Joshua 2:4, 5 presents a very awkward truth – Rahab’s first act of faith was a lie! “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, the men left. I don’t know which way they went. Go after them quickly. You may catch up with them.’” Actually, Rahab told three lies in one. First, she said she did not know where they came from. Secondly, she said they had gone. And finally, she said she did not know where they were. So here we have the amazing conundrum – a lie being Rahab’s act of faith! Does this give us license to lie in certain situations? I don’t think so.
The Scripture does, of course, record the lies of saints such as Abraham [see Genesis 12:10-20], but it never approves of such deception. Rather, God’s Word uniformly condemns falsehood and calls us to be men and women of truth. Moreover, the life of Christ, our quintessential model, provides us with the supreme example of truthfulness. Our Lord never lied nor deceived anyone. And as members of His Body, we are obligated to do our best to live according to His example.
Nevertheless, Rahab’s calculated lie was a stupendous act of true faith, for her subsequent actions – when she assisted the spies in their escape through the window and cleverly advised them to hide three days in the hill country – put her life in deadly peril [see vv. 15, 16]. In fact, if the king had gotten wind of her doings, her death would have been both immediate and terrible. Rahab’s faith was great and deserves the status it has been given.
We must also consider Rahab’s lie against the backdrop of her pagan culture and lowly profession. She had no knowledge of the revelation given to Israel at Sinai. We can be sure that godly morality and its radical truth ethic had not penetrated her pagan mind. True, she possessed a moral conscience, but it was not informed by God’s Word. Hence it very likely did not even occur to her that she was doing wrong. I am not saying her lie was okay but God recognized the motive behind the act – and that motive was faith! And remember that it is faith that God most desperately looks for on the earth. This is what pleases Him. This is what Jesus Himself wondered in Luke 18:8 when He asked His disciples, “when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?” We must strive to assure that He will and realize that often real faith is salted with sin. And realize as well, that God finds faith where we do not [and often cannot] see it. We need to be slower to judge and quicker to perceive faith, even in its rawest of forms.
The classic symbol that revealed Rahab’s great faith was the scarlet cord she hung from her window over the wall of Jericho. We see in vv. 17-20 how the two spies promised her safety if she would display that cord in her window. In fact, they vowed that everyone in the house would survive if the cord were in place. Rahab’s faith invited their saving work. V. 21 says she replied, “‘Agreed … Let it be as you say.’ So she sent them away and they departed. And she tied the scarlet cord in the window.” According the R. Kent Hughes, recent scholarship suggests that the scarlet rope may have been the mark of a prostitute and that Rahab lived, so to speak, in the “red rope” district. He also notes that since the Hebrew word for “rope” is the same word for “hope” – and, in fact, most often means “hope” – there may be an intentional play on words here: the “rope” being the prostitute’s “hope” for customers. But now that Rahab has confessed Jehovah as God, her scarlet “rope” signified a new kind of “hope” – that of deliverance by God.
Be that as it may, the scarlet cord tells us that Rahab’s faith, though nascent and uninformed, was completely trusting. If the Israelites failed to return and conquer the city, she would soon be found out. The gathering of her family into her home would be interpreted for what it was, someone would talk, and she and her family would go down to their graves in terrible agony. But Rahab completely believed that judgment was coming and that salvation awaited her. So she let down the scarlet cord in profound trust in God.
Some consider the scarlet cord to be a symbol of the blood of Christ and Rahab to be a symbol of the Church, because through it she obtained safety for her family. Some have even gone so far as to say the spies escaped down the red cord, which they interpret to be not only the blood of Christ but the bloodline of Christ throughout the ages. These interpretations may be a bit over the top, but it isn’t hard to infer a direct connection to the Passover, which had occurred a mere forty years earlier. Then the Israelites were commanded to gather all their family into the house [just as Rahab did] and paint lamb’s blood around the door, so that when the angel of death came and saw the blood, all inside would be spared [see Exodus 12:21-23]. What happened with Rahab parallels this closely, and it seems likely the spies [though not Rahab herself] were quite aware of the symbolism. In both cases the red upon the door or the window was evidence of the faith of those inside. What great trust flowed from Rahab’s faith. Rahab’s sequestering of her family and patiently awaiting the outcome demonstrably showed her trust. She stood alone against the whole of her culture, something few of us in our contemporary culture have had to do. She, like Moses before, saw the unseen when no one else did.
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