The Greatest Gift: Unwrapping the Full Love Story of Christmas (9 page)

Find a quiet place to read the Ten Commandments, and as you do, dance before the Lord. Thank Jesus for amazing grace.

I am more sinful and flawed than I ever dared believe, more loved and welcomed than I ever dared hope.

ELYSE M. FITZPATRICK

Confess the ways you’ve broken God’s commandments.

When have you felt afraid to approach God?

Write out your thanks to Jesus, whose love makes it possible for you to approach a holy God.

You must leave this scarlet rope hanging from the window.

JOSHUA 2:18

Joshua secretly sent out two spies from the Israelite camp at Acacia Grove. He instructed them, “Scout out the land on the other side of the Jordan River, especially around Jericho.” So the two men set out and came to the house of a prostitute named Rahab and stayed there that night. . . .

Before the spies went to sleep that night, Rahab went up on the roof to talk with them.

“I know the LORD has given you this land,” she told them. . . . “For the LORD your God is the supreme God of the heavens above and the earth below.

“Now swear to me by the LORD that you will be kind to me and my family since I have helped you. Give me some guarantee that when Jericho is conquered, you will let me live, along with my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, and all their families.” . . .

Before they left, the men told her . . . “When we come into the land, you must leave this scarlet rope hanging from the window through which you let us down. And all your family members —your father, mother, brothers, and all your relatives —must be here inside the house. . . .”

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

JOSHUA 2:1-21

There are swags and garlands and ribbons, and Advent gives away the Truth —we’re all wishing for a lifeline.

We have deadlines. There’s bumper-to-bumper traffic somewhere out on a freeway, a line of lights blinking tired in the dark. They’re sticking a PICC line in a vein right now down at the cancer center. At the last gate at the end of the airport, folks wait in line with heavy bags in hand, just trying to get home.

And we trim the doorways with a line of links, these paper chains, as if Someone could be the Door and set us free.

Rahab has had a line waiting out her back door. Men lined up at her inn, wanting a place to lie down —and a piece of her. In a town with no Sabbaths, no lines of God’s Word ever read, no prophets with a message of a coming visitation from heaven, she’s one woman alone with the grime of too many nights on her hands, the weight of too many wounds on her heart —a woman who looks up in her godless mess and sees the tenderness of God. In a place of faithlessness and doubtfulness and godlessness,
God gives God
. The God who can reveal Himself wherever, whenever, to whomever; the God who is never limited by lack or restricted to the expected; the God who is no respecter of
persons but the relentless rescuer of prodigals; the God who gives the gift of faith in the places you’d most doubt. That is always the secret to the abundant life: to believe that God is where you doubt He can be.

Rahab, in a godless place with a godless past, believes fully —and so lives fully. She steps out not in competence but in faith. She serves not her admirers but her adversaries. She saves the greatest gift for her family —a place of grace. She risks to live.

Rahab, the scarlet woman, flings a scarlet cord out her window —that one thread everything’s hanging on. And that scarlet cord is her identity —that scarlet line running from the animal sacrifice covering Adam and Eve’s nakedness in the Garden of Eden to the crimson markings of blood on the doorframes of the first Passover to the willing drops of blood in the garden of Gethsemane —and Rahab is delivered by that singular scarlet cord and tied into the Jewish family. And God makes the former woman of the night into a woman of the court —a princess and a wife of a Jewish prince, Salmon.

Their family line is furthered with a son —a son who would be the kinsman-redeemer of another foreign woman: a son named Boaz. The mother of Boaz is this Rahab; the mother-in-law of Ruth is this Rahab; the
great-grandmother of the great King David is this Rahab. This Rahab, who is one of the women named in Scripture in the line that leads straight to this Jesus —that one thread everything’s hanging on.

The great-grandmother of Christ many times removed —former prostitute, pagan, and profligate —Rahab finds herself the only other woman besides Sarah to be noted in the heroes’ hall of faith. Rahab, right there beside the fathers of the faith —Abraham, Jacob, Isaac, Moses, and Noah: “By faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believed not, when she had received the spies with peace” (Hebrews 11:31, KJV).

Great faith is the greatest equalizer, the greatest eraser, and the greatest definer.

By faith, Rahab stands as “a blessed example both of the sovereignty of God’s grace and of its power,” writes the Puritan theologian John Owen. “Nobody, no sin, should lead to despair when the cure of God’s sovereign, almighty grace is engaged.”
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Nobody and no situation —no sin, no mess, no decision —meets the diagnosis of despair. Because there’s God’s cure of amazing grace.

No personal choice that muddied your life can ever trump the divine choice to wash your life clean.

No situation is more hopeless than your Savior is graceful.

That scarlet cord Rahab threw out that window?

In Hebrew, that cord is a
tikvah
.

The same word in Hebrew that means “hope.”

You think about that as you tie string around Christmas gifts.

How strong a cord seems —until your life slips off the edge of a cliff and you lunge for something to hold on to.

One braid of fibers enough to hold you —that’s your literal only hope.

You know it with startling clarity in that moment —how there’s only a singular cord in this knotted mess of a world worth reaching for. It’s dangling right there from our impossible tangle, and it’s the one hope you need to reach for this Advent.

That scarlet lifeline of Christ.

Do just one thing today that would be venturing big for God (share the gospel, make a hard phone call, do one thing you are scared to do but know Jesus is calling you to). Hold on to God, and do that one big thing by faith! Our God is bigger!

God is coming! God is coming! All the element we swim in, this existence, echoes ahead the advent. God is coming! Can you feel it?

WALTER WANGERIN JR.