Many people are familiar with the story of Rahab the prostitute in Joshua (if not you can read about it here).  My potted retelling of the story goes something along the lines of this.  God's people are preparing for battle after many years of waiting in the wilderness.  Finally the time has come and Joshua (the bloke) sends two spies (I'm presuming reasonably young blokes) to go find out about the land they are about to invade and attack.  Now who knows what they get up to but the story tells us straight away they went and entered into a prostitutes house...  Now this seems highly unexpected to me?  Two young blokes go spy out the land and end up at a prostitutes house... Now I'm not saying they went there to have some naughty 'fun' while they were away from home but it certainly seems slightly suspicious to me.  Certainly if they came back home and I was Joshua I would have been asking questions.

Now I haven't done a whole heap of hard work on this passage, and I have no doubt there are many more exegetically relevant points the passage seeks to answer but the passage got me thinking about the idea of being beyond reproach.  The idea that we need to behave in ways that will mean people can't accuse us of things we haven't done.  An example might be Ricky Nixon (for those not in Australia or Melbourne see here).  Whatever Nixon did or didn't do with the 17 year old girl, the fact was he wasn't beyond reproach.  It looked bad.  Now I'm not suggesting that we go and seek out bad situations which make us look bad.  Of course not.  But I am wondering if sometimes we let this idea drive us away from doing things that are good but which might scare us, or make us feel like the price we pay is too high, because it's not behaviour that is, 'beyond reproach'.

Again, give me your thoughts either about the Rahab story or my 'beyond reproach' thinking.  Iron sharpens Iron.