The first friendly face Israel meets in the promised land is a prostitute. I want to make sure we do not hurry past that. Forty years of wandering, an entire generation of preparation, and when the spies finally slip into Jericho, the person God has waiting for them, the only believer in the city, is a woman whose house is built into the wall and whose profession is the town's open secret.
The Best Theology in the Book of Joshua
Rahab hides the two spies from the king's men, and then tells them why. Read her speech slowly, because nothing this theologically clear comes from anyone else in the whole conquest: "I know that the LORD has given you this land... For we have heard how the LORD dried up the waters of the Red Sea before you when you came out of Egypt... When we heard this, our hearts melted and everyone's courage failed because of you, for the LORD your God is God in the heavens above and on the earth below." (Joshua 2:9-11).
God in the heavens above and on the earth below! That is a confession of faith most of Israel had not managed after watching the Red Sea part in person. And here is the detail that gets me: the Red Sea happened forty years earlier. The news that melted Jericho's hearts had been sitting in the city for four decades. Everyone in Jericho heard the same reports. Only Rahab did something with them. Faith, it turns out, is not access to information. It is what you build on the information everybody has.
The Scarlet Cord
The spies strike a deal: gather your family into this house and tie a scarlet cord in the window, and everyone inside will live when the city falls. It is Passover logic all over again: a marked house, spared in a judgment, with the mark the color of blood. When Jericho's walls came down, one section held: the wall with the cord in the window. Rahab did not just save herself. She negotiated for her father, mother, brothers and all who belonged to them. The first thing her brand-new faith produced was a rescue list with her whole family on it! What names would be on yours?
Faith with a Deadline
It matters that Rahab's faith was expensive. Hiding enemy spies in a city on war footing was treason; if the king's men had searched the roof and found them under the flax, she would not have gotten a trial. James chooses her, of all people, as his second example, right after Abraham, of the principle that faith without action is dead: "In the same way, was not even Rahab the prostitute justified by her actions when she welcomed the spies and sent them off on another route?" (James 2:25).
Everyone in Jericho believed the reports about the Red Sea; the whole city's hearts had melted. Belief was universal. What Rahab had that her neighbors lacked was belief that acted before the walls fell: faith with a deadline attached, exercised while it could still cost her everything. The comfortable version of faith waits to see how things develop. Rahab's version hid the spies the same night she met them! It is worth asking which version we are practicing, because Jericho was full of the first kind, and only one house of it survived.
The Genealogy That Tells on God
If the story ended with her rescue it would already preach. It does not end there. The New Testament brings her back three times. "By faith the prostitute Rahab, because she welcomed the spies in peace, did not perish with those who were disobedient." (Hebrews 11:31). She makes the faith hall of fame, listed with Abraham and Moses. James holds her up as proof that real faith acts (James 2:25).
And then Matthew, opening his Gospel with the ancestry of the Messiah, writes this: "Salmon was the father of Boaz by Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse" (Matthew 1:5). Rahab of Jericho married into Israel and became the great-great-grandmother of King David, which makes her a direct ancestor of Jesus Christ. The Messiah's family tree includes a Canaanite prostitute, on purpose, in the first paragraph of the New Testament. God did not merely forgive Rahab's past. He built the future through her!
Tie the Cord Before the Walls Fall
Two applications, one for each direction you might be reading from. If you are the Rahab, if your history is the thing you assume disqualifies you, the Bible has gone out of its way, repeatedly, to say otherwise. Faith starts wherever you are standing when you finally act on what you have heard. Start there today; the cord goes in the window before the walls fall, not after.
And if you are comfortably inside the camp: notice that God's key person in Jericho was somebody no scouting report would have picked. Who have you written off that heaven has plans for? It might be worth being kinder to the Rahabs this week. One of them may outrank us all in the genealogy that matters!