Jesus' Grandmothers - Tamar

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello everyone. This is Pastor Dean Thompson with a word of hope. Jesus' grandmothers. We're looking at grace that refuse to give up on broken women. Matthew opens his gospel with a genealogy. Most people tend to skip it, skip over it when they read. But we really should not. Because buried inside that list of hard to pronounce names is one of the most scandalous, most beautiful, most hope-giving truths in all of Scripture. Matthew names five women in the bloodline of Jesus. And not one of them should have been there. Not by the world's standards, not by religion's standards, not by polite society's standards. These were not five noble ladies from good families with clean reputations and respectable histories. These were women whose stories would make the average church board or the average nominated committee blush. There was their scandal, prostitution, incest, a sex worker who ran what many scholars believe was a brothel, a widow who played a honey trap on her father-in-law, a refugee with no legal standing, a victim of royal abuse, a pregnant teenager. And God put every single one of them in the family tree of his son. This is not an accident. If anything, the mess is precisely where he does his best work. This message is not going to be polite. These women's stories are not polite. We are going to look at the full weight of what each of them carried, and then we are going to see how the grace of God showed up anyway and used their lives to change the world. Because that same grace is available to you today. A genealogy of the record, a geneal a record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Matthew chapter one verse one. Our first grandmother that we are looking at is Tamar, widowed, discarded, desperate, and declared righteous. Tamar's story is in Genesis thirty eight. This story is so raw that many preachers simply skip over it. She was a Canaanite woman who married Er, the firstborn son of Judah. The Bible says Er was a wicked, was so wicked that God killed him. And Tamar was left a childless widow in a culture that was a social death sentence. Judah gave her his second son, Onan. Onan used her for sexual gratification, but deliberately refused to give her a child. God killed him too. Now Tamar had been widowed twice, and Judah, fearing his third son, Shelah would also die, sent her back to her father's house with a promise. Wait until Shelah is grown. It was a lie. Years passed. Shela grew up, and Judah never called for her. She was thrown away, abandoned in her father's house, wearing widow's garments, aging, voiceless, invisible to the family that owed her everything. When Tamar heard that Judah himself was coming to town to shear his sheep, she did something that would scandalize most church churches, you know. She took off her widow's clothes, veiled herself like a cold prostitute, and sat at the entrance to Enaim, directly in Judah's path. When Judah saw her, he thought she was a harlot and propositioned her. She asked for his card, his signet, his card, and his staff as a pledge. He gave them to her. She slept with him, and she conceived. When it was discovered that she was pregnant, Judah offered, ordered, ordered her burnt to death for playing the harlot. But Tamar produced the evidence, Judah's own signet and staff, and exposed him as the father. Judah, to his credit, admitted the truth and said, She is more righteous than I, because he had denied her the marriage that was her right. She is more righteous than I, since I would not give her to my son Shelah. Genesis 38, verse 26. But here is a stunning part. Tamar bore twin sons from that scandalous encounter, Perez and Zera. And it is through Perez that the royal line of David would flow directly to Jesus Christ. The son conceived through deception and desperation became an ancestor to the Savior. God did not erase what happened, he did not pretend it was something else. He redeemed it, he took a transaction born out of injustice, born of injustice and abandonment and wove it into the greatest story ever told. Tamar's name is in the Messiah's genealogy forever. If you have been thrown away by people who owed you better, if you have acted out of desperation because no one protected you, if you have been forced to fight for a future that should have been handed to you, I want you to know God sees the full picture and he still writes your name in his story. Being discarded by people does not mean that you are being discarded by God. Desperation does not disqualify you. God meets people in their most desperate moments. What was conceived in pain can still burst something eternal. Oh God, please be with those who have been discarded. Many have been used, abused, and then refused like trash. I pray. Be with your people in their pain, in their struggles, in their desperation, and grant them deliverance. God bless you, brothers and sisters.