Transcript for episode 1.
To listen to this episode: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/askingforme
Summary
Rob, a pastor, introduces an Advent series focusing on the women in Jesus’ genealogy. He emphasizes the importance of this series, highlighting how Jesus changes the way women are treated and respected. Rob reads from Genesis 38, telling the story of Judah and Tamar. He explains that this story, often overlooked or skipped, is crucial to understanding Jesus’ lineage and God’s redemptive plan. Rob discusses the wickedness of Judah, the desperation of Tamar, and how this story illustrates God’s justice and care for the oppressed. He draws parallels between this ancient story and modern issues of social justice, emphasizing the biblical mandate to care for those in need. Rob concludes by highlighting how Jesus aligns himself with broken people, offering redemption and inclusion in His family.
Introduction to the Advent series on women in Jesus’ genealogy
Rob introduces an early start to the Advent series, focusing on the women in Jesus’ genealogy. He emphasizes the relevance of this topic, pointing out that even in modern times, women are often not given the respect they deserve, and Jesus changes this dynamic.
— SERMON TRANSCRIPT BEGINS HERE —
I’m Rob. One of the pastors here. We’re starting our Advent series a week early, so maybe this is pre-Advent. It doesn’t really count as Advent. We didn’t do any Christmas songs. But we are going to start our Advent series so that we can look at all four or five of these women in Jesus’ genealogy, and we’re gonna dive in in that in a second.
But why pay attention for the next 30 minutes or so? Why does this matter? What aspect of our doubts and our fears about life and faith does this address? And I think the answer to that is, again, we’re looking at the women that are in Jesus’ genealogy, and the answer to that is even with all of our progress today in our culture, in our society, in our country, women are still denigrated.
Women are still not given the respect that they deserve, and Jesus changes that. And so that’s what one of the reasons why we want to look at this sermon series. So to do that, I’m just to remind you what the genealogy in Matthew says, and it’s striking because particularly in the first century, when you’re talking about your family line, it was always about the father.
It was always passed from father to son, father to son, father to son. But in Jesus’ genealogy, and this is kind of related, I mean, not only do we have five women in Jesus’ genealogy, but we also have a bunch of people that did a lot of horrible stuff, like the patriarchs.
If you’re familiar with those men’s stories, you know that the things that they did don’t really fit into nice Bible stories, right? And so if you’re still operating under the illusion that the Bible is about heroes of the faith, and we should try to live up to how they lived as heroes of the faith, that’s not how the Bible tells the story.
In fact, the Bible tells the story through series of broken people who continue to recognize their brokenness in their sin, repent of their sin, and then are shown the love of God in response. And you know what they did after that?
They sinned some more. And so this genealogy, it’s not a list of all the best people. That’s not who our Savior came from. He came from a list of broken people, and it includes Judah, the father of Perez, and Zera by Tamar.
And then it includes Solomon, the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz, the father of Obed by Ruth, and David, the father of Solomon, by the wife of Uriah. And right there you get even a clue that in this genealogy that it isn’t simply about here are the best people, because it points out by saying Solomon by David through the wife of Uriah, that Solomon, the king of Israel, was born out of an adulterous relationship.
It says that, that Jesus came from an adulterous relationship. And then finally, Joseph, the husband of Mary, an unwed teenage mother by whom Jesus was born, who was called the Christ. And so when we see that, we see that Jesus’s line, his story is not one of perfect people who did the right things and were the best of humanity.
And that’s our Advent series. And it shows us who Jesus is and why he came. So I’m gonna read this story of Tamar, and I’m gonna skip over the first section if you’re familiar with it. Yeah, you’ll know why I’m skipping over that first section.
I’ll reference it. But in Genesis chapter 38, starting in verse 11, and just to preface what is happening here is Tamar is, she is a widow two times over, and we’ll get to that before, about why that was in a second.
In the course of, I’m sorry, then Judah said to Tamar, his daughter-in-law, remain a widow in your father’s house till Shaelah, my son, grows up. For he feared that he would die like his brother, so Tamar went and remained in her father’s house.
In the course of time, the wife of Judah, Shaelah’s daughter, died. When Judah was comforted, he went up to Timnah, to his sheep shearers, he and his friend Hira, the dolomite, 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 Naim, which is on the road to Timnah,
for she saw that Shaelah was grown up and she had not been given to him in marriage, and 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 says, 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 Adelamite, 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 a name 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 that 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. And as she was being brought out, she sent word to him, father-in-law, by the man to whom these belong, I am pregnant.
And she said, please identify who these are, the signant and the court and the staff. Then Judah identified them and said, she is more righteous than I, since I did not give her to my son, Shalom. And he did not know her again.
In 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 it and tied the scarlet thread on his hand, saying, this one came out first.
But as he drew back his hand, behold, the 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 with the scarlet thread tied on his hand and his name was Zara.
Let’s pray together. Jesus, this is your word, as difficult as it is to take in, to understand. It’s your word and you promise to teach us through it. And so do that now. Come, Holy Spirit. Show us Jesus.
Show us the hope that we have, even in the most broken of stories.
And it’s in Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.
You have a favorite movie, but there’s one particular scene in that movie you want to fast forward through. You’re not going to watch it for any number of reasons. Maybe it’s inappropriate. Maybe it’s too violent.
Maybe it’s too sad, or it’s, you know it’s coming. And you’re like, I’m not going to watch that part. I want to get to my favorite part. So I’m going to fast forward through that part. Or maybe it happens when any movie you’re watching, you’re like, if you’re not familiar with it, and you’re like, oh, that’s what this is about.
Let’s kind of move past that. I mean, this is, this passage in the Bible is kind of like that. Right? It’s a passage where you’re like, oh, what is going on here? Let’s skip that. Kids, ear muffs, don’t listen to that story from the Bible, which of course make them want to read it more.
But this story of Judah and Tamar, it’s right after the story of Joseph being sold into slavery. And as soon as it’s over, in verse 39, we get back to Joseph. And we like that story, right, because it’s a story of overcoming adversity and God redeeming all of his people.
And it’s more clear cut. And we kind of skip over the parts about Potiphar’s wife. I mean, that’s a little, you know, let’s not pay attention to that part. We can fast forward that one, too. But this one, it may not be a story that you’re familiar with at all, even if you are familiar with the story of the patriarchs.
And remember, the patriarchs were the people that God chose to become his people. In fact, it’s even one of his people that Jacob that was named Israel, who became the people of God. And in this story, I don’t have time to go into it, but there’s tons of brokenness, tons of failures from this family that God has chosen to be his people, this family that we are all descendants of, those who claim Jesus as theirs.
And this broken family in this story, we see Judah. Now, Judah is the son of Jacob, and he is the third son of Jacob through Leah. And rereading Leah’s story this week, if you’re familiar with it, it’s just absolutely heartbreaking, and I won’t go into it.
But then we get to Joseph, his story, and how his brothers hated him, and they were jealous of him, and they wanted to kill him. And in fact, it was Judah in this story who’s the one who says, you know, why don’t we sell him into slavery instead of killing him?
And so, I mean, Judah may be a little bit of redemption on his part, but then we get to this, and this really awful story, and why is it here? What needs to happen? Why is this a key point in the biblical story?
And part of it has to do with Judah, and if you’re a student of biblical history, you’ll know that Judah becomes the representation of the people of Israel, particularly in the southern kingdom of Judah, where more of the kings remained faithful.
And why is it important that we understand what’s happening here? And also, at the end of Genesis, we see with Jacob’s blessing of his sons, he says about Judah that the scepter will never leave the house of Judah, meaning that the royal line will continue through the house of Judah, not any of the other sons.
That, and what we know, Jesus will be born through the line of Judah, and as we see here through Tamar, who was not Judah’s wife. And so, what do we need to understand here? A couple things before we get into the story itself is, in that section that I skipped over, the first 10 verses of the chapter, Tamar’s first two, her first two husbands were terrible men, and we don’t get a lot of, we don’t get any details about the first and not a lot of details on the second, but they were both put to death by the Lord is what the passage tells us. That their evil was so great that God made sure that they suffered the consequences of their evil. And so, we see the husband’s evil, Tamar’s husband’s evil.
We also see a reality of a sexual double standard where the men do what they want. And then, the other thing you need to understand to understand this passage is Levirite marriage. And what Levirite marriage is, is that if the husband, I mean, if the first born son dies, the second born son then needs to marry the first born son’s wife to preserve the family line.
And this was a standard that was set up for the people of God. And so, it was expected, it was the way things were supposed to happen, and it was the right thing to do. Because in this time, a widow was completely destitute. She had no one to care for her. She had no one who could provide for her, particularly a widow without children in Tamar’s case. And so, she had to have been cared for. And so, there was a system of justice for widows in this case.
And we see this throughout the Bible. We see that God pleads the case of the widow, the orphan, the poor, the oppressed. That God is always for those who are not able to provide for themselves. That this is a pattern of justice that we see laid out through the Bible.
And so, this Levirite marriage, this system set up to care for widows, it was just. It was right. It was biblical. It was to care for those who are in desperate need. And this is an important principle for us to understand.
If you’ve paid attention to some of the controversies in the American church lately, you know that there’s this controversy between social justice and biblical justice. And there are people on some sides who say that, oh, social justice isn’t biblical justice.
I don’t care what you call it. But if it’s just, if it’s right. And what this means is that if you, if I, if we the church, if we have the resources to care for others and we don’t, then we’re living contrary not only to God’s law, not only to the way that he has set things up, but we’re living contrary to how God created us.
We’re living contrary to our Imago Dei that we were created in the image of God. We are created to serve and care for others like him. So if, if you have the resources, if I have the resources, if we have the resources to care for the people that are in need and we don’t do it, then the Bible calls that wicked.
The Bible calls that evil. Bruce Waltke, I think he’s 90 something years old now. He’s a well-known biblical Old Testament scholar. He says this, he says “the righteous are willing to disadvantage themselves, to advantage the community.”
The righteous are willing to disadvantage themselves, to advantage the community. The wicked are willing to disadvantage the community, to advantage themselves. Do you hear that distinction? And it isn’t just like this is what you’re supposed to do. It is, this is what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to disadvantage yourself for the sake of the community, if you have the ability to do so. But, but this puts this in a biblical category and saying the righteous, the righteous thing to do.
And it’s more than just saying the right thing to do. And then the other side, if you don’t do this, you’re in the category of the wicked. And, and, and this, this puts justice in its right vantage point.
And here we see Judah and his wickedness. And so what happens in verse 11, it says then Judah said to Tamar, his daughter-in-law, remain a widow in your father’s house till Shalom, my son, grows up. And, and so what he’s saying is, is that I know that you’re supposed to marry Shalom and he’s not old enough, so just hold on, go back to your father’s house, go to your family.
It’s like saying, hey, don’t call us, we’ll call you. And then we see Judah’s wickedness here in this next line. It says, for he feared that he would die like his brothers. And, and, and so what Judah has done is blame Tamar for her husband’s death.
She must be cursed. This is something that she has done. This is her fault. And so he doesn’t want her to marry Shalom. He doesn’t want to do what he’s supposed to do, which provide for his daughter-in-law, provide for this widow.
He doesn’t want to live righteously. He doesn’t wanna live like he knows God. And so it goes, we see Tamar’s plan and we see more of Judah’s wickedness. And so Tamar’s plan was entrapment. Now, Tamar’s plan was, all right, I’m going to entrap my father-in-law.
I am going to have children so that I can be provided for. I am not just going to have children so that I can be provided for. I am going to trap him in his immorality. And so what she does is she dresses like a cult prostitute and I think some of the things that are striking here about this story is about what people see or don’t see.
Now, it says in verse 14 that Tamar put on a veil. So she covered herself up, she changed her appearance and when Judah saw her, he didn’t recognize her. And even more striking is the place where this happened, a place called Nanaim and that place means two springs or two eyes is a place where two eyes didn’t see.
They didn’t see what was happening. And it says that Tamar saw that Shayla had grown up and that she had not been giving to him in marriage. And Judah saw her and thought that she was a prostitute. And Judah didn’t see his wickedness.
Now Tamar, I mean, another aspect of the story which is striking is that Tamar goes to his place knowing that Judah’s on his way and dresses like a cult prostitute to entrap him. How did Tamar know that this would work?
This gets back to that sexual double standard. Tamar knew that Judah would seek to gratify himself whenever, with whomever he wanted. She knew that that was his nature. She knew that that was what he would do.
And so she lays out this plan and then in this plan, she says, what are you gonna give me? What are you gonna give me to be sure that you’ll make payment? And Judah offers a goat and then she says, but what promise do I have that this goat will be sent to me?
And she asked for his signant which hangs on a cord around the neck or maybe on the staff and his staff. And this signant that hung around the neck was a way that you could sign something or like if you were to roll it into some clay, you would say, that’s my signant.
This is what identifies who I am. And this is absolutely remarkable that Judah would actually do this, right? He’s like, here, take my signant, take the cord. She asked for the cord so that she couldn’t say that, so Judah couldn’t say, oh, the cord broke and it fell off.
He’s like, I’ve got the cord. I’ve got the signant. I’ve got my staff too. It’s like saying, here, I’ll give you my wallet. I’ll give you my car keys. She’s going to make sure that she can prove who it was that got her pregnant.
And Judah was willing to do it. I mean, back to the sexual double standards, we also see Judah’s uncontrolled passions, like whatever it takes. With this woman, he knows to be a cult prostitute. Judah did not see.
He didn’t see his wickedness. He didn’t see the evil. He didn’t see Tamar. Have you ever used the phrase I see you or had someone use that phrase, like I see you? No. And this is a phrase that’s popular in the African-American community and a friend of Mark and I’s Luke Bobo says it all the time and an African-American man who is a professor of ours and Daniel’s and leave it up to like a white guy to go do some research on a cultural phrase used by the black community, which I thought was kind of amusing. But it’s this phrase that whenever you do something and you want to like give someone props and you’re like someone’s done something that’s worthy of admiration and you’re like “I see you.”
And if you’ve heard this phrase, it’s an encouragement, right? It’s endearment, it’s saying I see you, I see what you’ve done, I see what’s worthy about your actions, I see you and for us what will it take for us to see?
Well, what will it take for us to see the places where we have lived wickedly? And in the context here, what will it take for us to see how we have failed to disadvantage ourselves for the sake of our community?
Judah doesn’t see, he has to be confronted, you know, and so what happens in verse 24 is that it’s found out that Tamar is pregnant and she’s a widow and so if she got pregnant, it was through immorality and so that is brought up to Judah, the father-in-law and Judah, he’s probably like, yes, good, I don’t have to worry about her anymore.
And his wickedness is, I mean, it…
It seems even more plainly here because he says, burn her. He says, take her out and burn her. And the Hebrew is just two words, take. burn, and this was reserved for the worst, the worst of crimes. Now, it was more common that someone who was guilty of some sin and immorality, adultery would be stoned, which is awful enough.
But burn, take, burn. Judah’s going down this path of wickedness that didn’t have to do with his sexual immorality.
It had to do with the fact that he was unwilling to care for this widow. Do you see the striking juxtaposition here? What happens when he sees that? And so, I mean, imagine this scene.
This is the powerful climactic scene of the story. Judah is told to bring Tamar out, to burn her so so that
They, they set up the wood, they have the stake that she’s going to be tied upon, and they’re bringing her out and she says, do you see these? Do you see this signet? Do you see this cord? Do you see this staff?
Whose are these? And the word here that’s translated says, please identify whose these are, the signet and the cord and the staff. And it’s identified, it’s another, it’s another seeing word, right? But, but it’s a word that requires examination.
So it’s not just, do you see this? Can you identify, examine, examine what this is and what it was, was Judah’s guilt. And then, the next verse, 26, then Judah identified them, Judah examined, Judah saw them, Judah saw himself.
Why is this such an important story? It’s because it is the story of redemption. It is the story of Judah recognizing his sin. It says Judah identified them and then he said, she is more righteous than I.
Judah says, she is more righteous than I. She is in the right. It’s, it’s striking here because so often in our church context, in the American church, we get these sins backwards.
We say sexual sin, that’s the worst.
And that’s not what happens here. In fact, that’s not what happens in other places in the Bible. In fact, that’s not how God operates. In Hosea, chapter four, verse 14, when Hosea is speaking from the Lord, he says to the people, after he’s outlined the failures of God’s people, he says to them, I will not punish your daughters essentially for their sexual sin.
I will not punish your daughters for their sexual sin because of your greater sin. And that’s what we see here with Judah and Tamar. This word where Judah says she is more righteous than I, it’s a Hebrew word.
that doesn’t just mean righteous, it means just, Sadeq. It’s a courtroom word. It’s a room that a judge would use as a verdict. It’s a room that says, that would be like acquitted. It’s this word that says, made righteous.
It’s a word that says that, where Judah says, my sin is worse than yours. It’s a word where he sees that Tamar is on the side of justice, that Tamar was seeking what was right. I mean, notice that it doesn’t, get Tamar off the hook.
It doesn’t say that she was right to do those things. It says that her sin was not as great. It points to the fact that Judah’s sin overshadows. And it’s like, why would we condemn Tamar and overlook the greater sin?
Why would we go to the woman here that’s been abused and ignored?
Men. Me.
Am I, are we on the side of justice?
Women.
Have you condemned yourself?
for your sexuality, for your sexual sin. So I included the passage from John Chapter 8, Woman’s Caught in Adultery.
And he says to her, where are they? Because no one condemns you. And Jesus says, neither do I condemn you. He says, go and sin no more. But he says, neither do I condemn you. And what we see Jesus doing here in the story of Judah and Tamar, and what we see in the genealogy of Jesus is more than redemption.
It is redemption. It is the beauty of taking something that’s broken, that’s marred, that’s ugly, and making it whole and making it beautiful. It is redemption, but it’s more than just redeeming your story.
It’s Jesus aligning himself with you. It’s Jesus saying that you are mine, I am yours. You are in my family. This is my family. This broken family, this is mine. I have made myself a part of you.
He’s made you yourself.
He’s made Himself, He is yours, you are His.
Mother, sister, daughter, Jesus sees you.
Let’s pray together.
Jesus, give us your eyes to see.
Give us your eyes to see redemption. Show us your Son.
Lead us to the place of righteousness, to caring for those who are not able to care for themselves. Lead us more importantly to the hope that we have in you. And it’s in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.
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Stay tuned for more in this series on the Women in Jesus’ genealogy through Advent and a special book offer! Coming soon.
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