This has to be one of the hardest texts in scripture, and I had a hard time just like, one of the things you wanna do as you’re preparing to understand something, let alone to teach it, is to read it over and over. And I had a hard time reading this passage over and over. It was just, what the greatest privilege in my life is, is being able to—that might be a slight exaggeration. I do like being married and having kids too. But one of the greatest privileges in my life is getting to study and teach God’s word. And this week, this text was hard for me. It’s just not fun.
First Timothy chapter four verse 16. Paul tells Timothy to watch your life and your doctrine closely. Now that has a direct application. Obviously, he’s speaking to a pastor. He’s telling him to watch his life and doctrine closely for in doing so, he’ll save both himself and his hearers. But it has a secondary application, I think, to all of us as Christians that we all should be watching our lives. It’s not just what we believe that matters. It’s how we live that matters.
Sin is ugly. And the apostle Peter says Satan is there prowling around, creeping at the door, wanting to tempt us to sin. In the book of Genesis chapter four, God says to Cain, Sin is crouching at your door. And it’s crouching at all of our doors. Here in second Samuel chapter 13, we’re going to be lingering over some evil, and we’ll see three negative examples. There’s actually four negative examples in this text, but we don’t have time to get to the fourth one today. We’ll look at three negative examples, and then we’ll stop to listen to one cry for help.
The first negative example we see is the godless lust of Amnon.
Second Samuel 13, beginning in verse one, says,
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, whose name was Jonadab, the son of Shimeya, David’s brother. And Jonadab was a very crafty man. And he said to him, O 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. When your father comes to see you, say to him, Let my sister Tamar come and give me bread to eat, and prepare the food in my sight that I may see it and eat 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 everyone out for 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. Then Tamar took the cakes she had made and brought them into the chamber to Amnon her brother. When she brought them near him to eat, he took hold of her and said, 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. And 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 very great hatred, so that the hatred with which he hated her was greater than the love with which he loved her. And Amnon said to her, get up. Go. But 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. He called the young man who served him and said, put this woman out of my presence and bolt the door after her.
Who is Amnon? Amnon is the oldest son of David. He’s the heir apparent to the throne, and he’s also a very weak man. He’s a man who the apostle Paul might say is governed by his passions, governed by his belly, like Paul says in Philippians three nineteen, those who are godless and governed by their lusts. And he’s filled with lust for his half sister, Tamar, who is a beautiful young woman, apparently single, doesn’t have a husband. But Amnon can’t do anything about that. The law in Leviticus 18, Leviticus 20, Deuteronomy, I think it’s 27 maybe, specifically forbid the marrying of your sister or your half sister. These things, though they took place in the times of the patriarchs, like Abraham and Sarah were half siblings. By the time God is giving the law, he is banning these kind of close relationships.
And so Amnon sees no way that he can play out his lust, that he can do anything to her. And even the language here is just frankly, it’s grotesque. It seemed impossible to Amnon to do anything to her. There’s hints even in the way that the author is talking that the love here is not what we should be thinking of in terms of like godly love. It’s a passionate desire for something, but it’s not putting her interests first. He doesn’t actually care about her. He cares about his hormones being satisfied.
But he’s also a weak man, doesn’t have a lot of a plan for himself. He just because he thinks he can’t do anything, he sits around and he pouts. He sits around and he makes himself look ill to the point where Jonadab, his cousin and a close adviser comes to him and says, what is wrong with you? Like, why do you look haggard? What’s going on in your life that you can’t even get a grip on yourself and act normal? And when Amnon tells him, Jonadab says, Well, here. I’ll give you a plan. Since you can’t come up with one for yourself, I’ll come up with a plan for you. And Amnon drinks it up. He does exactly as Jonadab tells him.
But again, he’s not acting out of love. He’s acting in entire self centeredness. He feigns illness in order to be served. And apparently David has a habit of visiting his children when they’re sick. He doesn’t seem to know them very well. And so, like, maybe this is like his olive branch. I’m going to be present when they’re sick, and I’ll go visit. And he goes to see Amnon, and Amnon says, well, send Tamar to me. I need her to stand where I can see her and have her make cakes and then have her bring them to me and feed me. This is a strange request. You would think, man, David ought to smell a rat, but he doesn’t. Amnon is given just whatever he wants.
But when she comes to him and she does everything that’s asked of her, right? She serves him, she makes these cakes, she’s a hard worker, she brings them to him, he seizes her and demands that she sleep with him. In Scripture, true love is a gift from God. It’s a capacity that God gives to human beings to reflect what He is like by pursuing the good of others. It’s the chief of the spiritual virtues. These three remain faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love. To lay down our lives in pursuit of the good of someone else is the greatest gift that God gives to human beings.
Lust, in contrast, is the desire to take and have that to which we have no claim. To take what isn’t ours in order to satisfy our lusts, which is to say lust is a form of theft. And here that lust moves from being a theft of the mind to being a violent theft where he takes Tamar’s body for himself. Tamar calls this an outrageous thing in verse 12. She would call it an outrageous thing because, as we said, in Leviticus 18, incest was forbidden. That phrase there, such a thing is not done in Israel, calls to mind both Genesis 34 where the sons of Israel are outraged over something that should not be done in Israel. They’re referring to the rape of their sister, Dinah. Also in Judges chapter 20, there was an outrageous thing done in Israel when the Levites concubine was gang raped by the people of Benjamin the point where she actually died. That same phrase, such a thing should not be done in Israel. An outrageous thing was done in Israel. Same phrase is used there.
Lust is a lot more serious than we usually take it to be. It also turns and transforms what feels like what might even be able to be papered over and called, yeah, maybe there’s some lust there, but it’s tied to this love. That’s what the guy in Genesis 34 says about Dinah. Right? He takes her because he loves her. Here, Amnon says, well, I love Tamar. But it turns immediately once the lust is satisfied. It turns to hate. Verse 15. He violated her and lay with her into fourteen fifteen. 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.
Are you indulging lust in your life? Maybe letting your eyes linger where they shouldn’t viewing pornography, indulging fantasies that honor neither god nor those made in his image. This would be a lot easier, determined to preach, if there were, like, 400 people in here. You just, like, totally disconnect from everybody that’s here. For me, very practically, Andy and I were just talking about this a couple weeks ago. Like, one of the things that most helped me in my battle with these kind of thoughts was consciously thinking about every person to the extent that I’m able to as an image bearer of God.
Like, you can put up all the rules and all the whatever you want in your life. And if you’re driven by lust, you’ll just work around the rules. You’ll out reason yourself. We’ll talk about that in a second. You’ll reason your way around it. But you can’t get around being conscious that that person is an image bearer of almighty God, That God Himself cares about exactly how I think and act towards that person. And that would solve so many problems, not just in our lives but in society, not just in this area of sexuality, but in so much of our lives. If we would just look at other people as image bearers of God, not as people who are objects for our own gratification or roadblocks in the way of us getting to our own gratification and happiness, but human beings that God made in his image and that he cares about and that he wants us to treat as if they are reflecting him.
How we this is the very reasoning of murder being wrong in Genesis chapter nine is that God made man in his image. And so to violently act against an image bearer of God to take their life is in a sense a form of treason against God, like you’re trying to kill God. That that’s what murder is. So the first thing we see, the first thing we need to watch for is the godless lust of people like Amnon that can take place in our own hearts.
The second thing we see in the text is the godless cunning of Jonadab verses four and five or verses three, four, and five. Amnon had a friend whose name was Jonadab, the son of Shimeh, David’s brother. And Jonadab was a very crafty man. Now relatively few people in scripture are given, like, a description of this sort for us. I mean, it happens, but it’s not like not every person is getting a description of this is what this person was like. Sometimes they just pop up and they disappear from the story and they’re here and gone and we don’t know that much about them. Jonadab, we’re told who he is. He’s a close relative. He’s Shimiya, David’s brother’s son. And he is a very crafty man, which means he knows how to get what he wants.
So he tells Amnon, here is a very simple solution to getting what you want. He’s also a man we see at the end of the chapter. We’ll maybe look at this a little bit next week, but he’s a man who knows what’s going on in the world. He’s David’s freaking out when he thinks that all of his sons have been killed, and Jonadab says to him, oh, don’t worry. It’s only one. Amnon’s the only one that’s dead. You don’t have to worry. He has a kind of craftiness or cunning that is something that is fallen human beings we naturally admire. He is what we look for when we look for a winner. When we are thinking things like winning is a virtue or we just need to do whatever it takes or the ends justify the means.
If that’s your line of thinking, like doing whatever it takes to get what you want or to get to the end result that you want, Jonadab is the kind of guy you want on your side because he’s crafty, he understands how the world works, and he knows how to manipulate people to get at where he’s going. But the first person in Scripture who’s called crafty isn’t actually a person. It’s in Genesis chapter three where it says, Now the serpent was more crafty than all the other creatures of the garden. We can think of craftiness and the ability to get where you want to go, and that isn’t bad in and of itself. Jesus actually tells us to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. He says that the people of this world are shrewder with unrighteous mammon than the children of righteousness are. And he seems to be saying that as a compliment, like they’re better at using their goods to get where they’re going than Christians are. But if that craftiness is unhitched from submission to God and what He actually wants, then it is a very dangerous place to be. Beware of using craftily manipulated plans for your own benefit, and beware of hitching your bandwagon to those that do.
I’ve got more. I could probably go on with that, but I think we’ll move on to the godless anger of David. This is where I wanna spend some time. Actually, this is where I thought the whole sermon was gonna go to start with. David makes me mad at this passage so much. The godless anger of David. We see this down in verse 21. He hears what’s going on. He’s been manipulated in this situation. Remember, Tamar gets to Amnon because David sent her there. So David’s been manipulated by this plan of Jonadab and Amnon. And when David heard of all these things, verse 21, he was very angry, and that’s it. He was just mad.
Some older translations follow the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Septuagint, which have a longer reading. It says he would not punish Amnon, his son, because he loved him since he was his firstborn. And whether that actually should be part of the text or not, it’s obviously what’s happening here. He won’t punish Amnon. He’s just mad about it. David is right to be mad. These are the sort of things that should make us angry. If we read this text and we don’t feel some sense of anger or rage at this situation, there’s something wrong in our hearts. But David isn’t just an outside observer hearing about something that’s really bad. David is both the father of both of these people, and he is the king, which means he has the authority and the duty to act, not just to be mad.
That’s, again, that’s why we have the original title of the sermon in the bulletin, Why Fathers Matter. Don’t simmer and stew about situations where you have a duty to take action. I hear this from parents our age all the time. They’ll talk about how some there’s some problem with their child, and you just think you know you created that situation. Right? Like, you don’t discipline. You don’t correct them, and you’re surprised that they act like little terrorists. That’s you’re responsible for creating the situation in which they live. You’re not responsible for their actions. They are. But you are responsible for dealing with their actions and for correcting them.
And here, David is not just the father, but he is the judge. He is the supreme judge in Israel. And when a crime of this magnitude is committed, he has a duty to act and to punish Amnon. And instead he just sits on his hands and is angry. He stews. This is dangerous, first of all, in our own hearts, to stew on things because it causes bitterness. It doesn’t actually accomplish anything to just sit with your anger. It just makes you bitter. And out in the world to sit on your hands when you have a duty to act is the seedbed of chaos. David takes action here against Amnon, all of the tragic things that happen in the next five, six, seven chapters don’t happen. David could have cut it off at the pass. He wouldn’t have saved his daughter, wouldn’t have saved her from what had happened, but he could punish Amnon here and save all of the negative consequences for the kingdom, but he doesn’t do it.
Paul says, Don’t let the sun go down on your anger. And we think about that being about forgiveness. And it largely, that is the right application of that text to forgive things. But anger can and at times very much should be a motivation to righteous action. Here David should have punished Amnon, this wicked son and wicked servant to the king. And instead, he just sits and is angry and watches disaster unfold before him.
But so far in this sermon, we’ve done what most of the other characters in this chapter do. We haven’t listened to Tamar. Amnon doesn’t listen to her pleas to reconsider his actions either before or after the rape. David doesn’t listen to her case. And even Absalom, who is furious with his brother and does take action, not good action, but action, he doesn’t seem to actually be listening to her. We see that in verse 20. 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 it to heart. So Tamar lived, a desolate woman, in her brother Absalom’s house. Verse 20. Now Absalom spoke to Amnon neither good nor bad, for Absalom hated Amnon because he had violated his sister Tamar. Absalom is angry, as he should be, about what’s happened to his sister, but he doesn’t actually seem focused on trying to help her. He’s just focused on getting revenge, and that’s what will unfold as we look at it next week.
In verses seven through 11, we find Tamar hard at work, obeying her father, kindly serving her supposedly ill brother, making him cakes and bringing them to him. David said to Tamar, verse seven, 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. She took the pan and emptied it out before him, but he refused to eat. And Amnon said, send everyone out 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. When she brought them near him to eat, he took hold of her and said to her, come, lie with me, my sister.
When she’s seized, she doesn’t have a defense. She’s a woman. She’s weaker than he is. I don’t remember who I was listening to recently, but they observed, you know, we our society kicks against the idea of a male dominated world. But in a world where men are stronger than women, which is the world all the time, the world is going to be dominated by men, and it’s a question of will that domination be used to take advantage of women or to serve? And Amnon is bent on taking advantage of Tamar.
All she has left to defend herself are words. She has no recourse. The servants have all been sent out. They she has no way to cry for help. All she has are her words to him. So let’s listen to her plea. Verse 12, she says, No, my brother. Do not violate me. And that word violate could also be translated humiliate. He would be bringing great shame upon her. And in those passages in Leviticus 18, there’s a punishment for the man. There’s also a recognition that even though she wouldn’t be at fault, there would be a great deal of shame brought upon her. He would be humiliating her and in a way essentially taking away her future. Because if she’s been violated by him, then no other man in Israel is going to want to have her for a wife. So he is, for a moment of his own pleasure, robbing her entire future. He’s humiliating her. He’s bringing her low.
As we talked about briefly earlier, she said that this is not a thing to be done in Israel. It would be an outrage. And as she says these words structurally between verses one and twenty two, these are like the center of if the author’s making an argument, these verses, her pleas in verses twelve and thirteen and then down in verse 16, these are like the center of the argument. This is what the author wants us to focus on. He wants us to hear her out, and she says, This is not the sort of thing that ought to be done. And when you think of your sin, do you think in those terms? An outrageous thing, a thing that should not be done among the people of God. Is that how you view your sin? Or do you use pet language like a lust issue or an anger problem? Or do you see your sin? Like, Tamar sees this sin as an affront to God and to His people.
In verse 13, Tamar asks the most heartbreaking question. As for me, where could I carry my shame? Where could I carry my shame? I just said we tend to think that if you can’t help it, if you didn’t do anything wrong, then you don’t need to have any shame. Like, you shouldn’t be ashamed of that. But the Bible has a category for shame that is born not from our own sin, but from things that have been done to us. And I wonder if any of you are carrying that kind of shame this morning.
Amnon closes his ears to her cry, and he violates her, and then he compounds his crime. We see that when it says he hates her in verse 15. Amnon hated her with a very great hatred, so the hatred with which he hated her was greater than the love with which he loved her. And Amnon said to her, get up. Go. That’s just two words in Hebrew. It’s like, up, out. But she said to him, no, my brother, for this wrong in sending me away is greater than the other that you did to me. And I think this is tied to what she said earlier in verse 13, that if you would just speak to the king first, he would give me to you as a wife. Even though that was prohibited by law, we see that David is exceptionally indulgent of his children. He’ll let them do basically whatever if they just ask him.
And so she’s saying, don’t rape me like this. Don’t treat me as nothing. Ask our father and he’ll give me to you as a wife and then at least I will not be as humiliated and ashamed and brought low before everyone. But he won’t do that. He’s not interested. Again, he’s not interested in what’s good for her. He’s not motivated by love. She says, This wrong in sending me away, sending me essentially to be a desolate woman, it says in verse 20, for the rest of her life because of what he’s done. He sends her away to that. He would not listen to her. Verse 16.
When we read stories like this, I think not just in scripture, but people that we know, we talk to them, that’s part of your experience. A fair question is why would God allow such things to happen? And I don’t know. And I think most of the time when we try to answer that question, we create more problems than we solve. I think I don’t know is probably about as good an answer as there is. God, in his wisdom, allows a lot of awful, awful things to happen in this world.
What we can say is what Isaiah 53 says. Jesus joined in that sorrow and in that shame and in that humiliation. When we think of Isaiah 53, we think of all of the that it says about Jesus carrying our sins and carrying our iniquities, carrying the wrong things that we’ve done and the guilt that we have and bearing God’s punishment for those things. And that’s exactly right. Isaiah 53 is full of that. Verse five, He was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace. Back in verse three, it says he was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, as one from whom men hide their faces up out. He was despised, and we esteemed him not we listened to him not.
The Bible doesn’t tell us why God lets things happen like they happened to Tamar, but it does tell us that his response to it is to enter into that pain and that grief right alongside. So that even in our darkest moments, we can know that God is not far. And that He cares. And that He takes that sin so seriously that either the sinner will turn and repent, we should pray for the repentance of sinners, that they would trust in Christ who bore the wrath of God for their sin. Or if they don’t, it will be punished forever in hell. And we have no indication that Amnon ever turns from his sin before Absalom murders him. And so we know that Amnon pays for his sin eternally. Justice is served. Even if in this life it seems like the guilty get away with it, they never actually get away with it. It’s part of the hope of the book of Revelation, is the promise that God’s judgment is coming on sin.
God cares about our pain even more than we do. We’re told in the Psalms, all over the place in the Psalms, that God is a refuge for those who turn to Him. Psalm nine verse nine says, the Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble. And those who know your name put their trust in you, for you, oh Lord, have not forsaken those who seek you.
Sermons are supposed to have one point, but I couldn’t get down to one point. Okay. I think there’s two main things we see as we look at this first part of second Samuel 13. The first is that we have to beware of sin in our own lives because it will destroy us. We’ve been reading Proverbs seven, we get the end of Proverbs seven, it talks about what happens to those who follow the woman folly. The way to her house is the way to shield, the way to death, the grave. And you look at Jonadab, and you look at Amnon, and their way led to death. And David, had he not repented of his many, many sins, too would have gone to death.
But the other thing we see that I think we need to know from second Samuel 13 is that God cares about those who have been humiliated in this life. He cares about the weak and the powerless and those who have been trampled on by others. And we need to hear the promises of scripture that God will be with those who even in those dark times will turn to him because Jesus is not a savior who’s distant from those things. One of my great frustrations sometimes is I hear people talk about the gospel as if it’s a way to get rid of the pain in your life. But Hebrews four tells us that Jesus is able to sympathize with us in our weaknesses. I think we could say He’s able to sympathize with us and empathize with us in our humiliation. He’s happy to join us there.
Let’s pray. Father, As I pray that you would help us to be at a church that is welcome and open and sensitive to those who have experienced that kind of pain and shame and humiliation. And, Lord, would you help us to be watchful over our own lives, to hate our sin as you hate our sin so that we would not be those who perpetuate such humiliation and devastation against others? Lord, you hate sin not just because of it of the fact that it affronts you and your holiness, but because of the havoc that it wreaks against your creatures, against your people that you love. Lord, help us to hate sin that same way and to comfort those who have been wounded. We ask these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
