-I grew up as a pastor’s kid, which meant we were dragged along to church people’s home ALL the time! What was hard was that not every one of these people had kids my age, and all the parents wanted to do was talk. Those afternoons where my parents spent talking to each other dragged on FOREVER. On top of that, we lived in Minot, ND, and people didn’t necessarily live close, so after sitting in a chair listening to the adults talk all afternoon, then we had at least a 30-minute drive BACK home!

-But here’s the thing: every single one of those people who had us over cared. They loved my parents, me, and my sisters, and still care about us to this day. In fact, I went back to this church shortly after Calvin was born with no warning, and one of the people whose house wasn’t so fun when I was younger took my family out for lunch again that day, and this time we were the ones talking while Calvin sat around waiting.

-It’s a long text today, so we’re going to jump right in, but as we read keep the idea of hospitality in the back of your mind.

READ/PRAY

1. Abraham’s Intercession (18:1-33)

-We’re back to Abraham, the focal point of this whole story, and through whom the entire world will eventually be blessed. Lots to cover today, but since it’s 1 long story I thought it was important for us to keep it all connected, but this could easily be 3 sermons, so if I don’t adequately cover something that you have a question about, send me an email!

-Not sure how long this is after the events of last chapter, seems to be pretty close to the same timeframe, since the promise of Isaac’s arrival is the same time as last week, meaning Abraham is 99.

-Cultural norms didn’t allow a patriarch, much less one who leads a tribe to run, much less bow to anyone. Yet here is Abraham bucking all conventional norms and running, and he begs them to stay with him for a bit.

-Some debate/confusion about who these men are because if you look at vs. 1 it says “The Lord” but then in vs. 2 it says “three men,” and it’s easy for us who have the NT to look at this and jump to the Trinity, but that’s jumping ahead a little bit too far. And to make it even more confusing, sometimes they’re all described as talking (vs. 5b, 9), and sometimes it’s just the Lord talking (10), then to compound it even more when you get to 19:1 then there’s 2 men described as 2 angels. 

-My proposal (as of now and subject to change): God has come to earth in human form with 2 angels. The 3 together serve as a reflection of the triune God. My reasoning for that is based on a couple texts:  Gen. 3:8 says that the Lord would come down and walk in the garden with Adam & Eve in the cool of the night. The second is Ex. 34:29 where it describes Moses’ face as glowing because he spent time with the Lord, similar to Jesus when His glory is revealed during the transfiguration. What that shows us is those that spend time with God will end up reflecting Him, so angels who are in God’s presence all the time will similarly reflect the triune God. This would make sense that the 3 come to spend time with Abraham, then 2 of them go on to Sodom (the angels), while the Lord stays back to continue talking to Abraham. Another piece for us to realize is the divide between spiritual and physical is much less significant to Abraham. We tend to create this sharp distinction in our minds between “sacred” and “secular” (material vs. immaterial), but I would argue that’s not the way the Bible talks about spiritual matters. If you watched The Bible Project’s videos through the sermon on mount you’ve seen a glimpse of this, it shows people doing acts, but then creatively transitions to a different color scheme to show the spiritual reality of the physical event. All that to say, for Abraham it wouldn’t have been weird to have God visiting him.

-One textual note for you: if you look carefully at your Bible you’ll see that in some places the word “Lord” is in all caps but smaller font. There are a few different ways in Hebrew of referring to Lord, so when it’s all caps it’s the divine name “Yahweh,” if you look at vs. 3 Abraham uses the word “Adonai,” and those 2 terms will be used pretty often in this section!

-Abraham sees these men and immediately throws open his doors to them, inviting them to not just eat with him, but he throws a feast!

-Has Sarah make the best bread they can, he gets a choice calf, the pick of the lot for these men. Then he adds to it with curds and milk, and notice who the waiter is: Abraham. “He served them.”

-The conversation goes back to the same topic the Lord has been having with Abraham throughout the story: the children of the covenant. And remember what I said last week about laughing? Now Sarah hears the Lord’s promise (doesn’t note if she didn’t know, or if she didn’t believe Abraham), but now she laughs, note “to herself”.

-And since she’s in the presence of the Lord, he asks why. And Sarah lies! To the Lord, the one who knows everything! And then she doubles down on it, and He calls her out again!

-After this exchange between Sarah and the Lord, the men go look over to Sodom with Abraham.

-And here the Lord asks (almost to Himself) if He should hide His plans from Abraham. Remember what we just saw in Sarah? Lying. Remember what we’ve seen in Abraham’s life before? Lying! The Lord is modeling for Abraham what it means to be in covenant with God: no lying. Be open and honest with each other in a way that allows for a close relationship.

-So God tells Abraham that the outcry is terrible, their sin is very great, so He’s going to go observe for Himself, which means He’s going to send His angels as His emissaries to scope it out, leaving Abraham and the Lord alone.

-Since Abraham has just seen the Lord demonstrate the need for honesty in His covenant, Abraham decides to be honest with the Lord. Look at vs. 25: God is the judge of the whole earth, but He’s also just. These 2 things together bring comfort because God doesn’t grade on curve, but every single one of His actions is completely just. God doesn’t just destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because He’s heard they’re terribly sinful, He goes to see for Himself if it’s true. Think of what David says in Psalm 103. God isn’t fickle, He’s not sitting back waiting for us to mess up, He’s slow to anger and overflowing with faithful love.

-But at the same time, sin MUST be dealt with! It’s committing cosmic treason against the Holy God, and what’s amazing is the scales of sin vs. righteousness are completely unfair, but not in the way we tend to think. Let’s follow the passage here:

-Abraham begins by asking about 50 people, which the Lord says He would spare the city for 50, then down to 45, 40, 30, 20, 10 and the Lord acquiesces each time. 

-I don’t know about you, but as I read this growing up I was always amazed by the boldness of Abraham. Who does he think he is?! But the reality is Abraham knows God better than I do! And Abraham didn’t go low enough. See, in God’s plan for the salvation of the world, it only take 1 righteous person to cover the sins of the world. Abraham knew that better than I do, and I live as the recipient of that new covenant reality!

• Lot’s Lot (19:1-38)

-The story now shifts to the story of the 2 angels who make it to Sodom, and Abraham’s nephew Lot. Remember the trajectory we’ve seen of Lot: he chose to live near Sodom because it looked beautiful like the garden of Eden, then in Gen. 14 we read that Lot was living IN Sodom, and now he’s in the gateway (entrance to the city), where the leaders of the city would conduct their business. 

-Lot proceeds to coerce these men to stay in his house, and there’s some scholars that argue this description of a feast should be in scare quotes, because Lot doesn’t even take the time to bake real bread for them. Then after this “feast,” it says the mean of the city surround Lot’s house and demand Lot send out these 2 new men, and his response is fascinating:

-Instead of looking to protect and preserve his family, Lot throws out his 2 daughters to be abused by this crowd. Just as Abraham had offered up his wife, Lot is demonstrating where his heart is.

-But the crowd won’t take the offer: they call him an alien who’s sitting in judgment on them, and now suddenly Lot is in the crosshairs of this mob. 

-So the angels intervene, pulling Lot back in and striking the crowd with blindness (again see the thin line between physical and spiritual here, the crowd had just been pushing against the door and the angels somehow prevent them from being able to find what was literally right in front of their eyes). Then warn Lot about what exactly is going to happen, and we learn something else about his daughters: they were engaged, and despite Lot’s warning these future sons-in-law think Lot is a big jokester (perhaps Lot has been influenced by Abraham’s lying previously, too?).

-And these events are taking place over the course of a night, because as soon as the next morning begins Lot is encouraged to flee the punishment that is about to come, and look at Lots’ response in 16

-This is a picture of the way we dabble with sin. We hesitate to completely obey God because we’ve become enticed by the sin, blinded (like the mob) to the ways it’s destroying us. And as we’ll see explicitly in just a few verses, by placing himself in Sodom, Sodom had begun to place itself in the heart of Lot making him desire the things of Sodom instead of desiring what God wants for him. So the angels shake Lot out of his stupor and take Lot and his family outside the city and command them to run away, to not look back and not stop or else they will be punished like the city.

-But just like Abraham questions God, Lot questions the angels and asks if he can flee to a nearby city, Zoar which means “little place”

-And as soon as Lot reaches the “little place” Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed, along with the entire plain, all the people, and everything that grows on the ground, complete and utter destruction. And unfortunately, Lot’s wife looks back (1 translation: longingly), and just as the land of Sodom and Gomorrah becomes a salt plain, she becomes a pillar of salt.

-There have been some big questions today about why Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, it’s literally where we get the term “sodomy” from after all! 

-But the current cultural winds have attempted to throw doubt on these cities being destroyed because of sexual sin, in fact some have even attempted to argue that we’ve been translating vs. 5 wrong this whole time. The verb is “to know,” which doesn’t have to mean sex, but if you look at vs. 8 I think that argument loses some steam. 

-There are other texts that say they were punished for their lack of hospitality, particularly Ezek. 16and Luke 10. Yet Jude 7 reminds us of this truth, so it was certainly for more than sexual perversion, but it wasn’t less than that. That was a marker of a whole host of other sins they were committing, of which homosexuality was just one.

-The story then shifts back to Abraham and sees the destruction of the cities that the Lord had warned him about, demonstrating that there weren’t even 10 righteous people found, God only found 4 (and then 3)

-This is a brief glimpse at the blessing that comes to others through Abraham. Lot is saved because of the intercession of his uncle, Lot is blessed because of Abraham.

-Unfortunately the story doesn’t end here, because this would have been a great ending. But Lot doesn’t stay in the city that he fled to, instead he goes up to the mountains alone with his daughters. Maybe he fears the destruction of this city as well, maybe he’s grieving, the text doesn’t say. What it does say is what the consequences are:

-The daughters (had been engaged), decide to take matters into their own hands, getting Lot so drunk that he is able to be taken advantage of by his oldest daughter.

-And then the same thing happens the next day! I don’t know how drunk you need to be to not know what happened, but Lot reached that point 2 nights in a row! The sin that was prevalent in Sodom had followed his family even to the mountains. And the sin that marked Noah as a failure (drunkenness) had been passed down to Lot, too. Failures all around! I do wonder if this was some sort of twisted revenge from them after he had offered up his daughter to the mob.

-And the consequences of these actions are that both of the daughters become pregnant by their father, so Lot becomes the father of his grandsons. 

-Yet what is an absolutely disgusting story and evidence of the failure of Lot becomes the means by which salvation will come to the world, because this is where the Moabites originate from, and later on in the OT we have an account of a very specific Moabite woman named Ruth who was the great grandmother of King David. Then if you turn to Matt. 1 you’ll find the Ruth’s name appear again, but this time in the genealogy of Jesus. So if you didn’t have this incestuous relationship here in Genesis, you wouldn’t have David, and you wouldn’t have Jesus. Isn’t it amazing how God can take the broken and sinful things in the world and redeem them? 

-So what in the world do we do with a story like this? Definitely not going to be made into a Disney film and has some incredibly depraved things that take place in here. 

-I think first of all we need to remember how broken and depraved we are apart from God’s work in our lives. God’s redeeming love can bring beauty out of the most horrendous stories and situations. That doesn’t mean it’s easy or that the sin doesn’t have consequences, but these stories are in here to depict the realities of sin and the ways people willingly chase after and live in it. But praise God that there is a way to be righteous: to have Jesus’ righteousness given to us on our behalf. In 2 Peter 2:7Lot is described as righteous, but we’ve seen in this text that he was anything but! His righteousness had to come from someone else, someone who didn’t hesitate.

-Which gets us to the second piece to take away, don’t become complacent in your fight against sin. Lot looked at the world through a purely materialistic lens and chose the place of sin to plant himself, which then got worse and worse in his life to the point where he loses his wife and becomes his grandkids father. Friends, how often are we placing ourselves in situations where it’s easier for us to give in to sin and that slowly eats away at us? Really practically, I see this taking place with people’s relationship to the church. It takes time and effort to remain involved and invested in the family of God, yet how often do people not even consider the church when they think about where they’ll live or work? We had a family at the church I was at in CO decide to move to a small town in Idaho for a better job with better pay, and after they moved they couldn’t find a church and a year later started calling one of the other pastors on staff for help in their marriage and family because they had no support system around them. And they’re not that unique, unfortunately. A book came out 2 years ago titled ‘The Great Dechurching’ that did one of the biggest surveys of people who left church and the biggest reason was because people got busy and then never got plugged back in. The good news is most of the people who were asked said they would love to go back if someone invited them! So friends, invite your neighbors! Easter’s coming up, that’s a great time to invite others to join you!

-Third and finally, we’ve seen the example of the need for Christians to be hospitable. Many people believe the author of Hebrews is alluding to this passage in Heb. 13. But this command is also repeated by Peter and Paul, so when you add all these passages together, you’re left with an explicit command: be hospitable! Look for ways to be a blessing to others, even your home isn’t supposed to be just for you, it’s supposed to be a refuge for those battered by the storms of life. There’s a lot of needy people out there, and not just materially! People can be spiritually impoverished but materially wealthy, and God care about them too. So what are you doing to be hospitable? What is 1 step you can take today to be more hospitable and be a blessing to those nearby you? Arrive ministries needs financial help, youth group who made blessing bags to hand out to homeless people when they’re driving