You Go First

We opened this Sunday with a standoff we all know. You go first. No, YOU go first.

Two kids daring each other off the swing set. A hostage negotiation where nobody will move until the other one does. A business deal where neither side wants to pay first. Even a long marriage, where two people wait for the other to make the first move.

Underneath all of it is one thing: trust. And that put the real question in front of us. Do we trust God enough to go first with Him?

We picked the Joshua series back up in chapter 2. Bill had introduced Joshua and walked us through chapter 1, with Israel standing at the edge of the Jordan. Now two spies slip into the land, and they come to the house of a woman named Rahab.

Who does God save? That was the first question.

By her own culture’s reckoning, Rahab had everything against her. A woman. Poor. A liar. A prostitute. A non-Jew. The last person anyone expected. And God chose her.

The answer to who God saves is anyone. Everyone. Whoever takes the gift He offers.

How does God save? Through a faith that acts. Rahab had gathered what she heard about God, believed it, and moved on it. Hebrews and James both hold her up. Not faith alone, but faith that hid the spies and sent them out by a safer road.

And it was faith, not only fear. The first words out of her mouth are, “I know the Lord has given you this land.” The first thing she remembers is the Red Sea, God’s power to save rather than to destroy.

Someone always notices that Rahab lied to the king. Turan did not try to solve it or excuse it. He set it beside King David and every other honored sinner and let it stand.

All of us are sinners. Ours is a God who sees past that and loves us anyway.

Then the prophecy. Rahab’s story points straight to Jesus. The name Joshua means the Lord saves. He is a picture of Jesus, the one who judges Jericho.

The spies lay down their own lives as the guarantee of her safety. Blood must be shed to cover sin, and the scarlet rope in her window is the sign of it.

Her rescue was not the end but the beginning. She obeyed. And she ended up in the family line of David, and of Jesus.

So when does God save? We came back to the standoff. Who went first? Rahab did. Before she asked for a single thing, she hid the men and risked her life for them. She could have been burned. She was not.

And here is the turn. With God we never really go first. God already went first. In creating the world. In making us. In sending Jesus to be rejected and to die a death we deserved. He already stepped out and let Himself be burned.

He is not asking us to go first. He is asking us to see the love He has already shown, and to answer it with our own.

Something to sit with this week:

Where is God asking you to go first, to trust Him and move before you can see how it turns out?