Tamar
Pastor Zach Pummill • November 22, 2020
Sermon Overview
GENESIS 38:1, 6–26
Tamar is the first woman mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus. Her story gives us a glimpse of how God worked to bring about redemption in the story of Judah and Joseph and ultimately in Jesus Christ. Tamar’s story is one that’s raw, unfiltered, and often confounding as to why it’s even in the Bible. Yet, when we see her story in light of redemption, it’s no wonder she’s mentioned among the women of Jesus’s genealogy – for God uses the righteous one to humble the proud.
Sermon Transcript
I can see the encouragement on all of your faces. Welcome to Advent 2020.
Today, we are beginning a new sermon series for the Advent season. And maybe Advent is something that's new to you. Maybe you've never been in a church that's recognized that Advent, or maybe it's just been a year and you could do for reminder. Advent is a special time of year in really the Christian calendar. Advent is traditionally the four Sundays leading up to Christmas. Now a quick confession is that we are starting Advent a week early because in December we are going to also have Marq's installation service. And I did not want to preach on Bathsheba during that special day.
And so we are starting a week before so that we can actually have four weeks in Advent, thinking about Advent and what it means for us. Now, just the word 'advent' simply means coming or arrival. The advent of something is when it finally arrives. And the season of Advent in the life of the Church is a season in which the church looks back at the events leading up to the first coming of Jesus, so that it can teach us how to wait as we look forward to the second coming of Jesus. And so it's both a time of hope, but also a time of seeing reality. Yes, we have hope in the Lord, Jesus Christ, but it invites us not to just stop there. It invites us to look forward in hope that we haven't arrived. You're not home. You don't belong here, you belong somewhere else. And so part of the reality of Advent is that it's a season in which it invites us to see the world as it is in all of its brokenness, in all of its tragedy, and not just minimize it and move on or not just gloss over it with some pageantry, but to see it for what it is, because it's an Advent that we remember that what the world needs and what you need is not just a different set of circumstances or a new situation. What the world needs is a savior.
Because the one thing that hangs over all of our heads is death, and we need one to come and rescue us. And so it's in that spirit that we enter into Advent this season. We remember that one has come and one is coming again. And this year, as we consider Advent, we're going to meet the mothers of Jesus. If you look at Matthew chapter 1, it gives us the genealogy of Jesus and it mentions a number of different women. And we're going to look at them and consider their stories and see how is it that their stories tell the gospel to us. And I assure you that despite appearances, they are incredibly beautiful and powerful stories.
They're stories that invite us to stop, slow down, not just pull out a neat little point, something to make us feel good in the season, but to really enter into these stories and think about them. It invites a deep, rich meditation. And we want to give it that this morning because the first mother we meet is Tamar.
Now you just heard Tamar's story. And you thought you had family problems, right? We see Tamar's story, and you thought to yourself, "What on earth does this have to do with the gospel?" And especially what does this have to do with Christmas? As though on Christmas Eve, you're like, "Come on, kids, let's gather around. Let's all be encouraged by the story of Judah and Tamar!" Because this story is raw. It's unrefined. It doesn't ask you what you think of it. It makes us uncomfortable. It gives you those awkward goosebumps. Why is it here? Because if you were asked to write your genealogy, write it out for the world to see, and for you to be remembered by forever, these are the stories and the names you don't include, especially in an image driven culture that we are, that we want to present ourselves in the best possible light with the best possible circumstances in the best possible situations. We have a story like this. These are the stories that we hide. These are the stories that embarrass the family. These are the stories that no one talks about, and we keep them hidden and unseen. But not Jesus. Jesus does the complete opposite.
In fact, the Bible goes out of its way to mention these names and the stories that are attached to these names. Because women were not mentioned in ancient genealogies. They had no genealogical value. And yet here Jesus is mentioning these names, especially the names of women attached to stories like this. He puts these names and their situations right out in front of us. And he invites us to investigate and take a closer look. Why? It's because they reveal to us what God is like. It's these stories and these names that reveal the nature, the character, the mercy, the love, and the patience of God across the scope of human history.
It's the genealogy of Jesus that reminds us that the Bible is not a collection of stories about good people that teach us how to be good people. The Bible is a collection of stories that is far different. Jesus doesn't present us with a sitcom family, with a prerecorded laugh track, problems you can solve in 30 minutes, and everybody's always home for dinner. He doesn't have the Cleaver family. He doesn't present us with that. Instead, the Bible tells us the story about a good God that steps into this broken world and uses broken people to bring about his purposes. He's a real God for a real world. So he's not embarrassed by these names, which means he's not embarrassed by yours either. He's not embarrassed by your story. He's not embarrassed by what happened to you. He's not embarrassed by that thing that you did. He invites you to draw close, just like every sinner in his genealogy.
He invites us to draw near, especially in a strange story like this, because in this strange, weird story of Tamar, it reminds us that God doesn't just use broken people, he changes them. He heals them. It's in this story that it teaches us how God operates to actually bring real redemption, real restoration, and real renewal into a broken world for broken people.
But I don't want to move too quickly on from that statement, because I want you to address your skepticism and your cynicism this morning. And I have to address mine. And it's the cynicism and skepticism we have to the proposition that people can change. Do you believe that? Or are people just the way they are? Your husband is just the way he is. Your wife, that's how she's always been. Your mom, your dad, you're going into the holidays and you're dealing with people that will never change. And you're always going to have to deal with the same situation. We live in a world that begs us over and over and over again, to just shed hope that anything for us could change, any relationships could change, any relationships could have restoration and redemption.
Are you skeptical this morning as to whether or not people can change? I present to you the story of Tamar. What does she teach to us?
When I said yesterday on Realm, when I sent out a little pro tip that this story is placed in a really strange spot. It's placed in a place you might not expect, because this happens in Genesis 38. But if you look at Genesis 37 to Genesis 50, all of that is the story of Joseph in Egypt, except this one chapter of Judah and Tamar that slid right in there. And on the surface, it looks as though these two stories have nothing to do with each other. Plenty of scholars would even say they have nothing to do with each other. It's almost like they found the story of Judah and Tamar, they slipped it in there before it went off to the publisher real quick.
And yet these stories have everything to do with each other. If we want to truly meet Tamar, then we cannot understand Tamar apart from Judah, and we cannot understand Judah apart from Joseph. And what I mean by that is that we, in order to appreciate Tamar and her significance and the broader impact that she has, then we need to see her inside of this larger story.
So this morning I would invite you just to sit back and get settled in, put your spiritual feet up because we need to just sit in this story for a second. I want us to walk through it today and I want you to see Judah. I want you to see Tamar. I want you to see this story in this situation and not glance over it very, very quickly, but instead to look at it with an investigative lens. And the first one I want you to look at and see is Judah. What's he like?
If we go back to Genesis, chapter 37, it's when Joseph, the youngest brother of the twelve, Judah's brother, is sold into slavery in Egypt. All the brothers see Joseph coming their way. They don't like Joseph because Joseph is the favorite of their father, Jacob. They despise him, they hate him. So they come up with a plan to kill him. And at first they were just gonna kill him, throw him in a pit, say it was an accident and the problems dealt with. But instead one of them has the idea where they realize that if they're going to get rid of him, they might as well make a little bit of money off of it. And so whose idea was that? It was Judah's. It was Judah's idea to sell Joseph into slavery in Egypt. It was Judah who sold Joseph. And Genesis 37 ends with Joseph riding off in the caravan, looking back at his brothers that just sold him, as he goes into slavery in Egypt, perhaps never to see them again.
And then chapter 38, our chapter, Judah leaves the rest of his brothers behind. Why? It's probably hard to look at your dad whenever you sold his favorite son. Probably hard to deal with that kind of guilt and shame. So what's he do? He goes his own way. The prodigal runs, he leaves his family. He goes off on his own to do his own thing. Why? Well, he marries a Canaanite woman. Never even includes his father, which was customary. He's doing what Judah wants to do. And so Judah and this Canaanite woman, they have three sons, Er, Onan, and Shelah. And then, then in verse 6, we encounter Tamar. Judah takes Tamar to be the wife of his oldest son, Er. But right after they married Er dies because it says that he was evil in the sight of the Lord.
And then we get to verse 8 where Judah tells his second son Onan, he says, go into your brother's wife and perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her and raise up offspring for your brother. Now, what duty is Judah referencing here? He's telling him, he's referring to what was known as the levirate law. Levirate just comes from the word "levir", which means brother-in-law. So it's literally the brother-in-law law. And what it stipulated was that if a brother died unexpectedly without children and his wife was widowed, then it's the next brother's responsibility to marry the widow and provide an heir to provide offspring for his brother. But an important point is that that son, that child, that heir would not be treated as the son of the living brother. He would be raised and treated as a son of the deceased brother.
And so all of this going on is very foreign to us, correct? Some of you are thinking, thank God, right? Because you think about your in-laws. But it's really about honoring and protecting the family. How so?
Well one, childlessness was a source of shame for any woman in the ancient world. And so if a woman's husband dies unexpectedly, it's no fault of her own. She's in a situation where she has no children. And so it's a way to provide her with children and to give her an opportunity to not live with that shame over her head. Also keep in mind, this is for the protection of the widow. They didn't have insurance plans. They had children. It was children that would grow up and take care of their elderly parents, a widowed mother, a widowed father in their old age. But it's also about honoring the deceased brother because instead if he died without children, it's a way to honor him and continue his family line in the face of that tragedy. And the person responsible to make sure all of this was accomplished, to make sure all of this took place, and oversaw all of the proceedings was the father-in-law. And so in this case it was Judah.
And so Judah marries Tamar to Onan, his second son. But Onan is having nothing to do with it, because it says that when we get to verse 9, it says that Onan knew that the child wouldn't be his. And so he refused to provide offspring for his brother. He knew the child wouldn't be his. And then in verse 10, it says what? It says that what he did was evil in the sight of the Lord and the Lord put him to death. So what was so evil that was going on?
Well, if you think about Onan's story for a second, he's incredibly selfish. If you look at Onan, if he gives Tamar an heir, what happens? His inheritance goes down because right now it's just him and Shelah, it's split two ways. If he has a son with Tamar, then that means that he gets less. It means that he's no longer the front of the line for the family name. But it also look at the way that he treats Tamar. He goes into her to get what he wants, but he doesn't give her what she wants and needs. He uses her, treats her like property.
But also remember the promises that hover over this family. Remember the promises of God, given to Abraham, that were given to Abraham and then to Isaac, and then Isaac to Jacob, and then Jacob to all of his boys. The promises that hang over this family is that God said, "I am going to make you a multitude. I'm going to make you great on the earth and through you I am going to bless the world." And so what does faith in the face of those promises look like? What does it mean to respond in faith to those promises? You have babies! You have kids! It doesn't take that much theological effort or heavy lifting to figure out what that looks like. You just have babies, that's it, if you want to hold fast to these promises. Yet, Onan shows zero regard for Tamar. And he shows zero regard for the promises of God, his unwillingness to have children with her, was simply a complete rejection of the plans and purposes and promises of God.
That's because the Onan's just looking out for number one. Onan's just doing what he wants to do, trying to get what he wants. He sounds a lot like his dad, Judah.
And then we have Tamar, twice married, twice widowed, and without a child. And now Judah is going to add insult to injury because Judah tells Tamar to go to her father's house until his third son, Shelah, is old enough to be married to her. But he has no intention of giving Tamar to Shelah. In verse 11 it says that Judah is actually afraid that Shelah would die if he gives him to Tamar. Why? Because it's Tamar's fault. Essentially it's referencing that he thinks that Tamar is cursed. She's an ill-omened woman, cue the “Maneater” by Hall and Oates. She's gonna get ya. And he's afraid that if he gives Shelah to her, then he too will die, just like Er and Onan, because something must be wrong with her.
So instead of seeing the wickedness of his sons, the way that the Lord sees it, he blames Tamar for their deaths. She must be the problem. And so he holds her in contempt and he shames her by sending her back to her father, instead of taking care of his own daughter, his own daughter-in-law, waiting so that he could give her to Shelah, he sends her back so that he doesn't have to deal with it. He writes her off and he kills her in his heart. But eventually Tamar realizes that Judah isn't going to give her to Shelah. Shelah comes of age, the time has come and gone in which this would have taken place.
And Tamar realizes she's been lied to. And she's desperate. She's simply at the mercy of Judah. Yet it's the mercy that he refuses to give to her. She's young, she's probably in her early twenties, facing a life of shame, loneliness, childlessness, watching all the other kids grow up. The shame of being that woman and ultimately facing the reality of being forgotten. And so when she hears that Judah is going to be close by in a season in which all of the shepherds came and they sheared their sheep, she devises a plan. And during this season, there was all forms of debauchery, and paganry, and excess, and celebration, and partying that would go on because it's basically a time in which you count your money, for shepherds. And so all of this would be going on.
And so Tamar dresses as a cult prostitute. And boys and girls, we've mentioned before, that a prostitute is someone who sells their kisses. They sell their affection to someone else. And this is what Tamar does, she dresses up as a cult prostitute and she waits. But she doesn't wait for anybody, she waits for Judah. And the implication is that she knows her father-in-law well. And so he comes along, Judah goes into Tamar, but it must've been an impulsive because he doesn't have anything to pay her. And so he gives her collateral instead and he gives her his cord and his signet, which was a necklace, which was basically a piece of, it's a stone that they would roll over clay. It's his signature. And he gave her his staff, which represented his authority. A modern day way of thinking about it would be that Judah gives her his wallet and all of his passwords.
And so afterwards, Judah leaves, he goes and gets the agreed upon payment, which was a goat. And he sends his to pay this woman, but this woman is nowhere to be found. And he tells his friend what? He tells his friend to stop looking for the woman when he realizes that they can't find her. Why? Because he's afraid of being found out. Judah literally says, "I don't want anyone to know, lest I become a joke." And that's an important thing to note based on what happens next.
Because three months later, someone tells Judah, "Your daughter-in-law Tamar is pregnant." And they say she was pregnant because she must've been promiscuous and unfaithful and immoral. And Judah flies into a rage. And we know that he flies into a rage because he says immediately that she needs to be burned, which was an excruciatingly cruel form of execution, even for the ancient world. He immediately says for his pregnant daughter-in-law to be burned at the stake. He's already killed her in his heart, he might as well do it in reality. And yet, do we not see the double standard that whenever he thinks Tamar has been immoral and dishonored his family and acted shamefully, well, she deserves death. But whenever Judah has an opportunity to talk about his sin and his immortality, well, that can remain nice and tucked away and hidden.
And it says that as they're dragging Tamar to the stake to burn her, she sends the signet and the staff to Judah. And she says this. She literally says, "These belong to the father. Do you recognize them?" These belonged to the father. Do you recognize them? She got him. He was found out. And Judah says in verse 26, he said, "She is more righteous than I." His world comes crumbling down because that's a big statement for a man to make of a woman in the ancient world. She is more righteous than I. She's in the right, I'm in the wrong. And he actually uses judicial language. He says, "She is innocent. I'm the guilty one, I'm the guilty one. I should be there", because he finally sees her and he sees himself.
All this time, she was the one that he robbed. She was the one that he blamed. She was the one that he rejected. She was the one that he disgraced. And yet in this moment, he realizes that she is the one that's cared far more about the family line than anybody else. She's the one that held onto her right and her privilege to bear the line of Judah. She cared more than else, including Judah, even when he drove her to such incredible desperation. She was the one that risked death and humiliation to continue his line and hold fast to the promises that were given to this family. And so we see Tamar display an extraordinary act of faith at her own expense.
So let's get back to our question this morning. Can people really change?
Well, Judah certainly did, because this moment marks the beginning of an extraordinary change and transformation in Judah. From this point forward, you see a different Judah. You see him become something new.
Because remember I said you can't fully see Tamar, unless you understand Judah, and you can't fully see Judah, unless you understand the story of Joseph. Because a few years later during a famine, Judah and all of his brothers have to go to Egypt to get supplies and food so they don't starve. And Joseph recognizes them immediately. But they don't know him. And he conceals his identity and he undergoes this long, long, long period of testing of his brothers to see who they'd become after these decades had passed, to see who they'd become after all of these years. Are they different? Can he entrust himself to them? Can he reveal who he really is? He wants to see who and what his brothers had become.
And the testing gets so intense that eventually Joseph takes their youngest brother, Benjamin, the very son that replaced Joseph, and said, “I'm keeping him here as my slave.” And these are the 11 brothers, what are they going to do? This is the most powerful man on the planet, Joseph, the most powerful man on the planet at the time. What are they going to do, say no? He says, I'm taking your youngest brother and he's going to be my slave. What are they to do? And it's Judah that steps up, but it's a different Judah than we saw before. It's not one that negotiates a deal for his own gain.
It's Judah that steps up and he confesses all that they'd done in selling their brother all those years before. His heart breaks as he says all that they'd done wrong to their brother, how they deserve all of the punishment that they would face. He no longer hides his sin. He no longer pretends it's not there. He no longer tries to sweep it under the rug. He owns it. He takes responsibility for it and he confesses it. And he says that my father cannot bear to lose his youngest son again. It would kill him. And out of a love for his father and out of a love for his brother, it was Judah that said, “Take me. Take me instead, take my life for his.” And it says that Joseph was so moved, that he was no longer able to keep himself under control. He had everybody leave. He had everybody leave so it was just him and his brothers. And he lost control of his composure. And he says that it's me, it's Joseph. I am your brother. And he wept and wept and wept on the shoulders of his brothers.
And here it was, Judah of all people, that brought restoration to this family. It was Judah, the same Judah who sold his own brother, now offering his life for his brother. It was Judah, the prodigal son that left his family, now binding the family together through sacrifice. It was Judah, the one that hid his sin and his failures, now confessing them openly and honestly. It was Judah, the one who sold his brother with a cold heart, now melting the heart of the most powerful man on the planet with nothing more than his own contrition and humility. And how did all of that radical transformation take place? Where did all of it begin? It began with Tamar.
That's why this story is there. This moment where God used the one who was disgraced and despised and rejected to humble the one who was proud and selfish. And it was in that moment that God began a new process of transformation and redemption and healing. And Judah was reawakened to the promises of this God, for this family.
You see the gospel in this story? This is why Tamar points forward to how God operates and how he actually brings about his purposes.
You see how God foreshadows how he will use the One who was truly despised, the One who was truly rejected to humble the one who was proud, the one who is arrogant and the one who is the true prodigal, even me?
You see how God will you truly use the righteous one to humble the unrighteous one?
You see the innocent One who was marched to his death?
The One who took on the humiliation and was despised in our place because he cared about the promises of God for our sake, far more than we ever would?
And how through him, God begins a new process in us where the selfish one becomes the sacrificial one. Are you moved this morning by the One who was despised and disgraced and rejected? Because this morning, when you look at the cross, are you humbled by the One who is more righteous than you and I?
It's in this story we see that it teaches us that if we simply live for ourselves, my friends, then you are simply moving yourselves further and further away from the work of God in the world. But when you learn to sacrifice me for you, you from me, then we can know and trust that we are at the very heart of God's work in this broken world. But the only way that transition, that transformation, and that change can happen is when we are humbled by the One who is despised and rejected, the righteous one who is marched to his death.
This morning when you look at the cross, what do you see?
Let's pray.
