Jeremy Duncan: God has infinite power, inexhaustible ability, limitless capacity, and that means the only thing that could ever be interesting to God about power would be to give it away. And that is what we call love. The intentional surrender of a piece of ourselves to another for the possibility of relationship. Today though, we are still with Abraham and Sarah. And we have two, shall we say, heavy stories to finish off this series.
Today, it is Sodom and Gomorrah. Next week, it is the sacrifice of Isaac. So we are gonna go out with a bang here, and that means we're gonna dive straight into things. I do wanna say last week, Scott's message was beautiful. If you missed that, please check that out in the archives.
You can find it on our website. But first, let's pray. God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as we open these ancient stories once again, we ask that you would in turn open us. Open our hearts to trust your goodness. Open our minds to wisdom that is larger than we expect to find.
Open our imaginations to the possibilities that you are always more gracious, more patient, more faithful than we expect you to be. And so as we read even hard stories and sit with complicated texts, You give us courage to tell the truth about ourselves, about our frailty and our fear and our longing for things to be made right in the world. Then, would you give us the grace to see that you are already at work within us, calling us toward new steps even today. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.
We're gonna jump straight in today because today we have reached one of the more infamous stories in the entire Abrahamic tradition. One that even if you're not particularly familiar with the Bible, you have probably at least heard of. A story that deserves a lot more than to simply blame the outcome on our gay neighbors because that is not at all an honest biblical reading of what this story is all about. So today, it's Sodom and Gomorrah and we will cover righteous credit, negotiation tactics, the sin of Sodom, and hidden grace. But first, a quick throwback to last week Because chapter 15 is in some ways summed up by this famous line that we read near the start of the chapter.
It says this, Abraham believed the Lord and it was credited to him as righteousness. Now, that line is certainly about Abraham. In fact, picks up on that in the New Testament and makes it a central pillar of his theology. Belief, although probably better said here, trust, trust in God is where our righteousness comes from. So, is not just good behavior that saves us.
It's trust in. It's actually walking through life along the path of Jesus, trusting ourselves to God along the way. That is what heals us and makes us whole. But, if we're to take that line at face value in the story in Hebrew, what we find is that the object of this righteousness is actually pretty ambiguous. Now, ironically, we're gonna run into another verse just like this today.
That's foreshadowing, by the way. But, what this means is that you can read this line in chapter 15 as if it intends, Abraham trusted God, and that trust was then credited back to Abraham as his righteousness. That's how Paul reads it. But, it could also be Abraham trusted God, and therefore, Abraham credited God with righteousness. Now, that might sound odd, but all that would mean is that Abraham is saying something more like, I trust you God because you are righteous.
Or, maybe we could say it this way, Abraham's trust is grounded in the goodness of God. Now, if you work that out, you think through the implications, I think they're basically saying the same thing anyway. So, not really suggesting anything all that radical here. But, the reason I like that as a thought experiment is that sometimes I know that my belief, my faith, my trust can feel very fickle. And so to think that my rightness before God depends on my ability to get up in the morning and believe things that sometimes honestly feel quite fragile to me.
Sometimes that doesn't feel like enough for me. And yet, if I can shift that story, even just a degree or two, to remind myself that my faith is not in my ability to believe the right things, but simply to trust that God is the one who is good, that God is indeed righteous, and that the gracious divine will carry the day even when my beliefs can't, all of a sudden my faith starts to feel more durable. It's no longer faith in my ability to believe well. And, it becomes trust that God will bring me all the way back home. And, that conviction that God is righteous and that God is actually worthy of my trust, I think that is gonna help us as we move through our story today.
So, the heart of our story comes in chapter 19, but we need to back things up a little bit to set the stage. And so, this is Genesis chapter 18 starting in verse one. The Lord appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. Abraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby. And, when he saw them, he hurried to the entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed low to the ground.
Now, Abraham goes on to get them some bread and some water. He prepares a calf for them to eat. He brings them curds and milk. Basically, he just goes overboard welcoming these men who are angels or maybe messengers or according to the text at least, maybe even the Lord God's self. It's all a little fuzzy here.
That's because this is a proto example of something called the angel of Yahweh. The angel is this representative that shows up throughout the Hebrew scriptures as a direct stand in for God. Now, for today, what we need to understand is that this is as close as we're gonna get anywhere in the Old Testament to God showing up in person in the story. And, that is like a big red flashing neon sign that is telling us, pay attention, this is important. And what happens is they're going to make the promise to Abraham and Sarah that in their old age, they will have a child.
It's a continuation of that promise that we read in week one that they will birth the story that will bless the world. And, we tackled that promise in a series called Joy. The sermon was titled the Joy in Simplicity. You can check that out. We also tackled the fallout of that promise.
As Abraham and Sarah then proceed to mistreat an enslaved woman to make that promise happen on their timeline. That was in a series called Stories of Shadow. That sermon was called Hagar. You can find both of those in our archives on the website to flesh out the full Abraham and Sarah story. For today, what we wanna do is follow along with these three messengers.
Because next we read that as they're about to leave Abraham, God says to him, the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I'm gonna need to go down and see for myself if everything is as bad as everyone says. Couple things here. We've already seen a bit of foreshadowing in this story. Right? It's told us these towns are bad news.
When Lot chose the plains to the East, leaving Abraham the task of venturing into the West, the writer let us know, the path of least resistance is not always good news. Remember, was that little hint in chapter 13 to say that Lot may have chosen what seemed good, but that path was leading somewhere dark. Second, we've got a little play on the story of Babel here. In that story, humans want to build this tower that's gonna reach to God, and God says, hey, somebody told me the humans are building this huge tower. I'm gonna go down and I'm gonna see it for myself.
Now, the joke here is that we think we can build a tower to reach the heavens, and the truth is it's not even big enough to be seen from the heavens. God has to come down and check it out. Here, we've got God saying, I heard bad things about Sodom. Maybe I'll go see what's up. For the record, kids.
Any of you who are still in the room, you didn't go downstairs. That's fine. Just listen up. When you're fighting with your sister in the back seat and your mom says, don't make me come back there. I will turn this car around right now.
Just know she got that from God. Don't test her. But maybe more importantly here, what we are seeing is a lot of anthropomorphization of God in this story. God is showing up as a man. God is talking to Abraham.
We're gonna see God acting as if God needs to pop in to see things for God's self. And in a minute, we're gonna see God debating with Abraham in a second. What this is doing is it's bringing this story down to our level. It's telling us this isn't really a story about God. This is a story about us.
On our level, it's about how we understand, how we interact with the divine. You could almost say this story is more about our anthropology than it is our theology. And, we're gonna see that even in the next verse because what we read is that the men turned away and went towards Sodom, but Abraham remained standing before the Lord. Now, you recall, I told you we were gonna come across another ambiguous text today. This this is it.
Because this phrase, Abraham remained standing before the Lord, it's actually better translated the opposite, that the Lord remained standing before Abraham. And, the problem with that is that is a Hebrew idiom. To remain standing before someone means that you are in the position of a student. You are there to learn something from them. That implication tends to make bible translators a little uncomfortable, so they literally just flip the scene for us in English.
And yet, it seems to miss something really important. Perhaps not that God is here to learn something from Abraham, but certainly, God seems to want to listen for Abraham's response here. It's almost as if God takes the passive posture, the student's posture in the story to say, your move Abraham. Because this is what we read. Then Abraham approached God and said, will you really sweep away the righteous with the wicked?
What if there's 50 people that are righteous in that city? Would you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of those 50? Far be it from you to do such a thing to kill the righteous and the wicked treating them all alike. Will not the judge of all the earth do what is right? Now, keep reading here.
Abraham wins this one. So he's like, okay, I'm gonna push a bit farther. He keeps negotiating. If 50 is enough, what about 45 God? Let's say 40 or 30 or 20.
I mean, if we're all the way down to 20, why not 10? Would you not spare the city for just 10 good people? And God says, sure. Why not? Do you remember that conversation about that possible reading of Abraham crediting righteousness to God?
Lord, I trust you because you are good. That feels very much like what Abraham is calling on right now. Will you not do what is right? Okay. So here's a question.
Can we really negotiate with God? Can we change God's mind with some good logic? Can we appeal to God's ego to get a little bit of what we want from the divine? Well, I think theologically, we'd have to say no. But again, this story is about something different.
The divine is not subject to the whims of our rhetorical skill, but within the context of a story where God has to come down to see and expect son personally, I think this makes a lot of sense. God is inviting Abraham to make his case precisely so that God can make God's point to Abraham. Nahum Sarna is a very well regarded Jewish scholar who's written a lot about the story of Abraham, and in particular this story here. But he says something really significant. He writes, this story is important because this God is universal and omnipotent.
And humankind needs assurances that this almighty power is not going to be indiscriminately applied. That this God is not capricious like all the other gods. And Sarna's point here is that the Yahweh God of Genesis is absolutely unlike any previous conception of deity. This God is not localized, not hemmed in by mountains or rivers, but that also means this God is inescapable. And this God is invested in all people, though ultimately for the good of all people.
That's the basis of God's promise to Abraham in chapter 12, but that also means this God is inevitable. And, the problem with that kind of God, in a world that is dominated by the imagination of petty and jealous gods, is that a truly omnipotent deity that turns out to be evil is well, that's terrifying. You can't run from this kind of god. You can't hide from this kind of God. You can't call on a bigger God to defend you from this kind of God.
You are completely at the mercy of a God who is as Abraham says, judge of all the earth. And so for Sarnah, the reason the Hebrews told this story, the reason God lets Abraham, even invites Abraham to negotiate the terms is not because the game was ever up for grabs. It's because this God wants Abraham to know, wants us as readers to know that the primary characteristic of this God is not power. It is responsiveness. Let's talk theology for a second.
I think there's a lot that John Calvin got right. I actually think he was quite brilliant, to be fair. One of the things I am convinced he got wrong was grounding all of histology in the sovereignty of God. Now, yes. God can do whatever God wants.
That's kind of the point of being God. But my contention is that power is the least fascinating thing about God to God. See, we think power is important because every time we get a little bit of it, oh, we like that. We become enamored with it, and we think we need more of it. But God has infinite power, inexhaustible ability, limitless capacity, and that means the only thing that could ever be interesting to God about power would be to give it away.
And that is what we call love. The intentional surrender of a piece of ourselves to another for the possibility of relationship. And if that's true, then this story is not just about God changing God's mind, it's about God patiently standing before Abraham, letting Abraham discover for himself exactly who this God is. And for me, the fact that this God would do this, that God would countenance these kind of questions, none of this is an abigation of God's power. It is for my money anyway, where we actually see what divine power looks like.
It looks like responsive love. See, I'll say this. There are questions your life right now that you need to ask God. And, there are debates you need to have with your conception of God. And, sometimes, you will need to allow your imagination of that God to crumble and transform in the face of your interrogation.
But that's not because God isn't sovereign. It's because before anything else, God is love. And often, for us to get to love, we have to allow all of our misconceptions of power to slowly fall away. And so here we are. God relents.
And for 10 people, the city will be saved, and yet 10 could not be found. So now we arrive at chapter 19, and the two angels that left Abraham earlier, they arrive at Lot's house. He invites them in. He makes them dinner just as Abraham did, but this time before they'd even gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom, both young and old, surrounded the house. And they called out to Lot, where are the men who came to you tonight?
Bring them out to us so we can have sex with them. Now Lot goes out to negotiate with them. He says, look, don't do this evil thing. I got two daughters. I'll give them to you instead.
Now, I'm gonna argue, even in the context of an ancient story where there is absolutely a lot of misogyny embedded in the story, This moment is still absolutely meant to demonstrate that Lot is losing his moral clarity. The narrative of Sodom is overtaking him. We become what we surround ourselves with. But the men say no. In fact, in verse nine they respond.
They say, who do you think you are? Are you foreigner? We'll do even worse to you now than we had planned to do to them. So they break through the door and the angels strike them blind. And then the angels tell Lot to gather his family, get out of the city, don't even look back.
There's nothing to save here. And then in verse 24, the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah, God overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living, even the vegetation in the land. But as they fled, Lot's wife looked back and she became a pillar of salt. Now, I've already talked about how this story is pretty heavily stylized. But I also want you to know that even within antiquity, a lot of Jewish and Christian writers saw these references here as perhaps symbolic.
Salt has preserving qualities, but salt spread in soil also has a way of ensuring nothing ever grows again. In fact, that is exactly what the Romans did to the ground after they destroyed the Jewish temple. So this may be a way of saying that Lot's wife dies and her line dies with her. Nothing grows from her family tree again. Though to be fair, there is also a strong tradition that says she very literally became a block of salt.
Josephus even claims he saw a salt formation near the Dead Sea that he could have sworn was Lot's wife, so who knows? Similarly though, sulfur is also used as an image of God's anger throughout the Hebrew scriptures. For example, Isaiah 30 says that the breath of God is like a stream of burning sulfur to the wicked. And that's a really interesting image because the breath of God is also famously life to those who are righteous. Right?
God breathes into Adam's nostrils, for example. So in scripture, God's breath is both life and death. Even in that sense that we see throughout the Bible that God's judgment can be either the fire that burns away the impurities leaving us better, or perhaps the fire that consumes us completely if all that we have cultivated is wickedness in our lives. And yet, we're still left with this question, what exactly was the sin of Sodom that drove them to such depths that there would be nothing left to redeem once the fire had burned through? Now, from the story, we can see that all of this wickedness culminates when they try to violently rape these two angelic visitors.
But, truth is, it's probably only the final straw. God had pretty much made up God's mind before the messengers even went down to town. So, I do think it's important that we not jump to conclusions about what this story is about and assume it's not about us. Because the scriptures themselves seem to think this story is not about them, whoever they are. It's very much a warning for how dark turns can lead us to dreadful places.
Here's what I mean. Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom. Listen to the instruction of our God, you people of Gomorrah. The multitude of your sacrifices, what are they to me? Says the Lord, I've had offerings, more than enough of rams and fat of fattened animals.
I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats. Isaiah thinks the sin of Sodom is empty religion. Sacrifice without kindness. Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom. She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned.
They did not help the poor and the needy. Ezekiel, on the other hand, he thinks the sin of Sodom was greed and carelessness for the poor. Among the prophets of Jerusalem, I've seen something horrible. They commit adultery. They live a lie.
They strengthen the hands of evildoers so that not one of them turns from their wickedness. They're all like Sodom to me. Jeremiah thinks the sin of Sodom was adultery and the support of evildoers. They if anyone does not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that town or that home, shake the dust off your feet. Truly, I tell you, it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.
Jesus thinks the sin of Sodom is failing to welcome the stranger with hospitality. Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion. That's Jude, and this one's an interesting one. Because this English translation is doing a lot of work for us here. What the passage really says is that the sin of Sodom was pursuing strange flesh.
That's the phrase in Greek, which by the way is the term heterosarcos, and somewhat ironically here, that is where we get our English word heterosexual from. But what he's talking about here is lusting after different, strange, or in this case, nonhuman angelic flesh. He's talking about lusting after angels. That's the sin of Sodom. Point being, Sodom is not a great place.
The people practice empty religion. They don't care for the poor. They are greedy and selfish. They are unfaithful to each other. They are inhospitable to strangers.
They lust after anything they can find, and they try to sexually assault some angels that happen to wander into town. This is anything but a single issue judgment according to, well, the bible. And if anything, what this laundry list tells us is that Sodom and Gomorrah are intended throughout the scriptures to be an image, a caricature almost of the worst of humanity. Like, these aren't real people. They're comic book villains.
They're scaled up images of all of our failures intended to warn us about what our worst impulses can do to us if we let them. And for me, that does nothing to diminish the seriousness of this story. Actually, honestly, it probably makes it more grim. Because if this tale was just about a few bad people who did a bad thing and met a bad end, well, I could probably pat myself on the back, point the story at someone else, and move on with my day. Which honestly is probably what a lot of us have been taught to do with stories like this.
I mean, what else do you do with a story of fire and brimstone falling on a city of absolute hooligans? But the truth is, this tale is actually about how desperately hard it is to remove yourself from God's grace. Remember what Nehemia Sarna said? One of the scariest ideas in the ancient world was a God that you could not run away from. The gods were vindictive and capricious.
They were temperamental and unpredictable. And yet here was this Yahweh God claiming not just to speak to Abraham, but to be creator for everything and everyone. The big question with that kind of God is what if that kind of God turns on you one day? What do you run to? Who do you turn to for help?
What do you do if that God is not righteous? And so the ancient Hebrews told a story about the worst city they could possibly imagine, an image of the worst of what they knew humanity could become, and how even that city could still be saved if just 10 righteous people stood in their midst. And the story became important to them because it said, one, evil is real. And evil is possible, and evil will one day need to be made right. But two, that story said you could not accidentally wake up on the bad side of that God.
You could not unintentionally stumble into a place where grace couldn't find you anymore. You could not make one bad mistake and find yourself cut off from that goodness. You could. You can, if you want to, walk away from this God, but this story says that walk would take you a lifetime of effort to accomplish. And even then, God would still gladly stand before one good man and hear why you deserve yet another chance.
I think at times, we have read and we have told these stories as if fire and brimstone are waiting at the drop of a hat, that judgment is lurking behind every misstep as if God actually wants you to fail so God can pounce. When everything in the Abraham story, including the story of Gadam and Gomorrah, is reminding us of exactly the opposite. That God is slow to anger and abounding in grace, and that it is this realization of who God is that sits at the core of this journey we call faith. Because to believe is not just to believe that God exists. That can be a terrifying belief.
To believe is to slowly come to believe that God is good. And so as we learn to read, even the uncomfortable stories in ways that credit God with the righteousness God has shown, As we ask ourselves why ancient peoples told these stories and what it taught them about their God, as we assume God's goodness as the foundation of our belief, then the clearer we will come to see the God that is revealed in Christ in absolutely every story that we encounter. And, that's good news. Let's pray. God, thank you for these stories that make us uncomfortable.
And, that push us to imagine judgment in the world for what is wrong, directed at us for what is broken. And God, as hard, as scary as it is, we invite that judgment because we want those things to slowly be stripped away, burned away if needed so that we can be left as the person you imagine us to be. On the path that you invite us to walk, toward the future that you desire for us. And when that is hard, when it's uncomfortable, even when it hurts, we trust that your grace and your judgment are always ultimately for our good. And so as we are transformed and welcomed, as we refuse to point stories at our neighbors but instead reflect on what they say to us, We hope and we pray that in the midst of that we would slowly draw nearer to you.
To your heart and your path and your grace that welcomes us home. Might we see the God revealed in Jesus, in every scripture we read and in every person that we encounter. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Hey, Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast.
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