Our second episode in the Impact series explores the second chapter of Joshua and the story of Rahab rescuing the spies. Join us as we consider the difference between how we look at ourselves and how Jesus sees us.
Crosswalk Chattanooga Podcast
8-17-24: Impact Ep. 2 - Rahab
(upbeat music) - Hey, I'm Pastor Dave Ferguson. Welcome to Crosswalk Chattanooga's Weekend Teaching Podcast. We're glad you're with us. - Well, good, good morning again, Crosswalk, family, friends, any guests. We're so glad that you are here this morning. We've already had a big day, right? As we're moving along, I'm like that. As we're moving along, we should know this too. Our next service, some of you have noticed this over here behind this curtain. There's a little baptistry, young man named Luke Fogg is gonna be baptized in our second service. So some of you know Luke, if you don't know Luke, check out and figure that out, and please throw a warm welcome around him as well. As we kind of continue on, this is our second week in our impact series around stories from the life and the book of Joshua, and we continue today. So many of us know what it is to be one thing in one room and you go into another room and you're something else, right? You can be the guy who's in charge of a certain department or the woman who leads her own small business or is a nurse on the floor, and then you come home and your mom, right? Or your dad, or your brother, or you walk into different rooms and you're one thing, or you move into the space of being another. So here's the interesting question, how many of you are grandparents? Yeah, some of you got that arm only so high, I don't know what that means, but some of you raised it pretty high, that's good, Don. Here's what, Don, what are you called by your grandchildren? D-dad, D-dad, I was thinking about this, so I had a ma and pop as two of my grandparents, and a Grammy and Grampie as the other two grandparents, all sorts of names that we use, right? Some of the most, you know, there's grandpa, there's pa, there's pa, pa, there's pop, pop, granddaddy, there's pee, pa, there's, what was that again? D-dad, that's great, sorry, didn't mean to laugh, that is great. Or maybe there is Nana, I was checking around, that's one of the most popular ones, Nana Granny, I'm not sure everybody loves that, my mom didn't want to be Grammy, she wanted to be Grandma, that little vowel change at the end made everything happier for her, for some reason. Me, mom, mom, mom, all sorts of names we use. You walk from one place to another place, and your name actually even changes, potentially. Well, what a wonderful thing, what an amazing thing. We're gonna roll into the second chapter of the book of Joshua, and it can seem, in all that's going on in Joshua, big things are happening for God's people, for the church, and then we take this little detour, it starts out sounding like this is a big thing about the church, and it turns out it's about someone, a person. It's a reminder to me, all sorts of things going on, and we have schedules to try to make and keep, and we're rolling along with, we're gonna have a church business meeting, and we're doing some work on bylaws for our church, and we're having a new youth group that's launching, and we're at all these kind of big moves for the church, and in the midst of it plunks, this story in the second chapter of Joshua to remind us, God is always up to something with some one. Starts out this way. Joshua secretly sent out two spies from the Israelite camp at Acacia Grove. Now, first of all, two spies, you remember, Joshua was one of 12 spies, and Joshua's experience has probably caused him to say, you know, if you get the right two, that's gonna be plenty. You can mess things up by turning this into a committee. We're going with two. And beyond that, I get a sense what Joshua's doing here is, he's not, he doesn't have like weak faith, he's trying to decide can we do this, that's not what's going on here at all. We're not going to see if we're going to lay plans about when. So let's be a little secretive about this. I don't want to have everybody showing up at my tent saying, oh no, we can't do it, it'll ever work. So he sends two, secretly, shh, you just go. He instructs them, scout out the land on the other side of the Jordan River, especially around Jericho. Now, we're about to get into the story of when they cross the Jordan, and then in two weeks, we'll be talking about Jericho. But what you need to understand is, from where Joshua stands, giving these secretive instructions, he can look across the river and see Jericho. In fact, when the 12 spies come back all wobbly need, they had gone well past Jericho, into the hill country, where all the giants are and all this other stuff, and maybe there's a little tidbit for us to take away. When you look way too far down the road, you can't get your legs moving. We get scared by 15 steps from here, and we won't step into God's promise for today. And Joshua says, no, just don't go looking around everywhere. Pay attention to our next square foot. And move forward. Shh, people will get all whack, crazy. And so, the two men set out and came to the house of Rahab, the prostitute, and stayed there that night. And that may feel easy to just read and move on. Some of the rest of us might say, we could have just been fine skipping that part. But we're gonna slow down a tiny bit. Here they are. Years have gone by, 40 of them, since the last time spies went into the countryside. That was so close to the parting of the Red Sea, and all the stuff that was happening, that maybe the reputation wasn't quite so big and strong and bold and scary, but by now, everybody knows. And so, you can't just be a Hebrew passing among Jericho inhabitants, and just it's nothing. No, no, you have to be careful, you have to be secretive. And so, they go to a place that is capable of secrecy. It's a brothel, it's a place that travelers would spend the night. Rahab, the prostitute. Some of our translations polish that up with harlot. Neither term, the one we're hoping for. Well, so, here's the thing. These might be the very kind of places that the king would expect to get tips from for somebody to alert them. Hey, these strangers are in town. And so, someone tells the king of Jericho some Israelites have come here tonight to spy out the land. And so, the king of Jericho sent orders to Rahab. Bring out the men who have come into your house, for they have come here to spy out the whole land. And Rahab had hidden the two men. But she replied, yes, the men were here earlier, but I don't know where they're from. They left the town at dusk, as the gates were about to close. I don't know where they went. If you hurry, you can probably catch up to them. Well, actually, she had taken them up to the roof and hidden them beneath bundles of flax she had laid out. I think it's kind of crazy, but here's something we might want to just ponder for a minute. God doesn't change her before he uses her. If you're wondering what all you need to do before you can serve God, I think you might have it backwards. Start serving him. And he's gonna mess up your life. It's one of the things I love about our community here is we don't put you on the bench. We encourage you, serve God today. Step into the next square. The thing is, though, that means what does she use? She uses her house of prostitution. She uses deception and she uses lies. Another side note, some people read through scripture and read all the stories as if these stories are a description of how God wants us to be. No. God says, "I am not afraid of your story. "I am not ashamed of you. "I will let your story speak boldly "even when it's not cleaned up. "Even when it has all sorts of problems. "But don't be mistaken. "God is not the God of lies in prostitution. "He's the God of prostitutes and liars." There's a difference. And we get it all confused. We tend to treat it all as one thing. The prostitute is the same as prostitution. The person who struggles with truth-telling is the same thing with a lie. And we categorize people so fast and we treat them based on those categories in ways God does not condone. I love this comment by Stephen Furtick. The love of God is not the reward for change. It is the source. It is the fuel by which we are changed. So she hides. She lies. She protects. And you gotta wander a little bit. Why? What is she doing? So the Kingsmen went looking for the spies from her advice along the road leading to the shallow crossings of the Jordan River as soon as the Kingsmen had left the gate of Jericho was shut. But before the spies that went to sleep that night, Rahab went up on the roof to talk with them. And she says these things. "I know the Lord has given you this land," she told them. "We are all afraid of you. Everyone in the land is living in terror." What does she say? "I know the Lord." The language here in the Hebrew Bible is, "I know Yahweh." Not your God, not the Hebrew God, the God. And she begins this expression of faith. She says, "For we have heard how the Lord made a dry path for you through the Red Sea when you left Egypt." She's had this churning for years from stories 40 years ago that are going on in her heart. And we know what you did to Sihon and Og, the two Amorite Kings east of the Jordan River where people, there you just utterly destroyed them. No wonder our hearts have melted in fear. No one has the courage to fight after hearing such things for the Lord, your God, is the supreme God of the heavens above and the earth below. If you are reading this and you have read through these stories and through the stories of the Exodus, you just heard an echo. As Rahab says, "Our hearts melted with fear." That is a same phrase, the 12, the 10 spies who discouraged Israel from going into the land used. Our hearts melted with fear. All the while, as God's people are stuck and petrified, He has already melted the hearts of the opposition in fear. Is it possible that usually our refusal to step into the next square is not about how we see God, it's how we see ourselves. And in some way we are replacing the God with us. And our own power. And we start to think about what's wrong with me. And that that is bigger than what's right with God. She goes on, "Now swear to me by the Lord that you will be kind to me and my family since I have helped you." There's a whole side street maybe we'll get to in the future of how Rahab leverages her faith in God for the salvation of her family. A day when we dedicate so many children, maybe this is a good moment to just pause and not go too fast past this. Your faith has power. It is not that you get to decide for your family. But you can negotiate for their future because the faith that you have lives loudly and publicly. So give me some guarantee that when Jericho is conquered, she's a person of faith, she already knows, this is happening, the God, the one true God. These walls are gonna fall. But when it happens, give me some guarantee that you will let me live. I am doing what I can to be one of you. I am helping the cause. I am secretly you away. I am setting you free. I am your salvation today. Could you please help be mine tomorrow? Along with my father and my mother and my brothers and sisters and all their family, she's rolling in with a crowd now. And they respond, we offer our own lives as a guarantee for your safety, the men agreed. If you don't betray us, we will keep our promise and be kind to you when the Lord gives us the land. And so then, since Rahab's house was built on the town wall, on the edge of the wall, she let them down by a rope through the window. Escape to the hill country, she says. Hide there for three days from the men searching for you. And then when they have returned, you can go on your way. But before they left, the men told her, we will be bound by the oath we have taken on this condition, if you follow these instructions. When we come into the land, you must leave this scarlet rope hanging from the window through which you let us down. This story starts out being about the church moving across the Jordan and through Jericho and the success of God's people. And it stops, it delays, it pauses here on one person and their journey with Jesus. She went no to use that name. She might know Joshua's name, which we'll talk about in the future. Is Hebrew for the Greek name, Jesus. She believes in the one God. And she says, look, verse 15, I'm gonna let down this rope, you'll scramble down it to freedom. And they say, ah, that rope, that rope. They introduced the word scarlet, that scarlet rope. You need to leave it hanging. You're not gonna know exactly the day. You're not gonna know when this is all gonna happen. It will seem like maybe trouble is just swirling around you and you'll never get out of it. Leave the rope hanging there. Leave the scarlet. Have the crimson rope dripping from your window. It's interesting that the two moments in verse 15 and verse 18 are different Hebrew words. Here's the first one, what she says is, calvel, huh, calvel, rope. In fact, it's not just in the old rope, this is the kind of word that they would use for the kinds of ropes that they would measure out properties. And so it could even be used for the word territory, but over time it also came to denote difficulty and stress and pain and sorrow and travail so that this word is used a lot in the book of Job. A noose or a snare and destruction. At its worst meaning, this is a rope that lines out the measurements of difficulty. And so she lets down the rope of difficulty. They though, they were referred to this scarlet tikvah, tikvah, and tikvah actually also cord, but is a word used repeatedly in the Old Testament for hope, hope. So she says, look, your escape will be my difficulty. And they say, on and on now, you leave the rope, the cord, the scarlet, the crimson drapery of hope. And it maybe makes you think of Exodus, as God says, look, I'm gonna free you from slavery and out of bondage. You're gonna need to identify with me, though. You, what you do, you're gonna sacrifice this lamb, you're gonna have this meal, but as you do, you take some of the blood of the lamb and you paint your doors and you paint the windowsills and you identify your house as being under the blood of the lamb. You identify your place as being a house of hope, of being a claim on the lamb to come, on the Jesus to come, the Joshua of the New Testament. For the blood on your door posts will serve as a sign, marking the houses where you're staying. And when you see the blood, I will pass over you. And so she has hope. By the sixth chapter, we're gonna talk about the walls of Jericho and what it means. All that goes on there and we're gonna be remembering this promise and woman who will have gathered all her family into her house to be saved. Because, in Joshua chapter six, it's Joshua himself who will say to these two young men, all right now, go find Rahab the prostitute and her family. Rahab the prostitute. I don't know if you've ever had a nickname that bothered you. Look at it, my friend Brian, he knew it was coming, didn't you? You knew it was coming? We went to high school together and they gave me the nickname worm and I hated it. I have theories on why they did it, but I did not enjoy that nickname 'cause it didn't seem to me like it was a compliment. I don't know how you're gonna dress it up, but Rahab the harlot is not complimentary. Rahab the prostitute, and here's the thing, they'll keep bringing her up through scripture. And Joshua will say go get Rahab the prostitute. And the writer of Hebrews will say, oh yeah, let me talk to you about Rahab the prostitute and James in his book will say, oh, hey, let's talk Rahab the prostitute. It just will never relent. Check this out, Hebrews chapter 11, it was by faith that Moses, you know this chapter, it's the faith chapter, right? By the word part way in, by faith that Moses commanded the people of Israel to keep the Passover and to sprinkle blood on the doorpost so that the angel of death would not kill their firstborn sons. It was by faith that the people of Israel were right through the Red Sea as though they were on dry ground, but when the Egyptians tried to follow, they were all drowned. Side note, really distracting, hard not to spend more time here, but maybe we should wonder when God leads us through deep waters, whether he's trying to drown us or drown what's chasing us. It was by faith that the people of Israel marched around Jericho for seven days and the walls came crashing down. It was by faith that Rahab, who? What Rahab? You know, there aren't a lot of Rahabs. You could've just gone with Rahab. You gotta keep at it with the prostitute part. Rahab the prostitute was not destroyed with the people in her city who refused to obey God for she had given a friendly welcome to the spies. And then this verse. How much more do I need to say? I don't even have time. It would take too long to recount the stories of faith of Gideon and Barak and Samson and Jepthah and David and Samuel and all the prophets of Ezekiel and Isaiah and Jeremiah and, wait, time out. What? You just spent time talking about Rahab, the prostitute, and you don't have time to talk about David? You don't have time to talk about Daniel? You're gonna say something about those prophets, by lions and blah, blah, blah, blah, but you're not even gonna mention his name. Rahab the prostitute, and I wonder, we tend to categorize people and then put them in a line based on their nickname. And we will repeat their name and we will repeat their name and we will repeat their name and we will end their ADHD. You know that, right? They're not SDA, they're LGBTQ plus, they're blue or red, and we categorize and we cordon off and we create a line in which, based on your label, you are lesser than. And the writer of Hebrews says, I don't have time. Wait, wait, let me tell you about Rahab the prostitute. She's gonna be earlier in line for me than David and Isaiah. James, in James chapter two, we'll say, I wanna talk to you about faith. Let me tell you about Abraham. Oh, and also then there was Rahab the prostitute. Those are his two. Seriously though, Rahab, the prostitute, do you need to keep, keep laboring on that? Do you know, there is one place where she's just called Rahab. This is the record of the ancestors of Jesus, the Messiah. A descendant of David and of Abraham and on it will go in that portion of Matthew chapter one that we skip when we read at Christmas. And it'll get to the fifth verse. Solomon was the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab. Do you know what Jesus calls Rahab? Nana, great, great, great, grandma, me-ma, that's Rahab. Mom and wife and grandma of the Messiah. I don't know if it felt like it came in here with a label. But I think maybe we should make a commitment to be careful calling someone by how we have memorized their past. Fact of all places, this is a place where you should be able to come and leave your label behind. It might be a label that is a lie about you, more probably on occasion, it's a label that is true about you from yesterday or even today. You can look at yourself, how others look at you. Or you can look at yourself as Jesus looks at you. You today can lay claim to who Jesus says you are. You may feel in certain circles that you are defined by bankruptcy or a failed business or by divorce or by a terrible relationship with one of your children or by some act you did that became public or you may wander around feeling defined by an act that nobody else knows about, but you can't let it go. And Jesus says, walk in here and hear me call your name. Rahab, my grandma, my family who would lay everything on the line to protect her mother and her father and her children's children. This place is an invitation for you to be who Jesus says you are. You can walk into a room and feel like you're one thing and Jesus says you are another. If you're willing to come to me, though your sins are like scarlet, this same color of the red cord, though they are red like crimson, I will make them as white as snow, I will make them as white as wool, I will change your identity, I don't know if you ever tried to get blood out of something. That kind of red doesn't come out of the carpet easily. Jesus says, ah, I've got you. Throw your sins. Be a scarlet, though everyone would always and regularly call you. Rahab the prostitute. Time out, I'm changing it all. I'm changing it all. However you came in here today, Jesus says if you're willing, I'm changing it now. There's a Psalm 22 that's known as a Messianic Psalm. It wouldn't be surprising as you read the first verse of this Messianic song, Psalm, that starts my God, my God. Why have you abandoned me? Why have you forsaken me? Many of us will recall echoing those words from the cross as Jesus calls out, my God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Why have you forsaken me? In this Messianic Psalm, Brian, there is a verse, verse five that says this, I am a worm and not a man. I am scorned and despised by all, and if you just read that Psalm, you might not make, hopefully the first verse would tip you off, but if you read carefully and slowly, you begin to realize these are, this is the language of Jesus. I am a worm, not a man. What's going on here? All throughout scripture, there are these moments where somebody is described as being one thing and yet it is another thing, or there's this symbol of what, it's the lamb, right? No, no, it's Jesus. It's blood. No, no, no, no, no, it's grace. It's my body and blood broken and shed for you. No, no, no, no, no, it's salvation. I am a worm, not a man. I just, before we leave, you've got to know a little bit more about the Hebrew that's translated here, it's not the most common word for worm in the Old Testament. This is a more rare word used for worm in the Old Testament. It's also used for something else. It is tole a, tole a, there are some other derivatives of it, tole a, tole a is a worm, cocus illicus, a specific worm, a specific kind of worm that fed off of certain Palestinian oaks. It also became known that worm, that word, for this particular word, also became actually a translated word for scarlet. Or crimson, because these worms, as they feed off of trees, they're kind of more grub-like than what we kind of think of as worms, but these worms, as they feed off the sap of a very specific kind of tree, they become bright red and over time it darkens to a deep crimson color. It's kind of a gelatinous something, just under there. I don't understand the biology of a worm. Grub, illicus. In fact, over time this worm, they would harvest these worms to make die, so that in specific occasions, like when they're referring to the priests of the garments and crimson red, it is this word, tole a, and its derivative that's being used. There's something you need to know about this worm that is referred to as the scarlet worm. Here's what happens with this worm. When it's ready to lay its eggs, the female, it will climb up a tree and it will attach itself through spikes on its underside, it will attach itself to a tree. So attached that if you tried to get it off of there, the only way you could do so is to just break the worm apart. And it lays its eggs under its body next to the tree. While this is gross, think about the metaphor. Over a three-day period of time, the hatched eggs will feed off of the body and the blood of the cocous illicus. And it will turn them bright, it stains them, and it stains the tree. And shortly, if you were to watch over that three-day period, you would watch the mother cocous illicus scarlet worm start to turn white. So that by three days, it will look like a little piece of wool stuck to the tree. And then, for the end of the third day, it will release from the tree and flutter to the ground like a snowflake. So you need to know that when Isaiah says this, "Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, I will make them white as wool." So what you need to know is he's using the same word as in Psalm 22, verse 5. When Jesus says, "I am a worm," not a man, he is saying, "I am scarlet. I am crimson." I am your sacrifice. I am what takes you from being a prostitute to being my grandmother, from being outcast to being my child. And over a short period, what was crimson becomes white as snow. We're going to race through the book of Joshua, little bits and stories, but we needed to pause here. There's a lot going on for our church, but none of it matters outside of what's going on for individual people. And when you walk in here, you might think of yourself one way defined by either your worst failures or your biggest success, but none of that can compete with what Jesus is prepared to call you. His redeemed, loved, forgiven, his child, his family. Oh, please, lay claim to the grace of Jesus, the part, the thing that hasn't been exposed to anyone else. You know our worst story, the nicknames we like, the nicknames we don't. You above all could call us by names that are horrible, but we pause right now to hear you speak our name. Your love for us, your salvation for us that we are yours and your family, and we pledge to not give up, to hold out, to wait, to drape the crimson cord, to paint our door frames red, to lean in and lean on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Amen. Thank you for joining us for this teaching. Consider hitting the subscribe button to stay tuned for next week. If you'd like to support Crosswalk Chattanooga, go to crosswalkvillage.com/chatanuga and click the give button at the far right of the ribbon at the top. Notice the campus drop down menu and select Chattanooga. And if you'd like to come and worship with us on a Saturday morning, we would love that. When you do, please say hi to me. I'd love to learn your name. (gentle music) [BLANK_AUDIO]