Impact - Day 30

Day 30 – The Scarlet Cord

Joshua 6:17-18, 21 Before they left, the men told her, “We will be bound by the oath we have taken only if you follow these instructions. When we come into the land, you must leave this scarlet rope hanging from the window through which you let us down.

“I accept your terms,” she replied. And she sent them on their way, leaving the scarlet rope hanging from the window.

Rahab, an unlikely follower of the Hebrew God, can’t possibly know the depths of the deal she has struck. As the walls fall and Jericho is overrun, she and her family wait for help to come to her home. The two spies she recently harbored arrive to rescue them and move them to safety near Israel's encampment.

That isn’t the end of Rahab’s story. Matthew begins his Gospel by listing the lineage from Abraham through David and on to the Messiah, Jesus Christ. In the fifth verse of his first chapter, he comes to Boaz, David's great-grandfather, and includes the sidenote that Boaz’s mother was this same Rahab. She is David’s great-great-grandmother, or, in other words, Jesus was a descendant of Rahab, the prostitute. 

Through belief in Yahweh, Rahab has moved from the whispered shadows of a tragic past into the lineage of Christ. As Ephesians 2:13 says, “…now you have been united with Christ Jesus. Once you were far away from God, but now you have been brought near to him through the blood of Christ.”

It is significant to notice that the scarlet rope used to lower two spies to freedom is the mark of Rahab’s salvation. Our minds scroll back to the night before the Israelite nation escaped from Egypt and the angel’s warning to identify their families with the scarlet blood of a lamb painted across their door frames. Though she doesn’t know the name of this future grandson, she, like the Hebrew slaves, is claiming the blood of Jesus as the rope drips from her window.

1. What is your favorite color? What emotion, item, or action do you associate with that color?
2. What different ideas do you associate with the color red?
3. Take a moment to repeat in your mind that Jesus has chosen you, that you have been adopted into the family of God. How does knowing that you are God’s child and not an outsider make you feel?