to Joshua chapter 2. Now we're going to be doing chapter
2 a little differently because the first lesson is going to
be about the entire story that's in Joshua chapter 2. And then
we'll look at a few isolated verses
and gain what we can from it. But let's begin with prayer. Heavenly Father, we thank you
that you have called us together in the name of your Son. We thank
you that you have not left us in darkness, but have delivered
us from darkness and brought us into this glorious light. We confess, Lord, that even though
it is a glorious and brilliant light, yet such as our state
in the flesh, that it is often difficult for us to see things
clearly. Lord, it is required not only
that you send the light, but that you give us eyes to see
and a heart to believe that which you show us. So we pray for your
presence among us this morning. In Christ's name we pray, amen. Now, you're probably all familiar
with the story of Rahab and the spies. How that as the Jews were
about to enter the promised land, cross the Jordan and begin the
conquest of that land that God had promised to them on oath. Joshua sent in two spies. And these spies went to the city
of Jericho because that would be the first major city that
would be destroyed by the Israelites. And so they were sent there. Of course, it was obvious that
they weren't from there. Probably their speech was different. I know that when I moved here,
as a, well, not a native of West Virginia, but from the time I
was seven years old on, I lived in West Virginia, and I'm sure
to the ears of the people around here, they knew I was not from
these parts. And I've been told some of it
lingers. But, what, I've spent nearly
half my, or over half my life here, so some of it's gone, but
some of it's still here. And so they, having 40 years
previous been delivered from Egypt and then spent their time
together isolated as a nation, they probably sounded different
from the others. So it was known that these were
foreigners. And as was typical in those days,
when there were foreigners around that you had never met before,
there was suspicions Well, Rahab evidently recognized who these
men were and what group of people they came from, and she knew
what their purpose was. And she hid them. Her house,
I guess the back wall of her house was part of the wall of
the city. Consequently, she hid these spies there, and when the
coast was clear, She let them down by a rope through a window
and said, you go over to the mountains and you hide for three
days. By then, the people that are looking for you will have
come back figuring they can't find you. And then you can go
on your way. And she had them swear an oath
to her that when they destroyed the city, they would spare her
and her parents, her brothers and sisters and their families,
and children. And they told her that they would
spare her, but on this condition, that she hang a scarlet cord
out the window. Now, this story is a testimony of the work of God's
free and sovereign grace. Now, I normally do not like man-made
descriptions of the truth. And people even use that phrase,
free and sovereign grace, to mean different things. But I
don't know what else to call what the scriptures mean when
they refer to God's grace. Actually, grace by its very nature,
in order to be grace, it must be sovereign. Grace simply means
favor. Now, you cannot force anyone
to look on you favorably, no matter what you do. Even if you acted perfectly towards
someone, you can't make them like you. You can't make them
show you favor. If they show you favor, it's
because they decided to, for reasons of their own or no reason
at all. That's the nature of grace. Mercy
is the same way. Now, when we speak of free and
sovereign grace, the word free does not mean just without cost. It means without cause. When the Scriptures say we're
justified freely by His grace, It means justified without any
cause in us. Now there was a cause for our
justification, but it wasn't found in us. So from our perspective,
God justified freely, without cause. There was no reason for
him to justify us. It was just out of the goodness
of his grace that he did so. So it's free grace, and again,
it's sovereign. Sovereign means in control, having
authority and power. And God has the authority over
his grace, and he has the power to make his grace effective. Now, I may show you favor, and it accomplished nothing.
Isn't that true? Just because I favor you doesn't
mean that whatever favor I've had towards you is actually going
to work out to your benefit. We all favor our children, don't
we? We love them and therefore favor,
grace flows from our hearts toward them and we love them whether
they're good or bad and all that. But our favor toward them as
we try to do good things for them and cause good things to
happen to them, that doesn't mean that's what's going to happen
because we have neither the wisdom to always know what is good nor
the power to always bring about what is good for them. Well,
God suffers no lack of wisdom or power. Consequently, if he
has grace towards someone, if he's favorably disposed toward
a person, that grace is going to do something. It will accomplish
something. There is no such thing as God
being gracious to a person and then that person ending up in
God's eternal wrath. It cannot happen. God's grace
cannot fail precisely because it's God's grace. Now, I love
that doctrine. There are many, particularly
where I come from, of course, in a city dominated by Reformed
churches, at least in their creeds, they're going to say the same
thing. I don't know how much everyone actually believes in
sovereign grace. In fact, a lot of things have
changed in the churches since I came here 35 years ago. So
I don't know presently how strongly they hold to the sovereignty
of grace. But I know this, for a sinner,
I mean a real Bible-described sinner, there is no sound so
wonderful as sovereign grace. Rebels against the sovereignty
of grace hear it and say, well, that means God might leave me
out. Well, if he did, you'd have no complaint. That is, you have
no grounds to make a complaint because we've done nothing which
might rightly deserve God's favor toward us. If He showed us no
grace, He has not withheld from us something we deserve, has
He? So we can make no just claim against Him if He passes us by.
When a person gets upset by the sovereignty of God's grace, normally
what it shows is they just have a problem with God being God
at all. The very essence of God is to be in charge, isn't it?
To be able to speak, whatever you say, that's what happens.
As it says with regard to creation, He spoke and it was, He commanded
and it stood firm. And that's true not only of creation
but everything else that ever happens. God spoke it and it
happened. But people don't like it that
God can do that. They don't mind him being sovereign
over the non-human world. He can be sovereign over the
trees and the dogs and the cattle and all that if he wants to.
But they believe that man has such dignity he is entitled to have his will unviolated by God. Well, my friends, I'm here to
say if God doesn't violate your will, you're lost. If he doesn't
go against what you naturally desire, you're bound for an eternity
in hell. And if that bothers you to hear
something like that or makes you fear that he'll pass you
by, understand this. If it wasn't that way, that is,
if it wasn't that God will be gracious to whom He'll be gracious
and will be merciful to whom He'll be merciful, if that were
not true, absolutely no one would be saved. Because no one can
come to Christ unless the Father draws him. And that word in the
King James translated draw is actually like and not a tender
wooing or pleading. You know what it is to have,
to talk about an animal draws a carriage. The word is used,
Paul used it when talking about the rich who are dragging people
into court. The word refers to pulling on
something that has resistance. And we do put up resistance.
People say, you know, there's a doctrine called irresistible
grace. And once again, it's not a perfect title because we do
resist the grace of God. Every one of us did, or you're
still presently resisting it. The thing is, if you be one of
God's favored people, he will eventually demonstrate his grace
with such power that your resistance will prove futile. And I don't
know if you're fans of Star Trek, but every time I see the Borg
come on, they are a overwhelming, powerful race. But they say,
you will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. Now, of
course, they mean it in a bad way. When God says resistance
is futile, That's good. Your resistance will not be able
to withstand the power of divine grace. Now, when God would set
forth a trophy of His grace, as He does in the story of Rahab
and the spies, He does not hide the sinfulness of those upon
whom He shows grace. This woman, Rahab, she is a resident
of a city marked for destruction. She is a prostitute. She very well may have used her
house as a boarding house, what we would call a motel, but that
was only as a convenient means to ply her main trade, which
was prostitution. She is an example of where sin
did abound, grace did much more abound. She fulfilled, or it
was fulfilled in her what is said in Romans, sin has reigned
unto death, grace has reigned through righteousness unto eternal
life. Her sin is boldly declared by
the name of her profession, her house, was a house of prostitution. Now, we must understand that
in this time and place, prostitution did not carry the scandal that
it does in most Western cultures. And I assume that that's because
of the effect, that is the way we view prostitution, it's the
effect that what we call Western civilization has been greatly
influenced by what the scriptures say. But you gotta remember,
these people in Canaan, they were the descendants of the one
whom Noah cursed. And the interesting thing is,
in that story of Noah, it says that after the flood, that he
planted a vineyard and he got drunk and lay naked in his tent.
And it says that his son, Ham, saw it and laughed or whatever. I remember my philosophy professor
says the way it is worded, it probably actually means he took
pleasure in it. His other sons wouldn't shame
their father, nor did they take any pleasure in the fact that
their father was naked in his tent and they covered him up.
But it says, when Noah awoke from his stupor, and this is
the interesting words, and realized what his son did to him. This was more than seeing a naked
old man and getting a laugh out of it. He was perverted. He still had a wife and had children,
but he was perverse. And when it came time for Noah
to pronounce blessings and cursings or whatever on his sons, he blessed
Shem and Japheth. But to Canaan, he said. You say, why you bring up Canaan?
Canaan is the son of Ham. And evidently, Noah, by prophetic
understanding, knew that this perversity of nature would find
its fulfillment in Canaan and his descendants. He didn't curse Ham, he cursed
Canaan. And he said, you'll be a servant
of servants. And where did the descendants of a man named Canaan
settle? Canaan. Evidently he went there. And that area was full of people
like him. For example, Sodom and Gomorrah
were Canaanite cities. So this woman plying the trade
of prostitution would not have been such a scandalous thing
as we think of it in our day. And evidently, not even the Jews
looked on it with the kind of scorn we would. They are at the
present time, in this story, they're in an area called Shittim,
which actually, it's from the name for what we would call the
acacia tree. And so they were in an area that
had a lot of acacia trees in it. But it says that while they
were there, They committed or engaged in adultery with the
women of that area, which was Moab. So not even the Jews were so
careful when it came to matters of sexual purity. So what happens? They go into this city, and this
may be shocking, but these were believing men. But they're believing
men at a time when there wasn't much information about what believing
means. They didn't have Bibles. Christ
had not yet come and given the full revelation of God and his
will and his works. And they went into that city
and they needed a place to stay. and they found this woman Rahab,
the harlot. And it says that in verse one,
so they went and entered the house of a prostitute named Rahab
and stayed there. Now here's what's interesting,
every translation it seems tries to minimize the
fact that this woman was a prostitute and that the men who went there
and stayed at her house probably made use of her services. It will use that word translated
stayed. Another one, a translation I
saw, lodged there. You know what the word actually
means? Every other place, the word is, they lay there. And when you see how that word
is used in scripture, yes, it can mean simply, you lay down.
But it is the word always used in reference to sexual relations,
whether with one's wife or whoever. Adam lay with his wife, and she
conceived and bore him a son named Cain. Many years later,
Judah, the son of Jacob, his daughter-in-law had dressed
herself as a prostitute, and he went by. And evidently Judah
had no problem with the idea that while he's away from home
he could make use of prostitutes so he engaged the services of
this woman named Tamar not recognizing this was his daughter-in-law.
And it says he lay with Tamar or Tamar however it's pronounced.
And so it says here so they went and entered the house of a prostitute
named Rahab and lay there. What you see in this story is
just a great example of the wickedness of humanity, whether they be
in a state of grace or not. Rahab, a descendant of filthy
Canaan, brought up in paganism and outright abominations of
all sort. She's a sinner, wicked. Here
come two spies, descendants of Shem, the favored son of Noah. The Shemites, we call them Semites,
the Jews. And other, there's other nations
also that would fall into that category, but they are the favored
descendants of Noah through Shem. When God blessed Shem, He didn't
say, God bless Shem. He said, blessed be Jehovah,
the God of Shem. Evidently, Japheth didn't worship
that God, even though he'd come through the flood under that
God's protection. Neither did Ham worship that
God. Shem, of the three sons of Noah,
it seems that only one of them worshiped the God of his father,
Shem. And so Noah says, blessed be
Jehovah, God of Shem. And friends, if Jehovah is your
God, you have blessing enough. Noah didn't bless Shem with a
promise of future land in the Middle East. He didn't bless
Shem with the concept of riches. Though all those things would
eventually come to his descendants, Shem's blessing was the blessed
God, Jehovah, the I Am. And yet these descendants of
Shem go out to spy out the land, spy out Jericho, and no sooner
do they get in the gates of this pagan city, they find a prostitute
named Rahab. and engage her services. If they were to make a movie
out of this, particularly if any religious movie-making people
tried to make a movie out of this, Rahab would be a beautiful former
prostitute. The world loves ex-sinners. The religious world does. But
the Bible doesn't say they went into the house of a woman who
in times past was a prostitute. Now, I don't know how old this
woman was. She was old enough. Her brothers
and sisters had families. I don't know by personal interaction
very much about prostitutes, but I do know that it is a life
that degrades the person engaged in it. And I have seen some walking
the streets. Most of the time, at least in
our culture, most of the time they are prostitutes not because They don't have talent
to do anything else. Most of them are addicts of one
sort or another. What I'm saying is they generally
look pretty rough, not beautiful like a movie would
make them, so that you would be attracted to them and think,
oh, here's a wonderful example of a person who reformed, and
because of that, God spared her from the destruction of Jericho.
No. a prostitute in every sense of
the word. And the spies, they really weren't any better than
her. And into this story, into that context, God demonstrates
His grace. If you'd have looked on that
city, even with the two Jewish spies in there, if God had looked
down on there, He's thinking, OK, I want to save somebody out
there. I got to look for the brightest light of righteousness
there is. He would not have seen any. There is none righteous,
no, not one. There's none that does good,
not even one. Not the inhabitants of Jericho,
not the Jewish spies that were sent there. Grace made a distinction, though.
And here's the thing, and here's how you can tell the difference
between a religion that's of man and a religion that's of
God. The religions of man have God looking for distinctions
among men. And therefore their religion
will put you on a path of trying to distinguish yourself from
the condemned by doing something. Like that Pharisee who said,
I thank you God, I'm not like other men. I'm different. I'm
distinct. I'm apart from the wicked world. He was trying to make the distinction
himself. Grace does not look for distinctions. Grace makes distinctions. And though God would look down
on such a place if he were looking for righteousness, He wouldn't
have found anybody. But what the eye of justice could
not find, the grace of God made. He says there's a city full of
sinners. Most of them are natives of the city. Two of them, natives of my chosen
nation. They're all sinful. But my eye
sees three upon whom my grace They are mine. They will not
perish. Actually, more than three, because
there was Rahab, her parents, her brothers and sisters, and
all their families were included under this demonstration of grace.
Brethren, isn't that an amazing thing to think of? In the midst of all that gross
wickedness, God demonstrated his grace. Everyone in the city
deserved to die. Most of them did die, not those. And the only reason they didn't
die is because God chose not to visit his wrath on them. You
say, well, that's a wonderful story of the grace of God. Yes,
it is. And it's as true today as it
was then. We live in a very religious area. And so far as the creeds are
concerned, you know, most of what they say is spot on. I mean,
they believe, according to the creeds, free and sovereign grace
and all that. I love that. But when God looks down on Northwest
Iowa, With the eye of justice, he sees nothing but wickedness. Rank wickedness. Why? God doesn't look on the
outward appearance, he looks on the heart. And you and I have
hearts just like the heart of Ham, Canaan, all of Canaan's
descendants, and even those descendants of Shem who were sent in on a
mission for God into that city. And yet such was the wickedness
of their flesh. They're found in the house of
a prostitute. Yet, God set that whole situation up. Why? He was gonna gather all,
shall we say, all of his elect from that city, gonna collect
them all in that one house. And he would spare that house,
and thus spare everyone in that house. Not because they were better,
not because they deserved it, but because God is gracious,
and he will show grace, he will be gracious to whom he'll be
gracious, and he'll be merciful to whom he'll be merciful. I'm standing up here preaching.
Sometimes I tell people I'm a preacher. Well, that's just great. Well,
maybe, maybe not. Depends on what I'm preaching.
But I know this, not all my preaching, be it ever so good, not all of
it put together, would raise me a single inch out of hell. I stand before you to declare
the riches of God's goodness in Christ for only one reason. In sovereign mercy, he pitied
this wretch. He found me, as the prophet says,
on the dunghill, on the garbage heap, and he set me among the
princes. I was perfectly satisfied to
feast on garbage. I was not looking for a place
at the king's table, but the king was looking for me. I saw what I thought was a touching,
One of those poster things that goes up by on Facebook. And it's the woman at the well.
You remember that story? And it's words put into her mouth,
but I think accurately so. She says, he did not come here
looking for water. He came here looking for me. Not anybody else. that we know
of, he went out of the way for one woman. He went out of the
way for one woman in Jericho. He went out of the way for one
woman in Samaria. And he went out of his way for
one boy in the hills of West Virginia. And if you are a recipient of
His grace, He went out of His way for you. You're dismissed.