Back to sermon search

Full transcript

There is no possible way of denying, is there, that the judgments of God that fell upon the ancient city of Jericho were exceedingly severe. So heart-stoppingly severe that many people, when they read of them, find it difficult to believe that they were indeed the judgments of God. We are told that when the Israelites, uh, destroyed that city, then everything that breathed within its walls was put to the sword. And so many people, seriously minded people, of course, how could we possibly begin our begi- bring ourselves to think that a God of love would ever command the Israelites to execute every man, woman, and child in that ancient city of Jericho. Therefore, there are many who prefer to believe that what happened was simply this, that an a a band of very primitive savages used to living in the desert eventually descended upon the land of Canaan, like in later centuries the Goths and the Vandals descended upon the city of Rome. And being savages, they did not understand the civilization and the culture that they met in Canaan, not understanding it, with a savage ruthlessness, destroyed it all. Before we come to such a, a, a conclusion, however, it seems to me we had do better, uh, to consider the plain and simple facts that are here recorded for us in the Old Testament. We must beware of exaggerating the story. The story is telling us of the physical and temporal judgment of God that fell upon that city. It does not pretend to tell us about the eternal destiny of the people who thus suffered. And since the word of God does not tell us in this chapter what their eternal judgment would be, we might be well advised not to suppose that we know, and to content ourselves with the story, that here is a story of God's temporal judgment visited upon that ancient city. And then, of course, we do well to put this, uh, story of ancient judgment into a wider context. We should be unwise, shouldn't we, to think that this is a story of judgment contained in the Old Testament, typically so, because the Old Testament is rather a savage book. The New Testament talks to us quite bluntly, does it not? That one day God will visit our world with a judgment that compared with which the judgment of Jericho fades into insignificance. For the New Testament tells us that not only will God intervene in temporal judgments, the New Testament warns us that there is an eternal judgment. So that tonight, as we read of this ancient example of God's temporal judgment, we do well to let it remind us of that greater judgment, the eternal judgments of God. And if it should be that reading about this ancient temporal judgment of God, if it should be that that should remind us of the coming eternal judgments of God, and moved us to prepare ourselves that we might be ready when the eternal judgments of God shall fall, then certainly for all eternity we shall look back upon our study this evening and thank God that God had the courage to talk to us about the unpleasant topic of his judgment. And then, of course, we could say other things, couldn't we? Severe as that ancient judgment was that fell upon the city of Jericho, if one reads the historical context, there were reasons for it, and very powerful reasons there were. People say nowadays you cannot believe that God himself would have ordered the execution of innocent little babies in Jericho City. But the Old Testament tells us why he did. That city of Jericho, along with the other Canaanite cities in the Middle East in those days, were themselves in the habit of murdering little children. Given up to their primitive idolatries, from time to time they would take their innocent babies and put them to death and sacrifice them to their lurid gods. And if it was the only way that God had at his disposal to stop that evil practice, who shall complain against the Almighty that he visited his judgment once upon that city, that for centuries thereafter he might save multitudes of innocent babies? And ladies and gentlemen, while we're at the topic of the murder of babies, let us remember this very solemn fact, that in ancient Jericho, people sacrificed their newborn babes to the gods on occasions. Is our modern society any more kindly to little babies? They don't commonly sacrifice them a few hours and days after they're born, do they? But in this last fifteen years, multi-millions of little babies have been deliberately destroyed a few days before their birth. And this very solemn passage of scripture reminds us of this, that if God in those ancient days visited Jericho with his severe judgments because of their treatment of innocent babies, that same God, as he surveys our modern world and its habit and the sacrifice of millions of babies, will eventually visit our modern civilization with similarly severe and drastic judgment. The other fact we should bear in mind about the judgment of Jericho is this. The Old Testament tells us more than once the reason why God ordered Israel with their troops to destroy the city. It was that the Canaanite people were guilty of the grossest sexual perversions. When the Israelites came into the land of Canaan, God warned them through his servant Moses that they were not themselves eventually to give way to the same sexual perversions as the Canaanites practiced. And we cannot read that possibly, can we, without it being a very serious voice to our modern world. We know enough about our modern world to know that sexual perversion has led to a disease, an epidemic of AIDS, that threatens presently to be a worldwide catastrophe. And if in our day we know that sexual perversion can lead to such a thing, then of course we know it that in that ancient day those similar practices would have led to a similar result. And therefore it seems altogether likely that God's severe judgment of that on that city was but the merciful act of a divine surgeon that chose to excise that cancerous lump out of humanity, lest the disease that they had engendered should poison the gene pool of the nations for the rest of history. It must be apparent to us all, surely, that as we read these ancient stories, we're not reading of something primitive and irrelevant to our modern living. We are dealing with that same scourge of the human race, that is willful sinfulness, that in ancient times brought down God's judgment in his mercy upon them, and will in our day bring similar judgment. Then, as we think of the severity of the judgment that overcame Jericho, we again might put it into its proper context, might we not? By considering how merciful and long-suffering God was, even to that ancient evil and cruel and perverted civilization. The Bible tells us that four hundred years before the troops came into Jericho to destroy it, God had spoken to his servant Abraham and told Abraham as follows. God had said that one day Abram's descendants will be given the land of Canaan to occupy, but then God added, but not at once. It will be be four years and more before I shall give your descendants possession of the land of Canaan. I'm not going to do it at once, God explained, because the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full. And that paints before us a very interesting scene, doesn't it? Of a God who was watching that civilization for 100 years, watching it progress ever downward in its gadarine swine-like advance into its perversions, and in his mercy, waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting four hundred long years before eventually their civilization came to such a stage of corruption that God himself had to obliterate it. That is a theme too that runs through the whole of scripture, doesn't it? God, he assures us himself, is long suffering to us, Lord, not willing that any should perish. Sure, says Peter in his second letter, sure in the last time there shall come mockers saying, where is the sign of his coming? All this talk of the second coming of Jesus Christ and the judgments of God that are supposed to be spilled out on this world. Where is the sign of it? Our grandfathers talked about it, and their grandfathers talked about it, and from the beginning everybody talked about it, and it's never happened yet. Where is the sign of his coming? To which Peter makes reply in the name of God. But you'll see God doesn't count time as we tiny mortals counted. And the fact is this, that God is long suffering, not willing that any should perish, but that all should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. But that said, the fact remains that the day of the Lord will come. There is a day of judgment coming. As we think of God's great long suffering, then in particular tonight, our story will warm our hearts with the delightful record of a woman who, amidst all that carnage, was saved by God, protected from the judgment, and brought through alive and safe. It is a delightful story told in the ancient, charming way of the Hebrew historians. I trust that some of its charm will come through to us this evening, for it tells the age-long gospel of God. Whatever age it has been upon in which his judgments have descended, always and invariably has God made a way of escape, has God provided a salvation, has God provided a savior. It is absolutely true. As I live, saith the Lord, I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth. And the great story of Calvary at once comes to our mind to drive it home to our hearts and our conscience. The God that gave his son for our sakes to die at Calvary is a God who would have all to be saved if he could have them saved and come to the knowledge of his truth. Not only was this woman saved, but as we go through the New Testament, we discover that she was given the inestimable honor and privilege of becoming an ancestress of Christ. Her name was Rahab, her profession the oldest in the world. And yet the amazing fact is that when you open the first page of the New Testament, there to read the genealogy of Jesus Christ, our Lord, there it is splashed across the page for everybody to see that in the ancestry of Jesus Christ himself, there was this colorful character, the once time harlot of Jericho. You know, I fancy if some of us had had such a woman in our past, we wouldn't be so keen on tracing our ances- ancestry, nor parading it in our family tree upon the wall of our libraries. But the Savior, he doesn't mind your knowing. One of his ancestresses was the once-time harlot of Jericho. And what shall any of us say? As Paul put it to his fellow Christians in Corinth, reminding them of their colorful, not to say lurid past, he says, you know, such were some of you, but you have been washed, you have been justified, you have been sanctified in the name of the Lord Jesus. This is the gospel, a God whose judgments must fall upon sinful men and women, but a God who not only delights to save, a God who has a salvation devised in his heart that would make us all princes and princesses in the royal house of Jesus Christ, his son. A gospel that assures us not only of forgiveness and pardon for the past, but assures us that for everyone that trusts Christ, this present life is leading on to an exhibition of God's grace that will stagger the wildest imagination. We shall reign with Christ, says the Bible. We are heirs of God and joint heirs with Jesus Christ, his son, and all the incalculable wealth that will come to Jesus Christ, God's son, the heir of all things, the heir of this vast universe. That incalculable wealth will he share with every single man, woman, boy, and girl that has repented of sin and come for salvation through his atoning death suffered at Calvary. So let's think of this woman, an actual case of a woman who found salvation, and not only forgiveness, but deliverance from her sad and exceedingly unhappy way of living. Rahab was the harlot of Jericho. What she offered was pleasure without love. Or, if you'll have it, what she offered was love without loyalty. She turned love into a mere sensation that was to be bought for money. And as a result, of course, like all in her trade, depersonalized that lovely gift of God the Creator. Before we spend much time in criticizing her, we should do better to think, perhaps, that sad and sorry as her profession was, it was in its way, wasn't it, merely an expression at one level of the spiritual disease that lay at the heart of all the people of Jericho. Do you see these sinful attitudes at the physical level have their counterpart, perhaps indeed their source, in the false attitudes of people's heart towards God at the spiritual level. The Bible tells us that the ancient Canaanites, like all the other pagan nations right up to this present, had once upon a time known the true God. But that they hadn't liked to retain God in their knowledge, says the Bible. It irked them to think that they were constantly dependent upon a personal God. The fact that they had to feel grateful for all his gifts for them became an intolerable burden. The idea of a personal God who was always looking over their shoulder and watching what they did, they found insufferable. So while they knew of the existence of the true and the living God, they didn't like to retain God in their knowledge. So to the best of their ability, they got rid of God. And you know, there are many, many people still that do the same, are there not? They've given up on the idea of God. They think it will lead them to freedom. But you know, if you get rid of the idea of God, you don't actually find freedom, do you? You find yourself in a world full of powers, many of which you cannot control. They tend to control you instead of you controlling them. It wasn't long before those ancient civilizations, having got rid of the idea of a personal god, began to multiply gods to themselves of a different kind. They not only worshipped the sun god up in the sky, and the moon god, and the storm god, and the god of fertility, and made out of the great powers of the universe, but they may began to make gods out of their own urges. And so it came to be that feeling the urge of sex, they presently made a goddess out of her, called her in Greek Aphrodite and in other languages by various names. They made a goddess out of her. And lived to serve that goddess. And now there was no longer any question of any moral restraint or any rules, moral rules of behavior, for you just deified the raw urge, and whenever the urge took you, morals or no morals, you satisfied it. And you know, I have a feeling that we read that ancient story, we in our modern day, are not altogether different, are we? Days were when men and women believed in the true God and therefore accepted the moral standards that God laid down to control our behavior. Multitudes of men and women have scrapped the idea of God at all, haven't they? And with it, have scrapped the moral controls and lived to satisfy their urge. If it feels good, do it. If it's pleasurable, do it. And away with any constraint or control. And as a result, as the Bible tells us, they began to dishonor their bodies, depersonalizing not only love, but depersonalizing the very universe. You'll say, you believe in the one true God, and then it follows, doesn't it, that all the lovely things of life are his gift, meant to lead us in the end to God. Now, these ancient nations, they wanted all the lovely gifts. They wanted all the pleasures that go with them. They didn't want the God who gave them. You'll see that in the modern world. Here is a delightful young lady, she is a brilliant musician, and you sit enthralled at her music, and when she's finished, you say, that was simply superb, that was that bit of music you played, isn't that glorious? Isn't it marvelous of God to have given us such a delightful gift of music and the ears to hear it with and the genius to write it and the genius to play it? You say, my dear, tell me, how are you getting on with the Lord? What's your experience of the Lord like? And she says icily, oh, I don't believe in God. You don't believe in God? No, I've got enough with my music. I enjoy my music. I've no time for God and religion. I see. How's it come about? That strange state of affairs where people can enjoy their music and not be interested in the person who gave them the music. What they're doing is to depersonalize music, are they not? The Bible account of music is this, of a God who invented it, and a God who, in his love and delight, gave it to us to enjoy, that the wonders of music might charm our hearts and be one evidence upon many that would lead us to seek the living and true God, the person behind the gift. But no, they want the gift, but not the person. Our Lord Jesus commented upon that type of thing, didn't he? Reminding us that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. What would you do with me if one of these days you invited me to dinner? You decided, for reasons best known to yourself, you'd like to get to know me. So you invite me home to dinner, and you sit me down at a beautiful, uh, dinner table. And presently, as we begin, you'll say, and uh, um, been nice weather today, hasn't it, Mr. Gooding? And I take no notice. You say it's odd. So you let me go on with the soup. And a little bit later you say, uh, where did you go for holiday this year, Mr. Gooding? You've been on your holidays? And I carry on lapping up the soup. And presently you will say, I don't know, this is a very queer Englishman, this. You will say, have you read any good books recently? And I lift up my head from the anchovies and I say, well, well, look here now, I'd like you to understand something. I'm enjoying this dinner immensely. It's a marvelous dinner. Uh, you know, the way it's presented is most artistic, and those pictures you have on the wall, I've been secretly admiring them. I wish I possessed them. But let me tell you this, I'm enjoying your dinner. I'm not interested in you. I don't believe in you anyway. So please, will you be quiet? All I'm concerned with is the dinner. What would you do? Think you'll reach for the ejector button on my seat and have me out of the door, wouldn't you? Who but a fool would act like it? Dinners are good and to be enjoyed, but if there's a person behind the dinner, then I want to know the person. What a fool I would be if I were merely interested in the dinner and the pleasure of my palate and the enjoyment of my stomach and missed forming a friendship with you, which is the reason why you gave me the dinner, so that I might form a friendship with you, a friendship that will last for years, long after the carrots have disappeared into forgetfulness. How will you explain the attitude of men and women that can take the beautiful things of life, its music, its art, its literature, and all its glories, and down to its food and its carrots, enjoy them, and not be concerned to find out whether there is a person behind them. All their wretched philosophies that depersonalize life and reduces significance to mere carrots, mere taste buds, and mere stomachs. Rohab, sad and sorry woman, perhaps circumstances forced her to her profession. But the society in which she lived were guilty of that same sin at a far higher level. And so were the Israelites later on, where God, through his prophets, tells them straight, you spiritual adulterers and adulteresses. And the New Testament picks up the same story and tells us, you adulteresses, know you not that friendship with the world is enmity with God. Meaning this, that on the one side you have a world that is determined to forget God, to interpret life as a self-contained flat, and keep God out of their all their reckoning, and go for the enjoyment of life as it is. That is nothing short of the idolatry of the ancient world. If that was the situation, how then did this woman Rahab get converted? What were the elements in her conversion? Let's follow them, if we can, step by step. The first glimmer of a change of mind, as far as we can deduce it from what she herself tells us in the story, is this, that she came to be aware of the reality of the true God. You know, you can try as hard as you can to be an atheist, but as C. S. Lewis once put it, there are moments when even atheists come to shudder in their shoes, are they not? To think that it might be true after all. There is a living God. Rahab's conversion dawned here when she heard the evidence and came to the conclusion that this was no fairy story. This was no story of Guy Fawkes that mothers used when their children were disobedient to frighten the kids with. There was a living God. And a living God who had decided to bring his judgments down upon Jericho. Listen to her talking to the spies. She said, gentlemen, we've heard here in in Jericho, we've heard what your God did in Egypt to Pharaoh. We've heard of the miracle, how he brought you through the Red Sea and parted the Red Sea so that you walked through on dry land. We've heard it, she said, and I've come to the conclusion that your God is the living God of heaven and earth. The dawning of a conversion to discover evidence that there is a true and living God. What evidence shall we quote? What evidence would suffice us? I have only time to quote one strand of that evidence. It runs like this. I take it from Paul's great sermon before the Areopagites in Athens. Gentlemen, he said, God has appointed the day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained, Jesus Christ, of course, of which he has given assurance to all men in that he has raised him from the dead. There is to be a judgment. Does that sound gloomy to you? I wonder why that is. When you read in the Old Testament about God's judgment, it is very frequently accompanied by clapping of hands. The Lord is coming to judge, says the psalmist, clap your hands, all you mountains, and skip for joy, all you hills. The Lord is coming to judge. Marvelous stuff. And surely that ought to be our reaction, didn't it? Would you have evil to go on forever? Would you have the gas chambers of Germany repeat themselves? Would you have the Khmer Rouge repeat the killing fields of Cambodia? What sensible or sensitive man and woman on the face of the earth is there that wouldn't say, ah, if there's a God who would judge our world and put an end to evil, oh, hallelujah. Why don't we want it? Why should the topic of God's coming judgment be thought to be a gloomy thing, when from one point of view it's full of hope and delight and wonder that evil is not forever going to prosper, that God will one day intervene. It's the biggest compliment he paid, isn't it, to mankind? Just you think of that. I mean so much to Almighty God that what I do matters to God. You know, if a mosquito alighted on my noble brow this evening, I shouldn't stop twice. I shouldn't arraign it before the High Court in Belfast. I should just give it a slap, and that would be the end of the mosquito. It amazes me that Almighty God doesn't do the same with us, little midges that we are, and sinners in addition. Say, is it not a magnificent compliment that God pays us little mortal men and women to tell us that what we do matters to God, because we matter to God. He takes us seriously as personalities. He will never say that we don't matter or that what we have done doesn't matter. And because we matter to God, there will be a judgment. But that's precisely where our knees begin to quake, isn't it? Why don't we find it a happy prospect? Why, for the simple reason that our consciences tell us that if there's going to be a judgment, then we are sinners. How can we face it? It's still better to wake up like, uh, like Rahab to the fact that the judgment's going to take place, is it not? Than to live in cloud cuckoo land, or to live with our heads permanently in the sand of wishful thinking. Conscience, morality, the sense of fairness that every one of us has points to the great source of justice, which is God himself, and as sure as God is, there shall be a judgment. Rahab came to realize it was true, and she took her next step in conversion. There came two Israelite men to her door. They were spies, and they sought hiding in a place where men wouldn't be too closely investigated if they stayed a night there. And in that moment, she took a tremendous decision. If their God was the true God, if judgment was about to fall, then she'd got to make a decision upon which side she stood. It was a very real, big, difficult decision to make. To turn and side with the Israelites? Well, if the Jericho people knew it, they would have said she was guilty of, of treason. But her only hope of safety was to change sides. It wasn't merely either a question of changing sides from Jericho to Israel. There was the bigger concept. Behind Israel was the true and living God. Should she stay with a sinful world or change over to the side of the living God? And she made her decision, and she turned to God from her idols, determined thereafter to serve the true and the living God. Oh, my friend, this is raw gospel, this isn't it? It cuts us at the quick, but that decision we all must make sooner or later if we would be saved. Don't say it's too difficult. Ah, mercifully, the Bible says that all we have to do is to turn, to turn to God. Living God is at our very elbow. The question is a question of loyalty. To whom do you give the loyalty of your heart? Do you give it to the world? Do you give it to the gods and goddesses of mere passing pleasure, or popularity, or fame, or wealth, or whatever it is? Or do you, surveying life and its ultimate issues, say, no, I give my loyalty to none else than this. I give the loyalty of my heart to the true and living God. Let the ancient story impress it upon us that there are only two sides ultimately. We side with God, or we side with the world. We side with Christ, or we side with the devil. Which will it be? I cry again in the hearing of us all, and in the name of God I cry it, friend, what Moses cried before the host of Israel. He said, who, who is on the Lord's side? Let him come hither. In light of the fact that Jesus Christ is coming again, God is going to judge this world by the man he hath ordained. In the light of the fact that scripture in its most solemn language says, he will come in flaming fire, taking vengeance on them that know not God and them that obey not the gospel. I say again in your hearing, who amongst us? Who is on the Lord's side? Pray to what do you give your ultimate loyalty? She turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God. Ah, but then there were practical things to be considered, were there not? And up she went to the roof of her house where she had hidden the spies, and before she let them go, she said, look here, gentlemen, I have shown kindness to you, and the ancient word that she used is not mere kindness in the sense of giving them nice gifts. She used a word that its heart means loyalty, the loving kindness that is loyal. Gentlemen, she says, I've shown you kindness. I've been loyal to you. She had indeed, and risked her very life in loyalty to them, in protecting them against their pursuers. Now, gentlemen, she said, what, what token are you going to give me that you will be loyal to me? I have saved your life. Will you not save mine? And they said, yes, woman, we will. You get your neighbors and yourself and your family in this house, and we promise, we promise that when we come with the invading armies, we will protect your house and save you, so long as you are found inside the house. Ah, but then, they were words, weren't they? That woman had had a lot of men in her house, and when they were in her house, they'd said all sorts of wonderful sweet nothings. And when they'd gone out, they'd never come back again or thought of her again. That was the world in which she lived, in which love knew no loyalty, who couldn't rely upon anybody's word. Ah, now she was beginning to feel the steep, deep need of a human soul facing eternity, facing l- facing life's big issues. Or is there anybody that would be loyal to me? Where can I find a loyalty to depend on? Well, that is life's issue, isn't it? When all is said and done, and with my little soul I face the great ultimate issues of life, I want to know, is there anybody who really loves me? Is there a love in this universe that will be utterly loyal to me, that I may trust myself, my personality, my soul, that I may trust my life to them and know my life is secure? Look here, she said to the men, that's all right. Now you go and you go back. You'll never remember me again. I want something more than words, she says. Now please. And she hit upon an idea. Here was the only thing that she could think of that would give her the security she longed for. Swear to me, she said. Swear to me by the living God that you will be true to your promise and you will save me alive. And there, in the darkness of the night on the housetop, the men solemnly and in the name of God swore their oath, and the woman rested on it. Presently, she let them down through the window on a, on a rope, and then suddenly the weight was gone from the end of the rope, and the men were gone. I wonder how she felt when that old rope went slack and the men were gone. Soon the armies of Joshua would be coming to execute the wrath of God. How could she be sure? How could she be sure she was saved? Where in all this universe can anybody be sure? Where in a world packed full of lies will you find a truth you can hold on to? Where, oh where is it? But that woman found it. It lay at the heart of her conversion. She found her security in the loyalty of a God, who, when he gives his word of oath, will fulfill it through thick and thin. This is love. I was recently in the Far East, and as you might understand, was badgered on all sides by serious questions by serious people, and their chief objection to Christianity was this: Why do you say that Jesus Christ is the only way to God? And my standard reply was, well, I tell you what, um, my difficulty is a practical one. I'm a sinner. And I have read much in other religions, and they all of them tell me, by and large, that I ought to be good. That isn't my problem. I know I ought to be good. My problem is that I haven't been good. And I said, you know what attracts me in Jesus Christ is this, that because Jesus Christ says something to me that nobody else says. And what is that? But it is this, Jesus Christ says, I'm your God, I'm your creator incarnate, and as your creator, I love you. I love you personally, for I made you, and I love you with a love that is eternally loyal to you. Rather than that you perish, I, your creator, would die in your place. That's love. Not some passing sensation, not some sudden surge of emotion, but of a love that death itself can never quench and eternity will never see the end of, a love that is utterly loyal. All the wonder of a love like that. To be able to say with that other great convert, Saul of Tarsus, I live by the faith of the Son of God. He loved me and gave himself for me. Proud I am, sinner though I be, to be allowed to repeat it, for we have thought of solemn things, we have thought of the certainty of the coming of Jesus Christ as judge. Oh, how wonderful, friend, to be able to say in the name of Jesus Christ, my Lord, that that Lord who will come in flaming fire first himself came in his loyalty to us and died at Calvary to pay the penalty of sin so that we might be saved. Not only has God shown it by the gift of Jesus at Calvary, but the word of God to comfort our hearts adds that God himself has sworn an oath. And because he couldn't swear by anything greater, he swore by himself, saying, by myself have I sworn, this God who cannot lie, that blessing I will bless you, and multiplying I will multiply. So that we have two unchangeable things, God's word and God's own. Here is stability, you know. There is no permanence in the little planet upon which we live. One day it will all dissolve and be gone forever. Permanence, security, loyalty, found in the love of the true God who commends his loves to us in that while we were sinners, Christ died for us. Get hold of it, friend. Free for refuge, as the Bible puts it, to take hold of that great oath of God, and you will find his word keep you safe eternally. There's one final little detail that we must not forget. When the spies left the woman, quietly they shouted up to her, look, when we're gone and the armies begin to come, take the cord with which you let us down and bind it in the window, so that as the troops come, we shall be able to see which house is your house, upon which we will guarantee to save all that are in it alive. Ha. Do you know what? If I'd have been Rahab, how long do you suppose I should have left it before I bound the, the cord in the window? It wouldn't have been two seconds, you know. I should have cleared the curtains away. I'd have said, bother the curtains, cost what they may at Harrods in London. I, I'd get them away in case they obscured this rope in the window. I would have bound it, and not once, but twice or three times. I would have done all in my power so that when the troops came, they should be able to see the rope in the window. I can't see into your heart, but your heart does have a window, isn't it, doesn't it? You could let everybody know. As I look at the window of your life tonight, could I see that you have bound the rope in your window? You say, what rope? The rope of your decision to trust the Savior. Oh friend, I would like to see it. It is more important that God be able to see it. As God looks at our hearts tonight, and you sir, and you madam, and you lad, and you lass. As God looks at your heart now, does he see clearly the evidence that you have trusted Jesus Christ as your own personal Lord and Savior. If you have, I may tell you in God's name that you will be utterly secure. As you turn to God from idols to serve the living and true God and to wait for his son from heaven, the Bible assures believers that they may put upon their head as a helmet the absolute certain expectation of salvation, for God has not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by Jesus Christ who died for us and rose again. For all who trust him, he's coming as their savior. Oh, what a glorious day it will be. For those that have rejected him, he must come as their judge. How will he know the difference? By the rope in your window, sir. Have you tied it in? If not, now as we bow in prayer, in the conscious presence of Almighty God, let's take his word to our very hearts, bind it there for all to see that we have heard the Savior, we have repented and trusted him. We've turned to God from idols. We're determined to live, to serve him as we wait for his son from heaven. Shall we pray? O God, we thank thee for thy holy word. We thank thee for this ancient story. We bless thee more that we have heard the word of Jesus Christ, thy son. And now in our hearts, we handle and fondle it. He who hears my word, amen, amen, truly, truly, I tell you. He who hears my word and believes in him that sent me has everlasting life and shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from death unto life. We believe it, Lord. We bind it in our hearts for all to see. And if any yet in this congregation have not so done, oh God, by thy mercy, so make these things real to them by thy Holy Spirit, that the night shall not have gone by, but what they too shall have turned to thee from idols, to trust thy Son, and to bind his promise in their heart for all to see. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.