5.26.2005
Four Women (Part 2)
It's been a while since I've blogged. It must be a seasonal thing, but with Little League, landscaping and new job duties taking up a huge chunk of my time, blogging has just gone to near the bottom of my priorities.
Today, however, my nose is running like a faucet; my head feels like a beanbag chair; I'm sneezing my face off; and I'm blowing my nose every ten seconds. So I'm pretty much bagging work and catching up on my blog until I decide to go home and go to bed -- which is going to be pretty soon, given how I'm feeling.
I wanted to get back to the subject of the 4 women in the genealogy of Christ, since I only got through the first one -- Tamar, daughter-in-law of Judah, patriarch of the tribe of Israel that produced King David, King Solomon and King Jesus.
The second woman whose name is in this significant genealogy from the Gospel of Matthew is the one I like to call the Ho of Jericho, or Rahab. I love the story of Rahab, especially her inclusion in the 'paternal heritage' of Christ, because I believe it gives great insight into the way God shows His mercy and chooses His people.
Rahab's story is told in Joshua 2, when Joshua sent two men from the army of Israel into Jericho to spy out the city, which was next on the Lord's hit list for Israel to conquer in taking over the Promised Land. These men were hidden by Rahab in her home, and she deceived the King of Jericho and sent his men on a wild goose chase by saying that the two spies were in her home, but had left the city at dusk. Before she let them out of her window to escape, she made the spies promise to spare her and her family when the armies of Israel conquered the city. They agreed, telling her to tie a scarlet cord from the window she was letting them out of as a sign to Israel to spare the occupants of that house. All whom she wanted to save had to be inside that room, or they were dead.
Now, Rahab was a prostitute, and I find it very compelling that God chose to single her out as the means by which anyone survived the sack of Jericho. First of all, anyone who knows the Bible can easily recognize that it was completely unnecessary for Joshua to send two spies into Jericho for any reason, considering that He knocked down the walls of Jericho supernaturally and that the people of Jericho were scared shitless already, having heard of prior supernatural conquests by the chosen people of the Lord.
There are two possible reasons that come quickly to mind in my reading of this text as to why God bothered to have Joshua send spies into Jericho. First, in making allowances for the doubts of Israel, God wanted them to know just how scared and vulnerable the people of Jericho were.
Secondly, he wanted to save Rahab for His own purposes, one of which was to be a progenitor of Joseph, the human father of Jesus.
I take great encouragement from seeing these kinds of stories in Scripture, but they also fill me with frustration at how little appreciation I see in other Christians for what's really going on here. God's in the business of saving morally bankrupt people. If He wasn't, I'd have no hope in this life. Here you have a whore, who sizes up the impending doom and realizes that she's on the wrong side. She seizes an opportunity to get in with the right people in order to save herself AND HER FAMILY.
Let me re-emphasize that last point. Rahab wasn't just engaging in a cynical act of self-preservation. She was a person who saw that her lifestyle, her culture and her leaders were all corrupt. Yet she had a concern for her family. Maybe she was doing what she was doing as the only available way to take care of her parents and other needy family members. Whatever the case might have been, she was willing to leave that life and start again among people with whom she had little in common. AND she was certain enough that this was the better path to take, that she chose it for her kin. Scripture doesn't tell us whether all of her people accepted this invitation to salvation from the army of Israel, but for sure Rahab didn't know how it was all going to turn out.
This is the essence of faith -- to throw away all that you have, to surrender your loved ones to the inevitable consequences of their own choices, and to trust that God will take care of you when the rest of your world is falling apart.
I also find it ironic that the color scarlet has come to be identified with prostitution, adultery and all manner of sexual sin in the lives of women. To my way of thinking, that is a perversion of its use in this story, which is to signal brightly to the conquering soldiers that those people covered under that symbol are protected from judgment and death. In my mind, this symbol has much more to do with the Passover blood that protected the Jews from the Angel of Death back in Egypt on the night Pharoah lost his first-born son.
Joshua 6 records that when Jericho fell, Rahab and her family were given safe conduct outside the city, but were camped in a place OUTSIDE the camp of Israel. We don't hear anything else about Rahab in the entire Bible until her name is mentioned in the Matthew genealogy. From these two facts we can infer that while Rahab started her new life on the outside looking in, she (and presumably the rest of her family) was adopted into the family of Israel in time to marry and have children -- particularly a son named Boaz who figures prominently in our next installment.
- posted by The Drake @ 9:02 AM
