1. The Trouble with Sodom (16-20)
God’s pleasure with Abraham
Last week we saw how Abraham showed hospitality to a stranger and his two companions. But soon it became apparent that these were no ordinary men. They knew God’s promises to Abraham, and they knew the special covenant name that God gave to Sarah. It was the Lord himself. And God re-affirmed the covenant promise of a blessing to all the world through Abraham’s offspring, by telling them that the special child would miraculously be born within the year, in Sarah’s extreme old age. And now the Lord and his two angel companions prepare to leave Abraham. But as they go, God himself meditates on the close relationship He has with Abraham. It says, “When the men got up to leave, they looked down toward Sodom, and Abraham walked along with them to see them on their way. Then the LORD said, ‘‘Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?  Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him.”  

Now the bible calls Abraham “the friend of God,” not because Abraham made friends with God, but because God in his mercy and grace revealed himself to Abraham, and made him God’s friend. Abraham is a friend of God, and to friends belong confidences. You tell your friends what you are thinking, or thinking of doing. As the friend of God, Abraham enjoyed this great privilege: that God shared with him what he was about to do.

God’s displeasure with Sodom 
But what Abraham hears is disturbing news, because it affects his own family. “Then the LORD said, ‘‘The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.” The men turned away and went toward Sodom, but Abraham remained standing before the LORD.

Now doesn’t God know what was happening in Sodom? Of course He does! He didn’t need to come down from heaven to see. In Noah’s day when he sent the flood, we read “The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.”

What’s happening here with Sodom and Gomorrah is similar to what happened in the garden when God asked Adam “Where are you?” and “have you eaten of the fruit of the tree that I commanded you not to eat?” Or when the risen Jesus asks the disciples on the Emmaus road what things have happened in Jerusalem. God knew the answer to those questions and he knows the answer to the question of Sodom’s wickedness too. And Abraham knows that he knows, because he immediately assumes that God’s angels are going to punish the cities of the plain with destruction, as God punished the world of Noah in the flood. When God acts this way, it is for our benefit, not His.

Now what was the sin of the cities of the Jordan plain? Sodom of course has become synonymous with homosexuality, because of the events of chapter 19, where the men of Sodom want to have sex with the angels, whom they think are men. But that was merely part of the problem, a symptom of a far deeper rebellion against everything decent and in accord with God’s purposes for humanity.
The Jewish Talmud has legendary stories associated with the unjust laws and practices of Sodom. In one of these legends, Eliezer, the servant of Abraham has an encounter with an unjust judge in Sodom. The Sodomites were renowned for their inhospitable attitude to strangers. The story goes that Eliezer intervenes on behalf of a poor person who is being mistreated. One of the Sodomites strikes him and then charges him for blood letting, saying that he has performed surgery on him and therefore he must pay. He takes him before the judge, who agrees that this is their law. Eliezer then pays the money, strikes the magistrate in the head and makes him bleed, then asks him to observe his own law and to pay the money to the poor person. Now these are mere legends, but those who wrote them were trying to illustrate the obvious inference of scripture, that this was a society that had plunged itself with sheer abandon into the greatest depths of self-gratification, sensuality, and inhumanity possible. So the first thing to say about homosexuality is that it was just the thin edge of the wedge. It must be seen in the wider context of an unjust, corrupt and sensual society. It is not their only sin – it is not the complete reason God brought this judgement on them, but it illustrates just how far they had fallen from God’s creation purposes for humankind. Perhaps the apostle Paul had Sodom partly in mind when he wrote in Romans chapter one of humanity depravity. He says “God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another… Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.
That is what the Sodomites were like. They were all those things, not just homosexual offenders.

Is Homosexuality any worse than other sins? Yes...and No!
Now is homosexuality worse than other sins? The way some fundamentalists dwell on it and rail against it almost as a personal crusade, you would almost think that it was the unforgivable sin. Is it really worse than other sins? Well, the bible’s answer to that is yes, and no. There IS a sense in which it is worse. The bible says in 1 Corinthians 6:18 “Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body.”

What Paul is getting at there is that sexual sin goes against our Creator’s very purposes for the bodies he has given us. So in that sense, and in that sense only, sexual sin is worse. And homosexual practices are further distinguished in that they pervert the Image of God in us, for God made man in his image, male and female, and told them to reproduce. I don’t go along with the Greek and medieval Catholic idea that sex is merely for procreation and not for pleasure. However, sexual practices outside of God’s purposes of one man, one woman, for life, are solely for the purpose of gratification of desires, and don’t glorify God or reflect his creation purpose. So, in that sense, we may say that homosexual sin is worse. It shows even more clearly than other sins, the extent of human rebellion against our creator, because it twists the kind of sexual relationship God designed for us.

However, in another sense, it is no worse than any other sin. It does not have a worse penalty than other sins. God does not hate homosexual sin any more than other sins. He hates all sin, and all sin is equally punishable. Those fundies who parade around with placards declaring that homosexuals are going to hell are barking up the wrong tree. Because the bible condemns homosexual practices equally with other sins that I don’t see anyone protesting about, such as greed. Jesus never once singled out homosexuality for special attention, but he does do that on several occasions with other sins such as greed, intolerance, and religious hypocrisy. The apostle Paul mentions homosexual sin once or twice, but it is no more worthy of condemnation than any other sin. Let’s be clear about it – it IS sin – homosexual practice is condemned by both the Old and New Testaments because it is against nature, it is against the way our creator intended human beings to live. But it is the same as greed or envy – all sin is sin. Remember that when you point the finger at someone, your three other fingers are pointing back at you! You may not be tempted by homosexual sin – after all, despite the claims of the gay lobby to the contrary, only perhaps one or two percent of people are truly homosexual. But you do engage in other sin that the bible says is every bit as worthy of hell, such as slander, gossip, selfishness, arrogance, lying and rage.

2. Is God Unjust?  (21-33)
Abraham Intercedes
Well that was a rather long introduction to the problem of Sodom. What I am saying is that homosexuality was not the defining characteristic of their society. It was not that particular sin that caused their destruction. It was merely one of many symptoms of their life of completely abandoning any decent or noble behaviour. But were they all like that? Abraham is concerned lest God in his zeal to wipe out the ungodly, should also destroy any among them who are righteous.

He has in mind his nephew Lot of course. Whom he has already rescued, along with other subjects of the King of Sodom, from the armies of the five kings back in chapter 14. 

Abraham stretches the friendship as far as he thinks he can, yet always with great deference and reverence towards God. He says “‘‘Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes, what if the number of the righteous is five less than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city because of five people?”
And so the conversation goes, until Abraham asks, ‘‘May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more. What if only ten can be found there?” ”

God answers yet again that if even ten righteous people are there, he will not destroy it. And Abraham feels that he has pushed his luck far enough, and that he can indeed trust the Lord of all the earth to do what is right. But the obvious implication is that not even ten righteous people were in Sodom. And it raises the whole question of the status of Lot and his family. In what sense can we say that Lot was a righteous man? He is at best inconsistent in his righteous actions, as the next chapter shows. Yet the New Testament says that he was a righteous man who was grieved at the evil he saw around him.

Is anyone righteous?
And this raises the whole issue of what the bible means when it talks about the righteous. The bible is clear that we are made righteous in God’s sight by faith in his saving works, not by our own works of righteousness. Nothing could be clearer than the statement of Psalm 14 which says, “The LORD looks down from heaven on the sons of men to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. All have turned aside, they have together become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one.” And the apostle Paul echoes those words in Romans where he charges that all of us are under the power of sin and the condemnation of God. So there was no one righteous in Sodom. And there is no one righteous in Scottsdale either.

3. Why Does God Save Sinners?
Was Lot any better than his neighbours? Yes...and No!
So why then does God save sinners like Lot? Or us for that matter? Was Lot any better than his neighbours? Was he one of those righteous ones that Abraham spoke of? Well, yes, and no! He may not have been quite as depraved as his neighbours, but he was obviously a sinner like all the others in Sodom. However, the New Testament says quite plainly, in Peter’s 1st letter, that God “rescued Lot, a righteous man, who was distressed by the filthy lives of lawless men (for that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard).”

Yes, Lot showed by his subsequent actions that he was a sinner, but at the same time, he was a justified sinner, a sinner who hated sin, and tried not to give himself over to it like his neighbours. There is such a fine line, isn’t there, between the heresy of sinless perfectionism on the one hand, that regards Christians as more righteous in themselves than others, and the heresy of lawlessness that says on the other hand Christians may do whatever they like. Like Lot, we are by no means perfect. But like Lot, it is not our goodness that makes us righteous, but our relationship with God by faith in His promises. God did not save Lot because he deserved it in himself. He did not. He saved Lot, because of His covenant with Abraham. It’s not what you know it’s who you know. God saves us the same way, because of his faithfulness to the covenant, not because of our own intrinsic righteousness.

What does Sodom mean to us?
So, what does Sodom mean to us? First of all it is a warning. 1 Peter 2 says “God …condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by burning them to ashes, and made them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly...” And like Lot, we must heed God’s command to flee from the coming wrath and take refuge in Christ.

But, if we have done that, then like Abraham, we are friends of God. God did not hide what he was doing from Abraham, because Abraham was his friend. We too are God’s friends, and have just as great a privilege! Listen to what Jesus says to his disciples.
(John 15:12-17) My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit—fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. This is my command: Love each other.

And not only are we friends of God, we are friends of God’s friends too. In fact, one of the early names that Christians had for themselves, along with brothers and sisters, was…friends. John says in his third letter, (3 John 3:14) “Peace to you. The friends here send their greetings. Greet the friends there by name.”
John calls Christians the friends, not just because they are a mutual admiration society. Not just because they are friends of each other, but fundamentally because they are together friends of God.

We are no better than other sinners, we just have a better friend. Furthermore, that friend is an intercessor who is perfect. Why did God save Lot? Because of his promises to Abraham who interceded for him. Why does God save us? Because of his promises to Jesus who intercedes for us. Isaiah prophesied “For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.”
Hebrews 7:25 says “…he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them.”

And if Christ intercedes for us, then like Abraham we will intercede for others.
1 Tim 2:1 says “I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone… This is good, and pleases God our Savior,  4 who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.  5 For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”

And let me finish with Romans 8:26 which says that: “…the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.  27 And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will. 
28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.  29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.  30 And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified. 
31 What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us?  32 He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?  33 Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies.  34 Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.