Good evening, and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Genesis.  Tonight is study #19 in Genesis 38, and we will be reading Genesis 38:27-30:

And it came to pass in the time of her travail, that, behold, twins were in her womb. And it came to pass, when she travailed, that the one put out his hand: and the midwife took and bound upon his hand a scarlet thread, saying, This came out first. And it came to pass, as he drew back his hand, that, behold, his brother came out: and she said, How hast thou broken forth? this breach be upon thee: therefore his name was called Pharez. And afterward came out his brother, that had the scarlet thread upon his hand: and his name was called Zarah.

I will stop reading there.  Here, we are given another picture of a woman in travail, and we saw back in Genesis 35 that Rachel experienced travail, as it says in Genesis 35:15-16:

And Jacob called the name of the place where God spake with him, Bethel. And they journeyed from Bethel; and there was but a little way to come to Ephrath: and Rachel travailed, and she had hard labour.

It is explained in verse 19 that Ephrath is Bethlehem, and Bethlehem means “house of bread.”  So they came out of Bethel, the house of God, and we know that the church is called the house of God.  And there was just a little way to go to Ephrath, which would identify with “fruitfulness,” and it is the same idea as Bethlehem, the “house of bread.”

Then Rachel travailed and had hard labour, and the word “labour” is the same Hebrew word as “travail.”  Then it says in Genesis 35:17-19:

And it came to pass, when she was in hard labour, that the midwife said unto her, Fear not; thou shalt have this son also. And it came to pass, as her soul was in departing, (for she died) that she called his name Benoni: but his father called him Benjamin. And Rachel died, and was buried in the way to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem.

If you recall, we discussed the spiritual situation being a picture of coming out of the church and on the way to “fruitfulness” and the “house of bread,” because when God’s people came out of the congregations, we entered into the Latter Rain when God was pouring out the Holy Spirit a second time, saving the great multitude, and making His people to be fruitful, and He provided an abundance of “bread,” the spiritual truths coming forth from the Bible that had been previously sealed up.

And again, this whole passage turns on that statement of Judah, “Let her be burnt,” because that identifies with Judgment Day and the wrath of God.  We have already talked about this, but I will mention it again because it is such a tremendous truth and because going over something helps us to learn.  But the “pledge,” or the “ar-aw-bone',”  saved Tamar from burning, and it saved her twin sons from burning.  And that pledge identifies with the Holy Spirit that God places within us upon salvation, and because we have this pledge we will not die and be burned up in the Day of Judgment.  Instead we will be pronounced righteous and endure this time period.

Again, we see that Tamar had conceived prior to Judah saying, “Let her by burnt,” or prior to Judgment Day, so that conception would identify with the Great Tribulation when God saved the great multitude.  To “be conceived” means that children have come to life.  It means they already have life although they are not yet born.  You cannot see them, and that ties in with our understanding of what God has done in saving the great multitude out of Great Tribulation.  They were spiritually conceived, or born again, and yet they were not delivered, in a sense.  They are not brought forth because of the way God has arranged things.  Or we could look at it another way.  The Latter Rain fell and it produced all the fruit of the final harvest (of souls), and then the Latter Rain stopped falling at the close of the Great Tribulation, and then Judgment Day began on May 21, 2011, and there was no more rain.  But after the rain, in the time of judgment, there is the harvesting of the fruit, or the gathering in of the fruit, as we send forth the Word of God at Christ’s command, “Feed my sheep,” and the saints are thereby judging the world while the elect are gathered together unto Him, as it says in 2Thessalonians 2:1.  And this is what is taking place.  From the four corners of the earth, the elect will come to God.  This is what is in view in Matthew 24:29-30:

Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken: And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

We understand the “clouds” to represent the commandments of God, and we will “see” Christ being revealed to our understanding in His Word. Then it says in Matthew 24:31:

And he shall send his angels…

And when is this happening?  It is happening “immediately after the tribulation.”  And God’s people are the “angels,” or “messengers.”  Again it says in Matthew 24:31:

And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet…

It happened on May 21, 2011, Judgment Day.  Remember that the Apostle John heard the sound of a great trumpet in Revelation 1:10-11:

I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, Saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last…

Whose voice did John hear as a trumpet?  Who is the Alpha and Omega?  It is the Lord Jesus Christ.  His voice is the great sound of the trumpet. 

Returning to our verse, it says in Matthew 24:31:

And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet…

He sends them with the “voice of Christ,” or the Word of God, the Bible, and the truths that the Lord would reveal to the understanding of His people.  Then it goes on to say in Matthew 24:31:

…and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.

You see, the gathering of the elect takes place after the Great Tribulation ends, or in the Day of Judgment.  So we see that this matches up with the historical scenario that is recorded in Genesis 38 regarding Tamar conceiving children (more than one child) prior to the pronouncement, “Let her be burnt.”  Then afterwards, she is pronounced righteous, and she is not burnt, which would relate to Isaiah 24:6: “…therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left.”  The elect are the “few.”  We will go through the fires of hell, or the wrath of God, and we will endure, as it tells us in 1Corinthians 3 of the “gold, silver, precious stones.”  The character of each person is revealed by the fire in the Day of Judgment.  It will reveal who are not truly saved, the “wood, hay stubble,” and they will be burned.  And it will reveal those who are truly saved because the “gold, silver, precious stones” will endure to the end.

Again, it says in Genesis 38:27:

And it came to pass in the time of her travail, that, behold, twins were in her womb.

We do know that the Bible speaks of Judgment Day as a time of travail.  These are very familiar Scriptures in 1Thessalonians 5:2-5:

For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape. But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief. Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness.

That day of “sudden” destruction is a day of “unaware” destruction because of the word used here. So that is one reference, and there is another (reference) in Isaiah 13:6-9:

Howl ye; for the day of JEHOVAH is at hand; it shall come as a destruction from the Almighty. Therefore shall all hands be faint, and every man's heart shall melt: And they shall be afraid: pangs and sorrows shall take hold of them; they shall be in pain as a woman that travaileth: they shall be amazed one at another; their faces shall be as flames. Behold, the day of JEHOVAH cometh…

This idea is not foreign to the Bible.  It is clearly laid out in these two places.

So Tamar is in travail in the Day of Judgment, and she brings forth children.  She was very fruitful, and she brought forth not one child but two, and that “double portion” would identify with the right of the firstborn to receive the greater inheritance.

There are other verses that are very interesting in Micah 4, and they give us some specific information about our time in relationship to a woman in travail who gives birth.  It says in Micah 4:9-10:

Now why dost thou cry out aloud? is there no king in thee? is thy counsellor perished? for pangs have taken thee as a woman in travail. Be in pain, and labour to bring forth, O daughter of Zion, like a woman in travail: for now shalt thou go forth out of the city, and thou shalt dwell in the field, and thou shalt go even to Babylon; there shalt thou be delivered; there JEHOVAH shall redeem thee from the hand of thine enemies.

Can you see why this is such a special passage?  They are such revealing verses.  Again, it says in Micah 4:10:

Be in pain, and labour to bring forth, O daughter of Zion…

The daughter of Zion is the same as Jerusalem, and depending on the context it can point to the corporate church or the eternal church.  Here, I believe it is the eternal church, the elect.  Again, it says in Micah 4:10

Be in pain, and labour to bring forth, O daughter of Zion, like a woman in travail: for now shalt thou go forth out of the city, and thou shalt dwell in the field…

Which city are the elect, the daughter of Zion, to go forth from?  We have learned the answer in this time of the end, as God commanded His people to go out of Jerusalem, or Judaea: “Then let them which are in Judaea flee to the mountains; and let them which are in the midst of it depart out.”  We left the corporate church.  That is what is in view here with this woman in travail.  She is with child, and she was to go forth out of the church and dwell in the “field.”  What is the field?  The Bible tells us as Christ explained in the parable of the sower: “The field is the world.”  That is exactly what God commanded His people to do.  We were to flee to the mountains and depart out of Jerusalem.  We were to leave the church and go out into the world, and we were to continue to worship God from the location of the nations, wherever we happened to be in the world.  That is where we were to worship and serve God during that second part of the Great Tribulation.  Then it says in Micah 4:10:

… and thou shalt go even to Babylon…

God has tied it to the command that is found so often in the book of Jeremiah where He commanded the Jews to leave Jerusalem and the nation of Judah and go to Babylon.  He even said that those who went were likened to “good figs,” or “good fruit,” and those who would not go were “vile figs,” or “evil figs.”  You can read that in Jeremiah 24. 

And this fits perfectly with our understanding of what God did in the Scriptures with His command to depart out of Judea, in the New Testament.  And remember that Judea or Israel would become “a proverb,” as the Bible tells us.  Especially in the book of Jeremiah there was the commandment to go into Babylon, or the world.  Both the field and Babylon represent the world.  It goes on to say in Micah 4:10:

… there shalt thou be delivered; there JEHOVAH shall redeem thee from the hand of thine enemies.

The word “delivered” here has everything to do with salvation, as we see in Psalm 56:13:

For thou hast delivered my soul from death: wilt not thou deliver my feet from falling, that I may walk before God in the light of the living?

We also read in Psalm 86:13:

For great is thy mercy toward me: and thou hast delivered my soul from the lowest hell.

Then it says in Ezekiel 33:9:

Nevertheless, if thou warn the wicked of his way to turn from it; if he do not turn from his way, he shall die in his iniquity; but thou hast delivered thy soul.

To have your soul delivered is salvation.  So the woman, “the daughter of Zion,” is not an actual woman, but it is a figure of speech representing God’s true people.  She will leave the city (the churches), and she will go to the field, or Babylon, and she would be delivered there.

And what is our current understanding?  God saved the great multitude, the greatest number in human history over the whole course of time that has transpired in this world.  If you could count all those saved in all past generations, they would not equal the number the Lord saved in the short period of Latter Rain, the period of about seventeen years during the second part of the Great Tribulation.  He saved them mightily and quickly, and a great number of them (and this is some speculation) would have been very young children at the time of their salvation.  And all would have been “young” spiritually.  Then the Lord brought us into Judgment Day, a prolonged period that biblical evidence points to being 22 actual years, or 23 inclusive years.  And over the course of that time He will bring His people forth.  That is, Christ will gather them using His elect to reap the harvest of the Latter Rain, the final harvest of the great multitude.  And that will be the deliverance of not just a child, but of children, to indicate additional fruitfulness of the great multitude.

Lord willing, when we get together in our next study we are going to look at the binding of the scarlet thread upon the hand of the child who would be called Zarah.  We will look at some of the words found there, like “bind” and “scarlet.”  Then we will look at the names of these two boys because each name is full of meaning that we could talk about a long time, as far as the number of verses involved and the information these verses give us.  We will try to find out as much as we can.  As I said earlier, we will not learn everything, but we will have a better understanding as we search these things out.