Summer Series: Rahab: Red Ribbon of Faith – Sermon

One of the tenderest, if not the most tender, story in the New Testament, is of Jesus’ encounter with the woman taken in the act of adultery.

She was brought to Jesus for stoning, because that was the law of the day. It was clearly a test for Jesus. The accusing men who brought the woman put Jesus in a “no-win” dilemma.

If He elected to show mercy on the woman and free her, He would clearly be disobeying the Jewish law.

If He condemned her, or did not intervene in preventing condemnation, He would be going against everything He had taught about compassion and forgiveness.

The accusers thought they had Him. They made their charge, but they were not prepared for Jesus’ response. I’m sure they were speechless, immobilized by Jesus’ offer, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.”

Then Jesus did a very strange thing. Without saying another word, He bent over and wrote in the sand. We wonder — was He allowing the people some relief with their engagement with Him in order that they might deal with their own consciences?

Or did He write something that probed even more deeply and burned more searingly upon their calloused hearts?

We don’t know what He wrote; we can only ponder that and use our imagination.

I remember once someone and I were talking about this story, they provided an insight I had never thought of before. They suggested Jesus might have written in the sand a question — a simple one.

The question might have been this: “How would you feel if this was your sister?”

Powerful and searching, isn’t it? What a difference it would make if the accused was a sister. Jesus saw her as a sister, and you know what He did — whatever He wrote in the sand, and we can only guess at that — when He rose and looked around, there was no one present to condemn the woman, and Jesus announced to her His forgiveness and call to new life.

That’s who Jesus was — merciful, tender, seeking the best and calling it forth from a person — “seeking to save the lost.”

That’s who Jesus was, and it was in keeping with everything God came to earth to be and do.

But I wonder — I wonder if, when He was confronted with those violent men who wanted to stone this woman — I wonder if He remembered Rahab?

Some of you may not think of her name much. For most of us, her name is not one we readily recall among biblical personalities. But Jesus may have called her to mind that day, because, you see, she was one of his great-grandmothers. How far back, as a great-grandmother, I haven’t figured out. She is one of four women mentioned in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus’ family in the first chapter of his gospel.

Tradition has it that she married Salmon, one of the two spies whose life she saved. Their son — the son of Rahab and her husband — was Boaz. Boaz married Ruth, and Ruth and Boaz were the grandparents of David. So the family line came on down to Joseph and Mary, the parents of Jesus.

Rahab — a prostitute! In the genealogy as a grandparent of the Lord Jesus Christ?

Let’s look a little more at her, because she has much to teach us.  You heard the story in our scripture lesson. The spies went to the house of a harlot named Rahab, and they lodged there. When the king’s men came looking for them, Rahab hid them, telling the king’s men that they had already gone, and sent them in hot pursuit. So, Rahab played a significant role in the battle of Jericho, protecting the spies until they could get the information they needed to take back to Joshua in order that Joshua might “fit the battle of Jericho and the walls came a tumbling down.” Yes, Rahab, the harlot.

Rahab’s Unlikely Faith

Undoubtedly, the focus of this wonderful chapter lies on Rahab’s amazing confession in verses 9–11.  This speech reveals a situation that not even the most optimistic Israelite could have imagined. Jericho, that impossible barrier to the people of God, is in fact already a defeated foe. Before the first feet are placed in the Jordan to bring the people into the land, the hearts of the inhabitants of Jericho are melting in fear (v. 9). The agent of that defeat is the word about what God has already done for his people and how this reveals his character.

Look at Rahab’s testimony.

“I know that the Lord [Yahweh—the covenant name of God] has given you the land” (v. 9).

How does she know? What have she and her fellow citizens heard (v. 10) concerning the exodus from Egypt, the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea, and the destruction of Sihon and Og?

That is what has caused hearts in Jericho to melt and their courage to fail. But  it’s more than past progress or military victories involved, at least in Rahab’s case. She traces these events back not to any inherent superiority of the sons of Abraham but to the reality she confesses in verse 11:

“The Lord your God, he is God in the heavens above and on the earth beneath.”

For Rahab there is nowhere where God is not God, including Jericho.

The truth of who God is and what he has done for his people has already penetrated Jericho, and when the word of God gets into enemy territory, only two reactions are possible. Either there is faith in the greatness of the Lord and a casting of oneself entirely on his mercy (vv. 12, 13), or there is fear, which determines to resist God’s supremacy, challenge his will, and continue to fight against his purposes.

We shall meet the same pattern on at least three other occasions in the book. The same language is used in 5:1 regarding “all the kings of the Amorites who were beyond the Jordan to the west, and all the kings of the Canaanites who were by the sea.” In 9:24 the Gibeonite deception is explained by the same mechanism. Again in 10:1, 2 -Adoni-zedek, king of Jerusalem, reacts to the news of what God has done in Jericho and Ai in the same way.

The mighty acts of God in Israel’s history always serve to reveal the character of Israel’s God, and once the uniqueness of his sovereign authority and power over the whole of creation is realized, the reaction can only be submission or resistance. In the face of God’s purposes, neutrality is impossible.

Of course, the same is true today. Contemporary attacks on the reasonability of Christian belief often depend on ignoring the historical evidence of Biblical revelation, especially with regard to the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. If Christianity can be reduced to religious speculation or an ethical code, it can be easily dismissed, which explains why the anti-supernatural and anti-historical destructive Biblical criticism of the past 150 years has emptied the churches of the western world. But the Biblical revelation is gloriously and stubbornly historical, which we must never tire of asserting. “The Word became flesh and dwelt [literally, pitched his tent] among us” (John 1:14)—that is a historical statement. Certainly it contains an explanation of the event that may be contested, but the factual existence of Jesus of Nazareth on the pages of history is beyond dispute. Refusal to acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord does not lead to neutrality; ultimately it leads to fear that fans the flames of denial and resistance.

Rahab has no other explanation for the astonishing event of the exodus and all that flowed from it, even though she seems a most unlikely candidate to come to faith in Israel’s God and appears to stand entirely alone among her fellow citizens in Jericho. The sheer historical force of what God has done and what he will yet do generates within her the faith that is prepared to risk her life in order to save it and the lives of her family (vv. 12, 13). She is prepared to cut herself off from her background, to risk being charged as a traitor, and to do everything she can to help the spies because of her new faith-allegiance to the only true and living God. All her future now depends on this God; so she casts herself upon his mercy and on the faithfulness of his representatives (v. 14). Because it is the Lord who is giving his people the land, they will replicate his faithful character in the way in which they deal with this newest convert and her extended family.

Faith’s Unlikely Test

Rahab’s eventual rescue depends not only on her initial confession of faith leading her to seek God’s mercy, but on her continuing obedience to the instructions that the spies give her about the scarlet cord (v. 18). This is why she is such an attractive example for James to use in his New Testament letter. In that key passage relating faith and deeds (James 2:14–26), James several times asserts their indivisibility.

“Faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead” (James 2:17).

“I will show you my faith by my works” (James 2:18).

Abraham’s “faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by his works” (James 2:22), in his being prepared to offer up his son Isaac.

“You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24).

“Faith apart from works is dead” (James 2:26).

Rahab is the other example James uses of this “faith revealed in actions” principle. The primary significant action is her provision for the spies and their protection, but the life of faith is always to be expressed in the activities of obedience. Indeed, obedience to what God commands is the only credible confirmation of belief in what he provides.

The obligation laid on her by the spies is to hang a scarlet cord in the window, through which she will let them down by rope to escape the city, since “her house was built into the city wall” (v. 15). It seems unlikely that the scarlet cord was the escape rope since verse 18 calls it “this scarlet cord,” implying that the spies give it to her. Also different Hebrew words are used for “rope” in verse 15 and “cord” in verse 18.

One Commentary suggests that they would have brought it with them, as they “probably came prepared for various eventualities.” The reason is practical. Expecting to attack the city by siege and bombardment, the Israelite forces would need to identify clearly the house whose occupants are to be spared. They will be faithful to their rescue promise provided Rahab keeps the terms of the agreement, gathering all her family into the house marked by the scarlet cord (vv. 17–20). Rahab agrees to the terms, the spies escape through the window, down the city wall, and make for the cover of the hills (v. 21). The scarlet cord remains tied in the window.

Many commentators have seen the scarlet cord as a replication of God’s deliverance of Israel from Egypt. Back in Exodus 12, the only houses that were saved from the destructive judgment of the firstborn when God passed through the land were those where the shelter of the Passover lamb was demonstrated by its blood applied to the sides and tops of the doorframes.

“The blood shall be a sign for you [instead of you], on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you …” (Exodus 12:13).

The colour of Rahab’s cord, scarlet, has sometimes been taken to illustrate that deliverance is only possible through the blood of sacrifice, projecting forward to the New Testament reality of rescue solely through Christ’s blood shed on the cross. Taking seriously the unity of the sixty-six books of the Scriptures, we rightly identify recurring patterns or types of God’s dealings with his people at different stages of redemption history. The danger is that connections become imaginative and fanciful rather than real and then become an imposition on the passage rather than an exposition of its significance.

In this case the colour alone would seem to be a weak ground on which to justify a typological link to the cross. But the principle of obedience as the outward expression of inner faith and even more the dependence on God’s mercy as a guarantee for salvation are certainly principles that have New Testament currency, as we have already seen in James.

To Rahab, it may have seemed strange to have to tie a red cord in her window, but she did it for what it symbolized her faith in and obedience to Yahweh, Israel’s God, not because the object itself had any greater power than that of a sign of unseen realities.

Perhaps a useful reminder to us is the need to continue in trust and obedience even when we cannot see why it should be in certain terms or how things will work out. For the Christian believer, that same mercy of God is conveyed to us through Christ’s death on the cross as our Passover lamb, under whose blood we find shelter from God’s righteous wrath (1 Corinthians 5:7). But the cross is still the foolish stumbling-block it was to the Greeks and Jews of sophisticated first-century Corinth (1 Corinthians 1:23). “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18).

That is the urgent issue that the Rahab narrative presents to us.

The chapter ends (vv. 22–24) where it began, with the spies. The plan to evade their pursuers is successful, as is their crossing of the Jordan, and their consequent report to Joshua is triumphant.

“Truly the Lord has given all the land into our hands. And also, all the inhabitants of the land melt away because of us” (v. 24).

It is a striking contrast to the negativity of the ten spies and their report in Numbers 13—we came, we saw, we cannot. How different now and how like the content of the report that Caleb and Joshua had brought back to Moses! These two spies had not traveled extensively through the land or visited its settlements. Rather, their conviction was that if God could do this in Jericho, there could be no limit to what he would do in the rest of the land. It’s a good lesson for us to bring away from this exciting chapter. As the church of Jesus Christ, we are never so strong as when we are recognizing and rejoicing in the sovereign grace of God.

God is always at work behind the scenes. The city of Jericho presented itself as a hard nut to crack, but within its shell it had already crumbled. So we should never write off anyone because of their background or record. God’s delight is to save sinners.

“The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10).

“This man receives sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:2).  

We must not fall for the lie that Christianity is for a few people – The truth of God is for every man and every woman, all made in his image, all needing to be redeemed and restored. There is no life so impervious that God’s grace cannot break into it in transforming power.

Rahab and her family would be saved by the scarlet cord.

Does that remind you again of the blood on the doorposts of the houses of Israel back in Egypt, so the Angel of Death would pass over them?  Rahab is saying to us: Come home! If this harlot, can make it home, home to the family of Jesus — one of His great-grandmothers — there is a place for us in that family.

With Jesus, we need to expect the unexpected, to look for God in odd places, to recognize that often He is lurking in the hearts of unlikely people. We need to look for God, his grace, and his work in strange places so that, if we should happen to spy God on the move, we can then cooperate with His Spirit, we can then go with God’s flow, and so in the end–as happened for Rahab and her family–we can just maybe help to save someone after all.

In other words, perhaps if we would open our eyes and ask the Spirit for illumination, maybe we would see that there are a lot of places in this world where scarlet cords are draped out people’s windows if only we will take the time to notice and then lend a loving hand.

In the long run, Rahab is rescued, is saved, and becomes a prominent member in the household of Israel. She becomes so prominent, in fact, that one day Rahab’s great, great, great, great, great grandson would be born in Bethlehem and given the name Jesus. Indeed, Matthew goes out of his way in the opening chapter of his gospel to remind us that one of Jesus’ ancestors in the line of David was a former prostitute by the name of Rahab.

As Frederick Buechner once wrote, maybe that explains the soft spot that Jesus so clearly had in his heart for all those ladies of evening he met in places like Samaria, Capernaum, and Jerusalem. Maybe remembering great-grandma Rahab reminded Jesus that God can be at work in all kinds of people–sometimes God is even busier in their lives than in the lives of the more obviously religious!

At the outset of Joshua 2, we might agree with the words of that country-western song that those boys were “looking for love in all the wrong places.” By the time the chapter is finished, however, they had found their God in that wrong place and in that funny fact is an unnerving reminder that those of us who think we have God cased, nailed down  and fenced in are often wrong about that.

This chapter is a burning call to have confidence in the mercy and grace of our God, in the gospel of his saving acts. When that is rooted deeply in us, we shall both pray and expect God to work—not one or the other but both.

In our technology-dominated culture we are not short of sociological analysis about why Christianity is in decline in the twenty-first-century Western world. There’s nothing wrong in such diagnoses, but they do not provide a remedy. The answer lies in the Word of God in the hands of the Spirit of God and in the prayerful obedience of God’s people.

God’s amazing work in such unlikely places ought to be enough to help all of us move forward into the world with great confidence and holy hope.

Once upon a time, there was a prostitute who with a strong & unlikely faith, God saw fit to use. Her whole life she had been an outcast, but within the bounds of God’s sovereignty, she made bold choices that would forever alter the trajectory of History…She was Rahab, the Harlot.

This is no fairy tale . . . it is the Good News of the Gospel.

Let’s Pray.