Genesis 38-39 | A Tale of Two Brothers

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Please take your Bible or your device and find your way to the first book of the Bible in Genesis chapter 38.

Genesis 38 · chapter mention

In a little bit, we are going to partake together in the Lord's table.

Which means that this time together this morning is all about Christ.

Helping us see Christ, helping us worship Him.

Which leads to the question: how do we see Christ in Genesis 38 and Genesis 39?

Hopefully that helps us pay attention a little bit now to get to the end, right?

We're going to build through these two chapters of Genesis 2.

See Christ.

And be ready then to come before Him in the ways that He prescribed for us, taking the bread and the cup together to remember Him.

But before we dive into Genesis 38 and Genesis 39, I want to put two questions before you that I think really undergird these two chapters.

And you have likely experienced one or both of these questions in your own life.

One question is about that feeling of guilt that you have when you know you've sinned.

What happens to God's promises and God's work when his own people are unfaithful?

You ever felt that when you sin, you fall short of the glory of God, that somehow it feels as though you've just undermined everything that God's doing?

You wonder what's going to happen now?

That's one question.

The other question is when you have done well, in that you have gone through a trying, tempting time, and you have you've been obedient, you've been faithful, you've followed God, and yet your circumstances get worse.

And you wonder, God, what's going on here?

What happens to God's promises when we are faithful and things get worse?

And what is our relationship to God in those moments?

These are two questions that form a foundation for Genesis 38 and Genesis 39.

I'm going to apologize up front.

There is way too much information in these two chapters for us to cover it all this morning.

We're only getting a summary.

And we're only getting less of a summary because Webb chose to ignore reading it.

Oh, he's not in here, is he?

You know them.

At least one of the chapters, Genesis 39, is that chapter where Joseph is in Egypt and in Potiphar's household, and he refuses to succumb to temptation, and as a result, he's thrown into prison.

And at the end of the chapter, he's brought out of prison, but only after spending two years in prison, and he's brought to Pharaoh's court.

But before that, there's this other chapter, chapter 38.

Now, two weeks ago, we left Genesis with Joseph, about 17 years old, on the dusty road to Egypt as a slave.

And Genesis 37 ends with this somber, heavy tone.

Jacob, his father, is weeping.

Joseph is sold as a slave to an Egyptian, and his brothers are seemingly uncaring.

What comes next in Genesis 38 is one of the more confusing content shifts in the entire book of Genesis.

We expect the way chapter 37 ends to follow Joseph in Egypt to see what comes next with Joseph.

But it's not about Joseph.

It's about his brother Judah.

Judah, you might remember, is the brother who suggested that they sell Joseph into slavery instead of killing him.

And so in this chapter, chapter 38, the account pulls back from Joseph to consider Judah before returning to Joseph.

And in the end, by putting these two chapters together, it's like two open pages of your Bible.

We see them side by side, two brothers, two human beings in parallel at the same time, and we see how they are different.

Two lives moving in parallel in time, yet moving in opposite directions.

And Jacob's family is now split into two regions, if not three.

One brother in chapter 38 is pictured as unfaithful to the faith of his fathers, while the other is shown to be faithful even while he suffers.

And so these two chapters together ask the question: what happens to God's promise when his people are faithless or they suffer unjustly?

What do we do with God's word?

Is God changing or is he unchanging?

Is his word faithful or unfaithful?

Is God bound by our actions?

Does he have to adjust to who we are and what we're doing, whether we're faithful or unfaithful, whether we're suffering or not?

So these two chapters answer the question together.

They show us, in the end, that we can trust God's purpose and we can trust God's presence despite human faithlessness and human injustice.

If you leave with nothing else this morning, leave with that.

You can trust that He is present always.

Now, Genesis 38 is a difficult chapter.

It contains some sensitive content here.

So I'm going to walk us through the story without really dwelling on the details, but I don't want to skip it because it's in your Bible for a reason.

And we need to understand why it's there.

Genesis 38 is here to show us that we can trust God's purpose and presence even when people are unfaithful.

Now, first verse of Genesis 38 is one of the most important.

It's not the most important of Genesis 38.

It's one of the most important.

It says it happened at that time.

At what time?

At the time that Jacob's, or Joseph's going down to Egypt, right?

They've sold Joseph.

He's on his way to Egypt.

He's in Egypt, sold to Potiphar.

At that time, Judah went down from his brothers and turned aside to a certain Adolemite whose name was Hira.

And he saw the daughter of a certain Canaanite whose name was Shua, and he took her and went into her, and she became pregnant.

So Judah went down from his brothers.

If you've been with us for a while, you remember that in the book of Jonah, that word down is significant, right?

It traces Jonah's life from being kind of in the mountainous regions near Jerusalem, and he goes down to the seacoast.

And when he gets down to the seacoast, he gets goes down onto the boat.

And then when he's in the boat, he goes down into the boat to take a nap.

And then when he's out in the middle of the sea, he gets thrown overboard and goes down to the roots of the mountains.

Down, down, down.

Down's a negative term in the book of Jonah.

It's a negative term in the book of Genesis, too.

Going down in Genesis is the direction of danger, of sinful decline, of moving away, of distance from faithfulness and the place of promise.

You might say going down is a place of temptation, of potential compromise.

Here we're told that Judah settled among the Canaanites and he took a Canaanite woman as his wife.

That was crossing a line for ancient Israel.

As early as Isaac and Jacob.

You remember Abraham, right?

He sent his servant way back to his homeland, to his family origins to find a wife for his son Isaac.

He said, I don't want my son to be married to the people of this land.

Jacob himself, you'll remember, went back to the same region to find a wife.

That's contrasted with Abraham's first son, Esau.

Esau purposely took two Canaanite wives.

An act that Genesis says his parents grieved.

They were to be set apart from the Canaanites.

Much like the New Testament calls Christians today to be set apart from the world.

But Judah is now drifting into the culture around him, going in the wrong direction, going down, and he's bringing his family with him.

That's a hint to us as readers that what we're about to encounter here is not positive.

Going down is negative.

And in the end, Judah has three sons with this Canaanite wife.

When he arrives at the proper age, Judah arranges a marriage for his firstborn son Ur to another Canaanite woman named Tamar.

Text says that Ur was wicked in the sight of God, and God killed him.

Then Judah instructs his second son, Onan, to fulfill the cultural obligation, to marry his brother's widow, to keep the brother's line going, so that a man who died without an heir would still have his family line continue.

But Onan, we are told, is evil too.

He refuses to fulfill the obligation faithfully, and so God kills him.

So two sons are now following the pattern established by their father.

They're going down and refusing to be faithful to the patterns established by their faith in their fathers, and they're going down, down, down, and God kills them.

Judah's choice to drift from his family's faithfulness is now showing up in his sons.

And they're judged by God with a pretty harsh judgment.

God kills them.

Now, if you can do the mental math, you start with three sons and you eliminate two, how many's left?

How are you going to feel about that one son?

Probably pretty protective, right?

So we can't blame Judah that he's feeling protective.

He's left with one son, Shela, the youngest.

And so Jacob tells his daughter-in-law Tamar in verse 11 to return to her father's house and wait for Shela to grow up.

Sounds like a decent plan.

But the narrator then tells us what's really going on on the inside of Judah.

He says that Judah feared that if he gave Shela to Tamar as husband and wife at this point, Shayla too would die like his brothers.

That tells us that Judah's intentions are selfish and self-centered.

So Judah's plan for Tamar has no intention behind it.

He sends her away with a promise he never intended to keep.

And so she goes to her father's house waiting for something that will never come.

And that detail hints at how far down Judah had progressed in his unfaithfulness to God.

Even small decisions and small actions are impacted when we become more like the world around us.

Now we're told in verse 12 that some time passes and Judah's wife dies.

When the cultural period of mourning ends, he heads to a village called Timnah for a sheep shearing festival.

We're not told what's that like.

Is that like the county fair or the state fair?

Who knows?

I don't think they had 4-H back then, but we don't know what it's like.

We're just told this is a festival centered around the period of time in which sheep are sheared.

But it motivates Judah to go there.

Here it tells us that he went up, not down.

So is that going to be positive?

Or is that going to be negative?

But the narrator doesn't imply anything about Timnah or its festival.

But I wonder sometimes if there's a possibility that even though he goes up to Timnah, that we should wonder if Timnah is not negative.

Here's why I wonder that.

There's the possibility that we should hear that negatively when we put it into the context of other scriptures.

Timnah is mentioned elsewhere in the Old Testament, mostly in relation to boundaries.

Timnah appears in several lists of boundaries of land for the nation of Israel.

But there's one particular place where it is not mentioned as a boundary.

Centuries later, a young man by the name of Samson would also go up to Timnah.

And at Timnah he saw one of the daughters of the Philistines, and he went home and said to Mama and Daddy, get her for me as my wife.

And you know the rest of the story with Delilah, right?

So Judah is a man from God's covenant people making a journey toward Canaanite territory, toward sexual sin, away from what he knows to be right.

And in the greater Old Testament context, Timnah may serve as a moral indicator.

Timnah is where you end up if you aren't walking faithfully with God.

Somehow, Tamar hears that Judah's on his way to the festival.

She's been waiting.

We don't know how long.

She's been waiting for Shayla to grow up and for her to be given to him in marriage, but that hasn't happened yet.

So she does what sinful people do when they decide that God's timing is too slow.

Have we ever done that?

We act sometimes when we think God's working too slowly, right?

And we take matters into our own hands.

We think I can do it better than God.

And that's what Tamar does.

And this is a pattern in this family.

Abraham and Sarah did it.

Jacob did it.

Rachel did it.

And now Tamar, the Canaanite daughter-in-law, does it.

She disguises herself, puts on a veil so that Judah can't see her, or yeah, that Judah can't see her, see her face, can't see who she is.

She positions herself along the road, and Judah, not recognizing her, approaches her for his own pleasure because he has misjudged who she is.

And in the end, he leaves her with his ID as a pledge of payment, which was his seal, which would have been a ring that he could seal wax with, would identify him as the owner or the writer.

A cord that he had, and a staff.

All identifying markers, much like giving somebody your driver's license today.

And he goes home.

Life goes on.

Three months later, he is told through the grapevine that Tamar is pregnant.

And as her patriarchal head, Judah pronounces the common judgment for adultery in the time.

Bring her out and let her be burned publicly.

So Judah is ready to condemn her for doing what he himself had been participating in.

Sounds a bit hypocritical, right?

Yes.

That's the whole point.

Look at how far down Judah's gone.

Look at how far from faithfulness to God Judah has walked.

In other words, Judah's no different than the Canaanites around them.

That's when Tamar exposes her father-in-law.

In Genesis 38, verse 25, she uses the phrase, please identify these objects.

Genesis 38:25

Whose are they?

Whose ID is this?

There's a lot of parallels here in this account that this is a wonderfully written account, a masterful job of literary work.

These same two words mirror Genesis 37, verse 32, where Jacob's sons are shown Joseph's bloodied robe.

Genesis 37:32

Remember, they killed the goat and they put the goat's blood all over the robe, and they took it to their father and said, Please identify these.

There, Judah helped his brothers deceive their father with a bloodied garment.

Here, Tamar uses the same exact language to expose Judah.

In other words, Judah's sin is coming to light.

He's tried to hide it, but God's not letting it be hidden.

And Jacob's sons then are acting like Canaanites.

God's people become more and more like the world when they refuse to be unique from the world by being faithful to God.

And so the promised line of Abraham, remember, God said, I'll make your descendants like the sand on the seashore, not able to be counted.

But now they're in danger of becoming indistinguishable from the peoples around them.

They're no different.

They're just like everybody else.

And so Jacob now is exposed.

And what Judah says in verse 26 is the underlying truth of the chapter.

She is more righteous than I.

I don't know if I can really help us grasp the feeling of this.

But imagine having to say that a murderer on death row is more righteous than you.

Because your guilt has been exposed.

Something like that, I think, is what's behind this.

Jacob has now publicly identified it as being an adulterer, as being in the wrong, and he has to confess openly that a Canaanite woman is more righteous in God's eyes than him.

She's an outsider to the promise.

Yet she cared more for the continuation of the covenant line than Judah did.

She's just done what she thought was necessary to preserve the line that Jacob was abandoning.

And so this is Judah's self evaluation in the face of all the evidence.

He sees himself now as he actually is, not as he imagined himself to be.

Those kinds of moments are painful, aren't they?

When we see how rotten we really are on the inside, we're forced to come face to face with our own sin.

But they can be life-changing in righteous ways as well if they lead us to confession and repentance.

Here, Judah's actions are exposed and he has nowhere to run.

And he's forced to confess.

Tamar is more righteous than I am.

Tamar eventually gives birth to twin boys, one's named Perez, and the other is named Zerah.

So God's promise to continue Abraham's line of descendants survives despite Judah's unfaithful, Canaanite-like actions, which shows us that we can trust God's purpose and presence even when people are unfaithful to God.

God is unchanging, we've sown, and his purposes are unchanging, even though the people around us or we ourselves are unfaithful.

Now that's one page of your Bible.

The other page of your Bible is chapter 39, which shows us that we can trust God's purpose and presence even when faithful people suffer greatly.

Isaiah 39 · chapter mention

We have to move the camera from unfaithful Judah now to Egypt and Joseph.

It's a quick shift because chapter 39 begins with, now Joseph had been brought down to Egypt.

There's that word again.

And we are anticipating then something negative.

Probably something negative about the person going down.

But this is not exactly the same because Judah went down by choice, didn't he?

Judah chose to go down to the Canaanites to become like the Canaanites, following his own desires.

But Joseph was brought down by force.

He was carried there against his will and sold to a man named Potiphar, the captain of Pharaoh's guard.

And that sounds terrible.

But that's not the full story because verse 2 helps fill that out.

It says in verse 2 that the Lord or Yahweh, Jehovah, was with Joseph.

And he became successful in the house of his master.

So everything's not hunky-dory.

This is not a bed of roses, right?

He is still a slave to a master.

But God is with him, and he's successful.

And that's not all.

Verse 3 tells us that Yahweh being with him was observable.

You see that?

His master saw.

We're not told those details.

But something about Joseph and the way that Joseph obeyed his master and obeyed faithfully and lived out his life in his slavery, something about that was evident to Potiphar, and Potiphar could see that Joseph's connection with Yahweh was clear and it had fruitful, beneficial results.

Phrase appears again in verse 21 and verse 23.

So there's a particular reality then flowing through this chapter.

That everything that happens to Joseph goes together and is linked with God being with him.

And the fruit of that presence is somehow visible, such that Potiphar puts Joseph in charge of everything in verse 6.

And the text says that God blessed everything about Potiphar's life and household because Joseph was with him and Joseph was faithful.

The Lord blessed the Egyptian's house for Joseph's sake, verse 5.

So put that together now with chapter 38.

Jacob's family, and more particularly Judah's family, is not blessed as they pursue Canaanites.

But an Egyptian is blessed because of Joseph's faithfulness.

Even Potiphar's wife noticed.

The text says in verse 10 that she spoke to him day after day, after day after day, after day after day, after day, you get the point.

This is sustained, repeated pressure again and again and again over time.

The temptation didn't go away, but intensified.

And Joseph refused her every time, consistently, without wavering.

So Joseph is the opposite of his brother Judah in chapter 38.

Not only is he faithful to the family heritage in general, but he maintains an active, faithful presence with God.

When he tells Potiphar's wife why he refuses her, he says in verse 9, How could I ever sin against God and do this great wickedness?

Remember, Joseph is a slave in a foreign country.

It's not like he can escape the whole situation.

He can't merely run away back to Canaan.

That doesn't seem to be a possibility.

Maybe he can escape the room sometimes.

Maybe he can leave the house sometimes.

There's no family here.

There's no religious community watching over him.

He has no accountability partner, no one to report back to, and yet his orientation is continually toward God.

He understands that refusing to sin is worth the consequences.

Plant that into your brain, friends.

Refusing to sin is worth the consequences.

And there may be consequences.

Joseph is punished for doing what is right.

One day the woman grabs his garment as he turns to run from her presence and he leaves it in her hand.

And she turns and uses it against him.

Which is one of those recurring thematic patterns in the story.

First, Judah is deceived by Joseph's robe, and now Potiphar's wife is deceived by Joseph's shirt.

Sorry, Potiphar is deceived by Joseph's shirt.

The wife tells Potiphar a lie, and Joseph is thrown into prison.

So Joseph then is imprisoned unjustly for the second time.

The first time is when his brothers threw him into the cistern, into the pit.

This is now the second time.

He didn't do anything either time.

Yet here it's a follow-up to obedience to God.

He has faithfully resisted temptation.

He has faithfully been faithful.

He has done what is right and is being punished for it.

He has served his master with integrity.

He resists temptation at personal cost.

He refuses to sin against God, and the result is that things get worse.

He ends up in prison not because he sinned, but because he refused to sin.

Refusing to sin is worth the consequences.

Friends, faithfulness to God is not a guarantee of comfort.

You can do the right thing at great personal cost and still find yourself in a worse, harder, more difficult place of obedience than before.

The path of faithfulness is not always gentle and painless.

And yet the refrain, the important refrain continues.

Yahweh was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love.

Verse 21.

We can't just look at Joseph in prison, suffering the consequences of faithfulness.

We have to put Joseph's circumstances and his situation in conjunction with what God is doing.

God is not leaving Joseph alone.

He's with him.

This is God's covenantal loyal love that he shows to his people.

It's significant that God's loyal love does not necessarily keep us out of difficult circumstances or to remove us from painful circumstances.

Instead, God's loyal love is with us in those times.

Maybe you could say two, even though I walk through the valley of deep dark shadows.

You are what?

We see that working out in the life of Joseph.

And again, Joseph serves with utmost integrity in a hard place.

The keeper of the prison puts him in charge of the other prisoners.

And the text gives us a second time that note in prison, Yahweh was with him.

But there's no dramatic rescue.

This time there's no there's no Midianite traders coming by so that he's pulled up out of the pit and sold.

There's not even getting out of the pit.

He stays there.

And he's forgotten there, we'll see next time.

Yet Yahweh was with him.

There's no new dreams given to him.

Instead, as we'll see next time, others have dreams.

Instead, what we find here is the steady, present faithfulness of God at work in impossible circumstances, shaping a man for something he can't see, through a process that he would never have chosen for himself.

Some of you understand what that feels like.

Where you would not choose the process that God chooses to mold you into the image of Christ.

But in those times we always have to remember that even though I walk through the valley of deep dark shadows, you are with me.

We can always trust, friends, the process that God chooses to take us through.

Doesn't mean it feels good.

Doesn't mean there isn't fear and anxiety, confusion.

But we can trust.

So we've seen then two brothers taking different paths.

One chose the path of personal satisfaction that led him down the path of unfaithfulness and worldliness.

The other didn't choose the path he took, but he was taken down a path of difficulty and pain and uncertainty.

One wandered further from Yahweh, the other is told repeatedly, Yahweh is with him, Yahweh is with him, Yahweh is with him.

One is becoming more like the Canaanites, the other is mirroring the character of God he serves while becoming more and more Egyptian.

And that brings us to the whole point of this tale of two brothers.

Why does Moses put them here?

Why does he interrupt the story of Joseph with Judah and then come back to Joseph?

I suggest to you that he does it to remind us that God doesn't let his promises fail.

Yahweh, the covenant-keeping, faithful, loyally loving God, is the one constant across both chapters.

In chapter 38 with Judah, he is working despite human faithlessness.

He's preserving the covenant line through the least likely people by the most unlikely of means.

And in chapter 39, he's working through human suffering and injustice, sustaining a man in darkness and pain, so that his story will eventually lead to rescuing untold numbers of people from starvation.

They don't see those things in the midst of the darkness, do they?

In the same way, when we're following our good shepherd through the deep dark valleys, even though he's with us, we don't see the end.

And these two chapters are running simultaneously.

So imagine two roads that are diverging further and further from each other, and both men are walking their own road at the same time.

While Judah is in Canaan making selfish, sinful choices, Joseph is in Egypt being shaped by the crucible of slavery and false accusation and imprisonment.

God is moving both men, both stories at the same time toward his larger purpose without either man having any idea of what's really happening.

One is choosing his own pleasure, while the other is choosing to trust that God is with him.

These two chapters give us two men and two sentences that tell us almost everything we need to know about the difference between them.

Judah, when he's exposed and has nowhere to run, confesses she's more righteous than I am.

It's an honest sentence.

And it may be the beginning of something in Judah because we do see him changing in the chapters ahead.

But here, in this moment, it's reactive.

He's reacting to the guilt of having his sins brought out into the open.

It comes after exposure, after the consequences of sin have stripped away every excuse he has available.

But now that it's all out in the open, I guess I have to admit it.

Meanwhile, Joseph, in the middle of temptation, before anything wrong has happened, before anything has gone wrong or happened to him, he says, How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?

Joseph didn't need disaster to have clarity about what was right and wrong.

When the pressure came day after day after day after day, consistently, he wasn't scrambling around trying to figure out what to do.

He already knew because he was focused on faithfulness before the testing arrived.

Now, the difference between these two men is not one that was, is not, is not the difference of one being morally strong and the other morally weak or superior or indifferent.

The difference is orientation.

Judah's eyes were on what satisfied him and what he believed was best for him.

He chose what he wanted.

Joseph's eyes were on God, even in a situation that was unjust and unpainful and made no sense.

So the question, friends, for us is not what we will do after everything falls apart.

The question is where our hearts are oriented before anything ever happens.

Before there's temptation in front of us, before the choice has to be made.

What are we looking at when no one is watching and when doing what is right would cost us dearly?

But let's not make this into a moral story about two men.

When ultimately it's really a not about two men.

Ultimately, it's about what God is doing.

Because at the end of the story, remember in chapter 50, Joseph says to his brothers, Don't be afraid.

God sent me here.

Underlying all of the events in this chapter, is that in these chapters is that God is doing something.

God is working.

When we think about God working, we begin to see that God works through sinful people, even those we would least expect Him to work through.

A Canaanite woman?

Really, God?

A Canaanite woman who takes matters into her own hands?

Really?

God, Egyptians?

Slavery?

Injustice?

Judah is not a hero in these chapters.

He's anything but a hero.

And yet the line of promise keeps going through him.

Tamar is a Canaanite woman who deceives her father-in-law, and she turns out to be the one most committed to the preservation of the promised line.

At the very least, it shows us, friends, that God's not waiting for the right people in the right attitude and the right righteousness.

God is working with the people who are here in the situations that exist, using the broken and the unlikely to build towards something that only He can see.

Yes, human faithfulness is a part of that program.

It matters.

Clearly, in what we see in these two chapters, it matters.

But the plan of God, the purpose of God does not stand or fall on your faithfulness or your faithlessness.

And praise God for that.

It stands on the reality that God is unchanging and he is faithful.

God's promises stand even through unfaithfulness, injustice, and all the wrong that we can imagine.

Which says you can trust him.

And as we prepare our hearts and minds for communion, you must trust him.

Because in the end, the only rescue for Judah, and the only rescue for Tamar, and the only rescue for every single human being, is the faithfulness of Christ to die on a cross, to pay for our unrighteousness.

If you trust in your own faithfulness, you'll end up like Judah.

So trust in Christ and what he's done to rescue you from all the sin and the evil that's within us.

Would you pray with me?

Lord Jesus, we thank you and praise you that you've given us a way to see you.

To see you in our own lives, in the life of Judah, and the life of Joseph, to see how we need you.

Otherwise, we would be stuck in the whirlpool of sin and the mess that we've made for our lives.

Thank you that you are unchanging.

And it's because of your unchanging nature and your love for us that you would leave the glories of heaven and become like one of us to die.

So that if we might place our trust in you as our Savior, as our rescuer, you will rescue us forevermore.

Or draw our hearts to see you, to worship you in the fullness of your unchanging nature.

Forever and ever.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

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