2 Samuel 13:1-22 Where We Take Our Shame

Of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak is preaching from his series, The Warrior Poet King, Study of Second Samuel.

Worshiping God Through His Word

Let's listen in. Well, good morning and welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Filsak, I'm the lead pastor here. And I'm really glad we've gathered together in this place to worship God. Take that for you.

We worship God in the gathering together in this place. We worship God through prayer, through singing praises to his name, as we're going to here in a moment, and through listening to him through his holy word.

One of our core values as a church, and most of you know the core values, if you get donut holes on Sunday morning, they're printed right above the donut holes, but your focus probably isn't up there.

It's probably on the donuts. But the core value of truth is the T in Recast. It stands for truth. Our name is an acronym. It means replication, community, authenticity, simplicity, and truth. It's this core value of truth that keeps us coming back to God's word week after week after week.

And it is this conviction that all of God's word is for our benefit that keeps me marching through books of the Bible like 2 Samuel. It keeps me marching through the Bible even when the next passage is a really, really, really, really, really tough passage like the one we're gonna be looking at this week.

There are passages in the Bible that are difficult, and I think for a variety of reasons we can find them to be difficult. There are some passages that are difficult for us just simply because they're hard to understand, especially some of the logical flow of some of the letters of Paul.

They require us to put our thinking caps on. There are other passages that are difficult because they're hard to obey, like how about let no unwholesome word come out of your mouth, but only words beneficial for building others up.

How many of you are like failed that already this morning? Hard to obey, hard to put into practice. And then there are some passages that challenge cultural issues head on that can be kind of difficult for us to wrestle through.

Go where am I supposed to land on this in our current culture? But our text this morning is a different type of difficult, a very different type of difficult. This message is difficult because it is emotional.

It ought to strike us in our hearts. It's personal. It is deeply disturbing and troubling. When I finish reading our text, we may even be a bit scandalized and shocked that this account is actually in Scripture.

Some of you are aware it's there. You grew up in the church and you're aware, you've read through the Bible. Some of you, this is gonna be new and you're gonna go, that's in the Bible? Yes, it is. And yet we ought not to be shocked in one sense, church.

We, how many of you, raise your hand if you know this to be true. We live in a fallen world. We live in a sin-cursed world. We know that the things that are recorded for us here in the pages of Scripture actually happen in real life.

And the hardest part of this text is that statistics make it clear that we do not all read these things aloof from the pain and suffering, but many of us are victims of the very things that we read here in this text.

That Scripture speaks so bluntly to such a dark reality of human abuse in a sin-cursed world at least demonstrates that God is willing to go there with us, church. We see the tragedy of Amnon and Tamar this morning, the abuse, the scandal, the broken and horrible responses to the tragedy.

And then we see, of course, the tragic and devastating results of this sin as well. And I would suggest to you that we ought to be moved. We ought to be moved. I have found this week preparing for this to be a very emotional week for me.

I've never met Tamar, but I've shed tears for her this week. I've never met Tamar, but I have worked to try to sympathize with her plight this week. I've never met Tamar, but actually I kind of have. Actually, I kind of have.

Behind the smiling faces of how many women and men also hides the devastation of Tamar. And I would like to say that I've never met an Amnon either, but I would also like to directly say that I have at least met many who are Amnons in training.

This passage is for us all to be a wake-up call that sin is always, always, always carrying us somewhere we don't want to go. It is leading us to a label. Sin is leading you to be labeled. A label like liar, a label like adulterer, a label that fits Amnon like rapist.

This text is pretty direct. And so as we open to 2 Samuel 13, verses one through 22, I would welcome you, if you haven't read this text before and you have any concerns for children that are here, your own children, you are free to step out during the reading of this.

I open up to you at the end of the hallway, you can go out past the bathrooms, turn right. Room four is available for you if you would like to step out with your children while I read this. The passage is not graphic in the words that it uses, but it leaves no question about the depiction of sexual assault and abuse.

And so if you have concerns for your kids, now is the time. Otherwise, open your Bibles, your devices, your scripture journals. You can use the app. If you've downloaded the Recast Church app, there's this feature on there, click on the faith tab.

There's a place for sermon notes. It'll pull the text right up. And then you can take notes in there, but you can follow along and read this together. Recast, this is God's holy word. This is a word that is not shy to address real life.

And so from that standpoint, it is God's holy word speaking into our brokenness. Second Samuel 13, one through 22. Now Absalom, David's son, had a beautiful sister whose name was Tamar. And after a time, Amnon, David's son, loved her.

And Amnon was so tormented that he made himself ill because of his sister Tamar, for she was a virgin and it seemed impossible to Amnon to do anything to her. But Amnon had a friend. Put that in air quotes, whose name was Jonadab, the son of Shimea, David's brother.

And Jonadab was a very crafty man. And he said to him, oh, son of the king, why are you so haggard morning after morning? Will you not tell me? Amnon said to him, I love Tamar, my brother, Absalom's sister.

Jonadab said to him, lie down on your bed and pretend to be ill. And when your father comes to see you, say to him, let my sister Tamar come to me and give me bread to eat. And prepare the food in my sight that I may see it and eat it from her hand.

So Amnon lay down and pretended to be ill. And when the king came to see him, Amnon said to the king, please let my sister Tamar come and make a couple of cakes in my sight that I may eat from her hand.

Then David sent home to Tamar saying, go to your brother Amnon's house and prepare food for him. So Tamar went to her brother Amnon's house where he was lying down. And she took dough and kneaded it and made cakes in his sight and baked the cakes.

And she took the pan and emptied it out before him, but he refused to eat. And Amnon said, send out everyone from me. So everyone went out from him. Then Amnon said to Tamar, bring the food into the chamber that I may eat from your hand.

And Tamar took the cake she had made and brought them into the chamber to Amnon, her brother. But when she brought them near him to eat, he took hold of her and said to her, come lie with me, my sister.

She answered him, no, my brother, do not violate me for such a thing is not done in Israel. Do not do this outrageous thing. As for me, where could I carry my shame? And as for you, you would be as one of the outrageous fools in Israel.

Now, therefore, please speak to the king for he will not withhold me from you. But he would not listen to her. And being stronger than she, he violated her and lay with her. Then Amnon hated her with a very great hatred so that the hatred with which he hated her was greater than the love with which he had loved her.

And Amnon said to her, get up, go. She said to him, no, my brother, for this wrong in sending me away is greater than the other that you did to me. But he would not listen to her. And he called the young man who served him and said, put this woman out of my presence and bolt the door after her.

Now, she was wearing a long robe with sleeves for thus were the virgin daughters of the king dressed. So his servant put her out and bolted the door after her. And Tamar put ashes on her head and tore the long robe that she wore.

And she laid her hand on her head and went away crying aloud as she went. And her brother Absalom said to her, has Amnon your brother been with you? Now hold your peace, my sister. He is your brother.

Do not take this to heart. So Tamar lived a desolate woman in her brother Absalom's house. When King David heard of all these things, he was very angry. But Absalom spoke to Amnon neither good nor bad.

For Absalom hated Amnon because he had violated his sister, Tamar. Let's pray. Father, even reading that text is difficult. And in it we come face to face with a darkness that by any standards of the law that you have written on the human heart is egregious, terrifying and terrible.

To read a clear text about sexual assault, some in this room may even be experienced as triggering, may be experienced as egregious in itself. So Father, I pray that you would bring about redemption through your word, that you would highlight for each and every one of us both the shame that we have caused and the shame we have experienced due to the sin we have committed and the sins committed against us.

But we are not left with no place to take that shame. How can we sing praises to you at a time like reading a text like this and it only comes because of what Jesus Christ has done for us? Only because we have a place to carry our shame, a place to leave it at the foot of the cross.

So Father, I pray that you would be with us in this service, in this time of worship to you, that we would lift our voices in gratitude and thankfulness for the salvation that we have in Jesus Christ, the hope that is there, that no abuse will define us, no sin that we've committed will define us, that nothing defines us outside of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for your children.

And that the power for obedience, the power to deal with sin, to nip it in the bud before it carries us away like it carried away Amnon, the hope in all of that comes down to Jesus Christ and the spirit that you give to your children.

So Father, I pray that you would open our mouths right now, but most importantly, open our hearts to receive the grace that you have given to us and then to reflect that back to you in praise and gladness.

In Jesus' name, amen. Yep, you can go ahead and be seated and make yourself as comfortable as possible. If at any time during the message you need to get up and get more coffee or juice or donut holes, you can take advantage of that.

Our outline this morning, I do encourage you to also keep your Bibles open to 2 Samuel 13, one through 22. Again, that's 2 Samuel 13, one through 22. If you lost your spot, we're gonna walk through that text, difficult text this morning.

Our outline is as follows. First is the temptation, verses one through 10. So one through 10 is the temptation. Verses 11 through 17 are the sin. So the temptation, then the sin, and then the end is the aftermath, verses 18 through 22.

So pretty straightforward outline this morning. I wanna start off with an observation. I have a feeling that this is gonna be a hard message for me to get feedback from your faces. And so I've just been praying this week that I would be able to deliver this message in a way that reflects my heart, but most importantly, reflects God's heart to the matter.

Amnon was not always a rapist, but on one day he became a rapist. Of course we know that, but it's worth saying, because the distinction between those two realities took place over time in his heart. You see, I think to a person here, we would like to believe that we could never become as dark as Amnon because we have a skewed view of the dangers of incremental sin.

Amnon, I don't believe, wanted to be a rapist. He just played with lust and fueled it from time to time when he could. This passage serves a narrative purpose, of course, in the flow of the life of David, but it also serves a practical purpose for us as a church here in Matawan in 2022.

The slide, the narrative shows the slide of David's family into darkness. And that slide likely follows the logical consequences of a family that has lost respect for their father. We gotta remember in context that David took Bathsheba from her husband, had her husband killed in a coverup, and there was no hiding this from his family once he was exposed by the prophet Nathan.

He was called out directly by God. David has repented before God, but the consequences of his sin are rippling down into the next generation. It's a logical conclusion to see the way that the son acts in light of the way the father acted.

David's son follows the sexual ethics laid down by his father, not by word, but by deed. Our children and the next generation is always learning more from what we do and less from what we say. How many of you would love it if your kids learned from what you said?

How many of you learned really good from your parents by what they said? Or how many of you thought your parents had no clue what they were talking about and you were gonna go out and prove them wrong by your own life, right?

I think we've all been there. So here we begin with the temptation in verse one. Absalom will prove to be a major character in the narrative for the next several chapters, and so he's introduced in verse one as David's son who had a beautiful sister.

David had multiple wives. We know that, and the Bible doesn't endorse that. It's a fact of history and a fact of his broken culture. But David had multiple wives, but both Absalom and Tamar share a father, David, and their mother, Maka.

They are blood through and through. They are complete siblings, Absalom and Tamar. Now David's other son with another wife has an infatuation with his half-sister, Tamar. And it's interesting that the word love is applied in verse one because context drives the definition of that word into the ground.

What we see in this context is nothing like love, and what you need to understand is that there are multiple words in the Hebrew language for love. This is one that has a lot more flexible meaning than others.

This is a word that can imply flirtation. It can have all kinds of erotic and romantic feelings to it. Amnon had a physical attraction to Tamar that is not primarily about caring for her and protecting her, and we obviously see that in the text.

Don't get muddy in your mind. It would be good for us to briefly reflect on the distinction between lust and love. And I would just suggest to you a good question for us is how much of what we pass off as love is actually repurposed lust?

It's a genuine question I want you to think about in your own heart as we talk about this. I fear that much of what we call love in our current culture is about getting rather than giving. And if it is primarily interested in what the other has to offer, is it any wonder that so many marriages end in divorce in our current culture?

In lust, we want for ourselves. And we are very familiar, I think, to a person in the room with the seeds of Amnon's temptation. To primarily see our relationships, be that marital or be that others, as a primary benefit to ourselves.

And when the benefit isn't there, well, it's easy to drop papers. Or to just walk. He is lovesick to have Tamar in this text. And have is the emphasis. She is beautiful to him. And by the standards of the text, she is a beautiful woman by the culture.

And his obsession over this half-sister affects his health in verse two. And that informs the reader that he has placed her as an object over God. She is forbidden to him. And the end of verse two is a sickening statement that defines the entirety of his temptation.

It says, because she was a virgin, and therefore, what's implied by that declaration that she was a virgin, is that she's under the protection of her father and brothers. And so it seems impossible at the end of verse two, this heinous and grotesque statement, it seemed impossible for him to do anything to her.

This last phrase is what makes it clear that his love is not about giving, but strictly about getting. We need no imagination at all, and I encourage you to not let your imagination wander too far into understanding and entertaining what he's entertaining in his mind to do to her.

In this sense, I wanna point out that Amnon's temptation has begun. This is fundamental church. His temptation began where? In his own heart. He is rehearsing what he wants to do that he cannot do. His interest isn't in her as a person, but in her body as an object.

And in this sense, I wanna point out that the temptation is in him. This is fundamental for us to understand. Tamar is not the temptation. She is not a temptation. The temptation is in the heart of Amnon.

The book of James in the New Testament clarifies what we're seeing here. It gives us the, when you're reading the New Testament, the books of the New Testament give us a skeleton. The Old Testament illustrates it.

We're seeing a real life account that illustrates a truth that we see in James 1, 13 through 15. And this is what the author of the book of James says to us. James 1, 13 through 15, you don't need to turn over there, but it's here.

Let no one say when he is tempted, I am being tempted by God, for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. Amnon wasn't being tempted by God, but how was he tempted? And this goes on to describe the anatomy of temptation.

Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by what? By his own desires. Has to do with the heart. Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desires. But it doesn't end there.

Verse 15, then desire, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin. And sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth death. That's the pattern. That's our outline. Look at the passage and look at our outline.

Temptation, desire, sin, it grows. It's like you're sowing seeds of temptation. It's gonna grow into something. It's gonna produce something. You're entertaining that stuff, it's going to result in something, and that something is going to breed an aftermath.

There will be death. Much of it is gonna be what we see next week, but in our text, even, we see the death of dreams, the death of plans and hopes of a victimized woman, the death of the sinner next week.

Amnon has the desire, but he consults with a wicked and crafty friend. Note the use of the word crafty there. That word is used elsewhere in scripture, but the most prominent may very well be that the serpent was more crafty than the other animals in the garden.

Crafty is not a positive word. It is a negative word in this context. And Jonadab is his cousin who is identified as his friend. The two of them hung out together. Any of you grew up with a cousin that you hung out with and spent a lot of time with?

That's Amnon and Jonadab. They hung out together. They were friends, and they're identified in the text as friends before they're even mentioned as cousins. But there's a reality here that's just worth a minor application.

We need to be careful to consider those we consult with, and this is a message we tell our kids, but we tell ourselves. I encourage friendships and relationships with unbelievers. You should be rubbing shoulders with unbelievers.

You should have some people out there that you're interacting with on a regular basis that are not believers, some of your coworkers, some of your neighbors, some family members even, and you should be good with interacting with them on a social level, but I do not encourage you to seek counsel from them.

I can't tell you how many times people have sat in my office, the office right over there, and told me advice that they were gonna follow from a coworker that doesn't have the same allegiance to Christ, and I'm going, why are you listening to them?

Anybody know what I'm talking about? Any of you ever have some, is there somebody in your life that's not a believer that doesn't share your commitment to Christ that's very eager to give you advice? I think we have those people.

Jonadab jumps right on this. Jonadab fuels and feeds Amnon's lust with a plot and a plan. You're the son of the king for crying out loud. Why should you be moping about all day? Why shouldn't you get what you want, says Jonadab.

That's his attitude, so he comes up with a plot to get Amnon and Tamar alone in verse five, and it's a little complicated what his motives were. What Jonadab's motives were. We're gonna see him be the first one, when Amnon is dead, Jonadab's the first one to report it to David.

He's the one, he's the courier, he's the one who runs at the death of Amnon. We're gonna see that next week. There's something going on there, and he's crafty beyond just, how many of you think that probably Amnon had the means to get alone with Tamar if he wanted to?

Like, he could've been crafty enough to figure that out. Jonadab is being craftier than that. There's some subversive thing that's going on here. He is complicit in this terrible scenario. But Amnon is fueling his lust.

Amnon enacts on the plan in verse six. He pretends to be sick and requests from his daddy, the king, that Tamar come to prepare his favorite food. Some kind of cake or bread or something that was cooked.

This may seem strange to our ears, but it's clear, I mean, rather it's unclear whether this was culturally normal or not for somebody to request their sibling to come and cook for them. But one thing that seems to go across all cultures is the benefit of acting sick.

This is an ancient thing. Any of you ever benefit from acting sick? Ferris Bueller sure did. So we know that in our modern era, there's some benefit to acting sick and not going to school. And here he knows that he's got some benefit of acting sick.

And also, we also know that culturally, down through the ages, there has been a common theme of pampering someone who is sick. All the husbands in the room know how to milk that one. This is likely on David's mind when he gives permission and the instructions for Tamar to go over to Amnon's house.

His crown prince, that's one thing I haven't mentioned yet. Amnon's the crown prince. He's the oldest of David's sons. He's next in line for the king. The crown. And the crown prince is sick and is making a pretty minor request.

So Tamar is commissioned by David, the father, to go over to Amnon's house and cook for him. This is all within the royal family. And on the surface, to David and to Tamar, nothing seems amiss. It doesn't seem like anything is up.

So she's there and she goes to Amnon's house. Now, this is a royal family. They each have their own houses. They're the kids of the king. They have their own residences. She goes over and bakes in his kitchen, in his presence, probably one room house.

But he's in bed, leering at her every move in the kitchen. Note the way that the temptation is working, church. He has been building up lust and desire and a one-sided passion. He is drawing closer to acting on it.

She's now in the same room. She wraps up cooking and brings him the meal. But he is not hungry. He's not hungry for food. In verse nine, he sends everyone out of the room and now they are alone. And he has imagined this moment many times in his mind.

He is close to bringing his sick passions to reality. He coaxes her close, asking her to feed him. He is in authority. As the oldest son of the king, she obeys and comes close to give him food. And he grabs her and issues an illicit proposition.

Come lie with me, my sister. All kinds of sickness there, right? Let's break the tension for a second. How many of you find some sickness in this statement? I'd like to see more hands. His internal enticement to sin has brought him to this place.

I believe that by indication of the desires of his heart, he has rehearsed lust and now here within his grip is the ability to act on that. He has practiced this moment many times. The desire within Amnon is there.

And it is conceived this very moment in the gestation time of temptation is complete and it is about to deliver full-blown, egregious, destructive, awful, life-changing sin. And that leads to our second movement in the text.

Kind of analyze the temptation. Now let's see the sin. For all that it is, it's there in the text and it is described for us. The sin in verses 11 through 17. He grabs Tamar likely by the wrist and holds her against her will and issues a proposition.

He has imagined her saying yes so many times. And I imagine that everything goes off script when she rejects him. I want you to hear me. Because I recognize that there are people in this room who have been abused.

There are people in this room who have been sexually assaulted. Tamar is wise. Tamar is strong. She is not a weak woman. Tamar has a voice. And there is a myth, a terrible, terrible myth that weak people are abused.

Tamar stands here in our text as a type of every sexually assaulted person. She speaks up and she is raped. She tries to reason and she is raped. She tries to resist and she is raped. I'm not gonna apologize for needing to regain my composure for a moment.

I like football. I like shooting guns. Apparently I don't mind crying over sexual assault. She uses the Hebrew word here in the text for rape that is translated violate in verse 12. This is an unequivocal no.

There is no doubt to her intention. No, no, no, do not do this thing. If there was any doubt of the danger that she may have been in, she knows his intentions now. He has revealed his heart. She calls this thing an outrageous thing according to verse 12.

But the Hebrew word there in verse 12 carries with it, that word outrageous has within it the notion of godlessness. These things happen outside of Israel. The pagans do this kind of thing, Amnon, not us.

We are God's people. We don't act this way. She is a godly woman who is seeking to save a man of her people from becoming a godless fool. But practicing lust in his mind is seared, Amnon. He has been steeped in his lust, steeped in his desire, and it saturated him through and through.

He will become the outrageous fool. Her appeal to the possibility that if he were to seek to marry her, David would likely allow it. How many of you, that sounds a little strange to your ears. You know, halfsies, half-siblings.

There's some strange things in the Bible, not always endorsed, but described and explained. And I think it's probably realistic. I don't think it's the unrealistic cry of a desperate woman who's attempting to get him to change his mind from these actions, although I think that's part of it.

But the sexual ethics of this era indicate that David may very well have allowed them to be married. And despite the clear command of the word of God against a man marrying his half-sister, the Bible addresses that.

Leviticus 18 .9 and 18 .11, two different verses right next to each other that explain that this is not permitted by God's law. But I wanna take just a moment here to clarify that no culture and no era of human history has ever had a pure and completely biblical sexual ethic.

Not this era, not David's era, not Moses' era, nowhere down through history. In other words, nobody has ever lived in a location or a culture that followed God's sexual ethic to a T. We don't live in it.

Every people, including Israel, has never successfully applied this beautiful and glorious standard of sexuality that we find in the pages of Scripture. All of us broke in. All of human cultures broken.

All of eras broken. Verse 14 is a train wreck of action verbs. He will not listen. He raped her, using the clearest sexual terms possible in the Hebrew language, so that by the end, the reader of the Hebrew text of this would understand that a child could be the result of what happens here.

Nothing in the text indicates that that's the case, but it could be. Amnon has practiced lust. He has practiced wayward passions for a long time. And yet, verse 15 gives us a psychological conundrum that I think we can all relate to in a very minor key, a very minor way, but not to the degree that it obviously impacts this.

It's terrible to see in our hearts the ability to objectify other people, even in the minorest of ways, the smallest of ways we can do this, right? To objectify them as they're just money, there's dollar signs to us.

People can be that way. They can be an object to lust after. They can be all different kinds of ways to objectify people, not just merely sexually. But rape and sexual assault is obviously an extreme example of this objectification.

And when a person is reduced to an object in another person's heart or mind, the sinful hearts are prone to treat them that way, to be consistent with that feeling and that thought. Amnon here in the text has a sick and twisted form of buyer's remorse.

In verse 15, he has been salivating for the new iPhone, only to get a chance to hold it and find that it doesn't satisfy. And he quickly turns against it. C .S. Lewis highlighted the terrible objectification here with an equally shocking illustration.

Speaking of, Amnon's two words in the text where he commands her, get up and go, that's two words in Hebrew, four in English, get up and go, exclamation point. And it's in that kind of strong term that requires us in English to translate it with an exclamation point.

Lewis said this, C .S. Lewis, one gives little concern for the carton once the cigarettes have been smoked. But I think his illustration comes up short, far be it for me to disagree with C .S. Lewis, I just don't think he says enough, for Amnon hates Tamar more than his original want for her.

In other words, he is not indifferent to the packaging, he hates her, the text says it. And what has transpired in this sin is doubled up by his now casting her out. By the way, that word casting out is the same technical term for divorce.

In the Hebrew language, there's not a distinction between those words, so to divorce a woman or to cast her out is the same thing. The social reality in which this event happens is far removed from the sexual mores of our current culture.

He has taken her virginity, he has had sex with her, he is now responsible to care for her, he is responsible to marry her and provide children for her. Is that not loathsome to our modern minds? That's the culture that they lived in, she had no other hope.

Nothing in verse 16 says that this was ideal for Tamar, it's just the reality of the society in which she lives. She would not want to be married to her rapist, but the future for her is suddenly bleak without it.

If you have questions about that, I can explain that to you culturally, but it's not easy for us to wrap our minds around. But when she says in verse 16 that his sin of casting her out is worse than the original sin of raping her, she is not minimizing the rape, she is facing a future of desolation, and we see that word applied to her right by the end of the text.