If you would turn your Bibles to the very first page of the New Testament, where the opening lines say,
A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham: Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar.
A lot of people avoid the genealogies of Christ but I like them because they are nice and orderly. This passage sets down a clear track from Abraham, the father of the Jewish nation, to Jesus, so that everyone in the first century would know that this Messiah was honest-to-goodness Jewish. Along the way, that track runs straight through Judah and his family.
Then, please Turn with me to one of the last pages of the New Testament, Revelation 5:1-5, the apostle John writes,
I saw in the right hand of him who sat on the throne a scroll with writing on both sides and sealed with seven seals. And I saw a mighty angel proclaiming in a loud voice, "Who is worthy to break the seals and open the scroll?" But no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth could open the scroll or even look inside it. I wept and wept because no one was found who was worthy to open the scroll or look inside. Then one of the elders said to me, "Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals"
I believe that it is wonderful that while many others were disqualified, someone who came from the tribe of Judah met the standard to open the mysteries of God. That someone, of course, was Jesus Christ.
So Judah must have been quite a godly man, right? Of all of Jacob’s twelve sons, only he is mentioned in the genealogy of Christ. The other eleven were passed over by God. At the climax of history in heaven, it is Judah’s offspring who is hailed as worthy when all others fail the test. When we get to heaven someday, we will no doubt continue to hear Judah’s name often.
But what do we really know about this man Judah?
Judah gets a whole chapter of the Bible to himself Genesis 38-and that is the best place to get acquainted with him. If you have the stomach for it, that is.
The story begins with Judah drifting away from the rest of the family and marrying a Canaanite woman. That was his first mistake.
His uncle, Esau, had already been down that road, getting into a mess by marrying outside of those who served the one true God. As a result, Judah’s grandparents had gone to great lengths to make sure their other son, Jacob, didn’t make the same error.
They told him in no uncertain terms to avoid Canaanite women and sent him on a long trip to find the right kind of wife.
But Judah disregarded their counsel entirely. He married "the daughter of a Canaanite man named Shua".
The children born to them apparently grew up getting mixed messages about the true God versus Canaan’s idols. The bad results showed up quickly in the first son, who turned out to be so wicked that the Lord put him to death in early adulthood.
That left behind a young widow named Tamar. Judah asked his second son to marry her, as was the social requirement in those days. But the son selfishly refused. Because of this, God had him killed off also.
Judah now procrastinated about giving his third son, Shelah, to Tamar. The years went by, and Tamar kept waiting. She was getting past her prime, and she was lonely.
Finally, she heard about a trip her father-in-law, Judah, was going to take. It was sheep-shearing time, which was payday for those in the sheep business. Money flowed and people partied. To Tamar, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to carry out a terrible plan. She covered her face with some kind of shawl and posed along the road as a prostitute.
The Bible records that Judah, "not realizing that she was his daughter-in-law, . . . went over to her by the roadside and asked about her services. He offered to pay her a young goat from the flock," but she requested a deposit until it showed up. Judah happily gave her his signet ring, its cord, and the shepherd’s staff that he had. The result of the whole ordeal was that Tamar became pregnant with twins. Judah went home none the wiser.
When the news came out that Tamar was having a baby, Judah threw a fit. How dare his daughter-in-law cause disgrace on the family! "Bring her out and have her burned to death!" he stormed.
As she was being dragged out into the public square, she calmly identified the father of the twins by holding up the personal property Judah had left with her as a down payment for her services. Judah was humiliated and had to admit, "She is more righteous than I"
DISQUALIFIED?
I don’t know about you but it makes me want to shield my eyes from this kind of ugliness.
It sounds like something in the National Enquirer: If you or I have an ancestor in our families who did something like this, we don’t talk about it. We probably leave his picture out of the family album. We don’t bring up his name to our children-and hope they never ask. People who so mess up their lives-and others’ lives-are best left unmentioned.
So why would God put this seamy story in the Bible? It doesn’t seem fit for print. Or, if God had to include the story, why didn’t he then say to us, "The stern lesson of this is that the lineage of my holy Son will be Abraham – Isaac Jacob-Benjamin," or one of the other sons? After all, hadn’t Judah thoroughly disqualified himself?
Left to our own devices, any of us can self-destruct within an hour, just as Judah did. "There is no one righteous, not even one" Romans 3:10.
"We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way" Isaiah 53:6
"I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature" Romans 7:18
So in all honesty there is no need for self-righteous snickering as we read Judah ’s story.
God has given clear testimony about our moral standing with him. But unfortunately, we are very good at condemning others for the very things we also do.
“Brother So-and -so is selfish . . . so-and-so is racist . . . so-and-so is a hypocrite." But somehow, the mirror doesn’t work for us.
Like Judah when he was told about his daughter-in-law’s pregnancy, we can all be self-righteous and pompous. In truth not only are we weak, but we are judgmental on top of it! Wouldn’t it be better to stop giving opinions about everyone else and do a better job of humbly looking after our own hearts?
If every moment of our past were put on the big screen at church, which of us would seem so wonderful?
My main concern tonight is that we have lost sight of the reason God included Judah’s ugly story in the Bible. We are slowly drifting away from the Bible’s message of God’s amazing grace to change and redeem soiled people; instead, we are moralizing and expressing self-righteous disdain over the horrible lives others are living around us.
Instead of exalting Jesus, who came as a spiritual physician for the sick and unlovely, we are busy rehearsing all the commandments of God, like that alone would change a single soul. We are giving people only the law, when what they crave is the love and grace of God.
We have forgotten that God specializes in cases such as Judah. We need to return to preaching boldly what Paul wrote to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 -not stopping two-thirds of the way through the paragraph, but continuing on to the glorious end:
Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God
The early Christian church had its own share of "Judah’s," but "where sin increased, grace increased all the more".
GRACE BEYOND REASON
The devil’s specialty is to swarm in on people and hiss, "You did it! You really messed up! If people only knew. . . . You’re not what you seem to be. Do you think you’re going to get away with this?"
And the devil’s victims hardly feel like living. They feel unworthy to go to church. They avoid their Bibles. They see no hope of change.
Satan wants to hide the fact that the mercy of God is for everyone who has messed up.
As high as the heavens are above the earth, so are God’s ways higher than ours Isaiah 55:9.
James writes in Chapter 2:13, "Mercy triumphs over judgment".
God’s specialty is forgiving and putting away people’s sins from his sight. He delights in taking failures such as Judah and weaving them into the ancestry of his own Son, Jesus Christ.
What is even more remarkable is this: The genealogy of Jesus in Matthew 1:3 continues through Judah and then goes not to his legitimate son, Shelah-but to Perez, Tamar’s boy, the child of incest.
I believe that’s just remarkable. It is as if God were saying, "Forever I want my people to know that I not only forgive mess-ups, but I can take them and touch them and heal them-and put them in the line that leads to Christ." What Satan means for evil, God is able to change and work out for good.
Even today, God delights in hearing Judah’s name echo through the heavenly halls. He takes sinners like you and me and makes us right. He takes dirt and pollution and transforms them into holiness. He takes the crooked thing and makes it straight. He takes the tangles of our lives and weaves something new, so that we emerge singing Hallelujah. We love God, not because we’ve been so good, but because he is so good, and his mercy endures forever.
The Lion of the tribe of Judah is about deliverance, not condemnation. He takes our mistakes and wanderings and redeems them for his glory. Greater than his glory as Creator and Sustainer of the universe is the glory of his grace to losers like you and me. No record is so stained, no case so hopeless that he cannot reach down and bring salvation to that person.
It is our privilege to spread the message all over Hall County: Jesus Christ has the power to save! No matter how ruined the life, his blood can erase even the darkest stain, and his Spirit can breathe new life into fallen men and women. He is the God of Judah-the man who was a moral failure, a hypocrite, and a disgrace to God and his family. But through Judah we see more clearly the depth of the Lord’s love and the incredible richness of his mercy.
I pray that God will deliver us from self-righteous judging and make us, instead, merciful carriers of Christ’s salvation and freedom everywhere we go.
Jesus "came into the world to save sinners," the apostle Paul wrote, even considering himself to be "the worst" of the lot.
But rejoice in why he was so honest about his condition, because it applies to us also: "For that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe on him and receive eternal life. Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen"
