The Spurgeon Series 1857 & 1858. Charles H. Spurgeon

he bore her off in safety. Poor sinner! take comfort. The same faith which saved Rahab can save you. Are you literally one of Rahab’s sisters in guilt? She was saved, and so may you be, if God shall grant you repentance. Woman! are you loathsome to yourself? Do you stand at this moment in this assembly, and say, “I am ashamed to be here; I know I have no right to stand among people who are chaste and honest!” I bid you still remain, yes, come again and make this your Sabbath house of prayer. You are no intruder! You are welcome! For you have a sacred right to the courts of mercy. You have a sacred right; for here sinners are invited, and you are such. Believe in Christ, and you, like Rahab, shall not perish with the disobedient, but even you shall be saved.

      5. And now there is some gentleman in the audience who says, “There’s a gospel for you; it is a kind of sanctuary for wicked men, to which the worst of people may run and be saved.” Yes, that is the stale objection which Celsus used against Origen in his discussion. “But,” said Origen, “it is true, Celsus, that Christ’s gospel is a sanctuary for thieves, robbers, murderers, and prostitutes. But know this, it is not a sanctuary merely, it is a hospital too; for it heals their sins, delivers them from their diseases, and they are not afterwards what they were before they received the gospel.” I ask no man today to come to Christ, and then continue in his sins. If so, I would be asking him to do an absurdity. I might as well talk of delivering a Prometheus, {a} while his chains are allowed to remain upon him and bind him to his rock. It cannot be. Christ takes away the vulture from the conscience, but he takes away the chains too, and makes the man wholly free when he does it at all. Yet, we repeat it again, the chief of sinners are as welcome to Christ as the best of saints. The fountain filled with blood was opened for black ones; the robe of Christ was woven for naked ones; the balm of Calvary was compounded for sick ones; life came into the world to raise the dead. And oh! you perishing and guilty souls, may God give you Rahab’s faith, and you shall have this salvation, and shall with her stand there with her, where the white robed, spotless hosts sing unending hallelujah to God and the Lamb.

      6. II. But notice, Rahab’s faith was a SINGULAR FAITH. The city of Jericho was about to be attacked; within its walls there were hosts of people of all classes and characters, and they knew very well that if their city would be sacked and stormed they would all be put to death; but yet strange to say, there was not one of them who repented of sin, or who even asked for mercy, except this woman who had been a prostitute. She and she alone was delivered, a solitary one among a multitude. Now, have you ever felt that it is a very hard thing to have a singular faith? It is the easiest thing in the world to believe as everyone else believes, but the difficulty is to believe a thing alone, when no one else thinks as you think; to be the solitary champion of a righteous cause when the enemy musters his thousands to the battle. Now, this was the faith of Rahab. She had not one who felt as she did, who could enter into her feelings and realise the value of her faith. She stood alone. Oh! it is a noble thing to be the lonely follower of despised truth. There are some who could give you an account of standing up alone. There have been days when the world poured continually a river of infamy and calumny upon them, but they stemmed the torrent, and by continued grace, made strong in weakness, they held their own until the current turned, and they, in their success, were praised and applauded by the very men who sneered before. Then did the world accord them the name of “great.” But where lay their greatness? Why, in this, that they stood as firm in the storm as they stood in the calm — that they were as content to serve God alone as they were to run by fifties. To be good we must be singular. Christians must swim against the stream. Dead fish always float down the stream, but the living fish forces its way against the current. Now, worldly religious men will go just as everyone else goes. That is nothing. The thing is to stand alone. Like Elijah, when he said, “I only am left, and they seek my life”; to feel in one’s self that we believe as firmly as if a thousand witnesses stood up by our side. Oh there is no great right in a man, no strong minded right, unless he dares to be singular. Why, the most of you are as afraid as you ever can be to go out of the fashions, and you spend more money than you should because you think you must be respectable. You dare not move in opposition to your brethren and sisters in the circle in which you move; and therefore you involve yourselves in difficulties. You are blindfolded by the rich fabric of fashion, and therefore many a wrong thing is tolerated because it is customary. But a strong minded man is one who does not try to be singular, but who dares to be singular when he knows that to be singular is to be right. Now, Rahab’s faith, sinner as she was, had this glory, this crown about its head, that she stood alone, “faithful among the faithless found.”

      7. And why should God not bestow the same faith to you my poor sinning, but contrite hearer? You live in a back street, in a house which contains no one but Sabbath breakers, and irreligious men and women. But if you have grace in your heart you will dare to do right. You belong to an infidel club; if you should make them a speech after your own conscience, they would hiss you; and if you forsook their company, they would persecute you. Go and try them. Dare them. See whether you can do it; for if you are afraid of men, you are taken in a snare which may result in your grief, and is now your sin. Note that the chief of sinners can make the most daring saints; the worst men in the devil’s army, when they are converted, make the truest soldiers for Jesus. The forlorn hope of Christendom has generally been led by men who have proven the high efficacy of grace to an eminent degree by having been saved from the deepest sins. Go on, and the Lord give you that high and singular faith!

      8. III. Furthermore, this woman’s faith was a STABLE FAITH, which stood firm in the midst of trouble. I have heard of a church clergyman who was once waited upon by his church warden, after a long time of drought, and was requested to pray for rain. “Well,” said he “my good man, I will offer it, but it’s not a bit of use while the wind is in the east, I am sure.” There are many who have that kind of faith: they believe just as far as probabilities go with them, but when the promise and the probability part, then they follow the probability and part with the promise. They say, “The thing is likely, therefore I believe it.” But that is not faith, it is sight. True faith exclaims, “The thing is unlikely, yet I believe it.” This is real faith. Faith is to say, that “Mountains, when in darkness hidden, are as real as in day.” Faith is to look through that cloud, not with the eye of sight, which sees nothing, but with the eye of faith, which sees everything, and to say, “I trust him when I cannot trace him; I tread the sea as firmly as I would the rock; I walk as securely in the tempest as in the sunshine, and lay myself to rest upon the surging billows of the ocean as contentedly as upon my bed.” The faith of Rahab was the proper sort of faith, for it was firm and enduring.

      9. I will just have a little talk with Rahab this morning, as I suppose old Unbelief did commune with her. Now, my good woman, do not you see the absurdity of this thing? Why, the people of Israel are on the other side of Jordan, and there is no bridge: how are they to get across? Of course they must go up higher towards the fords; and then Jericho will be for along time secure. They will take other cities before coming to Jericho; and besides, the Canaanites are mighty, and the Israelites are only a parcel of slaves; they will soon be cut in pieces and that will be an end of them; therefore do not harbour these spies. Why put your life in jeopardy for such an improbability? “Ah,” she says, “I do not care about the Jordan; my faith can believe across the Jordan, or else it would be only a dry land faith.” By and by they march through the Jordan dry shod, then faith has a firmer confidence. “Ah,” she says, secretly within herself, what she would willingly have said to her neighbours, “Will you not now believe? will you not now sue for mercy?” “No,” they say, “the walls of Jericho are strong: can the feeble host resist us?” And lo, on the next day the troops are out, and what do they do? They simply blow a number of rams’ horns; her neighbours say, “Why, Rahab, you do not mean to say you believe now? They are mad.” The people just go around the city, and all hold their tongues except the few priests blowing rams’ horns. “Why, it is ridiculous. It would be quite a new thing in warfare to hear of men taking a city by blowing rams’ horns.” That was the first day; probably the next day Rahab thought they would come with scaling ladders and mount the walls; but no, rams’ horns again, up to the seventh day; and this woman kept the scarlet thread in the window all the time, kept her father and mother and brothers and sisters in the house, and would