I have a seminary professor who likes to shock her students at the beginning of the semester by saying the reason she loves teaching the Old Testament so much is because of all the sex and violence in it.

After the students pick their jaws up off the ground, open the Bible and begin reading, we started to see the truth in her controversial statement.

We also began to wonder, “Why have we never heard some of these stories before?”

For example, I have sat through literally thousands of sermons in my lifetime, but never once have I heard a preacher say “Turn with me today to Genesis 38. We are going to look at the story of Judah and Tamar.”

I can’t say I blame them, for if a preacher were to teach this story exactly as it appeared in the Bible, he would have to give the sermon a PG-13 rating, at the very least.

Regardless of how high you hold the Bible, Judah and Tamar is not a story for Vacation Bible School.

I’ll let you read the passage and draw your own conclusions. But be careful not to over-spiritualize the story or try to pretend it isn’t saying what it is actually saying.

Sex is part of the story, as are intrigue, deception, prostitution and violence. Above all else are guilt and shame. And at the end of the story, when Tamar gives birth to twin sons by Judah, her father-in-law, it seems redemption is nowhere to be found.

Christians believe the Bible is God’s very word. We use terms like “living” and “breathing” to describe the power it has to transform our lives. And I believe this is completely true.

I also, however, have been around long enough to know most things that are living and breathing can often be messy. Things that live and breathe don’t always behave the way we want them to, and the Bible is no exception.

When we want to raise our fists in triumphal victory, Paul tells us “God chose the weak things to shame the strong.” When we claim that God wants us to be wealthy, Jesus tells us that “blessed are the poor.”

Some Christians believe that God hates war, yet are dumbfounded when he commands the slaughter of entire nations in the book of Joshua.

Other Christians believe God approves just wars. But what do they do when Jesus tells us to “love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us?”

We want our Bible stories to be neat and tidy, yet we often get stories like that of Judah and Tamar, and are left scratching our heads wondering, “What was God thinking?”

Like I said, the Bible rarely behaves the way we want it.

But where living and breathing things can be messy, they can also be incredibly redemptive in surprising ways.

One of the twins Tamar gave birth to was an ancestor of David, whose bloodline gave us Jesus. Because of this, Tamar joined Rahab the prostitute, Ruth the outsider, Bathsheba the one taken advantage of, and Mary the Virgin as the only women listed in the genealogy of our Savior.

God can take a very complicated situation, such as the one in which Tamar found herself, and create an incredibly epic story — one that begins with sex and violence and ends with the salvation of the entire world.

If this is how God works, I’ll take messy and complicated over neat and tidy any day.