The men's breakfast that we're going to have at Cracker Barrel this coming Saturday, February 8th at 8 a.m. We hope to have you come out and spend some time with us in fellowship and sharing in the word or testimony and helping us solve whatever official or referee controversies are left over from the Super Bowl. Hope to see you there and if you have any questions about how to pay for anything, just ask Chuck Westcott.

Amen, amen, amen. We have a lot of information, a lot of things going on in the life of our church. We hope that you would please go to our website. We try to keep everything posted. There's a GroupMe app as well, too, for just the church, the men's ministry, women's ministry, all of the above. And you can be added to that by anyone who's on the GroupMe. And so please reach out to someone around you just to, in order to keep you just abreast as to all the people that you want.

All the things that are going on. I want to say thanks to everyone who came out and made our marriage enrichment dinner Friday night a huge success. It was awesome.

And we're hoping that this will be the first annual of many that we'll have in the future. We were hoping for at least 70 people that would come.

And we ended up with 43 couples. And so it was awesome. It was amazing. We had to scramble last minute and get some more food.

And it was a good turnout. I think we had even five couples who were not a part of our fellowship that were invited by some of you who came and were a part of it.

I think it was a night of just enjoyment and it was a blessing. And just thanks to all who made that.

May our staff did a tremendous job of making that happen.

Amen. And so, amen.

And one of the fun parts was watching our contestants fumble and bumble through the oldie-wed game as they played.

Yeah, and just how they tried to re-correct their answers. Right, Josh?

Yeah. Oh, no.

See, you're still correcting your answers. No, yeah, you know.

Anyway, at this time, we want to go ahead and dismiss our children, K-5 through 5th grade.

Did I say that correctly, Taylor? Yes. Amen.

I love watching all the children file out.

I want to say welcome if you were visiting with us this morning.

We're glad that you're here.

We have visitor cards located in the chairs in front of you.

Please take the time to fill that out just to give us some information about you so we can connect with you.

Located in our little offering boxes here.

Place those cards in one of the churches there or in the church in the back.

That would be great.

We'd love to be able to connect with you in that aspect.

And we are this morning going to jump back into Genesis.

Genesis.

The long-awaited re-entry into Genesis.

And today's lesson, I couldn't come up with a clever title.

So it's just Judah and Tamar.

Okay, that may be 7, which was a really encouraging chapter to a degree because we're introduced to Joseph.

Joseph finally gets on the scene.

And Joseph is the guy who's going to be the focal point of Genesis throughout the rest of the book.

And he comes on the scene.

He's kind of naive.

And his brothers love him to death.

And so they throw a party for him.

Come on, people.

No, they don't like Joseph.

They don't like his psychedelic coat.

They don't like anything about what Joseph stands for.

And so they throw him in a pit and they sell him off into slavery.

Right?

They sell him off into slavery.

And so Joseph goes into Egypt.

And that's kind of where we left things off in chapter 37.

Today is going to be, we're in chapter 38.

But today is the 56th message on Genesis.

Just so you know.

Yeah.

Some of you are like, yeah.

So, yeah.

We've taken 56 messages just to finally reach chapter 38.

And I promise we'll get through all of 38 today.

But we left things off in chapter 37.

I'm not going to do a whole lot of recap because we don't have time for that number one.

And number two, it's in the Bible.

So read it.

Okay?

If you've got questions, ask Steve Hemingway.

He'll answer them for you.

Okay?

But we left things off in chapter 37 with verse 36.

It says, meanwhile, meanwhile, the Midianites had sold him, speaking of Joseph, in Egypt to Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, the captain of the guard.

Meanwhile.

Meanwhile is the more important story here.

Okay?

This is a novelistic device to say, meanwhile, back at the ranch.

Okay?

You know?

All this stuff.

Meanwhile.

And so, and now the more important story now is Joseph as he is.

And we would also skip chapter 38 because it's horrific. It's a horrifying chapter. But there's some things that God wants to teach us through this as well, too. And this is the reason why we're going to look at this. Beginning. In verse 1.

It happened at the time that Judah went down from his brothers and turned aside to a certain Adulamite whose name was Hira. There Judah saw the daughter of a certain Canaanite whose name was Shua. He took her and went into her. Okay? So it says, at this time. At this time is another biblical way of saying it didn't just happen, you know, right off the bat. Okay? There's a segue here. All right? And so, but we have to ask ourselves, why the segue from Joseph, okay, into the story of Judah?

Judah and Tamar, okay? Judah is one of the brothers who does not fare well in the book of Genesis, nor in the course of history. He doesn't fare well. And we're not sure why he moves away from his brothers. It may be the pattern that we've seen earlier in Genesis where you have a family member who gets all the flocks and the herds and everything's growing, and there's not enough room for the land to sustain them in that one area, so they've got to move away.

We're not really sure. But he goes in here and he marries a woman from the outside, okay? And if we have learned anything from the book of Genesis up to this point, we have certainly learned that those who are going to be servants and leaders of God's covenant people do not marry outside the covenant.

All right? We've seen that over and over. And especially, they don't marry Canaanite women.

They don't marry Canaanite women. Every time there is a marriage to a Canaanite woman in the Scripture, it turns out very badly.

Do we not see that? It turns out horrifically.

So, again, we pick it up in verse 3.

And it says,

And she conceived and bore a son, and he called his name Er.

And she conceived again and bore a son, and she called his name Onan.

Yet again she bore a son, and she called his name Shelah.

Judah was in Chezeb when she bore him.

Now, this is not in proximity to Judah and the other, to Jacob, I mean, and the other brothers, all right, where he is.

He has gone into a Canaanite area.

He's attached himself to a Canaanite woman.

His friendships are Canaanite.

And it's very clear that this is a clear sign of the departure from the covenant plan that Judah has just lodged himself into.

And as this text unfolds, we're told that meanwhile, hold on, there's something that needs to be known before we can continue the story of Joseph.

And so we see that Judah has these three sons, but there's trouble on the horizon.

Verse 6,

And Judah took a wife for Er, his firstborn, whose name was Tamar.

But Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord put him to death.

Now, here we have a very clear act by God, okay, of killing the firstborn son of Judah because of the evil that was done.

And so Judah, in the patriarchal responsibility of ancient Israel, he arranges for his son to have a wife, okay,

but his son is so wicked in the sight of the Lord that the Lord takes him out.

Now, we're not told what he did or what the wickedness, it doesn't really matter, but he's so wicked that God just takes him out.

Now, this is not the first time that this happens.

We could read, we don't have time to unfold a lot of the stories, but even in the New Testament, you see this.

Ananias and Sapphira, okay, they are taken out.

They are taken out by the Lord.

So, we read this and we're just, it kind of blows our mind to a little bit of a degree.

But the story continues, it sets up for the continued story, if you will.

Then, verse 8, Judah said to Onan, go into your brother's wife and perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her and raise up offspring for your brother.

But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his, so whenever he went into his brother's wife,

he would waste the semen on the ground so as not to give offspring to his brother.

This is so foreign to us, it's difficult for us to understand when we read this.

It's horrific, all right?

But this in the scripture is what's called...

Okay, get your giggles out. It's funny, yeah. But here we have...this is called Leveret Marriage. Leveret Marriage within the scriptures.

And so, it's the requirements of the Bible. But here we have...this is called Leveret Marriage within the scriptures. And so, it's the requirements of the Bible.

The requirement of marriage of a brother to the widow of another brother who has died, okay? And it seems so foreign to us that we would ask the question,

why would such a law be required by Judah and eventually by scripture? Why in ancient Israel, at this time, would the expected morally right thing to do to be this?

Even the morally ordered thing to do, to do this, okay? It has to do with the fact that as Israel,

God's covenant people, is beginning to multiply and beginning to grow. And certainly, they are centrally and undeniably under God's rule

and under God's patriarchy. But it's critical for the continuation of Israel as God's covenant people to the continuation of the 12 tribes.

We know that to be the sons of Jacob, okay? So, they've got to perpetuate, okay?

And we're going to see that it's important for the families to be able to continue to flourish in this.

And the worst situation in those parts, and even today, is for a woman who has been married to be widowed without any descendants.

Even in today's time, to be without family means that out of necessity, there's no one to take care of her, all right?

And so, furthermore, the worst thing that can happen in a patriarchy is for there to be no sons, all right?

And so, specifically, you would want to continue the line.

So, you have what's known in China as a broken branch.

You have a tree, and the branch is broken, and that branch will no longer ever produce, okay?

That's what it's called today.

Leveret marriage was a way of perpetuating a family after the death of a would-be father.

It was not at all necessary if there was already descendants, okay?

If there were descendants in place, okay?

Only in the case when a brother dies, and there are no descendants.

And this is a covenant responsibility.

We need to understand that as we read Genesis 38 today.

And that's why it's so important.

It's not merely that Onan is rejecting the order of his father, that his father gave him, okay?

That would be significant, but that's not Genesis 38.

All right?

And it's not just that Onan is rejecting his communal responsibility.

If that was so, it would be important.

But that's not Genesis 38 either.

He's rejecting the covenant responsibility.

That's why we are in Genesis 38.

The mechanics of Onan is not that he refused to go into Tamar, okay?

It's just that he refused to complete it.

And it doesn't say when he went in.

It says whenever he went in.

So he's enjoying this time, but he's not going to follow through on the commandment, okay?

And so we could go down this road a lot.

But it seems grotesque to us, but we need to understand why this is going on.

And we need to know this because it represents, first of all, the candor of Scripture.

The candor of Scripture that is inspired by the Holy Spirit that tells us exactly how this covenant responsibility was denied.

This is important.

But it also tells us in another sense just how calculating Onan's sin is.

He's very calculated in terms of covenant responsibility.

He knows that in terms of covenant, in the terms of the covenant, these kids are not, these children, if he produces children, they're not going to be his.

They might be his biologically, but they won't be his children.

And he doesn't want his brother's children to be.

He doesn't want them to be, okay?

And we think, you know, what does this have to do with anything?

It has everything to do with the wealth of the father, the wealth of the dad.

And remember now, Onan, he's now the eldest son, right?

Because the other one's been capped off.

So now, guess what?

I get all the inheritance.

I get all the inheritance.

And I don't want for any kids to be born so that it be part of my brother because all of a sudden they step in and now I lose part of my inheritance.

And if you understand patrilineage, okay, if Onan goes into her and brings about a boy, that boy becomes the inheritor of Judah's patrilineage, okay?

And he doesn't want to lose what he feels like he has now in terms of...

And big girls there, okay? And so, did he just say that? Yes, that's what it's called, okay? I'll do that, because I can have all my jollies, and I won't create a child. I get the best of both worlds. No one will know, except for whom? God. Yeah, that's always a problem, isn't it? Yeah. So anyway, so Onan's act, listen, Onan's act is not described as sexual sin, though. It's not, it's important for us.

There is a negative moral verdict on the fact that he is wasting his semen, okay? But the reason why God kills him is because he is defying his responsibility in the covenant, okay? And to put it bluntly, God doesn't want either one of these two sons in the line of Judah.

That's effectively what's happening here. God sovereignly takes him out. He takes him out, out of the line of succession.

You know, it just got me thinking, what if God, what if God was as faithful to that, as faithful as he was then, as he would be now, as far as taking people out, when they weren't true to what they said they were going to do, for the Lord, in their relationship with God.

Every time we sang a song and we said, I surrender all, we'd have the paramedics out here.

We'd have to have a paddy wagon out here for all of us, probably, yeah?

If God said, you surrender all? All? Define all.

You know, seriously.

So, all right, let's look at verse 10. We've got a lot of ground to cover.

And what he did was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and he put him to death also.

You know, I know this is a lot for us to take in, and we ask the question, why would God want us to know this?

Is it hot in here or is it me? I ask this every week. It's hot in here, isn't it? Holy cow.

Now, okay, but obviously he wanted all, obviously God wanted all the people to know this.

He wanted Israel to know this, and he gave it, you know, through Moses to the Pentateuch, okay?

And the Apostle Paul says in Romans that these accounts in the Old Testament are given to us for what?

For encouragement. For encouragement, okay?

And the encouragement is to understand that God's sovereign determination to make his covenant promises happen.

His word will be fulfilled, and whoever stands in the way of his covenant purposes gets taken out of the story.

End of story.

That's what he's showing us.

But this wretched story continues.

Verse 11.

Then Judah said to Tamar, his daughter-in-law,

Remain a widow in your father's house till Shelah, my son, grows up.

For he feared that he would die like his brothers.

So Tamar went and remained in her father's house.

Tamar is twice widowed now, all right?

She's twice widowed.

And he sends her back.

He sends her back to her father's house.

This is bizarre because in this culture, once you marry, you are no longer part of your old family.

You are part of your husband's family now, okay?

But he sends her back to her dad's house.

It's almost like he's sending her back to a premarital state.

And he sends her back.

It says, we're told that it's because he's concerned about his third son, Shelah.

But something else about Shelah.

Obviously, he's a boy.

He's just a boy at this point.

He's not ready to take on the responsibility of fatherhood.

And one of the things that we can take from, that we can note from this text as well, is that this came very early.

You would accept that responsibility very early, especially in this current situation.

Judah's concern is to perpetuate his own line.

So as soon as this boy would be physically capable of being a father, okay?

That's what this is getting at.

He would be put in that position of being a husband and father as soon as possible, all right?

So, because one of the things that would be terrible is for Judah to pass away and without his line being able to be perpetuated, continued.

And so he's, you know, to be left without a son to produce an heir.

So we got to wait.

We have to wait.

He's obviously a little boy at this stage.

Verse 12.

Isn't that where we left off?

Yes.

took off her widow's garments and covered herself with a veil, wrapping herself up, and sat at the entrance of Innam, which is on the road to Timnah. For she saw that Shelah was grown up, and she had not been given to him in marriage. It's very interesting. The story gets even more horrifying still, because Tamar was told that Judah was going to this place.

And she knows that Shelah is grown up now. One way or another, she is going to be in the continuing line of Judah. And she comes up with this diabolical plan. Verse 15.

When Judah saw her, he thought she was a prostitute, for she covered her face. And he turned to her at the roadside and said, Come, let me come into you. For he did not know that she was his daughter-in-law.

She said, What will you give me that you may come into me? You know, he thought, Okay, it's just a prostitute. Okay, bad enough, right? Bad enough. But it's not just any prostitute. Listen, this is a temple prostitute. All right? Tamar has disguised herself as a Canaanite temple prostitute.

It makes it worse than if we were just trying to justify this as mere prostitution, as immoral and as godless as that is. Okay? But remember, Judah has married into this Canaanite family.

He brings all this trash with him. Okay? And now he's associating himself with the worst form of Canaanite idolatry.

This is more than a sexual sin. It is an idolatrous act. This is what he's committing. This is what he has stooped to at this point.

What will you give me that you may come into me? He answered, I will send you a young goat from the flock.

And she said, If you give me a pledge until you send it. She's a businesswoman, right?

And he said, What pledge shall I give you? She replied, Your signet ring. That's your checkbook, right there. Signet ring.

Okay? Your cord. That's the cord that wraps around your robe. That defines your patriarch. Okay?

Your cord and your staff that's in your hand. So he gave them to her. He went into her and she conceived by him.

This is even more horrifying than we can imagine. Okay?

But Judah... So Judah leaves his father. He leaves his brothers.

After participating in the selling of Joseph into slavery, Judah marries this Canaanite woman and has three sons by her.

The first is so wicked that God takes them out.

But according to the story, the third one's not old enough yet.

So he sends Tamar back to the mom's house and all this stuff to wait because he fears that something's going to happen to Sheila.

He's going to likely die.

But then he, in the act of idolatrous temple prostitution, he goes into her and by Judah, she conceives.

I mean, this is... Why do you watch any soap operas on TV, guys?

I mean, this is better than anything you can make up, right?

By Judah, she conceives.

And in terms of covenant morality and covenant responsibility, this is disastrous.

And when we read this, we should be shocked.

We read it like it's just another story.

And she goes around and takes around.

Oh, well, slept with a daughter-in-law.

It's kind of cool.

Okay?

So...

But we should hear this and we should think,

how could anyone who is a son of Jacob,

anyone who is a son of Isaac,

anyone who is a son of Abraham come to this low point in life?

Where did this ever become a good idea?

Where?

Verse 19.

Then she arose and went away, taking off her veil,

and she put on the garments of her widowhood.

When Judah sent the young goat by his friend, the Adullamite,

to take back the pledge from the woman's hand,

he did not find her.

And he asked the men of the place,

where is the cult prostitute who was at Iniam at the roadside?

And they said, no cult prostitute has been here.

So he returned to Judah and said, I have not found her.

Also, the men of the place said, no cult prostitute has been here.

And Judah replied,

I have not found her.

What does that remind you when you read that? I think back to David and Nathan. No, Judah, man. Judah, man. Judah, man. All these things are found out, are they not? God has a way of finding these things out. So the pregnancy has become detected. And it's, it's reported to Judah that his daughter-in-law, he thought he had her safely sequestered at home, right? Under dad's roof. She's saved.

Over there. She's safe over there. She's pregnant. And, and waiting. And he thinks that she's sequestered over there waiting for Selah. She's pregnant. And he knows it's not Selah. He knows it's not his son. And he's told that he's, she's pregnant. And he orders her to be executed.

As she was being brought out, she sent word to her father-in-law. By the man whom these belong, I'm pregnant.

And she said, please identify whose these are, the signet, the cord, and the staff. You cannot miss the parallelisms here when we read this. It was Jacob. It was Jacob who wore Esau's things to trick his dad.

It was, it was, it was Judah and his brothers who took Joseph's things to do, to, to, to, to fool the dad, to get the dad thinking that, that his son was dead.

And now Tamar says, these things, whoever these things belongs to, he's the guilty party.

There is indictment in these things. There's indictment in these things.

Then Judah, verse 26, identified them and said, she is more righteous than I, since I did not give her to my son Selah, and he did not know her again.

When the time of the labor came, there were twins in her womb.

And when she was in labor, one put out a hand, and a midwife took and tied a scarlet thread on his hand, saying, this is the one who came out first.

But as he drew back his hand, behold, his brother came out.

And she said, what a breach you have made for yourself.

Therefore, his name was Perez.

Afterward, his brother came out with a scarlet thread on his hand, and his name was called Zerah.

So they are confronted with the fact that Tamar is pregnant.

And obviously, it's not an authorized moral pregnancy.

It's assumed that she has committed adultery at this point.

And acting as the patriarch, Judah orders that she be executed for her sins.

A crime against the covenant, a crime against the law, and the law that's not yet given to Israel.

It's not yet given to the full law in Leviticus, but rather it's the law that God has already written on their hearts.

And it's the law that's already in its rudimentary form found amongst covenant people, that this is wrong.

But when she's brought out, she indicts the one by asking, whose things are these?

It's a diabolical plan that she's had from the very beginning.

And the response of Judah to the entire situation is theologically accurate.

It's bizarre, okay?

But it's theologically accurate when he says, she is more righteous than I.

She's more righteous than I.

And in context, it has nothing to do with sexual morality here, okay?

Don't miss that.

This, again, if we're looking for Genesis 38 as a template for sexual morality, we're going to put way too much emphasis on the wrong chapter, okay?

There are plenty of contexts.

The Bible gives us a comprehensive understanding of sexual immorality.

The context here is covenant fidelity, okay?

Covenant faithfulness.

The statement in there, more righteous than I, has nothing to do with the fact that she was less complacent in the sexual sin.

It was her idea.

It was her idea, okay?

And so it was her plan.

So in no sense is she more righteous in terms of sexual morality.

She is more righteous in terms of the fulfillment.

What does she do?

It's her mind.

Hirume ממ� animate.

Okay? But it's brought about a situation or brought about a continuation of the covenant. And so there are two boys that are born. Two boys. And they are twins. And where there are twins in Genesis, there's trouble. I mean, we have seen that. And so we saw that in Jacob and Esau when they were striving within the womb. Excuse me, but there's a very interesting aspect to this.

One puts out. One puts out his hand and the midwife ties a scarlet thread on it and saying, this one comes out first. Now, why? Again, patrilineage. It's important. It's important to know which one comes out first, okay? But the one that comes out first will be the patriarch of all the things to come. And this was the grandchild that was planned by Leverett marriage. Okay? Are you with me?

This was the grandchild that was supposed to be planned by Leverett marriage. But it's not a grandchild. It's a child. It's the son of Judah. It's the son of Judah. But the hand of the one with the scarlet thread tied on goes back into the womb. And the other one comes out first.

They make the declaration that this one was born first, but the other one comes out first, which is a way of saying that God's sovereign plan is simply going to be demonstrated.

It's going to be demonstrated in ways that no human being can outplan God and no human being can outplot God. Absolutely.

Absolutely. And so what is this scarlet thread that he ties on there?

You know, there will be another prostitute, Rahab, and there will be a scarlet thread that will be involved in that,

who tied a scarlet thread to identify her house.

And as the conquest of Canaan takes place, it's very important she and her family are going to be spared.

But there's something very important to this scarlet thread, and the text is not spelling it out,

but it's sort of tantalizing here as you read it.

There is something about the history of redemption, of redemption that's made clear in the symbolism of the scarlet cord.

And so there are even more emphatically about the, in this passage, about the sovereignty of God built into this text.

So why do we have Genesis 38? Why do we need Genesis 38?

Well, a couple of thoughts real quickly.

First of all, listen to me.

The only, listen, the only hero in the Old Testament is God.

The only hero that the Old Testament has is God Almighty Himself.

That's, that's the first thing, you know.

The patriarchs fail to be heroic.

I mean, absolutely, across the board, in the sense of being faithful, in the sense of being sinless, all these things.

Even the greatest patriarch, Abraham, who was even called a friend of God,

who was even willing to sacrifice his own son,

who was really called, who was justified by faith,

who in Hebrews 11 is given this great honor to.

Even Abraham has a contorted history.

Even with all of his attempts, and some of it with the cooperation of his wife, Sarah,

to accomplish God's covenant plan in a way that God didn't plan.

Okay?

So even in all that.

But he is a patriarch, and we're rightly to speak of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

But Isaac, and Abraham, and Jacob, and all who follow,

they all demonstrate to be men who sin.

Men who fail.

There is only one sinless one in the Old Testament, and that's God himself.

And listen, he promises a Messiah.

You with me?

He promises a Messiah.

And he promises, listen, a kinsman redeemer.

He promises a kinsman redeemer.

And you realize that Jesus Christ is the kinsman redeemer.

And it's exactly the kinsman redeemer role that Onan refused to fulfill.

He refused to fulfill the role of the kinsman redeemer.

Okay?

He refused to be, the word is the goel.

He refused to be the goel, the kinsman redeemer, to his dead brother.

And so, Jesus Christ is specifically identified as...

That meets the eye in Genesis 38. And as we... And as we look at this thing in the flow of history as well too, just to make it clear, we also see that... We see Joseph's singularity among his brothers is crucially important. Joseph is so different from all the other brothers. And... Well, I'll get ahead of myself here in a second as we close here. But he's so different. He's so different. And so, the lessons that we see in this that cannot escape is that...

First thing is that... Man cannot escape responsibility from his actions. You cannot escape responsibility from your actions. Number two, listen. The Lord is sovereign. The Lord is sovereign. And nothing will thwart His purposes. And third, you know, the third lesson has to do with just the remarkable grace of God. Just the grace of God.

Think about this. Judah. It's through the line of Judah that Jesus comes. It's not the line of Joseph. I would have chosen Joseph. Wouldn't you?

But showing us the depravity of Judah, again, reveals the great grace of our great God. It's mind-blowing. And we're all familiar with the choice that the Messiah was going to be born in a stable and not in a palace and all this.

But His genealogy, but His genealogy, the genealogy of Jesus portrays even more graphically the humility of Christ.

When you look at His genealogy in Matthew, listen. Only five women are mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus Christ.

Okay? You have Tamar. You have Rahab. You have... Who else? Come on.

Ruth. Ruth. You have... Come on.

Bathsheba and Mary. Okay? Right?

So, I mean, look at that. Tamar posed as a prostitute. All right?

Rahab was a prostitute. All right? You look at all this.

Bathsheba was an adulteress. Okay? And she's only mentioned... Bathsheba's only mentioned as the one who was the wife of Uriah.

You know, that's how... Not David. No. The wife of Uriah. Okay?

It's interesting how they pull that all together. Okay?

Okay? Ruth was a Moabitess. All right?

And Mary... Mary was regarded as immoral by her contemporaries because they didn't believe her story.

Virgin... Whatever.

You know? They didn't believe her story.

And so, maybe Matthew was putting all this together, okay, to include these women to counter the Jewish criticism that he's getting by his story.

But showing that God had moved in unusual ways to achieve his ends and had shown that he was not averse to using people who are outside the pale of respectability.

And he still does that today. Using people who are outside the pale of respectability. That's me. That's you. Outside. Okay?

And whatever he had in mind, we can't escape the fact that the Lord graciously reached out to all manner of people and offered them to have a part in what he was doing.

And so... And he still performs in those wonderful ways today.

And so, next, we will see Joseph. We will come into Joseph.

And what's the Lord doing in Joseph's life?

He's developing Joseph's faith.

That's what he's doing.

And Joseph had faith. He trusted in the Lord.

But remember, he was quite naive.

He had faith in God, but it was in very much an embryonic stage.

And like a seed that needed to grow.

And the way that... We talked about this in our study this morning.

The way that often your faith develops and your faith grows.

And you might not like this, but it's by pain.

It's by pain.

You know, if your boss comes in tomorrow and he tells you that he's giving you a raise and he's making you the VP of the company,

you probably say, Amen! Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!

Lord, I love you! Lord, I trust you!

But what if your boss comes in tomorrow morning and he says,

Hey, we've got to make some cutbacks and we've got to lay some folks off and bring some salaries down.

And guess what? You've got the short straw.

You're out of here.

Sorry.

Hate it for you.

Would you still be...

Praise the Lord! Amen! Hallelujah!

I trust you, Lord!

I trust you, Lord!

I trust you, Lord!

And all these things.

Now...

That trial is really a moment for your faith to be revealed and for your faith to grow. I mean, do you really believe God despite the circumstances, or do you only trust God when life is good, you know? We will see that in the life of Joseph. Joseph is a 17-year-old boy who loves God intently. But now he needs to grow. He needs to grow. He needs to grow. He needs to grow. He needs to grow. He needs to grow. And he needs to grow. And he needs to grow. He needs to grow. He needs to grow. He needs to grow.

And he needs to develop

And so this chapter is a contrast

Chapter 38 highlights the depravity of Judah

I mean just plain and simple

And chapter 39 is going to highlight

The rock solid integrity that Joseph has

His younger brother

And so really as you look at it

All the options

All other options will shortly become

Necessary as a rescue for Israel

Because there's no more options

I mean Benjamin's too young

Okay

The other ten are too useless

All right

And so you got Joseph

We're left with Joseph

And where's Joseph?

Meanwhile

Meanwhile Joseph is in Potiphar's house

Close to the Pharaoh

Close to all things that are important

And right where God wants him

And we'll pick up on that

Next time we get together with Joseph

So we lay before you a chapter this morning

Come on up worship team

A chapter this morning that I know

Is not an uplifting go tell your neighbor story

I get it

But it also teaches us how to study the word of God

It teaches us how to not just take things that face value

That there's something deeper that God is trying to show us

There's something deeper that God is trying to reveal to us

Even in the depravity of someone like Judah

Even in the lostness of someone like Judah

God still uses Judah

Because we know that through the line of Judah

Yeshua will come

Mind boggling

And so there in and of itself is a word for us today

It doesn't matter who you are

What you have gone through

How deeply you have fallen short

The God of this universe

Still desires to use you emphatically

Still has a plan for you

And maybe you're going through some pain right now

In your life

Maybe you're going through some discomfort in your life

Maybe some things in your world have been turned sideways

In your life

Understand that it could be the very crucible

That God wants you to walk through right now

In order that your faith in Him would grow like never before

Because the end result

The end result is that

That we would be holy

So that God would be glorified

Amen

We would be holy

That God would be glorified

So the question becomes today

God, how do I glorify you

In the midst of what I'm going through right now

How do I bring you glory and honor

In the midst

Through the midst of what I'm going through right now

I can take the example of Judah

I can take the example of

All those who tried to

To tell God that His plan wasn't good enough

And that He had a better plan

He had a better plan for God

I can take the example that the Old Testament gives us

Over and over

Or we can take the example of the only one true hero

Of the Old Testament

God Almighty

That followed Him

Let's stand

Father, this morning

If there's someone who is in need of prayer

Whatever that prayer might be

I pray that they would come

And take the hand of someone close to them

Come up today

We would love to be able to talk to them

And have that conversation with them

God, if there's someone here today

Who has never really fully given their lives to you

To the worship of your Son, Jesus Christ

I just pray that today would be the day of salvation

And that would take place in their lives and hearts

We lift up today the Drury family

And all that they are going through

And all that they are experiencing right now

Even when you know

You've been told that

Your Father is going to pass

It's hard, Lord

It's hard

So please, Lord

Bring comfort to them

As only you can do

Father, we love you this day

Jesus Christ