Rahab Comes to Faith

Abram followed the Lord’s call to leave his false gods behind and to go to the promised land, believing God’s promise to make him a great nation and to bless all the world in him (Gen. 12:1–9; see Josh. 24:2). Over the next six hundred years or so, the Lord continued to reveal Himself, first to Abram, whom He renamed Abraham, and then to his descendants, expanding on the promises and pledging increasingly greater blessings. The books of Genesis through Deuteronomy tell the story of how the Lord remained true to Abraham and to his offspring the Israelites, saving them from famine by bringing them into Egypt and then redeeming them from slavery by bringing them out of Egypt in the exodus. In all this, Israel developed into a national entity on its way to becoming an established state in the land of Canaan. This was a nation made up largely of one family, the family of Abraham, so it also had a distinct ethnic identity. The Israelites were largely a religio-ethnic people, Hebrews who covenanted to worship only Yahweh, the one true God.

Today’s passage brings us to the point when the Israelites were about to possess the promised land. We see in Joshua 2 that Joshua, the leader of Israel after Moses died, sent spies into Canaan to evaluate the Canaanite defenses in preparation for conquering the territory. In the city of Jericho, the spies lodged in the home of a gentile woman named Rahab, who was also a prostitute. She hid the spies from the king of Jericho, who wanted to kill them (vv. 1–7).

Rahab hid the spies because she had heard of the mighty acts of Yahweh in rescuing Israel from Egypt, proving to her that He is the one true God and Lord of all (vv. 8–11). Her comments help us understand the importance of people’s hearing about what the Lord has done. We proclaim the gospel of God’s great saving acts and their meaning because this is how people will come to fear and serve the Creator. Rahab’s act of hiding the spies demonstrated her true, saving faith in the God of Israel, as Hebrews 11:31 explains, so she was received into the people of Israel (Josh. 2:12–24; 6:25). A daughter of the gentile nations, Rahab joined the mostly Hebrew nation of Israel because she trusted in God, exemplifying the Lord’s mission to save the gentiles even before Jesus came. Although the covenant community was mainly ethnically Hebrew under the old covenant, we see that it was never God’s purpose to limit His salvation to the Hebrews.