“By faith the people passed through the Red Sea as on dry land; but when the Egyptians tried to do so, they were drowned. By faith the walls of Jericho fell, after the army had marched around them for seven days. By faith the prostitute Rahab, because she welcomed the spies, was not killed with those who were disobedient.” (Hebrews 11:29-30)
As we near the end of this series on the faith heroes of Hebrews 11, we come across three very improbable entries. People who, individually or collectively, should not have made the cut. But they did, so let’s see if we can find out why.
First, the people who “passed through the Red Sea as on dry land.” The Israelites have fled Egypt and now find themselves in a very dangerous situation. Ahead of them a body of water too deep to swim across. Behind them, the armies of Egypt. What to do? What to do? Well, their first thought is, “Let’s go back to Egypt! Oh, sure, we were in slavery there. Sure, the Egyptians made our lives “bitter with harsh labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields” (Exodus 1:14), but…
Oh, but now, perched between a rock and a hard place, they said,
“Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians’? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!” (Exodus 14:11-12).
Oh, but God had a plan for them! Exodus 14:4, “I will gain glory for myself through Pharaoh and all his army, and the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord.”
In verses 13-14 of Exodus 14, Moses tells the complaining people, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again. The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.”
It wasn’t up to them to save themselves. God would do it. They only had to be still and see the salvation of the Lord! They did their part; God did His part; and they made the list of faith heroes.
Fast forward 40 years. Despite repeated examples of God’s providential care for them, the Israelites have spent those 40 years in repeated cycles of rebellion, grumbling, complaining, and even idolatry. But now at last this generation has passed over the Jordan River in a move reminiscent of the crossing of the Red Sea (Joshua 3). No Egyptian army behind them, but ahead of them was the Promised Land!
But to take possession of the land, they would have to fight for it. And their first skirmish was an odd one to say the least! We read the instructions in Joshua 6. The armed men were to march around the city of Jericho once a day for six days. With them would be priests carrying the ark, and seven priests carrying trumpets. That’s all. Just march around the city, then back to camp where they would spend the night.
But then,
“On the seventh day, they got up at daybreak and marched around the city seven times in the same manner, except that on that day they circled the city seven times. The seventh time around, when the priests sounded the trumpet blast, Joshua commanded the army, ‘Shout! For the Lord has given you the city!’... When the trumpets sounded, the army shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so everyone charged straight in, and they took the city.” (Joshua 6:15-16, 20)
Did it make sense? No, I can’t imagine any general who would issue such orders. The Expositor’s Bible Commentary says, “Apart from the conviction that God would act, nothing could have been more pointless than the behavior of those warriors.”[1] But they acted as God had commanded, and the first conquest of the Promised Land was complete. The author of Hebrews tells us it was “by faith.”
And finally, a truly unlikely faith story, coming as it does in the person of a non-Israelite. Rahab is identified as a harlot,[2] and she would be by all accounts a heathen. But her decision to hide the spies was firmly based on what she had heard of the God of Israel. Here’s what she told the spies:
“I know that 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.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 the earth below.” (Joshua 2:9-11)
This faith based on her understanding of Israel’s God, as sparse as that might have been, resulted in her life, and the lives of her family, being spared when Jericho fell.
Sadly, all the other inhabitants of Jericho had the same knowledge. But none of the rest of them chose to come down on Israel’s side. As a result, when the walls fell and the Israelite soldiers entered the city, “They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle sheep and donkeys” (Joshua 6:21).
But the consequences of Rahab’s faith didn’t end simply with her life being spared. F.F. Bruce takes up the story:
“Yet [Hebrews 11] is not the only place in the New Testament where she receives honorable mention for her faith: in [James] 2:25 her kindly treatment of Joshua’s spies is one of the two arguments for the thesis that faith without works is dead, the other argument being Abraham’s offering up of Isaac. In fact, Rahab, despite her antecedents, enjoys the place of esteem in Jewish and Christian records….
The earliest Christian writer outside the New Testament canon, Clement of Rome, recounts the story of Rahab to illustrate the virtues of faith and hospitality, and makes her a prophetess to boot, since the scarlet rope by which she let the spies down from her window on the city wall, and by which her house was identified at the capture of the city, foreshadowed ‘that through the blood of the Lord all who trust and hope in God shall have redemption’ (1 Clement 12:7).”
Of the three stories in this article the Zondervan Bible Commentary notes:
“…the writer briefly touches on the faith of those from the Exodus to Maccabean times ([Hebrews 11] 29–38), mentioning specifically the faith of ‘the people’ in crossing the Red Sea and conquering Jericho (29), and of Rahab the harlot (31) showing that ‘strongholds tumble before faith and even the most disreputable are redeemed by it’.”
Their faith was indeed, “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).