JESUS' DESPICABLE GRANDDADDIES - JUDAH

Transcript

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Hello everyone. This is Pastor Dean Thompson with the word of hope. Jesus' despicable granddaddies. Most persons when they are reading the Bible tend to skip past it. It sits at the very front of the New Testament, like a locked door. Nobody wants to open. A long, monotonous list of unpronounceable names that seemingly has nothing to say to modern people. The genealogy of Jesus in Matthew chapter one. We treat it like the fine print on a contract, technically important, but not worth reading. And that is a big, big mistake. Because buried inside the list of names is a message that we can say is so raw, so honest, scandalous evil, that it should shake every broken person reading it. It should shake us to the core. Marty was not accidentally careless when he compiled this record. He was being theologically ruthless. He included names that any respectable Jewish author would have quietly omitted. He left in the failures, the disgraces, the men whose stories belong in a crime novel, not a sacred genealogy. God did not sanitize the family tree of his own son. He left the rat in on purpose. And in doing so, he issued an eternal declaration to every man who has ever looked at his own life and thought, I am I have gone too far. I have done too much. God cannot use a man like me. Today we look at three. We are going to look at, we are going to start a series of looking at the Jesus' granddaddies. These are three. We are looking at three of the most broken, most despicable men in the lineage of Jesus. And we will not soften their stories. We will not rush past the ugliness. We will sit in it because that is where grace is most clearly seen. Not on mountaintops of virtue, but in the shores of human failure. The beauty of God's grace is never more breathtaking than when it reaches the man everyone else has given up on. So the first granddaddy of Jesus we are looking at is Judah, the sellout, the hypocrite, the man who betrayed his own blood. Judah, the father of Perez and Zara, whose mother was Tamar. Matthew chapter one verse three. Who was Judah? Judah was the fourth son of Jacob, the man from whom the entire tribe and royal line of Israel would take its name. He was supposed to be something great. The name Judah literally means praise. He was the son of promise in a family of destiny. He had every advantage. A patriarch grandfather in Isaac, a patriarch father in Jacob, and a direct encounter with the God of the universe flowing through his bloodline like a river. The first thing you need to understand about Judah is this he looked his own little brother in the eyes and sold him into slavery. Joseph, the boy with the coat, the dreamer, had been thrown into a pit by his older brothers who wanted him dead. Judah is the one who stopped the murder. But do not mistake that for mercy. Judah stopped the killing not out of love but out of profit motive. His exact words in Genesis 37 verse 26 were, What will we gain if we kill our brother and cover up his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites. He turned his weeping little brother into a transaction. He pocketed the silver and went home. For the next twenty plus years, every time Jacob wept over his missing son, every grey hair that grief put on his father's head. Judah knew the truth and said nothing. He lived with that secret like a stone in his chest. And it gets worse, worse. Judah moved away from his brothers, married a Canaanite woman, and had three sons. He arranged a marriage for his firstborn, heir, to a woman named Tamar. But heir was so thoroughly wicked that God killed him outrightly. Under the law, Judah's second son, Onan, was required to marry Tamar and produce an heir for his dead brother. Onan took his wife, took the wife, but refused the responsibility, using her while denying her the children she was old. And God killed him too. Now Judah had one son left, Sheila. And by law and by honor, Shaila belonged to Tamar. Judah promised to give him to give him to her when he came of age, but he had no such intention. He had no intention of keeping that promise. He was terrified of losing another son. So he sent Tamar back to her father's house as a widow, with no husband, no children, no future, no protection, and let her rot there. He stole her life from her and didn't lose a moment's sleep over it. Years passed. Judah's own wife died, and one day, travelling to his sheep shearers, Judah spotted a woman sitting veiled by the road. He thought she was a prostitute. He didn't know it was Tamar, the woman he had abandoned. The daughter in law he had abandoned, the woman he had wronged, the woman he had taken this desperate measure. This woman had taken a desperate measure because she had no other options. Judah had hired her. He slept with her. He left his seal and his staff as a pledge for payment and went on his way. Three months later, when the word reached him that Tamar was pregnant, Judah's immediate response was merciless and judgmental. Bring her out and have her burned burned to death. He was a man who had who had used a prostitute, abandoned his responsibilities, lied to a widow for years, and sold his brother, now ordering a woman's execution for the very kind of immorality he had just committed himself. The hypocrisy was breathtaking until Tamar produced his seal, his staff, his cord. Judah said she is more righteous than I, since I would not give her to my son Shelah. Genesis thirty eight verse twenty six. That confession, that five word admission of guilt was the beginning of everything for Judah. Not because it fixed what he had done. It didn't. But because a man who has spent his life running from accountability had finally stopped running. Watch what happens to Judah from that moment forward. Years later, when famine drives Jacob's son back to Egypt, where where Joseph now rules as Pharaoh's second in command, though they don't know it yet. Judah becomes a different man. When their father is terrified to send his youngest son Benjamin to Egypt, it is Judah who steps forward and makes the pledge. I myself will guarantee his safety. You can hold me personally responsible. If I do not bring him back to you, I will bear the blame before you all my life. The man who once sold a brother for twenty pieces of silver, even less than the price of a slave, now offered his own life as a ransom for one. And when Joseph finally reveals himself and the family is reunited, the weeping that fills that room is a sound of twenty years of lies and grief and guilt finally breaking open. Judah's transformation is complete, and it is Judah's line that God selects, not Rubens, not Levi's, Judah's, the sellout, the hypocrite, the man who bought and sold human beings. Perez and Zara, born through the scandalous union with Tamar, are named in the genealogy of Christ. God did not scrub that chapter. He put it in bold face. If the grace of God could reach a man who sold his own brother, it can certainly reach you. Oh God, we thank you for your grace. And we thank you, Lord, that even though we may have messed up, we may have practiced hypocrisy, and we may have been the worst that we can ever be. Your grace is still able to make something good out of us. Let your grace abound towards every one of us, oh God, and make us into what you would want us to be. Forgive our sins and help us to grow, to transform, to become more like you, and to become people who extend the same grace that you have shown unto us. Thank you, Lord. Amen. God bless you, brothers and sisters.