Joshua 7
From prostitute to princess
We’ll begin with the Rahab story again, this time by turning to John
19. I want to clear up one point that
came up last time in connection with Rahab.
Last time we worked, for the third time, this second chapter of Joshua. You recall that the reason for this is that
the chapter is so constructed that the only way of handling the material is to
go through the same chapter four times.
The first time we went through we dealt with why Joshua sent out the
spies. This is primarily a question of
picking up information. From this we
obtained many valuable lessons about divine guidance. Contrary to what some commentators say,
Joshua was not wrong in sending out spies.
God had given him a commission to accomplish a certain task but Joshua
had to have information and he had to test God’s Word against the situation and
to define what God mean for him to do, etc.
In other words, he had to take the Bible and add to it the world and
man, and avoid compartmentalization. If
you have compartmentalitis you can never succeed in divine guidance because all
you know is the Bible surrounded by zero application and you’ve got to
application, the Word of God has to touch, has to flow into and touch the
situation in which you exist. And this
cannot happen if you don’t think these things through and digest mentally the
Word of God; mental digestion, and it requires effort. And to our generation that’s been raised on
the boob tube any concentrated thought beyond sixty seconds that you usually
spend thinking of something other than the commercial is problems for our
endurance. And this is why we are having
difficult in our time with regard to the problem of thinking among believers.
This has recently come to my attention; when you start to study church
history and you realize that men like John Calvin and Martin Luther would
preach three to four hours at a time and be able during those three to four
hours to cover great, great areas of thought and present the Word of God. It would be impossible to go three to four
hours today because of our limited concentration ability. But that was the normal concentration ability
of believers back in the 15th and 16th century. That was the way they were trained, that was
the way they were brought up, and that’s the way they learned, but today we
have a very weak form and therefore we’ve got a problem.
So Joshua, we found the first problem was the problem of gaining
information and he let the Word of God meet his situation and his
experiences. And he tallied up and he
used the Word of God as his absolute authority to judge his circumstances.
The second problem in Joshua 2 is the problem of how Rahab knew. Remember, this girl is alone in the city,
absolutely alone, without a Bible, without any believers because you remember
that she became a believer before the spies got there. So here is a woman all alone who overthrows
everything she’d ever known from childhood on up, she goes against the theology
and the beliefs of her parents, she goes against everything that she could
possibly have known and it’s all overthrown in a moment of time when she puts
all the pieces together. We speculated
probably how it was that Rahab came to this conclusion. It’s not easy to tell but apparently she had
a number of factors that were operating on her behalf. You remember that she had several
situations. First of all she had
knowledge about herself, about man. All
truth is formulated by the three parts of revelation: man plus the world plus
the Bible. The Bible has been given to
interpret the other two. That’s the role
of the Bible. The Bible is to control
and interpret and act as your framework to interpret man and the world for it’s
got to flow this way. This is where
Christians get compartmentalitis and they build a big wall here and the Bible
just bounces back and therefore a big concrete wall is set up and there’s no
connection between the two. This has to
be broken down for any effective Christian witness, particularly today.
So Rahab stated out, even without the Bible. The first thing she started with was herself,
she knew she had guilt and she knew she had problems with sin. She couldn’t define it maybe in theological
terms but she knew it was there, just as any other normal member of the human
race has a conscience and this conscience played a role in her life. Undoubtedly involved in prostitution as she
was this was much on her mind. The
second thing that she found was that I her day there were catastrophes, there
were historical things that happened to Pharaoh, there were plagues on Pharaoh,
the greatest kingdom of the ancient world was systematically torn apart by a
series of close accidents. So she had
this, she had a knowledge of herself; she had a knowledge of history that
flowed around her.
And then finally out of all the chaos she had the third thing, the Word
of God. How did Rahab get the Word of
God? Rahab got the Word of God by the testimony of
What did she do then? She
combined the things she knew, general revelation, Romans 1, man and the world,
she had that, God-consciousness, she added to her God-consciousness the Word of
God that she got through the nation
Again, both of these people were absolutely alone. Rahab did it all by her lonesome self;
Abraham did it all by his lonesome self.
Both of them did it without the aid of any help from any other
believer. Both of them did it against
their whole family. Nobody in their
family helped them out. Both of them did
it without a written Bible. They didn’t
have a Bible to hold in their hands.
They didn’t have a promise from God except verbally; they didn’t have
one written down so they could carry it around; they didn’t have a written
canon of Scripture. Think of it; there’s
not a person here tonight that has less that approximately 10,000 times the
information of Rahab and Abraham.
There’s not a person here that doesn’t have at his disposal hundreds of
historical events that have vindicated God’s Word, such that when God prophesied
it and it would come true. He prophesied this and it would come true. None of
you ever faced one thousandth of the problem that either Abraham or Rahab
faced. These two people became great,
great believers. So the second problem
we have is the problem of how Rahab came to be a believer.
Last time we dealt with the problem of Rahab’s lie, and how could it be
that God would bless a situation where a believer was involved in a lie, and
how Rahab, harboring these two enemies of the state, one night on her door the
knock of the secret police, not unlike at all the Christian position in Holland
during the early 40s when the Christians would hide Jews in their attics and
the Nazi police would come knocking on the door, do you have Jews in your
house, we want to search your house, upstairs and downstairs, do you have Jews
here. It’s the same kind of thing in
So this is not an unprecedented historical situation, it’s very easy to
conceive. Right in our generation
believers tonight face the same thing in many lands, whether it’s a jungle
tribe, or whether it’s in the dark of China, or in some other place behind the
iron curtain, believers are being hounded and persecuted by the police because
they have taken their stand against the state religion and have defied the
state and said we will serve the Lord Jesus Christ and we will buck the system;
if it means bucking the whole system we are going to live for Jesus
Christ. So this is not an unlikely
situation, it shouldn’t be hard for anyone to visualize the situation of Rahab.
Remember, she came to the door, and part of what she said was true and
part was a lie, and I said that that was wrong; I said that we cannot
compromise an inch. When God says
there’s an absolute commandment you use an absolute commandment. There is no situation ethic like this such
that the situation calls for a lie; no situation calls for a lie. But I understand that some people felt that
what I was saying, that Rahab ought to go ahead and tell where the spies were…
no she didn’t have to tell where the spies were and she didn’t have to
lie. And I gave you John 29 as the
illustration, that Jesus Christ used the same tactic. When the heat was on and the authorities
wanted to know something, Jesus Christ didn’t lie, He refused to answer them.
And in John 19 we have the precedent established by Christ Himself. If you look in verse 8 you will see the Lord
Jesus Christ and how He reacted in this situation. “When Pilate therefore heard tat saying, he
was more afraid, [9] and he went into the judgment hall and said unto Jesus,
Whence are you? But Jesus gave him no answer.”
Where are you from? It was a
clear indication, and this is the authority of the state asking the believer a
legitimate question in a court of law; a court of law and Jesus Christ had no
answer; He refused to give the state an answer.
And this is a case where the believer would be justified in absolutely
refusing to cooperate. Rahab would have
been justified; had the police knocked on her door and said where are they, and
she stood there, I’m not telling you, find them for yourself. This would have been a legitimate
answer.
It’s very easy for us to theorize that it would have been easy for her
to do that and obviously it wasn’t.
Here’s this lone woman, alone in this city with no other believers
except the two that she sent in the attic, and that’s all, and the police come
knocking on the door. It’s very easy to
think of the tremendous situational pressure upon her at this moment. The only thing we can say is that the Lord
Jesus Christ says later on in this verse, verse 10, “Then Pilate said unto Him,
Why don’t you speak to me? Do you now
know that I have the authority,” literally, “to crucify you and I have the
authority to release you?” And the
classic answer that Jesus gives is the classic answer that shows the
theological principle of defiance of authority in this situation. Now be careful, I’m not teaching the defiance
of the divine institutions of government.
I’m saying, however, when that institution transgresses its legitimate
domain and comes over to destroy believer then the Christian has every right in
the world to defy every authority on earth for the sake of His Lord, and in
this situation we have it, where Jesus said, even to this temple authority in
verse 11, “You could have no power,” or authority “at all against Me, except it
were given thee from above; therefore, he that delivered Me unto thee hath the
greater sin.”
In that Jesus Christ cast His life before His Father’s providence and He
said I will trust the sovereign Father, He is the one who is in charge here,
you’re not Pilate. You wouldn’t have the
authority to take a breath if it wasn’t for My Father and His sovereignty, and
therefore I’m going to rest My case in the middle of this situational question,
when it’s all bearing in upon Me.
Instead of lying… Jesus could have lied His way out of this very easily,
I read last time a statement of a situational ethicist, Fletcher, who is the
big thing in a lot of areas today in a lot of thinking, that if the situation
demands it according, (quote) “in love,” whatever that is, the content-less
word, you fill it with whatever you want to do and call it love. But Fletcher’s position would be like this:
he’d say there is a time when a situation would warrant false apostasy; the
situation might warrant some time a Christian giving a false heresy as an answer. And we say no, Mr. Fletcher, we cannot
cooperate with that whatever. We must
hold to our Biblical absolutes; no lying under any condition. In this situation we would defy authority but
we would not lie and we could adopt the same tactic that Jesus did here in John
19.
You say but what would have happened to the two spies if Rahab said
that? We don’t know what would have
happened. We do know, however, as with
Abraham, that God is able to do that which He has promised and He promised that
those spies would come back; undoubtedly they prayed before, undoubtedly their
mission… Joshua had to get the information back, we know God is able and
providentially she might have opened the door, the police might have knocked it
over and come in but they might have overlooked them providentially. Someone might have called them to go to
another house. There are all sorts of
options open in a supernatural universe and this is why when you come into this
situation, always remember that as a child of God if you have received Christ
as your Savior you have an option that the non-Christian, no matter how moral
and ethical he may be, does not.
You have a supernatural option because your heavenly Father is in
control of the circumstances. And the
test that comes, do you or do you not believe that the God of Abraham is your
God this moment in this situation, He is able to do that which He has promised
and He is able to work in and manipulate the situation. That is when all of the talk about whether
you’re a supernaturalist pays off. That’s when all the talk is blown away and
it gets right down to the nitty-gritty and the action because you show by your
response whether you’re a supernaturalist of not, whether you really believe
that God is in control of the situation.
That’s when your real heart theology spills out and everybody sees
it. So this is why in John 19 you have
at least a normative passage that Rahab could have used. I do not mean that she had to tell where the
spies were; she could simply defy their authority.
Now let’s go back to Joshua 2 and look again, we’re finishing Joshua 2
and we want to deal with one final problem.
And that’s a problem that people often pose, and Christians rightly so,
and certainly after the problem of the lie you would certainly think of
this. How is it that Rahab is a
prostitute and how does a prostitute be admitted to such a high and honored
place in God’s plan. This is forever a
lesson in God’s grace, and I want to take you back here because I’ve heard, one
person was telling me this week they were talking to a Christian person and
this Christian swore up and down that God would never have a prostitute in His
plan of salvation. Unfortunately I will
show you a verse that totally dislodges that concept; God has several
prostitutes who are ancestress of Jesus Christ.
And if that offends you, then let it offend you because you have a wrong
concept of God’s grace.
Let’s go into this problem of Rahab and her prostitution and how she got
into such a position in the plan of God.
The first thing we find in Joshua 2:12 is that when the spies come to
her she makes a request of them and the request itself is cast in a vocabulary
that tells us a lot about the way this woman thought, for when she asks them
something she makes this peculiar request.
I ask you, “swear unto me by Jehovah” that such and such be the
case. And here’s the paradox; here’s a
woman in the Canaanite land who all her life has been brought up to believe in
all of these gods of her tribes, all of these gods. Yahweh isn’t one of them, and these two
strangers come and she tells them I want you to swear by your God that such and
such will happen. And here right away
shows the woman’s faith, that she sees Jehovah and Jehovah alone as the
ultimate authority of it all and she wouldn’t even bother with the gods of her
own land or her own tribe.
So now she makes this request, verse 13, “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.” Here
you see something about the character of this woman. Too often prissy Christians think because
somebody may have an area of weakness and may have this kind of a problem in
their lives that they are automatically be thrown out the door and barred as
undesirable. And here we have a woman
who is truly compassionate at this particular point. I’m going to get on to the problem of
prostitution in a moment but I just want you to see the woman’s character. She has a concern for her family. It’s not unlikely that one reason she went
into prostitution, knowing what we do from the ancient world, was not because
she liked prostitution, it was one legitimate way in that day of getting some
money to finance her family. Notice she
has no husband and that concerns the fact that she is a prostitute in this
particular situation.
Now turn to Joshua 6, we turn to that climactic moment when Jericho
falls. The walls have fallen down and in
Joshua 6:17, we have Joshua giving the orders to his troops. His troops are getting ready to assault the
fallen walls; there’s chaos in the town, the walks have fallen, the defenders
are probably toppled and crumbled under these tremendous bricks as they fell
down, and Joshua quickly gives two orders to two men; get me those two men that
were the spies. Joshua says take those
two men and I want you two men to lead the attack on that position of the wall
because I want you to get there and I want you to get that girl out of her and
I want you to protect her family. And so
he commissions these two men.
Verse 17, “And the city shall be
accursed,” this means devoted, it’s pattern, the sacred principle of holy war
in the Old Testament in which the city would be devoted to Jehovah and
everything in it would be destroyed.
“…even it, and all that are in it, to the LORD; only Rahab, the harlot,
shall live, she and all whoa re with her in the house, because she hid the
messengers that we sent. [18] And ye, in every way keep yourselves away from
the accursed thing,” and in verse 22, “Joshua had said unto the two men that
had spied out the country, Go into the harlot’s house, and bring out from there
the woman, and all that she hath, as ye swore unto her. [23] And the young men
who were spies went in, and brought out Rahab, and her father, and her mother,
and her brethren, and all that she had; and they brought out all her kindred,
and left them outside the camp of Israel. [23] And they burned the city with
fire, and all that was in it….” Verse
25, “And Joshua saved Rahab, the harlot, alive, and her father’s household, and
all that she had; and she dwelt in Israel even unto this day, [because she hid
the messengers whom Joshua sent to spy out Jericho.]” which is the time that
the book of Joshua was written, sometime before the kings.
So up to this time Rahab lived, whether this means that she literally
lived and just survived down to this age or whether it means that her family is
there is a matter of interpretation, but the point still remains that she lived
with the people of God. And this is a
fantastic statement. Remember in
Deuteronomy there was a passage there that gave the policy toward foreign
nations and here we have an exception to that policy, the grace exception,
where a person who is a Gentile and not an Israelite, who has personally
believed in Jesus Christ, is admitted into the fellowship of God’s people, the
nation Israel.
Verse 26, “And Joshua charged them at that time, saying, Cursed be the
man before the LORD, who rises up and builds this city, Jericho….” Verse 27, “So the LORD was with Joshua,”
etc. So we find in this passage that all
of the spy’s dealings came true. Rahab and Rahab alone is saved alive. Archeology tells us that Jericho wasn’t a
large city; probably only about ten to fifteen acres and it had an immense wall
around it, so that’s why I’ve been saying the population numbered only a
thousand or so. But even among the
thousand there were no believers. Now
this should teach you something about ratios between believers and
non-believers in society. You have one
believer in this city. This one woman
knew everything everybody else knew in that city. All the other people had heard about Egypt
falling, she testifies they heard it; they heard all of these things. But one woman believed and the rest rejected
and true to His love for His children, God reached down in the chaos of history
and pulled her out: grace before judgment, God always takes care of His
children. Human parents may not take
care of their children but God always takes care of His children, and this is
one key illustration of God taking care of his children.
This is despised [can’t hear words] of history which says history is
just chaos, it’s just an accident. And
we believe that God is sovereign in history and He can reach down at a point in
time, it’s not a statistical envelope, it’s a point in time and God reaches
down and controls and manipulates.
In Hebrew 11:31 I want to show you the high place this prostitute
had. Keep in mind that this woman didn’t
get where she was by some emotional jag.
She didn’t get there by signing a card, by going through some hocus
pocus; this woman had to sit down and think this thing through because you can
imagine the pressure on her. It’s bad
enough for a woman to do this today but think of a woman in the ancient world,
a woman considered the way she was in this day going against everything, a
total rebel against her whole culture.
Rahab, as I said of Abraham, is not a paper person, not something you
learn in Sunday School, she’s a real live person and someday those of us who
have received Christ will meet her in heaven, and perhaps you’ll have ample
time to sit down and discuss with her what went on with the spies, etc. and get enlightened on the text.
But nevertheless, this woman is a real person and in Hebrews 11:31 she’s
written up. Incidentally she’s the only
woman mentioned in this list. “By faith
the harlot, Rahab, perished not with them that believed not, when” and remember
last time I translated that an aorist participle, “because she had received the
spies with peace.” In other words her
faith was open to empirical demonstration under a crisis situation. Real saving faith is open to empirical
demonstration; it doesn’t mean it’s perfect.
Rahab lied, I just showed you last time she’s not a plaster saint, she
made mistakes but still there were signs of the manifestation of saving faith
in her life. And because He saw this she
was physically delivered.
Now let’s come to another situation, James 2:25 which amplifies,
theologically Hebrews 11:31. Put right
along side with Abraham, notice each time she’s definitely labeled as the
prostitute. “In like manner also was not
Rahab, the prostitute,” it’s put in the Word of God, the Holy Spirit put it
there to remind us of her background and the situation from which she came,
“was not Rahab, the prostitute, justified by works, when she had received the
messengers, and had sent them out another way?”
We’ve gone through this problem of justification by works so we won’t
belabor the point. The point is that her
saving faith which was the basis of her justification was valid saving faith
because under pressure situations it empirically showed up. It showed up so that it could be observed. And real saving faith will always show up and
will always react and this is evidence.
Keep in mind again the tremendous decision she had to make.
Now turn to Matthew 1 and here she is as the great ancestress of Jesus
Christ. I was discussing with a Wycliffe
translator with some tribes in Columbia and we talked about the cosmologies of
these tribes and their beliefs about the universe and the things that would
challenge or refute or go along with Genesis, and he was telling me about the
problem of transmitting these theological concepts of the Word of God into
their culture. And he pointed out a very
interesting thing that I thought, almost amusing, that probably the dullest
part of the Bible for us living in America today is passages like this, the
genealogies. And he said when, by
accident, in this village one time he was trying to tell them the story of
Abraham, and somehow they got into a talk about genealogy, they gave Abraham’s
genealogy, and all of a sudden they all got excited about that, they wanted to
come and hear Abraham’s genealogy, Abraham was the son of this and the son of
this, and he begat so and so, and he went through it and it meant something
tremendous to them because in their tribal life these societies were structured
on their genealogies. So talk about
communication, he got communication from this kind of a passage. So the Word of God is written for all people
everywhere and it may not mean something to you but don’t think that there are
not other people to whom this isn’t interesting.
Really this should be interesting to you because this is the genealogy
of Christ from Abraham. In Matt. 1:2,
“Abraham begot Isaac; and Isaac begot Jacob; and Jacob begot Judah,” and it
goes all the way down to verse 16, “Jacob begot Joseph, the husband of Mary, of
whom was born Jesus, who is called the Christ.”
So Matthew gives the genealogy through Joseph’s side of the Lord Jesus
Christ. In this genealogy there are four
women. Each of these women are unusual
for several reasons. First of all, it is
highly, highly unusual to ever find a woman mentioned in a genealogy. The whole point of genealogy is the
father-son relationship, so why stick the woman in there. So that should tip you off there’s something
important about these four women.
Another thing that’s interesting about all four of these women is that
none of them were Jews. All four of
these women were Gentiles. A third thing
about them is that not one of them has a reputable background. All of them could be questioned as to their
background.
For example, in 1:3 we have “And Judah begot Perez and Zerah of Tamar,”
the Tamar incident is described in Genesis 38 and Tamar commits adultery with
her father-in-law. She is a Gentile; she
gets mad because her father-in-law promised her, after her husband died that he
would provide her with his other son.
And he didn’t like it because every time one of his sons married this
babe he died and it wasn’t because she poisoned him or something, it was
because his own sons were not living before the Lord properly and they were
being disciplined. But he tried to blame
it on the girl, so the girl had just about had all she could endure, so she
seduced him and had a child by him, and she said I’ll fix you, you won’t give
me your son so I’m going to have a child by you and she worked it out and
that’s how these people are born, and it’s mentioned specifically, this you
might say “off color” incident is deliberately brought by the Holy Spirit into
Jesus Christ’s genealogy in verse 3.
Then in verse 5 we have Salmon.
Now Salmon, as I said before, is probably, according to extra-Biblical
tradition, one of the two young men that went in to spy. We can’t prove it, all we know is that there
is an extra-Biblical tradition that has come down to us that relates to Rahab
to one of these two spies, and this is another reason why the Lord had those
two men picked out to go to Jericho. God
has a right man for every woman and He has a right woman for every man and this
girl and this fellow get together and so He did it, and so engineered the
situation and so that fellow met his girl in a prostitution house in Jericho,
such an unlikely place for a date. That
was the first date and later on they got together and so here we have a
marriage between Salmon and Rehab, it’s called Rachab because you have a Greek pronounciation of the Hebrew, her
real name is Rachab, I’ll get to that
in a moment.
Verse 5, “And Salmon begot Boaz of” this woman, Boaz is the hero of the
book of Ruth, and he in turn marries a girl called Ruth, and Ruth is a Gentile
and she is a Moabitess and if there was ever a despised race in all of Israel
it was the Moabites. In fact, some
scholars believe today, in fact one of the men who taught me in Dallas Seminary
has a theory about the origin of the book of Ruth that the very book of Ruth
was circulated in Israel as a tract, and they circulated it because the Jews
became very legalistic about the fact that Jewish men could not have Gentile
brides, and so the book of Ruth was written to prove that a Jewish man, if his
bride had accepted the faith of Israel, could marry under certain situations,
as unto the Lord. In other words, the
emphasis was is the bride a believer or not, not what race she is. So this was the big key, and here in verse 5
we have “Boaz begot Obed of Ruth.” Ruth,
although personally nothing is said of her in an immoral way, in Scripture,
nevertheless, her very genealogy has an off-color cast to it to a Jewish
mind. So again we meet with a woman who
is not a Jewess, who marries into the Jewish line of Jesus Christ, out of a
Gentile background with a less than desirable reputation in the eyes of the
nation.
And finally, in verse 6 we have the fourth woman mentioned, “And Jesse
begot David, the king; and David, the king, begot Solomon of her that had been
the wife of Uriah.” The point here is,
it’s an obvious innuendo at the adultery incident between Bathsheba and
David. Every one of the four women
mentioned in this genealogy… and how this must slap the face of a
self-righteous proud Jew who would read this genealogy of this Messiah and find
four Gentile women in the line and you could raise a question about all
four. An amazing illustration of grace.
But at least this will show you tonight that Rahab had a high
position. Now you’re bound to ask the
question, was she a prostitute. Some
Christians have actually argued that the word “prostitute” doesn’t mean
prostitute. And I have some commentaries
in my office where this is a big question, that the word “prostitute” doesn’t
really mean prostitute. So when we read
it in Hebrews she’s not really a prostitute, even though it says so; when you
read it in James she’s not really a prostitute even though it says so. They don’t want to deal with the situation
and they won’t let the text speak for itself.
So we have to go back to the name Rahab.
Now I won’t literally translate, I might offend some of you with what
the word means, but if you’ve been in the army this is the word that they would
refer to that kind of a woman. So that’s
what her name means and I will now take you to a portion of the text where this
is used in its original form. Isaiah
57:1-9, this is where Rahab evidently got her name. This is a passage in the prophesies of Isaiah
that relates to the time of the exile.
And Isaiah is chastening and accusing the leaders of the nation for
their apostasy. So he says in verse 1,
“The righteous perish, and no man lays it to heart; and merciful men are taken
away; none considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil to
come.” This is a real earth shaking
prophesy, because what Isaiah is [can’t understand words] have you noticed
recently the death rates among believers is abnormally high, have you notice
that the famous leaders are dying off in our generation (just like they are in
ours). That these men are dying who have
fought for the faith and do you know why?
The last part of verse 1, he says God is getting them out of the way
because He’s going to lower the boom on this nation, and He’s taking His
believers home to be with Him and then is going to come judgment; He’s getting
His believers out of the way.
Verse 2, “He shall enter into peace; they shall rest in their beds…” He
will remove them. Now in verse 3 and
following Isaiah goes on to say now God is going to lower the boom on the rest
of you. “But draw near here, ye sons of
the sorceress, the seed of the adulterer and the whore. [4] Against whom do ye
sport yourselves? Against whom make you a wide mouth, and draw out the tongue?
Are ye not children of transgression, a seed of falsehood,” I can’t halfway
convey to you the way this thing reads in the original languages. One of the fascinating things is to learn the
Bible in the original languages. This is
just blow after blow after blow, this man’s angry here and he’s leveling
accusation after accusation to the nation.
Then in verse 5 he is going to use the analogy that we so often find
between prostitution and fornication and spiritual adultery, going after the
false gods.
So in verse 5 he says you are “Inflaming yourselves with idols under
every green tree,” referring to the sex orgies of the Baalism type worship of
that day, “inflaming yourselves with idols under every tree, slaying the
children in the valleys under the clefts of the rocks?” Here is a reference to the worship of the
fire god Molech in which they would take these children and they would actually
burn them to death inside the [can’t understand word] of Molech. This is one of the horrible aspects of
religion; religion has caused more misery in the history of man than any other
phase of human life.
Verse 6, “Among the smooth stones of the stream is thy portion;” this
means that they have taken the libation of [can’t understand word] which are
great sacrificial vats that they would have various fluids in, such as milk,
wine, and they’d take these vats and they’d pour them down at the feet of the
gods and usually they’d have conduits and this stuff that they’d pour over the
gods would work down into the soil and eventually go out into the streams. He says do you see where this stuff is going
off into the streams: That’s what your
reward is. [“…they, they are thy lot.
Even to them hast thou poured a drink offering, thou hast offered a meal
offering. Should I receive comfort in
these?”]
And then he goes on to say in verses 7-8, “Upon a lofty and high
mountain hast thou set thy bed; even there went thou up to offer sacrifice. [8]
Behind the doors also and the doorposts hast thou set up thy remembrance;”
that’s a tremendous accusation. Do you
know what the word “remembrance” here is?
It’s a technical Hebrew word and it refers to the little portion of
Scripture that the Jewish family was required by Deuteronomy 6 to have at all
times, it was to be a part to the whole, an exposition of the Law, usually the
Ten Commandments would be rolled up in a tiny piece of parchment and it would
be put on the door so that the person, every time they went to their front door
they would have to see the Scripture. It
would be analogous today of Scripture memory, of having the Word of God
constantly in front of you. This is the
way the people were taught in the ancient world. He says what you have done is take that
remembrance, take that little coiled up piece of Scripture and rip the
parchment on which the commandments are written, and you have taken that and
you have put it behind the door so you will walk out of the door and your
conscience won’t hurt; you’ve put the Bible in the backroom in other words,
because you know every time you look at it it condemns you.
This is Isaiah’s attack, he says you’ve set this up and you’ve put it
behind the doors where you can’t see it, “for thou hast uncovered thyself to
another than me,” this means she has taken her clothes off before another man,
“and art gone up thou hast enlarged thy bed, and made thee a covenant with
them; thou loved their bed where thou saw it.”
He’s getting very explicit here and he’s blaming the religious apostates
of his time. Now the words “make large
the bed” is the word Rahab, and I leave you to deduce how the girl got her
name. That is the verb form from which
we get the name Rachab. Now this should
be sufficient to show you that Rahab was what the Bible says she was.
But let’s go back to Joshua 2 and deal with the next obvious question,
was she a prostitute when the spies came.
This is another question, was she still in prostitution when the spies
came. Remember we’ve already established
that Rahab had to deal with the problem of truth. Rahab in her day had to put together man,
plus the world, plus the Bible, and she didn’t have any Bible, she got just
[can’t understand word] from Israel’s testimony. This looks just like a nice sweet equation to
you and you can write this down and never understand it, but let me assure you
that Rahab didn’t just write this down and memorize it in five minutes. This thing that looks so easy to write
represented probably hours and hours of thought. This doesn’t come easily; you have to think
this thing through until you arrive at epignosis
or absolute truth. So she arrived at
this and the question now is, since she believed before the spies came, did it
change her profession.
We have one hint in Joshua 2 that indeed it did. For in Joshua 2:6 there’s a little phrase
stuck in there that tells us that she may have gone into another business. “She brought them up to the roof of the
house, and hid them with the stalks of flax, which she had laid in order upon
the roof.” Now I don’t know whether you
caught that when I was exegeting this before but I mentioned to you at that
time that this was the way, from what I can tell from studying the language
that the men, when they worked in this kind of a business, stored the flax to
dry before they would use it to make cord, and various linen material, etc. And it appears that she may have left her
profession at this time and had gone into the linen business. This would double be suggested by the fact
that she has a cord there. Now if you
look at your King James in verse 18 you see a very poor translation. “Behold, when we come into the land, thou
shalt bind this line of scarlet thread,” that they let the men off with; now
two men didn’t get out of the window on a piece of thread. Now I know they make strong thread these days
but two men didn’t get lowered out the city wall on a scarlet thread, it was a
cord. And the interesting thing about it
is the color of the cord, and throughout the generations of church history
Christian commentators have taken this cord to be a type of the blood of Jesus
Christ, as that which saves. Just as the
Jews applied the blood to the door and the angel of death passed over, so in
the destruction of Jericho this woman had the sign of blood on her window: it
was the scarlet cord.
But there’s even something more interesting about this scarlet cord and
that is that in some places in the ancient world a prostitute had to wear only
one color of clothing; that color was scarlet.
And it would be indeed ironic if this was the case with Rahab that she
had to take the only kind of clothing that she would have and weave it into a
tight type of linen, twisting it around to develop the cord, and that her very
gown that she had to wear as a known prostitute in the city of Jericho became
the thing that eventually led to her so great salvation; how God can turn
cursing into blessing.
So we would say therefore that there’s enough evidence in Joshua 2 to
suspect very strongly that this woman had left, that the faith had made a
change. But let me hasten to add that
she would still have been acceptable with God had she not grown to the point
where she broke with the prostitution at this time. It may have taken time for her to get out of
this. This is not condoning
prostitution; I simply say that under her situation, knowing as little of the
Word of God and growing as slowly as she must have, she may not have gotten out
of the field of prostitution by this time.
I only cite this as Scripture evidence that some take this to believe
that she was.
Now what are we to do with this?
What are we to make of this woman?
She came out of this background and had such a fantastic position in the
plan of God. The only thing we can say
about this is grace. She made a choice,
a choice that Joshua gives testimony to in Joshua 24:15. In Joshua 24:15 we
have a classic statement of the choice every man must make when faced with the
claims of Christianity. Again, I can’t
emphasize it strongly enough that this wasn’t made in an armchair, this wasn’t
made sitting easily in your leather chair in the evening with a lamp reading
quietly by yourself. This was made in
the rough and tumble of her life with the kind of men that she must have known;
with the kind of education she must have had; with all the troubles with her
family and everything. In fact, one of
strong [can’t understand words] could be made to the fact that Rahab stayed
behind to lead her family to Jesus Christ because it is interesting that
usually when you have a group of people that survive a catastrophe they are all
100% believers and it could very well be, for there’s no real reason why Rahab
couldn’t have left when the spies left.
Why did she stay behind? It’s
only to save her own father and her mother and her sisters and the people that
she loved. And Rahab stayed behind for
the sake of these people. She could have saved herself very easily.
But in Joshua 24:15 toward the end of his life Joshua reiterates the
choice that he must have made a thousand times during his life. You want to see the force of this because if
you don’t see the situation in which Rahab had to make it the whole thing is
lost and it’s just a set of words to be read in some sweet little environment
somewhere. Think of this, a lone woman
with no friends, with no help, with no fellowship, with no Bible, just thinking
by herself and putting two and two together and getting four and she was able
to literally take on everybody in her city.
She was able to defy the culture and her own king, for you remember,
when the police came knocking on her door, they told her this is an enemy of
the state. Rahab could have gotten out
of it a little bit up until that point, but once the police said you harbor
enemies of the state in your house, she was now under the charge of treason. Now it wasn’t easy to extricate herself at
all from the situation because now she had to face the loyalty to the king of
Jericho or to Jesus Christ, the captain of the Lord’s hosts. So she chose to go with Jesus Christ and she
chose to turn her back on her own king.
And yet she chose to live under the king on whom she’d turned her
back. She chose, having turned from him
to Jesus Christ, she still chose to live in his kingdom.
Just like Joshua puts it to the people at the end of his life. In verse 15 he says, “And if it seem evil
unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve, whether the
gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the river, or the
gods of the Amorites,” and the gods of the Amorites were the gods that Rahab
was brought up with as a young girl, to believe in, to sacrifice for, and to
order her life by, the gods of the Amorites.
And Joshua charges his generation, do you want to do this thing to or
whatever you want to do, “in whose land ye dwell; but as for me and my house,
we will serve the LORD.” That’s the way
Joshua put it, I don’t care what you choose, choose something, but I’m choosing
the Lord Jesus Christ. And he laid it on
to them that they had to choose something.
In summary I’d like to turn back to Eph. 2:1-3 to apply this to our
situation. Like Rahab, we live in a
Jericho, as I’ve said before, except our Jericho is the whole cosmos. Paul, speaking of believers, “And you has he quickened
who were dead in trespasses and sins; [2] In which in times past ye walked
according to the present course of this cosmos” and the word “cosmos” the best
way to translate it is probably by world system or culture. The only reason I use culture to translate
cosmos is it connotes value and the idea here isn’t so much physical pressure,
just the subliminal programming we all get, a set of values that emphasize
materialism, that emphasize what the older generation would have called
worldliness. That doesn’t communicate,
so we’ll use the word “culture.”
“…according to the present course of this age,” or this whole organized
system that we live in, “according to the prince of the power of the air, the
spirit now that works in the children of disobedience.” This means that we have a king; our king is
not the literal physical king of Jericho, but it is a person and the person is
this “spirit that now works,” it’s not Satan, Satan is the prince of the
spirit, “the power of the air,” is this subordinate spirit, comma, “the spirit
that now works in the children of disobedience.” Satan is over him and these are the
administrative organization that evidently Satan has in which he can control
every major section on the earth’s globe.
We learn from books like Daniel, Deuteronomy 32 and other passages in
the Old Testament that Satan has his hierarchy in a one to one relationship
with political entities. For example in
the ancient world Satan had a whole contingent of demon forces that were
operating in the Persian kingdom. Their
job was assigned to destroy the Jew, and when the power shifted to the Greeks
they moved over to Athens and they moved to the Greek peninsula and these demon
forces began to activate among Greek rulers.
This has always been the case; it is the cast tonight, that Satan has
demonic forces operating in the culture, all over. The place is loaded with them. Maybe you have heard the facetious question,
how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
It’s not a facetious question; it’s a very interesting question, to find
out what is the angelic and demonic density of the universe. How many are there. Evidently if we are to believe Scripture
there are billions of them, and they are busy, day and night, to destroy the
church of Jesus Christ, to hinder you as believers, to get you out of the Word
of God and on to something else, to get you to avoid the question of really
coming to grips whether the Word of God is true or not. Any way they can possibly hinder you they’re
there, and you, as Rahab, if you have received Christ, has properly turned your
back to Satan but you’re left inside the world system. Rahab was left there to save her family and
to gather them together in her house so that when judgment fell her family was
safe. So today we have been called in
the Church Age to stay here; otherwise Christ would have taken us to heaven at
the point of salvation, but we are called as one of our prime missions to
witness to Jesus Christ to our generation, to lead them to Jesus Christ like
Rahab led her family to Christ so that when Jesus Christ, our Savior comes, to us
as a Savior but to the world as the Judge, these people will not be destroyed
in the process.
Remember the captain of the Lord’s host in Jericho is none other than
Jesus Christ and when He walks to Jericho He has a sword. Joshua, as an old man, walks out on the
street because intelligence has said there’s a soldier standing out there in
the road and Joshua walks up to Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ is sitting there
with a sword in His hand, and Joshua says are you on our side or theirs, and
that’s when all of a sudden Jesus Christ reveals Himself—Joshua, get down on
your knees, you know who I am. It’s a
dramatic scene of this elderly soldier, walking out and challenging God Himself
as to whether He’s on his side or not; fantastic courage of the man Joshua. But the point to remember is that it was
Jesus Christ, He had a sword in His hand, and when He came there Jesus Christ
worked out the falling of the walls so that this family was saved, but He
worked it so that everybody else was killed.
It’s going to be the same thing at the Second Advent. Christ will work it out so that believers are
saved and the unbelievers are killed.
With our heads bowed and our eyes closed.