There is a temptation, deeply embedded in the way we organize our world, to define people by what they do. We hand out business cards. We answer the question "what do you do?" before we answer the question "who are you?" We sort people into categories based on their function, their profession, their past, and their reputation, and we treat those categories as though they are the whole story. Scripture, again and again, refuses to let us do that.
Rahab appears in Joshua chapter two with her occupation stated plainly and without apology. She is a prostitute. The text does not soften this, and neither should we. What she does to survive is real, and it matters to the story — not because it defines the limits of who she is, but because it reveals something extraordinary about the God who chooses her anyway. Her profession is the reason the spies can arrive at her door without drawing immediate suspicion. It is the reason she has learned to read people quickly, to calculate risk, and to act decisively under pressure. What she does for a living has shaped her in ways that God will use. But it is not who she is.
Who she is becomes clear in verses nine through eleven, when she speaks to the spies on her rooftop in the dark. She tells them that everyone in Jericho has heard what the God of Israel did at the Red Sea and what He did to the kings on the other side of the Jordan. She uses the covenant name for God — Yahweh — which means she is not speaking in vague religious terms. She is making a specific theological claim about a specific God. She says, "the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below." That is not the language of someone who merely hedges her bets. That is a confession of faith, offered in full view of the city walls that surround her and the culture that has shaped her entire life.
The city of Jericho heard the same reports she heard. The whole population knew the stories. Verse eleven tells us that when they heard, their hearts melted and their courage failed. Fear was the universal response — fear because they understood that God was moving to take something away from them. Rahab heard the same stories and responded with faith, because she was willing to get on the side of what God was doing rather than cling to what she stood to lose. That difference is not a difference of information. It is a difference of identity. The rest of Jericho knew who the God of Israel was and chose to remain who they had always been. Rahab knew who the God of Israel was and chose to become someone new.
This is the pattern we see throughout Scripture when God moves. He does not wait for people to clean themselves up before He calls them. He does not require a résumé that qualifies someone for His purposes. Moses was a murderer living in exile. David was the youngest son that nobody thought to call in from the fields when the prophet came looking. Paul was actively hunting down and executing the followers of Jesus. The genealogy of Jesus — the actual bloodline through which the Son of God entered human history — includes Rahab by name. Not as a footnote. Not as an embarrassing detail to be minimized. As a mother in the line of the Messiah.
What that tells us is that God does not define people by their worst chapter. He is not limited by what we have done, what has been done to us, or what we have been reduced to by circumstances we may or may not have chosen. The categories that culture uses to sort human beings into those worth investing in and those who are not — those categories do not bind Him. Rahab the prostitute becomes Rahab the hero of faith, cited in the book of Hebrews alongside Abraham and Moses. She becomes the mother of Boaz, who becomes the grandfather of Jesse, who becomes the father of David, who sits on the throne from which Jesus will one day rule forever.
None of that future was visible the night she hid two strangers under stalks of flax on her rooftop. What was visible was a woman who had heard the truth about God, believed it, and acted on it at considerable personal risk. That is who she was. Everything else was what she did.
We carry this same invitation. The gospel does not call us to perform our way into a new identity before God will accept us. It calls us to receive a new identity that then reshapes everything we do. We are not the sum of our worst decisions. We are not permanently defined by the roles we have played or the labels that culture or even our own memory has attached to us. In Christ, we are new creations — and that newness is not contingent on our history but on His.
The question Rahab's story puts to us is not whether our past disqualifies us. It is whether we are willing, like her, to give our allegiance to the God who has already decided to include us in what He is doing. We do not earn that place. We receive it, the same way Rahab received it — by believing that the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth below, and by acting like we believe it.
Dr. William C.K. Yomes is the founding apologist of Faith Makes Sense and the Senior Pastor of Catalyst Community Church in Wilmington, Delaware. This article is part of his ongoing teaching ministry at Catalyst Community Church.