Special Sunday Edition
Ethan Barton, Pastoral Resident, Tallowood Baptist Church
Reading the Bible is not for the faint of heart! This is one of its darkest stories. The verse following the above passage doesn’t beat around the bush; Amnon does the worst thing imaginable. It’s a despicable and grotesque deed.
The horror of this scene is not to be understated. Tamar is indeed his half-sister, and that alone makes it severely illegal by Israel’s law. She would be seen as a disgraced woman the rest of her life. Not to mention, this happened in the household of the king of Israel, between two of King David’s very children.
Paul tells us that all Scripture, meaning even this story, is God-breathed and useful for teaching. Specifically, every story demonstrates for us either how grievous sin is or how glorious our gracious savior is. This one does the former. When the world does not walk according to the Lord’s ways, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
One thing this story reminds us of is that sin blinds us from reason. Tamar tried to talk Amnon out of it, and her reasons were good. But in his raging lust, he had already decided to take the horridly unwise council of his friend. Sin corrupts the mind! God’s Word calls us to make our decisions with reason and wisdom. But one effect of sin is that these faculties of ours have been polluted, and we find ourselves making irrational decisions and neglecting to think straight. It's almost impressive the hoops we jump through to justify our sin, but the logic is always, without fail, laughable.
Our ability to think wisely, in spite of unwise pressures, is a gift from God. It’s perhaps the primary thing that makes us like him. A sound mind has the wisdom to recognize sin and a will strong enough to run from it. Thinking wisely is worship. The alternative is catastrophic.
