Hey friends and welcome back to the daily Bible study on this great Wednesday.
We turn to Genesis chapter 18 and as we mentioned yesterday we’re going to be
talking about Abraham and Sarah,
God’s covenant with them,
and now we’re going to shift gears
as we look to Sodom.
Yeah, we’re going to try and cover some ground today and tomorrow.
These are stories you’re familiar with.
They’re really,
they show up in surprising places throughout the rest of the Old Testament
and in the New Testament.
And Sodom and Gomorrah really becomes kind of code word in the Bible for God’s judgment.
I mean, all the way through even the Gospels and into the book of Revelation,
Sodom and Gomorrah become synonymous with a place of wickedness being judged and being destroyed.
And there are some parallels in this story to the Noah story.
God sees wickedness.
God punishes it from the sky.
It rains fire in this case,
not flood.
It’s more localized, but we’ve seen this kind of thing before,
but we see it in a very specific way here.
So essentially,
to get into the story,
these three men that we saw yesterday visit Abraham
and that he welcomes and treats with great hospitality,
they pronounce again the covenant
that Sarah will have a son.
And they mentioned in the conversation that they’re off to Sodom
because the cry
of the cry has gone up against Sodom.
So verse 20 here,
the Lord said, “How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah
and how grave their sin.
I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me.
If not, I will know.”
So the men returned from there and went towards Sodom while Abraham remained standing before the Lord.
This is a very interesting part of the story,
this part that comes next.
Abraham and God essentially bargain.
Michael, we just had the pie auction and there is that kind of sense in this text of a back and forth.
And we won’t read it all for you,
but he starts with 50.
Abraham says, “God,
if there’s 50 righteous people,
would you lose?
Would you forfeit a whole entire city and not save the 50 righteous?
Aren’t 50 righteous people worthy of saving the city?”
And God says, “For 50, I would save it.”
And it continues in this kind of bargaining pattern.
Yeah, which let’s just sort of pause here and reflect on the whole setup of this story, right?
Because
now you have
Abraham knowing who he’s talking to,
talking to the Lord here,
and you have Abraham with enough guts to be willing to begin negotiating with God,
standing on a weird side of the fence,
Clint.
I mean, you wouldn’t expect in this scenario that Abraham’s the one arguing for mercy.
And yet that’s exactly what’s happening.
God is saying in light of the injustice,
there needs to be destruction.
There needs to be a kind of reckoning.
Once again, as we’ve seen earlier in this book already.
But yet here, Abraham’s going to stand in the gap,
and he’s going to begin to negotiate with God.
The fact that
God is here talking with Abraham while over here in this story,
we have the reality of what’s happening in some sort of this investigative mission
is really interesting.
In fact, we haven’t seen anything quite like this in the book
thus far.
That assumption that we saw in the very beginning of this section here,
with the idea that God’s going to go look and see as if God doesn’t know,
is a very interesting personification,
that God is going to actually have boots on the ground to use that language,
and is going to see and is going to respond to what is seen in that place, is a very,
you know, a rich form of storytelling.
It’s a really anthropological,
understandable kind of way of reckoning with God,
engaging with humanity, even with humanity at its worst.
And then we can see,
as this conversation ensues between God and Abraham,
that God is flexible enough in this story to be changed at some level.
For God to be willing to engage in the back and forth is unto itself
a very kind of unique
revelation of God in scripture.
We don’t see this kind of thing very often.
And so I think that’s what makes this story certainly interesting.
Other aspects of the story,
I think, have caught people’s attention,
specifically what are the people in Sodom doing and how bad is it,
and all of these kinds of things,
which have gotten a lot of time and attention.
But if you look at how this story is describing God,
Clint, I see a lot of interesting footholds here.
We tend to focus on the destructive part of the city,
both whether or not it’s deserved and why it’s deserved and the aftermath of how it happens.
But there’s a wonderful—even with that set as the backdrop to this story,
it’s a very serious backdrop,
judgment and condemnation and destruction.
But even with that backdrop,
there’s a playfulness to this text that I think is very interesting.
So Abraham starts out with,
“Well, if there’s 50 people,
you wouldn’t do that.
You wouldn’t kill 50 people who don’t deserve it.
You’re the God who preserves righteousness.”
We saw that in Noah.
And God says, “Okay, you’re right.
For 50, I would save the city.”
And then Abraham says,
“Well, you know,
what about if there were just five less?
What if there’s 45?
I mean, you’re not going to do that for five people,
and you almost have a kind of—
there’s a child-likeness to this when your kid is with you at the grocery store
bargaining for sugared cereal,
or what if I took the garbage out for five days?
What if it was only three—you know,
there’s that kind of back and forth in this text as—and
Abraham speaks respectfully, but he doesn’t speak fearfully.
We don’t get any sense in this text that God is offended by this.
But God is also—the conclusion is almost foregone.
They get down to 10,
and he says, “Suppose 10 are there.”
And God answered, “For the sake of 10,
I will not destroy it.”
And the Lord went on his way.
Now, it could be that Abraham is conscious that Lot is there.
We’re going to see that in the next part of the story.
It could be that Abraham is just simply doing his best to
try and bring deliverance to these cities where he has family.
But the clear implication is part of the function of this story is also how bad Sodom—there
aren’t 10 good people between the two cities.
God knows who is righteous.
God knows that number,
and it is less than 10—in fact,
presumably in the context of the story,
probably zero.
Yeah, I need to be very careful here.
Because certainly, as we come to these scriptures,
we see in them revelation.
We see the stories of the family of faith that have been handed down carefully over
centuries,
thousands of years.
That said,
there’s a real sense as you read the story,
you get the mythic kind of sense
here in this story.
Number one,
the fact that you have Abraham arguing with God is so unique in the scriptures.
You don’t see this kind of negotiation in every book.
The idea that Abraham is doing this,
and when we know that this is cast within a culture where
the power of negotiation and the ability to outwit and this very built-in
kind of raising up of cleverness is clearly in mind here,
right?
And then now as we would move into the second part of the story—and I don’t know how far we’re
going to get here today,
but as we look to the second part of the story and we see the ubiquity,
I mean, just the sheer universality of depravity in this place as the text goes out of its way to
describe, is once again a nod to the idea that there’s lessons being taught here.
There’s a mythic kind of—I’m not going to use the word metaphor,
but there is a symbolic kind of
lesson happening here, which does speak to some of the narrative elements we had back in the Noah text,
and you remember the world is filled with corruption and violence.
Here we see a version of that,
that the entire city—I mean,
it’s a little hard to reckon with that
there would not be a single individual in the city other than Lot who wouldn’t be found with
some measure of morality or righteousness,
yet this story is making it clear that things are
way out of whack in this place,
and so we begin to see,
you know, there’s some lessons being taught
here.
My point is, let’s not rush to,
you know, figuring out the intricate details,
which from our distance we’re not going to know perfectly,
but rather let’s look for what’s being taught here,
as was intended, I think, by the authors.
Yeah, and I think we’ll probably get into most of that tomorrow,
but it is to say that
you will notice as we go through this story tomorrow,
the scripture unambiguously tells the tale of a place that echoes the pronouncement earlier in
Genesis, that their intentions were evil,
that their hearts were fallen,
and that they were
intent on doing the wrong thing all the time.
The nature of that wrong thing,
there’s an ongoing discussion that revolves around exactly what is the final offense,
but we’ll cover that tomorrow,
and we will get into that.
But I would
suggest now, and I’ll repeat it tomorrow,
trying to figure out
the individual sin of the story doesn’t take into account that God has already,
in the background of the story we just read,
clearly decided that there’s not righteousness.
It’s wrong to read this story and say,
“Oh, then the next story they do X, Y, or Z,
and God destroys them.” The punishment that is going to be visited upon them has already been
talked about, it’s already been planned,
and the clear assumption from scripture is that
Sodom and Gomorrah deserve it.
And we can talk more about the evidence that they deserve it in the next story,
but I don’t want to jump ahead,
but it’s easy to get distracted in this story.
The story has interesting implications as well for—the story,
the part we’ve read,
not the part that we’re going to get to tomorrow,
has interesting implications for our understanding
of God’s justice, I think,
because we in modern Western Christianity have for many, many years
emphasized the goodness, grace,
love of God, which I think is a good and helpful emphasis.
We see that in the gospel of Jesus Christ,
certainly in his care for the lost and the least.
What we see here,
though, is once again a God who stands for what is right,
what is a right way of being in the world.
And I think one of the reasons why this city has gone down in history as the exemplar of the worst
possible kind of city is because it stands on the farthest edges outside of the communicated plan
that God has given for the world,
the idea of hospitality and order.
We’re actually going to
see that theme tomorrow revisit again,
so you’ll hear that as Lot hosts these two men.
Yet the city that they go into not only does not offer them hospitality,
it actually seeks them
out to do harm.
And that kind of world,
one which was called in Noah’s narrative a violent world,
that’s the very kind of world that stands in opposition to the kind of nurturing, growing,
and healthy world that God created in the very beginning of this book.
The point I want to make
here is what we’re learning in a story like this,
even though we haven’t had the formal distribution
or codification of the law yet,
that’s going to happen in Exodus,
what we do have here is a kind
of natural law, a law that God expects of human behavior and a law that God is a righteous judge
does provide some form of adjudication for.
If you stand outside of this way,
this kind of basic
ordering that God made for the universe,
you stand on the outside of God’s righteousness.
And I think that that does teach us something.
Though reformed people have historically been a little suspicious
of natural law and natural theology in some of its forms,
I think we see a God who does stand for
justice here.
And there is an understanding of what just is,
even without the law yet being
pronounced, which I think is worth noting in a story like this.
And also, I think it’s worth
remembering in all of the Genesis stories,
really in all of the Old Testament,
that this is a thoroughly Jewish story.
These are the Hebrew scriptures.
These are the sacred text
of the people of Israel.
And therefore, they reflect,
in many instances, the biases and the
prejudices of the people of Israel,
who firmly believe Sodom and Gomorrah were places full of
wickedness that deserved to be destroyed.
And so as they tell the story,
they’re clearly going to
highlight those details that reinforce that idea.
We’ve already seen some of that.
We’ll see more of
it immediately after this story,
a brief story about the origins of the Moabites.
There’s a lot going on here, but some of it is what it looks like through the lens of the people of a particular
place, that place being Israel in this case.
All right.
Well, I think that’s probably about
what we have for you today.
Friends, thanks for being with us.
Of course, we hope you’re going to
see us.
Number one, for the conversation about strange Thanksgiving foods at the beginning tomorrow.
And then following that,
we’ll jump into part two of this story,
which I think isn’t easy,
Clint, but it does help provide some narrative conclusion to where we’ve been.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, there’ll be some disturbing
parts of the text tomorrow,
but we’ll work our way through them.
All right.
See you tomorrow.