The seventh day dawned, the last that the city of Jericho—as it then stood—ever should see. Seven times the march of the Israelites encircled the walls. Then with what terror must the household, gathered together in the dwelling on the wall, have heard the blast of the trumpet, followed by that thundering shout before which crashing fell bulwark and battlement—all Jericho's pride and strength! Fearful sounds succeeded; slaughter was raging in the streets; the swords of Israel were bathed in blood! Rahab and her family could not but have experienced emotions of pity and horror, as shuddering they listened to those sounds; but they needed to have no feelings of personal fear: that scarlet cord was to them a surer defence than strongest bulwark or loftiest tower; a surer defence than a phalanx of spears bristling around them. There was no danger to Rahab from falling wall or from enemy's sword; there was no stain on her threshold, no dying cry in her home. By faith, she perished not with them that believed not. She lived to be a mother in Israel, by adoption one of the people of God, if, as is supposed, it was this Rahab who became the wife of Salmon, and the mother of Boaz of Bethlehem, and thus an ancestress of the blessed Saviour Himself. We naturally suppose that the scarlet cord would be preserved as an heirloom in the family at Bethlehem; that the gentle Ruth, herself a daughter of Abraham by adoption, looked with peculiar interest upon this relic of her husband's Gentile mother; and that young David often gazed with reverential awe on this memorial kept in his father's home of her who, in faith, preserved the Israelitish spies. We can scarcely conceive that such a family relic as this would lightly be cast away. There is much that reminds us of Christ's Church, in the position of the pale, anxious woman of Jericho, watching from her casement the Israelites encircling the city doomed to destruction, she herself secure in a promise, saved by faith, reserved for blessedness and honour. A thousand years with the Lord is but as a day, and for nearly six such periods has the silent, solemn march of events, brought nearer the grand consummation before us. The Church knows that "the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up." She is listening with trembling expectation for the sound of the "shout, and the voice of the archangel," and "the trump of God," when the earth shall reel to and fro, and the mountains shall shake, and the mighty cities shall fall! She has nothing to fear in that day: the blood of Christ is her salvation—the angel of destruction will see the token of living faith, and touch not the redeemed of the Lord.