Your King, Righteous, Savior, and Humble
Genesis: Foundations of Our Faith • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!
Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
We all want a humble leader. We are tired of leaders who are full of themselves and empty of compassion. In fact, it’s one of the primary qualities I look for in a candidate when I vote or when I am praying through who should get involved in a ministry. Humility is more important than a person’s skills or views or professional experience. Humility opens a person to other necessary qualities in a leader, such as an ability to listen, to learn, to admit when you are wrong, to forgive, to remove personal interest from the mission, to focus on others more than yourself. Humility and love grow together. If I am humble, I will seek the shalom of my neighbor without regard to my personal interest. We want leaders like that.
Where does humility come from? How does someone grow in humility? Humility is the effect of the realization that we are not God, that there are certain things only God can do. When you have failed, and God works in your life to redeem and restore what was lost by your failure, this leads to greater humility. This is what we see in Judah.
But why are we talking about Judah anyway? Chapter 37 ended with a cliffhanger. Jacob is grieving the death of Joseph, who is not really dead. He’s in Egypt, sold as a slave to the chief executioner of Pharaoh. What a cliffhanger! What will happen to him and will Jacob ever learn the truth? Moses takes a page out of Charles Dickens’ books and starts chapter 38 with a new plot line with Judah. Why?
Moses is adding to the portrait of messiah, the king of Israel that will save the world. The seed of a woman will restore the fruitfulness of God’s kingdom among all humans. And he will come through the family of Jacob.
Last week we met Joseph, the beloved son of his father, whose path to greatness would go through suffering. He is one part of the portrait of messiah. He is the suffering servant, a righteous man who will go down into death for the sins of his brothers. The portrait will be completed with a leader who will humble himself and willingly lay down his life for his brothers to provide atonement and redemption.
What we learn today from Genesis 38 is that God redeems us from sin, overcomes death, and restores our righteousness through an offering of atonement, and we should respond in humility.
Humility Grows out of Failure
Humility Grows out of Failure
The last time we met Judah, he had cooked up the plan to sell Joseph for a profit. Like Cain, he is not his brother’s keeper. He chose personal interest over brotherly love. But in chapter 38, things get even worse. His apathy toward his brother multiplies in the next generation.
The language of this chapter repeats the language of Genesis 3. This chapter is Judah failing the garden test, twice. The first is with the choosing of his wife.
It happened at that time that Judah went down from his brothers and turned aside to a certain Adullamite, whose name was Hirah. There Judah saw the daughter of a certain Canaanite whose name was Shua. He took her and went in to her,
The words “saw” and “took” in this combination are a repeat of Eve who saw the fruit of the forbidden tree and took some. This happens as Judah “went down” from his brothers. This is a literary parallel to Joseph, who has gone down to Egypt (39:1). Joseph’s was a geographic move. In Judah’s case, as one Jewish translation says it, Judah has been demoted from his brothers. He has reached his downfall.
And that is where he sees forbidden fruit, a Canaanite woman, and takes her. This also reminds us of Genesis 6, in which powerful “sons of elohim” saw the beautiful daughters of men and took them as wives. This is all about lust and power leading to an unholy union. Abraham’s family was not supposed to marry among the Canaanites.
The fruit of this unholy union is three sons. They are all born in an place called Chezib, which means deception or lie. So the picture is complete. Judah has gone down, been demoted or exiled from the family of Jacob, he has seen forbidden fruit and took it in a place of deception. And the fruit is bad fruit.
He takes a wife for his firstborn son, Er. Her name is Tamar, which means “date palm tree”.
But Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord put him to death.
Just like that. No explanation. So I won’t try.
Then Judah said to Onan, “Go in to your brother’s wife and perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her, and raise up seed/offspring for your brother.”
This introduces what will become a law in Torah that we would think is pretty strange. If a man dies before he and his wife have children, his brother must carry on the dead brother’s name by having children with his brother’s widow. The children of the woman will carry on his brother’s name and inheritance.
It seems strange, but this law is really an outworking of God’s plan to restore what was broken in the opening chapters of Genesis. The direct result of our sin against God is our sin against one another, specifically Cain’s sin against Abel. He refused to be his brother’s keeper, and he murdered him. So, the restoration of God’s kingdom cannot come without peace between brothers, and that cannot happen if we will not humbly seek the shalom of our brothers and sisters. And should they die, we will plant seeds of life in their name.
Onan does not. He will not be his brother’s keeper, and he wastes his seed on the ground.
And what he did was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and he put him to death also.
Judah’s family is a failure. This is not promising if the kingdom is supposed to come through him. Two dead sons, and now he is afraid that the third son will suffer the same fate. So, instead of giving Shelah to Tamar, he deceives her.
Then Judah said 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.
By the way, this whole chapter is a mini version of the rest of the book of Genesis. It is packed with little references to other events. Looking forward, Jacob will lose two sons, try to protect a third, and in the end it will be Judah that redeems and saves them all through his humble sacrifice. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
For now, Judah’s life plans and his family have ended in failure. And in the next verse, his wife dies. Not a great story if Judah is the hero. Will there be any redemption? Have you ever been there? All your plans completely failed, and wondering where redemption can be found?
Humility Grows from Realizing You are not the Hero of the Story
Humility Grows from Realizing You are not the Hero of the Story
What happens next is completely scandalous. Tamar figures out after a while that Judah is not going to fulfill his contract and provide Shelah as a husband. So, she takes matters into her own hands. She will make sure the seed of the line of Judah continues.
If we can get past the icky nature of what she does, there is a significant biblical principle here. If you’ll allow me to tell this part of the story using the imagery of the Hebrew text, here’s how it goes:
Tamar, the date palm tree, was told her father-in-law is going up to Timnah. Timnah comes up again later we read the book of Judges and see Samson replay this whole episode at Timnah. But that’s another sermon. Tamar, the date palm tree, carries on the family business of Jacob & Sons, using garments to deceive her father-in-law.
she took off her widow’s garments and covered herself with a veil, wrapping herself up, and sat at the entrance to Enaim/opening of two eyes, which is on the road to Timnah…
The entrance to Enaim means literally “the opening of two eyes”. So, this whole episode should remind us of the Garden test in Eden.
But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of [the fruit of the tree] your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Now Judah, for the second time, fails the garden test. He sees the fruit of this date palm tree and takes it. But there’s the twist. Since he thinks she is a prostitute, she asks for payment. He offers her a goat. Since he doesn’t have the goat on him, he gives her collateral: his i.d./credit card (seal and bracelet) and most personal accessory (his staff).
When he sends the goat later on, and she’s not there, the goat escapes with its dignity in tact. But Judah realizes his shame. The woman, whoever she was, has his most personal items.
This part of the story makes us really uncomfortable. But two things have just happened. One is that Tamar has deceived the deceiver and succeeded in obtaining seed to continue the family line of Judah, something Judah and his sons had failed to do. The other is the introduction of this goat. Actually this is the second goat. Judah and his brothers had killed a goat to cover up their sin with Joseph and Jacob in chapter 37. Now, Judah wants to cover up his new sin with another goat, but it doesn’t work, and the goat escapes with its life. Judah fails to atone for his sin.
Unknowingly, he completes the picture of the Day of Atonement. One goat’s blood cleanses the stain of sin, and the other goat bearing the sins of the people into the wilderness frees them from the power of sin (Leviticus 16).
Judah is not the hero of the story. In a weird, uncomfortable way, Tamar is. More on that in a minute. For the time being, think about what’s happening in Judah. All his attempts to fulfill his lust have ended in failure, his sin remains, and now he is ashamed of being found out. The chapter started with him “going down” from his brothers. He has hit rock bottom.
Humility comes from realizing that we are not the hero of our own story. When all our attempts to fix our problems fail…when we cannot atone for our own sin…this teaches us humility. There are things we just cannot do. Problems we cannot fix. And we cannot atone for our own sins. We can ask forgiveness, we can make restitution. But it doesn’t cleanse the stain. We need God to do that. The unrighteous cannot cleanse themselves. It is like cleaning a stain with a filthy rag. We need someone righteous to cleanse us first.
Which brings us to the final act of this chapter.
Humility Grows through Confession and Repentance
Humility Grows through Confession and Repentance
Three months after this unfortunate event with Judah and Tamar, people start to notice this widow woman is pregnant. When word gets back to Judah, he’s ready to play the part of the self-righteous father.
About three months later Judah was told, “Tamar your daughter-in-law has been immoral. Moreover, she is pregnant by immorality.” And Judah said, “Bring her out, and let her be burned.”
Tamar’s response cuts like a knife.
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.”
She brings out Judah’s i.d. and personal accessory and she uses the same words that Judah and his brothers had used with their father Jacob when they deceived him with Joseph’s robe dipped in blood, “Please identify if this is your son’s.” Judah is cut to the heart.
Then Judah identified them 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.
There is confession and repentance. He confesses his unrighteousness and that justice was done for his sin by a righteous one. This is not to say that what Tamar did was righteous. But she had been wronged and was seeking justice. And what she does succeeds where all of Judah’s plan failed. She produces seed for his family line.
In fact, she gives birth to twins. The two wicked sons of Judah have been replaced by two sons born to a righteous woman, and a foreign woman at that. The date palm tree that was the tree of testing has become a tree of life in the family of Judah. What was lost has been restored. God redeemed this sinful act and overcame death.
Judah’s humiliation is complete. He has to confess to everyone that he was wrong and she was right. This is the power of confession and repentance. When we confess our sins, we bring them out into the light. When our dark, hidden, secret, dirty parts are exposed to the light, they can be cleansed, and we are freed from them. They have less power when we expose them for what they truly are. And God even redeems them to shine light on our path moving forward. We know what pits to avoid.
Judah is not the same man after this. The sex-hungry, self-seeking, profiteering brother, son, and father was humbled through failure: a failed family and a failed attempt to atone for his sin. After he has confessed and repented, He will go back to his father’s household, freed to love and serve his brothers. He will lay down his life in place of his brothers. He will become the leader the family truly needs.
And he becomes the pattern for his family line through Perez, the son of the righteous foreign woman Tamar. The line includes David, Hezekiah, Manasseh, all kings who follow the same trajectory. They make big mistakes and commit grave sins, but they humble themselves before God and He restores their kingdom.
But the messiah to come would put all the pieces together. He would be righteous, having salvation, and humble.
Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!
Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
Jesus is the fulfillment of the Judah and Tamar narrative. This just shows the humility of God. He ordained that a foreign woman become the hero of the origin story of the kings of Israel, His chosen people. And it didn’t end there. The same family line includes Ruth, a descendant of Moab, the line that came from the unholy union of Lot and his daughter. God chooses what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. Jesus is the suffering servant that fulfills the Joseph portrait for the messiah. And He is the humble, righteous leader that fulfills the Judah and Tamar portrait of the messiah.
“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
We have all failed the garden test. When we realize we are not the heroes of our own stories and we confess our sin, repent, and believe that Jesus is the hero who has atoned for our sins, God redeems us and overcomes death through the atonement Jesus has accomplished.
The best way to grow in humility is to think less about yourself and more about others. But this only goes so far. If I begin serving others and pouring myself out for them without any source of life filling me, I will get burned out and begin to think more about myself again. Instead, if we think less about ourselves and spend time abiding in Jesus Christ, He lives His life in us.
Communion
Questions for Discussion
What has been a highlight of your week? What was heavy this week?
What were you able to apply from last week’s passage, and what did you learn?
God, once again, does not make an appearance in Genesis 38. Is there anything we can learn about Him in this chapter?
What is God seeking in a leader among His people?
What do we learn about ourselves in this chapter?
Why does Genesis seem to spend so much time depicting deception in the narrative? What are we supposed to learn?
What patterns of human behavior are repeated in this chapter? What can we learn from that?
In what ways can we see the promise of redemption in this chapter?
How does Judah grow in humility, and what can we learn from that for our own lives?
How will you respond to this passage this week?
With whom can you share this passage this week?
