04 Nov Recognizing “It’s Him!”
Our threshold moments depend on our understanding of Who is calling us to step across. For the last three weeks we have been contemplating The Divine Dialogue’s function in an unbeliever’s life to bring each of us to the place where we begin to understand Who is summoning us. As it was for Abraham and Rahab, so it will be for you or me; we all begin in the same place, as unbelievers to whom God comes in words to reveal Himself to us.
We have also established the phenomenon of circumstances being engineered to speak to us, of correspondences too striking to be coincidence, by which God brings us along, teaching us what we need to know.
Having witnessed these things innumerable times in my own life and in the lives of those around me, it is reasonable to conclude that Rahab experienced The Same One speaking to her the same way. But how do we explain the difference between Rahab who would walk out of calamity unscathed, and Jericho who would perish?
Undoubtedly Jericho received the same news Rahab did, but they had their reason for not wanting to recognize what or Who was behind the striking warnings. They remained oblivious to the remarkable threading of occurrences, never suspecting a plan or a purpose moving beneath the surface of events. Therefore, they did not act on what was being shown to them. Rahab stood alone in her recognition of what things meant. She did not dismiss the signs as random and without meaning. She saw God behind the unfolding evidence of dramatic change taking place, yet her confidence only grew–that He was there with her, that He cared, and that He was acting purposefully. This confidence became her state-of-being, which we call “faith“, in which Rahab could look beyond the threat of current events trusting Him with whatever was to come. Rahab was not afraid for herself or those she loved. Like an arrow of light slicing into the soft darkness of her unknowing, she was exquisitely pierced by her repeated recognition of the divine hand at work. Again and again she would see some evidence and whisper softly to herself, “It’s Him!”
When the two Hebrew spies slipped through her door, she knew it was Him. Rahab knew exactly who they were and that it was no coincidence they had been sent to her. Yes, the conspicuous door of a harlot provides quick refuge for two strangers needing to hide. But Rahab knew these men had come to her door for a reason different than that which brought all others. She knew they came, because her heart and mind had been prepared to receive them.
The saint realizes that it is God who engineers circumstances;
Consequently there is no whine, but a reckless abandon….
Oswald Chambers
The Crossing
Something holy happened to Rahab, when the king’s men came to threaten her. It happened when she made the decision to act on what she had been shown. It happened when she crossed over the threshold, confirming her confidence that this was God at work in her circumstances. It happened in that terrifying moment, when the scalpel cut down to expose what lay within her, and she found she trusted Him.
I imagine she didn’t realize it right away, but with tears later, in a moment that overwhelmed her with tender passion. Her door was no longer tawdry. The years of traffic in men, the specter of indecency had been swallowed up by the holy. The door of her secret shame was made holy in the moment she allowed it to serve Him. From that moment on, Rahab was the harlot of Jericho no more.
If you run to your Bible to read all of these details for yourself, you will not be able to find all that I have written here. But what I am writing is true. I write autobiographically out of what I know, describing that moment of singularity shared by all who cross over. I know in the truest sense what happened to Rahab. The details may differ slightly, but the truth is the same.
From the little that Scripture tells us about Rahab, we know that when the Word came to find this young, uneducated, Canaanite prostitute thoroughly distanced from our religion by thousands of years—her heart leapt in recognition with her silent cry “It’s God!” She was not only able to recognize His speaking, but she was also able to dimly grasp the context He was giving her for the tumultuous events that were taking place in her time. He was moving upon history to forward His deep purpose. And she trusted Him in this.
In numberless moments He had reached out to elicit their response. His bright motions had stirred the air—briefly observed, but mostly unrecognized—melting into the shared obscurity of failed attempts. Sending one sign after another, He had signaled Jericho, so that they might acknowledge He was there. But something in them kept them from knowing and believing that it was Him. . . causing it to mean all the more to Him when a young, pagan prostitute actually did.
Knowing Him in real life and by all that Scripture reveals , I imagine that Rahab gave God pleasure, she did His heart good as she faithfully held on tight to what she had been shown–crossing that threshold into the singularity , where the walls of Jericho could fall, but she would walk out whole.