Podcasts about levirate

Two genealogies of Jesus—one from Matthew, one from Luke—list different names. Why? And what does it mean for Jesus’ claim to be the Messiah? One approach suggests Matthew lists royal succession, not biology, while Luke follows a biological line through a different son of David. But a deeper dive reveals something even more intriguing. Could legal adoption, Levirate marriage, and repentance after exile explain how Jesus inherited both David’s bloodline and right to the throne? Dr Robert Carter offers a reconstruction that makes sense of it all—and reinforces trust in the Bible’s reliability.

God is writing a bigger story than you can see. Ruth chapter 4 isn't just the end of a love story—it's the launchpad for legacy, redemption, and restoration. In today's message, we wrap up our Ruth series with powerful insights into how God redeems our brokenness, restores what's been lost, and brings purpose from pain.

We delve into the story of Judah and Tamar. We explore Judah's unrighteous actions, from selling his brother Joseph into slavery to his relationship with Tamar. We learn the significance of the Levirate marriage custom and the consequence of Judah's unrighteous actions leading to the birth of Perez.Support the showRead along with us in the Bible Brief App! Try the Bible Brief book for an offline experience!Get your free Bible Timeline with the 10 Steps: Timeline LinkSupport the show: Tap here to become a monthly supporter!Review the show: Tap here!Want to go deeper?...Download the Bible Brief App!iPhone: App Store LinkAndroid: Play Store LinkWant a physical book? Check out "Bible Brief" by our founder!Amazon: Amazon LinkWebsite: biblebrief.orgInstagram: @biblelitTwitter: @bible_litFacebook: @biblelitEmail the Show: biblebrief@biblelit.org Want to learn the Bible languages (Greek & Hebrew)? Check out ou...

Daily Dose of Hope May 2, 2025 Day 5 of Week 5   Scripture - Mark 12:18-34   Prayer:  Lord, How we need you.  Thank you for your presence, thank you for the way you continue to pursue us.  Lord, in these next few moments of silence, help us set aside our scattered thoughts and focus on you...In Your Name, Amen.   Welcome to the Daily Dose of Hope, a Deep Dive into the Gospels and Acts.  Today is day 2 of Mark 12.  Like I said yesterday, there is a lot here!  Today, we will talk about Jesus' comments regarding marriage at the resurrection and the greatest commandment.   Let's start with marriage at the resurrection.  The Sadducees were a group of Jewish wealthy and aristocratic leaders who did not believe in the resurrection.  It's not clear if they were trying to trap Jesus or possibly discredit him, but they ask him a question based on levirate law as outlined by the law of Moses.    Levirate law was intended to protect widows without a male heir.  When a brother died, leaving his wife without children, a surviving brother marries the widow with the sole intention of producing an heir.  If a son is conceived, he is actually considered to be the deceased brother's child.  In ancient near-East culture, a widow without any connection to a male would either starve or be forced to beg or prostitute herself.    Thus, the Sadducees question makes a little more sense even though it is a bit absurd.  A woman's husband dies and she marries a brother.  That brother dies and she marries another brother and so forth until she has been married to all seven brothers.  Then she dies.  Whose wife will she be at the resurrection?  Keep in mind, they ask this question knowing that they think the resurrection is false.  They have an ulterior motive here – possibly make a fool of Jesus?   Jesus basically tells them they are totally missing the point. In the resurrection, our bodies will be different – perfect and glorious.  There will also be a change in our spiritual nature.  Jesus is saying that in regard to marriage and sexual matters, we will be like the angels (note that he did not say we will be angels but we will be like them.)    But the Sadducees were mistaken so significantly not because of this absurd question but because they didn't believe in the resurrection.  This is a fundamental aspect of Jesus' teaching and they missed it entirely.  “You are badly mistaken!” Jesus says to them.   Let's move on. To the other part of today's text, the greatest commandment.  A scribe comes up to ask Jesus a question.  Unlike the Pharisees and Sadducees, he isn't combative and patronizing.  He saw how well Jesus answered questions and he genuinely wanted to hear from Jesus.  He asks Jesus for the greatest commandment.   Jesus begins his answer with the Shema which comes from Deuteronomy 6, Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.  Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.  Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.    The Shema recognizes the uniqueness and oneness of God. There aren't other gods but only one true God.  God calls his people to love him and obey him with every part of their being.  He called the ancient Israelites to this this and he calls us to do this as well.  Jesus took the Shema and added an important element.  In Mark 12, we read that Jesus says this: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.'  The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.'  There is no commandment greater than these.”  Yes, we love God with our whole being but we also love others.  In fact, love of God is demonstrated by love of others.  As Christians, we cannot separate the two.    Love of God and love of others cannot be separated.  How often do we try to say that we love God while we hate another person?    Blessings, Pastor Vicki    

Spirit of Praise - May the Fourth be with you!Website: http://www.battle4freedom.com/Network: https://www.mojo50.comStreaming: https://www.rumble.com/Battle4FreedomPsalm 7:18I thank Adonai for his righteousness and sing praise to the name of Adonai `Elyon.https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2029%3A35%2CGenesis%2038%3A29%2CDaniel%203%3A25&version=CJBThree verses on Fourths!Genesis 38:1 It was at this time that Y'hudah went off from his brothers and settled near a man named Hirah who was an `Adulami. 2 There Y'hudah saw one of the daughters of a certain Kena`ani whose name was Shua, and he took her and slept with her. 3 She conceived and had a son, whom he named `Er. 4 She conceived again and had a son, and she called him Onan. 5 Then she conceived yet again and had a son whom she called Shelah; he was in K'ziv when she gave birth to him.Genesis 38:6 Y'hudah took a wife for `Er his firstborn, and her name was Tamar. 7 But `Er, Y'hudah's firstborn, was evil from Adonai's perspective, so Adonai killed him. 8 Y'hudah said to Onan, "Go and sleep with your brother's wife — perform the duty of a husband's brother to her, and preserve your brother's line of descent." 9 However, Onan knew that the child would not count as his; so whenever he had intercourse with his brother's wife, he spilled the semen on the ground, so as not to give his brother offspring. 10 What he did was evil from Adonai's perspective, so he killed him too.Genesis 38:11 Then Y'hudah said to Tamar his daughter-in-law, "Stay a widow in your father's house until my son Shelah grows up"; for he thought, "I don't want him to die too, like his brothers." So Tamar went and lived at home with her father. 12 In due time, Shua's daughter, the wife of Y'hudah, died. After Y'hudah had been comforted, he went up to be with his sheep-shearers in Timnah, he and his friend Hirah the `Adulami. 13 Tamar was told, "Your father-in-law has gone up to Timnah to shear his sheep." 14 So she took off her widow's clothes, completely covered her face with her veil, and sat at the entrance to `Einayim, which is on the way to Timnah. For she saw that Shelah had grown up, but she still was not being given to him as his wife.Genesis 38:15 When Y'hudah saw her, he thought she was a prostitute, because she had covered her face. 16 So he went over to her where she was sitting and said, not realizing that she was his daughter-in-law, "Come, let me sleep with you." She answered, "What will you pay to sleep with me?" 17 He said, "I will send you a kid from the flock of goats." She said, "Will you also give me something as a guarantee until you send it" 18 He answered, "What should I give you as a guarantee?" She said, "Your seal, with its cord, and the staff you're carrying in your hand." So he gave them to her, then went and slept with her; and she conceived by him. 19 She got up and went away, took off her veil and put on her widow's clothes.Genesis 38:20 Y'hudah sent the kid with his friend the `Adulami to receive the guarantee items back from the woman, but he couldn't find her. 21 He asked the people near where she had been, "Where is the prostitute who was on the road at `Einayim?" But they answered, "There hasn't been any prostitute here." 22 So he returned to Y'hudah and said, "I couldn't find her; also the people there said, `There hasn't been any prostitute here.'" 23 Y'hudah said, "All right, let her keep the things, so that we won't be publicly shamed. I sent the kid, but you didn't find her."Genesis 38:24 About three months later Y'hudah was told, "Tamar your daughter-in-law has been acting like a whore; moreover, she is pregnant as a result of her prostitution." Y'hudah said, "Bring her out, and let her be burned alive!" 25 When she was brought out, she sent this message to her father-in-law: "I am pregnant by the man to whom these things belong. Determine, I beg you, whose these are — the signet, the cords and the staff." 26 Then Y'hudah acknowledged owning them. He said, "She is more righteous than I, because I didn't let her become the wife of my son Shelah." And he never slept with her again.Genesis 38:27 When she went into labor, it became evident that she was going to have twins. 28 As she was in labor, one of them put out his hand; and the midwife took his hand and tied a scarlet thread on it, saying, "This one came out first." 29 But then he withdrew his hand, and his brother came out; so she said, "How did you manage to break out first?" Therefore he was named Peretz [breaking out]. 30 Then out came his brother, with the scarlet thread on his hand, and he was given the name Zerach [scarlet].Did Onan die because he did not want to have children?Levirate-marriage is a strange custom for us today.  It required one brother to marry the wife of a brother who died and who did not have a son. Our question is about Onan who did not want this responsibility. The custom of levirate-marriage was practiced throughout the Old Testament (Genesis 38:6-10; Ruth 4:10) and even into Christ's time (Matthew 22:24). It is clear this was a divine principle during the time of the book of Genesis, and it was finally written down as part of the Mosaic Law,https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%2025%3A5-10&version=CJBDeuteronomy 25:5-105 "If brothers live together, and one of them dies childless, his widow is not to marry someone unrelated to him; her husband's brother is to go to her and perform the duty of a brother-in-law by marrying her. 6 The first child she bears will succeed to the name of his dead brother, so that his name will not be eliminated from Isra'el. 7 If the man does not wish to marry his brother's widow, then his brother's widow is to go up to the gate, to the leaders, and say, `My brother-in-law refuses to raise up for his brother a name in Isra'el; he will not perform the duty of a husband's brother for me.' 8 The leaders of his town are to summon him and speak to him. If, on appearing before them, he continues to say, `I don't want to marry her,' 9 then his brother's widow is to approach him in the presence of the leaders, pull his sandal off his foot, spit in his face and say, `This is what is done to the man who refuses to build up his brother's family.' 10 From that time on, his family is to be known in Isra'el as `the family of the man who had his sandal pulled off.'Credits:https://unsplash.com/@xangriffin - Person Praisinghttps://unsplash.com/@danist07 - Clouds

This is one of the more ridiculous things you can think of, the Sadducees imagine they have invented the ultimate hypothetical situation. It's based on the Levirate law found in Deuteronomy 25. It served both economic and spiritual purposes. Either way, if this did happen then who is married to the widow in the life to come? Jesus' reply has several layers to it.  What he suggests is that one day we will all be full alive, just as we all are with God right now. This is why he is the God of the dead, but the God of the living. This has the power to reorient the way we live our lives now – from God's point of view. That all things are already alive. Thank you for joining us today! If you feel led to give to DCC, you can do so here: https://pushpay.com/g/denverchurch?src=hpp

Joel Baden and Harry Attridge discuss Ruth's faithfulness, Levirate marriage, and what turns out to be the most explicit biblical sex scene in Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17. The text is appointed for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 27, in Year B of the Revised Common Lectionary.More Yale Bible Study resources, including a transcript of this episode, at: https://YaleBibleStudy.org/podcastJoel Baden is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Director of the Center for Continuing Education at Yale Divinity School. Harry Attridge is Sterling Professor of Divinity at Yale Divinity School.Connect with Yale Bible Study: Facebook: @YDSCCE Twitter: @BibleYale YouTube: youtube.com/c/YaleBibleStudy LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/yds-center-for-continuing-education Thank you for listening!

Part 13 of the series in Deuteronomy. Laws about marriage - the permission for divorce and duty of Levirate marriage - and various laws that will regulate life in Israel to ensure fairness for all.

A @Christadelphians Video: Summary The content delves into the biblical story of Ruth and Boaz as a kinsman redeemer, highlighting the Levirate law and the role of a redeemer in raising up seed. It draws parallels between the story of Ruth and the work of the Messiah in redeeming Israel. The narrative explores themes of redemption, restoration, and the building of a spiritual house. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/christadelphians-talk/message

What can the mitzvah of yibum, Levirate marriage, teach us about making difficult decisions and personal growth? In this week’s episode of Pardes from Jerusalem, Rabbi Zvi Hirschfield and Rabbi Dr. Daniel Reifman unpack the complicated family dynamics of … Read the rest The post Vayeshev 5784: Growth and Responsibility first appeared on Elmad Online Learning. Continue reading Vayeshev 5784: Growth and Responsibility at Elmad Online Learning.

This week, Rhys and Colin continue their readthrough of Begotten or Made? by Oliver O'Donovan. In Ch. 3, O'Donovan finally addresses the topic of artificial insemination, addressing questions about the ends of medical intervention; the differences between cure, compensation, and circumvention in treatment; and the ethics of involving a third party in the reproductive process.Subscribe to Ad Fontes from just $2.50 per month! Gain access to our quaterly print editions and exclusive interviews, and support our work.Subscribe here: https://adfontesjournal.com/subscribe/Timestamps00:00:00 – 00:10:39 - Intro; recap; the possibility of artificial insemination by donor00:10:50 – 00:24:43 - the ends of AID; the multiple goods of the procreative organs; cure, circumvention, and compensation00:24:54 – 00:38:39 - ethics of the third party in AID; reproduction a private act; proxy relationships and their limits00:38:38 – 00:50:14 - the Patriarchal and Levirate patterns in Scripture; problematic anonymity of AID00:50:23 - end - What We're Reading; Spotlight; wrap-upCurrently ReadingColin: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky Rhys: Birthday Letters by Ted HughesTexts DiscussedBegotten or Made? by Oliver O'DonovanSpotlightDavenant Hall Hilary Term Class Registration (REGISTER NOW!)MusicIntro and Outro:Midnight Stroll by Ghostrifter bit.ly/ghostrifter-scCreative Commons — Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported — CC BY-ND 3.0Free Download: hypeddit.com/track/2gic0sLink Music:New Road by Ghostrifter bit.ly/ghostrifter-scCreative Commons — Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported — CC BY-ND 3.0Free Download: hypeddit.com/track/l7ldfnTo find out more about The Davenant Institute, visit our website.

Jesus proved resurrection with scripture to the unbelievers Sadducees. After His own resurrection, we have evidence that God sovereignly will raise all who died in Christ. - SERMON TRANSCRIPT - A number of years ago, I was in an old cemetery in the center of the state of Kentucky. I was going through that area and there was this old kind of country church, and as often happens with these country churches, there was a cemetery connected with it, and I was walking through it. I came to a headstone that had been completely weathered, effaced by wind and rain and time. Based on the dates that were on the stones around it, probably in the latter part of the 19th century, quarter of the 19th century, 1870s, 1880s. As I knelt down, I could feel with my fingertips some slight indentations on the headstone, but I couldn't read any letter, not a single letter. I thought, "Who was this person? What did they do? How long did they live? Male or female? Is there anybody alive today in that area that would know who that person was?" I thought about the finality of death and how awesome an enemy death really is, how all of the glory of humanity is stripped away by death. Within a short amount of time in most cases, there's not a person on earth that remembers that that person ever lived. The book of Ecclesiastes faces these truths square on and speaks bleakness over human life, vanity of vanities. Everything is vanity. Everything we put our hand to is vanity. Ecclesiastes 3:20, "We come from dust and to dust we return." All of our great projects, we have to entrust them to someone else who didn't build them, and who knows what's going to happen with them. Within a short amount of time, all that we have constructed becomes destructed, blows away like chaff in the wind. ,Ecclesiastes 9:6, "The dead in the grave. They know nothing,” the writer says. "All of their loves and hates their envys and their achievements are forgotten." Ecclesiastes, I think, the way I look at that book, is that's what life would be like if there is no resurrection from the dead. But friends, I stand before you today to say that there is resurrection from the dead, therefore our labor in the Lord is not “vanity of vanities.” The things we do in the Lord will last for all eternity. They will have eternal consequence. Apostle Paul on trial for his life stood before the Sanhedrin and said these words, "I stand before you today because of my hope in the resurrection from the dead." I feel like as a preacher today, that's what I'm doing. I stand before you today because of my hope in the resurrection from the dead. But that's insufficient. I stand before you today on behalf of your hope in the resurrection from the dead, my hope and your hope, and I want our hope to be robust. I want it to be fed today, and there's only one food for that hope and that is the Word of God. Only by the Word of God can our hope in the resurrection from the dead be strengthened. I. Is Death the End? So the question in front of us, because of these Sadducees that came to question Jesus, is, "Is death the end?” Job asked this question. Job 14:14, "If a man dies, will he live again?” We walked through the Book of Job and we saw that despite remarkable faith at the beginning of his trial, Job was worn down by the sorrows, worn down by the grief, and began to say some things that were, putting it gently, questionable. He wrestled it seems with doubts concerning death in that very chapter in which he raises the question, "If a man dies, will he live again?" He seems to say, "I don't think so." In Job 14:7-12 he says, "At least there is hope for a tree. If it is cut down, it will sprout again and its new chutes will not fail, but man dies and is laid low. He breathes last and is no more. Man lies down and does not rise. Until the heavens are no more, men will not awake or be roused from their sleep." Praise God, that's not true. But Job had never seen any evidence to the contrary, neither have we with our own eyes. When I was preaching through Job, I made this statement, “Job is a better man than any of us will ever be, but we have a better hope than he ever had.” Hallelujah. We have a better hope. Christ is that better hope, and we're going to see that in this sermon all over the world people are yearning for an answer to death. You see evidence of it in the mausoleums and the different things, artifacts that people do in connection with funerals. The pyramids of Egypt were built in preparation for the Pharaohs to live after death. They were arranging a bunch of things they thought they might need in the next life. So also the emperor of China centuries ago, millennia ago, crafted a vast terracotta army to be with him, to fight there. I don't know how much those terracotta soldiers would do for him, but there it was. That's what he was yearning for. A coin was placed in the mouth of the dead by the ancient Greeks to pay the ferrymen for a boat ride across the river Styx, the River of Death. Some plains Indians buried dead warriors with a horse with a bow and arrow to help them hunt in the next world. So also, Eskimos of Greenland bury a guide dog with deceased person to help guide them through the cold wasteland of death. Ecclesiastes says, Ecclesiastes 3:11, that "God has set eternity in the hearts of men.” We have a sense that death is an interloper, an enemy, it shouldn't be there, something's wrong here. We don't have an answer. Now we're surrounded by scientific unbelief on this question. We live in a very scientific region of the country. This area's growing by leaps and bounds, population wise, and tons of people pouring in here to work in the RTP, the semiconductors, pharmaceutical research, all of that. I'm aware of the atheistic materialistic mindset concerning this question. It goes something like this: Death can be described as the failure of a body to metabolize. Once you're dead, you're dead. Asking what lies in store for us after death is about as meaningful as asking what you remember from before your birth with pretty much the same answer. Before your birth you didn't exist, and after your death, well you won't exist either. So in short, you will not be around to worry about it. But never fear. If you make use useful use of your potential, what you are, what you can become, what you want to be, you'll enjoy the ride. Remember to stop and smell the roses along the way because you'll never get the chance again. Sounds like the biblical statement, "Let's eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die." If there's no resurrection from the dead, just get as much joy as you can out of life because that's it. So for centuries, skeptics have doubted the existence of the afterlife, and the Sadducees were Jesus's generation version of that. We're called on as a church to reach people who are without hope and without God in the world. Of the essence of being without hope is this question of life after death. They don't believe in it, they don't think it can happen or they don't know what it is. "So for centuries, skeptics have doubted the existence of the afterlife, and the Sadducees were Jesus's generation version of that. We're called on as a church to reach people who are without hope and without God in the world." II. The Sadducees: Enemies of the Resurrection But I love this encounter that we're about to walk through between Jesus and the Sadducees who are very clever. Do you get the sense, witty and clever, they’ve got this whole test case worked out? They’re coming, these witty, clever debaters thinking that they have proven that there can be no resurrection from the dead based on this test case. Imagine them debating with the man who said, "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die." That's who they're debating. So we're going to walk through this. We are at verse 18. We're dealing with these Sadducees, the enemies of the resurrection, the Sadducees who say there is no resurrection, who came to Jesus with a question. The Sadducees were a religious sect, the most powerful in terms of political power and money, and control of society. They were aristocratic. They controlled the temple and the priesthood, the Sanhedrin. It was through their corrupt control of the temple's sacrificial system that they became fabulously wealthy. They were pro-Roman because they drive their position from Roman consent. So that's who they were. Spiritually, they're kind of an odd combination of weird literalists as we're going to see in the text today, but also unbelievers who denied the scripture. They say there is no resurrection and there are neither angels nor spirits [Acts 23:8]. III. Their Test Case: Marriage at the Resurrection They bring their test case, and it's about marriage at the resurrection. Look at verse 19-23, “‘Teacher,' they said, ‘Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and have children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first one married and died without leaving any children. The second one married the widow, but he also died leaving no child. It was the same with the third. In fact, none of the seven left any children. Last of all, the woman died too. Now at the resurrection, whose wife will she be since the seven were married to her?’” Here we go again. This is the last week of Jesus's life. Jesus's enemies are coming at him in waves, one after the other trying to trick him or trap him or box him in some way, just like the Pharisees and Herodians had come with the question on paying taxes to Caesar that we walked through last week. They're going to try to do the same thing. The Sadducees are trying to trap Jesus with this whole thing. They figured they got this thing all worked out. But Jesus cannot be tricked. He cannot be trapped. His mind soars infinitely higher than theirs. Isaiah 55:9 says, "As the heavens are higher than theirs, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.” They come with this test case from the books of Moses, from Deuteronomy, it's called Levirate marriage. In that, the law of Moses stated that a Jewish man is required to marry his deceased brother's wife if they have no children and raise children in his brother's name so his name will not disappear from Israel and his property can continue as well. That's a system set up in Deuteronomy 25:5-6, a true law. But they're coming with a ridiculous test case that I have to say I'm highly skeptical ever happened. This is like some parable or something they came up with. It's like, "Ah, what about this? What if this happened?" All right. Seven brothers, all of them unmarried, stair step brothers, I would guess, over maybe, I don't know, 18 months between each one, something like that. We're going to go with it. Let's just try to figure out this test case. The first one takes a wife and then tragically dies without children. It's very sad. And then the next one steps up. I picture them like standing in a line here. It's hard for me to do this with a straight face, but there they are standing in a line. And then that one dies without children and then the next one and the next one and the next one and so on down to the seventh. They all die without children and finally the woman dies. The point is they're all dead. Seven brothers and one woman at the resurrection. Whose wife will she be since they all married? Now their assumptions are that the next world will be essentially like this one. You're raised up into the same life that we have now, and that's not true. There is continuity but difference. It's very important we understand continuity and difference. Their second assumption is that while in those days and before that, polygamy may have been acceptable because frequently kings, like David, had multiple wives. Polyandry, which is one woman married to seven men, that is not acceptable. That could not happen. That's a basic assumption to their argument. So bottom line, resurrection cannot happen. That's the whole approach. Jesus answers them. "Are you not in error? You are in error." Jesus is the judge of all the earth. He gets to make these kinds of pronouncements. "You're wrong. You're in error. Let me tell you how." He addresses thoughts, motives, lifestyle, everything. He also addresses doctrine. He addresses issues of truth and error and He always judges by what is right and He judges by scripture. We live in a day and age in which absolute truth is questioned. Truth for me, truth for you, et cetera. That's the world we live in, postmodernism. We're defining our own realities for us even to the point of gender or other things like that. We can define it for ourselves. Jesus believed in absolute truth. He believed in standards, believed in judging, saying to people, "You're in error." There is truth. What gave him the right? God gives him the right. John 5:22-23 says, "The father judges no one but has entrusted all judgment to the son that all may honor the son even as they honor the Father.” Jesus is positioned as judge of all the earth. He will judge our doctrines. He will judge our lifestyles, the attitudes and motives. He'll judge it all. Therefore, Jesus in his ministry through the scripture, gives all of us the same invitation which He gave to Pontius Pilate. For this reason, John 18:37-38, "For this reason I was born and for this I came into the world to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me." Jesus is testifying to the truth. He's telling the truth, leading people to the truth. Sadly, Pilate sarcastically said, "What is truth?" and didn't wait around for the answer, implying, like an early version of a postmodernist, there is no truth. But there is. You're in error, Sadducees. It came from two related forms of ignorance. "You're in error," He said, "because you do not know the scriptures or the power of God. That's the source of your error, you not know. Ignorance, willful, sinful ignorance concerning these things. First of all, you don't know the scriptures. Now we can be familiar with the Bible, but it doesn't mean we know it, not like that. The Sadducees would've been offended at this statement. They actually came to Jesus in the name of the Levirate marriage command from Moses. They didn't know the scriptures like they needed to. There's a vast difference between being familiar with or knowing the words of the scripture and understanding the truth, understanding the Word of God. They did not know the scriptures. Jesus is about to refer to a very familiar passage, but they didn't understand it properly, the burning bush. I just want to make an application for you all, First Baptist Church, all of you, never stop learning the Bible. Drink it in, feed your souls on it. You don't know it as well as you think you do. By God's grace, you don't know it as well as you will a year from now. Never stop learning, never stop being hungry for the Word of God. It says more than you think it does. The thing that's beautiful about the Bible is the milk is so clear, so simple, a child could understand it. That's what you need to be saved. But there's more in there than milk. There's a lot that we need to learn just be feeding on God's word. It's a saying, "familiarity breeds contempt." "You're in error," Jesus said, "because you don't know the scriptures," and then, "or the power of God." "Never stop learning the Bible. Drink it in, feed your souls on it. You don't know it as well as you think you do. By God's grace, you don't know it as well as you will a year from now." Power here means God's ability to do anything that He wills to do. Omnipotence, the Sadducees probably denied the bodily resurrection because they didn't see how God could do it. There seemed to be insurmountable logistical problems. The body's destroyed at death. Within a certain amount of time worms completely devour it. There’s nothing left but skeleton. If it's an incineration kind of situation, maybe that's burned to dust. It's all gone. How could it ever? God could never reassemble the body. It can't happen, so they think God cannot do it. They don't understand the power of God. I believe, by the way, this is the very reason why the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, when he is addressing philosophical opposition to the resurrection from the dead, "How can some of you Corinthians say there is no resurrection from the dead?" , it’s the same thing like the Sadducees. Later on in 1 Corinthians 15, he says, “Some of you will ask, ‘What about the resurrection body? What kind of body will it come?’ He answers, ‘How foolish.’” That's an interesting rebuke there. Why does he say that? "How foolish." Then he goes on to answer the question, which we'll talk about in a minute, the nature of the resurrection body. Why is he saying, "How foolish"? I think this is the issue. They don't see how it can happen, so they think it can't happen. That's foolish. Our God is the God who calls things that are not, as though they were and gives life to the dead. Romans Chapter 4, “He created everything out of nothing by the Word of His power." Is there anything too difficult for God? You don't understand the power of God. The philosophers in Athens on Mars Hill, they sneered when they heard about the resurrection, mocked it, thought it was foolish. "Why would anyone want to be raised again," they think. In the same body, again back into the same life, the body is negative, the spirit is positive. Why would you want that? They sneered, they mocked. And so it is today, the urbane, witty, scholarly atheists of our day mock our faith. Now for me as a pastor, just in general, together with the other elders of the church, I am responsible for the doctrinal health of this church and the lifestyle of this church, and as well, responsible to line it up with scripture. I think this is one of the key phrases that I use. “You're in error because you don't know the scriptures or the power of God.” So again and again on every topic we bring Romans 4:3, that one statement, "What does the scripture say?" All controversies, in any topic that comes up, in my opinion are because those people, we, us, don't know the scriptures or the power of God. Debates over predestination, divorce and remarriage, gender based roles in the church, complementarianism, charismatic gifts, whatever, whatever's in your mind that's controversial and you want to talk to me about, all those debates and discussions, the disagreement comes because one or both parties, they're in error because they don't know the scriptures or the power of God. IV. Jesus’ Timeless Answer: “I Am Abraham’s God. . .” Now Jesus begins, interestingly, his answer with a revelation of something entirely new that's not related anywhere in scripture. It's quite remarkable. My sermon title is “Jesus Proves Resurrection from Scripture.” This isn't scripture before He spoke it. Once He spoke it became scripture. So we're reading it. But before that, there's nothing in the 39 books of the Bible about marriage at the resurrection. You're not going to find it. Jesus is prophet, priest, and king. And as a prophet, He gets to teach us new things that we didn't know anywhere else, and this is a new thing. Look at verse 25, "When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given a marriage. They will be like the angels in heaven." I have searched the 39 books of the Bible. You're not going to find it anywhere in the Old Testament. This is new. Does Jesus have the right to do that? He does. He has the right to teach us new things and that's what He does here. What He teaches is consistent with other doctrines in the Bible, connected with the resurrection, consistent, but it's new. The implications are the next world and life therein will be in some way significantly different than the life we have now. There'll be some significant disconnects, but there will be continuity or else we wouldn't use the word “resurrection". Resurrection means something was lifted up, something was raised, there's continuity, but difference. In the present world, vital to the mandate God gave to Adam and Eve was, "Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it.” Have children, procreate, and marriage is given for that. One man, one woman in covenant relationship for life, that's what sex is for. The two become one flesh in marriage. That's God's intention. But in the next world, procreation it seems will no longer be needed. The number of human souls, human beings, will be fixed, done. There are no new people. He also teaches us something about angelic life. But we're not taking that off ramp right now to go off and say, "Angels don't marry," but that's what He says. Next, Jesus proves the resurrection by scripture. He goes to an amazingly familiar passage, the burning bush account. Now as I look over, and I did this with Job, I tried to say, "Does the Old Testament teach resurrection?", and it does. There's some key verses. Jesus could have gone to Psalm 16, where David writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit says, "You'll not abandon me to the grave, nor will you let your holy one see decay." Peter quoted that on the day of Pentecost, Jesus could have gone there. He could have gone to Isaiah 26:19, which says, "Your dead will rise. Their bodies will live. You who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy." Or Daniel 12:2, "Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will arise.” Those are pretty clear, but that's about it. There's not a lot of others. There's a lot more about blood atonement, his death on the cross in prophecy, than there's about his bodily resurrection. I think the reason for that is Jesus preferred to show us. He preferred to say, "Touch me and see. Look at my hands and feet." He wanted to live it out. Then the apostles proclaimed it, and we got all of these verses in the New Testament that are clear about it. Jesus opened wide the gates of Hades. But there are prophecies and He goes to this burning bush. Look at verse 26- 27, “Now about the dead rising, have you not read in the book of Moses in the account about the bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’” He is not the God of the dead but of the living. You are badly mistaken. In Matthew's account, Jesus introduces scripture beautifully. "Have you not read what God says to you?" Isn't that beautiful? When you read Exodus 3, the burning bush, God is saying this to you, “Now the word of God is living and active.” He's really saying it to you. Now I know He said it to Moses, but that's how it was introduced. Moses wrote it down. He's saying it to them now. The root problem is the Sadducees do not believe God speaks through Scripture, therefore, they don't understand the relationship God had with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. How does this prove resurrection? That's a head scratcher. It's like, "Help me Jesus, help me. Holy Spirit, help me understand how this proves bodily resurrection from the grave. It's not obvious." Isaiah 26:19, "Your dead will live. Their bodies will rise. You who dwell in dust, wake up and shout for joy." That's pretty straightforward. I like that. But how does the burning bush prove bodily resurrection? It's not the same. It's interesting why He would choose that, but it all comes down to the grammar, the present tense. "I AM the God of Abraham," and I'm going to put it in "I AM”, "I AM the God of Isaac and I AM the God of Jacob.” Remember that that "I AM" statement is the key assertion, the key revelation. What is your name? "I AM," "I am the I AM." But He zeroes us in. "I AM the God of Abraham." What He's saying is, "I am Abraham's God right now. Abraham and I are continuing our friendship." Abraham is called the friend of God. "We're continuing our friendship now. I am Abraham's God and I am Isaac's God and I am Jacob's God right now.” At least that means that they have continued awareness and existence after death. But it doesn't prove bodily resurrection, not yet, but it just shows that the fundamental concept that you cease to exist at death is false. It is not true. "I am Abraham's God right now." But essential to this is God's original purpose in giving human beings a body to begin with. Why did He make us with bodies? Why did He put together a body for Adam? Why did He give him eyes and hands and feet and ears and all of that? And how is it that humans lost their bodies? It's called death. The separation of the soul from the body is death. That's separation. We believe that spirits, souls can, do have a continued existence apart from the body, unlike atheistic, materialistic types that say all of these things are biochemical illusions in the brain. That's false. There is something called the soul and it continues to exist. And those believers who died, they are absent from the body, present with the Lord. I believe the thief from the cross is absent from the body, present with the Lord. Jesus said, "Today you'll be with me in paradise." He's in relationship with God, but he doesn't have a body. But will he get one? Yes, he will. Why? Because that's God's purpose. He will not be defeated by death. When Jesus did all those healings He is saying, "God didn't make the eyes to be blind." So He touches the blind man. "Now I can see." God didn't make the legs to be lame. So He touches the lame person. Now they can walk like God intended its original purpose. What was his intention? So it is with the entire function of the body, completely destroyed by death, restored by resurrection. How beautiful is that? So that's how the argument works. I will say better proof than this awaits, clearer proof. I don't deny that this is a difficult argument. But Jesus's own resurrection from the dead clearly recorded for us in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is better evidence that the dead can rise. So also, all of the doctrinal instruction entrusted to the apostles to explain it all as eyewitnesses is better. There is such a thing according to the author of Hebrews, a “better hope,” [Hebrews 7:19] founded on better promises. Better, better, better promises. I've already given you the best one. John 11:25-26, "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even though he dies and whoever lives and believes in me will never die." Jesus asked Martha, "Do you believe this?" I'm going to stop and say, do you all believe this? Do you believe in the resurrection from the dead? Yes. Amen. If you came here as a guest or just a visitor and you have not yet come to faith in Christ, I'm here to tell you today that Jesus has triumphed over the grave. And I believe that it is natural to the as yet an unbeliever, to be afraid of death, to be enslaved through fear of death. Let Jesus set you free. All you have to do is trust in him, his blood shed on the cross, sufficient for the forgiveness of all of your sins, past, present, and future, and a promise based on John 11 that you'll live forever. Trust in Him. That's a better promise. Or how about this one, John 6:39-40, "This is the will of Him who sent me that I shall lose none of all that He has given me, but raise them up at the last day, for my Father's will is that everyone who looks to the Son in faith and believes in Him shall have eternal life and I will raise him up at the last day." That's the promise of resurrection. So clear. Or 1 Corinthians 15:20, "Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.” It is a vast harvest yet to come. Now about the resurrection of the dead, "Well, what kind of body will they have? How foolish." Then He tells us what kind of body we'll get. 1 Corinthians 15:42-44, "So it'll be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable. It is raised imperishable. It is sewn in dishonor. It is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness. It is raised in power. It is sown in natural body. It is raised a spiritual body." You're going to get, if you're a believer in Christ, a resurrection body characterized by these words, imperishable, glorious, powerful, and spiritual. That's where we're heading. The best proof of all, Luke 24:36-40, "Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, 'Peace be with you.'They were startled and frightened thinking they saw a ghost. He said to them, ‘Why are you troubled? Why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and feet. It is I myself. Touch me and see. A ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see I have.’ And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and feet.” Now here's the thing, you're not going to be able to touch him and see. You have to believe based on scripture. It is by the scripture alone that you'll believe in the resurrection from the dead. It's the only way. But we have these beautiful historical accounts of eyewitnesses to the resurrection of Jesus who actually did or were able to touch Him and see, like Thomas. "Put your hands in my wounds." Hand on the side, stop doubting and belief. Jesus said in John 20, "Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed." That's all of us today who are believers in Christ. We have not seen, and yet we have believed based on what? Scripture's testimony. The Old Testament, yes, but even brighter in the New Testament. Christ has risen. And because of that better hope, because Jesus said, "Because I live, you also will live," because of that, the Apostle Paul just did so much better than Job when it came to questions of the grave. He says, "For me, I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far. For me, to live as Christ and to die as gain.” It's gain. It's better, more Christ. That's all that means. Live as Christ. And to die is to get more Christ, to see Him face to face and to be with Him. Paul said in 1 Thessalonians 4, “We believe that Jesus died and rose again. And so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in Him. According to the Lord's own word. We tell you that we who are still alive, who are left to the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel, with the trumpet call of God and the dead in Christ will rise first.” Praise God. V. Application To sum it all up, the Sadducees were just wrong. They were wrong. You know what that means for all of us who are Christians? The best is yet to come. The best is yet to come. Even when you're on the deathbed, if you're in the ICU and you're dying, the best for you is yet to come. You're looking ahead to a glorious world. And I'm going to extend that, friends, to marriage. I know Jesus said they'll neither marry nor be given a marriage, but that doesn't mean that the relationship between Christian spouses will be over. Not at all. What do you think your relationship with your Christian spouse will be like in heaven? Better, same or worse? You're like, "Oh, Pastor, I'm hoping better. I definitely want better." Look, even if you have a wonderful marriage, if you have a wonderful marriage, you do not have the level of unity with your spouse that you will have in heaven because Jesus prayed in John 17, "Father, may they be brought to complete, to perfect unity. As the Father and the Son are one, we are going to be one with each other.” So that's what I call super marriage, the best possible thing. You and your spouse will perfectly agree. But both of you'll have some learning to do. But that's our future, our oneness with each other. It's beautiful. No sex, no procreation, but infinitely better relationship. Then concerning the ongoing life we have with the doctrine here, our job as elders, but all of us as Christians, is to fight the ways that we are in error because we don't know the Scriptures or the power of God. All of our sins that we commit are because of faithlessness, because we've not trusted in the God of the Bible, because we've not believed in Him. We've not believed that God was strong enough to help us put that troubling sin to death, to mortify that sin habit. God is powerful. He can do it. The Scriptures tell you to put sin to death, but you think that you can't do it. It's too strong. Satan's lying to you. God is powerful through the spirit to mortify sin. And the same thing with our witness. God is powerful. You'll see power when the Holy Spirit comes on you. We're in error in not witnessing because we don't know the Scriptures or the power of God. I would urge you to meditate on God's omnipotence, that God is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine. And when it comes to personal holiness, say, "I don't want to be in error anymore because I don't know the scriptures or the power of God. I want to live a holy life." Concerning our witness, we are strategically positioned here to speak to people who are without hope and without God in the world. Let's be so buoyantly filled with hope in the resurrection that people ask us to give a reason for the hope that we have. One of the pastors that spoke at the 9Marks conference that we hosted over the last couple of days, H.B. Charles, a godly man, said that his church has seen an unbelievable upswing in members sharing their faith and winning people to Christ in baptisms. I said, "How did that happen?" He said, "You remember a number of years ago, the SBC had a, "who's your one?" kind of approach. I would just commend that to all of you. That's what they did. They just said, every member of the church take responsibility for a lost person. Take them on as a project. Pray for them. Pray that you yourself will have an opportunity to witness to them and don't stop praying for them and seeking. You could say, "Well, why not who's your five? Why not who's your 10?" Well, you can do that if you want, but let's start with "who's your one?" and say for whom you going to take responsibility. It could be a neighbor, could be a coworker, could be a lost relative, somebody. Take a responsibility for a lost person and focus on that person and see where God leads. Close with me in prayer. Lord, we thank you for the beauty of the scripture. We thank you for the power of the Word of God. Thank you for the truth of the resurrection. Thank you for the deep mind of Jesus, how he just doesn't do what we think he's going to do. I thank you for how he used this passage, "I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob," to prove resurrection. I thank you that you have that intimate relationship with each one of us now through Christ. Help us to believe in it, to walk in it, and to be filled with hope and help us to be faithful in putting sin to death and being witnesses to this world that is so hopeless. In Jesus' name. Amen.

Ruth 3:1 Then Naomi her mother-in-law said to her, "My daughter, shall I not seek security for you, that it may be well with you? 2 "Now Boaz, whose young women you were with, is he not our relative? In fact, he is winnowing barley tonight at the threshing floor. 3 "Therefore wash yourself and anoint yourself, put on your best garment and go down to the threshing floor; but do not make yourself known to the man until he has finished eating and drinking. 4 "Then it shall be, when he lies down, that you shall notice the place where he lies; and you shall go in, uncover his feet, and lie down; and he will tell you what you should do." 5 And she said to her, "All that you say to me I will do." 6 So she went down to the threshing floor and did according to all that her mother-in-law instructed her. 7 And after Boaz had eaten and drunk, and his heart was cheerful, he went to lie down at the end of the heap of grain; and she came softly, uncovered his feet, and lay down. 8 Now it happened at midnight that the man was startled, and turned himself; and there, a woman was lying at his feet. 9 And he said, "Who are you?" So she answered, "I am Ruth, your maidservant. Take your maidservant under your wing, for you are a close relative." 10 Then he said, "Blessed are you of the LORD, my daughter! For you have shown more kindness at the end than at the beginning, in that you did not go after young men, whether poor or rich. 11 "And now, my daughter, do not fear. I will do for you all that you request, for all the people of my town know that you are a virtuous woman.Reasons for Levirate marriage·         God protected the Israelite women ·         God protected the family name of the Israelites – very important in the first and second coming of Jesus Christ·         God protected the land rights of the Israelites·         In Old Testament times it was vital that a man's family name should be preserved. If he died without an heir, steps were to be taken to make sure that he had an heir who would care for his wife, carry on the family name and inherit the family property. The law said that the widow of the dead man should marry one of her husband's relatives, with the first son of that union becoming the dead man's heir:Also relevant are the provisions of God's law for what was to happen when an Israelite family fell on hard times and sold their land. In such circumstances, the nearest male relative, called the kinsman-redeemer, was to redeem—to buy back—the land for his poor relatives:Keep in mind that the Book of Ruth is much more than the record of the marriage of a rejected alien to a respected Jew. It's also the picture of Christ's relationship to those who trust Him and belong to Him. In the steps that Ruth takes, recorded in this chapter, we see the steps God's people must take if they want to enter into a deeper relationship with the Lord. Like Ruth, we must not be satisfied merely with living on leftovers (2:2), or even receiving gifts (2:14, 16). We must want Him alone; for when we have Him, we also have all that He owns. It's not the gifts that we seek, but the GiverTrue faith takes initiatives on the basis of God's WordLessonsGod's sovereignty and providence does not overrule human responsibility2.       God's love for us is much greater than we know     Mark 8:36 "For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?             John 14:6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. Have you trusted Him as your Savior? He can Save you if You ask Him based on His death, burial, and resurrection for your sins. Believe in Him for

Emmanuel Enid, where Dr. Shonn serves as the Lead Pastor, has been going through a study on the book of Ruth. When talking about the Levirate marriage law, the question was asked, "What is that? And why does it matter?" The doc is in to answer this great question! If you'd like to listen to Dr. Shonn's sermons on the book of Ruth, you can find them here: https://open.spotify.com/show/0VhojUe1mHNoTHPP8CJd6l?si=bf6629801292412d If you have any questions for Dr. Shonn, you can email him anytime at shonnkeels@gmail.com!

What was the Levirate law? Did it have anything to do with the tribe of Levi? God's heart for widows displayed Did the Levirate law promote polygamy?  Was Boaz married when he married Ruth? Jenn comments on the story of Ruth and Boaz and other stories where polygamy may or may not have been involved.  *Sorry guys. Please excuse my use of the word "Leader" around 16:50. The word should have been "King."   Here's a resource about polygamy that was pretty good: https://nealhardin.com/polygamy-in-the-bible/    Check out these websites for more of Jenn and P40:  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hnh-aqfg8rw Website - https://www.p40ministries.com Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/p40ministries  Contact - jenn@p40ministries.com  Books - https://www.amazon.com/Jenn-Kokal/e/B095JCRNHY/ref=aufs_dp_fta_dsk  Merch Store - https://www.p40ministries.com/shop 

Are you a control freak? Is your greatest fear being out of control? In this conversation, Pastor Philip and Pastor Eric discuss the identity trap of seeking satisfaction through power. They address key questions from the sermon, including: What is Naomi's core identity trap? (3:30) Are there other ways we look for satisfaction through power? (6:58) How do we know if we've fallen into this identity trap? (10:19) Question from the audience: How does Levirate marriage work in practice, and does the relationship between Ruth and Boaz follow that pattern? (14:21) What resources in the Gospel help us with this deep identity need for satisfaction? (23:10) Watch the sermon for this episode here: https://youtu.be/VV5A1MnwKl8 Questions for Living The Message can be sent to livingthemessage@moodychurch.org  

Vayeshev 5783

Teacher: Kyle Grindberg Sermon Text: Genesis 38 Recorded on: October 23, 2022

Deuteronomy 21:10-14   A woman of a village captured in war was particularly vulnerable in the ancient Near East. Tragically, rape and enslavement were the norms. However, God restricted Israelite soldiers from acting immediately, instead providing the woman with a month to mourn and adjust to the new reality. Even then, he could not use her as a slave, but had to marry her, inducting her into his household as a person of status and into the wider covenant community of God's people. (See also Leviticus 19:18, 34.) Deuteronomy 21:15-17   In a polygamous marriage, a husband sometimes favored one wife above another. This law offers protection for the unloved wife in the case that she bore the firstborn son in the family. Deuteronomy 22:13-21   This elaborate scenario provides a threat to a cheating wife as well as to a malicious husband. It protects a wife from her husband lying about her virginity and metes out severe and public punishments to such a man. Deuteronomy 22:22   Both the man and the woman are equally held accountable in an adulterous affair. This equality of punishment reflects an understanding of equality in the act itself. Deuteronomy 22:23-27   Having an affair with someone who was betrothed was tantamount to adultery. However, if the act wasn't consensual, then the law favored the woman's innocence. Deuteronomy 25:5-10   Levirate marriage was an institution designed to prevent families from losing property as well as provide widows with care, support, and protection. This law promised public humiliation and enduring shame to the man who would not take care of his brother's widow. God cares about how women are treated. He doesn't want to see abuse. Even in the harsh world of the ancient Near East, He provided protections against abuses endemic to their patriarchal system.The post Women's Rights first appeared on Living Hope.

Levirate inheritance • A match made in heaven • Shidduch crisis averted by Shimon ben Shetach

Scripture Reading: Ruth 3 … 'Redeemer' in the Old Testament … nearest relative … "kinsman redeemer" … Hebrew word  -  goel …. the concept of the 'goel' included the notion of protecting, saving, sustaining, guarding a family member, usually with some purchase involved. …. Lev 25:25,26 - redemption of property …. Lev 25:47-49 - redemption of people …. Num 35:16-19 - avenging a murder …. Deut 25:5-10 - law of levirate marriage, though the word 'goel' is not mentioned in this section.  Levirate marriage is not the same thing as the work of the 'goel,' but the principle of legally caring for the nearest  relative is connected to the story of Ruth. …. in Ruth - 2:20; 3:9,12,13; 4:1,3,4,6,8,14 In Ruth, Boaz is the second nearest relative to Naomi's family.  When Naomi sells a parcel of land belonging to her deceased husband, Elimelech, Boaz buys (redeems) the land for the family and marries Naomi's daughter-in-law, Ruth, who is legally connected to the land. In the Old Testament, God is referred to as Redeemer . . . Job 19:25; Psa 19:14; Isa 44:6,24; 47:4; 54:8 (13 times in Isaiah 40-66).   In the New Testament Christians have been redeemed by the person and work of Christ . . . Rom 3:24; Gal 3:13; Col 1:14; Titus 2:13,14; Heb 9:12.  As our Redeemer, Christ, saves, protects, sustains us for all eternity.

In this message we look at the story of Judah and Tamar. We were introduced to the concept of the Levirate Law. Levirate (from the Latin word for brother), is the practice of a brother marrying the childless widow of his brother in order to preserve his brother's name and inheritance. As we look at this story we both see the effects of sin in Judah's family and God's plan for redemption in spite of that sin. In this we are reminded, that we were also shown immense love and grace by God, even in the midst of our own sins.

In this message we look at the story of Judah and Tamar. We were introduced to the concept of the Levirate Law. Levirate (from the Latin word for brother), is the practice of a brother marrying the childless widow of his brother in order to preserve his brother's name and inheritance. As we look at this story we both see the effects of sin in Judah's family and God's plan for redemption in spite of that sin. In this we are reminded, that we were also shown immense love and grace by God, even in the midst of our own sins.

In what ways are inferior relations effective for Levirate marriage? • Does Yibum require witnesses? • Why is Yevamos before Kesubos? • Would Jewish courts coerce a recalcitrant man to marry? • A woman's infidelity renders her prohibited to her husband • This prohibition of defilement requires the testimony of two witnesses to warrant administering lashes to the husband

NOTE: It's not you, it's us. Several events coincided to render the past several weeks very hectic for us (in different ways). Please God, we'll go back to releasing the episodes first thing in the Israeli morning in the next few days, at worst. || Why does Rabban Gamliel say there's no divorce after divorce, or betrothal after betrothal? But also, how do betrothal and cohabitation interact....? Plus, the sages disagreement with Rabban Gamliel. Also, a defective cohabitation - how does that compare to Levirate betrothal? Also, a general consensus that ma'amar is very effective. And tracing the sources of each rabbi who signs on for this position.

If a brother did ma'amar with his brother's yibum, and then divorced that Levirate betrothed, leaves the possibility of yibum for the third brother, with the co-wife. But the woman who had ma'mar and then a get is in a complicated position. (And corresponding other cases). Plus a new mishnah, with another case (well, set if cases) - and bumping up against the claim that the mishnah isn't supposed to be changed. Also, the difference of approach between R. Yosei and R. Shimon, on eisher ach vs achot ishto. Which boils down to one prohibition following another prohibition, and the question is which wins, or does one?

A new mishnah - that facilitates a deeper dive into ma'amar, the Levirate betrothal. Via a case of 3 brothers, and the complications there that get in the way of yibum. Plus, the language of "kiddushin," a formal act of acquisition, and how ma'amar compares to kiddushin. Also, the undoing of vows that a husband can do for a wife.... Can a yavam do so for a shomeret yavam, a woman who awaits yibum? How strong is the bond between them to allow for this? And lo and behold, ma'amar has a role here too.

Welcome to the Daily Daf Differently. In this episode, Miri Fenton looks at Masechet Yevamot Daf 10. This daf is in the middle of a long sugiyah that deals with halachic limit cases of Levirate marriage. Reading a mahloket between Reish Lakish and Rabbi Yochanan illuminates some of the legal problems and potential solutions around […]

Welcome to the Daily Daf Differently. In this episode, Miri Fenton looks at Masechet Yevamot Daf 10. This daf is in the middle of a long sugiyah that deals with halachic limit cases of Levirate marriage. Reading a mahloket between Reish Lakish and Rabbi Yochanan illuminates some of the legal problems and potential solutions around […]

Welcome to the Daily Daf Differently. In this episode, Miri Fenton looks at Masechet Yevamot Daf 10. This daf is in the middle of a long sugiyah that deals with halachic limit cases of Levirate marriage. Reading a mahloket between Reish Lakish and Rabbi Yochanan illuminates some of the legal problems and potential solutions around […]

Diving right in... Introducing Masekhet Yevamot and Seder Nashim! Defining the case of yibum, the Levirate marriage. Defining halitzah. Defining tzarot. Also, beginning with the first mishnah, which presumes knowledge of the basic yibum case, and how co-wives negate the need for yibum for other co-wives - 15 different cases of relationships. Note that the requirement of yibum cancels the prohibition of a woman marrying her husband's brother... And it does not cancel the other illicit sexual relationships. But by virtue of being co-wives, the possibility of negating the prohibition of marrying a brother is often cancelled. Note: Charts will be your friend!! You may want to see Hadran's charts of these 15 cases that make each of them, and the co-wife issues visually accessible: hadran.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Yevamot-english.pdf (it's available on Hadran in Hebrew as well).

Matthew 22:15-22The Sadducees step into the fray against Jesus. They want to know about a woman involved in multiple levirate marriages. Whose wife will she be in the resurrection? Since no one has been able to answer the question yet, they are convinced they've proven the resurrection false. Jesus gives a fantastic answer. Andrew and Edwin, however, discuss the nature of hard questions and what we can learn about them from how Jesus handles this difficult question.Read the written devo that goes along with this episode by clicking here.    Let us know what you are learning or any questions you have. Email us at TextTalk@ChristiansMeetHere.org.    Join the Facebook community and join the conversation by clicking here. We'd love to meet you. Be a guest among the Christians who meet on Livingston Avenue. Click here to find out more. Michael Eldridge sang all four parts of our theme song. Find more from him by clicking here.   Thanks for talking about the text with us today.________________________________________________If the hyperlinks do not work, copy the following addresses and paste them into the URL bar of your web browser: Daily Written Devo: https://readthebiblemakedisciples.wordpress.com/?p=8745The Christians Who Meet on Livingston Avenue: http://www.christiansmeethere.org/Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/TalkAboutTheTextFacebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/texttalkMichael Eldridge: https://acapeldridge.com/  

Set during the time of the Judges, the Book of Ruth follows Ruth and Naomi, two widows returning to Bethlehem during the wheat harvest. Neither has money or prospects, but by the end of the tale they will have secured their future. But is there more to the story than a tale of women taking control of their own destiny?

With the "Falling into the Bible" series, we will go through the entire Bible within two years. This will be a chronological Bible study. The World English Bible (WEB) edition or King James Version will be used but read from whichever Bible version you prefer. Dig deep and let God's word transform your life. Chapter(s) of the Day: Genesis 38 Way to support this podcast: www.venmo.com/u/DeneiceinWonderland

DESCRIPTION Episode 119 – Perfectly Quiet – The Intertestamental Period 5 Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The goal of Anchored by Truth is to encourage everyone to grow in the Christian faith by anchoring themselves to the secure truth found in the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God. Script: Then Jesus was approached by some Sadducees—religious leaders who say there is no resurrection from the dead. But now, as to whether the dead will be raised—haven’t you ever read about this in the writings of Moses, in the story of the burning bush? Long after Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had died, God said to Moses, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ So he is the God of the living, not the dead. You have made a serious error. “ The Gospel of Mark, chapter 12, verses 18 and 26 and 27, New Living Translation ******** VK: Hello. I’m Victoria K. Welcome to another episode of Anchored by Truth. Today we are continuing our look at “The Intertestamental Period” - the 400-plus year period between the close of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament. I’m in the studio today with RD Fierro, author and Founder Crystal Sea Books. RD, today we’re going into our 5th episode in this series. Last time we talked a bit about the conflict between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids for the control of Palestine during the intertestamental period. So, to set the stage for today’s discussion how about giving us a bit of a review of what we’ve been discussing. RD: Hello to all the Anchored by Truth listeners. We really appreciate you taking some time to be with us for this episode. The intertestamental period is probably the period of Biblical history that receives the least attention today. Most people are very familiar with the accounts of Jesus’ birth, life, and resurrection. Most are pretty familiar with some of the most popular episodes from the Old Testament such as Noah and the ark, Daniel in the lions’ den, or Elijah battling the prophets on Mt. Carmel. But even people who are regular Bible readers often pay little attention to the hundreds of years that elapsed between Malachi and Matthew. But we should because there were a great number of events that occurred during that period that are very important to us having a well-developed understanding of both the Old and New Testaments. And those events include the protracted conflict between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids that occurred between around 300 B.C. and 160 B. C. VK: And, as a refresher Ptolemy and Seleucus had both been generals in Alexander the Great’s army. After Alexander’s death his empire was carved into four territories. Ptolemy became the king of the Egyptian portion and Seleucus became the king of the Syrian portion. Israel, obviously, was between those two. So, when conflicts occurred between these two dynasties – which was pretty much all the time – Israel was always caught in the conflict. One of the most important prophetic chapters in the Old Testament has got to be chapter 11 of the book of Daniel. The entire chapter is devoted to the conflict between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. It’s so detailed that it could almost read like a historical report of the conflict but it was written over 200 years before the first events of the struggle. RD: Right. And that’s a very good reason for looking at the intertestamental period. In the intertestamental period we see the fulfillment of a large number of prophecies contained in the Old Testament such as those in Daniel, chapter 11. See those prophecies fulfilled in such fine granularity cannot do anything but enhance our confidence in the Bible. Fulfilled prophecy is one of the strongest lines of evidence of the Bible’s supernatural inspiration. But beyond just seeing the prophetic fulfillment that occurred during the intertestamental period we also see the foundation for many of the events that we read about in the New Testament. For instance, there is no mention of the Sadducees or Pharisees at all in the Old Testament. But both groups were prominent in Israel in the first century A.D. VK: And since our contemporary calendar is dated according to Jesus’ life this is the period during which Jesus lived and performed his earthly ministry. Jesus frequently encountered both the Sadducees and the Pharisees during that ministry – though unfortunately most references to them are not positive ones. RD: Unfortunately, they are not. At any rate, both the Sadducees and Pharisees arose sometime during the intertestamental period though scholars are not exactly sure when. But it can be helpful to our understanding of Israel during the time of Jesus’ earthly ministry to try to understand some of the forces that gave rise to them. VK: So, what is some of the thinking behind what gave rise to these two groups and why they became so prominent? RD: Well, as we have already mentioned after Alexander the Great died his empire was divided among four of his generals. Initially Palestine came under the rule of Ptolemy who also ruled Egypt. Under Ptolemy the Jews seemed to have retained a large measure of self-rule and were able to have their own high priest. Traditionally, the high priest had just a religious function but in the absence of a Jewish king the high priest also became a major source of political influence. Under the Ptolemies the Jews also flourished in Egypt and as we’ve noted the Greek version of the Old Testament, the Septuagint was eventually produced by the Jewish colony in Alexandria. The Ptolemies controlled Palestine from about 300 B.C. to 198 B.C. VK: But in 198 B.C. the Seleucids were finally able to get control of Palestine. There had been frequent conflicts between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids but this was the first time the Seleucids actually were able to directly rule Palestine. The Seleucid rulers normally went by the title of Antiochus. In 175 B.C. Antiochus IV (the 4th) came to power. This turned out to be a very bad thing for the Jews. RD: Correct. Antiochus IV also was known as Antiochus Epiphanes (god manifest). Well, Antiochus Epiphanes began to feel pressure from the Romans who were already beginning their expansion to the east. Macedonia, which is the northern part of the Greek peninsula actually fell to Rome in 146 B.C. but even before that Rome’s expanding territorial ambitions were becoming obvious. Antiochus Epiphanes saw this so in an attempt to strengthen his control Antiochus stepped up the process of Hellenizing his empire. VK: Hellenization referred to the process of importing the Greek language and culture into the territories Alexander had conquered. It had always occurred at some pace within the territories the Greeks controlled but not at the same rate everywhere. Evidently, Antiochus felt that if his empire were thoroughly Hellenized the people would be more resistant to the Romans. So, part of what Epiphanes did was to try to get the Jews to change their culture and even give up their religion. This produced a terrible period of persecution for the Jews. Not unpredictably it spawned a revolt. RD: Right. In 167 B.C. Antiochus set up a statue of Zeus in the temple and slaughtered pigs as a sacrifice to it. Many of the Jews thought that this event was what the prophet Daniel had referred to when he spoke of the “abomination of desolation.” It’s hard to imagine doing anything that would inflame faithful Jews more. Right after this desecration the Maccabean Revolt broke out. The revolt was led by Judas Maccabeus or Judas the “Hammer.” VK: And the revolt was successful. In 164 B.C. the Jews were able to regain control of Jerusalem and they cleansed the temple. This event is still celebrated among the Jews as Hannukah. All this history was recorded and is part of the book known as 1 (first) Maccabees. RD: And the books of 1 and 2 Maccabees are part of the group of books known as the Apocrypha which we talked about in the first episode of this series. The Apocrypha are thought by Roman Catholics and the Orthodox branches of Christianity to be part of a second canon or “deuterocanonical.” VK: So, after the Ptolemies lost control of Palestine there was a lot going on during the next 4 decades. How did all this lead to the formation of the Sadducees and Pharisees? RD: Let’s remember that both the Ptolemies and the Seleucids were Greek. They may have been fighting for control of territory but they were both part of the original Greek empire. So, Hellenization was present under both. It’s just that Antiochus Epiphanes had taken it to a whole new level. Well, after the Jews regained their religious freedom they also wanted political freedom. It took another 2 decades but in 142 B.C. the Jews finally regained their independence. VK: And this is hard for us to grasp but when the Jews regained their independence it was the first time in over 400 years. The first Babylonian deportation of the Jews to Babylon had taken place around 600 B.C. Even after the Jews returned to Palestine around 70 years later they still weren’t independent. They were just a vassal state of the Persian Empire and then part of the Greek Empire. That must have been an amazing period for the Jews – to finally have their freedom after over 450 years of foreign rule. RD: Undoubtedly. But of course even at that point the Jews had been subject to Greek influence for over 150 years. So, the process of Hellenization had been going on a long time. And as with any large cultural movement some Jews had welcomed the changes the Greeks had brought with them. But many did not. Even after the Jews under the Maccabeans gained their political independence they did not return to their traditional priestly line of governance. Instead, the Maccabees founded the Hasmonean Dynasty – named for one of their ancestors, Hashmon – and continued their control of the country. This was fine with some Jews but not with others. The Hasmonean rulers dominated the priesthood, even though they weren’t from the priestly line of Aaron, and continued to adopt Greek ways of life. VK: And the Sadducees appear to have been a group that supported them in this plan. The Sadducees were an aristocratic group that seemed to have prized political stability above everything else. I suppose we could think of them as being the “establishment” of their day? RD: Yes. Religiously, the Sadducees only recognized the first five books of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch, as being canonical. They saw the rest of the books of the Old Testament as having lesser authority. This is one of the reasons they rejected the doctrine of the resurrection which Jesus confronted them about. VK: We heard that in our opening scripture today from Mark, chapter 12. There’s a parallel account of the same confrontation in Matthew, chapter 22, verses 22 through 33. So, it’s fair to say that the Sadducees had embraced the process of Hellenization far more than some other groups within Israel at the time. RD: Yes. VK: Then where do the Pharisees fit in? RD: The Pharisees seemed to have arisen as one of the groups that opposed the loss of the traditional Jewish culture and laws. They were not primarily a political group but they seemed to have begun to function as a cultural, religious, and political counterweight to the Sadducees and the Hellenizing intentions of the Hasmoneans. The Pharisees did accept the entire body of scripture we call the Old Testament so the Pharisees did accept the doctrine of resurrection and life after death. VK: And the Apostle Paul was a Pharisee. He famously invoked this religious difference when he was arrested in Jerusalem in Acts, chapter 23. This was a bit of clever lawyering on Paul’s part wasn’t it. RD: Yes. Paul’s trial before the Sanhedrin was around 60 A.D. So, it was about 200 years later than the events we’ve been describing. As we mentioned, we’re not sure exactly when the Sadducees and Pharisees formed as identifiable groups but they are first mentioned by the historian Josephus in connection with a Hasmonean ruler named John Hyrcanus I who ruled from 134 to 104 B.C. VK: So, sometime between the latter part of the 2nd century B.C. and the opening of the New Testament period the Sadducees and the Pharisees had become so well established and prominent that together they became the ruling group within Israel. Both groups had longevity. They persisted for well over 150 years. And we know that both groups had influence and power in Jesus’ day. RD: Yes. While we don’t know the exact origin of either group we do know that both groups have their roots in the intertestamental period and I think we can see how the Greek control of Palestine was a significant factor in shaping the Israel in which Jesus appeared. VK: What are you thinking about? RD: The Roman general Pompey occupied Jerusalem in 63 B.C. VK: Which put an end to the Jews’ independence. So, they were independent for less than 100 years? RD: Yes. So, let’s think about this. Between 300 B.C. and 142 B.C. the Jews were subject to Greek rule by either the Ptolemies or the Seleucids. And even after they became politically independent there were still factions within Israel that had supported the increasing Hellenization of their culture. The Greeks actively sought to transmit and spread their ideas. The Greeks were replaced by the Romans but the Romans did not make a corresponding effort to change the cultures, languages, or religious practices of the people they conquered. VK: The Romans were a very practical people. They were interested in stability within their far flung empire. They wanted control over economies, taxes, the military, and what we might term “infrastructure.” But the Romans didn’t have any particular interest in the religions or worship practices of their subject provinces provided those practices didn’t disrupt the Roman governance or the peace and stability of their empire. In fact the Romans afforded the Jews a fair amount of self-rule even during Jesus’ day didn’t they? The Jews had their own ruling council comprised of the Sadducees and Pharisees. The high council was permitted to make judgments about civil and criminal matters, although only the Romans could pronounce a death sentence. The Jews selected their own high priest. They were permitted to regulate the activities of the temples and synagogues. And even some of the high ranking Jews became friends with very senior Romans including members of Caesar’s family. RD: Right. As you mentioned, the Romans were very practical and this made them very capable builders and administrators. While it’s painting with a very broad brush you might say that Romans were builders while the Greeks had been thinkers. Alexander took an entire contingent of Greek scientists and philosophers along with his Army. The Greeks not only sought knowledge but they actively spread their knowledge and culture. During Jesus’ time, even after the Roman Empire had displaced the Greek Empire, Greek was the most common language used in international commerce and affairs. Even today the names of Greek philosophers are household names. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are still well known in our day and time. VK: So, there are Greek philosophers that are well known in our day and time - but there are still Roman public facilities in use in our day and time. Aqueducts and roads built by the Romans have survived and some are still functioning after 2,000 years. The Romans were masters at construction including pouring and curing concrete under water to build very sophisticated ports and harbors. Naturally, the Roman military prowess is legendary because they were masters of metallurgy and military design. So, what you’re saying is that the differences in these two empires was significant in God’s preparation of the world for the arrival of Jesus. RD: Exactly. While we’ll talk more about this in a future episode the Romans made it safe for the first evangelists to travel throughout the Roman Empire and spread the gospel. But the Greeks had made it possible for the evangelists to speak with the people wherever they went. VK: But you are also saying that the impact of the Greek and Roman Empires on the preparation for Jesus’ arrival wasn’t just limited to the world outside Palestine. There were also impacts within Palestine. This was especially true of the Greeks whose had been present in Palestine in one form or another for 300 years. And part of that impact was reflected in the presence and differences between the Sadducees and Pharisees. RD: Yes. The Sadducees seem to have followed the Hasmonean practice of embracing the Hellenization that had been brought to Israel. The Pharisees did not. In fact, the Pharisees seem to have actively resisted attempts to change their culture. This meant that the Sanhedrin, the Jews’ ruling council at the time of Jesus was split religiously and philosophically. The one thing they did agree on, though, was on a desire to maintain their own power and influence. VK: Well just about anyone who has read the Gospels or listened to a sermon on Jesus’ life has heard about the Sadducees and Pharisees. But what are you thinking about when you talk about their presence being important insofar as the arrival of Jesus in the world is concerned. RD: As you said just anyone who has ever read Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John – or heard a sermon about them – has heard of the Sadducees and Pharisees. Part of the reason we’ve all heard about them is because it was often encounters between Jesus and a Sadducee or Pharisee that provided us with some of the clearest statements we have on major issues that pertain to salvation. VK: Such as? RD: Let’s look at the encounter we heard about in our opening scripture. This same encounter is described in Matthew and Mark. A group of the Sadducees were trying to trip Jesus up by asking, what was to them, a standard question they used in their debates with the Pharisees about whether there would be a physical resurrection. Remember the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection but the Pharisees did. So the Sadducees posed the famous married-to-seven-different-brothers question. VK: Let’s listen to the question from Matthew, chapter 22, verses 25 through 28. The Sadducees said, “Well, suppose there were seven brothers. The oldest one married and then died without children, so his brother married the widow. But the second brother also died, and the third brother married her. This continued with all seven of them. Last of all, the woman also died. So tell us, whose wife will she be in the resurrection? For all seven were married to her.” RD: Right. The basis for the question was the Levirate requirement for a younger brother to marry the widow of an older brother. Then the first son of that union would be reckoned as the son of the older brother. At any rate, it was a trick question. VK: Like the philosophy professor who asks the Christian student “If God is all powerful can God make a rock so big God can’t lift it?” RD: Exactly like that. It was a trick question but of course it couldn’t trick Jesus. Jesus quickly pointed out that even the part of the Old Testament that the Sadducees did accept, the Pentateuch, stated clearly that there was life after death. Jesus quoted from Moses’ encounter with God at the burning bush. That encounter is described in Exodus, the 2nd book of the Bible. Jesus pointed out that God had used the present tense when he was speaking with Moses indicating clearly that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were still alive with God even though all 3 had died physically decades before the encounter. So, we can see from this exchange with the Sadducees that Jesus often used his contact with either the Sadducees or Pharisees, or both, to clarify much of the confusion that existed at that time about major issues that pertained to faith and salvation. VK: So, you’re saying that the presence of the Sadducees and Pharisees in Israel during Jesus’ lifetime was actually helpful in Jesus getting out His message. The Sadducees and Pharisees were the leaders of society in their day. People listened to them just as they listen to various kinds of leaders and celebrities in our day. People would follow what the Sadducees and Pharisees said and did. And people would have been particularly interested if anyone confronted them. So, when Jesus had a debate or exchange with one the report would spread far more widely and quickly than it would otherwise. And, of course, we need to know something about the intertestamental period to know why that was true. If we don’t know anything about the intertestamental period the Sadducees and Pharisees appear in the Bible just like Dorothy dropping in from Kansas. RD: I like that visual. Next time we’ll take a little more about how some of Jesus’ exchanges with the Sadducees and Pharisees produced some of the clearest and most important teaching we have in the Bible. This is particularly important because so many of the things we learn pertain directly to our salvation and eternal life. Just as we heard in the scripture today Jesus Himself has affirmed that the resurrection is real. And since all things were made for Him and through Him when it comes to knowing how things work He is the most trustworthy voice possible. Now, I’m not saying that God or Jesus couldn’t have made these important revelations if the Sadducees and Pharisees didn’t exist. But I am saying that God chose to use the Sadducees and Pharisees as part of His plan of revelation. As such I think we need to take some time and understand how their arrival on the scene is part of the grand saga of redemption. VK: Amen. This sounds like a great time for a prayer. Jesus’ ministry while He was on this earth was all about saving those who are lost spiritually. The need for doing that continues today. So, today let’s listen to a prayer for the spiritually lost – knowing that God has promised that as we diligently and faithfully present our petitions He will respond with grace and mercy: ---- PRAYER FOR THE SPIRITUALLY LOST (JERRY). We hope you’ll be with us next time and we hope you’ll take some time to encourage some friends to tune in too, or listen to the podcast version of this show. If you’d like to hear more, try out crystalseabooks.com where “We’re not famous but our Boss is!” (Bible Quote from the New International Version) Daniel, chapter 8, verses 5 through 8 and 20 and 21, New International Version

An audio recording of chapter 31 of James E. Talmage's classic work, Jesus the Christ. Read by Bradley Ross. Music from Lara St. John, used by permission via Magnatune.com. The original text of this item, including footnotes and endnotes, is available from Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22542/22542-h/22542-h.htm#chapter_31Pharisees and Herodians in conspiracy.—Cæsar to have his due.—The image on the coin.—Sadducees and the resurrection.—Levirate marriages.—The great commandment.—Jesus turns questioner.—Scathing denunciation of scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!—Lamentation over Jerusalem.—The widow's mites.—Christ's final withdrawal from temple.—Destruction of temple predicted

It is estimated that between 15-40% of men breed with around 80% of the women on planet earth, so where does that leave the majority of guys who are scrapping for a minority of women? @_nathan_bourne and the boys explore the idea of how a finite amount of men have access to a surplus of women, should those men take advantage of their good fortune? Or does the repercussions lead to deviant social attitudes and even seedier behaviours? #TheDominoEffectPod is a weekly podcast that holds no punches when discussing those all-important controversial subjects on your mind. Yes, even the ones ‘21st Century political correctness' deem too touchy. Literature and events referenced in episode: Monogamy reduces major social problems of polygamist cultures: https://news.ubc.ca/2012/01/23/monogamy-reduces-major-social-problems-of-polygamist-cultures/, Jordan Peterson - Enforced Monogamy: https://youtu.be/jsMqSBB3ZTY?t=1, Heather Heying - Toxic Femininity: https://youtu.be/1oVyQGmD3d8, The Rationale Male by Rollo Tomassi, Inheriting Deceased Brothers Widow (Wife): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levirate_marriage, Bret Weinstein - Gender Ideology vs Biology: https://youtu.be/7xU77FhkcZ8, Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell, Kevin Samuels: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLjodVTY_kZzd3cQ7D82DhA, Fresh and Fit: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5sqmi33b7l9kIYa0yASOmQ Tik Tok: @dominoeffectpod x @doneitdaley x @oba_vbe x @still1ax Instagram: @dominoeffectpod x @doneitdaley x @oba_vbe x @still1ax Twitter: @thedominopod x @doneitdaley x @oba_vbe x @still1ax Email: info@thedominopod.com

One of my writing professors often said, “Sometimes in order to tell one story well, you need to tell two.” Sometimes two narratives, when placed side by side, deepen the impact of each individual story. At first glance, Genesis 38 feels like an intrusion into the life of Joseph. In chapter 38, we jump ahead to Judah’s story, you may wonder what will become of Joseph. We learn that Joseph’s brother Judah married and had three sons. But as soon as Judah arranged for his first son Er to marry Tamar, things spiraled downward. Because of Er’s wickedness, God put him to death (v. 6). Levirate law dictated that if a woman’s husband died, his brother must bear a child by her to continue the dead brother’s line. When Judah’s second son, Onan, refused to comply, God put him to death also (v. 10). What a sorrowful time this must have been in Judah’s life! In response to Judah’s instruction, Tamar lived as a widow. A long time later, Judah, whose own wife had died, came to town. Hittite levirate law also stipulated that when a widow married her late husband’s brother and he died, she was to marry his father. On the surface, it may seem Tamar was obeying this law, but her actions (disguising herself as a prostitute) continued her family’s legacy of deception. When Tamar revealed her pregnancy, Judah condemned her to death. But when she revealed his own culpability, he acknowledged his sin, which begins a stunning transformation. This same Judah promised to keep Benjamin safe (Gen. 43:8–9). This same Judah offered himself in place of Benjamin (44:18–45:3). This same Judah was blessed by Jacob with the royal line (49:8–12). And this same Judah carried—along with Tamar—the line of Christ (Matt. 1:3).  >> Are you open to seeing the sin that may exist in your own life? Set aside time today to spend in God’s presence, asking Him to expose any sins that need to be revealed.

Hear now the word of the Lord from Genesis chapter 38 starting in verse 1. 38 It happened at that time that Judah went down from his brothers and turned aside to a certain Adullamite, whose name was Hirah. 2 There Judah saw the daughter of a certain Canaanite whose name was Shua. He took her and went in to her, 3 and she conceived and bore a son, and he called his name Er. 4 She conceived again and bore a son, and she called his name Onan. 5 Yet again she bore a son, and she called his name Shelah. Judah was in Chezib when she bore him. 6 And Judah took a wife for Er his firstborn, and her name was Tamar. 7 But Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord put him to death. 8 Then Judah said to Onan, “Go in to your brother's wife and perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her, and raise up offspring for your brother.” 9 But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his. So, whenever he went in to his brother's wife, he would waste the semen on the ground, so as not to give offspring to his brother. 10 And what he did was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and he put him to death also. 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. 12 In the course of time the wife of Judah, Shua's daughter, died. When Judah was comforted, he went up to Timnah to his sheepshearers, he and his friend Hirah the Adullamite. 13 And when Tamar was told, “Your father-in-law is going up to Timnah to shear his sheep,” 14 she took off her widow's garments and covered herself with a veil, wrapping herself up, and sat at the entrance to Enaim, 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. 15 When Judah saw her, he thought she was a prostitute, for she had covered her face. 16 He turned to her at the roadside and said, “Come, let me come in to you,” for he did not know that she was his daughter-in-law. She said, “What will you give me, that you may come in to me?” 17 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—” 18 He said, “What pledge shall I give you?” She replied, “Your signet and your cord and your staff that is in your hand.” So, he gave them to her and went in to her, and she conceived by him. 19 Then she arose and went away, and taking off her veil she put on the garments of her widowhood. 20 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. 21 And he asked the men of the place, “Where is the cult prostitute who was at Enaim at the roadside?” And they said, “No cult prostitute has been here.” 22 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.'” 23 And Judah replied, “Let her keep the things as her own, or we shall be laughed at. You see, I sent this young goat, and you did not find her.” 24 About three months later Judah was told, “Tamar your daughter-in-law has been immoral. Moreover, she is pregnant by immorality.” And Judah said, “Bring her out, and let her be burned.” 25 As she was being brought out, she sent word to her father-in-law, “By the man to whom these belong, I am pregnant.” And she said, “Please identify whose these are, the signet and the cord and the staff.” 26 Then Judah identified them and said, “She is more righteous than I, since I did not give her to my son Shelah.” And he did not know her again. 27 When the time of her labor came, there were twins in her womb. 28 And when she was in labor, one put out a hand, and the midwife took and tied a scarlet thread on his hand, saying, “This one came out first.” 29 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 called Perez. 30 Afterward his brother came out with the scarlet thread on his hand, and his name was called Zerah. Genesis 38:1-30, ESV This is the word of the Lord given to us this morning in love. Well, when I was in college, I took a sociology class as a graduation requirement. While many parts of this sociology class were very interesting. My professor in that class took very strong stances against many of the things that I believed, so I anointed myself as the advocate of the things that I believed in. During the course of that class my hand shot up time and time again to challenge the professor for some of the things that were being said, and this was in a room of about 60 people. I did this again and again until one time I was doing this, and I saw a girl sitting in front of me who when I did this threw down her pen. Then I could see her mouth the words, “stop talking.” Well, that was an eye-opening moment for me. I realized that I wasn't being noble, I wasn't being bold, I wasn't being brave. I was being obnoxious, I was being rude, I was being disrespectful in this case. There are times in our lives when we experience an eye-opening moment, in small ways or in big ways. Times where we suddenly see our sin for what it is. In those times, all the rationalizations that we have been feeding ourselves to justify our sin suddenly fall apart as we see what our sin has been doing to those around us, what our sin has been doing to God, and what our sin is even doing to us. When our eyes are opened the big question we have to ask is, how will we respond? If you heard in the assurance of pardon and in the song, we sang from Psalm chapter 32, this is a big question. Should I cover over my sin? Should I hide it or should I confess my sin to the Lord? Well, this question is the question that Judah is faced with in this story. How should he respond when his eyes are opened to see his sin for what it is? It's certainly the question that you and I have every time we come to the word of God and the word of God exposes our sin. Our big idea today then is this, God opens our eyes to our unrighteousness. This story tells a three-part progression. 1. Blind Eyes 2. Opening Eyes 3. Opened Eyes Blind Eyes As we start with this section of the blind eyes of Judah, we should take a moment and note that what's going to happen in this story, we're going to see this in a number of ways, is that this story is going to give us very clear parallels between what's happening in life of Judah and what happens in the life of Joseph. Now we see this parallel start right away in verse 1 where we read it, 38 It happened at that time that Judah went down from his brothers and turned aside to a certain Adullamite, whose name was Hirah. Genesis 38:1, ESV If you look across the page at the next chapter in chapter 39, we will read now Joseph had been brought down to Egypt. So this is one of the examples, we'll see more of these, where there's a parallel between Judah's life and Joseph's life. Of course, where we see these parallels, we are also going to see very clear contrasts. Judah is able to go down as a free man, he goes up he goes down wherever he wants to. Whereas Joseph is brought down, he is taken down as a slave against his own will. We should remember that Judah was the one who suggested to the brothers of Joseph that they sell their brother into slavery. So, we're going to see parallels in clear contrast, that's one of the dimensions of this story. The other thing is even though the stories of Judah and Joseph are running somewhat parallel right now, what we're going to see is the beginning of where the stories of Judah and Joseph converge so that especially Judah is going to become more like his brother Joseph. Judah will become like Joseph beginning in this story. As I said at the beginning of this story Judah is very unlike Joseph. Joseph sees clearly, whereas Judah is very blind, and he lives life like this. Judah is blind yet we read that he sees again and again, but that he does not see rightly. Look at verse 2, 2 There Judah saw the daughter of a certain Canaanite whose name was Shua. He took her and went in to her, 3 and she conceived and bore a son, and he called his name Er. 4 She conceived again and bore a son, and she called his name Onan. 5 Yet again she bore a son, and she called his name Shelah. Judah was in Chezib when she bore him. Genesis 38:2, ESV Now this language of seeing and taking, Judah sees this woman and he takes her, should be ringing some alarm bells if we're familiar with our Bibles. This is the language of the very first sin in Genesis chapter 3:6. The woman in that story saw that the tree was good for food, that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise and so she sinned when she took of its fruit and ate it. Seeing and taking, this is an echo of the original sin. Now here this is describing marriage, to take someone is an act of marriage. This is what Judah is doing, he is marrying this Canaanite woman. Now it's not a sin to marry. The Bible says this throughout the scriptures and indeed God was the one who ordained the institution of marriage. Where Judah sins here is by marrying a Canaanite. See in the story leading up to this God had told the great-grandfather of Judah, Abraham, that God was going to remove the people who were living in the land of Canaan, the Canaanites. He was going to utterly remove them from the land because of their sin and wickedness, and instead God was going to bring the nation descended from Abraham and settle them in that land. So, what we see from a variety of different ways is that God's people, the people who were descended from Abraham, were absolutely not to intermarry with these wicked Canaanites. They would pollute their own spirituality and it would also jeopardize the promises. How could God both bring the offspring of Abraham and the offspring of Canaanites into the land if their lines were intermarried and intermingled? So what Judah does here is that he ignores the promise and the command of God, the heavenly promise. He lives faithlessly here. He doesn't live by faith, instead he pursues an earthly woman, a woman in the land. By sight he lives, by what he can see. He sees but he does not see rightly. While Judah does not see rightly the Lord sees rightly from the very beginning. This is exactly the way that the Bible tells us this, it puts an emphasis on the Lord's sight where we see in verses 7 and 10, where the Lord sees the wickedness of Judah's children. Right out of the gate there's something spiritually wrong in the family of Judah, especially with the influence of this Canaanite woman but also for Judah's own sin. So look at verse 6, 6 And Judah took a wife for Er his firstborn, and her name was Tamar. 7 But Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord put him to death. Genesis 38:6, ESV Now we are not told why Er was put to death, we are not told what exactly he did to be considered wicked in the eyes of the Lord. What's very interesting is that the word Er in Hebrew is just two letters long and if you just flip those two letters the other way, you get this word wicked or evil. Spell it one way his name is Er, turn it around and you have evil, and he is indeed evil in the eyes of the Lord. So, the Lord puts him to death, but then something strange happens that's difficult for us to get our minds around. In verse 8 we read, 8 Then Judah said to Onan, “Go in to your brother's wife and perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her, and raise up offspring for your brother.” Genesis 38:8, ESV What Judah was telling Onan to do was to enter into what was called Levirate marriage with Er his deceased brother's widow, Tamar. Again, this is very hard for us to get our minds around, we don't do anything like this in our culture. Essentially the idea is that if one brother is married to a woman and the brother dies before the woman can bear him any children, to continue on his name the next brother would then step up to marry that widow. When those two had children, there would be something of a posthumous adoption to the deceased brother so the child born to that marriage would then provide offspring. Again adopted posthumously to the deceased brother to carry on the deceased brother's line. Well, the issue for Onan was that Onan was the second born. The firstborn gets the birthright and with the birthright you get a double portion of your father's inheritance, but if your brother dies, if the firstborn dies, then the inheritance birthright would go to the second born. So if Er has died and he has no offspring then Onan stands to cash in on the birthright, which will then fall to him. What we read here is that Onan knew, in verse 9, that the offspring would not be his. He's calculating how much money he can get from this situation. Now Onan could have simply rejected his father's request. In the Old Testament there was a procedure for turning down the offer of Levirate marriage. This is built into the story of Ruth for example. She enters into Levirate marriage, but one person has to reject her before she can go to Boaz. Here we have Onan, and he could have refused this, but he does what is absolutely reprehensible in the eyes of the Lord. He is willing to use her sexually, but we read in verse 9, 9 But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his. So whenever he went in to his brother's wife, he would waste the semen on the ground, so as not to give offspring to his brother. 10 And what he did was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and he put him to death also. Genesis 38:9-10, ESV Well, the Lord sees this exactly for what it is. Again, we read that this was wicked in the eyes of the Lord and that the Lord put him to death also. Judah is scared at this point and the question is how is his line going to be continued? How will God raise up offspring for Judah if his sons continue to die? Judah seems blind to this concern, though he's not willing to give Tamar his daughter-in-law to the next man up, to Sheila. In verse 11 he pretends that he's going to though. We read, 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. Genesis 38:11, ESV So, Judah again sees the situation, but he doesn't see it rightly. He lies to Tamar because he thinks that she's the problem. He doesn't see that the issue is his sin, and the issue is the sin of his own children which have put them to death, which have come from his sinful marriage to this Canaanite wife. He thinks that Tamar is the problem, she's bad luck in some sense. Well, Tamar is blind to the fact that Judah is lying to her, so she does exactly what Judah tells her, at least for a time. It's at this point we have to ask who is this woman, who is Tamar? In fact, we're told very little about her. Back in verse six we are told nothing about her except her name. Now that's somewhat significant because we are never told the name of Judah's Canaanite wife, but we are told the name of Tamar. Perhaps the most important information that we learn about Tamar is what we don't read, never do we read that this woman Tamar is a Canaanite. Now probably she was, it's hard to know where exactly Tamar would have come from if she wasn't one of the women of the land, the Canaanites. The scriptures, and this is so important, never identify her as a Canaanite. Opening Eyes Well, here we are seeing the blindness of Judah to his situation and to some extent the blindness of Tamar. Now we have to go to the second section where we see opening eyes. We are going to see the opening of Tamar's eyes to realize the reality she's stuck in, and then also we're going to see the beginning of the opening of Judah's eyes. Look now in verse 12 where we see the start of the second section, opening eyes, in the course of time. 12 In the course of time the wife of Judah, Shua's daughter, died. When Judah was comforted, he went up to Timnah to his sheepshearers, he and his friend Hirah the Adullamite. Genesis 38:12, ESV Now it's important to notice here that when Judah's wife dies, Judah is comforted. Remember we've already read about two deaths of the immediate family members of Judah, the death of his two sons, and we did not read a word that at any point Judah mourned or that he needed to be comforted. This is in stark contrast to Jacob's example. If you remember in Genesis chapter 37 when Jacob thought that his son Joseph had died, he mourned grievously and in fact he refused to be comforted. Then 37:34-35 and he says, “no I shall go down to Sheol to my son mourning.” We never read that Judah mourns the death of his sons. We are seeing here a portrayal of Judah and it's done in subtle, skillful way by the narrator here. He is a cold, hard, cruel, callous man. He's not moved to mourn whatsoever by the death of his two older sons. In stark contrast to the way he mourns for his wife, in stark contrast to how Jacob mourned for his son Joseph. This hard callousness of Judah isn't new. Remember in the previous chapter Judah was the one who coldly callously suggested that his brothers sell Joseph into slavery. Why? To make a profit from him rather than just killing him and leaving him dead. Well, as the story continues, we find right away that Tamar's eyes have been opened, and this is the exact way the narrator tells us this. In verse 13 we read, 13 And when Tamar was told, “Your father-in-law is going up to Timnah to shear his sheep,” 14 she took off her widow's garments and covered herself with a veil, wrapping herself up, and sat at the entrance to Enaim, 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. Genesis 38:13-15, ESV She sees what's up, she sees what's happening, she sees that Judah does not intend to do what he has promised to do. So she puts into place a plan where she dresses up, takes off her widow's clothing, and instead dresses up as a prostitute and sits, we read in verse 14, at the entrance to Enaim. Now the ESV doesn't include a footnote here, but this word Enaim is the word in Hebrew for eyes. This is the exact same word that appeared in verses 7 and 10 to talk about Ur and Onan being wicked in the eyes of the Lord. She's sitting in a place called eyes and in fact she's at the entrance to the eyes, or the opening of the eyes is a way to translate this, because this is a place where eyes will be opened. Her eyes are open to her situation and this is the place where Judah's eyes will begin to be opened. Like clockwork blind Judah comes along seeing but not seeing. 15 When Judah saw her, he thought she was a prostitute, for she had covered her face. 16 He turned to her at the roadside and said, “Come, let me come in to you,” for he did not know that she was his daughter-in-law. She said, “What will you give me, that you may come in to me?” Genesis 38:15-16, ESV In verse 15 when Judah saw her, there's that word again, when Judah saw her, he thought she was a prostitute. He's blind to her identity for she had covered her face. Again, in verse 16 we read that he did not know that she was his daughter-in-law. So Judah is blind. He sees but he doesn't see, he's blind to the identity of this woman whom he takes for a prostitute. We're also reading here that he is blind to the moral sin, the moral evil of visiting a prostitute. Now here's another place where we see a direct contrast between the life of Judah and the life of Joseph. In the next chapter, chapter 39, Joseph is going to face his own sexual temptation. The wife of Potiphar is going to come after him again and again and again asking him to lie with her. We will then see not only a parallel, but a contrast. Joseph will every time refuse that request. He will run from sin, whereas Judah here is the one who is initiating the services of this prostitute. He's set up in some way, but he's the one who initiates the interaction. So blind Judah asks her how he can secure her promises. He promises to give her a young goat, but she asks for a pledge. Judah is so blind, so tunnel visioned, to what he wants in that circumstances that he gives her the farm. He not only promises a goat, but he is willing to give his signet, his cord, and his staff, all of which were personally identifying. As one commentator puts it, this would be like giving all of your credit cards and your driver's license to this prostitute in order to secure the immediate use of her services. He's blind, he doesn't know what he is doing, he's headlong into his lust and his sexual sin. It's clear though that although he is blind to the evil of this, he nevertheless wants to protect his reputation and all this. He wants to avoid the stigma. When it comes time to pay for what he has used, he sends the goat, but he doesn't personally make the walk of shame back to this place. He sends his friend the Adullamite to deliver the promised goat, back in verse 20. He goes and looks for her, but of course she's nowhere to be found because there is no cult prostitute in this area. So he comes back and reports this to Judah and Judah just wants to bury it, let's just get rid of this. Out of sight, out of mind. I tried but I don't want to be laughed at in this situation or we shall be laughed at, which in verse 23 is his only concern. He's blind to the evil of this, of what he has done, but he wants to protect his reputation. So through this at the end of the second section, Tamar is pregnant now. This is significant and very important because a new lineage has been opened for Judah. He is not aware of it yet, but one that will work around the wife who is identified as a Canaanite that Judah married, the children born to Tamar will be Judah's and they will not be born to a woman identified as a Canaanite. Opened Eyes Now again Judah does not know what has happened. His eyes are still somewhat cloudy to the situation, but in this final section his eyes will be opened. So that's the third section, in verses 24-30, opened eyes. In verse 24 word gets to him that Tamar his daughter-in-law has become pregnant by sexual immorality. Judah responds once again with hard cold cruelty. He is blind to his own sin, he just wants to make it go away, he wants to bury it. Yet he becomes inflamed with rage, above what would have been righteous or just in that situation. So he says bring her out and let her be burned. Now theoretically Tamar was engaged to Judah's son Sheila, so by becoming pregnant from someone other than Sheila Tamar had committed adultery. The punishment in the Old Testament for adultery was indeed death, but it was death by stoning. It was only the most heinous crimes that would be prosecuted by burning, but that's immediately where Judah goes even though he is literally guilty of the exact same crime. When Tamar is coming out on her way to her execution, she sends the signet and the cord and the staff. She asks Judah to identify it and he indeed identifies it, he looks at it and identifies it. This is Judah's eye-opening moment. This is an eye-opening moment for him because he realizes that he is again guilty for literally the exact same sin and therefore he deserves the same punishment that she is facing. Judah's eyes are also opened because he may be realizing that what has happened to him is the exact same thing that he did to his father Jacob. You may remember they took Joseph's coat, their brother's coat, and gave it to Jacob and asked Jacob to identify it. Jacob identified it and thought wrongly that Joseph his son had had died. The same words for identified is repeated twice in chapter 37. Also, don't forget that the brothers had used the blood of a goat to deceive Jacob, whereas Tamar's purchase price also involved the promise of a goat. Now we talked last week about how Joseph's brothers do to Jacob just as Jacob had done earlier in his life to his own father, Isaac, in Genesis chapter 27. Jacob deceived his own father with a goat to make his arms hairy like his brother Esau's, and clothing of his brother Esau in order to steal the blessing from Esau. So, what the brothers did to Jacob, they used a goat the blood of a goat and the clothes of Joseph to deceive Jacob. Here Judah has been deceived by clothes, where Tamar put off the clothes of her widowhood and put on the clothes of a prostitute, and with a goat to be deceived in what has happened. Here Judah's eyes are open to what is going on, but the question comes back to how then will he respond? Will he try to bury this? Well, his eyes are opened in one more way, which we see at the end of verse 26, when Judah identifies this. We read 26 Then Judah identified them and said, “She is more righteous than I, since I did not give her to my son Shelah.” And he did not know her again. Genesis 38:26, ESV It is not that what Tamar has done is righteous in itself. Instead, Judah recognizes that he has committed evil actions from purely evil motivations, while Tamar committed evil actions from good motivations. In that sense she is more righteous than he. Tamar's motivations were to gain offspring for the great-grandson of Abraham. His eyes have been opened to his sin, he doesn't try to hide it, he doesn't try to deny it, he simply confesses it. This becomes a dramatic turning point, the eye-opening moment in Judah's story. He begins the story like a blind man, and he acts like it, seeing but not seeing. Through this story his eyes have been opened through the place which is called the opening of the eyes. Later on, once again we will see Judah interacting with a pledge. It will not be a pledge, in Genesis 43, to try to secure the immediate services of a prostitute. Judah offer instead offer himself as a pledge to protect his younger brother Benjamin. Benjamin, who is the full brother to Joseph, the only other brother who was also born to Jacob's wife Rachel. Then Judah will make good on his pledge, not just to avoid being laughed at, but Judah will make good on his pledge with such deep-hearted sincerity that he will cite the fact that he is Benjamin's pledge and offer himself as a substitute slave to protect Benjamin. It's then in Genesis 44 that Judah becomes like Joseph. Joseph was the faithful son who, because of his faithfulness, was made to be a slave in Egypt. When Judah goes to Egypt, he will offer himself, as a faithful son, in order to be the substitute slave to protect his brother Benjamin. So, this story is the beginning, the turning point, the eye-opening moment where Judah comes to look more like Joseph. We should also remember this is also the place where Judah comes to resemble the greatest descendant in his lineage, the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, who will come from the tribe of Judah. For that to fill in the dots we have to look at this epilogue, where we see the descendant of Judah through whom Jesus Christ will be born. In verses 27 through 30 we read about the story of the birth of the twins Perez and Zerah. Like Jacob and Esau, these two twins struggle in the womb of their mother. Zerah is technically the firstborn, he gets his arm out first and they put a scarlet thread on his hand. But the younger Perez struggles to overtake his older brother. Just as the younger brother Jacob had prevailed over the older brother Esau, so now the younger brother Perez prevails over his own older brother Zerah. Ultimately it will be through Perez that Judah's lineage leads to David, and beyond David to the Lord Jesus Christ. You will find Tamar and Perez listed in the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew chapter one. Application How then should we respond to this story? What do we do with this? 1. Well, the question we have to wrestle with is are your eyes opened? First, are your eyes open to see your own sin? The only person in this story who does not see Judah's sin clearly is Judah himself. Everyone around him can see it, but he is blind to his lack of faith in God's promises, to the spiritual bankruptcy of his family, to the lies he tells, and to his sexual sins. The Lord sees it immediately and Tamar comes to see it over time. The extraordinary message of this horrifying story is not about Judah's sin in itself, it is about the Lord's extraordinary grace to open Judah's eyes to see his own sin. God could have left him his own blindness, but God does not. God opens Judah's eyes to see his sin clearly for exactly the evil that it is. Now you may be here today feeling deeply uncomfortable as we've studied this story, and not necessarily even because of the content of the story, as uncomfortable as this story is. It's uncomfortable because the Lord may be beginning to open your eyes to your own sin. So the question is how will you respond? You can clench your eyes shut, you can stuff your fingers in your ears to try to avoid it, you can try to bury whatever God is bringing to mind by the work of his Holy Spirit. Instead, let me point, as surprising as it may have sounded at the beginning of this story, let me point to the example of Judah. Look at what Judah does when he is brought face to face, when he sees his sin. He simply confesses it. He could have tried to cover it up, he could have hardened his heart, he could have existed on carrying out the execution of Tamar along with his twin sons who were growing in her womb. In doing so he would have eliminated any evidence against him for his sin. Instead, he simply acknowledges it, he confesses that he has not acted righteously. When Christ opens our eyes to our sin, he makes a promise to us, to help us to overcome the hurdle that we may be feeling of an intense desire to cover over our sin in shame. So we read in the Bible in 1 John 1:9, 9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 1 John 1:9, ESV If your eyes have been opened to your sin, confess it. Christ pledges he promises to forgive you. Don't hide it, confess it. 2. The second question to ask then is are your eyes open to see the glory of Christ? The Bible, throughout its pages, contrasts what it is when we see the things of this world. When we set our eyes on this world, against what we should be seeing. We should be gazing upon the glory of Christ. If our eyes are fixed on the things of this world then we will bump through life like Judah does in this story and in the previous story. When we see an opportunity to profit ourselves, even if it means selling our own brother into slavery, we'll jump on it. When we see an opportunity for sexual pleasure, even when this is illicit, forbidden, and sinful sexual pleasure, we will run toward it if our eyes are only searching for what we can gain in this world. Instead, the Bible tells us to fix our eyes on Christ. Now of course we can't see Christ physically, yet we are waiting for that day. Right now, we walk by faith and not by sight, 2 Corinthians 5:7. What the scriptures give us is a window that we can open up and through which we can see Christ in all of his glory by faith now. So then when he returns, we may gaze upon his glory with his Father and the Holy Spirit forever and ever, with our eyes by sight. In 1 John 3:2 we read this, 2 Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. 1 John 3:2, ESV That's the promise, we can set our eyes on Christ by faith today. The hope that one day we will set our eyes on him in the fullness of his glory forever and ever, when he returns. For now the Bible is teaching us to see Christ's glory. To see Christ's glory in his love and mercy toward wretched sinners like Judah, like you, like me, the love and mercy that was poured out for us in his own blood at the cross. The Bible teaches us to see Christ's glory in; his power and his victory over sin, death, and the devil, in his righteousness and holiness that he offers to us by faith, in his wisdom as he teaches us to say no to worldly lusts, and in the glory of his coming kingdom. Are your eyes open to see the glory of Christ? Almighty God, by the power of his Holy Spirit give to each of us eyes to see fully the glory of Christ in his gospel Let's pray. Lord we pray that you would indeed open our eyes, to where we have been blind especially to our own sin and to the glory of Christ. We pray that you would help us to clearly see our sin, to confess it, and repent from it, and to turn to Christ by faith who promises to forgive us our sins. We pray this all in the name of our powerful savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Interrupting the flow of the Joseph narrative at the end of Genesis is this one-chapter interlude, telling us how it came to be that Judah has descendants. Onanism and prostitution are mentioned, so not exactly an episode that would make sense for younger ears. Levirate marriage is also discussed, but that probably isn't as big of a deal for younger listeners...And yes, this is another story in salvation history where the characters go through something that looks pretty bad, and potentially is pretty bad, but it gets redeemed in the end with the advent of Christ. If you've been noticing a theme for every time we've dipped our toes into the Torah, you would be right!

We are in a series on the life of Joseph. But actually, it’s kind of misleading to say that. It’s not less than that. But it’s definitely more than that. Yes, Genesis 37-50 is the story of Joseph but it’s also the story of Reuben and Gad and Asher and Naphtali and Rachel and Leah and Jacob and Potiphar, Potiphar’s wife, and Pharaoh. Whenever God is doing one thing, he’s doing 1,000 things. There are so many threads at work in the narrative. We know about some more than others, but God is working in all of them.Last week we looked at that salvation moment of bankruptcy in the lives of two of the characters in the narrative. We looked at the surrender of Jacob and Joseph. Now today we get to tell the story of Judah. Now if you remember back several weeks we skipped Genesis 38 which was the story of Judah and Tamar. And I said we would return to it. Today’s that day. The story is all at once disturbing, amazing, fascinating, and exhilarating!The story of Judah begins with the unloved Leah giving birth to four boys. Her last son was named Judah whose name in Hebrew means praised. Well, Judah grows up in the rabble of that love-starved home, the fourth-born, forgotten-in-the-middle, eclipsed son. That’s how Judah grows up.The next reference to Judah is when he is in his early 20s. The dreamer Joseph comes out to meet his brothers, they strip him of his coat, and plot to murder him. And you will remember, it’s Judah who speaks up when Joseph is in the pit. He says, “Guys, why are we planning on killing Joseph? If we kill him we get nothing. Here are some Ishmaelite traders. If we sell him, we still get rid of him but we can walk away with cash.”Now why he does this we don’t know. Is it compassion on Joseph? Unlikely. Is it crass materialism? Probably.So chapter 37 ends with Joseph bound and off to Egypt. Chapter 39 picks up the narrative of what happens to Joseph when he enters Egypt. But artfully sandwiched in between these two chapters is chapter 38, this flash-forward, a scene from the life of Judah.Now I’m just going to tell the story of chapter 38 as set up for where we are today. Chapter 38 takes place sometime after Joseph has been sold. Judah is now grown, married, and has sons of his own. And we are told that Judah’s oldest son Er marries a woman named Tamar. We know next to nothing about Er except that he was flagrantly wicked and as a result, dies under the hand of God’s judgment. Now that, of course, makes Tamar a widow. A widow would have been one of the most socially and economically vulnerable people in society.Why was she vulnerable? Because she wasn’t likely to be chosen for marriage, and without that, she couldn’t have a family. And without that, she couldn’t be respected. Without respect, it’s hard to get a job, to have meaningful friendships, etc.This would be like a person in our day and age who couldn’t read and write. I mean, you don’t have the basic skills necessary for inclusion in the culture. It would be something like that. Because everybody knew that widows were doomed, there was an important law to protect widows, and this was called the Levirate marriage law.Levirate comes from the Latin word levir which means brother-in-law. And here’s how the law worked. As a father, if one of your married sons died, and if you had other sons, you were to provide one of them in marriage for your widowed daughter-in-law so that she would not be disgraced in society. That was the father’s job. That was his obligation. It was the Law. So we are told that Judah does his job and gives his second son Onan to Tamar. But this dude was just as wicked if not worse. This guy is bad news and so the same thing happens. The judgment of God falls upon him and he too dies. So now poor Tamar is twice widowed.Well, the Levirate marriage law kicks in again and the responsibility falls back on Judah to provide her with another one of his sons. He’s got a younger son named Shelah but he’s too young to marry. So he tells Tamar, “Go home and live in your father’s house and wait for him to grow up and then I’ll give him to you for a husband.” He’s claiming to be her defender and provider. But he was deceiving her. He had no intention of doing this. “Go home to dad and when he’s of age, I’ll let you know. Don’t call me. I’ll call you kind of thing.” Why is he planning to deceive? Because he blames Tamar for the death of his two sons. Tamar is poisoning the soup. She’s bad luck. Something like this.Now I think Judah knows exactly why they died. They were evil in the sight of the Lord. Judah absolutely knows this. But he’s in denial. Judah is blaming her for the death of his sons. There’s something wrong with her. Judah does not want to admit what a mess they were. Judah does not want to admit their corruption and brokenness. He does not want to admit what a mess of a father he must have been. He doesn’t want to admit it.Instead, what he wants to say is, “This woman somehow is bad news. If she marries my third son, he’ll probably die too. She’s the problem. Okay, maybe she’s not poisoning them, but somehow she’s corrupting them. I just know it.”So he sends her away to her father with the hope that she is never heard from again; maybe she’ll get eaten by a wild beast along the way.Now Tamar is no dummy. She is counting down the days and she starts figuring it out. She does the math and realizes that Shelah had grown up. She’s leaving voicemails without a response. She’s getting ghosted in her texts. And the reality begins to settle on her. Judah has no intention of protecting and providing for her, so she goes into action.When she hears her father-in-law is on his way to her neck of the woods she executes this bold plan. It says, “She took off her widow’s clothes. She covered herself with a veil to disguise herself as a prostitute.” And her plan is to seduce Judah. Now this says something about the character of Judah. She’s counting on the fact that he’s going to fall for it. She knew his character. This was his settled pattern of behavior.So Judah passes by and is captured by the eyes of the woman through the veil, but doesn’t realize it’s his daughter-in-law. And he has sex with her. And of course, prostitution has a fee and in those days you pay with goods but he doesn’t have any. He promises a goat and as collateral, he leaves behind his seal, cord, and staff. In the Ancient Near East, a person’s seal, cord, and staff would be like your credit card, your driver’s license, and the keys to your car. I mean, a guy needs these things. So he knows that if he wants them back he’s going to have to go back and pay the fee. When he goes back to pay the fee she’s nowhere to be found. And he’s got to be thinking to himself, “That little punk. What in the world?” So he’s got to cancel the credit card, go to the DMV, and get new keys made. It’s a tremendous hassle but life goes on.Well, that encounter gets Tamar pregnant. And when Judah finds out that his daughter-in-law got pregnant outside of marriage he makes a big stink about it. He gets the town together and makes this big charade about how unfaithful she is, how terrible her character is, and he calls to have her executed, but not just any old execution. He called for her to be burned to death. What? If you heard that someone was sentenced to capital punishment through lethal injection, you’d say, “Okay, that’s unfortunate but that’s what we do in these situations.” But if you heard someone was burned to death, you’d say, “Really? What? Why?” It was not different then. This seems like an overreaction. Why is Judah reacting like this?Now think carefully here. The reason is that he knew that in not giving her his son, he was sentencing a woman to social death and absolute impoverishment. He knew that what he did was totally and completely unjust. So to assuage that guilty conscience, he needed to believe bad things about her in order to justify his course of action. “She’s been poisoning the soup. She’s the reason. She influenced them in some way. She coerced and harassed them into it, or she brought it on somehow.” This is his way of silencing the voices of guilt, of justifying himself, of shielding himself. He knew his sons deserved the judgment of God and that Tamar had nothing to do with it. You see, he’s been telling himself a story all these years without any evidence whatsoever and then when he finally gets the evidence, bam, we see this over-the-top reaction, take her out, and burn her.He’s probably grinning ear to ear because now finally he has the confirmation he needed all these years. “I just knew it!” he’s saying, “Burn her. She’s a whore. I knew it all along.”So here he is, about to take a girl who had no part in the death of his sons, and he is about to torture her and kill her. He’s ready to feast his eyes on the burning body of a young girl to further the false narrative he’s created in his mind.The Dramatic PauseNow just stop right now. How dark is this? Do you see how lost Judah is? Do you see what kind of place he is in? If God allows him to go through with this, think about what the rest of his life is going to look like. He is going to have to spend the rest of his life trying to strengthen a narrative that has no evidence to support it, trying to convince himself just how wicked she was, over and over and over again, just so he can stay completely convinced that burning her at the stake was the right call. His conscience is going to try to condemn him, which means he’s going to have to continually lie to himself and lie to himself and that lying to himself will twist his heart and twist his heart until he is a twisted and broken, shelled out lost person. Do you see how Judah is just teetering on the brink of disaster?But this is a story of God’s sovereign redemption. God is redeeming all through this narrative. And he is redeeming Judah. Judah at this moment is absolutely imprisoned by selfishness. He’s imprisoned in shame. He’s imprisoned in denial. He’s imprisoned in guilt. And he’s just fueling that guilt and denial by telling himself stories. Like the coils of an anaconda, with every lie he tells himself it’s just tightening around him further and further and further.Look at the unlikely way in which Judah is saved. Now the story continues. She’s drug by her hair out into the public square to be burned. But before they light the fire she yells out in dramatic fashion, “Wait, I have a package.” And she pulls it out and sends it to her father-in-law, and there’s a message that goes along with that package. “Shouldn’t the guy who did this to me burn as well?” And he opens the package and you could imagine a note attached, “The man who impregnated me who, by law, ought to burn with me - these are his. Do you recognize these?” And there in the package is Judah’s cord and seal and staff. “Do you recognize them?”And it’s brilliant literature at this point. Not just, “Do you recognize to whom these things belong?” but “Do you recognize yourself for who you are? Do you see what you’ve become? Do recognize the hypocrisy in yourself?”Do you remember last week we talked about the salvation moment of bankruptcy? Oh, Judah was so proud. He was in charge. He was a powerful man. The fact that he even had a seal meant he was a powerful leader in his community. When he ordered Tamar to be burned, he was functioning as a community patriarch, the whole community danced to his tune.But God brought him to his knees. He humbled him. He absolutely stripped him publicly naked. He’s publicly being shamed here in a way that he will never recover from. He’s being taken out by both knees with a steel pipe. And you think this a bad thing? You are wrong. This is a gift of God. This is grace. You see, Judah was blind to his self-deception. He was so blind to his hypocrisy. He couldn’t see it which is why it has so much power over him. It was strangling him to death. He really was on his way to being lost. But God humiliated him. In God’s grace, he stripped him naked.This is what we learned last week. You cannot possibly see God without a stripping down of all self-deception like this. You cannot possibly be saved without some grace intervening from the outside to strip you down to who you really are so that you cry out and say, “I am such a sinner. I am such a hypocrite. I am so judgmental. I am the one who needs to be burned. I am no better than the people I used to despise.”It is often the awful, painful things that God will use to wake you up, to see who we really are. That is why we need the initiating grace from God, often in the form of deep trials, the Tamars and Nathans of the world who point their finger at us and say, “You are the man. You are the woman.”Now I believe it was this moment that began an incredible transformation that we see unfold in the life of Judah. Chapter 38 ends with the confession of Judah.Judah saw himself and cried out for mercy. It was that cry for mercy and the receiving of mercy that began to change him. Now we don’t see that change worked out until several chapters later.Back to JosephChapter 38 closes and chapter 39 opens and Judah disappears from the narrative and we are thrust back into the Joseph story. Here is the thirty-second reminder of what happened. We see Potiphar, the jail, the dreams of the cupbearer and baker, the two full years of prison being forgotten, the interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream, the seven years of plenty, the years of famine have begun. You have the first visit of the brothers. And last week we looked at the second visit.You will remember from last week that Joseph had invited the brothers into the house to dine with them. He was overcome with emotion when he saw Benjamin. The floodgates open and he excuses himself while he lets out great sobs. He recomposes himself. He seats them all in order. He gives Benjamin 5 times the portion of anyone else. And chapter 43 ends with them eating, drinking, and happy. Now everybody goes to bed with full stomachs a sensation they certainly were not used to and they mentally prepare for the trip home. Even though they are well-fed, their thoughts turn back home to their starving families. You know that feeling when vacation is over and you have to gear up for real life. They make plans for the following day and the long journey that awaits and they head to bed. But things do not go according to plan. Look now what happens next:Joseph is conducting another test. Now why he does this we do not know for certain. It could be that something in the conversation that night made him suspicious. It could be he wanted to be doubly sure because the first test wasn’t conclusive in his mind. But I think we can do better. Obviously, he’s setting up another test and we can deduce his intentions by looking at the test itself. Every good test is designed to provoke a particular weakness. A grade school multiplication quiz might have 100 problems and every one of them has a 12 in it, you can deduce that the teacher is testing to see if the student knows his 12s.What is Joseph testing for? Let’s think about the elements in this test. Clearly, Joseph has by now discovered that Benjamin has replaced him as the favorite son. It was the envy of that favoritism that caused his brothers to so despise him, throw him in a pit, and sell him off into Egypt. That envy was at the root of their previous murderous intent. Previously the brothers said in their hearts, “We can’t be happy till Joseph is miserable.” That’s what ENVY does to a person.Have they changed? Can they now say, “When you are happy, I am happy. When you win, I win. Can they find their joy in the exaltation of another?” And so Joseph sets up the test. Clearly, Benjamin is already highly favored by their father. “What if I pour fuel on that? What if I favor Benjamin by giving him five times the amount of everyone else, and really dote and spoil him, will that create jealousy in his brothers, the kind of jealousy which would cause them to betray Benjamin if given the right opportunity?”On their first journey, their greed was tested. Now they level up. It’s a test of greed and envy combined. So here it goes.Now Judah reenters the picture. And folks, I want you to notice the change. It’s so dramatic. If you ever hear someone say, “Man, people are basically who they are. People don’t change.” If you ever hear that, they don’t know the God of the Bible. No Christian can say that. Look at what God does with Judah. Look at this man. We can’t even recognize him. It’s incredible.Now do not get too hung up on this whole idea of a cup of divination. There’s a myriad of explanations of what’s going on here. Just let common sense put you at ease. Joseph can’t be into sorcery and be a worshiper of YHWH. Something else is going on. He’s probably trying to reinforce the image they already have of Joseph. The brothers know the Egyptian religious structure. They know Joseph is viewed as a god. Joseph is playing the part. “Don’t you know I am a god and can see all things?” He’s striking fear into their hearts according to their understanding of who they believe Joseph to be. Joseph launches the accusation. Look at Judah’s response.What is Judah doing? Judah is taking the fall. Judah is taking the blame. Judah is willing to absorb the injustice of the accusation. Now Joseph really wants to put a sharp point on the test here. He’s totally setting them up. If they have any inclination to betray their brother, if they have even the slightest temptation to sell him off for 20 shekels of silver, it’s all going to be revealed here. Joseph smiles, reassures, puts on a great show of warmth and compassion.“Oh, I would never do something so unjust as to imprison all of you!” Do you see what Joseph is doing? “Oh no. You guys are all good. You can all go. And keep the money in the sacks. I like you chaps. It’s just this Benjamin rascal. I’m throwing him in prison.”You could not engineer a situation more exactly to test if envy or greed were resident motives in the heart of the brothers. It’s genius. Joseph is doing everything he can to ferret out the heart that once betrayed for a fistful of cash. What happens next is this beautiful outpouring of Judah’s love for his father and his youngest brother. You can just see it ooze out of the text.We are on the absolute cusp of the great reveal of Joseph. In one more verse, Joseph is going to break. But that’s for next week. You are going to have to come back. I just want to stop right here and marvel at what we see in Judah. Do you see the transformation that has taken place? Judah was a lying, greedy, brother-selling, prostitute-loving, widow-burning, terrible father who had zero hope of changing. But God intervened.You can watch this transformation take place if you trace the word ‘recognize’ through the narrative. What happens is that Judah recognizes the grace of God. We as readers recognize that God is doing something in Judah and we can also recognize that God is doing something way, way beyond Judah.When we first meet Judah, he’s the one who suggested that he sell Joseph into slavery and he stripped Joseph of his coat. They put the blood of a sacrificial animal on it, and they brought it to their father, Jacob, and they said, “Father, do you recognize this?” Jacob says, “Yes. I recognize it. It’s Joseph’s coat. He’s dead! He’s dead!” In presenting that false evidence, Judah would have been lost had not God helped Judah to recognize himself.Alfreid Edersheim who’s a Jewish scholar especially knowledgeable in Jewish literature references a middle-age Jewish commentary on Genesis which says, “You deceived your father with a goat? Tamar will deceive you with a goat. You said to your father, ‘Do you recognize this?’ By your life, Tamar will say to you, ‘Do you recognize this?’”It’s a beautiful play on words. It was through deception that Judah would obscure the truth about his brother. “Father, do you recognize this?” And years later it would be through deception that Judah would see the truth about himself. “Judah do you recognize this?”Judah recognized his cord, staff, and seal. But more than that. He recognized himself for who he was. He recognized his absolute hypocrisy. He recognized his arrogance and bankruptcy. And now Judah bows before Joseph with his bald spot totally recognizing his guilt of the injustice done to Tamar. He totally recognizes his guilt in selling off his brother for a handful of silver. He recognizes that he needs to pay for his sins. But he does not yet recognize Joseph. He does not recognize that the judge before whom he is bowing is the one he has sinned against. He doesn’t yet recognize that the benevolence he receives, comes from the hand he has pierced. That recognition comes next week.But you see, this is such a beautiful picture of where this is all headed. Because we now can recognize something that Judah and Joseph and Jacob could have never, namely that this illegitimate union between Judah and Tamar would produce a son named Perez whose name means breakthrough. Perez would break through all this mess.Perez would have a son named Hezron, and he would father Ram, and Ram would father Amminadab, and Amminadab would father Nahshon, and Nahshon would father Salmon, and Salmon would father Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of David the king.And David the King would have a promise made to him that out of his loins would come the Messiah and the genealogy in Matthew 1 concludes.Nobody could have recognized this. We now recognize that this was all pointing to Christ, the ultimate Joseph. Jesus too was stripped of his coat. His blood was sacrificed and his stained robe was presented to the father, God, “Father, do you recognize this?” Yes, this is the blood of my son. This the blood of my one and only precious son. I recognize in this blood the atonement of all your sins. I recognize the debt has been paid. I recognize perfect innocence sacrificed.The sacrifice is complete. The payment satisfied the debt. And like Judah who absorbed and volunteered to absorb the penalty in himself, like Judah who offered himself as a substitute, Jesus too would offer himself as a substitute for us on the cross. He took our place, bore in his body our sins, and shed his blood for us. And God the father recognizes this sacrifice for us. It counts. The debt has been paid. Folks is this not a marvelous story? Is this not just glorious? Let’s sing!Who alone can save themselves?Their own souls could heal? The answer is nobody. Our shame was deeper than the sea. That’s where Judah found himself. Totally broken. Totally at the bottom. He reached that salvation moment of bankruptcy and then the gospel: Your grace is deeper still.

We are in a series on the life of Joseph. But actually, it’s kind of misleading to say that. It’s not less than that. But it’s definitely more than that. Yes, Genesis 37-50 is the story of Joseph but it’s also the story of Reuben and Gad and Asher and Naphtali and Rachel and Leah and Jacob and Potiphar, Potiphar’s wife, and Pharaoh. Whenever God is doing one thing, he’s doing 1,000 things. There are so many threads at work in the narrative. We know about some more than others, but God is working in all of them.Last week we looked at that salvation moment of bankruptcy in the lives of two of the characters in the narrative. We looked at the surrender of Jacob and Joseph. Now today we get to tell the story of Judah. Now if you remember back several weeks we skipped Genesis 38 which was the story of Judah and Tamar. And I said we would return to it. Today’s that day. The story is all at once disturbing, amazing, fascinating, and exhilarating!The story of Judah begins with the unloved Leah giving birth to four boys. Her last son was named Judah whose name in Hebrew means praised. Well, Judah grows up in the rabble of that love-starved home, the fourth-born, forgotten-in-the-middle, eclipsed son. That’s how Judah grows up.The next reference to Judah is when he is in his early 20s. The dreamer Joseph comes out to meet his brothers, they strip him of his coat, and plot to murder him. And you will remember, it’s Judah who speaks up when Joseph is in the pit. He says, “Guys, why are we planning on killing Joseph? If we kill him we get nothing. Here are some Ishmaelite traders. If we sell him, we still get rid of him but we can walk away with cash.”Now why he does this we don’t know. Is it compassion on Joseph? Unlikely. Is it crass materialism? Probably.So chapter 37 ends with Joseph bound and off to Egypt. Chapter 39 picks up the narrative of what happens to Joseph when he enters Egypt. But artfully sandwiched in between these two chapters is chapter 38, this flash-forward, a scene from the life of Judah.Now I’m just going to tell the story of chapter 38 as set up for where we are today. Chapter 38 takes place sometime after Joseph has been sold. Judah is now grown, married, and has sons of his own. And we are told that Judah’s oldest son Er marries a woman named Tamar. We know next to nothing about Er except that he was flagrantly wicked and as a result, dies under the hand of God’s judgment. Now that, of course, makes Tamar a widow. A widow would have been one of the most socially and economically vulnerable people in society.Why was she vulnerable? Because she wasn’t likely to be chosen for marriage, and without that, she couldn’t have a family. And without that, she couldn’t be respected. Without respect, it’s hard to get a job, to have meaningful friendships, etc.This would be like a person in our day and age who couldn’t read and write. I mean, you don’t have the basic skills necessary for inclusion in the culture. It would be something like that. Because everybody knew that widows were doomed, there was an important law to protect widows, and this was called the Levirate marriage law.Levirate comes from the Latin word levir which means brother-in-law. And here’s how the law worked. As a father, if one of your married sons died, and if you had other sons, you were to provide one of them in marriage for your widowed daughter-in-law so that she would not be disgraced in society. That was the father’s job. That was his obligation. It was the Law. So we are told that Judah does his job and gives his second son Onan to Tamar. But this dude was just as wicked if not worse. This guy is bad news and so the same thing happens. The judgment of God falls upon him and he too dies. So now poor Tamar is twice widowed.Well, the Levirate marriage law kicks in again and the responsibility falls back on Judah to provide her with another one of his sons. He’s got a younger son named Shelah but he’s too young to marry. So he tells Tamar, “Go home and live in your father’s house and wait for him to grow up and then I’ll give him to you for a husband.” He’s claiming to be her defender and provider. But he was deceiving her. He had no intention of doing this. “Go home to dad and when he’s of age, I’ll let you know. Don’t call me. I’ll call you kind of thing.” Why is he planning to deceive? Because he blames Tamar for the death of his two sons. Tamar is poisoning the soup. She’s bad luck. Something like this.Now I think Judah knows exactly why they died. They were evil in the sight of the Lord. Judah absolutely knows this. But he’s in denial. Judah is blaming her for the death of his sons. There’s something wrong with her. Judah does not want to admit what a mess they were. Judah does not want to admit their corruption and brokenness. He does not want to admit what a mess of a father he must have been. He doesn’t want to admit it.Instead, what he wants to say is, “This woman somehow is bad news. If she marries my third son, he’ll probably die too. She’s the problem. Okay, maybe she’s not poisoning them, but somehow she’s corrupting them. I just know it.”So he sends her away to her father with the hope that she is never heard from again; maybe she’ll get eaten by a wild beast along the way.Now Tamar is no dummy. She is counting down the days and she starts figuring it out. She does the math and realizes that Shelah had grown up. She’s leaving voicemails without a response. She’s getting ghosted in her texts. And the reality begins to settle on her. Judah has no intention of protecting and providing for her, so she goes into action.When she hears her father-in-law is on his way to her neck of the woods she executes this bold plan. It says, “She took off her widow’s clothes. She covered herself with a veil to disguise herself as a prostitute.” And her plan is to seduce Judah. Now this says something about the character of Judah. She’s counting on the fact that he’s going to fall for it. She knew his character. This was his settled pattern of behavior.So Judah passes by and is captured by the eyes of the woman through the veil, but doesn’t realize it’s his daughter-in-law. And he has sex with her. And of course, prostitution has a fee and in those days you pay with goods but he doesn’t have any. He promises a goat and as collateral, he leaves behind his seal, cord, and staff. In the Ancient Near East, a person’s seal, cord, and staff would be like your credit card, your driver’s license, and the keys to your car. I mean, a guy needs these things. So he knows that if he wants them back he’s going to have to go back and pay the fee. When he goes back to pay the fee she’s nowhere to be found. And he’s got to be thinking to himself, “That little punk. What in the world?” So he’s got to cancel the credit card, go to the DMV, and get new keys made. It’s a tremendous hassle but life goes on.Well, that encounter gets Tamar pregnant. And when Judah finds out that his daughter-in-law got pregnant outside of marriage he makes a big stink about it. He gets the town together and makes this big charade about how unfaithful she is, how terrible her character is, and he calls to have her executed, but not just any old execution. He called for her to be burned to death. What? If you heard that someone was sentenced to capital punishment through lethal injection, you’d say, “Okay, that’s unfortunate but that’s what we do in these situations.” But if you heard someone was burned to death, you’d say, “Really? What? Why?” It was not different then. This seems like an overreaction. Why is Judah reacting like this?Now think carefully here. The reason is that he knew that in not giving her his son, he was sentencing a woman to social death and absolute impoverishment. He knew that what he did was totally and completely unjust. So to assuage that guilty conscience, he needed to believe bad things about her in order to justify his course of action. “She’s been poisoning the soup. She’s the reason. She influenced them in some way. She coerced and harassed them into it, or she brought it on somehow.” This is his way of silencing the voices of guilt, of justifying himself, of shielding himself. He knew his sons deserved the judgment of God and that Tamar had nothing to do with it. You see, he’s been telling himself a story all these years without any evidence whatsoever and then when he finally gets the evidence, bam, we see this over-the-top reaction, take her out, and burn her.He’s probably grinning ear to ear because now finally he has the confirmation he needed all these years. “I just knew it!” he’s saying, “Burn her. She’s a whore. I knew it all along.”So here he is, about to take a girl who had no part in the death of his sons, and he is about to torture her and kill her. He’s ready to feast his eyes on the burning body of a young girl to further the false narrative he’s created in his mind.The Dramatic PauseNow just stop right now. How dark is this? Do you see how lost Judah is? Do you see what kind of place he is in? If God allows him to go through with this, think about what the rest of his life is going to look like. He is going to have to spend the rest of his life trying to strengthen a narrative that has no evidence to support it, trying to convince himself just how wicked she was, over and over and over again, just so he can stay completely convinced that burning her at the stake was the right call. His conscience is going to try to condemn him, which means he’s going to have to continually lie to himself and lie to himself and that lying to himself will twist his heart and twist his heart until he is a twisted and broken, shelled out lost person. Do you see how Judah is just teetering on the brink of disaster?But this is a story of God’s sovereign redemption. God is redeeming all through this narrative. And he is redeeming Judah. Judah at this moment is absolutely imprisoned by selfishness. He’s imprisoned in shame. He’s imprisoned in denial. He’s imprisoned in guilt. And he’s just fueling that guilt and denial by telling himself stories. Like the coils of an anaconda, with every lie he tells himself it’s just tightening around him further and further and further.Look at the unlikely way in which Judah is saved. Now the story continues. She’s drug by her hair out into the public square to be burned. But before they light the fire she yells out in dramatic fashion, “Wait, I have a package.” And she pulls it out and sends it to her father-in-law, and there’s a message that goes along with that package. “Shouldn’t the guy who did this to me burn as well?” And he opens the package and you could imagine a note attached, “The man who impregnated me who, by law, ought to burn with me - these are his. Do you recognize these?” And there in the package is Judah’s cord and seal and staff. “Do you recognize them?”And it’s brilliant literature at this point. Not just, “Do you recognize to whom these things belong?” but “Do you recognize yourself for who you are? Do you see what you’ve become? Do recognize the hypocrisy in yourself?”Do you remember last week we talked about the salvation moment of bankruptcy? Oh, Judah was so proud. He was in charge. He was a powerful man. The fact that he even had a seal meant he was a powerful leader in his community. When he ordered Tamar to be burned, he was functioning as a community patriarch, the whole community danced to his tune.But God brought him to his knees. He humbled him. He absolutely stripped him publicly naked. He’s publicly being shamed here in a way that he will never recover from. He’s being taken out by both knees with a steel pipe. And you think this a bad thing? You are wrong. This is a gift of God. This is grace. You see, Judah was blind to his self-deception. He was so blind to his hypocrisy. He couldn’t see it which is why it has so much power over him. It was strangling him to death. He really was on his way to being lost. But God humiliated him. In God’s grace, he stripped him naked.This is what we learned last week. You cannot possibly see God without a stripping down of all self-deception like this. You cannot possibly be saved without some grace intervening from the outside to strip you down to who you really are so that you cry out and say, “I am such a sinner. I am such a hypocrite. I am so judgmental. I am the one who needs to be burned. I am no better than the people I used to despise.”It is often the awful, painful things that God will use to wake you up, to see who we really are. That is why we need the initiating grace from God, often in the form of deep trials, the Tamars and Nathans of the world who point their finger at us and say, “You are the man. You are the woman.”Now I believe it was this moment that began an incredible transformation that we see unfold in the life of Judah. Chapter 38 ends with the confession of Judah.Judah saw himself and cried out for mercy. It was that cry for mercy and the receiving of mercy that began to change him. Now we don’t see that change worked out until several chapters later.Back to JosephChapter 38 closes and chapter 39 opens and Judah disappears from the narrative and we are thrust back into the Joseph story. Here is the thirty-second reminder of what happened. We see Potiphar, the jail, the dreams of the cupbearer and baker, the two full years of prison being forgotten, the interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream, the seven years of plenty, the years of famine have begun. You have the first visit of the brothers. And last week we looked at the second visit.You will remember from last week that Joseph had invited the brothers into the house to dine with them. He was overcome with emotion when he saw Benjamin. The floodgates open and he excuses himself while he lets out great sobs. He recomposes himself. He seats them all in order. He gives Benjamin 5 times the portion of anyone else. And chapter 43 ends with them eating, drinking, and happy. Now everybody goes to bed with full stomachs a sensation they certainly were not used to and they mentally prepare for the trip home. Even though they are well-fed, their thoughts turn back home to their starving families. You know that feeling when vacation is over and you have to gear up for real life. They make plans for the following day and the long journey that awaits and they head to bed. But things do not go according to plan. Look now what happens next:Joseph is conducting another test. Now why he does this we do not know for certain. It could be that something in the conversation that night made him suspicious. It could be he wanted to be doubly sure because the first test wasn’t conclusive in his mind. But I think we can do better. Obviously, he’s setting up another test and we can deduce his intentions by looking at the test itself. Every good test is designed to provoke a particular weakness. A grade school multiplication quiz might have 100 problems and every one of them has a 12 in it, you can deduce that the teacher is testing to see if the student knows his 12s.What is Joseph testing for? Let’s think about the elements in this test. Clearly, Joseph has by now discovered that Benjamin has replaced him as the favorite son. It was the envy of that favoritism that caused his brothers to so despise him, throw him in a pit, and sell him off into Egypt. That envy was at the root of their previous murderous intent. Previously the brothers said in their hearts, “We can’t be happy till Joseph is miserable.” That’s what ENVY does to a person.Have they changed? Can they now say, “When you are happy, I am happy. When you win, I win. Can they find their joy in the exaltation of another?” And so Joseph sets up the test. Clearly, Benjamin is already highly favored by their father. “What if I pour fuel on that? What if I favor Benjamin by giving him five times the amount of everyone else, and really dote and spoil him, will that create jealousy in his brothers, the kind of jealousy which would cause them to betray Benjamin if given the right opportunity?”On their first journey, their greed was tested. Now they level up. It’s a test of greed and envy combined. So here it goes.Now Judah reenters the picture. And folks, I want you to notice the change. It’s so dramatic. If you ever hear someone say, “Man, people are basically who they are. People don’t change.” If you ever hear that, they don’t know the God of the Bible. No Christian can say that. Look at what God does with Judah. Look at this man. We can’t even recognize him. It’s incredible.Now do not get too hung up on this whole idea of a cup of divination. There’s a myriad of explanations of what’s going on here. Just let common sense put you at ease. Joseph can’t be into sorcery and be a worshiper of YHWH. Something else is going on. He’s probably trying to reinforce the image they already have of Joseph. The brothers know the Egyptian religious structure. They know Joseph is viewed as a god. Joseph is playing the part. “Don’t you know I am a god and can see all things?” He’s striking fear into their hearts according to their understanding of who they believe Joseph to be. Joseph launches the accusation. Look at Judah’s response.What is Judah doing? Judah is taking the fall. Judah is taking the blame. Judah is willing to absorb the injustice of the accusation. Now Joseph really wants to put a sharp point on the test here. He’s totally setting them up. If they have any inclination to betray their brother, if they have even the slightest temptation to sell him off for 20 shekels of silver, it’s all going to be revealed here. Joseph smiles, reassures, puts on a great show of warmth and compassion.“Oh, I would never do something so unjust as to imprison all of you!” Do you see what Joseph is doing? “Oh no. You guys are all good. You can all go. And keep the money in the sacks. I like you chaps. It’s just this Benjamin rascal. I’m throwing him in prison.”You could not engineer a situation more exactly to test if envy or greed were resident motives in the heart of the brothers. It’s genius. Joseph is doing everything he can to ferret out the heart that once betrayed for a fistful of cash. What happens next is this beautiful outpouring of Judah’s love for his father and his youngest brother. You can just see it ooze out of the text.We are on the absolute cusp of the great reveal of Joseph. In one more verse, Joseph is going to break. But that’s for next week. You are going to have to come back. I just want to stop right here and marvel at what we see in Judah. Do you see the transformation that has taken place? Judah was a lying, greedy, brother-selling, prostitute-loving, widow-burning, terrible father who had zero hope of changing. But God intervened.You can watch this transformation take place if you trace the word ‘recognize’ through the narrative. What happens is that Judah recognizes the grace of God. We as readers recognize that God is doing something in Judah and we can also recognize that God is doing something way, way beyond Judah.When we first meet Judah, he’s the one who suggested that he sell Joseph into slavery and he stripped Joseph of his coat. They put the blood of a sacrificial animal on it, and they brought it to their father, Jacob, and they said, “Father, do you recognize this?” Jacob says, “Yes. I recognize it. It’s Joseph’s coat. He’s dead! He’s dead!” In presenting that false evidence, Judah would have been lost had not God helped Judah to recognize himself.Alfreid Edersheim who’s a Jewish scholar especially knowledgeable in Jewish literature references a middle-age Jewish commentary on Genesis which says, “You deceived your father with a goat? Tamar will deceive you with a goat. You said to your father, ‘Do you recognize this?’ By your life, Tamar will say to you, ‘Do you recognize this?’”It’s a beautiful play on words. It was through deception that Judah would obscure the truth about his brother. “Father, do you recognize this?” And years later it would be through deception that Judah would see the truth about himself. “Judah do you recognize this?”Judah recognized his cord, staff, and seal. But more than that. He recognized himself for who he was. He recognized his absolute hypocrisy. He recognized his arrogance and bankruptcy. And now Judah bows before Joseph with his bald spot totally recognizing his guilt of the injustice done to Tamar. He totally recognizes his guilt in selling off his brother for a handful of silver. He recognizes that he needs to pay for his sins. But he does not yet recognize Joseph. He does not recognize that the judge before whom he is bowing is the one he has sinned against. He doesn’t yet recognize that the benevolence he receives, comes from the hand he has pierced. That recognition comes next week.But you see, this is such a beautiful picture of where this is all headed. Because we now can recognize something that Judah and Joseph and Jacob could have never, namely that this illegitimate union between Judah and Tamar would produce a son named Perez whose name means breakthrough. Perez would break through all this mess.Perez would have a son named Hezron, and he would father Ram, and Ram would father Amminadab, and Amminadab would father Nahshon, and Nahshon would father Salmon, and Salmon would father Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of David the king.And David the King would have a promise made to him that out of his loins would come the Messiah and the genealogy in Matthew 1 concludes.Nobody could have recognized this. We now recognize that this was all pointing to Christ, the ultimate Joseph. Jesus too was stripped of his coat. His blood was sacrificed and his stained robe was presented to the father, God, “Father, do you recognize this?” Yes, this is the blood of my son. This the blood of my one and only precious son. I recognize in this blood the atonement of all your sins. I recognize the debt has been paid. I recognize perfect innocence sacrificed.The sacrifice is complete. The payment satisfied the debt. And like Judah who absorbed and volunteered to absorb the penalty in himself, like Judah who offered himself as a substitute, Jesus too would offer himself as a substitute for us on the cross. He took our place, bore in his body our sins, and shed his blood for us. And God the father recognizes this sacrifice for us. It counts. The debt has been paid. Folks is this not a marvelous story? Is this not just glorious? Let’s sing!Who alone can save themselves?Their own souls could heal? The answer is nobody. Our shame was deeper than the sea. That’s where Judah found himself. Totally broken. Totally at the bottom. He reached that salvation moment of bankruptcy and then the gospel: Your grace is deeper still.

[Correction from Pastor Rob: I made a mistake in my sermon. While referencing a passage from Deuteronomy 25, I said something that the passage does NOT say. I always want to correct any mistake I make especially when referring to scripture. I realized this and did not make the same mistake in the second service. So first I apologize for making this error. Second, here is the correction for those of you in the first service or watching online. When we came to the section with Tamar and the three sons of Judah, the practice of Levirate marriage was brought up. This is when the brother of a deceased man is obliged to marry his brother's widow. So at this point I referenced Deuteronomy 25:5-9. In that passage when the brother refuses to marry his deceased brothers wife, the text tells us that she is to go to the elders of the city and attempt to get them to convince him otherwise. If they fail she is to take his sandal and then spit in his face. The custom of taking his sandal is a practice from the Ancient Near East that represented a transaction had been made (See Ruth 4:7). During the first service I took this further than what the text says. I mentioned that she would also slap him in the face with his sandal. Which is is comedic, but the text does NOT say that! For some reason I embellished this point and took it too far. So again, I apologize for that comment. It's not that big of a deal in the overall meaning of the text, but I always want to be exact with God's words so I needed to make this correction.]

M’Cheyne Bible Reading Plan Meditation for Ruth 3–4: Levirate marriage, kinsman-redeemers, and the real story of Ruth—the transition to King David. The post August 10th: Bible Meditation for Ruth 3–4 appeared first on Free Daily Bible Study.

Great NT Profiles Part 9Homework Tips Checklist for ParentsSAMARITAN WOMANIntroductionØ Related Scriptures:John 4:1-26• This unnamed woman is named “a Samaritan. “• She was the wife of multiple men.• She meets Jesus at a well reminiscent of other “women at the well”.Rebecca (Genesis 24)Rachel (Genesis 29)Zipporah (Exodus 2)• The literary convention known as a “type scene” charges her of sexual impropriety, Intellectual obtuseness, and false religion.History of Samaria• Following Solomon’s rule, the United Monarchy split into two independent states: Judah in the South, ruled by a Davidic descendant (see 1 Kings 12), and Israel in the North, ruled by a series of dynastic houses.• In c. 720, Assyria conquered Israel (see 2 Kings 17:1-16), dispersed the political and religious elite throughout the empire (hence the “ten lost tribes”), and resettled other peoples in Israel.• The combination of indigenous and resettled populations became the Samaritans.The New Testament Portrait• The New Testament offers a somewhat ambivalent portrait of Samaria.Jesus says, “enter no town of Samaria” (Matthew 10:5).Luke’s introduction of Samaritans concerns inhospitality to Jesus (Luke 9:51-56)Yet the next chapter offers the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37).In Luke 17:11-19, a Samaritan leper returns to thank Jesus for healing.In Acts 8, Samaria is beguiled by Simon Magus, converted by Philip, and receives the Holy Spirit from John and Peter.John’s Approach• The story of the Samaritan woman may be read as a correction or an alternative to Matthew’s Gospel, in which Jesus restricts his followers from entering Samaria, and to Luke’s writings, in which Samaria is evangelized only after Jesus’ ascension.The Expectation• Samaritans awaited a messianic figure, and some became believers in Jesus.The Location• The location is “a city of Samaria, called Sychar, near the field that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there.”• The location is “a city of Samaria, called Sychar, near the field that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there.”The Samaritan Woman• The Samaritan woman is female, alien, and unnamed.Living Water• “Living water” also indicates “running water”; the Samaritan needs to make the shift from the physical to the spiritual (4:14; see Jeremiah 2:13; 17:13).• The woman echoes the words of Jesus: “Give me this water” (4:15). The type scene is reversed. The man give water to the woman.Five Husbands• Jesus changes the subject asking the woman to “go and call your husband” (4:16).• Jesus observes, “you have had five ‘husbands’” (4:18)Is the woman a “five-time loser”?Are the husbands symbolic of the five Samaritan gods, or do they represent the five Books of Moses (which make up the Samaritan Pentateuch).• Is it necessary to judge her negatively?She may have been in a Levirate situation (see Mark 12:18-23).To take her situation negative and literal may be missing the point.Theological Epiphany• The woman slowly comes to a deeper theological understanding.She acknowledges Jesus as a prophet (4:19).Perceiving him to be an expert, she inquires about the appropriate locus of worship.• Jesus claims to be the Messiah.Hearing his identification, the woman leaves to announce to the town, “could this be the Christ?” (v29).At her word, the Samaritans go out of the city to meet Jesus.Her question allows them to judge for themselves.• The Samaritan woman is the only person show to evangelize an entire community. Her success is marked by the phrase “this is truly the savior of the world” (4:42)Questions to Consider• Does the woman’s sexual history hint at John’s ambivalence about the Samaritans? Does this history create ambivalence toward the woman on our part?• Why would Matthew forbid a Samaritan mission, Luke reserve it for Acts, and John depict it?• How is the Samaritan woman like and unlike the male disciples?

This may be the only business podcast to ever talk through a Levirate marriage. From the story of Judah and Tamar, we learn that as leaders, we should seek out ways to leverage our businesses to assist the vulnerable. When we do this, we reflect the heart of God.

Today’s episode is a little bit different than our regular programming around here, as we are commemorating Pentecost with a reading of the book of Ruth! In the first part of the episode, my friend, and worship pastor, Kevin Perry and I will unpack why this unique book of the Bible carries such a powerful punch, the history that makes various moments significant, and how we can see our Savior foretold in this beautiful story of redemption. Why commemorate Pentecost with a reading of this particular book? What is Pentecost anyway? We’ll absolutely address that and so much more as we celebrate the first fruits of the Church, and celebrate the way our Redeemer tells a story.  I hope you enjoy this conversation and this beautiful reading of Ruth! I want to say a HUGE thank you to our cast of characters for giving us their time and their talents: Kevin and Alicia Perry, David Wilkinson (host of the fabulous Dad Matters Podcast!), Chris and Stephanie Teauge (check out their beautiful music Out of the Dust), edited, produced and a little voice work by the best husband in the world, Andrew Humphries.  I pray this leaves you encouraged, friend. The same God who can work this kind of beauty from smoldering ashes,  can and will work in your life too. Resources: Esther Reading on Simply Stories  Pentecost Festival of Weeks The Mission of the Body of Christ - Russ Ramsey The Bible Binge Podcast: Ruth episode “From Now On” - The Greatest Showman Poldark Downton Abbey Demons: What the Bible Really Says About the Powers of Darkness - Dr. Michael Heiser A Refuge Assured - Jocelyn Green Whiskey Rebellion Jewish Calendar for barley harvest Kinsman redeemer Levirate marriage The northern kingdom Northern Kingdom exile Scripture References: The book of Acts God gives the Law through Moses The book of Judges Judges 21:25- In those days there was no ruler in Israel Deuteronomy 17-34, Psalm 91- God says in Deuteronomy: famine is one of the judgement Daniel 3:18- If not He is still good Isaiah 61:1-3- Beauty from the ashes Esther 4:14 - Deliverance will come from another place Matthew 1- Rahab and Ruth part of the lineage of their Messiah Genesis 13- Lot and Abraham Genesis 19-Lot, Sodom and Gomorrah Genesis 19:30-38-Lot’s daughters Genesis 6 Ruth 1:16-  your people will be my people Deuteronomy 24:19- law written for gleaning (esp for the widows and the poor) Judges 19 -Gross last chapter of Judges (UGH. That’s all I have to say about that. UGH.) Joshua 2- Rahab’s story in Jericho Genesis 38- Judah and Tamar Mark 12:30-31- Love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself Acts 2:14-36-Peter’s first Spirit filled sermon Micah 5 Connecting with Em and catching up on episodes:InstagramFacebookBlogSign up for our newsletter! *Intro and Outro music by audionautix.com *Edited and produced by the world’s best husband, Andrew Humphries

Audio Transcript: Good morning. Welcome to Mosaic church Brookline. My name is Jan. I'm one of the pastors here at Mosaic. Hopefully you've got a nice mask like I do. I got this from my dad. My only problem with this thing is, fogs up my glasses so can't see a thing. Happy Mother's Day, everyone. Here in the beginning, just a quick announcement. Could you do me a favor? If you're watching on Facebook right now, could you please hit the share button? I hate to ask. Feels like self-promotion, but it's basically the easiest way to share the gospel ever. Just press that button. Or if you're watching on YouTube, hit the subscribe button, and like, and comments and all that. It helps us get the word out. Also, if you are visiting, welcome. If you're not part of the Mosaic Brookline community, we'd love to connect with you and we do that through the connection guide. The link will be down in the comments on the Facebook Live premiere. And then also, we have another connection card either on our website or in our app, which you can get in the app store or Google Play. Just search for Mosaic Boston.We're so glad you here. Happy Mother's Day. We're so thankful for our moms. We love our moms and we're praying for them. We're thinking and honoring all the mothers in our community. And this day and age, mothers are clearly, clearly essential workers. More work than ever. Salary has not increased. I see this with my own wife, Tanya. She's an incredible mother to our four daughters, working harder than ever. So we're praying for you. I'm praying for the fruit of the spirit in your life, in particular, patience. As we pray for our mothers, we also pray and honor those who are pregnant today in this crazy season to be pregnant. You are already mothers and we're praying for you, for the Lord to strengthen you and comfort you and sustain you and bless you and the child.We're also thinking of those who would like to be mothers and are not. Jesus didn't have children. St. Paul didn't have children. There's many great, godly people in scripture who didn't have children. And from God's perspective, spiritual children are as important, if not more important, than physical children. I know many strong, powerful young women in our church who have seen people come to faith through their ministry. Those are your children, and we are to be fathers and mothers to them. Also for anyone who's lost a child, we pray for you, and God the Father knows what you're going through, what you've gone through. He too has lost a child. So here in beginning, I would just like to pray for all the moms and bless them in the name of Jesus Christ, by the power of the spirit. Would you pray with me?Heavenly father, we're so thankful for the gift of life and we're so thankful for the gift of new life. Lord, we're so thankful for our parents, our fathers and mothers, they're alive. Lord, we pray for them. We pray that you bless them today, in particular the mothers. You told us to honor our fathers and mothers, so we honor our moms today and the moms in the community, moms of physical and spiritual children. I pray that you give them wisdom and knowledge and discernment to raise up these children in the knowledge of the Lord, love for the Lord. Holy Spirit, I pray, fill them with your power, with your fullness, with your love and comfort and wisdom. And I pray that through their ministry at home, what an important ministry that is, what a calling that is. Lord, I pray that you through the spirit bear much spiritual fruit in their lives. Lord, and help us be great children to our parents, to our moms, to honor them well as you've commanded us. And Lord, bless our time in this tremendous book, brilliant book of Ruth. We thank you for the time that you've given us in it, and I pray that you bless the preaching of holy scripture and we pray all this in Christ's holy name. Amen.If you are tuning in today, if you're new, we've been going through the book of Ruth, all three sermons. The previous ones are online, and we'd love for you to listen to those. They've been a blessing to our community. Next week we are starting a new series through the book of Philippians, so definitely come back. Philippians is a timely book. The title of the series is inner peace in utter chaos, and St. Paul is writing this book about joy and peace that transcends all understanding and he's writing it from prison, from quarantine. Today we're finishing Ruth. We're in Ruth chapter four. The title of the sermon is The Heart of the Deal, not the art of the deal, but The Heart of the Deal, and at the center of the chapter is a transaction between Boaz and another gentlemen and Boaz is motivated by his heart. He's motivated by love.The story of Ruth, it is a love story, but more importantly it's a story of redemption. Redemption and love are inextricably intertwined because at the heart of redemption is sacrifice. At the heart of love is sacrifice as well, and that's where they meet together. It's not just a love story of hormonal surging love like rom-coms. It's a love story of sacrifice and of redemption. It's a story of costly sacrificial love. And the story of Boaz and Ruth and the whole book of Ruth, it's a prequel to Jesus. Both Ruth and Boaz, they point to Jesus Christ and his redemptive love and that's what we'll talk about today. One of the reasons why we love the story of Ruth, it's such a great story because it points to a greater story. Jesus Christ takes the stories of our lives and when we give him our lives, he takes the tragedies and triumphs and he weaves it into the ultimate tragedy; the death of Jesus Christ, and then the ultimate triumph, which is his resurrection.Every true story, every powerful story has the same arc; creation, fall and redemption. Think of the greatest stories that you've ever heard, the greatest books you've ever read, the greatest movies that have a lasting impact on your life. If there's no redemption, if the story just ends with loss, fall. If the story is just a descent into lossness, like Camus' The Stranger, Beckett's waiting for Godot, you're left with emptiness. You're left with a pit in your stomach, a bitter taste that you can't get out of your mouth. We long for an ending that's happy, that's full of joy and enduring Christianity is the universal explanation of reality, therefore if we take this our creation fall, redemption and we through it look at the stories that have had a lasting impact, shown endurance and popularity, they all use the same pattern and this can be statistically proven. Of all the books that have ever written, the most popular books of all time, number one is The Bible. Over five billion copies published and so many more now with apps, et cetera. Number two is the writings of Mao Tse-Tung, more than five billion copies as well.The Bible has been valued for its blessing to the largest religious group on earth and the history of the earth, and Chairman Mao's book has been popular because it's been printed as governmental propagation within the largest nation. Then come the Quran, the Book of Mormon, the Chinese Dictionary, Boy Scout Handbook, all around a hundred million, but if you look at pure literary works of fiction, Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities, 200 million. The Little Prince, 200 million. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, 150 million. The Alchemist, 150 million. Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, a hundred million. Tolkien's The Hobbit, 100 million. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 80 million. All of them creation, fall, redemption, and they try to give a glimmer of restoration. Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With the Wind, Ben-Hur, all the stories that have endured and were massively popular, same exact arc.And that's why we love the book of Ruth. Same exact arc. The heart of the book is a story of redemption. What is redemption? Just to define our terms, redemption is a pattern of debt and repayment. A debt was owed and it was repaid by someone who paid it at a personal cost to themselves. It's loss and reclamation, it's deliverance upon payment. It's rescue from bondage or enslavement or destitution. And most popular enduring works, more or less, they have a Christ-like Redeemer at the heart of it. Dostoevsky and Brothers Karamazov through Father Zosima, this is what he say;, men are always saved after the death of the deliverer. This is the heart of Christianity; that we are lost, that we are spiritually destitute, in poverty, ostracized from the presence of God. And a Redeemer comes in, a kinsman Redeemer, someone just like us to represent us and pay a debt that we owed.The context of Ruth chapter four where we find ourselves is chapter three. Interesting chapter. As we learned last week, Ruth proposes that Boaz propose. Boaz goes asleep, he wakes up and the first thing that he does is he wants to handle the situation so that he can marry Ruth, but there's an obstacle. He's not the first person legally in line to marry her. We'll talk about that. There's another guy who's got the right to marry her. So, the text is actually a legal transaction before court, so to speak, and Boaz has to handle some business before going on the honeymoon. So would you look at Ruth chapter four with me? I'll read verses one through 12 now and the rest later. Now Boaz had gone up to the gate and sat down there. And behold, the redeemer, of whom Boaz had spoken, came by. So Boaz said, "Turn aside, friend; sit down here." And he turned aside and sat down. And he took ten men of the elders of the city and said, "Sit down here." And they sat down.And he said to the redeemer, "Naomi, who has come back from the country of Moab, is selling the parcel of land that belonged to our relative Elimelech. So I thought I would tell you of it and say, 'Buy it in the presence of those sitting here and in the presence of the elders of my people.' If you will redeem it, redeem it. But if you will not, tell me, that I may know, for there is no one besides you to redeem it, and I come after you." And he said, "I will redeem it." Then Boaz said, "The day you buy the field from the hand of Naomi, you also acquire Ruth the Moabite, the widow of the dead, in order to perpetuate the name of the dead in his inheritance." Then the redeemer said, "I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I impair my own inheritance. Take my right of redemption yourself, for I cannot redeem it."Now, this was the custom in former times in Israel concerning redeeming and exchanging. To confirm a transaction, the one drew off his sandal and gave it to the other, and this was the manner of attesting in Israel. So when the redeemer said to Boaz, "Buy it for yourself," he drew off his sandal. Then Boaz said to the elders and all the people, "You are witnesses this day that I have bought from the hand of Naomi all that belonged to Elimelech and all that belonged to Chilion and to Mahlon. Also Ruth the Moabite, the widow of Mahlon, I have bought to be my wife, to perpetuate the name of the dead in his inheritance, that the name of the dead may not be cut off from among his brothers and from the gate of his native place. You are witnesses this day." Then all the people who were at the gate and the elders said, "We are witnesses. May the Lord make the woman, who is coming into your house, like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel. May you act worthily in Ephrathah and be renowned in Bethlehem, and may your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah, because of the offspring that the Lord will give you by this young woman."This is the reading of God's Holy and infallible authoritative word. May he write these eternal truths upon our hearts. Three points. To frame up our time, first Boaz the Redeemer. Then we'll look at Ruth the Redeemer, and both point to Jesus Christ; Jesus the Redeemer. First, Boaz the Redeemer. In verse one, Boaz had gone up to the gate and sat down there. Boaz wants to marry Ruth, but he wants to do it in the right way. He wants to do it honorably. He wants to do it righteously. He wants to do it biblically. And there's an obstacle in the way, but he's motivated by love. And when you love, obstacles are turned into opportunities and whatever the cost, whatever the sacrifice, whatever needs to get done, you will do everything you can. You have to biblically, morally, righteously, legally to be with the beloved.One of the things that we're dealing with at the church is lot of young couples had wedding plans for this season and things have had to change. Wrenches have been thrown into plans. My brother, Vlad the drummer, who's usually behind me during worship band, shout out, Vladdy, and Sarah were supposed to get married at the end of May. The banquet hall that they had scheduled they said, "We can't do any meetings." So they've had to adapt. They've had to overcome and they're having a ceremony. It's going to be smaller ceremony. I can't wait to preach at it, do the homily. And I'm also the best man. Can't wait to do the best man speech. I know so many stories, oh so many. But this is one of the things that we see is that love is willing to sacrifice. Love is willing to adapt and overcome. The other thing that we see here is in this relationship, as Boaz wants to marry Ruth, who sacrifices more? Is it Boaz or is it Ruth? It's Boaz. Boaz has to make the greater sacrifice financially and personally and emotionally and socially.And actually, we see this pattern throughout scripture. And no matter how much our culture fights this, it's still true that the man leads with sacrifice. Who pays for the engagement ring? The man does. That's always been true, no matter what our culture says, because it's written on our hearts. So but Boaz goes to the gate. Towns were on hilltop, so he went up to the gate. The gate was a combined town hall and a courthouse and archeological studies show us that along the walls next to the gate were benches and whenever anyone came to the gate and sat down, that meant this person had to do, wanted to do some official business. Boaz spent the previous night at the threshing floor and the text insinuates that he didn't even go home. First thing that he does as he wakes up, as he goes and handles some legal business.So he sees the gentlemen, this Redeemer friend gentlemen. He says, "Turn aside, friend. Sit down here." Great move. Good start. Disarm the guy. Proverbs says, "A soft tongue will break a bone." He says, "Friend, sit down. Let's chat." Verse two and he took 10 men of the elders of the city and said, "Sit down here." So they sat down. He gets a quorum of witnesses in order to officiate or in order to confirm the decision, the contract that will be made. It says, "And behold the Redeemer," or friend, and he calls him the Redeemer. This gentlemen, according to Leviticus 25, it was his obligation to redeem Naomi, to redeem Ruth, to redeem the land. He was spiritually obligated as the closest living male relative to Naomi and Ruth to take care of them. Did he know that Naomi and Ruth were there? Of course he knew. We see this in chapter one that as soon as Naomi comes back to Bethlehem, the whole town knew. In a small town, everyone knows your business as well, maybe even better than you do. He had known that they were there.Why didn't he do anything? Well, that's really the problem here. He didn't do anything. Scripture gives us different categories of sin. There are sins of commission where we do the wrong thing, and then there are sins of omission where we don't do the right thing. Scripture says, "He who knows what is good to do and doesn't do it is in sin." This man knew his obligation according to the law was to take care of Naomi and take care of Ruth, but he doesn't. And we see that he commits the same sin that Adam committed in chapter three of Genesis; the sin of cowardice or the sin of not doing his duty, not fulfilling the job that God had for him. There's weakness and there's cowardice and there's a lack of leading, a lack of intention.Ruth chapter four verse three and then Boaz said to the Redeemer, "Naomi, who has come back from the country of Moab, is selling the parcel of land that belonged to our relative Elimelech." The backstory is Joshua, when he comes into the promised land, one of the things that he did was divide the promised land amongst all the families. And God knew that there would be ups and downs in life. And because of the vicissitudes in life and because of the variations in ability and variations in diligence of work ethics, some families would lose their land and enter into poverty and end up selling their land or leasing it out. So God made two, and these are very interesting laws, to offer these families a second chance. The first was the year of Jubilee. God said every 50th year, whoever has bought the land, whoever has leased the land, has to give it back to its original owners. It was after the seventh segment of seven years. After 49 years, the 50th year, that's the year of Sabbath. That's when land goes back. But before the 50 years were up, land could be bought back, but only by a kinsmen or someone related to the family.The reason why God gave these laws, and I love the theology here and how practical it is, because in God's vision, he didn't want society to be characterized by incredible divergences of the richest and the poorest. He didn't want the top, top, top, top 1% and the bottom, bottom, bottom 1%. He wanted people to give, if you're wealthy, to give generously, to provide meaningful work for those at the bottom to help them rise up. These laws are meant to keep families together so the land stays in the family. Now, scripture says that Naomi was selling her parcel of land. She was selling that little piece of portion of the promised land. And by the way, this piece of land was never meant to permanently leave the family.So, something happened. When Elimelech and Naomi, when they left the promised land, most likely that they leased the land out to someone else. They gave someone else the ability to use the land while they were gone, probably for some on the front end and made some kind of deal that when we come back we would like to purchase the land back from it. Now, this whole leasing, there's a word for it. It's usufruct. I'm sure you know this word. It's an SAT word, if you studied it. Here is the challenge of the day. Chicken wing, usufruct. Who can spell it quickly right now? You get a chicken wing, and I am good on my promises. So usufruct is from the Latin, you get to use the fruit of the land. So, what Naomi is doing now is she isn't giving the land away to someone forever. She wants someone to buy back the land that she had leased before she left, and she wants that person to be a kinsmen Redeemer, whoever buys this land. So, this kinsmen Redeemer gentlemen would take a lump sum of money, pay the current users of the land, and this gentleman would come in and use the land in order to sustain himself, but also Naomi and Ruth, and raise an heir so that by the time the heir gets to legal age, that land goes to the heir.So that's what's going on. Ruth 4:4, Boaz says, "So I thought I would tell you of it and say, 'Buy it in the presence of those sitting here and the presence of the elders of my people. If you will redeem it, redeem it. But if you will not, tell me that I may know, for there is no one besides you to redeem it, and I come after you.' And he said, 'I will redeem it.'" Now, this is fascinating. It's fascinating because Boaz is so committed to God's law. Despite the fact that he loves Ruth, he is willing to give her, he's willing to sacrifice his own desires so that she is cared for. He loves her enough to sacrifice the possibility of marrying her. And what's fascinating is this gentlemen, he's thinking about making a great deal. He's thinking with a deal. Boaz is thinking heart of the deal. For him, this gentleman thinks, "Oh my, I buy this land and I can use it. This is a tremendous investment. I'm so glad. I'm redeeming. I'm buying it." And Boaz is so shrewd that he didn't lead with what he says in verse five. He led with, "You get the land," and then brings in a stipulation. This is verse five."Then Boaz said, 'The day you buy the field from the hand of Naomi, you also acquire Ruth the Moabite, the widow of the dead, in order to perpetuate the name of the dead in his inheritance.' Then the Redeemer said, 'I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I impair my own inheritance. Take my right of redemption yourself, for I cannot redeem it.'" So you can imagine the scene. You can imagine Boaz handing a contract to this gentleman, this Redeemer friend, and he says, "Great, let's make a deal. Sign here. Sign here. Initial here." Pages flipping, pages flipping, pages flipping. "Oh yeah. By the way, last page. Along with the land, you have to marry Ruth and you have to start a family with her. And if a son is born to you, that son will not carry your last name. He will carry the last name of Ruth's previous husband." So with the land, you have to care for Naomi, Ruth's mother-in-law. What's her name? Mara. Bitter. She used to be sweetheart, turn a little sour, so you get her thrown in with Ruth. You have to have a child. Three mouths to feed and when the child gets to legal age, you have to give everything up to him, and that child also gets to split the inheritance of your other children and everything there.As soon as this guy hears all this, he says, "Oh, no. No thank you. I don't need to do this." When he thought the deal would benefit him, he was all for it. As soon as he counted the cost and realized what kind of loss it would bring him, he backs out of the deal. Boaz here is incredibly shrewd and one of the things that we see with Boaz, scripture says he's a worthy man. He knows God, he knows the law, but he also knows people. There's a godly wisdom that he's developed by applying God's word in his life over the long haul, over decades. He's built himself up spiritually, emotionally, theologically, financially. He was ready when God presents him with the situation. He strategically invested his time in the previous seasons so when the new season of opportunity presents itself, he is more than ready.When you're a single man or a single woman, it's not an opportunity to extend adolescence until marriage. And too many men, especially young men, they think, "Okay, marriage is going to turn me into a man." No, no. What turns you into a man is submission to God, to his word. What turns you into a man is fighting the good fight of faith on a daily basis, fighting your sinful desires, fighting sins of omission and commission. What makes you a man of God is time with God. It's walking with God. Boaz was ready when God said, "I'm giving you my daughter." I did this little thing last week where I said, "Here's all of my standards. Here's all of my tests that I'm going to make any potential suitors for my daughters to go through. Here are my standards." Some of them are superficial for comedic effect. Homiletical effect, you know that. Okay, you get that, but the most important ones? They're true. Are you a Christian? Do you love God? Do you fight your sin? Have you led yourself well? Have you protected yourself from sin? Have you provided for yourself? Have you pastored yourself? Well, if not, how are you going to do those things with my daughter?God does the same thing with his daughters. If you want to marry one of God's daughters, you need to meet the standards that God has for a man of God, and Boaz was working on that. He was working on that for decades. He was becoming the man that God wanted him to be, so that when God brought him into the situation and when he introduced him to Ruth, he was ready. He was ready to pastor her, to provide and to protect because he's done that with himself. That's my just pastoral and brotherly encouragement to the brothers in the church, to the sisters in the church. Don't waste the season. Use the season to build yourself up in the Lord, build yourself up for whatever the next season is, marriage or not. And God definitely does bless that.Ruth 4, 7 through 10. Now, this was the custom of the former times in Israel concerning redeeming and exchanging. To confirm a transaction, one drew off his sandal and gave it to the other, and this was the manner of attesting in Israel. So when the redeemer said to Boaz, "Buy it for yourself," he drew off his sandal. Then Boaz said to the elders and all the people, "You are witnesses this day that I have bought from the hand of Naomi all that belonged to Elimelech and all that belonged to Chilion and to Mahlon. Also Ruth the Moabite, the widow of Mahlon, I have bought to be my wife, to perpetuate the name of the dead in his inheritance, that the name of the dead may not be cut off from among his brothers and from the gate of his native place. You are witnesses this day." He signs a contract with the gentleman. That's what's going on with the sandals. Kind of weird, but what he's doing, signing a contract. He's signing a contract with another believer.Now, this is just biblical wisdom in terms of doing business with people. If you're doing business with an unbeliever, you sign a contract. If you're doing business with the believer, you've got to sign at least two. It's important. Why? Because the world is fallen. Things take longer than anticipated, cost more. Things tend to go bad. I've seen this practically that when deals go bad or business goes bad, in the church community, the right hand of fellowship quickly devolves into the left fist of disfellowship. So don't do that, sign contracts if you're doing business with one another. Ruth 4, 11 through 12. Then all the people who were at the gate and the elders said, "We are witnesses. May the Lord make the woman, who is coming into your house, like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel. May you act worthily in Ephrathah and be renowned in Bethlehem, and may your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah, because of the offspring that the Lord will give you by this young woman."What's fascinating here is they welcome Ruth into the community. They welcome her into the house of God, into the people of Israel. She was an immigrant. Wrong race, wrong faith, wrong language, wrong everything, and she trusts in the Lord and they welcome her into the community. So to speak, they're naturalizing her. If you're an immigrant and you've gone through naturalization process of becoming a U.S. citizen, you know how meaningful that is. I know how meaningful it is. I've gone through it. My wife has gone through it. Basically saying, "You're one of us. You were an outsider. Now you're one of us." And they bless her and they invoke the names of Rachel and Leah. This is important because Rachel and Leah were barren just as Ruth was up to this point, and Leah was the mother of Judah, the ancestor of the tribe of Boaz and Naomi.Why is Perez mentioned here? First of all, Perez is the ancestor of Boaz, but he's also a product of one of these Leviticus 25 Levirate marriages between Tamar and Judah. The problem was, Judah did not fulfill his obligation. He backed out of his obligation. He was passive and not fulfilling the obligation in the same way that this Redeemer friend was passive. And Tamar pretends to be a prostitute, seduces her father-in-law, kind of a story, and Perez is an ancestor of Boaz, and Boaz did not. He did not follow in his ancestor's sinful patterns, sinful decisions. He broke the generational sin by following God. This is important, because if you did not come from a family of believers, if you were not raised in the faith, if you have seen pattern of generational sin in your own life, if there is a legacy of sin, you don't have to follow in those footsteps. By grace through faith, God can redeem you from that. That's what we see here. So Boaz, he makes the decision to marry Ruth. All of her liabilities, all of her debts now belonged to Boaz, and all of Boaz' money, all of his finance, all of his wealth now belong to Ruth. All she has is his. All he has is hers. There's a transfer of debt and a transfer of inheritance. Praise God.Boaz is a Redeemer, but we also see that Ruth as a Redeemer. Look at verses 13 through 17. So Boaz took Ruth, and she became his wife. And he went in to her, and the Lord gave her conception, and she bore a son. Then the women said to Naomi, "Blessed be the Lord, who has not left you this day without a redeemer, and may his name be renowned in Israel. He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age, for your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has given birth to him." Then Naomi took the child and laid him on her lap and became his nurse. And the women of the neighborhood gave him a name, saying, "A son has been born to Naomi." They named him Obed and he was the father of Jesse, the father of David. Ruth does for Naomi what she could not do for herself. That's what a Redeemer does. Boaz does for Ruth and Naomi what they could not do for themselves. That's what a Redeemer does.Naomi had nothing. She couldn't work the fields, was too elderly, can't have kids, so no family. Economically, spiritually, emotionally without hope. No family, no land, no name. And Ruth says, "I will do everything I possibly can. I will sacrifice everything I need to sacrifice to redeem you from this situation." She practices chesed, which is kindness. It's sacrificial love and she also redeems Naomi and everyone in the community realizes this and they said, "Naomi, do you not see what a treasure your daughter-in-law is? She is better than seven sons." Why is this important? Because in ancient Jewish customs, ancient Israelites, for them, seven sons constituted an ideal family. This is one of the most shocking texts in this ancient scripture, where they're saying, "Your daughter-in-law is better than ideal family." The original audience would have had goosebumps at this point.Orpah left Naomi. She was left destitute. Ruth stayed and what Ruth said was, "Your people will be my people and your God will be my God. Wherever you go, I am going to go. I'm going to immigrate with you." Here's the thing about immigrants. I come from a family of immigrants. You immigrate from one place to another. My family went from the former Soviet Union to the United States. You go from one place to another in the hope of a better life, in the hope of more freedom, in the hope of more prosperity. And Ruth is saying, "I know I'm going to a land where I will always be looked at as an outsider. I will be ostracized. I don't look the same as everyone. I'll always have an accent. No one will welcome me into the community." She was willing to immigrate for a worse life and she expected that eyes wide open. She said, "I'm becoming a follower of God because God is true. She's basically becoming a Christian because she believes in this as true, not because there's a promise of better life here on earth. She would rather live worse materially, socially, economically. She would rather live worse than live better in a lie. She says, "I'd rather go where I have access to God's people."Ruth knows that if she leaves Naomi by herself, Naomi was likely to perish. So if Naomi is going to have a life, Ruth has to lose her own. If Naomi's going to have a name, Ruth has to lose her own name. If Naomi's going to have to get land and we'll have a family, Ruth has to give up everything; her family wealth, everything. She impoverishes herself so Naomi can eventually prosper. She suffers outside the gate. She becomes an alien and a stranger. She leaves the familiar to go into unchartered territory. As a result, Naomi is redeemed. Ruth also along with redeeming Naomi, redeems Boaz, and Boaz says as such. Ruth 3:10. And he said, "May you be blessed by the Lord, my daughter. You have made this last kindness greater than the first in that you have not gone after young men, whether poor or rich."The key, the secret to a loving marriage, an enduring marriage, a marriage that gets better with time like fine wine, the secret is recognizing the other person's sacrifice for you. Recognize it, name it, call it out. Talk about it. Thank you. I'm so thankful. As soon as you start feeling entitled, that is the first step to being pulled apart from one another. Sacrifice and recognize the sacrifice of the other. Ruth sacrifices to redeem. Boaz sacrifices to redeem. The Lord blesses them, gives them a baby son. In the previous marriage, Ruth didn't have children, and God here in their honeymoon gives them a baby.Point three, Jesus the Redeemer. Both of them point to Jesus Christ. Where do I get that? Verse 14, "Then the women said to Naomi, 'Blessed be the Lord, who has not left you this day without a Redeemer.'" Who are they talking about? Are they talking about Boaz? That's what it sounds like. Let's keep reading. Without a Redeemer. "May his name be renowned in Israel." Whose name? Boaz' name is already renowned in Israel. 15, "He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age." Is that Boaz? Boaz has already done the restoring. He's already done the nourishing with the grain and with his love. Let's keep going. Restorer of life and nourisher of your old age. "For your daughter in law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has given birth to him." Who are we talking about? You see what's going on in the text? Who's the him? You were just talking about a Redeemer. You were talking about restore, a nourisher. We thought it was Boaz and then it says, "You have given birth." She, Ruth, has given birth to him. What is going on?What's going on is this baby is pointing to the ultimate Redeemer. This baby is a child born in Bethlehem, pointing to another child born in Bethlehem. Ruth 4:17, "The women in that neighborhood gave him a name, saying, 'A son has been born to Naomi,' and they named him Obed. He was the father of Jesse, the father of David." Obed means servant of the Lord. There's another one who's called servant of the Lord. This is talking about Jesus Christ. It's a prophetic passage. Naomi is redeemed by Ruth. Ruth is redeemed by Boaz. Boaz and Ruth have a child who is the ancestor of a king who will redeem all of Israel. That's King David, and King David, he was promised by God, on your throne, King David will sit my son for all of eternity. Who is that talking about? It's talking about Jesus Christ and that's why we have a genealogy at the end of the book. That's why the happy ending of this book points to not just redemption. It points to restoration.Verse 18, "Now these are the generations of Perez. Perez fathered Hezron. Hezron fathered Ram. Ram fathered Amminadab. Amminadab fathered Nahshon. Nahshon fathered Salmon. Salmon fathered Boaz. Boaz fathered Obed. Obed, fathered Jesse, and Jesse fathered David." The book isn't about Ruth primarily. It's not about Boaz primarily. It's not about Obed primary. It's not even about David primarily. It's about Jesus Christ and it's about us. Ruth and Boaz lived their lives in view of eternity. They lived for the long term. They lived to leave a legacy, not have a good time. The choices that we make by the prompting of the Holy Spirit have ramifications far beyond our greatest, wildest dreams. God graciously provides Boaz to redeem Ruth. God graciously provides David to set Israel free, and God graciously provides Jesus Christ to set the world free, set us free.The way that you become a Christian isn't to say, "I want to be more like Boaz," or, "I want to be more like Ruth." Those are all great aspirations, but that's not where it starts. Where it starts is we say, "You know what? I can't be like them by myself because they weren't themselves. They weren't what they turn out to be by themselves. All by the power of the Holy Spirit, and was all by grace through faith." The way you become a Christian is to truly believe in the one who went outside the gate, as Hebrew says. To the one who was truly ostracized, to the one who truly suffered, to the greatest alien and the poorest person spiritually speaking; Jesus Christ on the cross. He was cosmically homeless, cosmically alone, cosmically spiritually destitute. As he cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Jesus Christ was forsaken by God the Father so that we would never have to be.The gospel we see from Ruth is that Boaz sacrificed everything to get Ruth, just like Jesus sacrificed everything to get us. And Jesus doesn't just redeem us from physical debt or from the debt of sin. He doesn't just save us from the captivity to Satan. He saves us from death. One way or another, everyone searches for a way to make themselves right, to justify themselves. And even in a sense, pay a ransom for what they've done, and to pay a ransom to find a rescue from death. In some societies, that payment comes through ancestor worship. That's how you try to overcome death or pay that ransom. Other societies like ancient Egypt, immortality came through elaborate burials or mummification. We live in a culture where we try to pretend death isn't a thing. We try to extend life as long as possible, remain as youthfully looking as possible, but death is coming and we need to think about it.Deep down in our souls, we understand there's got to be some kind of payment for our sins, some kind of payment to overcome death. Be it through works, and it's always ... This is what it boils down to in any other religions. Always works. Hinduism is devotion to the gods and living according to one's dharma. Buddhism, control of passions to attain nirvana. Either Jewish theology, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Shintoist, Taoist, Confucians, atheist. It's all work-based righteousness. Here's how I justify that I am a good person, that I am worthy, that if there is a God, he definitely needs to let me in to heaven. He needs to give me eternal life. That's what he owes me.And someone could push back and say, "Isn't Christianity about works?" Not in its foundation, not in its essence. The rules that God gives us about how we are to live, one of the primary goals of those laws is to expose our sin, expose our brokenness, expose our need for redemption. Galatians says, "The law was our tutor bring us to Christ." The way that we are redeemed by Jesus Christ is by grace through faith, believing and repenting, and Christ's sacrifice is accounted to us. Our debt is paid, and not only does he pay our debt, he offers us his inheritance. I love the word inheritance. I love the idea of inheritance; that you just get this surplus of cash, of whatever, this windfall financially. That's what inheritance is. But there's also a tinge of sadness to inheritance, because for you to get an inheritance, someone else had to pay for it and someone else had to die. And Jesus Christ to cover our debt and offer us an eternal inheritance, he had to die as a sinless substitute.As sinners, there's nothing we can do to redeem ourselves, and for someone to cover our sins, they had to be sinless, a sinless substitute. Not only that, to cover the sins of all of humanity who would turn from their sins and believe in Christ, that Redeemer had to be divine. So Jesus, the sinless human being, our kinsmen Redeemer, was also divine and he alone can save us. As C.S. Lewis said, "The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start." Everything we read in the old Testament, it all points to Jesus Christ. The greatest redeemer doesn't save himself. He save others. The greatest redeemer doesn't just pay money to save. He gives the greatest thing he has himself, which is his life. Jesus is greater than Boaz. Jesus Christ is our kinsmen redeemer through the incarnation because he became one of us. Jesus paid with a sinless life to redeem our sinful life. Jesus isn't forced or obligated to do it. He willingly laid down his life out of love just like Boaz out of love redeems Ruth.Ruth says and does nothing in this redemption process. Redemption to her was a gift and she lovingly, willingly accepted it. Would you today accept the gift of grace, the gift of redemption? You do that with a quick prayer or a long prayer. Just pray. Just talk to God. God, I am a sinner. I've fallen short of your standards. I've committed sins of omission and commission. God, I haven't loved you with my whole heart, soul, strength and mind. I haven't loved neighbor as my self. Lord, forgive me. Lord, redeem me, and Lord, I want to be in a loving relationship with you. Romans 3:24. "And are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." Redemption is only in him. It's a gift. Receive that gift today. And if you do, would you let us know? Would you follow up via the connection card? We'd love to connect with you. We'd love to help you take the next steps of following Christ as Lord and savior.Last, Bible trivia. Question for the chicken wing. We see Boaz, we see Ruth, we see the elders. What was the first ... the guy who was first in line to redeem Ruth and Naomi. What was his name? Type in the comments section. He doesn't have a name. He's called friend and he's called redeemer. His only lines are verse four, "I will redeem it." Verse six, "I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I impair my own inheritance." And verse eight, "Buy it for yourself." The guy who is so focused on himself, the guy who was so focused on his life now, the guy who was so focused on the short-term loses eternal impact, misses out on the blessing of becoming an ancestor of Jesus Christ. He wanted to keep his name, keep his line, keep his legacy, and his name isn't even mentioned in the book.But you know whose name is mentioned? Ruth, because Ruth was willing to give up her name, give up her legacy, give everything up, deny herself and follow Christ, follow God, and she becomes an ancestor to the one who has a name above all names; Jesus Christ. Do you want your name to be remembered? Connect your name to his. Become a Christian and live for him. Weave your story in with his and he'll make your story as good, if not better, as the story of Ruth. What a story this was. We're so thankful for it. I can't wait to be in heaven. I can't wait to meet Ruth. I can't wait to meet Boaz. What a couple. What a story, pointing to the greatest story. Ruth in this story celebrates Mother's Day with the birth of a baby. Naomi celebrates Mother's Day by becoming a grandmother, so happy Mother's Day, everyone. God bless you, praying for you, love you. Let's pray.Heavenly father, we're so thankful for this book. What a rich book it is. What a blessing it's been to our souls, to our community. I pray, Lord, help us follow Christ our redeemer with more vigor, with more passion, with more zeal, knowing that the decisions we make to follow Christ have an impact not just in our lives, not just in the lives of our families, not just in the lives of our community, but they have an eternal impact. Make us godly people who follow Christ who are saved by grace through faith, make us men like Boaz and women like Ruth. Make us more like Christ, the ultimate Redeemer, in whose name we pray. Amen.

Water Wow A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC March 15, 2020, third Sunday of Lent. “How Can You Believe This?” series. Text: John 4:5-42 Today we are drawn to a well in the rough, dry, mountainous lands between Judea and Galilee. It is an ancient well, Jacob’s well, and—like all fresh water sources in that region—the well is a source of life. At this strange moment in our common life with the whole world grappling with how to test for, treat, and contain the Novel Covid-19 Corona virus, we are not only in a religious wilderness place—the season of Lent—but also in a wilderness place of increasing isolation and concern for the wellbeing of ourselves and our neighbors, especially the most vulnerable. We are journeying into uncharted territory that is riddled with questions and complications. We may be cut off from some resources that, in other difficult or uncertain situations, would be our “go-to” things or people—church gatherings, sporting events, our local restaurant or pub. Many will be increasingly struggling to make ends meet as gigs and conferences are canceled, hours cut, patrons diminished, shows closed, contracts canceled, and on it goes. Those who already suffer from anxiety and those who daily fight for sobriety may be drawn toward the edge. The avalanche of human struggle and strife that is possible—and some of it already realized—surrounds us as we journey into this new wilderness place.  And let’s take just a moment to acknowledge what has led us place: a microscopic particle—that’s what a virus is. Consider for a moment the fact that a microscopic particle has the capacity to take down all the things we assign so much power to, all the things upon which we with any privilege are tempted to rely:  the markets, our own control, the ability to go where we want, when we want, our capacity to buy what we need when we need or want it. This microscopic particle has underscored human hubris in a variety of ways, and is reminding all the world of the truth many live daily: life is fragile and our health and wholeness is never to be taken for granted. The microscopic particle, this virus, doesn’t have any prejudice against the rich and powerful or disenfranchised and impoverished—and so is a great equalizer. The thing that is not equal in our nation and world is access to information and care. That, too, is a truth upon which this outbreak shines a light. It is humbling and disorienting to realize just how much damage can be done by so small a thing. It reminds us of our own smallness and vulnerability. And today, our spiritual path leads us through the wilderness to this ancient well, a source of sustenance and life. We’re not the first to travel this way or to need the life that the well provides. In our story today, Jesus—on his journey north from Judea to Galilee—is the first to acknowledge that he needs a drink of water from the well. And in asking for what he needs, Jesus does an astonishing thing: he engages in conversation with a Samaritan woman. These two—a Jewish Rabbi and a Samaritan woman—were part of groups who had been practicing a kind of “social distancing” for a long time. Their distancing was not to guard against harm of neighbor, however, as is our practice today. Their distancing was out of prejudice and even deep hatred. Jews thought that Samaritans were unfaithful because they had—in the time of the Assyrian incursion—worshipped the false gods of the five foreign tribes. You can read the background on this in 2 Kings 17:13-34. It’s pretty clear in the theological histories of Kings and Chronicles that all of God’s people were pretty much equal opportunity idolaters; and the Samaritans had long been guided by Torah and worshiped YHWH. But this religious and racial prejudice was solidified early on and, for ages, Jews and Samaritans avoided each other like the plague. The need for water, for sustenance, drew these two together. And Jesus, thirsty from his journey, begins by asking the woman for a drink. The woman has what he needs—a bucket—to quench his thirst. In her response to Jesus, the woman focuses on things that normally would divide them, the gender rules, the cultural and purity rules, differing religious practices, and such. She is clearly educated and aware of all the reasons why Jesus should ignore or despise her. But he doesn’t do that. Jesus engages in meaningful conversation with her and truly sees and knows her. In fact this is one of the longest, most lively theological conversations Jesus has with anyone in the Bible. This unnamed Samaritan woman has often been characterized as (surprise!) a terrible sinner—most likely a prostitute—though nothing in the story necessarily suggests that interpretation. In John’s symbolic storytelling style, the woman is likely a metaphor for the Samaritans as a whole and her five husbands represent the five foreign, false gods named in 2 Kings. A cultural reading of the narrative highlights the fact that “Jesus at no point invites repentance or, for that matter, speaks of sin at all. She very easily could have been widowed or have been abandoned or divorced (which in the ancient world was pretty much the same thing for a women). Five times would be heartbreaking, but not impossible. Further, she could now be living with someone that she was dependent on, or be in what’s called a Levirate marriage (where a childless woman is married to her deceased husband’s brother in order to produce an heir yet is not always technically considered the brother’s wife.) There are any number of ways, in fact, that one might imagine this woman’s story as tragic rather than scandalous.” We don’t know what circumstances led to her situation, but we do know that she has been through a lot and is vulnerable. She’s a woman in a time where women weren’t valued as equal citizens, a member of a despised race, potentially housing insecure, and possibly shunned by other women since she comes to the well alone in the heat of the day instead of with other women in the morning or evening. She comes to the well thirsty, too, but I imagine for something other than the water that was her job to fetch. Perhaps she was thirsty for a different kind of life, a life less complicated and difficult and vulnerable and isolated. I wonder if her exclamation “Come and see a man who has told me everything I have ever done!” was partly astonishment that someone had finally acknowledged her and seen her as a human being with a brain and heart, a person of sacred worth and dignity. This encounter inspires the woman to be the first person in John’s Gospel to invite others to “come and see” the gift of life and love and care—the living water—that Jesus offers.  There’s a lot going on in this story for sure. But today I just keep coming back to this well, this lifeline that brings unlikely folks together, that provides opportunities for new connection and insight, that reminds us of the needs and vulnerabilities we all share, that continues to gush up with fresh water even today. I was at this well in January and brought some water home… And I was thinking about the landscape in those parts and how vulnerable I would feel were I to journey on foot for any length of time there.  In the wilderness and unknown places we become hyper aware of our needs and vulnerabilities. Where will we find what we need to survive, to be safe, to make it to the other side? In this present wilderness, things get pretty basic—people are stocking up on what? Toilet tissue and water! Pretty elemental stuff. And truly, what is more elemental than water? Months ago as I was first contemplating this text for this series, I discovered a children’s coloring book called “Water Wow.” This coloring book comes with a “pen” that you fill with water. The water magically brings out the colors on the page. What a beautiful metaphor: water brings things to life, brings vitality and color. // I imagine we all know that water is THE thing that keeps our bodies alive. We can fast from food a long time but water is essential. And Jesus says in our Gospel that there’s “living water” that, once received, becomes a spring within us that “gushes up” to eternal life. What is this living water? It might be described as the grace, steadfast presence, and liberating love of God. In the wilderness, we need sustenance for both body and soul. We need water to hydrate, fuel, and cleanse our bodies and “living water”—God’s indwelling presence—to nourish and sustain our spirits.  In the face of all this, I must say it has been one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in my 25 years of ministry to NOT be physically ingathering our community in worship on this day. Not only did we have to postpone our special music and reception of 17 new family members here at Foundry—including two adult Baptisms—but it also goes against every pastoral bone in my body. Because in moments of anxiety and uncertainty, it is a grounding thing to be in the same space with other people in worship and prayer and song and community, to be reminded—concretely—that we aren’t alone. In a society that is already so often plagued with disconnection and isolation, this forced practice of distancing seems deeply counterintuitive. But we are reminded that there is not one place or one way to connect with one another and with God. Jesus and the Samaritan woman had that debate thousands of years ago—we don’t have to worship on that mountain or that city or in this building. It’s about the more profound connection that flows within and among us through the power of Spirit. I say often that we are connected in God’s love  even when we are far apart—that those who livestream our worship are connected to us in this space. This is an opportunity for us to all remember and celebrate that beautiful gift. We also know that this way of connecting is the way right now to live our mission to love each other, to love our neighbor, because it cares for the health of one anothers’ bodies. Today we gather at the well. A well that is far away in another land, a well whose waters are present in my hand, a well that represents in our story the ever-flowing grace and mercy of God. Jesus meets us at this well. I don’t know all the circumstances of your life or how you are holding this present moment or how you came to be where you are today. But the Gospel suggests that Jesus does. Jesus sees you, knows what you are going through, what you are feeling today, what you’re thirsting for. Jesus also knows how God’s liberating, reconciling love will set you free to live with greater courage, peace, hope and joy. Jesus knows God’s indwelling presence will sustain you through the wilderness. Jesus sees your dignity and your worth and the difference you can make in the lives of others. This living water is available for you…  Having received it, the invitation is to follow the lead of the Samaritan woman and to offer others water that nourishes both body and soul, to offer physical sustenance to those who need it and to invite others to drink from the well of God’s steadfast mercy and love. Draw from the wellspring of your kindness and generosity and get groceries for folks who can’t get out, reach out to folks who may be feeling anxious or overwhelmed as they try to telework and care for kids who aren’t in school. Organize an online small group or prayer group. Be intentional about calling those in your pew neighborhood who may not have online technology to be connected in this way. Stay close to your sponsor or sponsee. If you happen to go to a restaurant, tip big. If you have the means, give alms to the service agencies who will be even more stretched than usual. Say thank you. Be mindful of the many ways that this wilderness moment is making vulnerable people even more vulnerable.   Today, Spirit has led us in the wilderness to a well and we are blessed to gather at the water, the wellspring of love and grace that nourishes and reconciles and connects and sustains vitality and the beautiful colors of life together. Wow. Thanks be to God. https://foundryumc.org/

In this episode we continue our study in the fascinating book of Ruth, learning a bit more of the back story and some of the motivation of why Orpah and Ruth might have wanted to accompany Naomi back to Bethlehem.

The book of Ruth ties together and applies some of the key societal structures of the Israelites, such as the Laws of Gleaning, Redemption and Levirate marriage, and the pivotal concept of the "Kinsman Redeemer". Also, it is considered the ultimate love story, as the main characters of Ruth and Boaz display and effectively define pure, selfless devotion, loyalty and honor. Most importantly, it is the main book in the Old Testament that outlines the key concept and function of the church as the bride of Jesus Christ in the New Testament age. The history of Ruth and Boaz can be applied as a fore type of the love and self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ as provider, redeemer and loving husband to the church. The New Testament church is considered the specially chosen bride - the "Eve" to Jesus' position as the coming "Second Adam". Where the first Adam and Eve failed and gave up their reign of the earth to Satan, the Second Adam comes to redeem what they lost. The second Adam and Eve are destined to reign as King and queen during the coming 1,000-year Millennium on earth and the entire creation in eternity thereafter. Please join us as we begin our study of the richness of the book of Ruth. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/biblestudyweekly/message

In Deuteronomy 25, Moses commanded that if a man dies childless, his brother should marry the widow and that “the first son whom she bears shall succeed to the name of his dead brother, that his name may not be blotted out of Israel.” The practice, called “Levirate marriage” was the backdrop for the Sadducees' trick question for Jesus about the woman who married the seven brothers (Matthew 22). If the surviving brother refused to fulfill his duty and marry the widow, she had options. One was to pull off the deadbeat brother's sandal, spit in his face, and say, “So shall it be done to the man who does not build up his brother's house.” Another possibility was for another kinsman to volunteer to marry the widow. In that case, the sandal would still be removed but would be handed to the willing kinsman without any spitting or cursing. This is what happened with Boaz and Ruth. Today, Levirate marriage is rarely if ever practiced, even among the most traditional Jews. Instead, an increasing number of Israelis have found a new way to achieve the goal of Moses' command. As described in a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, all Israeli women under the age of 45 have a right to IVF treatments for up to two children. Now, IVF, as we've discussed a few times on BreakPoint, is a procedure laden with ethical challenges, at least from a Christian perspective. Even so, the Jewish state has added a new ethical dilemma by fully subsidizing IVF “procedures using genetic material from deceased spouses.” That is, retrieving sperm from a deceased husband, and using IVF to create and implant an embryo. If the idea of creating a child from a deceased husband sounds strange, hold on. It gets even stranger: this procedure isn't limited to widows. As the Atlantic tells readers, Israel is learning that the parents of deceased childless sons are increasingly looking to reproductive technology to provide them with a posthumously-conceived grandchild. The article tells of an unmarried woman whose “biological clock” is ticking more loudly. She wants to have a child using IVF but is concerned about that child not knowing its father's family. Her “problem” is “solved” when she comes across a grieving family looking for a woman to bear their dead son's child. To make a long story short, the procedure I described earlier worked, and a child was born from a dead biological dad, but with two sets of grandparents. And everyone lived happily ever after… Or did they? We're talking here of the phenomenon of “ghost dads,” and it raises a host of ethical questions. First and foremost is that the child is not the fruit of a union whose purpose was to produce her. Instead, she was conceived to meet someone's else's emotional needs. As a social worker at Hebrew University asked: “Is it ethical to create a child as ‘the means for fulfilling the wishes of an adult, in any way possible, and at any cost?'” Another expert quoted in the article raised questions about the impact of what he called “planned orphanhood.” We have no idea how a child “will feel knowing that he is not an individual, but a copy of someone else . . . a ‘living monument to the dead.'” By the way, the “ghost dad” phenomenon isn't limited to Israel. While some European countries explicitly forbid it, the United States doesn't. What's more, the rates of children reproduced posthumously vary from state to state, furthering reinforcing their status as means rather than ends. Even though, as I mentioned recently, Israel treasures children in ways that few nations do, you can't say the same of the U.S. Too often here, “having kids is something you get around to” and the thing we worry most about is having the freedom to live as we please. If kids get in the way, we eliminate them. If they serve our purposes, we accept them. We might even use our technologies to make them. Either way, in any country and everywhere, it's wrong. The point of having children should never be us. It should be them. Resources Grieving Parents Are Turning to Posthumous IVF Shira Rubin, The Atlantic Monthly, February 27, 2019 Resources Grieving Parents Are Turning to Posthumous IVF Shira Rubin, The Atlantic Monthly, February 27, 2019

The post IBL: Law of the Levirate appeared first on Rushdoony Radio.

[paypal-donation] We started this conversation by talking about the paternity of Josephine Lyon.  It turns out that Dr. Ugo Perego is also testing other potential children of Joseph Smith.  We'll talk about the historical relationship between Joseph Smith, Orson Hyde, and Marinda Johnson, as well as Parley Pratt and Mary Ann Frost.  What are the results of the Joseph-Parley paternity test? Ugo:  Mary Ann Frost was the second wife of Parley P. Pratt. He was born December 1844, Moroni Pratt, which placed him 9 months within the death of Joseph Smith.  Mary Ann Frost was sealed to Joseph Smith, was never sealed to Parley.  In fact Mary Ann Frost is recorded as one of the first females, if not the first group that received the temple ordinances in the Red Brick Store.  She was there when Joseph Smith introduced the first temple endowment.  Eventually she was sealed to Joseph and children were born.  The first one, Moroni was linked to Joseph Smith as a possibility.  I think Fawn Brodie mentions that as a possibility in her book. ... I found a document while I was researching this when I was doing this project that had Parley P. Pratt's statement that every child he would have with Mary Ann would be Joseph's in the eternity.  Are you with me?  So every child he would have with Mary Ann Frost would have been Joseph's in the eternity.  It sounds to me very much like the Levirate marriage where the man dies, his wife is still alive, we're talking about spiritual wife here because we are talking about celestial marriage, the next of kin, which would be brother Pratt to Joseph, spiritually is raising a posterity in eternity for Joseph. GT:  Hmmm. That is very interesting interpretation. Ugo:  That's what he said.  That's what Parley said.  It's not my words. GT:  Parley said that? Ugo:  Parley said that. GT:  So let me make sure I'm clear on the thing.  So you said that Frost, what was her first name? Ugo:  Mary Ann Frost. GT:  Mary Ann Frost was sealed to Joseph but that was after… Ugo interrupts:  but married to Parley. GT:  Was she married to Parley before she was sealed to Joseph? Ugo:  Yes. GT:  That just seems so strange. Ugo:  She was married to Parley for time, but to Joseph for eternity. GT:  See I think most people would be so surprised to hear that they would have a polygamist marriage that would be not for eternity.  I mean when you read D&C 132, that's what it seems like and so it seems so strange. Ugo:  We still don't know a lot of things about it.  If you are very negative about the whole thing, you're always going to look for the dirtiest reasons why there were these things:  polyandry, promiscuity, sexual interest, control over women, whatever you want to bring up. But if you are more on the, well let's see.  If they are really trying to establish some celestial order on the earth; Who are we?  We are all children of Heavenly Father.  It doesn't matter how we are connected as long as we are connected to him at the end, right Ugo also makes some interesting points regarding potentially polyandrous relationships. Ugo:  We have to wonder, what was the nature of a woman being alive and having some certain documented tie, a union, or marriage to more than one man?  We are trying to speculate and guess what was the nature and the practice and the environment and the sexuality that surrounded this union.  Was it the same?  Was it different from husband to another husband?  We are left with wondering on this issue. Besides, the fact that we don't have children of Joseph Smith from polygamous relationships does not tell us anything about his sexual interactions with this woman.  We all know that you don't have a child every time you have intercourse.  But it does bring up some interesting alternative answers when you see that there are absolutely no children.  Brigham Young had no problem having children with all his wives, or Joseph F. Smith, or anyone else,

We are still on our Journey through the bible and on week 8 with the book of Ruth. Pastor Josh talks about Ruth.During the time of the Judges when there was a famine, an Israelite family from Bethlehem – Elimelech, his wifeNaomi, and their sons Mahlon and Chilion – emigrated to the nearby country of Moab. Elimelech died, and the sons married two Moabite women: Mahlon married Ruthand Chilion married Orpah. After about ten years, the two sons of Naomi also died in Moab (1:4). Naomi decided to return to Bethlehem. She told her daughters-in-law to return to their own mothers and remarry. Orpah reluctantly left; however, Ruth said, "Intreat me not to leave thee, [or] to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people [shall be] my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, [if aught] but death part thee and me." (Ruth 1:16–17 KJV) The two women returned to Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest, and in order to support her mother-in-law and herself, Ruth went to the fields to glean. As it happened, the field she went to belonged to a man named Boaz, who was kind to her because he had heard of her loyalty to her mother-in-law. Ruth told Naomi of Boaz's kindness, and she gleaned in his field through the remainder of barley and wheat harvest. Boaz was a close relative of Naomi's husband's family. He was therefore obliged by the Levirate law to marry Mahlon's widow, Ruth, in order to carry on his family's inheritance. Naomi sent Ruth to the threshing floor at night and told her to go where he slept, and "uncover his feet, and lay thee down; and he will tell thee what thou shalt do." (3:4) Ruth did so. At midnight Boaz was afraid and turned to see that a woman lay at his feet. When asked who she was, she replied: "I [am] Ruth thine handmaid: spread therefore thy skirt over thine handmaid; for thou [art] a near kinsman." (3:9) Boaz blessed her and agreed to do all that is required, and he noted that, "all the city of my people doth know that thou [art] a virtuous woman." (3:11) He then acknowledged that he was a close relative, but that there was one who was closer, so he deferred to spread his cloak over her at that time, and she remained in submission at his feet until she returned into the city in the morning. Early that day, Boaz discussed the issue with the other male relative, Ploni Almoni ("so-and-so"), before the town elders. The other male relative was unwilling to jeopardize the inheritance of his own estate by marrying Ruth, and so relinquished his right of redemption, thus allowing Boaz to marry Ruth. They transferred the property and redeemed it by the nearer kinsman taking off his shoe and handing it over to Boaz. (Ruth 4:7–18) Boaz and Ruth were married and had a son named Obed: who is "the father of Jesse, the father of David." (4:13–17)

Welcome to the Daily Daf Differently. In this episode, Miri Fenton looks at Masechet Yevamot Daf 10. This daf is in the middle of a long sugiyah that deals with halachic limit cases of Levirate marriage. Reading a mahloket between Reish Lakish and Rabbi Yochanan illuminates some of the legal problems and potential solutions around […]

An audio recording of chapter 31 of James E. Talmage's classic work, Jesus the Christ. Read by Bradley Ross. Music from Lara St. John, used by permission via Magnatune.com. The original text of this item, including footnotes and endnotes, is available from Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22542/22542-h/22542-h.htm#chapter_31Pharisees and Herodians in conspiracy.—Cæsar to have his due.—The image on the coin.—Sadducees and the resurrection.—Levirate marriages.—The great commandment.—Jesus turns questioner.—Scathing denunciation of scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!—Lamentation over Jerusalem.—The widow's mites.—Christ's final withdrawal from temple.—Destruction of temple predicted

INTRODUCTION The story of Ruth isn't fairy tale tucked away in a corner of the OT. Though there's high drama, disaster, intrigue, even romance, this episode is more than just thrilling narrative. Rather, it's an anticipation of the redemption of all things in the coming of the promised Seed. The literature is delightful, the story is thrilling, but the providence & purpose behind it all is glorious beyond compare. THE TEXT “Now it came to pass in the days when the judges ruled, that there was a famine in the land. And a certain man of Bethlehemjudah went to sojourn in the country of Moab, he, and his wife, and his two sons. And the name of the man was Elimelech, and the name of his wife Naomi, and the name of his two sons Mahlon and Chilion, Ephrathites of Bethlehemjudah. And they came into the country of Moab, and continued there. And Elimelech Naomi's husband died; and she was left, and her two sons. And they took them wives of the women of Moab; the name of the one was Orpah, and the name of the other Ruth: and they dwelled there about ten years. And Mahlon and Chilion died also both of them; and the woman was left of her two sons and her husband…” (Ruth 1:1-22). SUMMARY OF THE TEXT During the wild-west days of Israel, when the judges judged, a famine came upon Israel (Cf. Jdg. 6:3-4) and the severity compelled Elimelech to resort to sojourning in the fields of Moab, along with his wife, Naomi, and his two aptly named sons Mahlon & Chilion (vv1-2). Then the hard times got harder when Elimelech died. Though Naomi's hope arose through the marriage of her two sons to Moabitess women (Ruth & Orpah), it was soon dashed to pieces by the tragic death of the sons before they'd brought forth any sons themselves (vv3-5). Rumor of returned abundance upon the Lord's people reached Naomi, so she set out to return to Bethlehem, accompanied by her daughters-in-law (vv6-7). She gives them her blessing to depart without any obligation to her (vv8-9); initially, they both refuse (v10). She reasons a second time with them, remonstrating with them that she has no hope of providing them husbands, in satisfaction of the Levirate law (Cf. Deu. 25:5); this demonstrates–not for the last time–her godliness & piety (vv11-13). Ruth & Orpah are clearly affected by her speech, but whereas Orpah is compelled to return home, Ruth clings the closer to Naomi (v14). Naomi tries a third time to persuade Ruth (v15); but Ruth wonderfully avows her steadfast resolve to remain united to both the people & God of Naomi (vv16-17). Seeing Ruth's resolve, Naomi ends the debate; they come at last to Bethlehem, causing a great hubbub amongst the Bethlehemites (vv18-19). Naomi insists on being renamed “Mara” to reflect the afflictions which the Lord's hand had brought upon her (v20-21). Like any good story, a clue is given to us by informing us that the return to Bethlehem took place at a specific season of the year: the barley harvest (v22). SETTING THE STAGE The initial crisis of this story is striking: a breadless house of bread. It's likely that this famine came about during Gideon's time, when the Midianites had brought ruin upon the fields of Israel. This tale (likely written by Samuel) is intended as an origin story for the house of David. That being the case, admitting to his “tainted” ancestry seems problematic. But the story “leans into” this controversy. In the end we see that God always intended the arc of Israelite history result in gathering in the Gentiles into the harvest of Redemption. Moabites were descended from the incestuous union of Lot and his eldest daughter (Gen 19:37). Moses had warned against marrying “strange women” (Ex. 34:16); Solomon, later on, repeatedly warns his sons against being enticed by the “strange woman” (Pr. 2:16, 7:5). Balaam had prophesied that a scepter would arise from Israel, destroying Moab (Num. 24:17); he then concocted the scheme to seduce Israel into whoredom; this led to Phinehas' heroic act (Num. 25:7-8). Moses died in the realm of Moab (Deu. 34:5). Moab had repeatedly persecuted Israel in the days of the judges, most famously by the tyranny of the enormous Eglon (Jdg. 3). In other words, by every token, we should be suspicious of Ruth. THE BREADLESS HOUSE OF BREAD Naomi had fled the breadless House of Bread full (of offspring); but now the House of Bread was full of bread once more while she had been emptied. She is barren, and is accompanied by a barren, but loyal, daughter-in-law. The hope of having their inheritance in Israel preserved hangs by a thread. Namoi could have resentfully claimed that the deuteronomic blessing rang hollow: “And your threshing shall reach unto the vintage, and the vintage shall reach unto the sowing time: and ye shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your land safely. And ye shall eat old store, and bring forth the old because of the new. […] The LORD shall command the blessing upon thee in thy storehouses, and in all that thou settest thine hand unto; and he shall bless thee in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee (Lev. 26:5,10; Deu. 28:8).” Yet we find her devoutly explaining the Law to her daughters-in-law (Deu. 25:5). In the depths of bitter suffering, she endures without becoming bitter. Her three debates with Ruth & Orpah aren't marked by the briny waters of self-pity. Her return to Bethlehem is a return of hope that the Lord who'd brought the judgement of famine upon His people, had now visited them with abundance. It was this hope which Ruth, by Naomi's faithful witness, wished to join herself. Even in Ruth's famous lines, we see a depth of understanding of Israelite law which can only be attributed to Naomi. Indeed, Naomi embodies the lines of that wonderful hymn: Though vine nor fig tree neither their yearly fruit should bear, though all the fields should wither, nor flocks nor herds be there, yet God, the same abiding, His praise shall tune my voice, for while in Him confiding I cannot but rejoice. WE DON'T NAME OURSELVES One of the ironic features of this story is Naomi's attempt to rename herself. She tasted the bitter cup which providence had sent her, and she thought she knew the ending of the story. But the Storyteller refuses to go along with her renaming. Despite telling everyone to call her Mara (bitterness), we get no indication that the Bethlehemites complied, and the narrative certainly doesn't. Naomi, in her just complaint, is learning the lesson which every saint must learn, to hope in God's goodness, even when confronted with the most bitter trial. This is the same truth which Naomi's descendant David would one day wonderfully compose in the 42nd Psalm. Why are you downcast? Hope in God. We don't know the end of the matter. Thus we must trust ourselves to the One who shall give to His redeemed a new name (Cf. Rev. 2:17). FORSAKING FOREIGN GODS The most poignant moment in this first act of the story is when Ruth avows her loyalty to the laws of Moses, the people of Israel, and, above all, Jehovah God. This is true faith. In Ruth, through Naomi's witness of suffering through famine, exile, the valley of the shadow of death, and the pain of barrenness, we see that true faith looks not to circumstance but to the promise. Though there are many practical lessons to glean from these characters, and their example is worthy of emulation, the golden thread is found in Ruth's confession of faith. Redemption is of God. The foreign gods are impotent. They won't raise up a promised Seed. Out of Jacob shall the scepter rise, a promised Seed springing up to bring deliverance from all evil. The barley harvest has come, even for the barren woman.