At the House of Salvation

Is it any surprise that when the Philistines sent the captured Ark back to Israel that it stopped at the house of Joshua the Bethshemite? Joshua means "The Lord is salvation," and here came a key piece of that salvation up the road on the back of a cart. It's as if the Lord is reminding the Israelites that salvation comes through him.

Joshua starts out well. He immediately breaks up the cart for wood and then offers up one of the cattle as a burnt offering. The men of Bethshemesh do not end so well. Some of them look into the Ark and a number (the text says 70 and 50,000 which seems improbable and we know that the book of Samuel is the worst preserved of any book in the Scriptures, so there is a good possibility that this is an error in passing down the text) are struck down and die, thus demonstrating that God is holy and his instructions should be followed.

One of the things that strikes me about this whole episode is that God does all of the work himself. The Israelites TOTALLY blow this episode, but the Ark is returned by God's work and initiative. Grace and mercy in action here.

Rahab's Scarlet Cord

Reading in Joshua 2 this morning, the story of Rahab and the spies. Rahab was a prostitute. There is no getting around that fact. Amazingly enough she understood that Jericho was going to fall to the Israelites because their God was the true and only God; or, as Rahab put it: "He is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath." Remarkable. Here is what Francis Schaeffer says about her:

How did she know that? We are not told. Often in Scripture we find that people knew things, though we are not told how they came to know them. But Rahab knew! And what she knew was totally against her culture. She believed in a new God, a God totally and diametrically opposed to the gods of Jericho, but a God above all other gods, a universal God. In the midst of the Canaanites, the Ammonites, the Amorites — in the midst of their horrible, polluted worship, laden with sex symbols and sex practices — Rahab affirmed a true theological proposition about who God really is.

The scarlet thread is, no doubt for Rahab, a sign of salvation, and indeed when Jericho falls, she and her family are saved. The church, going all the way back to Clement, has seen the scarlet thread as a symbol of the salvation coming in Christ. Indeed the term "scarlet thread" has become a metaphor for tracing salvation through the scriptures or through history.

God's grace pops up in the strangest places again and again and often without any real explanation how grace arrived. This is the mystery of God's providence and grace.