Rahab: Faith that Surprises | Heroes of Faith | Trinity Sermons

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Trinity Sermons.

This week we are continuing our sermon series on the heroes of faith and we're looking

at the second woman in this list of heroes and that is Rahab.

Rahab is often thought of as an outsider.

She's a woman in a society where women weren't valued.

She is outside of the family of Israel.

She's a Canaanite woman.

And she's also a prostitute, someone who is often marginalized by society.

But Rahab is going to teach us about how her faith shows up in some surprising ways and

has some challenges for our faith as well.

Our first reading is from the book of Joshua, chapter two, beginning at the first verse.

Then Joshua, son of Nun, secretly sent two spies from Shittim.

Go look over the land, he said, especially Jericho.

So they went and entered the house of a prostitute named Rahab and stayed there.

The king of Jericho was told, look, some of the Israelites have come here tonight to spy

out the land.

So the king of Jericho sent this message to Rahab.

Bring out the men who came to you and entered your house, because they have come to spy

out the whole land.

But the woman had taken the two men and hidden them.

She said, yes, the men came to me, but I did not know where they had come from.

At dusk, when it was time to close the city gate, they left.

I don't know which way they went.

Go after them quickly.

You may catch up with them.

But she had taken them up to the roof and hidden them under stalks of flax she had laid

out on the roof.

So the men set out in pursuit of the spies on the road that leads to the fords of the

Jordan.

And as soon as the pursuers had gone out, the gate was shut.

Before the spies laid down for the night, she went up on the roof and said to them,

I know the Lord has given you this land and that a great fear of you has fallen on us,

so that all who live in this country are melting in fear because of you.

We have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of

Egypt and what you did to Sihon and Og, the two kings of the Amorites east of the Jordan,

whom you completely destroyed.

We heard of it.

When we heard of it, our hearts melted in fear and everyone's courage failed because

of you.

For the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on earth below.

Now then, please swear to me by the Lord that you will show kindness to my family because

I have shown kindness to you.

Give me a sure sign that you will spare the lives of my father and mother, my brothers

and sisters, and all who belong to them, and that you will save us from death.

Our lives for your lives, the men assured her.

If you don't tell what we are doing, we will treat you kindly and faithfully when the Lord

gives us the land.

So she let them down by a rope through the window, for the house she lived in was part

of the city wall.

Our second reading is from Hebrews chapter 11, beginning at the 30th verse.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

By faith, the walls of Jericho fell after the army had marched around them for seven

days.

By faith, the prostitute Rahab, because she had welcomed the spies, was not killed with

those who were disobedient.

This is the word of the Lord.

Look the most famous newspaper reporter in all of Metropolis is of course, Lois Lane.

Lois Lane.

But you see Lois is always getting herself into trouble, right?

She's sniffing out a story.

She's getting too close to something that Lex Luthor is doing, and pretty soon she's

in real hot water.

She finds herself dangling from a helicopter, or she's falling from an airplane, or she's

tied up on the roof of a skyscraper.

Oh no, Lois, what are you going to do?

Who is going to save you?

But wait, look, what's that?

It's a bird.

No, it's a plane.

No, it's Superman.

And yes, Superman comes flying in and sweeping in.

He's the white knight to the rescue.

And he comes in, and just the nick of time, he catches Lois and carries her to safety.

You remember the Superman movie where he's like, I've got you.

And she's like, you've got me, but who's got you?

Right?

It's just like, oh, it's so wonderful.

So wonderful.

But listen, the question I want to ask is, why is Lois Lane always needing saving?

Right?

It's the old trope, right?

The damsel in distress, right?

And whether it's the comics or whether it's the movies or the TV shows, it's often true

that men are the heroes and the women are the damsels in distress.

But what happens when we flip that script?

And what happens when the woman in the story becomes the hero of the story?

Ah, well, I'm glad you asked because today is week eight of our teaching series, which

is called Heroes of Faith.

We've been looking in chapter 11 of this book in the Bible called the Book of Hebrews, where

a list of all these people who lived by faith and demonstrated wonderful faith in their

lives are commended for what they did.

And in that list in Hebrews 11, you've probably noticed, just like I've noticed, that there's

16 plus names there, but only two of them are women.

And that raises an important question or two questions maybe we should talk about this

morning.

And that is, why are women's stories kind of underrepresented or overshadowed in biblical

history?

Now, there could be a couple of reasons for that, but one answer surely has to be this,

is that the Bible was written in a deeply patriarchal society.

I mean, that's just the way that it was, right?

The people who had the power, the people who wrote the books of the Bible were men.

And so it's true that since everything kind of came from that male perspective, it was

very rare that a woman got to be the hero of a story.

And it's not because women weren't heroic.

It's just because in that world, many stories of women just got downplayed, or maybe they

never got written down at all.

But another question to kind of think about is, okay, so that we have maybe some kind

of a silence of women in the Bible, but what about the sidelining of women in the church?

Because over the centuries, many churches kept reinforcing this idea where men's voices

get priority over women's voices.

And in many churches today even, and I'm really grateful that I don't think this is true of

Trinity, but in many churches today, the men still get to be the heroes.

The men get to be the ones who lead.

The men get to be the ones who make all the decisions.

The men get to be the only ones who get to take to the platform and teach and that sort

of stuff.

And for that reason, I am really glad for this story we're going to be studying today.

As a father of four girls, I'm really glad for the story that we've read today because

here, even though the Bible does not record as many stories of female heroes, that doesn't

mean that those stories aren't there.

It just means that we got to search for them a bit and we've got to reclaim their voices

and we've got to tell their stories even if that makes us a little bit uncomfortable.

So today we are looking at Rahab, one of the women in the Bible who does not wait around

for Superman to come in and save her.

Instead, she trusts God.

She takes things into her own hands in a way.

She becomes the master of her own faith.

She flips the script and she becomes a hero of faith.

She becomes the one who is doing the rescuing.

It's a great story.

I would invite you, if you got the sermon notes today, to grab them and follow along.

And if you're watching at home, you can access those sermon notes by going to our website,

go to the tab that says Sundays at Trinity and you can find them there.

But let's start with this.

It is actually true that Rahab was a damsel in distress.

But it is also true that just about everybody in her community was in distress at that time.

That's because war was coming, right?

You heard the reading.

Israel was planning on crossing over the Jordan River, moving in and doing battle with all

sorts of people in the promised land in Canaan.

And Jericho was like number one on their hit list.

And Rahab even says everybody's hearts are melting in fear because of this war that is

coming.

So yes, these were difficult times.

These were difficult times for everyone.

Everyone was in distress, but Rahab had it worse than most.

And here's why.

First of all, Rahab was a prostitute.

And that meant that Rahab was used and discarded by the men of her world.

Back then, of course, prostitution was never a career someone would choose for themselves.

It was a last resort really, right?

Prostitutes were people who usually had no money.

They had no influence.

They had no protection.

They had no security.

And so in that sense, people like Rahab were kind of forced into prostitution.

And so instead of being valued as a person with dignity, often they were just used and

they were discarded.

They were kind of the bottom, the lowest of the low.

But if that wasn't bad enough, not only was she used by men, but she was abused by religion.

And here I'll explain why.

And that is because the Canaanite religion was a fertility religion.

And so they believed in these fertility gods, which meant that if you wanted good crops,

if you wanted lots of livestock, if you wanted a big healthy family, then you had to please

these gods.

And one of the ways, the main way that you please these gods was through ritual prostitution.

And that meant that, imagine this, picture this, a temple filled with prostitutes.

And men of Canaan, they go into the temple and they have sex with these prostitutes.

And it's an act of worship.

This is an act of worship, having sex with these prostitutes.

And the thinking is, is that the more people did this, the more the gods looked down from

on high and they were pleased or even aroused.

And as a result, the gods would pour out their blessings and pour out their goodness and

cause your crops to grow and cause your flocks to increase.

It was a totally twisted system because it not only exploited and abused women, but it

justified it all in the name of religion.

Can you imagine Rahab believing that even the gods thought that this is all that she

was good for?

So she was used by men.

She was abused by religion.

And thirdly, she was excluded from society.

Being a prostitute meant that you didn't get to hang out in the center of action where

everything was going on.

You didn't get invited to all the respectable parties.

You weren't welcome at the community gatherings.

No, you were on the margins.

In fact, the Bible even tells us that Rahab lived on the margins, right?

Her house was part of the city wall.

She didn't have a home among the thriving center of Jericho.

No, no, she lived in the wall.

She lived in the edge of society, as far removed from the center of life as possible.

And there she was, the damsel in distress, used by men, abused by religion, removed from

the life of the city, a woman on the margins.

Oh, I bet you, I bet you Rahab sat there at night and she hummed this little tune.

I need a hero, I'm calling out for a hero to the right.

He's gotta be strong.

So who are the heroes in this story?

Where is the white knight that is coming sailing in to save Rahab from her plight?

I mean, it appears that we're about to meet them because the way the story goes, we hear

about these spies.

And of course, you know, spies can often be heroes, right?

I love a good spy movie, right?

I love, you know, spies sneaking around, breaking into enemy compounds, you know, scuba diving

underneath ships, you know, the elite agents.

We're thinking of people like, you know, Ethan Hunt from Mission Impossible or James Bond

or Jason Bourne, right?

These are heroes.

Well, prepare to meet the superhero spies of Israel because Joshua is sending some spies

into Jericho to just scope things out, to do a little recon before he attacks it.

And you would think that these guys, they're spies after all, right?

These are gonna be the heroes of the story.

But it turns out, turns out these guys are not heroes, they're zeros, right?

These two guys are the worst spies in all of history.

Just think Jason Bourne, think Austin Powers, right?

That's the kind of hero that we're dealing with here.

Joshua tells them, listen, guys, I want you to do this.

I want you to go in there.

I want you to be sly.

I want you to blend in.

I want you to be invisible.

But within a few hours, they have totally botched the entire mission.

And maybe we should have seen this coming because we're actually told the name of the

hometown that these two heroes came from.

I don't know if you noticed it.

Yeah, that's right.

They're from a town called Shiddam.

Yeah, I don't know about you, but when I hear about a couple guys coming from Shiddam, I

don't have high hopes for who they are.

But anyways, they're complete and abject failures.

First of all, they are moral failures, right?

These highly trained, covert soldiers, they get into the city of Jericho and literally,

the first thing they do is we read, they entered the house of a prostitute.

Now where was that in the plan, guys?

What are they thinking?

They're supposed to be like men on a mission.

The first thing they do is say, hey, let's go find a prostitute, right?

Now some people say, wait, wait, Rob, no.

I don't think they actually went and slept with a prostitute.

They just lodged at her house.

But I mean, come on.

I think even Hebrew scholars, they look at the language, they look at the wording here

and they say, no, there's clearly sexual undertones here.

And by the way, that wouldn't be the first time that Israel, Israelite men had fallen

into sexual immorality with Canaanite women.

So anyways, I think this is kind of how it went down.

They were heading into town.

They said, hey, have you heard about the women of Canaan?

Have you heard about the women here in Jericho?

They have sex with people as part of their religion.

So hey, you know what?

Why don't we mix a little business with pleasure, if you know what I mean, right?

What happens in Jericho stays in Jericho.

And you know what?

Besides, we're just going to destroy this city anyways, right?

I mean, everybody else uses these girls for whatever they want.

Why don't we just use them too?

They're just going to be slaughtered on the streets.

So listen, these are not the heroes we had hoped for.

They are moral failures.

But secondly, not only did this is a complete moral failure, but the whole thing is a complete

tactical disaster, right?

Because it turns out, like an hour after the mission begins, their cover is blown already.

Yeah, that's right.

The king of Jericho already knows that they're there.

He announces, hey, there's Israelites that have broken into the city and they're spying

out the land.

Guys, get them.

And he sends out his soldiers.

These boneheads were supposed to be undercover spies, but their stealth mission turns into

this like townwide manhunt before they even had the chance to like order room service,

right?

They are the world's worst spies.

And this brings us to the third thing that I think we should know is this whole mission

is a complete failure of leadership because these guys were supposed to be under orders.

They were under orders of Joshua.

They were under the orders of God, right?

That's what's supposed to be dictating their actions.

But they seem to have very little regard for actually what God or Joshua has actually called

them to do here.

Instead, they're following their own impulses, their own desires.

These guys aren't leaders.

They aren't heroes.

They aren't saving the day.

Instead, they need saving.

And this is where the real hero of the story emerges.

Rahab is the one that does the rescuing.

Rahab is the one who outsmarts the enemy.

Rahab becomes the unexpected hero of this story.

And she does it in a pretty brilliant way.

And I want to just look at, you know, what was it?

How did Rahab become this hero?

Well, the first thing she does, the most surprising thing ever, and that is she shows them mercy.

I don't know how she did it.

These spies wanted to use her.

They wanted to dispose of her just like every other man has.

She could easily have said, I'm just going to hand these guys over to the authorities.

I want to watch them suffer.

But instead, she shows them mercy.

She hides these doofuses.

She actually lies for them.

The soldiers come knocking at the door.

Hey, Rahab, we heard that there's some spies in this brothel, right?

Can you send them out?

She's like, oh, yeah, there were some guys here.

I don't know who they were, but they already left.

I think they went west or whatever.

She lies.

Go catch them.

You might catch up to them.

Right?

It's shocking.

She saves them.

Why?

But we find out the reason.

This Canaanite prostitute is willing to show mercy to these two Israelite knuckleheads

because she has faith in their God, in the God of Israel.

Somehow she has heard about Israel's God and she has come to believe in that God or at

least want to know more about this God.

And so she actually speaks this line, this word of faith, one of the most awesome statements

of faith, I think really anywhere in the Bible.

She says to those spies, the Lord, your God is indeed God of heaven above and on earth

below.

Even though she's a Canaanite, somehow she has heard the stories of Israelite God, of

Israel's God.

And maybe she heard the story of how God led them out of Egypt to freedom.

Maybe she heard the story of how this God helped them to defeat other enemies on the

east side of the Jordan.

Now as a prostitute, it is true.

You do meet a lot of people, if you know what I mean, right?

Travelers passing through.

You know, you end up hearing a lot about what's happening in the outside world.

And she had heard the buzz.

She had heard the buzz about there is a God in Israel, a different kind of God in Israel.

And she declares her faith and she believes.

And then the most amazing thing happens.

She switches sides.

All she's ever known in her life was Canaanite culture.

That was her life.

That was how she was brought up.

That was how she was taught.

That was the air that she breathed.

And she's willing now to let it all go and join the other side.

Double agent, right?

She was willing to be a traitor to her own people in order to follow the God of Israel.

And I wonder, I wonder if she's also heard that the God of Israel doesn't require ritual

prostitution.

It seems to have a different view of women.

That this God of Israel doesn't require a child sacrifice.

There's no sex temples in Israel.

Whatever it was, she rejects her entire culture.

She changes sides.

And she says to them, now then, listen, please swear to me by the Lord that you will show

kindness to my family because I have shown kindness to you.

This is this Hebrew word has said, which we've talked about here before at Trinity.

It is this kindness, this loving kindness, this covenant kindness, this kind of kindness

that God extends to us.

It's a sacrificial kindness.

Listen, she's got no power.

She's been victimized her whole life.

She's facing death now from a foreign power.

And she looks into the eyes of these two idiot spies who wanted to use her and then wanted

to discard her, didn't care a thing about her.

And she extends God's loving kindness to them.

And they look into her eyes and I think they're, they are cut to the heart, right?

They come to their senses because see when they arrived there that night, they thought,

ah, this is just another girl, another piece of meat, someone disposable, someone we can

do whatever we want to.

And now in this moment, they look into her eyes and they see someone who knows and understands

the love of God better than they do.

They see someone who is more faithful to God than they are, who demonstrates righteousness

more than they do.

And that's when they realize we're not the heroes of the story.

This is the hero of the story.

K. Losson Younger describes this reversal.

These mighty men of God are found to be much less than expected.

While a whore who we expect to be in the depths of sin is the one who truly knows God and

is obedient to him.

And her kindness to them draws out their kindness back.

They say to her, listen, our lives for your lives.

If anything happens to you, may it be upon our head.

That's another way of saying if any harm comes to you or your family, may our lives be forfeit.

They are now willing to lay down their lives for her.

It's absolutely amazing.

They aren't actually just getting rescued physically.

She has somehow, I think, rescued them spiritually.

And so they escape and they go back to Joshua and they tell him everything that has happened.

It's actually pretty hilarious though, these spies.

I don't think they actually did any spying in the end.

They just went straight to a prostitute, got busted, and then were somehow, you know, snuck

out of the city.

But, but actually we do learn some very important lessons about heroism in the process.

Firstly, isn't it amazing how heroes in God's kingdom so often arise from the margins?

Look at the people God chooses again and again.

It's not the kings.

It's not the presidents.

It's not the CEOs.

It's not the people with power or status or influence.

It's the outsiders.

It's the overlooked.

It's the Rahabs of the world.

We tend to judge people by their position, by their status.

We look at the poor.

We look at the homeless.

We look at the jobless, the mentally ill, the troublemakers, the immoral.

And we think, oh, God couldn't possibly use that person.

But guys, God has an entirely different value system.

And it's one where the forgotten people become the favored people.

It's where the outsiders become the insiders.

It's where the damsel in distress becomes the hero of faith.

And I just want to say, if you have ever felt unworthy, if you have ever felt like, oh,

I'm on the outside.

God could ever use me.

If he knew my track record, he knew what I'd been up to.

If he knew my life, you know what that means?

You're exactly the kind of person that God loves to use.

No matter your past, no matter your false, no matter your screw ups, right?

It's your faith that matters to God.

And that means, as a church, by the way, we need to stop looking past the people that

God is actually looking toward, right?

Who is it that we're overlooking?

Who do we write off?

Who are the Rahabs in Mississauga today?

Those are often the very people God is calling us to love and to invite into his kingdom.

The second thing we learn from Rahab is that heroes of faith have this amazing legacy.

If you were to follow Rahab's story, we couldn't keep reading, but if you were to follow it

after Jericho, you will see that the spies were actually good on their word, that they

did spare Rahab and her whole family, and that actually later on, Rahab ends up marrying

an Israelite man.

And they have a son, and that son's name is Boaz.

And Boaz grows up to be a great man of faith and a man of great, great character.

Boaz becomes the father of this guy called Obed.

And Obed becomes the father of this guy called Jesse.

Jesse becomes the father of this kid named David, who would later become king of Israel,

the greatest king Israel's ever known.

So think about that.

Rahab, the Canaanite prostitute, is the great grandmother of King David.

And if that weren't enough, her legacy goes even farther because that means that Rahab

became the great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother of

Jesus Christ himself.

What a legacy.

Can you imagine God, including a Canaanite prostitute in the family line of his own son,

the Messiah?

It's exactly what he does.

And it made me think, you know, in like Luke chapter seven, when Jesus is sitting there

at the table and there's this prostitute that comes in and she's weeping at his feet.

Do you think that maybe Jesus remembered his great, great, great, great, great, great, great,

great, great, great, great, great grandmother, Rahab?

Did he think about how God's grace transformed her story?

And I just think we have to remember that our choices, our faith, our willingness to

trust God can leave a legacy that we have no idea, that could leave a legacy for generations

to come.

You may not see all the ripple effects right now.

You may not know what God is going to do through your obedience today, but just like Rahab,

your faith can outlive you.

And the last thing we learned from Rahab, and I said this earlier, heroes switch sides.

Rahab makes this crazy radical choice.

She turned her back on the only culture that she had ever known.

She walked away from her home, her identity, her past, and she switched sides.

Because why?

Because she realized that God was doing something bigger and better in the world.

She had to betray her own people to be faithful to God's kingdom.

And I have to ask you, are you willing to do the same?

Are you willing to become a traitor to this culture that we live in, in order to be faithful

to God?

Because here's the truth.

Every single one of us is shaped by this culture, right?

It's not the Canaanite culture.

It's our own culture, right?

And it tells us a story.

It says, you know, get ahead, climb the ladder, make money, get power, secure your future,

look out for yourself, be successful, be strong, be admired.

This is what you've been taught from birth.

This is what society rewards.

But Jesus calls us to a different story.

His story says, lay down your life, consider others before yourself.

If you've got two coats, give one away, love your enemies, be content with what you have,

store up treasures in heaven, not on earth.

The first shall be last, the last shall be first.

May have switched sides, will you?

I even think, I mean, if I may, we look at the world that we're living in today, where's

your allegiance?

I mean, because we're watching a world where cruelty is becoming increasingly glorified,

where power is worshiped, where leaders are choosing oppression over justice, where selfishness

is somehow becoming a virtue.

We are watching the rise of totalitarianism, right, in our own time, even in places that

were once considered bastions of freedom and democracy.

I don't want to get all political, but the question is really the same question, right?

Which kingdom are you going to stand with?

Will you align with the world's story where power and greed and self-preservation are

the rule?

Or will you align with God's kingdom where mercy and sacrifice and love reign?

Here's the thing, switching sides will cost you, cost Rahab, right?

May cost you comfort, may cost you some approval, may cost you some money, cost you some security.

It may mean standing apart in a radical way from the culture that you are in right now.

But Jesus did not call us to blend in.

He calls us, like Rahab, to switch sides, to align ourselves with the kingdom of God.

Rahab, man, she is not a damsel in distress.

She is a hero that rises from the margins.

She's not rescued, she's the rescuer, right?

She's not silenced, she speaks boldly.

She's not forgotten, she's going to be remembered forever.

Because she saw the truth of God and she took a risk and she took a chance and she chose

the side of God.

That was Rahab's choice.

Today it's your choice.

And so what will you choose?

Amen.

Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Trinity Sermons.

This sermon was recorded at Trinity Church, Streetsville on February 23rd, 2025.