Have you ever
been into a jewelry store & watched the way they display the beautiful
diamonds?
Why don’t they use a cloth of multi-colored background? ---Contrast! It’s a stark contrast for people to see the beauty of the diamond against the black background.
The Bible contains some stories that are so terrible they boggle the mind.
Remember the one about Lot & his two daughters? They both got pregnant by him. Remember Dinah the sister of Judah? Remember Rahab the prostitute?
Then there’s the adultery between David & Bathsheba. What about the prophet Hosea who was commanded by God to marry a practicing prostitute? What about the murder of the little boys in Bethlehem?
If there was one chapter in the Bible I’d have removed if it were up to me [If I looked at it strictly from the human standpoint] it would be Genesis 38,-- because it’s so exceedingly dark. But the reason this black chapter is there is so that we can see God’s love & grace contrasted against the blackness.
Chapter 38 of Genesis pops out at you almost like one of those pop-up books for children, interrupting the interesting flow of the story of Joseph.
Here’s a good rule of the thumb in Bible study;
--if you find something that seems to be out of context or out of sync with what you’re reading, stop & look carefully for God is trying hard to get a message through.
The story of Judah & Tamar in Genesis 38 is so ugly that teachers & preachers don’t like to address it often.
Judah, one of Jacob’s twelve sons is supposed by divine fiat to have offspring because God had promised it would happen. His kids were supposed to have kids of their own & this was supposed to happen until at last Jesus was born.
But Judah doesn’t believe this & he wanders off to do his own thing. He has no faith in all the prophecies so he goes down to Adullam & takes a pagan wife from the unbelieving Canaanites, themselves folk who don’t have any regard for the prophecies of the coming Christ.
Notice, they had people who doubted the coming Messiah just as we have people who doubt He ever came.
Judah knew better. He was in possession of the facts; he’d been raised as a member of God’s covenant & was one of God’s special people. He knew he was unequally yoked just like people in our day go right on & yoke up with unbelievers & expect good results. 2 Cor.6:14.
Judah & his wife have three sons, & they are like him, they don’t believe the promise of the coming Messiah either. All these people doubt Jesus will someday come. Does that kind of hard-hardheadedness sound familiar?
Now, God kills Judah’s first son before he has any kids. The second son is a non-believer & wants no children so God kills him. Now this man Judah has only one son left. Judah by now is scared, wouldn't you be? He has only one son to even try to have children & he’s afraid God will kill his last son too. [I'm trying to be polite but these men are killed because they are intentionally rebelling against God, in having sex only for pleasure & not allowing their seed to be used to produce an offspring.]
A woman named Tamar enters center stage. She was Judah’s daughter-in-law who was married to Judah’s first two son’s who died. Judah had promised her his third & only other son Shelah but he had no intention of keeping that promise.
In Matthew 5:37, the Bible says, ---- let your yes be yes & your no be no. Anything beyond this comes from the evil one.
There was a custom in those days that if a man died & left no children, his brother should take the widow in & father her kids in his brother’s name so his name would not die out.
Now Judah’s wife dies, so, nobodies having children. But how is Jesus supposed to get here if He’s coming through this lineage &, pardon my countrified speech; “they aint having no babies?”
Well, Tamar decides to fix all of this mess. Boy did she fix it? She finds out that Judah is going to Timnah to sheer sheep & disguises herself as a temple prostitute. Judah, somehow justifying it in his mind, doesn’t recognize her behind the dark veil & hires her for her services. These aren’t very nice boys & girls. Here we see a major step down for Judah as he descends into wickedness. He knew better than to sleep with a prostitute.
But Tamar bargains with Judah & asks him for a pledge, or shall we say, a deposit? They finally settle on it & Judah gives her a signet cord & a staff. A signet cord in those days was a sign of identification & a staff was a symbol of authority over his family & servants. Can you believe this; Judah is handing over his identification & authority to this “strange woman?” He’s giving up his social security number & his American Express credit card, voluntarily forfeiting that for this pleasure.
Don’t think too deeply about this, just think of some of the crazy things you’ve known men to do just for a few moments in the arms of some strange woman. It’s a good thing that women seem to be more forgiving than men.
Through Judah’s lack of faith he’s condemned his family but now he’s giving everything up to have what he thinks is a meaningless one night stand that can’t, as far as he knows produce a seed.
Judah finds out he’s been tricked by his daughter-in-law & decides to get his two identity symbols back & sends an offer of a goat to Tamar. What a mess!
Time goes by & now Judah is told that Tamar is pregnant, [shades of David & Bathsheba.] Judah decides that for Tamar’s deception she’s to be burned to death, him being so holy & all. Talk about a double standard. He doesn’t know she’s carrying the promised seed. The seed is now in jeopardy.
Judah has sinned by whoring around, he’s sinned by being against the promises of God, he’s sinned by marrying a Canaanite woman in the first place, this hypocrite will now sin by standing in judgment against Tamar, & having her burned to death. At this point, Judah isn’t exactly a lover of the truth. As a matter of fact he’s perfectly willing to settle for quick judgment rather than to take the time for truth & justice.
But wait, on the way to the fire Tamar produces Judah’s signet cord & staff & asks, “Whose are they?” Now comes the turning point for Judah. I wonder if he turned white or red in the face when he saw this. He recognizes the proof she has, acknowledges them & makes the famous statement, “This woman is more righteousness than I.”
Truer words were never spoken. It seems that right here Judah was converted. He’s clearheaded enough to see he’s in no position to judge Tamar because he was a greater sinner in not keeping his word to give her his son Shelah to try to produce a seed.
When people hear the truth, it often makes them angry & contentious. They want to argue rather than say, "It's me O Lord." But Judah came clean here & we can see the basic good stuff that was in him.
There can be no doubt that the Judah we met at the first of this story isn’t the same Judah we meet at the last. He started out wicked, hypocritical, self-righteous & untrustworthy & ended up humble, loving, caring & trustworthy.
So Tamar gives birth to Judah’s babies & has twins. The names of the kids will be Zerah & Perez. When the time comes, one of the twins sticks a hand out first, & this catches the mid-wife’s attention. She ties a scarlet thread around the hand & says “this one came out first.” What she is securing are the rights of the firstborn for the child.
But the other child comes out first. What’s happening is; God is interjecting Himself here & choosing the child not chosen by man. According to the midwife, Zerah is the firstborn but according to God He can do what He wants to so He chooses Perez.
This child Perez will be in the direct lineage of none other than Jesus Christ. Once again God does it His way & turns people’s plans on their heads. Doesn’t this cause you to marvel at the gracious providence of our God?
How does this story make you feel; revolted, disgusted, shocked, horrified, embarrassed, or dismayed? Is there a messier story in the entire Bible? Yet out of all this messiness God brings the righteous Christ. God’s plans aren't thwarted & His purposes are sure.
Yes, there has to be willingness on our part but God many times in spite of our best efforts to frustrate His plans produces great victories.
We can now see the reason God interrupted the story of Joseph; like a television channel interrupting a program to bring us an important message, God wants to show us how the linage of Jesus went from Judah to Christ. It’s plain to see that Jesus didn't have an ancestry of noble men.
God also wants to show us the ugliness of sin & the self-delusion of sinners & how easy it is for the worst of us to pretend we are better than the best of us.
Like Judah, we see many messed up family situations today don’t we? We see divorce, remarriage, incest, physical, mental & emotional abuse, adultery, broken promises, homosexuality, pre-martial sex, & single parent homes.
It’s easy for us, like Judah, to set in judgment on all this wickedness & condemn them with gusto when some of us have done just as bad as those we condemn. Like Judah, we need to be humbled at times & see ourselves as God sees us. We might even end up saying, even of someone whose behavior we despise, “She/he is more righteous than I.”
Tamar is also a story of grace, God’s grace. God used Tamar to humble Judah & after that he started to change.
Consider this; Judah was one of the leaders in selling his brother Joseph into slavery & not killing him. Gen.37:27. And remember what Judah did years later when a cup was found in Benjamin’s sack of grain. Judah offered himself as a hostage & slave in the place of his brother. Do you see the change that took place in Judah’s life? He was changed from a very bad man to a man willing to serve & love others & it was God’s grace that brought about that change.
If God’s grace can change a man like Judah, then His grace can change the life of people we’re praying for too—no matter how great their sin & misery may be. So in actuality, this is a story of hope & comfort is it not? It’s the story of what God can do & does do in the lives of broken people.
This story is also about how God providentially preserved the family tree of Jesus. The twin boys given to Tamar were named Perez & Zerah. When you read the first few verses of Matthew, you see the names of Judah, Tamar & Perez as part of the family tree that starts with Abraham, goes to David & ends with Jesus.
Yes, Judah & Tamar & Perez are part of the family tree of Jesus. They are listed among those whom God has chosen, whom God has elected to be His special people. They aren’t exactly the kind of relatives we’d tell others about but the Bible includes them in the family tree of Jesus.
Father Jacob is now on his deathbed. He called all of his sons to him, one by one. God inspired him to give a special prophecy & blessing to Judah. Judah may have lived a portion of his life as an alley-cat but Jacob called him a lion. Jacob said that Judah’s & Tamar’s line would be a royal line that would eventually give birth to the Ruler of all nations.[Genesis 49:10]
This prophesy was realized in Jesus Christ, the lion of the tribe of Judah.[Rev.5:5]
It’s also awesome to note that of the twelve gates of the celestial city of heaven, God has a gate named Judah.
So now these very bad things become a wondrous story of divine irony & God’s providence by which He preserves the linage of the Christ Himself. We can see what God can do with messed up, mixed up families like Judah’s & Tamar’s to carry out His great & eternal purposes in Christ.
Take note that Perez & Zerah were twins who struggled in the womb just like their grandfather Jacob & Esau struggled. You will probably also remember that the birthright in that case didn’t go to Esau, the older brother ; instead contrary to human custom it went to Jacob the younger brother.
In the case of both the sets of twins, what counted were not human qualifications, not human righteousness, or human efforts, or human custom or standards. What counts was God’s blessing & God’s providential choosing.
This story tells me that God doesn't avoid sinners but rather by His grace He saves them, changes them & uses them. Truly...
Those who sat in darkness have seen a great light.
At first blush, this story doesn't seem like it should be in Holy Scripture; a tradition that requires a widow to try to conceive a son with her dead husbands relatives; a man so greedy he would destroy the reputation of his brothers widow in order to take the inheritance that would go to her children; a woman who dresses as a prostitute to attract her father-in-law who doesn’t recognize her, but when he finds out his widowed daughter-in-law is pregnant he has her brought from the neighboring town so he can burn her to death for adultery.
Then as the story ends the woman pulls the evidence out that her father-in-law is the father of her children, her life is saved & she is proclaimed the most righteous one in the whole bunch. This seems more appropriate for HBO than for the Bible.
Why would this story be told at all & why should Matthew's genealogy include this motley crew? The answer to this question is part of Matthew’s root understanding of who Jesus is, and how God can work through those the world would consider unrighteous, or at least at the very bottom of the religious pecking order.
Another thing it shows us is that our race is depraved. If God can use the people in this story He can certainly use & bless our families no matter how messed up they may be.
Selfish behavior is destined to bring trouble & what looks like successful strategies in the eyes of man are not always successful. You & I apart from Christ are nothing & He’s certainly not depending on us to produce our own salvation.
You and I know the nature of God is such that He cannot & will not accept anything unholy. Tamar’s behavior is no more to be emulated than Abraham who was willing to cut his son apart with a knife. We generally won’t be called to go to distant lands like Ruth & Abraham or leave our families behind like Peter, James & John.
We don’t have to endure the hardships like the people did in the early development of the Kingdom. We don’t have to shed the blood of animals or be circumcised or baptized over & over. Christ has changed things & destroyed many barriers. Praise His Name!
If God could work miraculously as He did in Genesis 38 before the New Covenant & before His Son came to be the sacrifice for sin, think what He can do for us today, in the light of the finished work of Christ on the cross?
All we have to do is;
--lay aside every weight & the sin that doth so easily entrap us & run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author & finisher of our faith.
Blessings,
John
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