Joshua 2:1 And Joshua the son of Nun sent out of Shittim two men to spy secretly, saying, Go view the land, even Jericho. And they went, and came into an harlot’s house, named Rahab, and lodged there.
Ever been stuck in quicksand? Probably not, but you have probably been stuck in traffic. You have probably felt trapped by time, lack of time, decisions you have made, or scarcity of resources like money. All of us have felt trapped at different times, and none of us like the feeling of being trapped. Perhaps the worst type of entrapment is being entrapped by our past.
In Joshua 2, you find two people who learned from their past. One was Joshua and the other was Rahab. They were two very different people. Joshua was a man; Rahab was a woman. Joshua was part of God’s people; Rahab was a Canaanite. Joshua was a man who loved God; Rahab was a wicked woman who didn’t even know God until the time of this story.
Joshua 2:1 says that Joshua sent two men to spy out the land, and the Bible says very specifically, though it is easily overlooked, “To spy secretly, saying, Go view the land, even Jericho.” Now, by “spy secretly” Joshua did not merely mean that the spies were to be hidden. That would be obvious, wouldn’t it? If you are a spy, you wouldn’t want to be known by the enemy. No, this secret was to be kept even from the people of Israel.
Why was that? It was because Joshua himself had been a spy years before. Joshua himself had been sent by a leader, Moses, along with eleven others to spy out the land. Yet, only two of those men, Joshua and Caleb, came back with a report that acknowledged God in what they were attempting. The majority of the spies said, “We can’t take this land because the land is too great for us.”
So what did Joshua do? He could have felt trapped by their unwillingness and inability to possess the land the first time, but he didn’t do that. He wasn’t trapped by the past. He learned from the past. This time around, Joshua made sure that no one other than himself knew about the spies in order that no one would be tempted to fear the enemy.
Those two spies that Joshua sent went to the house of Rahab the harlot, and what follows is that she spared their lives and they agreed likewise to spare hers. She said to them, “As soon as we had heard these things, our hearts did melt, neither did there remain any more courage in any man, because of you: for the LORD your God, he is God in heaven above, and in earth beneath.”
Joshua had learned from the past defeat and Rahab had learned from a past victory of the children of Israel. In both cases, these were people who were very different in their backgrounds, yet who had obeyed God and honored Him because they had learned from their past.
Now every day you live, you have a choice. You can learn from your past as a student or you can follow your past as a slave. Those outcomes are completely different. Let me urge you, regardless of your past, to learn from the past as a student and not to follow the past as a slave. Joshua and Rahab were two people who were not enslaved by their past. They were students of the past and they were successful and God-honoring because they were.