Clough Genesis Lesson 84

Judah’s autonomy – Genesis 38:1-11

A few Sundays back we said that one of the things we’ve been trying to do is to show you that these stories we’ve been studied in Genesis are not something borrowed from the Sunday School, they are something that was deeply embedded in one time in western culture, and therefore there were at that time men who were great artists who drew their paintings from these stories. I showed you a painting by Rembrandt done of Jacob wrestling with the angel. Some of our art students have prepared another example of this; this time it’s a painting by Murillo, who lived from 1618-1682 and this is the throwing of Joseph into the cistern and the girl who prepared this points out in her commentary: “Many times artists of the Reformation and Counter Reformation are grouped in the baroque era. It is this writer’s opinion that this is valid in terms of technical considerations, yet in terms of meaning it is impossible not to make a distinction. Murillo, probably a Spanish Catholic, would therefore have to be classified as a Counter Reformation artist.”

And for those of you not acquainted with the terms, what this means is that after the Protestant Reformation the Roman Catholic Church became so concerned with the tremendous rupture throughout Europe of people defecting from the church that they decided they were going to conduct an all-out campaign to stop Protestantism. And that all-out campaign was called the Counter Reformation and they pulled out every stop they could to try to eliminate the threat of Protestantism from Europe, and when she says this is a Counter Reformation artist, this is a man painting Christian culture through the eyes of the Roman Catholics, who are reacting against the Protestant preaching of the gospel. And to show you, part of my purpose of doing this is to show you if you haven’t been clued before, that doctrine influences artistic expression. As much as we’ve said it, here’s a clear cut illustration.

“It is interesting to note that parallel to our present day church conditions, the Counter Reformation artist in this painting has made an appeal to the viewer through emotions rather than through scriptural dogma. Notice the depiction of Joseph’s age as a young child instead of the biblical account of 17. We tend to react sympathetically for the young boy’s abuse rather than viewing it as a divinely manipulated event to train a young man to be a powerful ruler. We also know that the cistern was located in the plain region, the Dothan, yet Murillo has intentionally placed powerful turbulent waters in the background to bring about an emotional response to accent the turbulence of the situation. As discussed earlier, Murillo emphasizes figures, gestures and facial expressions by technical devices which maintain continuity in the artist’s captivating methods.” This will be on display down in the front after the service. I hope those of you who are interested in this will take advantage of it and begin to think through the fact that nothing is neutral, either any artistic expression, whether it’s in art proper or whether it’s in music is going to express the scriptural view of life or the anti-scriptural view of life. There is no middle ground; people think there’s a middle ground, there is no middle ground. If we had time I could show you that you cannot add 2 and 2 and get 4 without presupposing something for the Bible or against the Bible. Even arithmetic is not philosophically neutral.

This morning we’re going to go to Genesis 38 and we’re continuing our study of this section of the book of Genesis. As we said, from Genesis 37 all the way to Genesis 50 we have this large expanse of the text. And this expanse of the text we’ve called the generations of Jacob. The author himself calls it this in Genesis 37:2. This is the major theme for all of these chapters; so you don’t lose the forest for the trees we’re going to go from story to story and different person to different person, and you want to keep track of the main theme. The main theme during this time of history is that God has picked out one family and He is going to work with that one family, so to speak, breeding up a generation that will be the nucleus of the Old Testament kingdom of God, that is, the nation Israel. And the importance for us as Bible-believing Christian is the fact that this shows how God works. He works basically through families, not through states and nations. Now He works through states and nations but the preferred sequence of action is through the family first. Now you can’t have a better argument than the whole book of Genesis giving the basis for the Old Testament kingdom is not about a kingdom, it is not about a nation, it is about a family. And from chapter to chapter in this there’ll be minor variations in the theme; different characters are involved, but always the work with the family.

Today, in 20^th century America, because of tremendous impact of political liberalism, the emphasis is on the state. In fact, in our day the state has become the messiah that saves; the state is the state which dispenses blessing from whom all blessings flow with a song at one time devoted to God, to our own generation devoted to the state. This entire propaganda of liberalism, against which we have to take our position as Bible-believing Christians is just that; it’s propaganda; it’s not well thought out, it’s just the intelligentsia that have been in control of the media for so long think this way and they want everybody else to think this way, including you. This was brought out recently by an address by Malcolm Muggeridge who was the famous English writer, journalist, playwright and editor. Mr. Muggeridge recently became a Christian but before he became a Christian he was involved in the hotbed of British liberalism. In fact, he married the niece of Beatrice and Sydney Webb, the Fabian socialists of England. And so he qualifies intellectually and by lineage to be the basic heart of western intellectual liberalism and he gave an address last month at Hillsdale College in Michigan in which he spoke of several items in his career, one of which was the first time as a writer for the Manchester Guardian, he had an interesting assignment. I read you this section of his report to show you how this propaganda gets started in the media that you listen to. Here is a brilliant man; the man isn’t going to do what I’m going to tell you he’s doing because he’s stupid; he’s doing it, not because he’s stupid, not because he’s an inept writer, Muggeridge is an exceptionally talented writer. He’s doing it because this is the way liberalism feeds on itself.

He says (quote): “I remember my first day as a writer for the Manchester Guardian. Somehow that day symbolizes my whole experience. I was asked to write a leader, a short leader, about 120 words, on corporeal punishment. Some headmaster’s conference, it seemed, words had been spoken about corporeal punishment and I was to produce the appropriate comment for the Guardian. So I put my head in the room next to mine and asked the man who was working there, hey, what’s our line on corporeal punishment. Without looking up from his typewriter he replied, oh that’s the same as capital punishment only more so. So I knew exactly what to tap out on my typewriter. That was how I got into the shocking habit of pontificating about what was going on in the world, weighty pronouncements tapped out on a typewriter deriving from nowhere and for all one knew concerning no one.” (end quote) Now that is the head, that’s kind of like the New York Times in England, so if that’s true of their fountainhead what of the lesser papers, that we wonder how stories get started.

So if the Christian is to take his position over against this liberalism and over against this propaganda, typed out by inane typewriters, then what are we going to do when we come to taking our base; where do we operate from. Genesis 37-50 gives you a tremendous amount of Scripture showing you the justification for starting with the family. For those of you interested in this practically I draw your emphasis to the announcement in the bulletin for fathers, if you want to conduct the dinner reading program we designed for you to just help you get started working with your family on a once a week basis, please make sure you order your character sketches volume this week because it will be too late if you wait any longer.

We’ve looked at these stories and we’ve looked at Genesis 37, let’s review for a moment what we saw there so we’ll be prepared for Genesis 38. We looked at Joseph, symbolizing Joseph here as the so-called victim of external pressure, we see a great Bible truth about life; that God uses His providence to shape people’s character. Now in the recitation on the Heidelberg catechisms, one of those questions was about what do you think providence is? Well providence is the sovereignty of God applied to circumstances.

Let’s think of some of the circumstances of Joseph. He had an unwise father. Jacob was not hitting on all cylinders when he was working with his son, Joseph. Remember what that developed? It developed partiality in the home, as a result of partiality in the home he had hate brothers. When siblings fight and it gets so bad as to try to murder one another you tend to believe that you’ve got a few problems. So he also had an unwise father and he had hateful brothers. Remember Joseph delayed, how the Hebrew text emphasize he leaves the area around Hebron, he goes north, he hits Shechem, he can’t find his brothers, he wanders around, the Hebrew uses a participle mood there, and so it’s a mood of motion, he finds one man who happened to be there when his brothers said they were going to Dothan, he goes up to Dothan, he arrived there just in time when a caravan of Ishmaelites just happened to be going by on the way to Egypt where God wants Joseph. So all these delays, while very frustrating to Joseph, actually, under the providence of God are a blessing to him. And then we find out the boy had tremendous talent. Joseph was a genius and he later showed his genius in history as designing one of the most all-encompassing bureaucracies the history of man has every seen and that was the bureaucracy that ran the old kingdom of Egypt. In fact, I suspect if we make certain adjustments in the chronological dating of Egypt, I suspect it could be shown that Joseph probably was the architect of the construction program through the great pyramids. So that being so you can see the man was a genius.

But the problem that the Bible presents us with is a problem we face in our lives and that is if we’re to summarize Joseph we are to summarize him as a brilliant brat. At 17 he ran at the mouth more than he ran in between his ears and the result is he irritated everyone around him. Now God is going to work in Joseph’s life but the way He’s going to work in Joseph’s life is not destroy the boy; he’s not going to destroy his talent, there’s no breaking of Joseph. There’s a breaking of his prideful spirit but there’s not a breaking of his talent. And so God is going to work to maintain his brilliance and get rid of this bratiness that he has in his character.

So now we come to Genesis 38, and when you begin to read it, it looks like you’re in a whole other world because Genesis 38 doesn’t seem to have any continuity whatsoever with the Joseph story. If you skip ahead to Genesis 39 you suddenly discover Genesis 39 is right back with Joseph again and the text stays with Joseph, all the way up through chapter 50. So now the question we have to answer this morning is why is Genesis 38 separate. Are we to believe, like Bible critics perhaps, that Genesis 38 is just a convenient short story tacked on to the main narrative, or does the author of Genesis have a reason for designing these stories the way he does. Genesis 38 involves not Joseph but Judah. If you follow in the text as I read the first 11 verses.

Genesis 38:1, “And it came to pass at that time, that Judah went down from his brethren, and turned in to a certain Adullamite, whose name was Hirah. [2] And Judah saw there a daughter of a certain Canaanite, whose name was Shuah; and he took her, and went in unto her. [3] And she conceived, and bare a son; and he called his name Er. [4] And she conceived again, and bare a son; and she called his name Onan.
[5] And she yet again conceived, and bare a son; and called his name Shelah: and he was at Chezib, when she bare him. [6] And Judah took a wife for Er his firstborn, whose name was Tamar. [7] And Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the LORD; and the LORD slew him. [8] And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother’s wife, and marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother. [9] And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother. [10] And the thing which he did displeased the LORD: wherefore he slew him also. [11] Then said Judah to Tamar his daughter in law, Remain a widow at thy father’s house, till Shelah my son be grown: for he said, Lest peradventure he die also, as his brethren did. And Tamar went and dwelt in her father’s house.”

And you say what has this got to do with Joseph? One day we have Joseph in a cistern, going down to Egypt, and now we have this in Genesis 38. Well, Genesis 38 is deliberately put into the text to demonstrate 3 or 4 problems. You’ll notice it’s quite realistic because the Bible, if anything, is realistic. I have very little patience, frankly, with people that say the Bible gives me an idealistic view of life. It does not; it gives me a realistic view of life. Few pastors would dare even comment in the details I’m going to on this particular passage. But the passages of Scriptures are written because life is t his way and it is real then we have got to deal with these kinds of problems.

Now here are some of the problems that Genesis 38 defines and alerts you to. Remember, all during this time the major theme is we must develop the first family in order to have the nation Israel. But we live in a fallen world so Genesis 38 depicts depravity. It shows the state of this family, when left to itself it starts to deteriorate. And particularly the reason why Judah is mentioned and not Joseph is because in the lineage from Adam to Christ, Joseph is not there; Joseph, while a very famous story in the Bible, Joseph actually is not in the line of Christ, Judah is. Christ comes out of Judah; He doesn’t come out of Joseph. And so therefore the Bible doesn’t abandon Judah, even though it talks a lot about Joseph.

Here’s the picture graphically in mind. First you have the generation of Abraham, the generation of Isaac, the generation of Jacob, and then Joseph and his generation, and you can see the downhill slide of that first family. Borrowing terms in physics, this is spiritual entropy. Left to itself the system deteriorates and gets more and more chaotic, and this is the whole doctrine of Genesis 38; it is to show us that God indeed uses sinful people because He can’t get anybody else. Who else is He supposed to use for his program? So don’t get so high and pious when you look down your long spiritual nose at people like Judah; he’s made of the same stuff you are. And so the story is realistic; it simply shows that if anything good is ever to come out of history, our of a depraved fallen human race, it has got to be by God reaching down and dealing with the depravity problems through His grace. And apart from grace there can’t be any bona fide progress. Left to itself the human race craters.

Now the point that is also brought to bear in the minor theme of Genesis 38 involves Judah because Judah must marry and produce a godly seed to be in the line if the Messiah. The irony and there’s a lot of irony in this story and I’ll point it out as we go through it, tremendous irony in this story. Here we have Judah, whom God has selected to be the great-great-great-great- great-great-great-great-great-grandfather of Jesus Christ. Now Judah is going to have to, somehow during his lifetime, produce a seed who will become the great-great-great-great- great-great-great-great-great-grandfather of Jesus Christ.

Now the question: how is God going to work with a man who doesn’t want to produce a godly seed? How is God going to do that? Well, God is going to have very interesting ways and before we’re through with these 11 verses you’re going to see how God works with families in history. Before we go any further I want to show you some of the terrain where this story takes place so you can visualize and realize that these stories are not just made up stories, they happened in a real time, in a real place.

This map is a large section of Israel, just to the west of the Dead Sea. That mountain chain in the ancient times is a major commercial access route; even today it is. There’s a road that runs from Jerusalem, go down the road 5 or 6 miles, there’s Bethlehem; on down the road about 20-25 more miles and there’s Hebron, and travel down the road 20-30 miles and there’s Beersheba. They’re all on the same route, and that’s why in Genesis all these stories involve those cities; the men are traveling up and down that road. It’s the main business route at the time. Today the story concerns this area just south of Jerusalem. We last week left off, Jacob was living around this area of Hebron because that’s where Abraham lived, but the boys had gone up north in the area of the Dothan, near the valley of Jezreel. Today Judah has come on down to this area and actually left Hebron, moved his flocks over to this place, halfway between Hebron and the Dead Sea, at a place called Timnah. Unfortunately the place is lost; archeology today has an idea where it is but I don’t believe they found actually the place of Timnah but it’s over in this area.

Now it says in Genesis 38:1 that he’s meeting a friend from Adullam; Adullam is over here and most of you ought to know Adullam from something else in the Bible; that’s David’s life, because David, when he fled from Saul, where did he go? He hid in a cave at Adullam, and it was in the cave at Adullam that David built up a guerilla force of some 400 men which later became the officer corps for one of the finest armies that Israel ever produced. Those caves look something like this. We’re not talking about a little dog house some place; we’re talking about some very healthy sized areas. These formed the barracks for David’s officer corps for a number of years. It’s from this place, Canaanite at the time, that Judah gets his friend, and he meets his girlfriend and so on, and then later on goes over to Timnah by the end of the story, which looks something like this. This is what the area looks like east of Hebron toward the Dead Sea. This gives you some idea of the terrain for Judah’s sheep ranching business. You have to understand that in the time of Judah that terrain was covered mostly with trees as you see on the far hill in the background trees still there. That should give you an idea of the terrain problem; let’s look at the story.

Verses 1:2 and 2 are to show you the condition of the first family. Remember Genesis is very highly abbreviated stories. The writer is not giving you a lot of details so when he does give you a detail you want to pay attention to it because he’s very sparse (usually) in his style. “And it came to pass at that time, that Judah went down from his brethren,” now he went down because I showed you that cave of Adullam; he went down away from that access route; that’s what that “went down” means. He “went down from his brethren. So we now begin to have geographical separation of the sons of Jacob. You see, what God wants to do is form a unity; He wants a vibrant spiritually mature family, and what’s happening? Already you’ve got a feud going on in the home, you’ve got the little boy being almost murdered, and now you’ve got Judah, who is one of the key men in the family and he’s starting to take off. So what is verse 1 telling you? It’s telling you that this family is fracturing; it’s coming apart at the seams. That’s the state of the thing in Genesis 38, to warn you why God is going to have to do the kind of things He’s going to have to do later in the text.

Then in verse 2 he goes down and he sees “a daughter of a certain Canaanite, whose name was Shuah; and he took her, and went in unto her.” Now there’s no mention in verse 2 of ever consulting his father; never asked his dad what he thought of this girl he was dating; never asked any parental consent, just went ahead and did it. This is one of the themes of Genesis 38. Watch what’s going to happen; here’s a boy that God has picked out for a vital role in history. Instead of honoring his parents, instead of going to them, asking what they think about this situation, he’s just says well, that girl, I like her, she’s going to be my wife and I’m going to marry here and I’ll come back and I’ll tell my parents about it later; that attitude. Now we’ll just see where that attitude leads; let’s just see if as a result of autonomously marrying the wrong person, trying to raise a family on a wrong basis, how successful is this boy. That’s one of the ironies of the whole story.

So he goes out with no consultation whatsoever; you keep this in mind because remember, Abraham was very particular about what kind of girl married Isaac, and Isaac was very particular about getting, somebody in the clan at least, that would marry Jacob. The men basically saw the dangers of marrying pagan women because if they did, what it would do to the first line of their family? It would shatter the background of that family; it would destroy it from what God wanted him to do.

Now as Judah goes out and marries, unauthorized by his parents, this person, we find there comes into play a kind of a principle of which God works in families. Remember when God gave the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, when He gave the second one He said this: I am the God who visits the iniquities of the fathers unto the third and fourth generations of them that hate me; and I am the God who blesses the thousands of generations of them that love me. What does this mean? It means that God has a built-in, and I believe this is a general rule of providence; it’s not just true of Israel, that God has a built-in system of destroying through self-destruction devices families that become so hardened to His grace that it becomes essentially impossible for their children to become Christians; that God simply breaks them.

Illustrations, if you want history, abound; you can go into the royal families of Europe where we can trace the genealogy and see this, but the most famous non-biblical family that you can check out for yourself is the Herod family. Old man Herod destroyed the babies in Jerusalem; that was grandfather Herod. By the time you get to the end of the New Testament his grandsons are all dying. For example, his grandson is the one that dies in the book of Acts. How come? How do you explain this? Well, for four generations you had a family that went hostile to the grace of God. Not only did they not believe but they went out of their way to crush what God was doing in history and God says I am not going to tolerate that behavior pattern in a family; I’ll tolerate immorality, I’ll tolerate all sorts of foolishness and other things in homes because I have to work with sinful people. All that I’ll tolerate but I am not going to tolerate this hardened, determined attempt to destroy Me and My program. And so by the third and fourth generation of families that do this, you will see things begin to happen. For example, in the third and fourth the grandson and the great-grandson, you’ll find out maybe they don’t marry, they never have any children. Or maybe they marry and their children die through mysterious accidents. Or maybe they die of disease or accidents. Or maybe they’re just infertile and they can’t have children. But you watch, something will happen and that line will be cut off. And the Bible points out that that line cutting off… it isn’t always, it isn’t always due to this but often it’s due to rebellion.

Now let’s look at what happens; here’s Judah and here’s why God is going to cut him off in the first generation. Let’s look what happens mathematically if you let a family go on for four generations and each couple has four children. We’ll start out, of course, with two; then you go and each of their children marries so there’s four couples. So in the first generation you’ve got 8 people under this influence. They go and they multiply by four and then in the next generation you have 32. Then in the third generation you have 128 people, and in the fourth generation you have 512 people, making a sum total of 680 people under the influence of somebody that wanted to do their own thing. You see, this is why God doesn’t allow this to go on much longer. He’s being very gracious here, allowing it to just spread out to 680 people. Remember, people were prolific at that point in history due to longevity capabilities and so on.

So that’s the background of verses 1-2; Judah is going to do his own thing, he is not going to correlate it with parental authority, period. So now watch what happens; verse 3, 4, 5, he produces three sons. Scripture gives the name of each son; only one problem, not one of those three sons is in the lineage of Jesus Christ. Not one of those three sons is a Messianic seed, and therefore not one of those three sons plays a major role in the Bible. In fact, they disappear after Genesis 38. Shelah goes on and he manages to behave himself but the first two get the ax. Why? Because all of this is the production of a rebellious person that’s going to do their thing, their way. Let’s watch how God gives him the ax. See, all of this is a thwarting of Judah’s autonomy. That’s the story of this chapter. Judah wants to do his thing; God says no Judah, I’ve got a plan for you and that isn’t the plan so I’m going to fake you out. In fact, when I get through, you’re going to do exactly what I wanted you to anyway except there’s going to be a lot of pain, misery and heartache in your life because you rebelled against me. Let’s look at what happens.

Verse 6, after his three sons are born, the first one, Er, gets to marriageable age. Now at least by verse six you do notice Judah doing something right. In verse 6 he again assumes male leadership and begins to give direction to his son in who he’s going to marry. So there is a fatherly management of the home that’s going on. And it obviously is something improved from verse 2 when he didn’t get any of that from his father, but at least he’s going to exercise it on his son. Now the irony is the introduction of the woman, Tamar, because Tamar is going to be God’s woman. She’s going to be the one God wants to bear the Messianic seed. Now by the time you get through Genesis 38 you’re going to be dizzy at all the intrigue and the second and third and fourth moves that are made in this great chess game; but you watch, at the end of this story Tamar winds up as the woman in place; not the other woman. Shua, verse 2, that woman, she just disappears some place and two of her three sons are dead. That’s a real great batting score for her. But Tamar is another story; we’ll come back to her more next week.

Now verse 7, “And Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the LORD; and the LORD slew him.” So now number one of the three sons is eliminated from history, they get rid of him. And notice the phraseology, “the LORD slew him,” direct physical discipline. If you don’t believe God can do that I refer you to the New Testament book of Corinthians where people were coming to the communion service and getting drunk. And so in 1 Corinthians 11 Paul says because you’re doing this, have you ever noticed why you’re having so many people sick in the congregation, why so many people are dying in your congregation. He says, in verses 30, 31 and 32 it’s due to divine discipline and the way they were conducting their communion service. So don’t say that God is an absentee landlord that never influences history; he’s very active in influencing history and here’s one case where we don’t know, maybe he died of cancer or something else, the means isn’t important in verse 7; verse 7 is simply telling whatever the means, maybe he fell in a cistern, I don’t know, but however he died, he died and it was a result of God’s interference.

Now this mysterious passage, verses 8-10. This is one of those passages which I’m sure the more pious would wish wasn’t there but since it is… I did not write it, I just teach what is written so you’ll just have to put up with it this morning, put in the ear plugs or something. “And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother’s wife, and marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother. [9] And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother. [10] And the thing which he did displeased the LORD: wherefore he slew him also.” The key is in verse 10, the last part of verse 10 is an exact repeat of verse 7 and it ought to give people a hint at the whole meaning of that story. Verse 7, we have the elimination of heir because he’s an ungodly seed, God doesn’t want him around so He eliminates him. And in verse 10, God doesn’t want Onan around either so he eliminates him. That’s the big picture.

Now incidentally, the details of why Onan is wicked are brought in in verse 8, 9 and 10. Now we have to spend quite a bit of time on verses 8-10 because of a great debate that has been waged at least since the Protestant Reformation, an argument over these three verses has gone on for 500 years in the history of Western Europe and here’s the argument. Verses 8-10 are the classic text that Roman Catholic scholars have used to say that contraception is against God’s will and therefore it is illegal for the Christian to use. You hear this pronouncement, you wonder where they get it; here is where it comes from. It’s the only text in the Scripture that it comes from. So therefore we’ve got to deal with what is the biblical view in this area; are the Roman Catholics right when they point to verses 8-10, after all, look for a moment, contraception is being used, coitus interruptus or withdrawal is being used in verse 9 and in verse 10 obviously that use of contraception was displeasing to God. So are the Catholic scholars who argue against all birth control right?

First of all, what systems of contraception were available in the ancient world? We don’t know all of them, we know some of them. Here are some that were used; they’re not technically all contraceptive systems because some of them are infanticide systems. One was infanticide; infanticide meant that if a couple had a child, particularly the temple priestesses who were nothing more than religious prostitutes, when they had children they’d simply throw the children… they had a little place around the temple and they’d just die there, sort of like you’d throw your garbage there.

I remember when I was in Fort Worth listening to Edith Schaeffer giving her talk, a very moving discussion by this woman and she pointed out when she was a little girl in China as a missionary child, she’d walk by on her way to school, back and forth from the mission compound by a Buddhist temple, and she went by this temple one day and they were throwing babies in a pile and they were dying; they were just debris, and she became so upset she ran home to her mother and she asked her mother why, what are they doing to those babies. And she said this is Buddhism because in Buddhism the child doesn’t have value because, you know, he’s just absorbed into the nirvana, so there’s no real value on the part of the individual, and this being the case it makes sense if you don’t like them, just chuck them in a pile.

Edith said later she came back to the United States and she said you know, it’s interesting, 30 to 40 years later in our American hospitals children that survive the abortion process receive the treatment, they are left on a shelf in the delivery room, some with a little tag around their heads, don’t feed them, and the child is simply left there for 2 or 3 days until he dies and then he’s shuttled up and dropped in the ash can. So let’s not say that the Buddhists are the only ones that do it; American hospitals are now doing it by the thousands. This was one way of getting rid of children, infanticide, a very cruel way but nevertheless one very popular in the ancient world. By the way, the ones that did this most were the Greeks, and Plato and Aristotle were always held up as the lofty philosophers of Western civilization lived in a time when this was a routine way of handling problems.

A second method of use was abortion. We know abortion was used in the ancient world because there were laws against it. We don’t know the techniques but we do know that abortion is very, very ancient indeed. A third system of birth control in the ancient world was sterilization. A fourth system of birth control was abstinence. And the fifth system of birth control is the one mentioned in verse 9, coitus interruptus or withdrawal. The Talmud, in Yebamoth 34b says: “A man must thresh inside and winnow outside,” which is a euphemism for this system. So we know that verse 9 is reporting something that was widely used.

Now what is the background for Onan’s sin? Here’s the question. Is Onan’s sin because he used birth control or is Onan’s sin a certain motive in this particular case of birth control. Turn to Deuteronomy 25 and we’ll look at an institution that is described in Genesis 38 but not explained. It is called the principle of levirate marriage. It’s something kind of strange to our modern ears but one used widely in the ancient world—levirate marriage. In levirate marriage the attempt was made to preserve the property holdings of a family. Now this is not very romantic, there’s a provision for romance in it but I have to be candid with you, the Mosaic Law is not interested in romantic feelings here. The Mosaic Law is interested in preservation of the family’s property; it’s money folks, just simple money that’s involved. And if a woman is a widow and she has no sons she loses title to the family holdings; it’s that simple. So the reason they’re interested in the sons is to hold on to the family fortune. Now it isn’t quite as cold blooded that way because they wanted family, they were imbued with the idea that man should be fruitful and multiply.

In Deuteronomy 25:5 here’s how it worked; I’ll read through and I’ll explain it to you. “If brothers dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead one shall not marry outside unto a stranger;” meaning she shouldn’t go and marry another man outside of that blood line that she’d already married into. “…her husband’s brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him as his wife, and perform the duty of an husband’s brother unto her. [6] And it shall be, that the first-born which she bears shall succeed in the name of his brother who is dead,” now see the word “succeed,” there is the meaning of this whole operation of levirate marriage. It was so that the property could be carried on in the family line. “…that his name be not put out of Israel,” you see, they were concerned with historical propagation. [7] If the man does not want to take his brother’s wife,” now here in verse 7 is the exclusion clause, so here’s this poor guy, he’s single and he’s a bachelor and he doesn’t want to get married and furthermore he can’t stand this woman, God’s not going to arm twist him to marry her, so there is an out for the guy. “And if the man does not want to take his brother’s wife, then let his brother’s wife go up to the gate of the elders,” that was the city council of the day, “and say, My husband’s brother refuses to raise up unto his brother a name in Israel; he will not perform the duty of my husband’s brother. [8] Then the elders of his city shall call him, and speak unto him; and if he stand to it, and say, I do not like to take her,” in other words, they check out, it’s a legal proceeding what we’ve got going here.

And then the more humorous part of it in verse 9, “Then shall his brother’s wife come unto him in the presence of the elders, take his shoe off from his foot, and spit in his face, and shall answer and say, So shall it be done unto that man who will not build up his brother’s house. [10] And his name shall be called in Israel, The house” literally, “of the sandal.” Now this procedure occurs at several places in the Bible and you can see how God balances it; it’s an escape clause, if the guy really doesn’t like her he doesn’t have to spend his life with her, but on the other hand, there’s enough humiliation in the scheme that it shows the guy’s responsibility. Now that is the process of levirate marriage. It’s a system to take care of family.

Now you think, oh that’s awful unromantic and so on; listen, it wasn’t 300 years ago in our own country that in Massachusetts and Connecticut and those areas where you have a strong Puritan community, there would be a funeral on Sunday afternoon and the young men of the church would be almost drawing lots to who would marry the widow of the deceased man. And the Puritans would encourage marriage within months of the death of the previous husband. You say well how could this… gee, there’s no room for recovery, there’s no room for any kind of a romantic [can’t understand word]. That’s right, because they were concerned namely with the family and propagating the family and you just became subservient to that [can’t understand word], she learned how to respond, you learned how to develop love. And it sounds strange to a very independent generation but let’s not forget that was true in our country less than two centuries ago.

Back to Genesis 38. In Genesis 38:9 now we can define what the sin is. It is not the use of contraception per se that displeases God. What displeases God is explained in the first part of verse 9; Onan knew that the seed wouldn’t be his; that’s what displeases God, it’s the irresponsible use of contraception that God condemns and God slays him. Well, that’s fine, but from time to time as a pastor I get questions from young couples: well, are there some biblical guidelines for the use of contraception? Yes, let me give you some biblical guidelines.

First, you’ve got to, in order to deal with the process as a Christian, think it through; you’ve got to deal with what are the goals of marriage. The Bible gives goals of marriage and if you get this wrong then you’re going to be wrong in your use of contraceptions. It is because we, as Protestants have to differ, as much as we may personally like a friend of ours who’s a Roman Catholic, theologically I have to differ; I’m sorry but that’s just the way it is. I start from the Bible, they start with the church and we’re just going to clash on this point. And that is we have two different sets of the goals of marriage. The Protestant has at least three reasons for marriage; the Catholic tends to one. The Protestant’s first reason for marriage is social unity, and that’s given, if you want the passage in the Bible, Genesis 2:17, 24, “it is not good that man be alone,” and He made a “helper fitted for him.” It’s not talking about having children; it’s talking about companionship, a social unity. A man by himself is just abnormal. The Bible says it’s not good for man to be alone, so the woman was made as his helper. So you have that as the first reason for marriage, social unity or companionship.

A second reason for marriage, frankly, is pleasure. That’s given in Ecclesiastes 9:9; it’s given in Proverbs 5:18-19; it’s given in 1 Corinthians 7:3, 5. Those are the passages that Protestants have emphasized time and time again over against the Catholic position that marriage’s chief purpose is number three, propagation. Now, true that that is one reason for marriage, Genesis 1 and Genesis 9 both depict as a function… a function, not the function, a function of marriage is procreation, yes, but it’s not the only one.

Now, no sooner do we mention this third item, if we mention this, for example some of you in high school and I have looked at some of the materials you’re getting in some of the high schools in our state and they say that no longer can be the function of marriage because we live in an overpopulated world. We don’t need any higher population. Now at this point, as a Bible-believing Christian, I have to say I am sorry, I disagree with you. I do not believe the world is overpopulated. Now that sounds like a totally irresponsible statement, why don’t you know the starving millions in India, don’t you know the fact that we can’t produce enough food in many, many parts of the world, how can you stand up there and seriously say you don’t believe the world’s overpopulated? For the simple reason that God’s mandate of Genesis 9 still stands. What does the mandate say? To fill the earth, and it says to propagate. So therefore we have to say that since the command hasn’t been negated it must still be in effect and if it’s still in effect, then deduction tells me the world can’t be overpopulated.

But you say but still what you do with the millions of people dying of starvation. I say that is not due to overpopulation; it is due to a mismanagement of resources. I’ll give you an example right here in Lubbock, Texas. A hundred years ago this whole area, before men began to really settle in this area you had the Indians running around chasing buffalo off into the canyon out here east of the city. Now at that time was it true or wasn’t it that these high plains were overpopulated? And scholars will tell you yes, in fact some sections of Indians died because they couldn’t feed themselves. But how many Indians were roaming around here? 180,000 like we have in our city? No, not anywhere near that amount. Ah, then you see we come up with a new definition of overpopulation, don’t we. Overpopulation is a relative term, not an absolute term; it’s relative to the food resources and the management of those resources that counts. In this day when you can’t blow your nose without causing cancer we have a situation where we have environmental impact statements. Everything has an environmental impact statement to it; overpopulation, why it’s going to affect the environment.

I have a friend of mine who’s a commander of a squad of Special Forces in the army; you know what he has to do? Take ten or fifteen men out on a squad to reconnoiter an area and when he gets back as the C.O. of the group he has to write out an environmental impact statement; they want to know how many pieces of paper they dropped, wants to know how much they walked and traipsed down… you know, they might have knocked over some wild daisies out in the forest or something and this is serious. The United States Army requires all hikes, all movements to file environmental impact statements. You can’t move a tank, you can’t move people, and we wonder why we can’t train…because of environmental impact statements. And yet every morning I jog over here in a city park and Monday morning it’s jogging through the beer bottles to get around this thing once. Now no environmental impact statement there and it seems like we have quite a bit of environmental impact statement need right in our local town.

But as an illustration further of this absurdity of environmental impact, I was just reading an article about the Air Force’s problem, we of course are being outmoded 3 to 4 to 5 to one by the Russian ICBM force; we’ll hear about it by 1984, and right now the Air Force is desperately trying to get an MX missile which is a counter missile to their missiles, and before they can even seriously propose this weapon system they’ve got to file environmental impact statements, because apparently the only way we have of defending is to dig 4,000 holes and put 200 missiles, scatter them statistically among the holes and the Russians don’t know which hole has the missile. But the point is that it’s an effective device. Well, the Air Force, before it can seriously design 4,000 holes had to come up with an environmental impact statement; this is the second one, they’ve got to do four of these, and the second one cost the tax payers 5.1 million dollars. No weapon system has even been designed; that’s just the environmental impact of this thing. Now I might suggest that if the Russians attack us in the years to come and drop 6,000 nuclear warheads in the United States that will have a slight environmental impact, but that’s the impact we ought to be worried about, not our own weapon system. Well, this is the nonsense that goes on, and it goes on sadly, often propagated from the pulpits of America.

Overpopulation is something the Bible simply does not recognize. It puts the burden of proof on man to use better the resources he has. Now let’s apply this to contraception. A young couple comes and they say well look, I see that marriage has these three causes or these three goals and we’re convinced that contraception is right, it’s part of management, but can you give us some guidelines on the proper use of contraception. How do we plan a family biblically? All right, here are four verses, four passages of Scripture, that can give you help in this area. These four Scriptures deal with the requirement of parents to manage properly their children. In order to answer the problem of when you use contraception and plan your family, answer them against these four verses. In other words, ask yourself this question? Are we capable of carrying out these guidelines for our children?

For example, the first verse is Deuteronomy 6:4 and following, verses 4, 5, 6 and 7, that section. In there it tells you that to have children and to raise them the way God wants you to raise them you must be prepared to sit down hour by hour by hour by hour and work with them, answering their spiritual questions, giving them spiritual guidance. So to apply Deuteronomy 6:4 ask yourself this: how many children can we do this for effectively? There’s one of your controls.

A second passage of Scripture you might want to rely upon is Malachi 2:15; in Malachi 2:15 it talks about the goal of parents is to raise a godly seed. It doesn’t just say promiscuously having children all over the place; it says children who you will follow through on and raise, same principle, how many children can you personally manage well? This means more than just putting food on the table; believe me, it doesn’t take as many hours to put food on the table for children’s mouths as it does to sit and deal with the spiritual background; it takes a lot more hours.

A third reference in the Scriptures is Ephesians 6:1, fathers, raise your children “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” There are some duties that have to be done; can you do them for two children, for three children, for four children, for five children, etc. etc. etc. 1 Timothy 3:4, 12, that talks about fathers and mothers being good managers of their children. Can you be a good manager of your children with two, with three, with four? These are the questions you have to ask yourself. For those of you interested in some “how to’s” I have structured a summer reading program for young parents, or older parents for that matter, who would like some help, we can come together as a group on Sunday mornings between the early and the late service, we’re going to work through Bill Gothard’s character sketches and I’ll try to show you how to lead a family discussion; no new doctrine, it’s just getting involved in the process and we’ll sit here and I’ve worked out the sheets where you as a father can open up a passage in the character sketches and start an interchange and a dialogue with your children and get some good background on it.

Now, what about methods; here’s a Christian couple, contraception is okay if we use it biblically. But now what are some methods. Abortion is out because in the Scriptures we find from Psalm 139 the fetus has value. We do say, and I differ in this from my evangelical friends, but I do not believe the fetus, until it takes its first breath is full life, therefore I do not view abortion as murder when it’s conceived this way, though nurses tell me now there are other systems of abortion that in fact produce a breathing baby which then is destroyed. If that’s the case, then we’ve got murder; we’ve got a far more serious situation. But Exodus 21:22 shows the situation where a woman who is pregnant is physically assaulted, she’s made to bear a child ahead of time, and the child dies and the person who assaults here is not held of a capital crime, which tells us that in the Mosaic Law the fetus was not considered a full living person. But that still doesn’t verify it for contraception; the only use I see for abortion, from these scriptures, after really looking at it, is it can only be used to save the life of the mother. In that case the doctor can go ahead and abort and not be guilty.

Continence, which ironically the Roman Catholic scholars of verse 8, 9 and 10 are always advocating abstinence and continence, itself is denied in 1 Corinthians 7:3-5. Long term abstinence is specifically condemned in 1 Corinthians 7:3-5. Sterilization in the Old Testament could not be used either because of Deuteronomy 23:1. In the New Testament it isn’t addressed. So there is some guidance; we do know in the ancient world sometimes apparently they did use some sort of medicines which we know little of.

To finish the story in Genesis 38 we look at verse 11. After this misuse of contraception, Onan is destroyed, Er is destroyed, all of what Judah tried to do on his own has just crumbled in his hand. Now in verse 11 the final end of the thing. “Then said Judah to Tamar his daughter in law, [Remain a widow at thy father’s house, till Shelah my son be grown: for he said, Lest peradventure he die also, as his brethren did. And Tamar went and dwelt in her father’s house,” you stay at your father’s house. Now if you have the King James and you see the phrase in the middle of verse 11 that begins with “for he said,” and ends with “as his brethren did, that should be parenthesized. If you draw a parenthesis around it you’ll get the spirit of it because what that is is his mental attitude, that’s what he’s saying to himself. See, he’s saying I’ve got to get rid of this woman, you know, I’ve lost two sons and for sure I don’t want my third son dead, so to save my home I’m going to ship her back to daddy. There’s only one problem; which woman is God’s woman? Tamar.

To finish turn to the New Testament and look at Matthew 1 and you’ll see that old Judah hasn’t seen the last of Tamar. He may try to get this woman out of his life but he just can’t do it; she keeps coming back. We won’t use the illustratiaon of the bad penny. Matthew 1:3, this is the genealogy of Jesus Christ; it’s very interesting, look at verse 3. “And Judah begot Perez and Zerah of” who, “Tamar.” So here she comes because she’s God’s woman, not Shua, not all the other stuff that Judah was trying to do by himself, it was Tamar. And then interestingly Tamar is a woman who basically commits in-law incest and then in verse 5 we have Ruth who was a Moabitess, part of a race condemned by the Mosaic Law; In verse 6 Bathsheba, with whom David committed adultery and so on, so you tend to wonder, why does the Holy Spirit sort of insult us in Matthew by the only women that are mentioned prominently in display are all women who are Gentiles and who were, apart from one, was sexually promiscuous. Why is that put in the genealogy of Christ? It’s simple, same thing as Genesis 38; what other kind of people have we got in the world except sinful ones. So that’s the kind of people God is using. See, the Bible is real; it’s not an ideal document.

Next week we’ll continue our study in Genesis 38.