Welcome to PowerPoint with Jack Graham. It is hope, in particular God's hope, that keeps us going. That when we are knocked down, it causes us to get up again and keep going. This is hope, and hope is the heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ. On today's PowerPoint, Dr.
Graham brings a message about how Jesus can give you hope even when all seems lost.
Now, here's Dr. Graham with his message: Hope for the Hopeless. Begin finding Joshua chapter two. Rahab was a woman that had been used and abused by men, and yet God saw her need, and God knew her desire to know Him. And out of all the people in a pagan city called Jericho, so long ago, He chose this woman of all people.
It's a it's a strange place. To experience amazing grace is the story of Rahab. We need hope, don't we? Our world needs hope. We need hope personally.
Someone said that hope is the oxygen of the soul. We cannot live without hope. It is hope, in particular, God's hope—the hope that Jesus gives us—that. Keeps us going. That when we are knocked down, it calls us to get up again and keep going.
This is hope. Is described in the Bible as a blessed hope, and ultimately, our hope is when Christ returns and we will see Him face to face. And hope is the heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and the Bible is God's love letter to us. And the love is expressed and felt in this hope that we have in Him. In our series, our just beginning series in Joshua, we've seen that the children of Israel are poised and prepared now to cross over into the land that God had given them, the promised land.
They've been wandering in the wilderness. For forty years, an entire generation has died out, and now a new generation is ready to take what God had given them. Go and take it. And so they are ready. Why do we have the Old Testament?
Why do we have this in our Bible as New Testament believers and followers of Jesus? Because, according to Romans chapter fourteen. For whatever was written in former days, the olden days, was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have what hope. And then in that same Romans chapter thirteen, fifteen rather, verse thirteen, one of my favorite verses: May the God of hope Fill you with all hope in believing that by the power of the Holy Spirit that you would overflow with hope. We live and breathe in this hope that we have in Christ, and this story that we have in front of us today is a story of hope.
In the New Testament, you hear the word grace. Grace is God's unmerited, unmitigated favor towards us, undeserved favor—the gift of God. That's grace, and is primarily a New Testament word, though a form of it shows up in the Old Testament. The primary Old Testament word is mercy, and in Jesus, we now have both grace. That is, God gives us what we don't deserve, and mercy.
He does not give us what we do deserve. And in the mercy of God, and because of the grace of God, we find this hope every day. His mercies are new every single morning. But you do see it again and again and again. In the scriptures, and in particular the Old Testament, this theme of of mercy.
So, after forty days of wandering and waiting for the fulfillment of the promise, the children of Israel are ready to cross over into Canaan, the Promised Land. And remember, for us, Canaan, the Promised Land, our Canaan, that we're to conquer every day in Jesus' name, because He has won the victory. Our Canaan is the victorious Christian life. We are living in this victory, and God has given us a promise.
So, the promised land for you and me is the promised life. We live a promised life, but there's one problem for the children of Israel, and that is Jericho. Jericho was a walled city in the ancient world. In fact, you can visit Jericho as I have on numerous occasions. This very day, and you can see the remains of ancient Jericho.
And the archaeologists have dug deep there in this ancient city, and indeed, they have found the mighty walls of Jericho. And about, well, two walls really circling the city, about fifteen feet thick each one, so thirty feet thick walls. Each one of them, in effect, saying this wall, saying, "Keep out." This was a fortified city, and as the children of Israel are waiting and wanting to go in, God leads General Joshua to send two spies into enemy territory to gather intelligence. That's what a good general does. A good army gets good intelligence, and so two brave.
Men, spies, and these two spies go into the city of Jericho. Let's pick up the reading in chapter two, verse one. And Joshua the son of Nun sent two men secretly from Shittim as spies, saying, "Go view the land, especially Jericho." And they went and came into the house of a prostitute whose name was Rahab, and lodged there. And it was told to the king of Jericho, "Behold, men of Israel have come here tonight to search out the land.
Someone spied the spies." And then the king of Jericho sent to Rahab, saying, "Bring out these men who have come to you, who entered your house, for they have come to search out all the land." But the woman had taken the two men and hidden them. Verse five.
Well, let's go to verse four. But the woman had taken the two men and hidden them, and said, "True, the men came to me, but I did not know where they were from." Now, some people want to get all worked up about Rahab telling a lie here. Don't get all worked up three thousand years later about whether she should have lied or not.
So she didn't tell the truth. She said, "Well, I don't know what you're talking about." She said, "In fact, they left." And when the gate was about to be closed at dark, verse five, the men went out, and I don't know where the men went. Pursue them quickly, for you will overtake them. Go now. All the time, these two spies are hidden out at her house, but she had brought them up to the roof and hid them with the stalks of flax that she had laid in order on the roof.
So the men pursued after them on the way to the Jordan as far as the fords, and the gate was shut as soon as the pursuers had gone out.
Now, before we go any further in this story about Rahab, I want to say a word about these two unlikely, unsung, unnamed heroes. We don't have the names of these two men; they're anonymous. They don't even get a small appearance tag. Just two spies, two brave men who went into the city of Jericho. And they found this house where, apparently, you would imagine men were coming and going.
I mean, I mean, I asked myself when I read this the first time: Were these men going to the house of a prostitute for sex? No. They were going to spy, and one of the ways that they could hide was in a place where many people knew, and a lot of men were coming in and out. I don't know how or why, but in the providence of God, they came to this house of the prostitute Rahab. I love the stories of unsung, unheralded, unnamed heroes—people you may not know about.
I think about these spies, these men who went in behind enemy lines, and I'm reminded that this is what God has called us to do: is to go, take risk by faith, and do what is necessary in order to advance the kingdom of God in our generation. And it doesn't take great talent or skill, but it does take humility, and it does take availability and expendability.
Someone said it's not scholarship, but relationship with God that God uses.
So God wants us today in our generation, in our culture, in our Canaan, if you will, to get behind those enemy lines and and bravely do whatever it takes, at even personal risk, to do the will of God. And that happens because you have brave souls. You probably don't know their names. But these brave souls who are in effect in a culture, going against the grain and doing what is necessary to obey God, to do what God wants them to do.
So I love the story of these two men and all who do whatever it takes to accomplish the purposes of God and the providences of God, and that's what's happening here.
So the the spies speak sneak into the house of Rahab again. Amazing grace in an unlikely place, a house of prostitution. Here they meet Rahab. You're listening to PowerPoint with Jack Graham and the message, hope for the hopeless. Did you know that you can join Dr.
Graham for his daily devotion? It's a study of God's word that will help you grow in your faith, encourage you in your walk with Christ, and show you how to navigate through the challenges of life. To sign up, text Devo D E V O to five nine seven eight nine and begin receiving Dr. Graham's devotional every day. Again, text Devo D E V O to five nine seven eight nine.
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Now, let's get back to today's message: hope for the hopeless. Rahab is mentioned five times in the Bible. Six times when you add the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew one. But the five times she is mentioned in both Old Testament and New Testament, it always comes with the tag, Rahab. The harlot.
I mean, the Bible doesn't clean it up. Not Rahab the escort, not Rahab the shady lady, but a strong word for prostitution.
Now, Canaan was a very wicked place, and Jericho was a wicked place. I've been to the land of Canaan in Israel and seen the remains of platforms of worship where babies were sacrificed, killed. It was very immoral. The people were idolaters. It was a wicked place, and they refused the grace of God.
When you read these Old Testament stories, sometimes you wonder why so, so so much war. Why did God tell the children of Israel to take these people out?
Well, you read in the Bible earlier that God gave Canaan and the people in Canaan, the Canaanite cities, four hundred years to repent. Four hundred years, they had an opportunity to repent, but they just went deeper and deeper and deeper into their sin and rebellion and into idolatry. And even when the children of Israel are perched and ready to attack, they could have repented. Even when those children of Israel were walking around those walls and waiting to blow those trumpets and take the city, they could have all repented and been saved. But no.
And yet, in the midst of this. Wickedness. There is a prostitute in this vile and wicked place, who herself, no doubt, was a part of a false religion and idolatry and all that came with it—prostitution, sexualized culture.
Sounds pretty familiar. You know, it's said that prostitution is. The world's oldest profession. It's been around for thousands of years, of course, as immorality has. Sexual trafficking is a terrible, terrible thing, as is prostitution, because it uses and abuses.
This woman is selling her body. She never intended, I'm sure, as a little girl to end up a prostitute. Her life wasted and wanton, and yet here she is. Sexual sin is enslaving. Pornography, also a form of prostitution.
Billions and billions of dollars spent.
Now God made sex as a sacred gift to His creation, but Satan twists and perverts it. Sex is not should not. Be cheap or casual or corrupt. God has given us this gift of intimacy, and the mark of a Christian. Once your life is transformed by Jesus Christ, once you experience the grace and the mercy of God in your life, one of your number one desires is purity and holiness.
To pursue holiness in the fear of God.
So sexual sin and fornication and whoring and whore mongering and all the rest—that's never to be a part of the Christian's life. Rahab's testimony is that by faith she believed she had heard. I wish I had a little more time to tell you this story, but she had heard of the mighty miracles of God that had taken place at the Red Sea. She had heard something. She knew a little bit about the Israelites.
The word had passed. And can I tell you, the greatest evidence for the Christian faith is for you and me who have experienced the miracle power of Jesus Christ, His cross, His resurrection. When people hear of us, pagan people, ungodly, unchurched, unsaved. When they hear of our faith, when they hear of our God who has done miracles in our lives, just like Rahab had heard what had happened in the lives of those Israelis, she knew that there was a God in Israel, and she wanted to get on God's side. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.
So. Though her faith was infantile in many ways, it was so small, and yet she believed, and it was accounted unto her as righteousness. And so, listen to her testimony in Joshua chapter two, Joshua chapter two, and verse eight. She said to the men, "I know that the Lord has given you the land, and the fear of you has fallen upon us." See, she. Begins with the fear of the Lord.
She knew that she, along with her citizenship, were they were all doomed and damned by the judgment of God. And yes, there is a judgment coming. God is not mocked. She had heard. She said in verse ten, "We've heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea before you, and when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to the two kings of the Amorites who were beyond Jordan, to Sihon and Og, whom you devoted to destruction.
I mean, that was a wipeout in itself. And as soon as we heard it, our hearts melted, and there was no spirit left in any man because of you, for the Lord." She uses the holy name of God, the Lord your God. He is God in the heavens above and on the earth beneath.
Now then, please swear to me by the Lord that as I have dealt kindly with you, that you will also deal kindly with my father's house. These two spies were courageous, but they were also kind. And she was kind towards them, and therefore they were kind towards her. Said, "Give me a sure sign that you will save alive my father and my mother, and my brothers and sisters, and all who belong to them, and deliver our lives from death." And then, when you read on in the scriptures, you discover in verses eleven through fifteen that the soldiers, or rather the spies, yes, they were soldier spies. Told her to take a rope, a red rope, a scarlet thread, a crimson cord, and to hang it in the window of her house.
Her house apparently was on the wall itself. Hang it out the window. Probably was the same rope by which these men's escaped into the night. But he said, "When you hang this red rope there, when we come and take the city, and in the fury and the fire of the war that's about to take place, we'll see the red rope, and we will spare everyone in this house, you and your family." Wow, a red rope of hope. And you know what?
That scarlet thread. Should remind us all about it is the red rope of hope that runs throughout all of Scripture. It's representative of the scarlet thread in the Bible, the blood redemption and remission of sin. That is the story of the Bible. I've said many times, cut the Bible any place and it will bleed.
It is a bloody book. Filled with blood, and all that blood started in the Garden of Eden when man sinned against God. The man and the woman rebelled against God, and they killed an animal to cover their sin and their shame. And the blood began to flow because of sin. And a promise was given of one who would come and redeem them with his blood.
Blood began to flow in the earth and. Cain killed Abel, and Adam and Eve began to realize the consequences of sin, which is death. And then came the story of the children of Israel in Egypt. How did they go out of Egypt by putting the blood of the lamb on the doorpost of their house? They went out under the blood.
It's the story of the redemption and salvation of all who come under. The blood, and you get to the book of Leviticus, and you read through all of that, and you're wondering what is all this blood about? All this sacrifice, and all this killing of the animals. You see, God was conditioning the world to this truth, recorded in Hebrews nine twenty two, that without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin. And so the blood began, kept flowing through the Bible.
You find it in Isaiah, the Lamb of God who took on Himself our death and our hell and judgment. The blood flows to the to the banks of Jordan when John the Baptist said, "Behold, the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world." The blood flowed to Calvary when Jesus laid down His life on the cross, and the blood of redemption flowed. And Jesus died for you and me. It flowed on through into the book of Revelation and even into heaven, as the people are saying, "Worthy is the Lamb, for we are redeemed by His blood." It is this scarlet thread of redemption, in a little cord, a rope of hope that was hung in Rahab the harlot's window, that speaks to us this very day. That's the scarlet thread of the Bible.
That all through the Bible, it's the story of redemption, the story of salvation, the scarlet thread of redemption, remission, and forgiveness. And this woman, she found favor, grace in the eyes of the Lord, mercy. She found freedom. She was set through free from the power of her sins. She ends up getting married, and tradition tells us that she married one of the spies.
She got married, and they had a son, and then she had a grandson, and then she had a great great grandson whose name was David, king of Israel. The son of David is Jesus, our Lord. Can so God gave this prostitute, this shady lady, this wicked woman, like you and me. Favor and freedom transformed her life, and forgiveness, and a future, and a hope, and we have a future and a hope in Jesus Christ. Amen.
Amen. And so that's why when Rahab shows up in the genealogy of Jesus, Matthew one, you know what God can do in your life. You say, "Well, I'm not a prostitute. I'm not even immoral. I'm really kind of a moral person.
I'm a good person." Jesus told the unsaved Pharisees. He said, "The prostitutes and the tax collectors are going to go to heaven before you will ever get there." Because if you know that you've sinned, as we've all sinned and broken God's commandment, then you fall on the mercy and the grace of God. You come to the blood. There's no redemption. There's no salvation apart from the scarlet thread.
Man's blood stains everything, but God's blood, the blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, bleaches everything. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow. Though they be red like crimson, they shall be white as snow. They shall be as wool. And so this is Rahab's story, and it can be your story, regardless of your morality or immorality.
Your life can be changed. You're listening to PowerPoint with Jack Graham and the message, Hope for the Hopeless. We want to tell you about an encouraging resource available this month from PowerPoint Ministries. It's Dr. Jack Graham's book, Destiny.
Have you ever wondered if God really has a purpose for your life, or questioned what He might be doing through the seasons of disappointment, waiting, or uncertainty? In Destiny, Dr. Graham explores the life of Joseph to reveal how God's sovereign hand is always at work, even when we can't see it. This powerful resource will help you trust God's plan, find peace in a difficult season, and move forward with confidence and hope. And when you give a gift of $10 or more to help share the biblical truth around the world through PowerPoint, we'll send you Destiny as our thanks.
To give your gift and request your copy, text OCT O C T to five nine seven eight nine. That's OCT O C T, as in October, to five nine seven eight nine. Let me remind you that you can join Dr. Graham for his daily devotion. It's a study of God's word that will help you grow in your faith, encourage you in your walk with Christ, and show you how to navigate through the challenges of life.
To sign up, text DEVO D E V O to five nine seven eight nine and begin receiving Dr. Graham's devotional every day. Again, text DEVO D E V O to five nine seven eight nine. Pastor, what is your PowerPoint for today? Rahab was far from pure.
In a human sense, there was nothing holy about her. She was a pagan, profligate prostitute, and yet the message of this story is that by faith. And you see her showing up in Hebrews chapter eleven. If you know your way around your Bible in the New Testament, there is a book called Hebrews, and in Hebrews chapter eleven, it's the story of the people of faith by faith by faith by faith. How these believe God, and you have great people in there.
You've got you got Abraham in there, and you've got King David, and you've got Moses, and you got all these great names and personalities. And right in the middle of it, eleven thirty-two comes this woman by faith, Rahab the harlot, because you see, God loves everyone, and His mercy and love extends to all of us. There was nothing good about this woman, and hey, are you listening to me? There's nothing good about you. There's none that doeth good.
The Book of Romans, chapter one, says, "Not one, none, no one does good. Even our goodness is badness in the face of a holy God. Filthy rags, self righteousness is also a great sin." There is hope because God gives love and mercy to guilty sinners, grace to guilty sinners, and where sin abounds, grace much more abounds. Grace that is greater than all our sin. And that is today's PowerPoint.
And join us again next time as Dr. Graham brings a message about how God can make a way even when there seems to be no way. That's next time on PowerPoint with Jack Graham. PowerPoint with Jack Graham is sponsored by PowerPoint Ministries.
