a crisis situation used by Jesus Christ.
In verse 10 Pilate said back to Him, don’t you speak to me? And you can just see it, he’s the Roman
judge, he’s the procurator, he’s the man in authority, and he says look, I can
let you off, why don’t you speak to me.
“Do you not know that I have the power to crucify thee, and I have the
power to release you?” Now look at this
fantastic statement Jesus makes right back to him in verse 11, “You could have
no power at all against Me, except it were given thee from above; therefore, he
that delivered Me unto thee has the greater sin.” And what He does is say no, Pilate, you are
not in control. And he’s saying to the
police in this particular situation, no, your authority has been given to you
by one greater than you and you only have your authority because He wills
it. The authority doesn’t come from you
and I’m not scared of looking you right in the eye and telling you that. And that’s what Jesus did in the pressure
situation. He didn’t lie. He just looked them straight in the eye and
said you don’t have the authority, My Father has the authority.
Now, how do we apply this back to these other verses? If this truly is the way that should be
reactive in this crisis situation, then how do we justify those three passages
of Scripture that I showed you? Turn
back, in reverse sequence, to 1 Kings 22:19-23.
This is back in that prophetic vision, and the lying spirit that the
Lord sent. The key to this passage is in
verse 19, in this situation what happens?
God called a meeting of the angelic council; at the angelic council… we
don’t know much about this angelic council except it appears at certain
passages in God’s Word. All I can say is
to summarize it quickly, is that Scriptures seem to imply that the universe is
run through the mediation of this angelic council at the present time and will
be so run until halfway through the Tribulation when this angelic council will
be dismembered and the church will replace it.
In other words, every believer in the Church Age will take the place of
this angelic council in control of the universe. But at the moment the angelic force, this
council that’s convened at this point, is in charge. Not that they are the ones that sovereignly
determines it; God sovereignly determines it, but they are the responsible
agencies that carry on.
Now in this situation in verse 19 it says “all the host of heaven” that
includes good and evil angels; that includes Satan, as for example in Job 1
where there’s another meeting of the council, Satan drops in for a visit. In other words, he has free access to this
angelic council. The lying spirit, verse
21, “And there came forth a spirit,” and the spirit volunteers to lie. This apparently is one force of evil, this is
one of the evil spirits, this is one of the fallen angels who volunteers, they
love to lie, I love this assignment Lord, I love to lie, I love to deceive
somebody, let me have a chance. So the
Lord says fine, you want to lie, here I’ve got a job for you, you just go right
down there, and that’s it.
Now this is how God uses evil; and this is almost terrifying when you
think of this, but the most frightening thing to me about the way God runs the
universe is how He utilizes evil for His end.
In other words, Judas Iscariot didn’t deliberately set about to crucify
Christ and Satan didn’t deliberately enter into Judas Iscariot’s heart to
betray Jesus if Satan had known what would happen. If Satan really knew what would happen on the
cross he would never have entered Judas Iscariot’s heart to trespass against
the Lord. But you see, Satan can never
quite do this. He always wants his evil
and his rebellion and it’s like a person moving in this direction and God just
deflects it and it accomplishes in the end God’s perfect purpose. This is maddening to be in Satan’s position,
no matter how hard he tries, in the end he turns around and says you know what,
I just got through doing the Lord’s will.
And no matter how hard I rebel against Him it turns out in the end I’ve
accomplished exactly what He wants me to do.
The only thing I can think of in the human realm that would be analogous
to this kind of feeling would be playing a master chess player and you get on
the board with your pieces, and no matter how you move your pieces you always
find that how you move your pieces is exactly the way you wanted to and bang,
you’re finished. The master player
always induces you to make the move so you kill yourself and that’s exactly how
God’s sovereignty works in history, utilizing the forces of evil to destroy
themselves. So we find this in 1 Kings 22.
But you say what about 2 Sam. 17?
Let’s go back there, this is the woman who puts a blanket down and she
hides these men in the well and she lies and she says the men have gone the
other way. Actually in this case it looks like she didn’t have to lie at all;
use deception but she didn’t have to lie about it. What do you do about this situation? This is a principle of Bible interpretation
that I do not understand how many ministers in the pulpit cannot get this
through their heads, but I have heard it from the pulpit time and time again
and I have seen it in Christian literature and it violates one of the
fundamental canons of hermeneutics and that is that when you take a historical
narrative in Scripture, the historical narrative does not give you moral
judgments. And you cannot build doctrine
from historical narrative. You get your
doctrine in didactic portions of God’s Word; you then analyze the historical
narrative in the light of the doctrine that you’ve gotten from those other
parts of God’s Word. This is why you
cannot build doctrines in the book of Acts.
Acts has mistakes recorded in it; there are mistakes in the book of Acts
that do not fit with the New Testament, just as there are mistakes here. There are mistakes in every historical book,
not in the sense that they violate the inspiration of Scripture. These mistakes are infallibly recorded. By
mistakes I am talking about people who err, who make errors and these errors
are recorded for our benefit, but historical narratives never gives you norms
and if you hear these Christians say we’ve got to get back to the book of Acts
and we’ve got to return to the 1st century as described in the book
of Acts—nonsense! What do you want, a
bunch of Ananias and Sapphira’s running around.
I can do without that kind. There
are lots of people I can do without in the book of Acts, I wouldn’t want them
in the congregation, horrible people, and there are mistakes that these people
make and there are mistakes the apostles made in the book of Acts.
David is recorded to make mistakes; Solomon is recorded to make
mistakes, etc. Why? Because they’re not God, that’s why. Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ alone is the
only man who didn’t make mistakes.
Therefore every historical narrative has a mixture of good and evil in
it and the way to read and interpret historical narratives in God’s Word is to
use the divine viewpoint you gain from the didactic section, the instruction
section such as the Law, such as the epistles, such as the discourses of Jesus
of Nazareth, etc. This is where you get
it, but historical narratives, unless it is of a certain type. Now one of the types of the historical
narratives that does not follow this plan and principle is Judges. The book of Judges is always analyzed for
you. When you read this book the man who wrote this, or the men who wrote
Judges analyzed it for you; they said this is wrong and this is what happened;
this is wrong and this is what happened, and you have clues. In Genesis you don’t. Abraham is making errors all over the place;
are you going to build doctrine out of Genesis.
You can’t do it.
You cannot build doctrine out of historical narratives and every
preacher who tries to build doctrine out of the book of Acts falls flat on his
face sooner or later because he’s going to have a contradiction. You cannot build doctrine from the book of
Acts. You can use Acts to illustrate
doctrine but you learn in the epistles; you cannot build doctrine directly out
of Acts. Now that’s the same problem
with 2 Sam. 17, it’s a lie, it’s a historical narrative and there’s no problem
with 2 Sam. 17.
But you say wait a minute, over in Exodus 1 that first illustration,
back in Exodus 1 didn’t it say “therefore God blessed.” All right, let’s turn back to Exodus
1:15. Certainly you would say that in
Exodus 1:15 and following it clearly says that God blessed these women because
they lied; the midwives who lied about these Jewish women having their children
too fast for them to get there, they didn’t have to handle infants, they didn’t
get there in time. And so what
happens. All right, verse 20 is the
verse where it says “Therefore,” only one very slight problem, in the Hebrew
it’s not there; that is an interpretation of the King James translators. The phrase in verse 20 from the original
language reads: “And God dealt well with the midwives.” Now why did He deal well with the midwives,
because of verse 17, “the midwives feared God, and they did not as the king of
Egypt commanded them,” that’s the basis of blessing, not the lying. The basis of blessing was that they were
believers, they trusted the Lord, they accepted what they knew of Jesus Christ
in their generation and they were accepted in the kingdom of light, etc.
Now let’s go back to Joshua 2 and deal with Rahab again. What about Rahab? Didn’t we say she was a believer? And yet here it seems that she was
wrong. What happened? Let’s go back to those verses again,
4-5. We said that Rahab had got to the
point in her life of believing that God in heaven above and the earth beneath
was Jehovah. So watch verse 11, she
says, I know that “the LORD your God, he is God in heaven above, and in earth
beneath.” See, this testifies to the
role of God-consciousness. She knew
God-consciousness that there was a God, a God of “heaven above and earth
beneath.” She knew that. But then she connected Jehovah, now verbally
revealing God of Israel and identified as the God she knew must exist. So there’s two parts to her faith. First she had God-consciousness, she believed
in God. Secondly, she moved out and she
said Israel’s God is more than just Israel’s God, Yahweh or Jehovah is this God
and that’s the connection she made. She
said I know there must be a God in heaven above and the earth beneath and this
nation, their God, that’s the One; not Baal, he isn’t the god of heaven, he
isn’t the god I’m looking after, this is the God I’m looking for, the true
God.
So she makes this statement and you’d say well doesn’t Rahab have faith? Yes she does, but she is a new believer and
she doesn’t have background and when she gets in the position she’s in at this
time she panics and she gives out. Her
faith, in other words, is tremendously operative up to a point. Here’s a timeline of her experience. T-1, she has a knock on the door, the police
are there, and somehow she quickly gets the men out of sight, that’s step
two. So far she’s in fellowship, so far
she’s moving along, she’s operating by faith.
Now she comes to an obvious problem, step three she’s lying, she’s out
of fellowship. That’s as far as she can
take it and decides this is getting a little too hot, so I’m going to try a
little human viewpoint here and lie my way out of it.
The reason why she lies is because she’s afraid; it’s very
understandable, this woman is panicked, you’d be panicked, I’d be panicked,
here you have police, you’re all alone, you’re the only believer and you have
these two people and you know what’s going to happen if they get in your house
and you get caught with them. So she
panics and she gets out of fellowship.
Now I’m going to show you something, there were two other believers on
the scene who never got out of fellowship all during the process, because we
now read, verse 7, after the men pursued after them to the Jordan, in verse 8,
“And before they were laid down she came up to them upon the roof,” and what
this means is those spies were so relaxed they were just about ready to sack
out. And here they are, they’ve been
hustled up on the roof underneath all this flax, and it’s dusty and so on up on
this roof, the police are downstairs, they can hear the knock, they can hear
Rahab, and you can image from the human viewpoint what kind of a jam they’re
in. They’re locked in Jericho, the gates
are shut; we know that from verse 5, so there’s absolutely no way they can get
out of the walls because the gate is shut; there is no way they can get out of
the city. So there they are with the
gate locked; they are in a panic situation because the spies that went with
Joshua and Caleb, do you know what happened to them? They never were caught. Remember the twelve spies that went with
Joshua and Caleb, remember what happened to them. They never were caught.
You can imagine these two spies before they went out, Lord, protect us,
we pray that in Your grace you’d protect us, etc. and they go over there, first
thing, bang, they’re caught. This isn’t
supposed to happen, didn’t we pray that God would protect us and now we’re
caught, what kind of a deal is this. So
you can imagine the interruption in their thinking about how God can answer
prayer. And to top it all off, the only
thing that stands between them and arrest is a Gentile believer, and probably
these guys never saw a Gentile believer; probably a completely new phenomena,
just like Peter in the book of Acts, a Gentile believing in Jehovah, fantastic,
where’d that come from, never heard of one of those; what dune did they crawl
out of. And so this is a completely new
person, they’d never saw anything like this before, and a woman to top it
off.
These two guys, they come in there, and good night, everything hangs on
that woman downstairs? And she doesn’t
have any background, she doesn’t have the Scripture in front of her, she hasn’t
been wandering around the desert for 38 years with us so she gets an idea of
the miraculous supply of God, and our salvation hangs on that! Doors locked, police downstairs, and a woman
between the police and them. What’d they
do? Sat down, ready to go to sleep, and
that’s what this verse says. The word
here means lie down to go to sleep, and it shows you that these two believers
were relaxed. They realized that in some
way God would protect them and nothing they could do about it so might as well
relax. Panicking about it isn’t going to
help the situation, crying about it isn’t going to help the situation, and a
prayer meeting isn’t going to help the situation because they’d already prayed
about it. They’d prayed about it before
they left Joshua so they prayed that when they got over here that God would
protect them and now they’re relaxed.
Right in the middle of this thing, everybody is panicked and the two
spies, the object of the whole thing, they’re upstairs waiting to go to
sleep.
And Rahab has to climb upstairs and say hey, before you go to bed guys,
let me tell you something. So here they
are, relaxed, because these believers have faith. You might ask, well how do you suppose they
ever expected to get out of this jam.
They probably wouldn’t tell you, they probably couldn’t have told
you. They’d say we asked the Lord to
protect us, we’re on His mission, we’re in the center of His will for our lives
and God is obliged to fulfill His promises on our behalf. We don’t know how He’s going to do it, we
have the confidence that we’re in the bottom circle, God’s will for us, we’re
believers, and when we’re in God’s will for us nothing can happen to our lives;
there’s no such thing as accidents happening to believers. Nothing can touch us, and so they were tremendously
relaxed individuals.
And of course I would imagine that Rahab got kind of a shock, after
she’d lied her way out of a situation and came back and here these guys are,
she practically had to wake them up and tell them what’s going on. So it must have been a tremendous testimony
to her. Now what promise do you suppose
they must have quoted? We don’t know
what promise these believers had in their minds; we do know one that wasn’t
written at that time but probably is one that we could use in a similar
situation. Isaiah 41:10 is a promise
that we can apply in our lives as believers.
This applies to you if you are operating in God’s will, whatever the
panic situation that you face you have a right to claim this promise. “Fear thou not, for I am with thee; be not
dismayed, for I am thy God; I will strengthen thee, yea, I will help thee, yea,
I will uphold thee with the right hand of My righteousness,” and you don’t have
to lie because God is going to help you.
Now the fact that people lie in these situations means they panic. They don’t know how to handle themselves in
the situation and so the quickest reaction is lie. Now it’s understandable in Rahab’s case. Here she is, a lone woman, in the middle of
this city, look at her background, she probably made her life by lying, and so
it’s a behavior pattern that this woman has learned and as a believer it’s
going to take some unlearning; maybe this is her area of weakness, maybe she’s
the kind of person that would never gossip but she’s habitually lying all over
the place, that’s all she does is lie, lie, lie; maybe this is an area of
weakness so she becomes a believer and she inherits that pattern of
weakness. So in her sin nature, she may
be a very genuine relaxed woman to be around, none of this catty business,
she’s very open, etc. except when she gets in a panic situation she’ll try to
lie her way out of it. It’s just a
behavior pattern she’s learned and it’s going to take her some time, perhaps
many years, as a child of God to erase gradually this pattern of behavior and
have it replaced by that of righteousness.
It takes hours and sweat to do this and falling on her face. This is one situation but I want you to
notice that her best moment was followed by her weakness.
We’re going to draw two conclusions with Rahab’s lie that we can apply
as believers. The first conclusion is
this, that in the moment of your strength, in the moment when you are enjoying
the most fantastic success of your Christian life you can also fail the Lord, and
it’s very easy to do this because you are riding high, you are relaxed and you
have let your guard down. And the very
moment that you are riding high and think you’ve got it knocked, then is the
time that you can fall flat on your face.
The great lesson we learn from this is that many of the great efforts of
believers that are genuinely great, remember this woman is written up in the
New Testament as a great believer. Five
minutes before she got out of fellowship with her lie she did something that was
so fantastic that it was recorded in literature for centuries. That’s how fantastic she was, the lie never
invalidates her good work. She obeyed
the Lord and she got her credit for it.
But within seconds she failed the Lord.
Now that should be an illustration that victory by itself does not
guarantee victory in your life. You can
have victory and within five seconds we can be out of it. If you want a key illustration of this, think
in the New Testament when Peter talks to the Lord and the Lord says, Peter, who
told you that I am the Christ? And Peter
confesses, etc. and the Lord Jesus Christ turned to him and says, the Father in
heaven has revealed that to you. And he
praises Peter. What do you find Peter
doing the very next moment? Lord, don’t
go to the cross, and immediately what is Jesus saying to Peter? Peter, “get
thee behind Me Satan” and He’s looking right at Peter. You see how quick, you can go from victory to
failure within seconds. And this should
be a tremendous lesson for each of us as believers; this great woman of God did
a fantastic work, and our best works that can be praised by God and genuinely
can be very mixed with our failures.
This is why I have cautioned you again and again to avoid getting
trapped by what I call the blessing fallacy.
The blessing fallacy goes like this: because God blesses me everything I
do must be right. Because God blesses
such and such an organization, everything that organization does is right. Because God blesses Reverend So and So,
everything he does must be right; that is the blessing fallacy. God blessed Rahab because of her act of
obedience toward His will; He didn’t bless her because of the lie that followed
five seconds later. But you could have,
if you weren’t careful, God blessed the whole thing. No He didn’t, He blessed on the basis of her
obedience to His word in this area, not the lie. And we have had this repeated time and again
in church history where men of God have been greatly blessed and have been in
error on many points. This explains why
you can have men, like John Wesley for example, being blessed of God and yet in
some areas he’s almost a heretic in his theology. Why?
Because God didn’t bless John Wesley because of his errors, He blessed
John Wesley in the areas where Wesley was right and he obeyed the Lord. Just like He blessed Martin Luther greatly,
not because of everything Martin Luther did but because of the acts
specifically that He did in obedience.
Now the second thing that we can draw from this Rahab incident in our
own lives is this, that there will never come a time in your life where God isn’t there, according to
Isaiah 41:10, I will be with thee and be not dismayed, I will be thy God, I am
there to strengthen you. Now in practice
you will find difficulty applying this promise in every situation. You and I are going to fail, like Rahab. The basis for our failure, however, is not
the insufficiency of the promise. The
basis for our failure is the insufficiency of our assurance. We do not yet perceive in our state of
maturity or Christian growth that God is able to do it within a split second,
right here, in this situation, the crisis in front of my eyes right now. God isn’t able to do it there, because my
faith hasn’t expanded, I haven’t tested it, I haven’t worked it through, I’m
not yet that certain of it in this particular kind of situation. That may be true, but that’s an area of
growth. Don’t be discouraged because
Rahab had to learn it, and she went down and she went down in the annals of
history as a tremendous woman of God.
A prostitute who became a princess is Rahab’s story; we’ll get into that
next time.