(Joshua 2:1-14, Joshua 6:22-25; Matthew 1:4-5a)
I’ve talked to a couple people this week who thought it strange that I would do a sermon series on the women mentioned in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus. After all, as we read it—if we read it; most people don’t—it doesn’t seem like that big a deal to us that he’d mention a few women here and there; and of the ones he does mention, some of their stories aren’t exactly nice. But in fact, his inclusion of women is a profound break with normal practice that needs an explanation—and the fact that there’s something scandalous about every one of these women, that they weren’t the sort of people a good Jew would want in the lineage of the Messiah, is part of it. The other part, I think, is the way that God used each of them to build Messiah’s family—which in most cases was through extraordinary acts of faith on their part.
Last week, we looked at Judah’s encounter with Tamar, which led to the birth of his sons Perez and Zerah. It wasn’t long afterward that a great famine drove them and his brothers and all their family down into Egypt—where Joseph, the brother whom they had sold into slavery, had risen to be the Pharaoh’s prime minister. Though Joseph might have taken vengeance on them, instead he welcomed them (after testing them a little first), and the Pharaoh gave them the best grazing land in the kingdom for their own. As time passed, their numbers grew, until they were a powerful tribe; they were known as the Israelites after their ancestor Jacob, whom God had renamed Israel.
As their tribe grew larger, the Pharaohs who ruled Egypt began to view them as a threat. Finally, one Pharaoh tried to end the threat, first by enslaving the Israelites, and then by ordering that every boy born to them should be killed at birth. Despite this policy (which the midwives tried not to enforce), God raised up Moses to lead his people out of Egypt and back to Canaan, to the land God had promised to give to Abraham and his descendants; and by God’s grace, Moses did. And yes, I’m skipping a lot here, but we don’t have time to read all of Exodus and Numbers just now.
Anyway, as our passage this morning begins, the Israelites have reached the banks of the Jordan River, which forms much of the eastern border of the Promised Land; Moses has died, command has passed to his chief lieutenant, a man named Joshua, and the people of Israel are preparing to invade Canaan. They’ll cross the Jordan near the city of Jericho, which means that will be the first threat to their bridgehead, and the first city they’ll need to take; so Joshua sends two men ahead to spy out Jericho, its defenses and the surrounding area. They enter the city and decide to stay in the house of a prostitute named Rahab—and it should be noted, the Hebrew text is carefully worded to make it perfectly clear that they did not sleep with her, they just slept in the same house.
Rahab’s an interesting character. Clearly, she was an independent businesswoman. She’s unmarried—there’s no husband mentioned anywhere in the text—and though she has a father and brothers, they aren’t the decision-makers: Rahab runs this family. She owns the house, she runs the business, and she makes the decisions; indeed, she feels perfectly free to make a major commitment on her family’s behalf without consulting anyone. She certainly has the ability to handle the job: she thinks fast on her feet, she’s clever enough to keep the king’s messengers from finding the two spies, and whatever we might think of her deceit, she has the nerve to put her head on the chopping block for them. To lie to the king’s messengers was to lie to the king; to lie to the king and get caught was fatal. She does it without hesitation, and she gets away with it.
Like Tamar, Rahab is a strong, smart, capable woman; and like Tamar, she chose the people of God over her own people. We don’t know what about the spies caught her attention, but her speech in verses 8-13 makes it clear what won her support: the absolute conviction that God was with them, not her own people, and that they were on the winning side. To us, that might seem rather crassly opportunistic, but that misses the religious element of the conflict: she was convinced that the God of the Israelites “is God in heaven above and on earth below,” and thus that the gods of her own people were false gods. She may have been convinced by military victories, not by argument, and she may have been motivated by fear for her family, but that doesn’t make her faith any less real or praiseworthy. She could see what the rest of the city couldn’t, or wouldn’t: that these spies were on the side of the God of the world, which meant that fighting them could only bring disaster. The proper course was not to fight them but to welcome them.
Thus when the spies come to her house, she protects them and sends the king’s messengers off on a wild-goose chase; then she goes to them and confesses her faith in the God of Israel because of all he has done for his people. “Now then,” she says, and the NIV says, “because I have shown kindness to you,” which captures the sense but not the force of her statement; the key word here is the word hesed, which we’ve looked at before. Hesed, you remember, is a loaded word—it’s the word used to describe the absolute loyalty and faithfulness and unstinting love which God shows to his people with whom he has made his covenant. It gets translated “lovingkindness,” “covenant love,” “covenant faithfulness,” and other things of that sort, but none of the translations really capture its full meaning; there’s no word in English that really expresses the depths of love and commitment and faithfulness hesed entails.
Here, what Rahab says is, “Since I have done hesed to you,” preserving your life from destruction, “now you swear to me by the LORD that you in turn will do hesed to my family,” saving them from destruction as well. Basically, she wants them to treat her actions on their behalf as her making covenant with them, and through them with the whole people of Israel, and thus to make sure she and her family survive to join the people of Israel once Jericho has fallen. We might see this as her application for Israelite citizenship for herself and her family, but there’s more to it than that, because Israel is defined by its covenant relationship with God; her offered oath of allegiance is to God, not just to his people. If the spies accept it, she and her family will in every important respect cease to be Canaanites and become Israelites, heirs to all God’s promises. From the spies’ point of view, if she gets them out of this alive, they’re happy with that. She does her part, getting them out of the city and helping them get safely back to their camp; when Jericho falls, God does his part, and she and all her family are preserved.
The story of Rahab points forward to the work of Christ in a couple different ways. First, as we saw with Tamar and will see again next week with Ruth, we have a foreigner—this time with her entire family—being brought into the people of God. This fulfills in a small way God’s promise to bless all the nations of the earth through Abraham, and it anticipates the day when Jesus Christ would come to fulfill that promise in earnest. Indeed, since all these women are ancestors of Jesus, each is a part of that fulfillment: because of them, when he came, he came not as a pure Jew, but as a Jew who already carried the blood of the nations in his veins.
Second, Rahab is accepted as one of the people of God because of her faith, not because she had lived an exemplary life and kept the Law. She was living in a pagan society, worshiping pagan gods, and earning a living as a prostitute—she was a long way from being a model of righteousness by Jewish standards. But whatever one might say about her life in Jericho, here’s the important thing: when she saw something better, she went for it. When she saw the true God, she knew she needed to set aside her false gods and worship him. Where others merely saw danger, she saw deliverance, and when it came within her grasp, she took hold and would not let go. She was given the choice between the way of friendship with the world and the way of friendship with God, and she chose God. For this, she is named in Hebrews 11 as one of our heroes of faith.
Note this well: her act of faith was a total change of allegiance, laying everything on the line. From the point of view of her society, the people of her world, she was a traitor; if she’d been found out, she and all her family would have been dead. But she took that step in the absolute faith that she and all her family would be dead if she didn’t act—in the utter conviction that the only path to survival, the only path to life, was to turn her back on Jericho and join up with the people of God. A few weeks ago, we heard James calling us to choose our side, to give up double-mindedness and commit completely to God; in Rahab, we see what that looks like. She set herself apart from her friends, neighbors, customers, government, society, everybody; she chose God over all of them. They would no doubt have said that she betrayed them, though one imagines that she would have saved some of them if there had been any way to do so. She chose God over her entire life—she turned her back on everything she had ever known, and gave up everything she had, except her family, whom she brought with her—and she never looked back, because she had no doubt that what she gained in return was worth it.