Know the Word - Week 7 Extra - Rahab: the prostitute who was chosen by God

Rahab: the prostitute who was chosen by God
I find in this story of Rahab a marvelous demonstration of the electing love of God. You need to realize that there was no military reason for the expedition of the spies into Jericho. Given the rather unique battle plan that God was going to adopt at Jericho, there was no need to send spies to discover troop strengths, fortification weaknesses, enemy plans, or even find food and water supplies. All those pieces of normal military intelligence are worthless if you are going to conquer a city in seven days without firing a shot or storming a wall. So why did the spies go? The only intelligence that we have any record of them bringing back is the fact that the inhabitants of Jericho were already in terror because the things God had already done for the Israelites. I believe that the purpose of the expedition was not military at all, but evangelistic. I am certain that it was God's purpose to save one family out of Jericho as a testimony to the sovereign love of God, just like God saved Noah and his family out of the judgment that he brought upon the ancient world, to testify to His sovereign love and mercy. It was to the household of a prostitute named Rahab that the spies were led. She is not the person that I would have chosen to save out of Jericho. But she is the one God chose. I would have looked for someone respectable, someone upright, someone whose sins were somehow less gross, less obvious. My judgment would probably have been that Rahab was beyond redemption, but that wasn't God's judgment. He chooses Rahab.

Rahab responds in faith - she believes in the God of Israel - and she is saved by a scarlet cord hung firmly from her window. (That cord has tremendous symbolic meaning. It points us to the blood of Christ.) If you think very long about this story, it becomes clear that it is a ‘miniature’ of the Gospel story. We, like Rahab, are living in the midst of a doomed civilization. For us, as for her, it is the grace of God, and that alone, which reaches out and saves us from the just desserts of our sin. Like Rahab, we are called upon to respond in faith, and are marked out by the scarlet cord of Christ's blood. Our salvation is made sure, even though we might continue to live for a time, at least, in a city marked out for destruction.

It is extremely significant that Rahab becomes an ancestor of none other that Jesus Christ Himself - not only does God rescue this woman from Jericho, He honors her by grafting her into the line of the Christ! There is something very prophetic about that, because the purpose of Christ, of course, is to redeem not only the Jews, but the whole world, and even this early in the working out of God's purposes through the Old Testament in planning the lineage of Christ, He takes this non-Jew and grafts her into the line.