Hiding Some Limbs on the Family Tree

“Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab,

Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth,”

Matthew 1:5

There are many websites today that offer people a look into their past.

You can pay the website and delve even deeper into your ancestry.

I suppose all of us have skeletons in our ‘family closet’ that we would just as soon not know about or perhaps more to the point, we wouldn’t want others to know about.

How about a prostitute on the family tree?

Would you be proud or would you try to chop off that limb of the tree?

The Bible doesn’t hide the fact that Rahab the harlot was an ancestor of Jesus!

Why would that fact need to be pointed out?

Because what we were is not who we need to become.

Rahab was a harlot.

That was her past.

It was not her future.

Hers is a story of redemption told in the bible and highlighted in the genealogy of Matthew 1.

Perhaps it offers a certain recognition that no family line apart from the divine one is left untouched by sin.

We all have history, some good and some sordid.

But we do not need to live in the past nor do we need to allow our past to shape our future.

In Christ the power of our past is broken.

Rahab’s redemption story is not unique.

We too can be redeemed from a past we are not proud of.

Your past need not become your future.