A Right Judgment

Genesis 38
Gary Wassermann | Sunday, January 08, 2023
Copyright © 2023, Gary Wassermann

The title this morning is “A Right Judgment.” Several weeks ago Rev. Broderick commented on the difficulty of seeing how Genesis 36 could be useful for preaching.  Genesis 38 tells more of a story and involves names that we encounter again, but because the story it tells is so thoroughly sordid, one commentator called it “entirely unsuited to homiletic use.”  That means no good for preaching.  But as before, we will find that God has a message for us here.

We are covering Genesis 38 now in order to delay our treatment of Joseph until we can cover him in successive weeks. But, nevertheless, in the Bible this account of Judah appears where it does, after Genesis 37, where we first read about Joseph.  So before getting into my main theme, I want to say a few things about why the Bible includes this account here, and, for that matter, why this account is included at all. Many things happen that are not written in the Scriptures.

The story of Genesis is in one sense the introduction to the story of Israel as God’s people.  God was forming a holy nation, and the rest of the Pentateuch would be the story of how God delivered them from Egypt and gave them laws and a government and eventually a land to be his nation and his people.  Now God had called Abraham out of Ur and brought him to the Promised Land, and there he lived, there he dwelt, making many sacrifices to do so, as did his son Isaac after him—he ensured Isaac would live in the land—and as did Jacob.  So why didn’t the Israelites remain in the Promised Land?  Genesis 38 shows us why they had to leave.  It was because God’s people were mingling with the Canaanites.  Here Judah marries a Canaanite wife.  If they remained in Canaan, they would have blended in with the idolatrous people there and ceased to exist as a holy nation.  So God had to bring them to Egypt, where the Hebrew shepherds were repulsive to the Egyptians, so that as this people grew into a great multitude, they would remain separate, and God would have them as a holy nation.

On a more individual level, Genesis 38 provides a contrast with the life of Joseph. Genesis 38 shows us Judah, who sought out a prostitute in a place that did not even normally have a prostitute. This was not normal for the people he was living among. The contrast is with Joseph, who resisted the urgings of Potiphar’s wife, and it shows all that much more how brightly Joseph shines.

There are literary reasons as well. The Bible is itself an exciting book. And by putting Genesis 38 where it is, we are delayed from seeing what will come of Joseph as we read through the account sequentially. And then we come to it eventually.

There are many other reasons here, but now I want to come to my main theme and that, as I said, is “A Right Judgment.”  The unbeliever cannot make a right judgment about anything.  He certainly cannot make a right judgment about God.  In his heart he denies the true and living God, and he suppresses the truth daily by sinning.  And because he denies God, he cannot make a right judgment about anything important, including particularly about himself.

First Corinthians 2:14–16 tells how fundamentally important the Holy Spirit is for us to make a right judgment.  “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God,” which means anything important or fundamental, “for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.”  On the other hand, “The spiritual man,” that is, the man controlled by the Holy Spirit, “makes judgments about all things.”  Indeed, “We have the mind of Christ.”

Psalm 36:1–2 says, “An oracle is within my heart concerning the sinfulness of the wicked: There is no fear of God before his eyes.  For in his own eyes he flatters himself too much to detect or hate his sin.”  That is why he cannot make a right judgment about himself.

That is the story of Judah for many, many years, and for most of Genesis 38.  He was a man who could not make a right judgment, especially about himself.  So I am going to speak this morning about three wrong judgments he made as a son, as a father, and as a father-in-law; one right judgment; and then the redemptive significance of all these things in Genesis 38.

A Wrong Judgment as a Son

Here we see that wrong judgment leads to more sin. Genesis 38 begins with Judah leaving his brothers and living with the Canaanites.  Why didn’t he stay with them?  Why didn’t he stay with the clan of Israel?  This was the family that descended from Abraham and from Isaac.  These were the men that God had called and to whom God had given his blessing and his covenant.  The blessing was passed down to Jacob.  He was the bearer of God’s favor.  Those who blessed him would be blessed and those who cursed him would be cursed.  And on top of the great blessing to Jacob’s household in general, which Judah ought to have lived in and enjoyed, Judah in particular had great potential.  Reuben was the firstborn, but he had spoiled his opportunity by combining sexual immorality with contempt for his father.  Simeon and Levi were the next two after Reuben, and they too had spoiled their position when they massacred the Shechemites.  So Judah was next in line.  He was set to inherit the birthright.  The Lord would be his God and would be with him wherever he went.  This is the most anyone could ask for.  Judah, as a son of the covenant, had an obligation to follow the Lord faithfully.  He had an obligation to be holy to the Lord.  He had an obligation to faithfully administer the blessings he received for the good of others.  He had a good inheritance.  He was in the best place possible.  Why, then, did he leave?

We are not told explicitly why he left.  Clearly, he did not see the value in God’s promises.  Perhaps he had a desire to go out into the world, a certain restlessness, much like Esau, who also did not see the value in God’s promises and was always going out into the world, venturing out to hunt or to enjoy what the world had to offer.  But it appears that Judah was also unhappy at home.  In Genesis 37, he saw Joseph as the problem.  Joseph did not go along with what the brothers were doing.  Joseph was favored.  Joseph reported on the bad behavior of his brothers.  So we can imagine Judah being like Haman, who boasted in all he had, but said, “All this gives me no satisfaction as long as I see that Jew Mordecai sitting at the king’s gate” (Est. 5:13).  So it would have been for Judah.

Of course, a righteous man is only a problem for the wicked.  Joseph would have been no problem if Judah himself had been godly.  Nor would Joseph have been a problem if Judah had been humble, willing to recognize his own guilt and willing to change.  But Judah was neither godly nor humble.

Judah thought he could solve his problem by getting rid of Joseph.  If Joseph is the problem, make Joseph go away, and everything will be good.  So he did get rid of Joseph, but things did not go as well as he hoped.  His father Jacob fell into a depression.  Judah and his brothers and sisters tried to comfort him, but he would not be comforted.  This was a miserable situation.  As Judah saw it, his father was the problem.  Why should his father be so grieved over Joseph?  No one else was so sad to see him go.  But again, Judah refused to see that he was the problem, that he was the reason Joseph was gone.  His sin was the motive.  He sinned in seizing and selling Joseph, and he continued to sin by lying to his father about what had happened to Joseph.

Judah made a wrong judgment.  Judah was the problem, not Joseph and not Jacob. And a wrong judgment is not just a mental error. This is not a trivia question. This is not an inconsequential matter.  Wrong thinking leads to wrong living. It leads to more sin and being wrong about everything.

First, Judah separated himself from the people of God and went down to live with the Canaanites.  This is the conduct of those whose going shows that none of them ever belonged to the people of God.  This is a very serious thing.

Second, Judah chose ungodly friendship.  Hirah, the socially adept Canaanite, became Judah’s best friend.  Judah confides in him.  He travels with him. He stays with him.  They spend time together.  And a man is known by the company he keeps.  He is also influenced by his friends.  Proverbs 22:24–25 says, “Do not make friends with a hot-tempered man . . . or you may learn his ways.”  You are sure to be a bad judge of company if you are a bad judge of yourself.

Third, he married a Canaanite.  Judah knew better.  Abraham had ensured that his son would marry someone from his own clan, and not a Canaanite.  Esau married two Canaanites and they were a grief to his parents.  Isaac and Rebekah sent Jacob away to find a wife in Laban’s household, and not from the Canaanites.  Even the sons of Jacob, Judah’s own brothers, said, “We cannot give our sister to one who is uncircumcised.”  Yet Judah married a Canaanite.

And we get more and more of a picture of Judah’s character when we read in verses 2 and 3 that there is nothing said there about this woman as a person.  The verbs tell us that Judah saw her, he took her as a wife, and he lay with her.  This is a shallow relationship based on physical attraction.  Judah was led by his lusts.  He was led by his eyes and led by his appetite.  There was nothing deep.  There was no character involved here.

This again is the result of Judah’s wrong judgment about his family and his wrong judgment about himself.  His reasoning was clouded, and he threw out everything he had been taught.  See how wrong you can go and how much evil you get can tangled up in when you make a wrong judgment.

Wrong Judgment as a Father

Second is Judah’s wrong judgment as a father.  Here we see that not only a wrong judgment leads to more sin, but it also results in heaping up the wrath of God against us.

We each naturally have a vested interest in our children.  Our children take after us, and we are prone to overlook their faults, because in some measure we would have to condemn our own example or at least our own negligence to assess our children accurately, and that is Judah to a T.

The text leaves us with no uncertainty about the character of his sons.  Judah got Tamar as a wife for his firstborn son, and verse 7 says, “But Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death.”  We have no specific information about what Er did.  It is as though it was so obviously bad that the specifics do not need to be stated, and the reason for his early death was as obvious as his wickedness.  The Lord saw his deeds, and the Lord put him to death.

The second son, Onan, was also wicked, but living in the time that we do, we need a little more explanation to understand his sin.  Onan was asked to fulfill an obligation that seems strange to us.  He was asked to marry his dead brother’s wife and to have a child on behalf of his brother.  This is called a levirate marriage.  So that no one is confused, the word “levirate” has nothing to do with Levites.  “Levirate” comes from a Latin word meaning “husband’s brother.”

At the time of these events, there was little explicit revelation of the afterlife.  Abraham understood it in some measure as did other godly people, but much of that understanding came by inference and by types rather than by direct and explicit statements from God.  So, in part. the way that the people of Israel laid hold of the hope of eternal life was by the hope of what we could call “social immortality” in their children.  Having no children means that your name perished and your inheritance in Israel was lost.  Having a place among the people of God and later having a share in the Promised Land both personally and through your descendants were types of having a share in eternal glory.  That is the significance of having a son.

Additionally, if your line of descendants was cut off, that meant the Messianic line could not come from you.  God’s blessing and his protection were on the family through whom the Messiah would come.  This is part of the blessing that Jacob had coveted so much a generation earlier.  So in that context, we see why a levirate marriage was a duty.  The firstborn son of the levirate marriage would then inherit the dead brother’s property.  Deuteronomy 25 speaks about the duty and the procedure of such a marriage.

We see an instance of this in the book of Ruth.  If a man could not fulfill this duty, there was a way to decline it and to state that publicly, which was by handing his sandal to the next nearest kinsman.  The nearest kinsman to Ruth did that.  Boaz went to him, presented the case to him, and said, “You have the right to marry her. You make your decision.”  That man refused because of the financial cost.  The son would receive the deceased man’s inheritance.  Now, this was not the most noble thing to do, but it was permitted, and it was honest.  And in Ruth’s case, Boaz was there, ready to marry her.

So Onan, for financial reasons, did not want the inheritance divided up among three brothers.  He wanted it divided up among two brothers, of whom he then would be the default firstborn.  He stood to gain if Tamar had no son.  So he made a pretense of taking her as his wife, as was his duty, but he prevented them from having children.  Onan was being a hypocrite.  He was lying.  He was pretending to do something he was not doing.  And in the process, he was abusing this young widow, not only by taking advantage of her but also by depriving her.  He was depriving her from getting what she hoped for, which was not only the joy and the security of a son, but the religious significance of a son, that she might have descendants in Israel, and that perhaps she might have the privilege of being the ancestor of the Messiah.  That is the wickedness of Onan, and that is why the Lord killed him.

So Judah had nothing to be proud of in his sons.  We might sympathize with Judah a little bit more if there was any evidence that he had tried to lead them in the way of the Lord. There is a mystery of election.  And if Judah had been a godly father, we could sympathize with him.  But Judah didn’t even seem to have the feeble words of Eli to tell his sons that what they were doing was not good.  Nor did Judah even have the anger of David, who recognized that his sons were wicked but did nothing about it.  No, it appears that Judah excused his sons.  He shielded them.

After Onan died, Judah did not want his third son to marry Tamar, because he thought that Shelah may die too.  The implication is that Tamar is to blame for Er and Onan dying.  This is the sort of wrong judgment that parents can make too.  We may be able to see very clearly the faults in others, but when it comes to our own children, we can be totally unable to detect their sin.  We can come up with justifications and explanations for everything they do, so that they end up with no fault.  We can blame someone else for their troubles, perhaps someone without much standing like Tamar, and think we need to watch out for that person.

Now, the Bible doesn’t tell us explicitly God’s view from heaven of Judah. But if God saw what Er did and it was wicked in his sight and he put him to death, and if God saw what Onan did and it was wicked in his sight and he put him to death, you know that God saw what Judah was doing too. It was wicked in his sight. The thing Judah did displeased the Lord, and the Lord’s anger against Judah was piling up. It was increasing against him.

As before, wrong judgments lead to more sin.  As a father, Judah surely continued his pattern of failure.  He did not warn Shelah not to follow in his brother’s footsteps and try to impress upon him the fear of the Lord.  And as for Tamar, he had a responsibility to Tamar.  He was supposed to give his next son to her, but he didn’t.  He didn’t even include her in his broader household.  He pushed her away, back to her pagan father’s house.  He used the excuse that his son was young, but he had no intention of giving his son to her.  He wants to keep her out of sight and out of mind.  You see the evil of another wrong judgment.

Wrong Judgments as a Father-in-Law

Here we see more of the same, but here we also come to the way of return through sorrow and conviction.

In Genesis 38:12, Judah’s wife dies.  At some point Tamar has come to realize that Judah will not give her to Shelah.  We have seen what that means for her.  In terms of her personal future, if she went on as a childless widow, she would in all likelihood be destitute.  So she naturally would want to have children.

But the greater significance, the continued participation with the people of God, was a thing to be laid hold of by faith.  Not everyone did lay hold of it by faith.  Esau considered it of no value, and we would expect that Tamar the Canaanite would do likewise.  In that case, as a Canaanite living among Canaanites, she might have sought a Canaanite husband, and I am sure that Judah would have been happy to release her from her obligations.

But it appears that Tamar has laid hold of the Hebrew view.  She sees eternal value in being included in the people of Israel, and she wants an interest in the Messianic line.  Now, this is incredibly amazing because she is still living among the Canaanites. And if anyone ever had reason to say, “What is this Hebrew religion? What is this Israelite religion? My husband was wicked, and he was killed. My next husband abuses me.  My father-in-law neglects me.  If this is what your God is like, I want no part of it.” But somehow, by faith she understands who the Lord is, and she wants to have a part in his people and in his salvation.

However, she considers that the only way back was through a path of deceit.  She considers that if she dresses as a prostitute, Judah will come to her.  What a terrible indictment of his character, that she would recognize him as such a lust-driven man that he would go for a prostitute!  But this is totally in keeping with the character of his first marriage—shallow, superficial, lust-driven—and she was exactly right.  At the time of sheep-shearing, which is a time of partying, she goes out, and Judah approaches her and falls for her trap.

Three months later, when he hears that Tamar is pregnant, Judah becomes a rank hypocrite.  From the public’s point of view, he had grounds to condemn her not just for fornication but also for adultery because ostensibly she was betrothed to his third son, and that deed that she had committed was not merely adultery but adultery as a prostitute.  But he never intended to give her to his son.  He was so eager to get rid of her that he calls for her to be brought out and burned.  He immediately goes to the most severe judgment, and he makes another wrong judgment.  He does not investigate.  He does not ask questions.  He doesn’t ask, “How do you know it was through prostitution?”  If she had told the person that, one might wonder why did she volunteer that information? He might have paused a little bit. But he is heartless toward her, irresponsible as a judge, and blind toward his own immoral conduct.  He was a hypocrite.  How can he be so blind to himself?

Yet Judah still had some knowledge of right and wrong, and we all have some knowledge of right and wrong.  We know general principles.  Judah knew that adultery is wrong, and we know that too.  You ask, “Is adultery okay?”  Everyone will say, “No, it is not okay.”  “Is it okay to steal?” We all say, “No.” “Is it okay to lie?” We all say, “No.” We all know these things in general principles.  But we get cloudy and confused when it comes to ourselves.  Why is that?  It is because we blindfold ourselves through self-love.  Through self-love, we deny the fear of the Lord.  Through self-love we reject and are utterly unfit for the Holy Spirit.  When it comes to facts that would accuse us, we look to our own honor and reputation and profit rather than to truth or to justice.

This is no excuse. The motives of self-love or of contempt for others or of greed do not excuse us for making a wrong judgment because they are themselves sinful motives. So when we make such a wrong judgment, we add sin upon sin and heap up God’s anger upon his anger and his wrath upon his wrath. It makes it worse.  We must therefore strive earnestly to get rid of this wicked self-love, which is by nature deeply rooted in us.

At this point, Judah was very much like King David in 2 Samuel 12.  David was a man of God.  He had a history of great faith, and he was a man of great prayer and worship.  But he had become arrogant and committed adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah.  Then he murdered Uriah and took Bathsheba to be his wife.  For months he went on untroubled as though nothing was wrong, but the whole time he was under God’s wrath.

Then God sent the prophet Nathan to David.  Nathan told him, “There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor. The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him. Now a traveler came to the rich man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep or cattle to prepare a meal for the traveler who had come to him. Instead, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for the one who had come to him” (2 Sam. 12:1–4).

David still had some sense of right and wrong.  He could see clearly that this rich man had done a cruel thing.  So we read, “David burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, ‘As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this deserves to die!’ . . .  Then Nathan said to him, ‘You are the man’” (2 Sam. 12:5, 7).

A Change in Judgment

Yet both David and Judah walked around freely as though there was no problem. They were quite comfortable and quite confident for a long time, even though great guilt before God rested on them. And neither David nor Judah would freely come forward and confess what they had done, because the natural desire of men is to want to be flattered, not to be confronted or accused.  Recall from Psalm 36 that man “flatters himself too much to detect or hate his sin” (Ps. 36:2).  And if they cannot have that, they want people to leave them alone.  That is what we naturally seek as well, but it only promotes our guilt and punishment before God.  It is like a severely ill person just wanting to be left alone.  Now, what is the result of that going to be but that he is going to die miserably before his time.

We are inclined to such hypocrisy that we will naturally cover up our sins.  We will be like the man Jesus described in Matthew 7, who has a plank in his own eye, but somehow pays no attention to it and goes out to examine his brother to see the speck in his brother’s eye.

Tamar probably meant to humiliate Judah so that she herself might escape condemnation for her sin. Your sin will surely find you out, and it is great mercy when that happens. You see, David had turned into the path of sin.  Judah’s whole life had been sinful.  When we are in this condition, it is a great mercy for God to send someone to condemn us, whether a Nathan or even a Tamar, whose motives may not have been entirely pure.  But the effect of her bringing out the evidence that Judah was the man was the same.  Judah was caught in his own condemnation.  He could no longer stand up with righteous indignation before the men of the town.  He could no longer stand proudly before anyone.

But this is how we are led back to the path of repentance.  Paul says in 2 Corinthians 7:10, “Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret.”  Sorrow is what enables us to come to repentance.  Otherwise, we will remain under condemnation.  As long as we excuse and justify ourselves, God continues to condemn us.  But there is a way to be forgiven by him.  That is what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11:31: “If we judged ourselves, we would not come under judgment.”  If we can make a right judgment about ourselves—to borrow the words of Jesus from John 7:24, “Stop judging by mere appearances, and make a right judgment.”

Judah’s Right Judgment

For the first time in his life, Judah made a right judgment.  He said, “She is more righteous than I.”  He who had looked down on his family, he who had shielded his son from Tamar and looked down on her now saw the truth clearly for the first time.  His judgment was like that of the publican: “God, have mercy on me, the sinner.”  And the publican went home justified.  It was humbling, but it was true, and because it was true, it was liberating.  There was a Christian man who said, “The day I learned that I was a guilty sinner in need of salvation was the best day of my life.”  That is the truth and the testimony of everyone who has known and experienced God’s salvation.

Just as wrong judgment leads to sin and heaps up wrath, and throughout Judah’s life, his wrong judgments inevitably led to more sin, a right judgment leads to holiness.  Before this, Judah cast Tamar aside when she inconvenient for him.  Now, he took her back into his household and took care of her, as was proper for him to do.  Before, Judah had been a lust-driven man—shallow, superficial, pursuing women out of lust. Now, it says that he did not sleep with Tamar again.  He controlled his own body in a way that was holy and honorable.

It appears from Genesis 42 and 43 that Judah no longer lived with the Canaanites, but returned to the area where the clan of Israel lived.  This was a new life.  Judah was a changed man. Judah had not been able to restrain himself before, but now he can.  Why is that?  First, of course, he is no longer blinding himself to the truth by his self-love.  He has humbled himself.  But his new life is not just the result of his ability.  God gives grace to the humble.  There is a new power from God by the Holy Spirit that came to him to live a righteous life. And when we make a right judgment about ourselves, it is not just our own ability that is unleashed, but God’s power comes to us.  The Holy Spirit comes to us. The Holy Spirit comes to those who are humble, who are lowly, whose weaknesses are laid open and bare before God. And he gives them a new power.

Judah was now prepared for the bigger test ahead when he would face the ruler of Egypt and lay down his life for his younger brother, who was his father’s favorite.  This was the very opposite of what he had previously done for his younger brother, who was his father’s favorite. Judah was a new creation, and that is what God holds out for all who make a right judgment.

Redemptive Significance of Genesis 38

The story of Genesis 38 has great redemptive significance.  The accounts and histories in Genesis can show us a lot by way of example, especially so that we may learn the pattern for covenant life with God.  But if example is all we see, we risk reducing the Bible to a book of instruction in moral living, and that is not the Bible’s purpose.  The Bible presents us with God’s plan of redemption and his work of redemption for sinful man through the Lord Jesus Christ.  The whole Old Testament is looking forward to the coming of the Savior, Jesus Christ, and that is true in Genesis 38 as well.

Matthew’s gospel begins with Jesus’ genealogy starting from Abraham, to whom God had promised, “Through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed” (Gen. 22:18).  Matthew traces that genealogy from Abraham to Isaac and then to Jacob, and Matthew 1:3 says, “Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar.”  In the most amazing sin, grace triumphs.  Onan had sought to deprive Tamar of the possibility of being used by God to bring the Savior into the world, and Judah had intended to neglect her.  But God included her.  And in her commitment to the tribe of Israel as God’s people, Tamar unwittingly gained the privilege of being in the line of the Messiah himself.

Judah and Tamar were the ancestors of the Messiah—Judah, the sometime apostate, and Tamar, the pagan Canaanite!  If we had chosen which of Jacob’s sons would be the ancestor of the Messiah, surely we would have chosen Joseph, or, if not Joseph, perhaps Benjamin.  But not Judah.  And it is not just the case that Judah and Tamar were in the line of the Messiah, but the son through whom the Messiah came was conceived through this union that was shrouded in deceit on the one side and solicitation of a prostitute on the other.  How can it be that the sinless Son of God should come from this heritage?  On first impression, this may seem to tarnish the glory of Jesus Christ and bring him down, but, in fact, this humbling of himself redounds to his glory.  He came so low in order to save the worst of sinners.  He came from such people in order to show that he came for such people.

He came for people like Judah.  Perhaps there are Judahs here this morning, people who have been brought up in a Christian home but are not serving the Lord.  You may have been arrogant and looked down on the people of God and looked down on those who seem to be weaker than you. You have contempt for them. They are totally uninteresting to you, people you just want to get away from, people you want to avoid.  But now you realize you have been going in the wrong direction the whole time.  You know what?  God can change you from within.  It begins with the confession: She is more righteous than I.  The fact that Jesus came from the line of Judah should make this right judgment all the easier to make.  You are not coming before him as someone he has never encountered before, or someone he will turn away.  You are coming before him as the sort of person that he already knows completely and he has already associated himself with so closely.

So I ask you again: Are you abusing the privileges that are showered on you from being in the company of God’s covenant people?  God’s glory and his great plan of redemption are clearly revealed through his word, but do you believe it from your heart?  Have you been neglecting it and overlooking it and counting it as nothing, letting the devil snatch it away as soon as it is preached?  If that is the case, you are taking everything for granted.  You are living for this world.  So judge yourself rightly and repent.  See what Judah has to say.

Jesus Christ also came for people like Tamar.  You may have had a troubled upbringing.  You were not raised in the church but came in later from the outside.  Perhaps you were even abused by various people.  It should not have happened, but it did.  Your own conduct has not been blameless, just as Tamar was at least deceitful if not actually vindictive toward Judah.  But God is in the business of saving.  No amount of sin and abuse causes you beyond the pale of God’s amazing grace.  You have a bad past and a bad heritage, while others you know cannot remember a time when they were walking in sin as slaves to sin, and so you fear that the best you could hope to be is a second-class Christian.

But there are no second-class Christians with God.  You make a right judgment.  You acknowledge freely who you are.  Confess the sin you have done, but then know also that it was for you that Jesus Christ came into this world.  The first woman named in the genealogy of Jesus Christ is not even the first woman whose name is known in the genealogy of Christ.  Sarah is not named.  Rebekah is not named.  The first woman named in the genealogy of Christ is Tamar.  So through this God is declaring grace, grace, grace.

How do you judge yourself? Right judgment does not cover up. It does not conceal, but exposes and confesses. Right judgment also does not fly into self-pity and “poor me.” Right judgment is clear and specific: “I was a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a violent man,” says Paul in 1 Timothy 1:13.  And the summary is, “I am the chief of sinners.”

Finally, I ask you this all important question: How do you judge Jesus Christ?  The apostle Paul said in 2 Corinthians 5:16, “So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer.”  Many people regard Jesus Christ from a worldly point of view.  Many would say that he was a good man.  Others would say that he was a failed revolutionary.  Others would say he is the god that they want him to be, one who never commands, who always forgives, and who exists to make life easy.

You may have regarded Christ this way in the past.  But what do you say now?  Jesus Christ is God.  He is Lord and Christ.  He is the head of the covenant.  You have the opportunity to judge him correctly now, because the day will come when he will judge every one of us, and his judgment will be true and final.  How do you judge Jesus of Nazareth?  You must make a judgment.

This is not a message of condemnation.  The message of the Bible and even of Genesis 38 is the way of salvation through the only Savior, Jesus Christ.  You can ensure now that when you die, you will go straight into the presence of God.  How?  Along with putting away all arrogance and self-sufficiency and making a right judgment about yourself, you bow down and kiss the Son.  May God have mercy on us all and help us to make right judgments.