I’m sure you can think of some day in your life for which you waited a long, long time. And then, eventually it came. It may have been Christmas, a birthday, perhaps a birth of a child, or something else. Your anticipation grew as the event got closer. Imagine the intensity of the Israelites’ anticipation as they stood on the banks of the Jordan River and prepared to cross over and go into the Promised Land. Most were part of the new generation that had come from the one who had refused to believe God could give them the land. God had judged them by allowing them to wander in the desert for the 38 years until all of the old generation that were over 20 years old at the time had died. So it was a new generation that was going in, and they had been waiting for this moment for a long time. Joshua and Caleb had waited even longer than that. They were about 80 years old at this time. Of the twelve spies who had gone into the land to bring a report to Moses, they were the two who had believed that Israel could triumph. They were the only ones of that generation who had not died.
I started out by saying that this is a story of God’s mercy, which indeed it is. When the spies arranged to save her life, they said that she was to tie a scarlet cord in her window. That was to mark the house, such that no one would touch it when the Israelites came. It was a powerful symbol of her deliverance. Going all the way back to Clement of Rome, there has been a tradition to trace the scarlet cord through Scripture and see it pointing to the blood of Christ. It’s called “the line of the blood,” beginning with Abel’s sacrifice of the lamb and leading to Calvary. It is through the mark of the blood that we are saved.
