Selfish Holiness

I want to tell you a story. I want to tell you about a woman who made it into what many Christians call God's "Hall of Faith," Hebrews 11. She's listed right there with all the men whom Christians, Jews, and Muslims think are holy men of faith. And she was a prostitute.

Yup, Rahab was a prostitute. She had done well for herself, too. She had her own penthouse built into the wall of Jericho, with one of the best views in the city. Her customers appreciated her well. And she was young when Joshua's spies came knocking on her door. She was young when she hung a red ribbon out her window as a sign to the Almighty that she'd rather be with His people than die with her customers. She married someone afterward and had a baby, who became an ancestor of David, Solomon, and Jesus.

Apparently, God likes people with a past. He likes them well enough to make them His examples for His church. In fact, I can't think of one person in the Bible who didn't screw up in ways that would send today's Christians into a scandalous rage if it had been their pewmate. But, for some reason, when we read about it and know the end of the story, we just gloss over the glaring humanity of God's heroes.

God hasn't changed; neither has humanity. If you don't have skeletons in your closet, it's probably because someone found out about them and dragged them out of the closet to display in his front window. Funny how some Christians can't resist that primal urge to get to the top of Jacob's Ladder by knocking everyone else off the Ladder. But God's answer to that kind of behaviour hasn't changed, either: “But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea" (Mark 9:42). Know what that means? You're better off to have been a prostitute than to have grown up in the faith and be throwing the prostitute off the Way of Life.

I have a point. Sometimes bad people make it into church leadership. They do bad things to little boys, or they treat parishioners badly. I'm not defending that. But sometimes bad people can't make it into church leadership, and they make it their job to search through the rubbish in the everyone else's closets, looking for skeletons. It gives their selfish holy hearts such glee when they find a skeleton!

But is it worth the price?