1. Introduction
Today we return to the book of Genesis that we left last June. But I actually want to start by talking about Romans chapter five, the passage I preached on last week. The apostle Paul makes the statement there that “death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam.” He’s talking about the time between the giving of the first command, not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the giving of the Law of God to Moses. After the time of Moses, once again people sinned by breaking specific known commands of God, such as “you shall do no murder,” or “do not work on the Sabbath Day.” But between those two times, Law was not given. Yet, Paul says, people still sinned and still paid the penalty for sin, namely death, the penalty that Adam brought on the whole human race by his one primal sin as head and father of the race. 

Paul’s point in Romans is that sin is more than law breaking, and salvation is more than law keeping. You don’t have to willfully disobey an exact command to be a sinner under the sentence of death. Ignorance of the Law is no excuse. Furthermore, the Law spelled out specific penalties for specific sins, and by doing that, it taught Israel what God thought of the relative worth of certain actions. Before the law, there was no way of quantifying sin, of knowing just how sinful it was, or knowing which actions ought to be regarded as the most heinous. Before the Law came, all people had to go on was their own subjective social mores and culture.  

Now why am I telling you all this? For two reasons. First, because the story we have heard today, from Genesis chapter 19, comes from that era of bible history. Abraham and Lot lived in that period that Paul spoke of in Romans, the period between Adam and Moses. And all of what I just said is important to remember when we evaluate Lot’s moral choices and actions. More about that later, let’s turn to the text of Genesis. And the second reason is, we also now live in a culture that has rejected and largely given up the knowledge of the Law of God as found in the bible. And so all that is left to us to guide us in the moral choices we make are our own subjective values, just like Lot and the people of Sodom.

Let’s turn to our story, and it is truly an appalling story:
2. An Appalling Story
1The two angels arrived at Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gateway of the city. When he saw them, he got up to meet them and bowed down with his face to the ground. 2“My lords,” he said, “please turn aside to your servant’s house. You can wash your feet and spend the night and then go on your way early in the morning.”

Now you may remember that we have met all three of these characters before. Last year in earlier chapters 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 God gave to Sarah. It was the Lord himself. And God re-affirmed the covenant promise of a blessing to the entire 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. But as the Lord and his two angel companions prepared to leave 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 chose him to be God’s friend. Abraham is a friend of God, and 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 – that he would destroy the cities of the plain, where Abraham’s nephew Lot was living. And Abraham pleads with God that if there are any righteous people, even as few as ten, in the city, that God spare that evil place for their sake.

So that’s who these two angels are. They have come to do God’s work in Sodom. But exactly what that work will involve has not yet become clear at this point in the story. Will they destroy Sodom as God has said? Or will they find enough righteous persons there to spare it? Well, the character of Sodom shows itself before the night is out, but the first person they meet, at the city gate, is not a typical Sodomite. In fact he’s a foreigner, Abraham’s own nephew, Lot, the one he is worrying about because of the destruction the Lord has promised. 

There are many later Jewish legends about just how bad Sodom was, and how the Sodomites went out of their way to persecute, rip off, abuse and generally give a hard time to foreigners in their midst. They may not put them behind razor wire in the desert like we do, but they did even worse things to them. But not Lot. He is a model of Middle Eastern hospitality. When we read what the New Testament says about Lot, I think it gives us a clue about why he was sitting there at the gate. It says in Peter the Apostle’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).”

Lot sat there welcoming travellers, because he had seen what the Sodomites regularly did to their guests, and it grieved him so much that he wanted to do everything he could to prevent it. He wants to protect these two men from his fellow citizens – that’s why he urges them to come straight to his house and to leave early the next morning.

But these heavenly visitors in disguise are reticent to accept hospitality from anyone in this place. They have come here to observe how evil the conduct of this city is, and to destroy it. “No they answered, we will spend the night in the square.” But Lot insists, and takes them home and gives them meal.

Evidently he was not quick enough in getting them unseen to his house, for the next verse says “Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom—both young and old—surrounded the house. They called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.”

Now Sodom has become synonymous with homosexuality, because 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. Those who say that God punished Sodom in this way simply because they were gay, are barking up the wrong tree. Don’t get me wrong, the Law of God, which came 400 years after these events, clearly states that all homosexual acts are wrong. And the New Testament confirms that. The Sodomites did not have the Law, but they did have the witness of God in nature, and the bible says also that homosexuality is against nature. It is unnatural and obviously a deviation from the way we were made. But people who equate the sin of Sodom simply with being gay, haven’t looked closely at the text. What does it say? “…all the men from every part of the city of Sodom—both young and old—surrounded the house…”  ALL the men. All the men of Sodom were there. Now surely all the men of that city were not gay. Yes they were about to engage in homosexual rape, but they included normal family men, grandfathers, fathers, sons, and including the two men who were engaged to Lot’s unfortunate daughters. No doubt the men of Sodom would have done the same thing had the angels appeared as female strangers. The sin of the Sodomites was hatred of the rest of the human race. They did not like anyone who was not one of them. It comes out very clearly in their attitude to Lot when he gets in their way, in verse 9: “This fellow came here as an alien, and now he wants to play the judge! We’ll treat you worse than them!” No doubt they had only tolerated Lot’s presence among them because of his wealth and his relationship to the great man Abraham. But they can no longer control their hatred for all outsiders and are sick of this meddling alien.  It was such a fierce tribalism and antipathy to outsiders that they took it to an extreme that is rarely seen. They quite literally said to visitors, to put it in our crude Australian slang, “bugger off.” This ritual rape was, if you like, a kind of political statement. No doubt it also reflected their lust and sexual depravity. But it is fundamentally a sin of hatred to strangers, and that is why it is contrasted with the hospitality of Abraham in chapter 17 and of Lot and the beginning of this chapter. Abraham and Lot know the Lord, the creator of heaven and earth, the One who has made all people equal in his image. But the people of the city of the plain know only their own bodily desires and care only for their own tribe. Hedonism and nationalism are their only principles.

I don’t have time today to go through the story verse by verse, but I must say something about Lot’s proposals regarding his virgin daughters. It is puzzling, isn’t it, that the New Testament calls Lot a righteous man, yet here he offers his own daughters to the mob if they will repent of their designs on the two men. Now we must acknowlege that there may be some sort of cultural thing going on here that we are misinterpreting. But it’s pretty hard to justify Lot’s actions at that point. We must recall two things, however. First, Lot was a righteous man because of his faith in the Lord, not because he was a perfect person. The most important verse in this chapter is verse 16: “the men grasped his hand and the hands of his wife and of his two daughters and led them safely out of the city, for the LORD was merciful to them.” The Lord was merciful to Lot. Lot did not earn that mercy by being good. Remember that the offer of salvation was extended also to Lot’s potential sons-in-law who were among the mob outside, but they rejected it. Second, remember what I said at the beginning. Lot live before the Law of God was given. He had only the light of nature and the little that God had already revealed to people like Abraham of his character and purposes. Before the Law came, all people had to go on was their own subjective social mores and culture. What all these stories from this part of the bible show is how woefully inadequate human culture is when it comes to devising morality that is consistent and that reflects God’s character. Lot did not know enough to work out the right priority between the code of hospitality at all costs that is still practiced by some Bedouin tribes today, and the sanctity of his own daughters. And in the highly traumatic situation he found himself in, he cast about for a solution to the dilemma he faced and came up with the wrong answer. So Lot provides us with both a positive example of faith and a negative example of moral muddle headedness.

3. It was the same in the days of Lot…(Luke 17:28)
Well, what has all this to do with us? It is perhaps ironic that this week is the week of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. I assure you I did not choose to preach on Genesis 19 this week for that reason – but I suppose in some ways it is quite apt that I do. On Thursday morning the channel 7 morning program sunrise featured their weather man (who is not gay) dancing with a homosexual hockey team as he did the weather. He interviewed the captain of the team, who boasted of the place of pride and importance that the Gay Mardi Gras holds in Australian society. He said that when people around the world think of Australia, they think of three things – one of them was the Opera House, I don’t remember the second one, probably the beaches, but the third was the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. It draws a crowd of half a million people – almost as many as flock to the harbour every year for the New Year’s Eve fireworks. It is seen as a defining feature of Australian society. In particular, this man said, it epitomized the Australian traits of tolerance for all.

The bible clearly sees homosexual practice as sin against nature.  But homosexual sins are not any worse than any other sin, such as greed or pride or rage. Nor are homosexuals any more likely than heterosexuals to act like the men of Sodom did. But their corrupt actions sprang from a corrupt society. A corrupt collective consciousness. And the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras likewise points to a deeper problem in Australian society than merely the surface expressions of homosexual pride and practice. What the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras represents is society thumbing its nose at God, and wearing as a badge of pride those things that God says are shameful acts and attitudes. 

But the Mardi Gras is just one of many examples of this proud human defiance of God and His Word. Any lifestyle that involves a pride that refuses to accept the gospel of Grace and that seeks to build a meaning to life that leaves God substantially out of the picture, is a life of rebellion, whether it is outrageous and decadent like the Mardi Gras, or respectable and acceptable to society. Yes, those men and women parading around, flaunting their aberrant sexuality and promoting promiscuity are rebelling against their Creator. But so is the man who replaces true faith in the Lord Jesus Christ with a false assurance that God will be pleased by his respectability; mateship; or innate goodness. Dikes on bikes, old diggers in the RSL, even boring people like accountants and dentists – we’re all in the same boat. We’re all sinners. You see, how does the New Testament view the Sodom incident? Does it take it up as an illustration of the judgement that is coming on homosexuals? No it doesn’t. Look at Jesus’ words in Luke 17. Does he say, “It was the same in the days of Lot, people were engaging in sexual deviation and then God came and judged them, so you’d better not be homosexual and then you’ll be okay”? That’s not the lesson Jesus takes from it is it? He gives the example of Noah, when “People were eating and drinking, marrying, and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and destroyed them all.” And then he says “It was the same in the days of Lot. People were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building. But the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur reigned down from heaven and destroyed them all.” He doesn’t even mention their sexual sins, just their normal living. But the lesson Jesus wants us to take home from the story of Lot’s rescue from Sodom is this: Luke 17:30 “It will be just like this on the day the Son of Man is revealed. 31On that day no one who is on the roof of his house, with his goods inside, should go down to get them. Likewise, no one in the field should go back for anything. 32Remember Lot’s wife! 33Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it.” 

The New Testament is quite clear that the world stands condemned. But there is a way out before the sulphur starts to fall. Lot’s sons-in-law laughed and did not believe that judgement was coming. Lot’s wife turned to go back to the world and suffered its fate. She rejected the Lord’s escape plan. The word of Jesus to us is flee! And when you do, take someone by the hand like those angels did, and guide them out of the city of destruction too.


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