The walls were closing in. The soldiers were at the door. But God chose her anyway.
She was a Canaanite girl with a window on the wall of Jericho, a working girl in a city of idols and false gods. She had heard the stories of the Hebrews coming across the desert. The Red Sea. The wilderness. The God who fought for them. Something in her already believed before the spies ever knocked on her door.
Then they did knock. Two Hebrew strangers, hunted by her own city's soldiers. She hid them on her roof under flax stalks. She lied to the soldiers' faces. She made the men promise her family would be saved when the city fell. They told her to hang a scarlet cord in her window, anyone inside with the cord would be spared.
The night the spies left, she paid out the scarlet cord with both hands from her windowsill atop the wall, soldiers' torches in the streets just outside, the cord catching lamp-light from inside her room. Days later, the walls fell. Her family lived. She married a man named Salmon. She had a son named Boaz, who married a Moabite girl named Ruth, who became the great-grandmother of King David, who became the ancestor of Jesus. The outsider with the scarlet cord ended up in the family tree of the Messiah.
Every image is a frame from the cinematic universe, the same look, the same world, every story.
Rahab was the wrong nationality, the wrong job, the wrong city, and God did not care. He took her in. He put her in the family tree of His own Son. There is no version of you the gospel wasn't already big enough for. Belonging before performance, every single time.
If the world has labeled you the 'wrong kind' of anything, wrong family, wrong school, wrong story, God doesn't see those labels. He sees a kid with a scarlet cord in their window. He sees you, and He's already planning the rescue.
Tap a chapter as you read. We'll remember which ones you've finished.
The notice nailed to her father's door.
Bad news in the marketplace.
The medicine her mother needed.
The black cloth that marks them all.
The men on the rooftop, hunted.
The scarlet cord catches lamplight.
The Stranger walks into Jericho.
The race home through chaos.
Trumpets the seventh time.
The walls come down, except hers.
Watching from the wall.
The army marches in. Her family lives.
Rahab — Completed
Ready for David? →"I have never seen my kids so captivated by a Biblical story before. They actually ask for the next chapter."
— Stephen Jackson"My 12-year-old read this out loud to my 8-year-old. Both loved every second of it."
— T HornerRahab hid the spies even though it was dangerous. Have you ever done the right thing when it cost you something?
The scarlet cord was a sign. What's a sign in your life that God remembers you?
Rahab was an unlikely hero. Have you ever felt like the wrong person to do something important?
The Stranger meets Rahab on the wall. Where has God surprised YOU?
Rahab's family was saved because of her faith. Who do you want to bring with you to know God?
A shepherd boy. A lion. A sling. And a God who never stopped speaking.
Enter David's World →Jericho's walls were so wide you could ride a chariot along the top.
Rahab knew. She'd done it once, in a dream, the wind in her hair, the desert below her, a feeling she'd never had on the ground. Then she'd woken up in her family's house, the one built INTO the wall. The one where she could press her ear to the brick and hear the wind on the other side.
She was fifteen. She was the oldest of four. Her father had been gone for three years and was probably never coming back. Her mother was sick more days than she was well. Her sisters and brother needed dinner. The dinner was up to her.
Rahab had learned that the world could be cruel to a girl with no father and a sick mother and three smaller mouths. She had learned that she had to be cleverer than the cruelty.
She didn't yet know that someone, somewhere, had been watching her be clever, and was about to send two strangers to her door.
— end of chapter one —
The story keeps going.
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