Year 4, Day 187: Joshua 2

Theological Commentary: Click Here 

Discipleship Focus: Obedience

• Obedience: Genuine and satisfying obedience comes out of our identity.  Our true identity comes only from Father.

If you want a really neat understanding of Rahab and Christianity, I’d like to invite you to look at the theological commentary.  However, for today I’m going to narrowly focus into one particular element of this story.  Rahab tells the spies that they had advance notice of the Hebrew people and the hearts of her own people melted.  Furthermore, word gets to her king that she has entertained the spies.  At that moment, Rahab has a decision to make.

She knows that if she lies to the king and is found out, then she will be in great trouble.  So she could choose to be obedient to her king in fearing his wrath.  However, if she chooses to spare the spies, she and those whom she chooses to save can avoid judgment under the hand of the Hebrew people.  She has a choice to make.  Does she choose imminent danger to avoid a much worse future wrath?  Or does she choose imminent peace and embrace the possibility of greater future wrath?

This is fundamentally a question of obedience!  Of course, that also means that by default it is a question of identity and Father, too.  We know that our identity should come from the Father and we are always obedient to our identity.  This is the neat part to this story.  Rahab does choose to embrace imminent danger – being found out by her king and risking his wrath – in order to know peace with the coming Hebrew people and their God.  She has a choice of obedience before her, and she chooses to be obedient to the Father.

What’s cool is how things go for Rahab.  This woman – identified as a fornicator before meeting the spies – is known to have peace as we are told in Joshua 6:25.  Jewish tradition suggests that she herself married Joshua and is an ancestor to some of the greatest prophets in Hebrew history, Jeremiah and Huldah.  (For more information on either of these people, see the whole book of Jeremiah and 2 Kings 22:8-20, respectively.)  Furthermore, the genealogy of Christ in Matthew 1 lists Boaz as being a descendant of a Rahab, probably the Rahab of this story!  Because she got her identity sorted out before being in a place of choice, Rahab can choose obedience to the Father rather than obedience to a short-term need instead.  That one choice sets her up for a huge spiritual journey that is unequalled by anything in life that could have come from any other choice of obedience.

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