Just a reminder, I mentioned last week that this weeks
message would be a PG13 message and you're going to understand
why just from the language that that we hear and the Genesis
reading and not going to be graphic, but I am dealing with
some topics that are mature in nature and I just wanted to give
folks a heads up about that. I think these things need to be
preached on even though sometimes they are.
They are hard to say and hard to hear and maybe uncomfortable to
hear, but they're in the Bible. They're part of our Scripture.
And I think we need to hear these messages from our Father
as well as the ones that are a little more happy, happy joy,
joy kinds of messages. So Genesis chapter 19 versus 1
to 13. We're skipping a little bit
ahead in the narrative and Genesis 18, angels are sent from
God. They visit Abraham, they tell
Abraham we're going to go and destroy the cities of Sodom and
Gomorrah. Abraham pleads for and bargains
for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah.
We're going to talk about that. Not next week.
I'm going to be gone for a couple weeks.
We'll talk about that when I get back.
But we're jumping ahead because in order to really understand
Genesis chapter 18, we need to understand Genesis chapter 19.
And so we're going to start there and then back up and get
Genesis chapter after 18. But let's read today.
The 2 angels arrived at Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting
in the gateway of the city. When he saw them, he got up and
met them, bowed down with his face to the ground.
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. No, they answered, We will spend
the night in the square. But he insisted so strongly that
they did go with him and entered his house.
He prepared a meal for them, baking bread without yeast, and
they ate 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 out to Lot.
Where are the men who came to you tonight?
Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.
Lot went outside to meet them and shut the door behind him,
and he said No, my friends don't do this wicked thing.
Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man.
Let me bring them out to you and you can do what you would like
with them. But don't do anything to these
men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.
Get out of our way, they replied.
This fellow came here as a foreigner and now he wants to
play the judge. We'll treat you worse than them.
They kept bringing pressure on Lot and moved forward to break
down the door, but the men inside reached out and pulled
Lot back into the house and shut the door.
Then they struck the men who were at the door of the house,
young and old, with blindness so that they could not find the
door. The two men said to Lot.
Do you have anyone else here, sons in law, sons or daughters
or anyone else in the city who belongs to you?
Get them out of here, because we are going to destroy this place.
The outcry to the Lord against its people is so great that He
has sent us to destroy it. That is Genesis chapter 19.
Now hear these words from Ezekiel chapter 16.
This was the guilt of your sister Sodom.
She and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous
ease, but did not aid the poor and the needy.
They were haughty and did abominable things before me.
Therefore I removed them when I saw it.
May the Lord add to the His blessing to the reading and the
hearing and living of His Word. We're talking today about the
sin of Sodom and the real sin of Sodom, our culture, and it's
been, it's been present in our culture and in in churches for
for many, many years. Not from the very beginning, but
for many, many years have have highlighted a particular aspect
of this story, misunderstood it and made that specific thing
what has been called the sin of Sodom.
But the real sin of Sodom, The reason that God destroyed the
cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and other towns and villages that
were around them and part of their sphere of influence and
under their authority. God tells us about in Ezekiel
chapter 16, and he's very, very explicit about it.
This was the guilt of your sister Sodom.
She had pride, excess of food and prosperous ease, but did not
aid the poor and the needy. The real sin of Sodom is
prosperous is is that they were prosperous and arrogantly cold
hearted. They were prosperous and
arrogantly cold hearted. And that attitude and mindset
and way of living is what led them to eventually do all of the
abominable things that are covered in that more general
word in Ezekiel 1650. But the real sin was in their
prosperity. They were arrogant and cold
hearted to those who were in need.
Now we're going to break this apart.
First looking at Ezekiel chapter 16 in a little bit more detail,
and then I'm going to talk about why it's so important that we
get this right. And then at the very end, what
we can do. But I just want you to kind of
know that progression. We got to look at what the sin
is, why it's important we get that sin right, and then what we
can do in our current context in response to these scripts,
captures. Going to break it down.
This was the guilt of your sister Sodom.
She and her daughters had pride, excess of food and prosperous
ease, but did not aid to the poor and the needy.
We're going to start in the middle.
This excess of food and prosperous ease is kind of the
linchpin here. It's the thing that led to the
other thing, the other things being a problem.
So excess of food is, is a way of saying they were wealthy.
The city of Sodom and its surrounding areas were wealthy.
They were incredibly prosperous. We already knew that because
when Lott and Abram were, were looking out over the fields and
the lands and the areas and, and Abram said, Lot, we need to
split up because we're bumping into each other.
You pick which area you want and Lot look down at the Jordan
Valley where the city of Sodom was and saw how good the land
was and said, I'm going to go there.
Then we're told then that he pitched his tents near Sodom.
By Genesis 19, he's living in the city of Sodom.
It was a prosperous area, agriculturally rich, probably
rich in trade as well. They had a lot of extra stuff.
And, and, and at most points in history, we live in such
prosperity today. We don't quite see it this way
anymore, but at most points and places in history, having an
excess food of food was a sign of significant wealth.
If you had more food than you needed, you were wealthy.
And that's where Sodom was excess of food and prosperous
ease. That that phrase, prosperous
ease meant that they were indifferent in their prosperity.
And we're going to come back to that in a little bit.
So they were prosperous. They had more than they needed.
They had an excess of food. And there are two ways in
general that you can respond to prosperity, to economic,
financial, material prosperity. One of those ways to respond is
gratitude. My God, thank you for blessing
me, blessing us with more than we need, with humility and with
gratitude, recognizing where your good things come from.
The other way is the way Sodom responded and that civilization
responded, which is with pride. We have all of this prosperity
because we're great. We're just, we are exceptional.
We are better than the surrounding nations and
surrounding cities. There is just something special
and wonderful about us. We're smarter than they are.
We work harder than they do. We have earned this prosperity
because we have worked for it and we are just that good.
That's why we have more than other people do.
Pride. Their prosperity did not trigger
humility in them. It triggered pride and they
leaned into that, that sense of we have it better because we are
better. We have more because we are
superior. Our nation, our country, our
culture and civilization is just an exceptional nation, country,
culture and civilization, and that's why we have so much more.
We've earned it. And if you want to share in our
prosperity, all you need to do is be like us, and you too will
be prosperous and can live in sort of prosperous ease in this
world. And that's how Sodom responded
with pride, with pride. And because they were
prosperous, and because they responded to their prosperity
with pride rather than humility, that led them to be indifferent
in their prosperity to the needs of the poor.
And even though they had all of the resources that they needed
to do it, even though they could have done many things to help
the poor and the needy, they just said no, Nope.
If they want what we've got, they can work for it like we
did. If they want what we've got,
they can become like us. We have.
And we don't know what they necessarily said was superior
about them and work ethic or skin color or culture or
civilization or history or religion.
But it was their pride. They were.
It's because they were great. And then if people are poor and
in need, well, it must be that there's something wrong with
them. And it's not my concern.
That's their problem. Who cares if they're suffering?
Who cares if they are in need? This was the sin of Sodom.
This was the sin of Sodom, Ezekiel continues.
And this is actually God speaking directly speaking to
Ezekiel and through Ezekiel to his people.
We'll talk about that a little bit more in a moment.
But God sums it up this way. They were haughty.
That word haughty there has got the same root as pride in the
previous verse. So reemphasizing their pride.
And they did abominable things before me.
Therefore, I removed them when I saw it.
That phrase, abominable things in Hebrew.
I'm not going to give you the Hebrew word for two reasons.
One, I can't pronounce it, and two, I can't remember it.
But I do know this. I do know this.
It's a, it's a, it's a general word for awful, despicable,
terrible things. And it's used throughout the Old
Testament in a number of different ways.
Ezekiel uses it a lot in his book.
He uses it a lot in his book and it it's a catch all term for
awful things. Ezekiel uses it primarily to
refer to idolatry and adultery, which are often linked in the
Bible, Old Testament and New Testament.
That's how Ezekiel uses it. But it's used for all sorts of
other sins and bad things that that people are taught not to
do. Don't do these things.
So the progression that we get here in Ezekiel from God's own
mouth is that in their prosperity, Sodom responded with
pride and became indifferent to and cold hearted toward the poor
and the needy, the vulnerable that were among them.
And that attitude of prideful, prosperous arrogance and
indifference is what opened the door for them to eventually
engage in all sorts of evil kinds of things.
And what we see in Genesis 19 is, is kind of the end result of
that as as a quick snapshot of this is how bad it got.
So those specific acts that we see in Genesis 19 alone aren't
the reason why God destroyed Sodom.
They were, I had a teacher somewhere along the way,
actually I've mentioned her before.
Her name's Kimberly Butler and and she talked about in sin
there's difference between roots and fruits and and the fruit the
the root of Sodom's sin, the root of their sin was there in
their prosperity. They were proud, arrogant and
indifferent to the needs of the poor.
And the fruit of that sin were the despicable things that we
see just a few of them there in Genesis chapter 19.
All right, And we're going to talk about those in just a
minute. But this is the sin.
This is the sin, the sin that's often labeled as the reason why
God, the thing, the reason it's often given as to why God
destroyed Sodom is, is supposedly the sin of
homosexuality. Homosexuality is not even talked
about in Genesis chapter 19. We're not seeing the men of the
city engaging in homosexual activity.
We're seeing the men of the city gathering to gang rape 2 guests,
and to suggest that the sin that God destroyed them for as
homosexuality is to suggest that if guests, if the angels had
appeared in the form of women rather than men, then if his sin
just wouldn't have been as bad. If the men had gathered to rape
two women, well that wouldn't be as bad.
I don't think anyone here believes that that somehow
raping women is is less evil, less despicable, less abominable
than race raping men. Rape is evil, period.
And the men, both young and old, every man of the city had
gathered outside of Lot's house to rape the two guests that were
staying in Lot's house. And that was the fruit of the
sin of pride and cold hearted indifference in the midst of
financial prosperity. Is what that what led to that
The real sin of Sodom was that they were prosperous and
arrogantly cold hearted. And in their prosperous,
arrogant, cold heartedness, they eventually normalized something
as awful as gang rape of people. And so God wiped them out.
God wiped them out. So why is it so important that
we understand this rightly? It's important that we
understand this, right? This is not a question of just
theological nitpicking or, or, or exegetical hair splitting.
There's a reason why these stories are in the Bible.
And if and the reason, the reason is simply this, the story
of Sodom and Ezekiel's prophecy are warnings.
And if we mislabel the sin, we will miss the warning.
These are here for a reason. They're not.
They're not there. I mean, there were a lot of
things that happened in the ancient world that didn't get
written down in the book of Genesis.
This one got written down. It's there for a reason, the
story in Genesis 18 and 19, and it's there as a warning.
And God emphasizes that in Ezekiel, the context of Ezekiel
making his prophecy is this. So Sodom.
After God destroyed Sodom, Sodom became a byword.
Sodom was a shorthand reference of saying as evil as it gets,
that a city, a nation, a culture or a civilization were as evil
as it gets, and God destroys nations, cities, cultures that
get that evil. That's what Sodom became a
byword Sodom. The people of Israel looked down
their noses at Sodom. They judged Sodom.
They stood in arrogant contempt over Sodom.
And then this awful thing happened among God's chosen
people and the nation that God had given them.
They became so far off track that God sent the Pagan empire
of Babylon in and they conquered the nation of Israel and they
conquered the city of Jerusalem and they sacked Jerusalem and
they destroyed the temple, God's physical dwelling place on
earth. And they they did one of three
things to the people that were left in Israel.
They killed a whole bunch of them.
They deported a whole bunch of them, took them into exile to
become slaves in the empire of Babylon.
And the few people they left behind, they left them behind
because they were so weak and so much not a threat.
They just left them there to work the ground.
And that's what happened to God's chosen people, God's
nation, Abraham's descendants. And while they're in exile in
Babylon, God sends them a prophet, Ezekiel, to tell them
why they're in exile in Babylon. They're going, why aren't we
here? We thought God loved us.
We thought we were God's chosen people.
We thought we had divine protection.
Does this mean God is faithless? Does this mean our God is weak?
Is that why we got conquered by Babylon?
Are their gods stronger? Is our God too weak?
Is our God faithless? And God says through Ezekiel,
no, you're here because you became like Sodom.
You became like Sodom. And he compares them to other
cities and other civilizations that God had also destroyed as
well. But we're talking about Sodom
today. And that's why God calls them,
says to them, your sister Sodom, he's addressing his people, says
you're like your sister Sodom. You're just like that alone.
See, being called Sodom's sister would have been a huge insult to
all of the folks Ezekiel was talking to.
But God said, you're just like your sister Sodom.
You're prideful in your prosperity, and you've become
cold, heartedly indifferent to the poor and the needy.
That's why I wiped out Sodom, and that's why I sent you into
exile. Sodom is a warning.
Ezekiel's prophecies are a warning.
Throughout the New Testament, you hear Sodom raised repeatedly
as the epitome of what God does not want from his people and
from the nations and cultures of this earth.
And if we mislabel the sin of Sodom, then we miss the warning.
And if we miss the warning, then we fail to be the sort of
witness that God calls us to be and wants us to be as his people
in this world. It's so crucially important that
we get this right because, well, we'll talk about the because
Sodom is the polar opposite, the antithesis of the Kingdom of
God. When we pray thy Kingdom come,
thy will be done on earth. It is in it as it is in heaven.
We are praying that the Kingdom of God overthrows the kingdoms
and cultures of this world, including the kingdoms and
cultures that are like Sodom. It is the opposite of what God
wants. God rejects and destroys.
Cultures, communities and nations that are prosperous and
yet arrogantly cold hearted to the poor and the needy.
God says I will wipe that from the face of the earth.
It will not endure. I'm going to get back to the
warning being personal and social.
I was realizing when I was preaching it earlier that I put
that in and doesn't make sense to talk about it here.
I'll talk about it later, very soon.
What do we do? So what do we do if, if this is
a warning, if these scriptures are in there as a warning to us
and to all peoples of the earth throughout history, what do we
as God's people do? Now we'll talk about, I should
have just said it. Now, we'll talk about the
warning being both personal and social, because there's a way to
respond to this warning that is at a personal level.
So we've got to see where we are in our prosperity.
We've got to see where we are in our prosperity as individuals,
as families. But there's a social component
to this. And in fact, in this passage,
the social component vastly overwhelms the personal
component because God didn't go to Sodom to destroy an
individual. God destroyed a civilization in
a in cities. God didn't send Ezekiel to
preach to a person. God sent Ezekiel to preach and
prophecy to a people, to a nation, to a civilization.
And so we need to see the warning at the personal level,
yes, but also at the level of our cities, our communities, our
nation, and our civilization. And So what do we do?
We got to check our GPS. Now at this point, I'm going to
beg your forgiveness in advance for a very lame pun that I am
about to inflict upon you. So if we imagine 2 cities, the
city of Sodom and the New Jerusalem, which comes down from
heaven, and when Jesus establishes his Kingdom, we read
about in the Book of Revelation, 2 cities, and we got to know
whether we're heading toward one city or the other.
We got to check the GPS, right? We're on our road to one city or
the other. We got to check the GPS.
In this case, our GPS is the God Positioning System.
Forgive the pun, I know it's lame, but it works, right?
It works. Our God Positioning System,
where are we according to God? So let's take a look at it
according to that metric that God gave us through Ezekiel.
Are we prosperous? Are we arrogant?
Are we cold hearted? Are we prosperous, arrogant or
cold hearted? Well, one by one, are we
prosperous? Yes.
Check. No questions asked, period.
If you're sitting in this room, you are prosperous.
If you're standing in this room too, if you're in this room,
frankly, if you're living in this county, if you're living in
this state, in this nation, you are almost certainly among the
prosperous people of the world, even at our our poverty, and I'm
not trying to say this again, this is not an excuse to be
colder, indifferent to folks that are poor and in need in
this country. But poverty line in the United
States is wealthy in most places in the world.
It just is. If you've got a refrigerator
with food in it and it's more food than you need for today,
you're wealthy. If you've got a television, if
you've got a car, if you own a house, if you've got healthcare
provided for you either through private insurance or or or
government supplemental kinds of insurance, you are wealthy.
If you have education provided for you through taxpayer
funding, you are wealthy. You have access to resources
that most people in the world don't.
We are prosperous. There is almost no way to live
in this country and not live in prosperity.
So we're just going to check that box and say everything
going forward. We got to acknowledge this.
We are living in prosperity. We are part of the most
prosperous nation in the history of the world and we're living
right smack in the middle of it here.
And when God looks at prosperity, he's not going to
look at Meigs County and say, oh, well, you know, I compare,
if you compare them to Franklin County or Cuyahoga County,
they're not that prosperous. But God doesn't play those
games. God looks at the whole world,
something like 2/3 of the people in the world.
Like, like how many is that? 4 billion people live on less
than $2.00 a day, period. And you have to get all of your
food, all of your healthcare, all of your medicine, all of
your housing, every, all of your drinking water out of that $2.00
a day. That's where most people live.
We're prosperous. Question is, are we arrogant in
our prosperity in this country? And again, we got to look at it
personally, look at it socially as well, because at this point,
we have a choice in this country.
We're prosperous. We got to choose.
Are we going to respond to our prosperity with arrogance or
with humility? Are we going to respond to our
prosperity saying, you know what?
America is just an exceptional nation, greatest nation in the
history of the world, better than all the other nations out
there. A bad day in America is better
than a good day anyplace else. Why are we prosperous?
Because we work harder. We're the shining city on a
hill. We are just better than other
countries. Or are we going to look at our
prosperity and receive our prosperity and say God has been
gracious, God has been merciful, because we know that Jesus died
for every living, breathing human on this planet, and none
of us is any better than any of them.
We are all sinners, all sinners in the eyes of God, and the only
hope we have is through His mercy and His grace.
And our God has blessed us with so much more than we need.
And it can't be because we earned it.
It must be because God is gracious.
Those are those two perspectives are light years apart.
In biblical terms, they are kingdoms apart.
One is the Kingdom of the New Jerusalem.
One is the Kingdom of Sodom. Do we respond to our prosperity
with arrogance or with humility? And are we cold hearted or will
we choose to be compassionate? If we choose to be humble, then
it's much easier to choose to be compassionate.
If we look at the great tremendous blessings that we
have and say God has given us so much more than we need and it's
a blessing, it's a gift from God, not that we earned it.
It's a gift from God. Then we can look and say, how
can I share this? How can I help my sisters and my
brothers who God blessed with less, Maybe God blessed me with
more so I would get to enjoy the blessing of sharing it with
them. And that's why I have more that
we can choose to be compassionate.
We can choose to say God has blessed me with so much, God
must want me to share it. God has blessed this nation with
so much, God must want us to share it.
There is a particular moral philosophy out there.
It's been there for years. I can't remember which old dead
guy said it, but I and I think he's got he's on to something.
I should look this up because we get to reference the specific
person. And I don't know that you can
live in absolutes, absolutes. It's really tough to draw
absolute lines. But he phrased this in the form
of an absolute. And he said that any time a
society, a culture, a civilization is trying to make a
decision about a certain policy or practice or plan to ask the
question, is it good for the poorest people in our society?
And if it's not good for the poorest people, then it's not
good. Now, I don't know on an absolute
basis whether that can be said to be true every single time.
But what a way to look at policies and plans and programs,
whether they're in the school system or in the city or in the
state or in the country, and ask, will this be good for those
that are the most poor, the most needy, the most vulnerable among
us? And if not, is it really good?
Is it really good? We have been given tremendous
prosperity and two choices. Will we respond to that
prosperity with arrogance or with humility?
Will we respond to that prosperity with a cold hearted
indifference or with compassion? And those are the choices that
we have before us. The real sin of Sodom is that
they responded to those choices with arrogance and cold hearted
indifference and that opened the door for all manner of evil in
their lives. All manner of evil.
And here's the thing, Lot was saved from the destruction and
most of his family were saved from the destruction not because
Lot was good. We're told at the end of this
chapter that God saved Lot to honor Abraham because Lot was
Abraham's nephew and God saved Lot out of respect and to honor
Abraham. Lot.
Lot who knew the promise. Lot who knew that his
relationship to Abraham made him part of God's promise to be a
blessing to the whole world and got moved.
Lot moved into Sodom and had zero impact.
His impact was so minimal. His family, he and his family
became like Sodom. So they're, you know, so the
people come and they say we want to rape these guys.
And this is and I, the gang rape of strangers, of guests who've
been given the privilege in the position and the protection of
hospitality. The people that showed up at
Lot's house came there to do rape, and that was the
abominable thing. Whether that was a rape of men
or rape of women, it was gang rape.
And Lot's response was thankfully not here.
Take him to protect himself. Thankfully it wasn't that.
But did you hear what Lot told him?
Take my daughters, take my daughters, They're virgins.
Rape them. This was Lot's response.
Then as they were fleeing the city, Lot goes to tell his sons
in law they're well, future sons in law.
The men his daughters were going to marry.
Hey, God's going to destroy the city.
We got to get out of here. They had such little respect for
him. They just laughed at him.
That's what the Bible, they laughed at him.
Stupid, crazy old man. And so Lot flees with his
daughters and with his wife. And as they're leaving the city,
his wife, the city that was so far gone, every single man
showed up at Lot's house in that city, young and old.
And his wife looks back at that city with longing.
She didn't just turn around to see what was happening, she was
looking. I don't want to leave this
behind. And God took her life and they
flee to another city and then lots of fray there.
So they flee, takes his daughters up into the mountains
and his daughters now in the mountains with their father.
Everything they've known has been destroyed, saved by the
angels from being gang raped. And they find themselves going,
you know what, we're up here. Dad's dad's messed up.
He's a drunk now with everything that's going on.
Mom's dead. We don't have any husbands.
We need someone to take care of us when dad's gone.
We need kids. We need sons.
And what their solution is? They raped their father.
One daughter says I'm going to get dad drunk tonight.
When he's passed out, I'm going to have sex with him.
Second daughter did it the next night.
And if you don't think that's rape, just flip it.
What if Lot had said I'm going to get my daughter drunk and
have sex with her tonight? Everyone knows that's rape.
It's rape when it goes the other way too.
The very thing that was the abominable thing that was being
threatened to them, they did to someone else.
The real sin of Sodom. That's just the fruits of it,
the root of that. How do daughters get to the
point where they're willing to do something like that to their
father? How does a father get to the
point where he's willing to send his daughters out to be raped
because of pride in the midst of prosperity and a cold hearted
indifference to the vulnerable and the needy?
That's how you get there. And that's the sin that we are
warned against and that we are called to live and preach and
teach against as we live out the values of the Kingdom in this
world. In Jesus name, Amen.
Amen.