Some Straight Truth

 "Not many of you are worldly wise, or particularly powerful or of distinguished background - because God chooses to use what is often despised".

1 Corinthians 1:26 & 28.

So, that's how it is.

You're in a disreputable profession, the world is coming apart around you, and all you really know to your core is that there is a far greater truth at work in the universe than those around you want to admit (and actively avoid), which leaves you often alone in your thoughts and actions, longing for something truly deeper in this time and place.

That doesn't sound like a particularly motivational list of qualifications for going places, but when we meet the likes of Rahab of Jericho amidst the events that will lead to the conquest of Canaan, this is exactly what is true for her.

Evidential failure to amount to what is presently prized by the consensus is so easy to make a means of evaluation, but it doesn't actually tell us anything about what is actually going on. No one would have looked upon the arrest and mockery of a show trial of Jesus, or the savage events that follow this as a triumph, and yet, this is the very 'hour' God had anticipated since our failure in Eden to bring the most substantial event in all of time and space.

Rahab's story makes you realise just how easily we can ill-define the superficial criteria for actual significance. How many of us would have given a pagan named Abram a second look or even considered the possibility that any kind of redemption would have been possible through a renegade like Moses? We readily recognise the flaws of someone like Noah (taking to getting drunk after a truly astonishing deliverance), or the vile nature of David in adultery and pre-meditated murder for his own ends, but how do we then untangle the clear unmerited benevolence shown to them?

These records remind us perfectly of the daily propensity of people in general - to want to bury or evade in whatever way we can the fact of what we actually are.

That isn't news. What is astounding is the God who Rahab knew was there interrupted the 'natural outcome' of these people's lives to bring about something entirely outside of what should have been, purely because of mercy.

Because of that alone, they are actually rescued from themselves.

God revealed in Jesus (a descendant of Rahab, by the way), is looking for those who know they need that manner of overwhelming care in the now, so that their day to day lives amounts to something more than a litany of disaster - it speaks of a goodness far above what should normally be true.

These are the people God reaches to, and rescues, purely because they ask and He so freely provides.