Judah & Tamar

Good morning.

Uh today's reading is Genesis chapter 38.

Genesis 38 · chapter mention

It happened at that time that Judah went down from his brothers and turned aside to a certain Aldamite, whose name was Hera.

There Judah saw the daughter of a certain Canaanite, whose name was Shua.

He took her and went into her, and she conceived and bore a son, and he called his name Ur.

She conceived again and bore a son, she called his name Onan.

Yet again she bore a son, and she called his name Sheila.

Judah was in Shabiz Shazib when she bore him.

And Judah took a wife for Ur, his firstborn, and her name was Tamar.

But Ur, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord put him to death.

Then Judah said to Onan, Go into your brother's wife and perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her, and raise up offspring for your brother.

But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his, so whenever he went into his brother's wife, he would waste the semen on the ground, so that so as not to give offspring to his brother.

And what he did was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and he put him to death also.

Then Judah said to Tamar, his daughter-in-law, Remain a widow in your father's house till Shala, my son, grows up, for he feared that he would die like his brothers.

So Tamar went and remained in her father's house.

In the course of time, the wife of Judah, Shua's daughter, died.

When Judah was comforted, he went up to Timnah to she to his sheep shearers, he and his friend Hera the Alzheimer.

And when Tamar was told, your father-in-law is going up to Timnah to shear his sheep, she took off her widow's garments and covered herself with a veil, wrapping herself up, and sat at the entrance to Inam, which is on the road to Timna.

For she saw that Sheila was grown up, and she did had not been given to him in marriage.

When Judah saw her, he thought she was a prostitute, for she had covered her face.

He turned to her at the roadside and said, Come, let me come into you, for he did not know that she was his daughter-in-law.

She said, What will you give me that you may come into me?

He answered, I will send you a young goat from the flock.

And she said, If you give me a pledge until you send it.

He said, What pledge shall I give you?

She replied, Your signet and your cord and your staff that is in your hand.

So he gave them to her and went into her, and she conceived by him.

Then she arose and went away, and taking off her veil, she put on the garments of her widowhood.

When Judah sent the young goat by his friend the Aldamite to take back the pledge from the woman's hand, he did not find her.

And he asked the men of the place, Where is the cult prostitute who was at Enam, at the roadside?

And they said, No cult prostitute has been here.

So he returned to Judah and said, I have not found her.

Also the men of the place said, No cult prostitute has been here.

And Judah replied, Let her keep the things as her own, or we shall be laughed at.

You see, I sent this young goat, and you did not find her.

About three months later, Judah was told, Tomorrow your daughter-in-law has been immoral.

Moreover, she is pregnant by immorality.

And Judah said, Bring her out and let her be burned.

As she was being brought out, she sent word to her father-in-law, by the man to whom these belong, I am pregnant.

And she said, Please identify whose these are, the signet and the cord and the staff.

Then Judah identified them and said, She is more righteous than I, since I did not give her to my son Sheila.

And he did not know her again.

When the time of her labor came, there were twins in her womb.

And when she was in labor, one put out a hand, and the midwife took and tied a scarlet thread on his hand, saying, This one came out first.

But as he drew back his hand, behold, his brother came out, and she said, What a breach you have made for yourself.

Therefore, his name was called Perez.

Afterward, his brother came out, and the scarlet thread on his hand, and his name was called Zara.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Good morning.

Welcome to Redemption Church Denver.

My name is James Rasman.

I'm the pastor here.

I think we all understand.

Some texts just speak for themselves.

So go and go and live Christianly, you know.

Be encouraged by the word of the Lord today.

Yeah, we're as we continue through Genesis and through the story of Joseph, we uh are hitting all the nooks and crannies along the way.

Um I don't think this scene has made any um uh musicals uh about Joseph, um uh but uh it is an important one.

So we'll we'll look through this uh together this morning.

So let's pray.

Holy Father, we thank you for your word, which uh matches and explains the strangeness of life.

Father, we pray that you would give us wisdom to interpret your word, that we might see the patterns of the stories that you have woven, and we might then better understand our lives and how they tie up to your glory, that we might enjoy and participate in your glory, and that we might have hope amidst all kinds of sinful and uh uh uh brutal and disastrous circumstances.

Uh, that in the midst of those we might understand the Lord is at work here.

Oh, Lord, help us to see that in this story today and help us trust in you uh in those strange places, even of our own lives.

Lord, we lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

All right, here we go.

The story of Judah and Tamar.

Uh we'll we'll piece together the story along the way.

So if you're thinking, what did we just read?

Uh I don't really it after just one hearing, it's hard to grasp the coherence of such a long narrative.

By the way, uh Danielle did a wonderful job.

She set a record today.

That was our longest reading.

Um the uh I was thinking of Ezra when uh all the people of God stood for half a day and listened to the reading of the law.

That was a little flavor of what that must have been like as we read this morning.

Last week we saw Joseph sold by his brothers into slavery and was taken down into Egypt, where he was purchased by uh the uh captain of Pharaoh's guard, a man named Potiphar.

And then the story breaks off, and we're left with this tension where our minds should be thinking, what's happening to Joseph?

Is you know, how are things going uh down there?

What's it like being a slave in Egypt?

Is will he ever be recovered?

And the the story builds this tension by inserting right here this uh narrative back home with uh Joseph's older brother Judah.

And in the story of Judah, we see this pattern of almost like an anti-Joseph.

This story is it's uh Judah does everything that Joseph doesn't do in the next chapter.

In the next chapter, Joseph will be uh pursued by Potiphar's wife, and he will reject her advances and uh will live a holy and pure life before the Lord.

Judah uh has none of the pressures that Joseph is facing, and yet we see him live in a perfectly opposite way to Joseph.

He's like an anti-Joseph.

Now, Judah is a strange character.

I don't really know what to do with Judah in this story.

If I was thinking, if I were to write my own musical with singing nuns, I would probably have a scene that went something like, How do you solve a problem like Judah?

Might be the opener.

Because Joseph, he takes up the bulk of the end of Genesis.

And he is so righteous throughout the story.

He's incredibly uh he's he's admirable and worth modeling your life after.

And then the the the son of promise, the the one son of Israel through whom the line of David will come, and then therefore, the the line that will bring us our Lord Jesus Christ, the one who who it comes from is not Joseph, it's Judah.

Well, how do you solve a problem like Judah?

It's just so it I this is if I were to sit down with God, you know, or even if in like the writer's room, it I would have to chime up and be like, I feel like we've done a lot of development with Joseph here.

And we've built in a lot of good reasons to go with his line.

And great news, we've got two options, you know, two half tribes, Ephraim, Manasseh.

Either one of those would be great.

But Judah is the one that is gone with.

And Judah is like the anti-Joseph in this story.

I wish I could tie this up for you neatly.

Uh and uh and just make a simple case that there is just a plain admirableness that we'll see later in Judah.

And he does become more admirable as the story goes on, but um not to the heights uh uh uh that um account for the depths to which he falls in this story.

So I was thinking, you know, a lot of times, a lot of times the the strangeness in Scripture, we spend time trying to polish over and make not strange.

And it and it teaches us to read the Bible, I think, in a pretty thin way.

What would be better, and what we'll do this morning, is let the strange be strange at you, because the gospel is a strange thing.

It is an unexpected and strange story.

As we looked at a verse in Romans to kind of hang last week's sermon on, we'll do the same this week.

Romans chapter 5, verses 6 through 8, Paul writes this for while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly.

Romans 5:6–8

For one will scarcely die for a righteous person.

Though, perhaps, for a good person, one would dare even to die.

But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

What is our gospel?

The good news that we have, the the central story of Scripture is that God saves sinners.

God saves sinners.

And I desperately want to polish these stories to create some moralistic fable about the life of Judah where we can say, see, uh he he actually amounts to the type of person who deserves to be saved.

Someone might dare save, even die to save the type of person who deserves to be saved.

But our gospel is more strange than that.

God demonstrates his own love towards us and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

And so we know that's where the story is headed.

And so the means of the story matching that pattern, look who he chooses, Judah.

Of what right does Judah have to be chosen?

Well, the same that we have to be chosen.

None.

So then what is the mechanism of our salvation?

What does it hang upon?

The love of God.

There's nothing else.

This is our hope, the love of God.

So as we explore the strangeness of the story with Judah, we should keep we should consider that in our minds that the strangeness of this story is no less strange.

The fact that Judah is chosen as the son of promise is no less strange than any of us being chosen to be included in the covenantal family by the blood of Jesus Christ, that the righteous died for us, the unrighteous.

God saves sinners.

That is the good news.

And let's see it in this exploration of the particulars of some of those sinners.

All right, so let's piece this story together.

This is an odd one.

Genesis 38, 1 through 2.

It happened at that time that Judah went down from his brothers and turned aside to a certain Adulamite whose name was Hera.

There, Judah saw the daughter of a certain Canaanite, whose name was Shuah.

He took her and went into her.

Okay, uh Judah, he's uh Joseph's uh one of Joseph's older brothers, and he's really next in line for authority outside of Joseph, because the three of Judah's older brothers from Leah, this is all going to get confusing, as if it hasn't already, uh had had murdered and also slept with one of their other mothers, their husband's concubine.

So they were they were kind of disowned from the family politically.

Uh Joseph is the oldest son of Rachel.

So there are two legitimate wives, Leah and Rachel.

So now we have Judah is the oldest of the first legitimate wife, and Joseph is the oldest of the second legitimate wife.

They are sort of political rivals in the family.

So there's some mirroring there.

So this begins with Judah.

He uh went down from his brothers and turns aside to a certain Adulamite.

Now we've got to have some geography in mind.

Because down and south in the Genesis narrative, you should hear bad.

And he went down.

Oh, down, not good.

See, that's easy to remember.

Like the stock market, you know.

I like it when it's up.

It's an old Norm MacDonald joke.

But the uh uh so he goes down.

So we should think, uh, Judah, that's probably not a good idea.

And we should remember, what's what's like the furthest down in a biblical uh geography?

It's Egypt.

Egypt is the it's the southern border of the world.

Now Joseph is taken down against his will, right?

He's he's taken to the bad place by compulsion.

Judah is just hanging out with his brothers, and he's like, you know, I might take myself down there.

And he goes with a friend.

And this friend becomes an important player in the story.

His name's Hera.

Hera is interesting because uh Hera is a part of all the bad things that take place for Judah, but Hera is not particularly bad or wicked.

In fact, a better description of Hera is he's just an ordinary Canaanite.

He's just an ordinary man in this culture that he is surrounded by.

And he becomes Judah's best friend.

They do all kinds of things together, as you'll find out.

So he goes down with his friend Hera and he sees the daughter of a Canaanite.

The Canaanite's man was Shua, the woman who Judah marries, the daughter, we don't uh hear her name throughout the whole story, but he marries her.

Uh so he marries an ordinary Canaanite woman.

Now, all of this contagion begins with this just ordinary integration with the culture and the cultural norms that Judah is around.

We could receive the warning like this friendship with the world is enmity with God.

I could say the same thing another way.

My son, if sinners entice you, do not consent.

I could say it another way, do not be deceived.

Bad company ruins good morals.

Our ordinary relationships uh shape our moral compass.

And for us, you know, these days, I think that our ordinary relationships are patterned in the actual friendships that you have face to face, and also in the media consumption that we participate in.

And so our morals become normed just by the world that we're living in.

And this happens to Judah.

He begins to just norm not off of his family and his lineage and the promises of God that they have been given, but off of just the ordinary patterns of the Canaanites that they're living around.

Now, in a sinful world, a world that exists after the fall, that's corrupted by sin, which is the world that we're living in, in this Genesis story and out here, we see that the ordinary patterns always lead to death.

The ordinary norms of culture are those patterns which lead to death.

And this is always throughout all cultures, throughout all time, this is most clear.

This is why the Bible visits this topic sort of archetypally, uses it as a pattern for all other sins.

Because it it gets shown most clearly in a culture's sexual ethic.

Now, if you think about it, if you were to just be an you know an alien who was looking at the world, think and you would think like what symbols would I use to if I were to show that they had become a culture of death?

Think of it like this.

You know the first Avatar?

The one without the talking whales.

There is a Thanks, Bo.

It's you and me in here now, buddy.

There's that tree of life, you know?

Uh and that this is where all the life of the community comes from.

Uh so if you were to show that death was coming, then you would threaten that tree, right?

Just narratively.

That's what you'd do.

Okay, so consider sexual ethic.

Where do people come from?

You know, where does life come from?

So if we were to consider these people have become a culture of death, then you would see it clearly demonstrated in the very place of life being turned into a place of death.

So you see a disrupted sex ethic throughout all cultures and all times is the clearest place, a place where you can just see, look, that is off.

Because that is meant for life.

And yet we see in it patterns of death.

Does that make sense?

So we see that this Canaanite world has this brutally disrupted sexual ethic that Judah just begins to participate in and norms against and lives as though this is the true sex ethic of the world.

Although he ought to know better.

And we'll see that it is uh particularly women who become victimized by these deranged sexual ethics.

Now, why would that be?

Well, women are uh where people come from.

They're the ones that that give birth.

They're they're where life and and humans and and people come from.

All of you.

I remember after our first child, after seeing my wife give give birth, and then I left the hospital and went to the grocery store to grab some things, and I was looking around at all the people and thinking, how are there so many of us?

Because that's no way to.

And yet, all of you come from a woman.

And so there is a distortion.

And that asymmetry, when this power of life gets turned uh uh to a pattern of death, it It's particularly hard on women, and we see that in this story.

So, Judah marries a Canaanite woman.

He has three sons: Ur, Onan, and Shelah, with this Canaanite woman.

Ur is so evil that the Lord kills him.

First warning of our story today.

Don't be so evil that the Lord kills you.

Now, when that happens, Tamar, excuse me, I didn't explain this.

Judah marries U, his oldest son, to a woman named Tamar.

Now, Ur is so evil that Ur is killed.

And so now Tamar is a widow.

Now, what happens is when she is widowed, she would then be married to the next brother in line because she has the right to the heir of Judah.

This is her right as having married the oldest son.

So the responsibility of the next son in line is to take her as a wife and conceive with her.

And now that son would not be the heir of the younger brother, but would be the heir of the oldest brother who has since died.

And so the incentive structures are not aligned.

Because Onan, who's the middle brother, thinks, look, I gotta raise this kid and uh, you know, save up and pay him through school and all the things that come with children.

And I don't even get an heir out of this.

But the air is just goes to my my dead oldest brother.

And so this son that I will have will actually stand in line in such a way where he will be a threat to my inheritance.

And so each time that they go to conceive, he spills his semen on the ground, and the Lord uh condemns him for that and kills Onan.

So that's two brothers who are killed for their wickedness.

Tamar is twice widowed so far in the story because of the evil of the sons, and her right to the heir of Judah is being denied over and over again.

Okay, so what we see happen there is a sexual pattern between Onan and Tamar, in which Onan is refusing to receive the responsibility that comes with his sexual relationship.

It is technically irresponsible sex.

That's what's taking place between Onan and Tamar.

In this pattern, this is like a perfect little microcosm of our culture's whole progress through the sexual revolution, which is a removal of responsibility from the sexual relationship.

We are trying in all ways possible to separate those two things.

We see that this is the very pattern that Onan is operating in.

So we see this in our culture in all realms from just hookup culture, which is a way of saying there is no relational responsibility here.

We can simply use one another and then move on from one another.

We see this clearly in pornography, which is the perhaps like a maximal hookup culture, total irresponsibility, the sacrifice of one for and the uh not even participation, but just mere gazing of another.

We see this in the LGBTQ movement in our culture.

An acronym only held together by that which it stands against.

There's no internal coherence to the acronym.

And what it stands against is sex which could lead to life.

This brings unity to the acronym.

Sterilization of the sexual relationship.

It is lifeless and necessarily irresponsible in that regard.

If this were Avatar, it would be the man in the Marines who tries to shoot and kill the tree of life.

This is what holds them together.

And so the result of this sexual pattern is death.

Now, where do you normalize?

Who do you normalize with?

Hira?

That this just looks like an ordinary expression, an ordinary means of participating in your sexual relationships?

Do you normalize with the ordinary Canaanites?

Tamar is twice widowed.

Judah says to Tamar, his daughter-in-law, remain a widow in your father's house till Shelah, my son, grows up.

For he feared that he would die, like his brothers.

So Tamar went and remained in her father's house.

So Judah comes to Tamar.

Judah's responsibility then is to marry Tamar to his third, final, and youngest son, Shelah.

That is the right that Tamar has.

But Judah thinks Tamar is like a bad omen.

Every son I marry to her dies.

And so he's fearful of marrying off his third and final son to Tamar.

Now look at the blindness.

He doesn't see what has resulted in the death of my two oldest sons.

It's their wickedness.

He probably didn't see it because I think if he were to look at his oldest sons, he would say, They live just like me.

And we'll see that he uh adopts the same patterns as his sons as the story moves on.

So Tamar is sent back home to her father's house to live twice widowed and to await, although never to receive, the marriage to Judah's third and final son, Shela.

She is being deceived and taken advantage of, twice widowed and now rejected.

Genesis 38, 12.

In the course of time, the wife of Judah, Shua's daughter, died.

So Judah's wife dies.

When Judah was comforted, he went up to Timna to his sheep shears, he and his friend, the Edulamite.

Now, when Hira shows up, uh in it in any next phase of the story, it's like, okay, things are gonna not go well again.

So Judah's wife dies, the mother of Ur, Onan, and Shelah.

And it's time for the sheep to be sheared.

And this would coincide with a Canaanite festival season.

And it was typical during the festival season for cult prostitutes to.

I mean, this is not atypical, you know, like you read a story about uh the Super Bowl and the city is is filled with prostitutes, or the um that's the only one I can think of.

So it was also considered a fertility ritual, as though um sleeping with a cold prostitute would uh sort of guarantee a more fertile result in your harvest and from your flock of sheep.

So Tamar, Judah's daughter-in-law, who's been estranged, hears that Judah is coming down for his sheep to be sheared.

And so she positions herself along the way.

She dresses herself as a cult prostitute, veils her face, and uh we can understand that she was so confident in Judah's character that she need only position herself on the way.

So that's what she does.

She knew that she had been cheated and rejected, and that she had a right to Judah's heir.

So she was right about Judah's character, and he sees her along the way.

And as he sees her along the way, uh they make a deal together, and uh he says, uh how much, and she says, one goat.

Uh and uh for for this uh gosh, the these times are getting outrageous how much they're adding up.

The amount of times that we see we're going to need a goat to cover up this sin.

We're going to need a goat to make this sin and deception work.

We see this with um Jacob's deception of his father Isaac by dressing himself as a goat.

We see this with the goat being killed to dip Joseph's coat in the blood, and the deception the deception is covered over by a goat.

And here the sin of sleeping with this cold prostitute, who is Tamar, is covered over by a goat.

This time, however, the goat isn't there.

And when the goat's not there, it means it won't be hidden long.

As you all know.

As the old saying goes.

He said, What pledge shall I give you?

She replied, Your Signet, your signet, and your cord, and your staff that is in your hand.

So he gave them to her and went into her, and she conceived by him.

Now, what of Tamar's deception here?

What are we going to do with that?

Well, uh, the writer of Genesis writes in just a couple of verses later, and what Tamar did was bad, and you shouldn't do that.

No, he doesn't.

He doesn't write that in.

You know, there's no moral commentary about this.

It's very strange.

A lot of times I wish there were in the Bible uh, you know, uh some other book that wrote down like that bad, good along the side, but there's not.

We have just the one.

You know, in an upside-down world, sometimes upside-down things flip it back over.

And Tamar is acting in an upside-down way, she's acting deceptively, and she will flip things back over.

But you know, this story coming right before the story of Joseph in Potiphar's house, rejecting the advances of Potiphar's wife.

It just is stands in such stark contrast because Joseph was suffering far more than Tamar.

And yet he does not resort to this deception.

Now it goes without saying that Joseph was suffering far more than Judah.

So neither of these characters seem to be like, oh, yeah, this is the one who's acting rightly, this is the one who's acting wrongly.

Oh, there is it is a world of deception, in which it seems as though there is no way out of this world of deception.

So he gives to her his signet uh and the cord that a signet would have hung on and his staff.

His staff, his authority, his signet, his name.

He gives, instead of the goat, he gives his name and his authority to sleep with this cult prostitute.

Let us understand something about sex.

If something is of high value, that means that it either produces something unthinkably good or it is incredibly costly.

Sex is of high value.

Which means that it produces something incredibly good or it is extremely costly.

It is only pretending to try and devalue such a thing, to make it merely an experience or expression of something that happens within you.

So there's a bit of a comedic moment where Judah says to his friend Hera, hey, take the uh um goat, and could you mind dropping off that goat with that cold prostitute along the way?

And Hira, you know, he's a good guy.

He'll take care of things for you.

So he's like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll take the goat.

I was headed down that way anyway.

If we learn anything about Hira, it's that friends that um can get you into problems like this uh can't get you out.

So Hira uh takes the goat and is wandering around the town, and she's like, she's not there, she's not there.

Uh, and asks the man around, and he's like, hey, the cold prostitute who is here?

They're like, there's no cold prostitute that's ever been here.

And he's like, Are you sure?

And they're like, yeah.

We'd I think we'd know.

So he comes back and he says to Judah, Hira comes back and says, Judah, she was not there.

And the men of the town even said that there was no cult prostitute who had ever been there.

And Judah, thinking quickly on his feet, says, uh, well, let's not go back there again and try and give it.

Um, just let her have those things uh that were mine, because we'll be laughed at.

That was his reasoning.

If we go back again, we'll be laughed at.

Look at the moral compass of Judah.

What frames his sexual ethic?

It is just what will the Canaanites laugh at me about?

What will the Canaanites think make me look think makes me look foolish and silly?

This is the the whole of his moral compass had been dissolved into what the Canaanite norms were.

And the only punishment that he could receive from that world is just shame from it, looking like a fool, being laughed at in that world.

This is the way that we enforce sexual ethics.

You're thinking very prudishly.

We could advance that a little bit.

You're you're thinking, oh, oh.

Oppressively by not acknowledging the reality of the Canaanite's sexual ethic.

An upside down world, sometimes upside down things, flip things back over.

His entire moral compass had been the opinions of his peers.

Genesis 38, 24.

About three months later, Judah was told, Tamar, your daughter-in-law, has been immoral.

Moreover, she is pregnant by immorality.

And Judah said, Listen to this, bring her out and let her be burned.

This is Judah's answer.

Now, there's a lot in that response.

One is just the cultural double standard, which, as I said, when the sexual ethic gets distorted, it comes out on women.

And we see that so clearly here.

Let her be burned.

Second, we can see that there's an ordinary his incentives.

Look, he thought that Tamar was a bad omen and didn't want to marry his youngest son off to her because he thought that she would result in him dying again, like what happened with her first with his first two sons.

And so he sees here, oh man, great.

She's been immoral.

Now I don't really have to make a decision.

We can just have her burned, and this whole thing with Tamar can be over.

Now, if we were in a if if I were back at CU Boulder, which is just over there, and I was in a Bible as lit class, then, which is not good.

And what would happen is I would be given a copy of this, and and we would take it down and we would we would read through this copy in the Bible as lit class, and the professor would stand up front and they would say, look at the misogyny of the scriptures.

How self-evident it is that this uh the Bible, this monument to the patriarchy, uh results in uh terrible and tremendous harm towards women.

And then everybody in class would go, Ah, I do see.

I never even heard the story of Judah and Tamar in my Sunday school class, which our kids aren't right now.

So they'd have a point there.

Um but there's a uh and then in we'd see, see it look look at this great patriarch, Judah, from whom the line of Christ comes says, Let the woman be burned.

Oh.

These are foolish readings.

These are foolish readings.

You know what else our Lord says about interactions like this?

In Hosea 4, 14, he says, This I will not punish your daughters when they play the whore, nor your brides when they commit adultery.

For the men themselves go aside with prostitutes and sacrifice with cult prostitutes, and a people without understanding shall come to ruin.

So there's an element of this where the Lord looks at this, and we can say, Tamar has not been acting well.

And the Lord says, I'm not punishing her.

He might say to Judah, I'm not punishing her, because look at you.

Look at what you have done, and that she is borne the brunt of.

Now the turn.

In Genesis 38, 25, as she was being brought out, she sent word to her father-in-law, by the man to whom these belong, I am pregnant.

And she said, Please identify whose these are, the signet and the cord and the staff.

What a moment.

You know, she says it so well and so clearly, by the man to whom these belong, I am pregnant, please identify whose these are, the signet and the cord and the staff.

Why did it come out so well?

Because she had been practicing that line for the past three months, you know.

Oh, right when that baby bump popped, she thought it's go time.

Now, remember, there was no goat to cover the deception.

The truth reveals itself.

Our sexual sins are so often private, hidden sins.

The nature of pornography is this private, hidden sin.

There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.

There is no secret that will not be made known.

The truth is not something you want to pit yourself against.

The truth reveals itself here.

Judah identified them in verse 26 and said, She is more righteous than I, since I did not give her to my son Shelah, and he did not know her again.

Tamar gives birth to twins.

Their names are Perez and Zara.

There's a bit of a strange birth story with the twins, one that you would think would be recorded in a family history and is here.

And it is Perez who ends up being the firstborn of the twins.

Perez, upstream of the line of David.

Upstream of the line of Jesus Christ, our Lord.

What do we do with a story like this?

What's the moral of the story?

And that verse in Hosea gives this diagnosis.

It says, A people without understanding shall come to ruin.

Now, this is a whole world.

In this family, it had become just this disaster of disaster upon disaster of people without understanding.

Nobody operating according to the truth.

What hope is there for a people like that?

You know what it's like to be in a family that's experiencing dysfunction and you and you can't, it's like, what do we what would someone even have to say to correct this?

This is our world.

How do you flip this back to where it is right or in its rights?

Once again, we see a story in scripture, and we are pressed deeply into a corner where we realize we would have to be saved.

Somebody else would have to come in and perform a rescue, would have to account for all of the unrighteousness and somehow make it work for righteousness.

So a story like this, it should cause us to be warned.

Be warned of how susceptible we are to adopting the sexual ethic of our age and the death that that results in.

We should be fearful of how easily we can just find that normal and ordinary.

And we should look forward and see, look, this is a dangerous game to be playing.

And we should consider that God saves sinners.

That this is the heart of our story.

That God saves sinners.

Like you and like me.

With hidden sexual sins, with open sexual sins, God saves sinners.

And so we should move forward in hope that we can be saved, that He can work in our lives, that our hearts might be transformed, that in the background of dysfunction like this, what we see is, although you can't hardly see it by looking at it, but we see that the names of Judah and of Tamar and of their irresponsibly conceived son are recorded in Matthew chapter 1, verse 3, in the genealogy of our Lord.

Matthew 1:3

Forever.

So let us hope in the sovereign care of our Lord, in an upside down and dysfunctional place, with our upside down and dysfunctional hearts.

Let us hold fast to Him, find a warning in the story of Judah and Tamar, and next week we will find something worth admiring in the story of Joseph.

Are there any questions today?

Can't imagine that there would be.

Take dominion of the earth.

Now those are related things because it's hard to take dominion of the earth when it's just the two of you.

Because the earth is a very big place.

And so once you start weeding one portion, by the time you're on the other side of the earth, weeds are already grown up.

So you need a lot of people to do that.

So it's a it's a generative generational project, which means that God has uh normed humanity into these patterns, designed us to participate in these patterns.

These, even in the asymmetry in which we create life of a man and a woman, and the different responsibilities that we have in that generation of life, those patterns are part of the goodness of creation.

And so when we deny those patterns, we are participating in things which are not goodness.

Now, with regards to oh, the the Tamar, excuse me, the um Onan and Tamar example, Onon spilling a seed, um is used by some for an argument against birth control just generally.

Now, it's not useful as an argument against birth control for a married couple who is deciding the timing of their uh conception.

Because this was a perpetual and constant denial of Onan to take responsibility for the offspring which he ought to have participated in the creation of.

Now, imagine you can easily imagine a situation in which uh Onan is not denying that responsibility, and they're still unable to conceive.

That's not a sinful pattern.

That is not a reality.

That is a reality of the effects of sin in our world, but that is not a participation with sin.

Now that's an important distinction.

Because there are realities of sin in our world and of the effects of sin in our world.

And we see this narrative pattern throughout scripture.

You know, the mother of Samuel, Hannah, who's unable to conceive, the story of Sarah and Abraham, who are unable to conceive for so much of their life, the story of the mother of uh Samson, who's unable to conceive, this pattern throughout Scripture is uh clearly laid out uh that these are the effects of sin.

So, what is our responsibility when we see the goodness of the Lord and we see the effects of sin?

We do not norm on the effects of sin.

But instead we seek for our world to be brought back into the position of function.

It is a restoration of the world.

When Jesus heals the man with the withered hand, he does not come to the world and say, See this man with a withered hand, in order to norm his withered hand, all of your hands must be withered.

No, he restores the hand to the position of function.

The pattern of the Lord's goodness is a restoration, so that sin does not have the final answer.

So many people, I uh there are people, I'm looking into the eyes of people who I know right now who are struggling with having children and desire to.

This is this is not a that struggle is in no way a participation with sin.

It is an act of hope.

So, how do you live in a sinful world?

You don't participate in the patterns of sin, you participate in the patterns of hope.

To what end?

Well, what is the most finally hopeless thing?

It is death.

And where is our hope secured and accomplished?

It is in the death of Jesus on the cross, in which he killed death itself.

So we have an unshakable hope, even amidst the disasters of our upside-down world.

There's probably more to be said on this.

It was a long question.

If you ask that question and would like to, you know, reveal yourself out here in the world, I'd be happy to talk through it more with you.

Now let us take communion.

Paul writes, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.

That the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you, do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

The Lord gave us these words.

On the night before he was crucified, our Lord Jesus Christ was born.

And like us, he was born from people who were born from people who were born from people.

And in that lineage, towards the beginning, stand Judah and Tamar, terribly, grotesquely upside down in their relation to one another.

And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love him, to those who are called according to his purposes.

And we praise God that he entered into the corruptness of our world, that it might be restored, and we could have a hope in him.

His grace is sufficient wherever you find yourself.

It's absolutely sufficient that we might be restored.

Holy Father, I pray that you would bless this time of communion, that we would remember the glory of your sacrifice, that we would find a deeper hope in the messiness that the scripture so clearly places on display and know you entered directly into that, that that might give us a confidence to participate with you in the real mess of our lives in hope of restoration.

Lord, you see us as we are.

Help us to see you as you are.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.