Rahab: Faith from an Unlikely Place

Hebrews 11 reads like a gallery of patriarchs and princes: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses. And then, hung among them without apology: “Rahab the prostitute.” The writer doesn't clean up her résumé. He could have said “Rahab the innkeeper of Jericho.” The Spirit left her label intact, it seems, so that no reader could ever say, “Faith like that isn't available to someone like me.”

Where did her faith come from? No angel visited her window. No prophet preached in Jericho. She had only heard things: reports of a sea split forty years earlier, of kings defeated across the river. Her neighbors heard the same news and bolted their gates tighter. The same evidence reached every house in Jericho; only in Rahab's did it become faith. That's worth sitting with. Hearing about God is not the variable. What the heart does with the hearing is. Jericho heard and hardened. Rahab heard and concluded, in her own words to the spies, “the LORD your God, he is God in heaven above, and on earth beneath.” A Canaanite prostitute composed one of the clearest confessions in the Old Testament.

Then her faith did what living faith always does: it acted. She “received the spies in peace,” hid them at the risk of her life, and tied a scarlet cord in her window, casting her entire future on the mercy of a God her city was at war with. Notice the direction of the verse: she “didn't perish with those who were disobedient.” The dividing line in Jericho ran not between moral and immoral, respectable and scandalous, but between faith and unbelief. It still does.

And God was not done dignifying her. Matthew's genealogy lists her by name: Rahab, great-great-grandmother of David, mother in the line of Jesus the Messiah. The woman from the wall got woven into the bloodline of the Savior. If you carry a past you're sure disqualifies you, the gallery of faith disagrees. The only people God's grace cannot reach are the ones who won't hang the cord.