Joshua 2
“Behind Enemy Lines”
January 10, 2010 - Baptism of the Lord

         The body of a dead Union soldier is left behind in a supply wagon mired in the swamp north of Saline after the battle of Jenkins’ Ferry in Arkansas. But he’s not dead. He wakes, then slogs bleeding and dazed through the rain and mud until he reaches a little farmhouse. He stumbles onto the front porch and slumps against the door.

         The old farmer and his wife push the door open against the young man’s unconscious form and grimace when they see the blue uniform. But then they roll him over and his face calls to mind their own boy. Their son, a Confederate soldier, had been shot dead the year before in a battle near Little Rock. So instead of finding a kitchen knife to finish off their helpless enemy, together, wheezing and straining, they drag him over the threshold into their front room. They roll him onto a straw mattress and cover him with a blanket.

         In the morning, Ma and Pa clean and bandage the northern soldier’s wounds, feed him bean soup and tell him he can stay awhile. Three days later, healing and stronger, the boy stammers out a humble thank you, leaves their farm, and heads north to try and find and rejoin his company in General Steele’s Union army.

         That Civil War tale is my fiction, but similar true stories have happened in wars throughout human history. Spies, soldiers, even civilians caught behind enemy lines have found unexpected refuge and aid from strangers who by all rights should have been hostile. Motivation might range from sympathy with the enemy to simple human kindness. Yet for whatever reasons foes have occasionally found friends behind the lines.

         Rahab’s motivations are not perfectly clear, but in Joshua 2 it appears she is the one person in Jericho who has a good sense of which way the wind is blowing, as they say. A huge Israelite army was camped a few miles away on the other side of the Jordan River, and verse 10 tells us she had heard the rumors of miracles and amazing victories for these invaders. When a couple of enemy spies from that army show up in her household, she takes it as a golden opportunity to hook up with the winning side.

         Now if by any chance you picked up on the possibility of a little double entendre in that last sentence, you would be absolutely right. This whole story is filled with an element that is almost sure to evoke snickers among the less high-minded among us, myself included. Here in chapter 2 we’re just told that Joshua chose two men, but in chapter 6 verse 23 we learn that they were young men. And where do two young nomads sent to a big city for the first time go almost immediately? To a prostitute’s house. Sent to spy out the land, they end up spying out the inside of Rahab’s home and her rooftop, and perhaps spying out… well, use your imagination.

         In fact, Bible scholars tell me that the whole story may be full of innuendo and double entendre that doesn’t show up in English. Even Rahab’s name actually means something like “broad” or “open place.” You connect the dots. And so if you want to snicker, go ahead. This tale is eminently snickerable. But it’s also full of grace and salvation.

         We’re meant to understand that Rahab is a disreputable person. Not only is she an enemy, she’s a loose woman. Her low morals are not only sexual. She is a liar and a traitor to her own people. There is plenty of moral ambiguity in this chapter. We can question the motives of the spies in choosing Rahab’s place to spend the night, and we can question Rahab’s motives in aiding and hiding them when the king of Jericho got wind they were in town. Rahab is certainly clever, but she’s the kind of conniving trickster who you’re not quite sure won’t betray her new friends too if she finds a better deal.

         Yet right in the middle of all this moral slack, something wonderful happens, something that the people of Israel took note of and remembered for the rest of their history. God used this sleazy, shady, sneaky Canaanite woman to save two of His people and in the process she got saved too.

         What Rachel says to the men about God in verses 9-11 starts out with simple fear, a recognition that Israel appears to be backed by superior spiritual power. This army isn’t just big, it’s marching through lakes and wiping out kings and enemy forces that should have had the advantage. As she starts out in verse 11, “When we heard of it, our hearts melted in fear and everyone’s courage failed because of you…” And that could have been it, could have been plenty of motivation for Rahab to aid and abet her people’s enemies, as cheap and low a motivation as it might be. Fear works.

         Yet verse 11 ends with something more than fear. Rahab makes a confession of faith. She names God by His Hebrew name, Yahweh, which we translate “Lord,” in small capitals. She acknowledges that He is the universal God, the One God, the real God: “the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below.” For all her failings, Rahab has come to believe in the one true God. She had faith.

         So in the New Testament more than a millennium later we read in Hebrews 11:31 that Rahab was not killed with all the rest of Jericho because of her faith. And what the writer to the Hebrews implies, James chapter 2 verse 25 says plainly, that Rahab demonstrated her faith in and by what she did, sheltering and protecting the two young spies with her trickery and deceit. And so God’s people have remembered her not so much as an enemy and a prostitute and a traitor to her own city, but as a hero of faith.

         God is in the business of saving and welcoming into His kingdom all sorts of people who might make us snicker or even more, make us choke on their reputations and their low moral standards. Yet they are just the ones God especially wants to draw to Him. Rahab should remind us that Jesus Christ came and hung out with sleazy prostitutes and cheating tax collectors. Even on the Cross, He turned and reached out and saved the filthy thief hanging next to Him. And rather than cause us to question God’s good sense in His choice of people to save, that should be good news.

         Several of the church fathers saw Rahab as Gospel good news because they understood that we are still very much like her in our own moral failings. Origen said, “Indeed, everyone of us was a prostitute in his heart as long as he lived according to the desires and lusts of the flesh.”[1]

         Haven’t you and I sometimes sold ourselves, sold our reputations or our friendships or almost our souls, for a little profit, a little pleasure, a little extra comfort or advantage for ourselves? Aren’t most of us daily tempted to sell out to the false gods of money and power and sex? If God can save prostitutes, can save His enemies, that is good news, because it means He can save you and me. The salvation of Rahab means God can save anyone.

         When Jesus Christ came into our world, He came like a spy in disguise crossing enemy lines. Hidden as an infant in the straw of the stable, He snuck in among us like the Israelite spies hidden under the straw on Rahab’s roof. And like those spies, Jesus brought with Him a blessed and wonderful opportunity for salvation to anyone who would accept it.

         As Rahab helped the Israelite pair escape out her window and down the wall of the city, they made the deal with her that we find recorded in verses 17 to 20. When the Israelites come marching up to destroy Jericho, she’s to gather all her family into her house, mother, father, brothers, everyone. And she’s to drape a scarlet cord down from the window as a sign to the invaders. Any of her family in the house with the red thread will be saved. Any outside of that marked home will die.

         Very early on God’s people saw Rahab’s scarlet cord as a sign of blood, of the way God brings salvation. For Jews it recalls the Passover, when the children of Israel put lamb’s blood on the doorposts of their houses as the death angel passed over Egypt, identifying themselves as God’s own, to be saved and protected.

         For Christians, Rahab’s cord reminds us of the blood of our Savior dripping down from His head and hands and feet as He hung dying for us. As Rahab and her family were saved under the sign of the red thread, so we are saved under the sign of the Cross, bloody with the life and grace of Jesus poured out for us, spiritual prostitutes though we are. And so we come to the house of God’s family, to the Church where salvation is promised and assured to all who gather there. So the wicked prostitute, say the church fathers, became a sign of the pure virgin Bride of Christ, His Church.

         Just like the Civil War fable I started with, Rahab is a story of unlikely friendships and unexpected help in strange places. Enemies help each other and find themselves blessed and saved in the process. Rahab aids the foreign spies and receives the promise of deliverance for her whole family. The spies offer protection to an enemy woman of low morals and she rescues them from sure capture and execution. Back and forth it goes in a strange but beautiful dance of reversed blessing and grace.

         The reversals of grace are even larger here. For Rahab’s name appears one more place in the Bible, in Matthew chapter 1. There near the beginning of the genealogy of Jesus we find that “Salmon was the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab.” And you may remember that Boaz like his father also married a foreigner named Ruth and together they had a son named Obed, who had a son named Jesse, who had a son named David.

         One of the reasons the writer of Joshua remembered Rahab’s story is that she became part of the larger story. Not only did Rahab find a sanctuary among the Israelites, the prostitute gave up her immoral profession, found a husband, and found a place in the royal lineage of the tribe of Judah. When Joshua and his spies honored their bargain with Rahab, they made it possible for God to save His people in an altogether different way over three hundred years later, when He gave them a good and great king to rule their new nation.

         Of course, what we also see in Matthew, which is even more important to you and me, is that the salvation of Rahab stands right there in the history of our own salvation in Jesus Christ. The sneaky prostitute was one of the ancestors of Joseph, the husband of Mary, the mother of our Lord.

         Behind enemy lines, those two youthful espionage agents were saved by an unexpected friend. In the process she was also saved, and so was the whole world. God was working behind the enemy lines of Canaan not only to save one family, but to save everyone through her descendants. And so through her Jesus came down behind the enemy lines of our own sin and rebellion to befriend and save everyone willing to welcome and accept Him.

         God is still working behind enemy lines. Wherever and whenever a person opens heart and home to the holy Invader, Christ brings grace and salvation. And whenever we His people cross the enemy lines we find around us, we open our lives and the lives of those we encounter to that same blessed salvation.

         That is why it’s part of our mission as a church for you and I to keep crossing the lines that separate us from people who are not like us, people whom we may even regard as enemies. God works behind enemy lines. If we want to be where God is and doing His work, that’s where we will need to be.

         My wife heard one of her students say the other day that God hates Muslims, hates those who worship Allah. We cannot and must not believe anything like that. Even if the followers of Mohammed are God’s enemies, and I doubt many of them are, God loves them and He is looking for agents ready to meet them behind the lines.

         Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, a friend of our friends at Church of the Servant King, tells a story that happened in Iraq not long after we invaded in 2003. He was part of a group of American Christians there trying to promote peace. Please ignore the politics and listen to the story. As Jonathan and his team traveled through the western desert, one of their vehicles hit a piece of shrapnel and spun into a ditch, seriously injuring two of them.  A car full of Iraqis stopped, helped them out of the ditch and took them to a hospital in nearby Rutba.

         There in Rutba a doctor told them, “Two days ago your country bombed our hospital, but we will take care of you because we take care of everyone, Muslim or Christian, Iraqi or American, we take care of everyone.” When they tried to pay the doctor, he said, “Please just tell the world what has happened in Rutba.”[2] Wilson-Hartgrove and his friends came home and named their new Christian community “Rutba House” in memory of what they learned there in the Iraqi desert.

         Behind the lines is where we want to be, whether it’s political lines or personality lines that separate us. God is sending us to be the friends of our enemies and to find enemies who will turn out to be our friends. It’s as simple as having lunch with someone you normally wouldn’t hang out with and as complicated as trying to get to know someone who speaks a different language.

         As we have our annual congregation meeting today, it will be clear that Valley Covenant Church is struggling right now, both with numbers of people and with finances. It’s tempting in such times to pull back, safely behind our own lines. Cut spending, take care of our needs, don’t try anything new or too challenging. Yet now is exactly the time to remember that we will find our salvation, we will find our Lord, on the other side of the lines, where the hard and expensive work is, where the difficult people are, where the climate may seem hostile and unfriendly. That’s why, struggling as we are, we will keep opening our building to the homeless when the weather gets cold.

         The Israelite spies found their own salvation behind the lines as they brought salvation to Rahab’s house. Every time we go behind the lines we find the Lord working the same sort of miracle. Those of you who volunteered for the Warming Center went behind lines of poverty and homelessness. You brought grace to the people you helped, but you also found grace, a little reminder of salvation in the blessings you discovered along the way. You met people who encouraged you, who renewed your own trust in the Lord by their simple openness and gratitude. That’s the miracle of grace working both ways, behind the lines.

         Let’s keep going there, behind the enemy lines, not just through the Warming Center, but through the friendships we try to make at work, through other ministries we offer our community, through visits to retirement communities, through contacts with people of other races and languages. As a new year begins, let us remember that hundreds of Rahabs are waiting around us, behind whatever lines divide us from them. Just like her, they are waiting for the opportunity to put their faith in our Savior, in our God, in Jesus Christ. Let’s allow God to lead us into their homes, into their shops, into their lives, so that He can transform those who seem like foes into friends in Christ.

         Jesus came behind the lines to find you and me. Let’s keep meeting Him there and finding our new friends.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2010 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj