Life is full of mismatched pairs. The grandmother who texts in all caps and the teenager who answers only in emojis. The cat and the dog who somehow end up sharing the same sunny spot on the rug. The two coworkers who couldn’t be more different and yet make the best team in the building.
Stories love a mismatched pair, too. Scout Finch, a feisty little girl, walks the neighborhood’s most feared recluse, Boo Radley, home on her arm. Huckleberry Finn drifts down the river with Jim, an escaped slave, and Huck decides he’d rather be damned than turn him in.
The Grinch, who despises everything about Christmas, gets his heart cracked open by Cindy Lou Who, a child barely out of toddlerhood. Captain Kirk’s gut rides along with Mr. Spock’s logic, and Sheldon and Penny share a hallway and almost nothing else. We keep telling these stories because we suspect that the best things happen when people who shouldn’t fit together do.
Scripture is full of them. Ruth, a Moabite widow, hangs onto Naomi, an Israelite who has lost everything: “Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God” (Ruth 1:16).
Isaiah pictures a world where the wolf lives with the lamb and the lion eats straw like an ox, with a little child leading them all (Isaiah 11:6-7).
And if you’re a fan of The Chosen, think of Matthew and Peter: a tax collector who worked for Rome and a hot-tempered fisherman who resented everything Rome stood for, called to follow the same Jesus (Matthew 9:9; Mark 1:16-17).
Then there’s the pair James drops into a single breath: Abraham and Rahab (James 2:21-25).
Abraham is the big name. He’s “Abram the Hebrew” (Genesis 14:13), the first of that line. God promised him descendants like the stars (Genesis 15:5), and Abraham “believed the LORD, and He counted it to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6). James says he was called “the friend of God” (James 2:23), and when Abraham laid Isaac on the altar, his faith was completed by what he did (James 2:21-22). Matthew starts Jesus’ genealogy with his name: “the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1). Abraham is the real deal.
Rahab is almost his opposite. She was a woman in a world that gave 
women little standing. She was a Canaanite, from a people marked for judgment. She was a prostitute (Joshua 2:1), and to save her own skin, she lied to the king’s men to hide the Israelite spies (Joshua 2:4-5). Not exactly who you’d cast as a hero of faith.
But look closer. Abraham grew up among idol-worshipers (Joshua 24:2). He lied, too, twice passing Sarah off as his sister to save his own skin (Genesis 12:13; 20:2). Neither Abraham nor Rahab earned their spots in history because of their clean records, but both were counted righteous because they believed God and acted on it.
Rahab’s faith was no vague feeling. She’d heard what God did at the Red Sea and bet her life, and her family’s, on it. She told the spies, “The LORD your God, He is God in heaven above, and on earth beneath” (Joshua 2:11). Hebrews 11:31 puts her in the same hall of fame/faith as Abraham, and James says she was “justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out another way” (James 2:25).
Then comes the real surprise. Matthew 1:5 lists her in that same genealogy: “Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab.” The Canaanite prostitute became the mother of Boaz, great-grandmother of King David, and an ancestor of Jesus. The first Hebrew sits at the top of the family tree, and the woman from Jericho sits partway down. Matthew doesn’t hide either one.
That’s the gospel in miniature. God doesn’t build his family from the likely candidates. He pulls together the patriarch and the outsider, the father of nations and the woman with a past, and holds them up as proof of the same thing: faith that trusts God is demonstrated by actions.
Faith and actions belong together. Abraham’s faith led him up the mountain, and Rahab’s led her to hide the spies. James says, “faith apart from works is dead” (James 2:26). Real faith doesn’t stay in the head or the heart—it picks up its feet and goes to work.
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