Radical Faith – 2 | Solid Rock Centre Dublin

Genesis 38: The Gospel According to Tamar

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him.” John‬ ‭1:1, 10-11‬ ‭NKJV‬‬

Before Christ came into the world in the flesh, God spoke of him through several manifestations and in different ways to the Old Testament fathers. Through the giving of the law of Moses and through the prophets, God spoke to his chosen people Israel, of the coming of the one true shepherd of Israel. Today we have the privilege of exploring the speech of God concerning his Son through the lens of Genesis 38, the life of Judah, son of Jacob(Israel), bearer of the promises of the Messiah.

Judah takes a journey away from his brothers and goes down to a city in the land of the Canaanites. He befriends a man called Hirah who is a citizen of the city of Adullam. Let’s do a background search and explore the biblical history and some of the names in this story . What gospel markers and pointers can we find?

Judah, whose name means ‘Praise’ is the fourth son of Jacob who holds the promises of the coming King and Messiah. He leaves his brothers, his usual dwelling place and makes a lone journey down to another city. The city is in the cursed land, a land of idolaters who do not fear Yahweh, the land of Canaan. Canaan the son of Ham, and his descendants, were cursed by their grandfather Noah for the sin of their father Ham. Inside this cursed land is a city called Adullam (meaning – a refuge). And inside the city of Adullam Judah strikes a friendship with a man called Hirah (meaning – nobility).

If your spiritual antennas are picking the signal of the heavenly network, you may already have seen that we are speaking salvation matters here. Canaan here represents the world in its fallen state, cursed for the sin of our first ancestor Adam. Christ, who is represented by Judah here, was to leave his usual abode of heaven above, and make a lone journey down to this earth. In the earth, his purpose was to establish his city of refuge (Adullam), the New Jerusalem, the Kingdom of God. When he came he was full of the Holy Spirit and power and went about preaching the good news of the kingdom. The Holy Spirit is here represented by Judah’s friend Hirah, a man of noble character who walks with Judah everywhere he goes and performs Judah’s commands.

Judah gets into a covenant with Shuah the Canaanite and marries his daughter. This marriage is representative of the Old Covenant under which the nation of Israel related with God. God gave them the law through Moses. The children of Israel had to do all that was written in the law in order to live, breaking one commandment meant you had broken the whole law and it carried the penalty of death with it. There was no righteousness under the law, therefore whatever good works were done were as good as dead. Their good works could never put them in right standing with God.

The failure of the law to impute righteousness to the doer is seen in the sons of Judah; Er, Onan and Shelah. Although the nation of Israel were God’s chosen nation, their righteousness did not come through doing the works of the law. We see here that the sons of Judah were not saved by being natural descendants of Judah. Er and Onan died for their sins despite being descendants of he that held the promise of the Messiah. The failure of both Er and Onan to leave a seed in the form of a child to Tamar shows how powerless the law was in producing the fruit of righteousness in those that practiced it.

For fear of the death of his third son Shelah, Judah sent Tamar, his twice-widowed daughter in law, back to her father’s house. The promise of the Messiah, the Prince was in jeopardy unless Judah took some drastic action to redeem his own name. There had to be another way.

The answer came by divine arrangement: the death of Judah’s wife, the daughter of Shuah. This signifying the end of the Old Covenant and the removal of the wall of enmity of the law by the death of Christ on the cross. Both Jews and Gentiles could now be reconciled to God by a new and living way, under the New Covenant.