Rahab – No Longer a Wasted Woman (Part B)

The great part of being not only born again, but Jesus taking you and immersing you in the third part of the Trinity, immersing you in God, immersing you in the Spirit of God. And again, why should He do it to anyone who is going to undervalue that and claim salvation at the same time?

So I encourage you to not undervalue what God wants to do to you and for you. This is Cross-Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the book of Genesis.

Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross-Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. Today Pastor Rick will begin in Hebrews chapter 11 and he'll be teaching part two of his study called Rahab, No Longer a Wasted Woman. The most important thing they had to gain was obedience to their God. Well that's what everything was back then.

Everyone was trying to be obedient to their God. Which brand? Pick one. Through a process of elimination, you could easily arrive at the conclusion that God is wrong. Why? Because that God kills the innocent.

That's why. You should look at Islam and think there's anything redeeming about it when in its own writings they support the violence that they produce. It's just very simple. Well if that is God, then that's not right. That is not consistent with my idea of a supreme being who is good. That is consistent with my idea of an evil being, but not a good one.

And it has not changed in all this time. And this very simple way of looking at things is I think one of the first things the devil targets when he locks down an individual so that they cannot become free. But before we get to that part, and that is I hopefully I've saved the most powerful part of the message, if I may say so myself, to the end.

But in the middle there's building up to this. There's so much to glean, so much to be reminded of. Talking about what Rahab saw and how she saw it. She saw what God was going to do before she even knew it was God showing her what he was doing and going to do. She was being exposed to divinity, true divinity. Not these fake gods that littered the landscape of Jericho and all of Canaan and everywhere else. This was different.

And though she was being drawn in and enjoying it, she still didn't understand it. Joshua sent two spies into the land. He wasn't going to go through this, okay, let's vote on it. Ten no, two yes. This is not up for a congregational vote. This is an executive decision. The executive being God.

We're going to take this land. I need two good men to go in and I need them to choose for me high-value targets so we can get this show on the road. And he sends two men in whom he knows are righteous men. Not only are they stealthy and wise, but they're righteous.

Big part of the story. They're not men who are just capable like Joab. Joab was very capable.

He probably would have killed everybody in the city in one of his homicidal fits, but it's not a man like Joab. These two men were spies. That was their mission. They were righteous and they impressed Rahab enough to begin to give her a hope.

And so he sends these two men. And as I mentioned, they kindled her hope. There was a dread working in her.

She already knew this. They didn't really care. They go to the house of the harlot because it's also an inn. And where else are they going to go into this city? That was the hotel.

They're not going to go to the mayor's office. Hi, we're spies from Israel. We're about to conquer you.

We just want to see your defenses. So it's not like they were doing something wrong by going to her house. This was how it was done. It does not mean that they engaged her services.

Not at all. That would be a diabolical thought and certainly not from the Scripture. But of all those again in Jericho, she alone saw beyond its destruction and saw beyond and entered beyond by faith. She entered beyond by faith as all those who have faith will enter, and that is what Hebrews 11 is all about. All these people struggled with their personal struggles of the flesh, yet they saw beyond this life, and they are now in the next life in glory. The time that Hebrews was written, they were no longer in paradise.

They were with Jesus in heaven, and that's where they are now, and that's where every one of us who believe, we're going also. Now let me add this about the Holy Spirit and this being filled with the Holy Spirit. I believe that the Bible teaches there are cases where a person can be saved and not filled with the Holy Spirit, but I believe that is less than what God wants because there's less He can do through it. But the real evidence of being infused or immersed in the Holy Spirit and therefore infused by Him is the love of Jesus Christ and the desire to do whatever He wants you to do. That is the great part of being not only born again, but Jesus taking you and immersing you in the third part of the Trinity, immersing you in God, immersing you in the Spirit of God. And again, why should He do it to anyone who is going to undervalue that and claim salvation at the same time? So I encourage you to not undervalue what God wants to do to you and for you. And if you have experienced this filling of the Holy Spirit in the past and, but now it's kind of pittered out, then all you need to do is come for a refill. You just need to call out and say, Lord, again, fill me. Not immerse me again, that's a one-time event, but refill me.

Refit me for action, the power of your Holy Spirit. And so when those spies showed up at her door, she knew this was her one chance. She knew it. And as she began to talk with these men, she knew that they were men that she could indeed engage. They weren't like all the others that would come to her door.

These two men were different. That alone, that alone is significant. It tells the power of God that we can block if we're not careful.

It also tells of the power of God that can be unleashed if we are careful. And I love that part about the story because these two spies, you know, there were two angels sent into Sodom. They couldn't save the place.

They destroyed it. The two spies sent into Jericho, they couldn't save the place, but they could get out of Jericho, Rahab and her mother and her father and her sisters and her brother, brothers, plural. Then there are the two witnesses that will come to earth.

They can't save this place. But they are used to extract out of the Great Tribulation period the Great Tribulation saints who otherwise would have been doomed with everybody else. And so these lessons of God, they're all over the place. And one of the problems is when I'm struggling or maybe it's a time of boredom in my life or a time of waiting which is very difficult when you have all of this energy for God, in those times we're vulnerable. Those times Satan can shoot us in the ankles if we're not careful. He can sweep us off our feet. You have to learn how to wait the right way for God.

How do you do that? You have to see what's beyond. You just have to wait. You can't think about, well, what if I don't? You have to trust in what you do, what is, what has already happened.

And that has to be sufficient. But I'm getting ahead of myself and we'll come to that when we talk about Mrs. Lott. But now I mentioned this is her one chance. And I asked you to turn to Joshua chapter 2. Joshua chapter 2 verses 9 through 11 speaks about her hesitation. And there we read, and said to the men, this is Rahab speaking to the two spies, I know that the Lord has given you the land that the terror of you has fallen on us. And that all the inhabitants of the land are faint hearted because of you. Not you two guys, but you Israel. For we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea.

That's an old story. For how He dried up the Red Sea for you. Pause there with me.

I know I'm interrupting a lot of this, but I can't help the commentary. God dried up the sea for the people of God, but He didn't dry it up for the people who were wrong with God. That's what He does. He makes a distinction between those who are His and those who are not, and it is really just that simple. She says, He dried up the water of the Red Sea, Yam Suph, for you when you came out of Egypt and what you did to the two kings of the Amorites who were on the other side of the Jordan, Sihon and Og, whom you utterly destroyed. Notice her emphatic statement. You blew the guys away. That's how we would say it today. It didn't just defeat them.

You utterly wiped them out. I'd love to see her eyes when she phrased those words. They probably squinted just to squeeze out the emphasis, because this was something that was real to all of them, because now these men were there. She passes by other stories about the Amalekites and all the other people of the wilderness who the Jews dealt with. In verse 11, and now here's where we find out what was going on inside her head before this moment.

And as soon as we heard these things, our hearts melted. Neither did there remain any more courage in anyone because of you. Now what she's saying is, I was part of that team. I didn't like that you showed up. There was no more courage in me.

Everything failed because you were the enemy. But she's not talking to them now as an enemy. She's going to risk her life for these guys.

For Yahweh, your God, He is in heaven above and on earth beneath. And there's her great confession of faith. For her to say such a thing would have been a capital crime. But she said it because she has been converted. God was moving her to this place. And now that she has got these two Hebrew men in her dwelling place, in her home, she can see for herself that they're not monsters.

There's something more to this. She wants it. She's ready for it. Because Jericho did her no favors. She had become a failure in this city and she knew it. This wasn't right. This was not what my mom had in store for me when she raised me as a little girl. This was a divine opportunity and it fell right into her lap and she was savvy enough to realize it. She didn't have to.

She could have blew the whistle, ratted them out. She could have been like Delilah. She could have gained some momentary wealth, momentary monetary gain.

But she did not. Because she saw a chance to live, a chance to start all over again, to get out of this city with these people and the sin that is everywhere. She had a heart. She cared about her mom and dad. She cared about her brothers and sisters. That meant when she saw child sacrifice, to me this is, this didn't sit right. There's more to her than this. She had a chance to learn of the only true God and these men were the link. A chance to be free from the shame and the guilt and the filth and she knew it. A chance to no longer be a waste of a woman and a failure no more. I cannot identify with no longer being a waste of a woman, but I can certainly identify with no longer being a waste of a man. I'm not, that's what is real to me and that's what it should be for any man and this is what it should be for any woman.

When we understand that this is what's going on. She needed, she wanted to get away from her past for good because her past was no good. A lot of people don't do that. A lot of people try to make excuses for their past so that they can continue with their past and their present. This is again the case with Lot's wife, Mrs.

Lot. This Rahab risked everything on the basis of a deep spiritual discovery. I emphasize the word deep because that's what it was. Look with me at verse, Joshua chapter two verses two through four and it was told the king of Jericho saying, Behold, men have come here tonight from the children of Israel to search out the country. So the king of Jericho sent to Rahab saying, Bring out the men who have come to you, who have entered your house, for they have come to search out all the country. Then the woman took the two men and hid them. So she said, Yes, the men came to me, but I did not know where they were from and it happened as the gate was being shut when it was dark that the men went out.

Where the men went I do not know. Pursue them quickly for you may overtake them. Give her an academy award. Now she's lying and it's wrong and there is no way to justify a lie. But God is bigger than her lie. I almost cringe to say that because if there is a Christian who is flirting with some sin they may take that as they're out and continue to sin as though it were not a big thing with God.

The puniest of sin, the sin of the size of a flea is enough to damn one soul to one eternity in hell without out. This is called conviction if you are the guilty one. She was convicted, but she had not grown that far yet. They had some work to do with her. Common sense would say she did the right thing, but we do not walk by common sense.

It's supernatural sense. God knew she was going to lie, so he allowed things to run their course. If she had made up her mind to tell the truth, God would have done something differently to protect her, to protect those spies.

It is nothing for him to do what he does as Jericho is going to soon find out, as she already knows, but he's just not yet developed it, and that will come out in a moment also. Unlike the Lot family, the Lot family, a man named Lot and his family, who lacked depth and therefore they lacked want, they lacked desire. See, the depth of her spiritual discovery gave her a desire to get out, to get right with God. This God that she had talked to them about, they had to be impressed. I mentioned I would have loved to have watched her eyes as the words left her mouth. I would have then quickly glanced over at the two men and looked at their eyes as they listened to her recite for them what God had done. They had to be impressed. They had to say, man, this is a divine moment. This is God. What are you going to do with this? Stab her with a dagger?

Absolutely not. They enter into a covenant with her because of her conversion. Lot's family is forever remembered as the family that lacked depth. They lacked depth and therefore they had no want. They did not want what God had to offer. Lot forsook his tent and he moved into Sodom.

Let me rephrase that. Lot forsook his own tent where he had control of his destiny, more so than in Sodom, where he could pick up and move should circumstances change. But he moved out of his own tent into Sodom and everything he lived for went up in smoke.

Okay, that's an easy part of his story but there's much more to it. Not only did Mrs. Lot move into Sodom with her husband, but worse still, Sodom moved into Mrs.

Lot. There's the real danger of seduction. She allowed Sodom to move into her. That's what the story is all about, her perishing.

I don't know that you can ever use that word perish without some alarm going off. Even when the Jews saw that the army of Israel perished, it was still a startling moment. They were in the presence of great things. Lot's wife perished not because she looked backwards, but it was that backwards look that indicated that she had a different view. She had a different view of things. She saw things differently and they weren't like what God saw. God said to me, he said, don't look back at this trash.

It's done. No depth, no want for God. But when it came to sin, there was depth, there was want. She was hungry and thirsty for the things of unrighteousness. Paul wanted the Romans to be ignorant when it came to the things of sin and filth, and he wanted them to be knowledgeable.

He wanted this for all the churches, for Corinth, for Galatia, all of them. He wanted them to be knowledgeable about things that were true, noble. Noble is a big word.

It's decent. That's things that are right. Whatsoever things are true, that's first, foremost. You can't get to decency and nobility without truth. The minute you inject a lie, it is no longer true, nobility. Truth is gone. It's something else now you're dealing with.

It's now you're in salvage mode. Whatsoever things are just, pure, lovely, good report. This is what he wanted, but it's not what Mrs. Lott wanted. She enjoyed the thrills of the flesh. She had learned in her mind to sort out that which was over the top versus that which she could live with, and she was fine with it, and God was not. Her heart was divided. We see this in church often, too often. We see divided believers. Their heart's in two places, and therefore they're restless, and the conviction is always something that does not work good with, will serve them well. It doesn't work good in them. It works resistance towards God. When you bust them, when you catch them, they want off the hook.

They don't want to fix it. They just think about the judgment they're going to get. They don't think about what they've been dolling out, and those who have a divided heart are always unhappy, always unhappy, and they spend all their time trying to be happy, and in so doing they make everybody around them miserable. When they stay in the church, we call them immature Christians. There's a difference between being an immature Christian and a babe in Christ. A babe in Christ hasn't had time to mature. By definition, maturity requires time. An immature Christian has had time and has not matured. The word used to be dwarf. They've not grown like they should have.

Something is not working the way it should. We should tolerate. We should look to work with them nonetheless because we are not committed to shooting our wounded, and nor should we ever be. Rahab, in contrast, in stark contrast to Mrs. Lott, she forsook Jericho. She wasn't about to look back at this place.

Don't blow the walls down half at it. She forsook her city and moved in with the people of God and everything she lived by before God's people showed up tumbled down. Burned up. The spies ended up burning up her house.

They got her out and her family, but they were ordered to burn down her house and she said, have it. It never did me any good. Oh, to have a heart like that when we look at sin. Every born-again believer wants that heart, and this is the struggle that we have. We get a lot of it. We don't get all of it in this life, and it causes us disgust and it should, but we have to learn how to work with our personal disgust in the light of grace or else it would beat us to death. The grace of God. It's not being careless about sin.

Quite the contrary. It's being careful about what Christ has done for me and I receive it. Let me get this right. You want me to come to the cross and that's that. And if I come to the cross genuinely, something's going to happen to me that could happen nowhere else? Yes, that's what I want, says God.

Then I do it. And that is something that Satan cannot undo. When the Christian loses his temper, hates it, doesn't like it, but still continues to serve, still commits to not doing it again, the enemy has nothing else to do. And so out of the ruins of Jericho a new life is born for her and her family. That is very significant because she could have said, because her family doesn't live with her. We know this because the story the spies tell her, make sure your family is in your house. The deal is off. It's not two houses, one house, yours.

They come under your roof and they will come under the law of Israel and guaranteed the men will be circumcised and be grafted into Israel as converts. We don't have to look any further to understand it, but I'm spending a little time, more time than I want to on that and I get back to this. It is enough to say about her that she left nothing behind.

I want that to be said about me. Everything he lived for was in front of him, was ahead of him, was beyond this. The things that he did in this life were with what is beyond in mind. That's why he never looked back at Sodom burn.

He was too busy looking beyond Sodom. That's the idea. This is what she did. This is what she teaches.

I think this is one of the great attractive things about her. The only thing she left behind was wasted life. She is an un-wasted woman at this point.

She is an un-wasted woman from this point forward. You've been listening to Cross Reference Radio, the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel in Mechanicsville, Virginia. Pastor Rick is teaching from God's word each time you tune in.

As we mentioned at the beginning of today's broadcast, this teaching is available free of charge at our website. Just visit crossreferenceradio.com. That's crossreferenceradio.com. We'd also like to encourage you to subscribe to the Cross Reference Radio podcast. Subscribing ensures that you stay current with all the latest teachings from Pastor Rick. You can do so at crossreferenceradio.com, or search for Cross Reference Radio in your favorite podcast app store. That's all for today. Join Pastor Rick next time for more character studies right here on Cross Reference Radio.