Rahab a Foreshadow of the Church. Joshua a Foreshadow of Jesus, Joshua Series Part 2 - Justin Wadel

In Hebrews chapter 11, which is often referred to as the Hall of Fame chapter, we read that without faith, it is impossible to please Him, that is, God. For he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. So God honors and rewards true, diligent faith that seeks after Him and His kingdom, even when we're not sure how everything is going to work out in the end. And I think that's even—that's when it's even more powerful. Kevin read a quote this morning in communion, and he talked about—I don't remember the quote exactly, but it had to do with how we tend to be very impatient when it comes to waiting on God, when it comes to waiting, I'm going to say, for our turn.

All right. And when we look at many people, especially in the Old Testament, when we read stories like of Joseph and of David, many of these great men had their time when they just had to wait. They had no idea what was going on. They had no idea how it was going to turn out. We see the story. We see the end. And so I think it's hard for us to remember that they went years—20, 30, 40 years sometimes—trying to figure out what was God doing, what was happening here. But they had faith through it all. And faith is rewarded when we continue to diligently seek, even when we're not sure how it's going to turn out.

So back to Hebrews 11, we read about some of these kinds of people, these great heroes of faith, like Enoch, who had a testimony that he pleased God. We see Noah, who by faith built an ark and became heir of the righteousness, which is according to faith.

We read about Abraham. We know a lot about him. His faith led him away from his family and all that he knew in search of the promise of an inheritance, and who in complete faith and obedience offered up his only begotten son.

And we read about his wife, Sarah, who through faith received strength to bear a child in her old age. And then we read about Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and Moses and his willingness to forsake Egypt and the pleasures of sin, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God.

And we have names like Gideon and Jephthah and David and Samuel, who through faith subdue kingdoms, work righteousness, obtain promises, out of weakness became strong, became valiant in battle, and turned to flight the armies of enemies. Great names, names that we all recognize and we know because of the great things that they did through faith.

But then right in the middle of all these names, we have another person mentioned. And besides Sarah, she's the only other woman mentioned by name in this chapter. And Paul gives credit to her. And who we may at first, or at first glance, we may wonder, how does she make it into this chapter alongside these people like Abraham and Moses and Noah and Isaac and Jacob? Verse 31 in Hebrews 11 says, "By faith, the harlot Rahab did not perish with those who did not believe when she had received the spies with peace."

Okay, very short verse, and it just kind of lets you wondering, what is it about her? Here's a woman who showed hospitality to a couple of spies. So how does this qualify her to make it into this hero of faith chapter alongside people like Moses and Abraham?

Obviously, there's more to the story, and that's what we're going to dig into today. You can turn to chapter 2 of Joshua.

This is my second sermon in the book of Joshua series.

And I'm just going to go ahead and we'll read the chapter first and just get into this and try to figure out what is it about Rahab that made her such a unique person.

Joshua chapter 2. I'm reading out of the Septuagint.

"After this, Joshua, the son of Nun, sent out two young men from Achazia Grove to spy out the land, saying, 'Go and see the land in Jericho.' So the two young men went and entered Jericho, and they went into the house of a harlot named Rahab and lodged there. This was reported to the king of Jericho, saying, 'Behold, men from the sons of Israel have come to spy on the land.' So the king of Jericho sent and spoke to Rahab, saying, 'Bring out the men who came into your house last night, for they are here to spy on the land.' But the woman took the men and hid them. And she spoke to them, saying, 'The men came to me.'

But as the gate was being shut in the darkness, the men went out. I do not know where they went. Pursue them, if indeed you may overtake them.' But she led them to the roof and hid them in the stalk of flax she had piled together on the roof.

So the men searched for them along the road to the Jordan, to the fords, and the gate was closed. Then it came to pass when the men who pursued them went after them and before the spies went to sleep, that she went to them on the roof and said, 'I know that the Lord gave you the land, for fear of you has fallen upon us. For we heard that the Lord God dried up the Red Sea before you when you came out of the land of Egypt, and what you did to the two kings of the Amorites who were beyond the Jordan, to Sihon and to Og, whom you utterly destroyed.

So when we heard it, we were amazed in our heart, and there was no longer any spirit in any of us because of your presence. For your God is in heaven above and on earth beneath. Now therefore, swear to me by the Lord God that as I showed you mercy, you shall also be merciful to me in my father's house, and capture alive all my house, my father and mother and my brothers and everything they have, and deliver my soul from death.'

Then the men said to her, 'Our life for your life, even to death.' She then said, 'When the Lord shall deliver the city to you, deal with me in mercy and truth.' After this, she let them down through the window and said to them, 'Go away to the hill country lest the pursuers happen to find you. Hide there for three days until your pursuers return from their search for you. Afterwards, you shall depart and go your way.' So the men said to her, 'We will be without fault regarding this oath of yours. For behold, we will come into a part of the city, and you will set a sign. You shall hang this scarlet cord in the window through which you let us down.

Then you shall gather yourself and your father and mother and your brothers into your father's house.' This reads a little different than the Masoretic text, which reads into it was specifying her home. I don't know if there's a difference. Maybe they lived at the same place.

It probably doesn't matter, but I did notice that one difference. The Septuagint specifies it's her father's house. The other text tells her to bring them into her home, her house. 'Whoever shall go outside the door of your house, his guilt shall be upon him, and we will be free of this oath of yours. But we will be responsible for whoever is with you in your house.

But if anyone injures us or reveals these words of ours, we shall be free from this oath of yours.' Then she said to them, 'Let it be so according to your word.' So she sent them away. They departed and went to the hill country and remained there for three days. And the pursuers searched all the roads but did not find them. So the two young men returned and came down from the mountain. They crossed over to Joshua, the son of Nun, and told him everything that happened to them. They said to Joshua, 'The Lord will deliver all the land into our hand, for everyone who inhabits that land cowers in fear because of us.'

All right, I just want to—I want to start out with a little review from the first chapter just to kind of give us some context. It's been a while since we went over that first chapter, but we focused mainly on Joshua, the person of Joshua, who he is, what he was becoming here.

Joshua is a very capable commander. His name means salvation. And under his leadership, the children of Israel are poised to enter the promised land where they will meet the Canaanites and Amorites who have been settled there for over 500 years. I don't know the exact—it could be thousands of years. And they have dozens of fortified city-states, very fortified city-states.

The only way that Joshua and the Israelites will conquer and inherit this land will be through obedience to God's commands and through God's divine intervention. So God isn't going to go just in front of them and do it all for them. He's not just going to go down there and wipe out city after city and let them just kind of take over. He expects them to do a lot of work and put a lot of effort into this. But if they're obedient, he will also intervene through many divine ways.

Joshua is an Old Testament type of Christ. This comes through just clearer and clearer the more I read through this book. Joshua and Jesus are the same name in Greek. Just as Joshua leads Israel into their promised rest, so Jesus, our Messiah, leads us into our promised eternal rest.

Joshua began his rule over the people at the River Jordan, and Jesus also began to preach the gospel after he was baptized in the River Jordan. Joshua appointed 12 leaders to divide the inheritance. We didn't get into that yet. And Jesus sent forth 12 apostles as heralds of the truth.

Just a lot and a lot more. There's a lot more similarities, a lot more types that we could talk about. This book, the book of Joshua, is packed full of types and shadows of Christ and his kingdom. Good book to argue from if you want to prove Christ through the Old Testament. And we'll be seeing a few of these today. We'll be looking at some of those types. I know I'm not catching all of them. I've had a little bit of help from others, but it's just they start really sticking out if you read through this book enough. All right, so let's get back here to chapter 2. So Joshua, you can imagine Joshua, he's standing there on the one side of the Jordan River, and he's looking across the Jordan, knowing that at the point that they cross over the Jordan, it's battle time, it's conquest time.

And the first obstacle, the first mission was to defeat or to conquer Jericho. And this was probably one of the biggest cities, definitely one of the strongest cities, one of the oldest.

History makes a pretty big deal about the walls that they had. It must have been a tremendous fortified city.

And so Joshua makes his first move. And just so you're aware, spying didn't start with the during the Cold War. I think we all know that. Joshua is now preparing to cross the Jordan. But before he does that, he wants a plan in place. He wants to know what he's up against. He wants to know what to expect. He wants to know he's a military man, so he wants to have a plan. And that's not a bad thing at all.

And if you remember, at this point, he has no idea how this city is going to come down. He doesn't know. The Lord hasn't told him about how they're going to march around it and the walls are going to come down. We all know the story. Joshua didn't know this at this point. He has no idea. All he knows is that they're going to go in there and they're going to conquer this city.

Jericho, like I said, is claimed to be the oldest city in the world and also the city with the oldest known protective walls. And so I'm sure it was a very formidable sight to Joshua as he was considering what the best way was going to be to conquer it.

So maybe Joshua's primary reason for sending in the spies was from a military perspective. I think that would make sense. He wanted to come up with this battle plan. He wanted to know what was the layout of the city. He wanted to know what was around it, maybe some weak points.

But I would like to just step outside the box for a little and suggest that perhaps Joshua had something else in mind. Maybe these two men that Joshua sent into Jericho went into Jericho more as messengers than as spies, and with more of the intention of looking for hospitality, of looking for cooperation within the city instead of just looking for weak points.

It's very interesting to me that James in the book of James, when he's speaking about Rahab, we'll go there later, but he refers to these men as messengers. He doesn't call them spies. And I didn't look up all the meanings of the words. There could be some crossover in the meaning of a spy or a messenger. But I find that very interesting. I think it's the only other place that they're called messengers.

And it makes me wonder if the early Christians possibly had a little different take on this story than we typically do today when we think of spies. When you think of a messenger, you think of someone with a mission to deliver a specific message.

And perhaps one of the jobs of these two men was to see if there was anyone in this city, this great city of Jericho, who wanted out or who was willing to surrender or was just willing to help them in some way find a way in.

It would almost appear that the men, you know, specifically went into this to Rahab's house there, which could have been kind of like an inn or some kind of hotel. But it's like they specifically went in there, and it almost seems like they told her and whoever else may have been there who they were and what was about to happen. Who knows? All right, I'm just—this is just speculation a little bit, but it helps the story make a little more sense.

Either way, whatever the case, we don't know all the details why they ended up where they ended up and what specifically their mission was. We're not sure, except that Joshua had told them to check out the land and the city.

Either way, these men weren't very good spies because, number one, they found lodging at one of the most popular places in town. And number two, somehow their cover was blown pretty much immediately after they came into the city.

Somehow, either Jericho had a pretty good counterintelligence going on or something, but word got out that they knew exactly. It says that word got to the king that two spies came in, why they were there, where they were, pretty much knew everything that was going on about basically by the time they got there.

And they even knew which house they had went into.

But just as the two angels who went into Sodom and found Lot and received hospitality and saved Lot and his house from destruction, so these two men or messengers found a woman named Rahab and received hospitality and saved her and her family from destruction.

So who is Rahab? What do we know about her?

Actually, we know more about what she is to become than we know about her at this point. What we do know is her occupation and her bravery, as exemplified in this chapter.

Rahab is someone that we want to learn from and someone who represents so much more than what we get just from a glance at her in this chapter or in this story. It almost would seem that she was here waiting for an opportunity like this so that she could forsake sin, forsake her past, forsake Jericho, forsake the world, and join herself with the people of God. It seems like Rahab was an active actively seeking God.

From her testimony, it's obvious that she knew judgment was coming. She knew that.

She declared that. And she was ready to do whatever it took to deliver herself and her family from death. And in doing this, she becomes one of the most prominent Old Testament types of the church and examples of repentance.

Rahab had no idea at this point how much of a difference one choice makes and how much of a difference this choice would make for many generations to come. She had no idea that she would go on to become the great-great-grandmother of the beloved shepherd, King David. No idea.

She just knew that what she knew, what was in front of her, and what she needed to do, how she needed to respond. And she certainly had no idea that she would make it into the genealogy of the true King himself, Jesus Christ, our Messiah.

But there she is about, I think it's 26 to 28 generations before Jesus. And Matthew, in the Epistle of Matthew, he mentions her name in the list of genealogy. Again, God is a rewarder of true faith, although many times we may not even see or understand the full reward, and often we don't see it.

She certainly didn't see it, maybe through faith a little bit, but she didn't. She had no way of knowing the impact that her choice was going to make on generations to come.

The narrative of Rahab was very popular amongst the fathers of the church, the early church fathers, although they continued to refer to her as Rahab the Harlot. And you see that in the New Testament, like about every time you see her name, it's Rahab the Harlot. Like, why did that title have to keep following her?

Although they continued to refer to her as Rahab the Harlot, they always used her story in a positive sense. Her previous questionable profession never counted against her. They used Rahab as an example of faith, of hospitality, of repentance, and as a model of the church, as a patroness of salvation, and as proof of God's love for man.

All in this one lady.

So I want to go ahead and take a look at some of these examples and types that Rahab in this passage represents and what we can learn from them. And it's amazing. I'm still amazed. After just really looking into this and looking at her life, reading what some of the early Christians had to say about her, it's just like, wow, this lady represents a lot.

And it makes a lot more sense why Paul included her in that list in Hebrews 11.

Okay, number one, faith requires action and obedience.

James uses Rahab as an example of this in James 2:24 to 26. He says, "You see then that a man is justified by works and not by faith only. Likewise, was not Rahab the Harlot also justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out another way? For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also."

And we already mentioned that Rahab made it into the faith chapter in Hebrews because, again, her faith spurred her to action. She was willing to lose everything in order to gain something that she couldn't possibly understand or foresee, but she took the risk anyway. And I find it interesting that in James, he gives Abraham an example, follows that up with Rahab. Paul does the same in Hebrews 11. Just after he gets done talking about Abraham, he brings out Rahab. And I find that interesting that here we're putting Rahab almost on an equal level of someone like Abraham in the kind of faith that they exhibited. I think that's amazing.

Something I would have never thought of before that we definitely consider Abraham very high up when it comes in the ranks of faith, and we consider him the father of faith. And many, many religions have claimed Abraham as their father and their founder.

But then along comes someone like Rahab, Rahab the Harlot, and she just finds her place right in there after Abraham. It's very amazing. Number two, Rahab was an example of hospitality. We talked about this in Sunday school. I appreciated that. I really think that is a great way to witness and to interact with people.

It's this very virtue, hospitality that she is noted for in the New Testament and which procured salvation for her and her family. Again, something I never thought about. When James talks about her, when Paul talks about her, it says it was because she housed the spies and kept them safe and everything. It was her hospitality that saved her. That's very interesting that the very act of faith that was required of her was hospitality.

She not only housed the messengers, but she also hid them and put her own life at risk for them. She then helped them out of the city, gave specific directions on how to avoid being caught by their pursuers.

She went above and beyond. And there's writings out there. There's people who tried to figure out this whole way to work around the fact that she told a lie. They come to her door and she told a lie.

She lied to the soldiers when they came asking about them. And she told a very obvious lie at that point. She said, "Yeah, they were here, but they're gone. They're already out of town. If you want to catch them, you're going to have to get moving."

I'm not going to spend any time on that.

And in a lot of the writings, people give some very good reasoning for that and maybe some justification. I'm not going to condemn her or justify her for it. She did what she thought she had to do in order to save the spies. But in doing this, she did save their lives.

She was willing to lose everything, like I said before, in order to gain what she knew she had to find. Later, she showed hospitality to her whole family. She wasn't just concerned about her own self. And another very noteworthy thing, she could have been like, "Look, I don't know about my family. I don't know what they want, but make sure that you come back and save me when you destroy the city."

She was very concerned for her father, her mother, her brothers, her family. She wanted them to go with her. We don't know anything about their faith. We have no idea what they were thinking in this whole process, if they had faith or not, but her faith definitely helped them.

She showed hospitality to her whole family by bringing them all into her house or to her father's house, whichever it was. So hospitality is a virtue worth noting. It's a virtue worth pursuing.

And I have a lot to learn on that. And we could say, well, it's a culture thing. The Eastern culture, when you bring someone into your home, you're kind of responsible for them. You make sure all their needs are met. You make sure they're safe.

They're under kind of like when Lot brought the angels in. He felt like he had to do everything to protect them and to save them. And we probably don't understand that here in our Western culture, but maybe we should. True hospitality is laying down our lives for the people that come into our lives and into our homes.

Number three, Rahab is a model of repentance. She confessed openly that the Lord is God in heaven above and on earth beneath, and then followed that by forsaking her sinful way of life and placing her hope in the God of Israel.

We know from the fact of who she became that she pursued godliness and a life of virtue from this point forward. That doesn't even need to be said. We know that. And that's true repentance. When we turn our back on sin and on our past, and we walk a different direction, and we don't turn back, we confess with our mouth, and we follow through with our life.

Origen sees an implicit connection to Rahab in the story from Matthew's Gospel of the sinful woman who anoints Jesus' feet. She represents the repentant sinner in contrast to the self-righteous Pharisee. These have become like the Harlot Rahab, who received the spies of Joshua and was saved with all her house, after this no longer playing the Harlot, but coming to the feet of Jesus and wetting them with the tears of repentance and anointing them with the fragrance of the ointment of holy conversation or holy living.

And I think that's really neat to compare her to the woman in the New Testament, who I think also had a very similar past. Number four, Rahab is an example and proof of God's love and mercy for man. And this is a really big one that I didn't spend enough time on. So when we read through the Old Testament, if you're like me, sometimes you're just like you get tired of the scenes of judgment and the scenes of killing and just the God's wrath kind of a thing.

But I've learned that you can choose to only see a God of wrath who punishes sin and brings judgment on wicked nations and on wickedness on people, or you can see him as a God of mercy and long-suffering who doesn't at all want anyone to perish. And when you go through the Old Testament and with that kind of a mindset of seeing God as being merciful and long-suffering, he gives people opportunity after opportunity after opportunity to repent before they receive punishment or judgment. In the case of Jericho, almost the whole city was destroyed.

But God waited hundreds and hundreds of years. And even at the end, when the people marched seven times around that city, I think God was giving them one more opportunity to repent. And I really think that if that whole city would have repented and surrendered, I think God and Joshua and the children of Israel would have saved them. I really think that. Hundreds and hundreds of years giving them that opportunity.

Chrysostom says that it is remarkable that he who said in the law, "You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery," now changed his message and said through Joshua, "Let Rahab the Harlot live." This new message illustrates God's love for mankind. It also foreshadowed the words of Jesus that tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you. And he said that to the Pharisees. That was a very stinging rebuke for the Pharisees to hear.

And I'm sure Jesus had Rahab in mind when he made this statement that, "Here's these people living a life of sin, but they're turning, they're repenting, they're finding the kingdom of God in front of the very people who had everything given to them from day one."

There's a lot more that could be said about that, about God's mercy. And there's just so many examples all through the Old Testament. We can think of many other names of people who they walked in from the outside. They came in from the outside, and they were accepted. God, we had the law. If you read the law very strictly, it's like, "Well, there's no way. There's no way that anybody else could ever come into this." But they did many, many times.

All right, number five. Finally, Rahab is a beautiful Old Testament type of the church.

And this is probably one of the most prominent types, definitely, that comes out in the early Christian writing. And it's not like I've read a lot, but this type of the church that she represents, one of the conditions given to Rahab in order to be saved, and this condition was given to her by the spies before they left, is that she and her family would stay inside her house until they were rescued. And they said, "If you don't, if you go outside, if anybody goes outside, his blood's on his own head. Our hands are clean."

When we come back, when we come back, and they didn't know how they were going to come into the city and conquer it, but they knew they were going to conquer it. And they said, "When we come back, you must be inside the house."

And we know from the rest of the story that when the walls came down and the men went in to rescue them, that they were inside the house, just like they had been told to do. I was going to read that. I didn't read that. We'll get to that eventually.

I think we're all familiar with that story that Joshua gave those two men the responsibility when those walls were coming down. He said, "You two go in there and find Rahab and her family and bring them out."

I like to think that it was one of those men that married her, but I might be wrong. Just a fun thing to think.

We can think of other examples of this, like Noah and his family in the ark, or the Passover when the children of Israel stayed inside their houses with blood smeared on the doorposts. In Rahab's case, she had a scarlet cord tied to the window, which I think represents the blood of Christ and our redemption in a very beautiful way.

According to Cyprian, when the spies tell Rahab to bring everyone into her house, okay, this quote, "The mystery is declared that they who will live and escape from the destruction of the world must be gathered together into one house alone, that is, into the church."

As another writer notes, that just as Joshua, the son of Nun, causes Rahab the Harlot to live, Jesus, the Redeemer, gives life to the church, though she is polluted by the Harlotry of idolatry. And again, a theme that runs through the whole book of the Old Testament is that God's people have played the Harlot. God's people have committed fornication. They've committed adultery. And we have books like, is it Hosea? That just bring that out very clearly. And yet here's God redeeming them and buying them back. And this picture of what happened with Rahab, it just illustrates that very graphically.

That this is a type of the church coming out of sin and coming out of the world and being bought by Jesus, by his blood, being redeemed and bought back. Very beautiful.

Just to think of all that, the scarlet cord, the house, them being inside the house, inside the church, that's where safety is. That's where salvation is. And I'm not sure if we quite understand the reality of that or how much that should impact us when we think about the church. Origen gives another reason why Rahab should be seen as a symbol of the church. The stem of the name Rahab means to be wide or broad.

This shows that Rahab foreshadowed the church which came forth from all nations.

It wasn't just for the Jews. It wasn't just for those select chosen people. It's for everyone.

For many early Christian thinkers and writers, Rahab represents the church herself, fallen and stained, but faithful and rescued. She responds to God boldly, bringing others into her fold to escape the coming devastation. She bears upon her house the mark of Christ's blood as a sure sign that she and her family belong to God.

Rahab manifests the hope that the church, despite a tarnished record and a soully reputation, might declare a true confession of faith and enact brave feats of cunning that offer help and protection so that those who find themselves numbered among her family can be saved.