PASTOR DEAN P THOMPSON'S WORD OF HOPE PODCAST MINISTRY
This Podcast is for daily devotions, spiritual enlightenment and inspiration, to encourage the child of God unto faithfulness and transformation.In these times of distress, desperation and fearfulness, it is my utmost desire to share words of hope and consolation to the hurting, the depressed, and to those who are feeling hopeless and lost.
PASTOR DEAN P THOMPSON'S WORD OF HOPE PODCAST MINISTRY
THE SCARLET CORD
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Everyone, this is Pastor Dean Thompson with a word of hope encounters with grace the scarlet cord and she bound the scarlet line in the window Joshua chapter two verse twenty one. Jericho was one of the oldest fortified cities in the world. Its walls are byword for security. Rahab lived in a house built into the city wall. Archaeologists have found such casemate housing at ancient sites, and she is introduced with a label that would make any respectable Israelite recoil, a harlot, a Canaanite, a woman of the very people God had marked for judgment. Canaanite religion with its ritual prostitution and the child sacrifice represented everything the covenant opposed. By every category of the ancient world, Rahab was an outsider three times over. Wrong nation, wrong faith, wrong profession. Yet this Canaanite prostitute makes one of the great confessions of faith in the Old Testament. The Lord your God, he is God in heaven above and in earth beneath. She has heard the reports of the Red Sea and believes what most of Israel still doubt in. She hides the spies and asks for mercy, and they tell her to hang a scarlet cord from her window, an unmistakable echo of the blood at the doorpost at Calvar at Passover. When the walls fall, one house stands marked by scarlet. Rahab and her whole family are saved, grafted into Israel, and she appears in Matthew's genealogy as an ancestress of the Messiah. No category disqualifies you from grace. Wrong background, wrong past, wrong reputation, grace reaches through every wall we think should keep us out. Rehab was saved not by cleaning up her history, but by trusting the God she had only heard about, and by hanging out the scarlet sign of her faith for all to see. The blood red card in her window is the gospel in miniature. Judgment passes over the house that is marked by faith. O God, we are happy to know that nothing of our past can keep out your grace. Like Rahab, we hang out the scarlet cord of faith. Let judgment pass over and graft us outsiders into your family. Amen. God bless you, brothers and sisters.