24th November 2024

Old Testament Heroes 6 – Rahab – Martin Mowat

Readings: Joshua 2:1-11 & Joshua 12-16 and 21b-24

After talking about Moses last Sunday, Charlotte asked me who I’d be talking about this Sunday, and I replied “Rahab”.  Imagine our surprise therefore, when on Monday morning, Jill Weber started talking about the two Israelite spies that Rahab helped escape. And then on Tuesday she spoke about Rahab’s son Boaz, whom I’ll mention this morning too.

Interestingly Jill was talking about them in the context of hospitality and justice.  No-one likes foreign spies, but nevertheless Rahab showed hospitality to these two, and justice was rendered to her when they proved good to their word and saved her family from destruction. We, on the other hand, are talking about her in the context of her faith and her heroism.  Let’s pray. 

First of all, who was Rahab? The Bible describes her as “a harlot” who ran a boarding house, a house where the door was always open to locals and strangers alike, an ideal place for spies to hide inconspicuously, or so one would think. 

But not that day?  I’ll come back to that. 

We need to remember that the people of Jericho, the whole of Canaan in fact, were idolaters, bigtime. They worshipped a god called Baal, who was believed to control the weather, and also, therefore, the fertility of their crops, and a goddess called Ashtoreth (also called Ishtar or Astarte) who was the goddess of erotic love, sexual fertility and war – strange combination!

As I explained in a message 18 months ago, it's difficult for us to understand today that idol worship sometimes involved having sexual intercourse with male and female prostitutes, as a ritual to ensure the fertility of the land. 

We don’t know whether Rahab was one of those prostitutes.  Possibly she wasn’t. But either way, it’s important for us to judge her by the standards of her culture, not ours. 

It appears that she also had a business growing flax and drying it on her roof. That flax would then have been turned into linen thread, and then used to make clothing. That’s why it was easy for her to hide the spies under those stalks. 

Finally, at some point, probably after the episode that was just read to us by Sharon and Alan, she married a man called Salmon, who was a direct decendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and they had a son called Boaz. Boaz was a really nice guy who married Ruth, as we’ll hear in a couple of weeks time, and they were the great grandparets of David.  Rahab was the ‘18 times great’ gandmother of Jesus.

So what exactly was going on in Jericho?  Our passage says that the inhabitants were “melting in fear”.  That doesn’t sound to me that they were just a bit frightened or panicky, that sounds like seriously terrified.  They’d heard about the Israelites freeing themselves from slavery in Egypt, and then, quite incredibly, crossing the Red Sea on foot. Those two things in themselves were quite beyond belief, but then they had only very recently defeated two Amorite armies, and now they were camped right on the other side of their river. 

Jericho was next in line for defeat. No two ways about it. Their days were numbered. No wonder they were “melting in fear”.

What did Rahab do and why? Well, we’ve just heard the story.  Despite their best efforts, the spies didn’t go unnoticed. The king of Jericho must have anticipated that the Israelites would send spies, and so he would doubtless have had counter-spies of his own, on every street corner, watching out for strangers.  The inhabitants, too, would have been suspicious of foreigners. 

When the spies arrived at Rahab’s door, the most natural thing in the world would have been for her to turn them away, and tell the authorities, but she didn’t.  She took them in and hid them. 

When the soldiers come knocking, she told them a pack of bare-faced lies, and then she facilitated the spies escape, even giving them some excellent advice about how to avoid detection once they got to the bottom of the rope. 

Interesting that she had that rope – just the right length.  These two were obviously not the first to have used that escape route. 

If you think about who and what she was, this was strange behaviour that would certainly been seen as an act of treason to the king of Jericho, for which she would surely have been killed if she had been found out. She was playing a very dangerous game.

So why? Because, despite her possible involvement in the religious practices in her town, she realised that the Israelite God was, in her own words “God in heaven above and on the earth below”, FAR greater than Jericho's gods, far superior. And she knew, she said, “that the LORD had given the land to them”.

For Rahab, this is not a quiet conviction, it had become the truth by which she now reordered her life. She’d had a “click moment” and everything had suddenly fallen into place. She now put her faith in her new God and took the ultimate risk.  Would I have done that? I don’t know. Would you? 

Just as an aside, there has been lots of discussion over the centuries about the rights and wrongs of the lies that she told the soldiers. But suffice it to say that it wasn’t just save her own neck, or even those of the two spies, that were ultimately on the line, but those of the whole Israelite nation. 

Rahab's faith is mentioned three times in the New Testament. First, as I mentioned earlier, in the Matthew’s genealogy of Christ. Interestingly she is one of only five women mentioned, which is amazing in itself.  Tamar, Ruth, Bathsheba and Mary were the others.

But remember too that these five women are also examples of how our God is in the redeeming business. One had posed as a prostitute so that her father-in-law would impregnate her, and another was a warrior's wife with who committed adultery with a king. But instead of hiding these "irregularities" in Jesus' family tree, they are pointed out by Matthew as trophies of God’s grace and forgiveness. 

No matter what you and I may have done in a past life, God is ready to forgive us, to give us a new start, and to use us in his kingdom. Our God is the God of the second chance. 

Back to Rahab. By this time, the sins of idolatry and licentiousness in Canaan had reached what the Bible called “full measure”. God was ready to bring the judgement that he had talked about with Abraham years earlier. Yet, this well-known prostitute of Jericho, because she put her faith in God, was saved, both from temporal destruction and from eternal destruction. 

So, to conclude, Rahab really was an amazing lady, and as we heard, Joshua honoured the spies' promise to her by sending them back into the city, during the battle, to bring her out, along with her entire family.

Rahab had demonstrated both remarkable faith and amazing courage. But what’s really beautiful about this story is God's forgiveness and grace towards her. 

So why was she a hero, or should I say a heroine? The Bible is saying that although she was a gentile, and a former sex worker at that, she become integral to the history of salvation. 

But I would say even more than all that. Rahab, surrounded as she was by spiritual and physical garbage, nevertheless not only recognised who God is, and she also submitted to HIS plan for her life, and for her redemption.