In this week's video teaching series by Ray Vander Laan, we learn about Tamar. The name "Tamar" means date palm or palm tree. A date palm cannot flourish or reproduce without human involvement. Male palm trees must be planted near female trees or, the tree won’t bear fruit. The woman Tamar symbolizes someone who will need the help of others to flourish biologically, emotionally, and spiritually because she is, metaphorically, a palm tree.

Having godly people in government is a good thing, but that is not how the Kingdom of God comes. The Kingdom comes when God humbles Himself and takes the form of a servant—Jesus—who died on the cross (Philippians 2:5–8).

We are called to walk as Jesus walked (1 John 2:6). But how do we do that if we only emphasize that He is the Son of God? We are not God, so how can we become enough like Him that others can see Him in us? Where is our passionate devotion to show Jesus to the world? When we look at Jesus’ family tree, we see He is both fully divine and fully human. Earthly fathers and mothers shape who children become, and God chose to work through very human people.

Jacob, the patriarch and one of Jesus’ ancestors, had twelve sons. He favored Joseph who did not handle it well and considered himself superior even to his older brothers. They despised him. When Jacob gave Joseph a beautiful coat, their hatred grew. One day, Jacob told the young Joseph to go find his brothers, who were five- or six days ahead on the journey. Joseph went. When the brothers saw him approaching, they effectively said, “Here comes this cocky dreamer. Let’s kill him once and for all.” Reuben talked them out of it, and they threw him into a cistern instead (Genesis 37:18–24).

Later, Judah came up with the idea to sell Joseph to passing Ishmaelite slave traders. They pulled Joseph out of the cistern and sold him. He was taken to Egypt (Genesis 37:25–28). In the Jewish world, for someone to be the ancestor of the Messiah, they could not be morally disqualified. But Judah had sold his brother into slavery. So, in their minds, Judah’s line which was the line that was supposed to bring the Messiah was now on hold, because it couldn’t be the line of the Anointed One if it involved betraying your own brother.

The next part of the story shifts to Joseph rising to second-in-command in Egypt but in between is a strange and seemingly out-of-place story—Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38. It seems bizarre unless we understand that Judah must be brought back into the story for the redemptive line to continue.

Judah had three sons. His oldest was married to Tamar, but he was wicked in God's sight and died (Genesis 38:6–7). According to the cultural and spiritual system God set up, if a husband died, the father-in-law was responsible for ensuring that the next male in the family line would marry the widow and produce a child to continue the deceased brother’s name (Deuteronomy 25:5–6). So Judah arranged for his second son, Onan, to marry Tamar.

But Onan was selfish. He didn’t want to raise a child who would carry his brother’s name and receive his brother’s portion of the inheritance, so every time he had relations with Tamar, he practiced withdrawal, spilling his seed on the ground (Genesis 38:9). This is where the word “onanism” comes from—birth control through the withdrawal method. But the deeper issue was that Onan enjoyed the physical relationship while refusing to give Tamar a child, refusing to help her flourish. God was furious because He is all about redemption, and Onan was standing in its way, so Onan died as well (Genesis 38:10).

Tamar then came to Judah and asked to marry the third son, Shelah, to be redeemed. Judah refused, fearing Shelah might die too. This displeased God. Tamar, now excluded from the household with no more sons to marry, had no way back in. So she made a bold and risky decision: she disguised herself as a shrine prostitute.

In those days, along well-traveled roads, there were small pagan shrines to honor various local gods. Part of pagan worship sometimes involved sexual acts meant to invoke fertility and favor from those gods. Tamar positioned herself near one of these shrines. Judah passed by, saw her, and for whatever reason, desired her. Not knowing who she was, he slept with her. She, however, knew exactly what she was doing. When he finished, he realized he had nothing to pay her, so he gave her his staff, belt, and seal as collateral, promising to send a young goat later—a very small price. Essentially, he cheated her (Genesis 38:16–18).

Tamar kept the items. Soon after, she was pregnant. Word got out. Judah, playing the self-righteous hypocrite, said she should be burned to death for her apparent immorality (Genesis 38:24). They built a pile of wood and sent for her. Tamar had risked her life, but she privately sent Judah his staff, belt, and seal with a message: “Do you recognize these?”

The words echoed from earlier in the story—when Joseph’s brothers took his coat, dipped it in goat’s blood, and said to their father, “Do you recognize this?” (Genesis 37:32). Tamar might not have known the symbolism, but Judah did. He realized the connection. In that moment, he repented and declared, “She is more righteous than I” (Genesis 38:26). Tamar had tried to do the right thing in the wrong way. Judah had simply done wrong.

Tamar gave birth to twins. As one child began to emerge, the other grabbed his heel and pulled him back in and was born first. The firstborn was named Perez, which means “breakthrough” (Genesis 38:27–30). This is the line through which Jesus would come (Matthew 1:3).

Jesus has the quality of Perez—intense, intentional, breaking through. (Ray Vander Laan  inserts here that once he stepped into the Jewish world, he found a passion to be part of God’s story that he didn’t have before. That passion ignited a fire in him, and he says, though he still has far to go, he wants to grow closer to God every day.)

Ray then introduces the concept of kenosis—the emptying of oneself. He shifts the focus to Philippi, a significant Roman city. After the famous battles involving Julius Caesar’s death, Marc Antony and Augustus defeated Brutus and Cassius. Philippi became a Roman colony, founded by Philip II, the father of Alexander the Great, who was loved and revered throughout Greek history. The wealth from local gold mines funded Alexander’s massive army that conquered much of the known world.

In Philippi, along the modern road, there are ruins of a structure called a heroon, a place where a hero is honored. In Roman culture, heroes like Hercules or Aeneas were often deified after death. Unlike Jesus, who came to earth as God and took on human form, these Roman heroes were human beings who were elevated to godhood. People prayed to them because they were believed to have the ear of the eternal gods, similar to how some pray to saints today.

Philippi had a heroon dedicated to Philip II. He was one of the first to declare himself divine while still alive. On his birthday, he had statues of the twelve Greek gods brought into the theater and added a thirteenth statue—of himself. This was so offensive that his own bodyguard assassinated him. Ironically, after his death, he was deified. He spent his life trying to become a god.

Jesus, in contrast, was God who humbled Himself to become a man.

Paul wrote his letter to the believers in Philippi—people living in a city full of imperial hero worship. He writes in Philippians 2:5-7, “In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to His own advantage; rather, He made Himself nothing
 by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.”

Ray’s favorite quote on discipleship is this: “Jesus did not come to raise up admirers, but imitators.” Jesus was an anti-hero. He humbled Himself below everyone else and became the servant of the most undeserving. He emptied Himself—completely. Like turning a cup upside down until it stops dripping. That is kenosis. To be fully emptied.

Paul begins this teaching by saying, “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5). The question we are left with is: Are we willing to empty ourselves for others in love and humility?

As Matthew 1:3 reminds us, it is not Jacob and Esau who are listed in Jesus’ genealogy, but Perez and Zerah—the twins born of Tamar. Through a painful and messy story, God brought redemption.

Are we willing to do the same?