“AVOID SINS CONSEQUENCES.” GEN. 19: 12-17-29.
GENESIS 19: 12-13, 14, 15-17, 23-25, 26, 27-28, 29.
PLEASE OPEN YOUR BIBLE TO GENESIS 19.
In last Sunday’s lesson Abraham’s obedience did not save him, but it did demonstrate that his salvation was genuine. We believers today are under a new covenant, a covenant established through the death and resurrection of Christ, but the demands of obedience and submission are just as important and just as great.
Those who have trusted God with their eternal souls should certainly trust Him with the plan and purpose of their earthly lives. God always keeps His promises. He will never leave us or forsake us. He will work all things together for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. The promises of God will always prove true, so His followers should always remain faithful.
For many adults today the idea that they would experience consequences for their sins is a silly notion. To them, sin is pleasurable; not consequential. In fact, many people don’t believe sin exists. Further, they laugh at the biblical teaching that their sinful actions offend a living God who will judge people for their sinful behavior.
Believers realize that God judges people for their sins, but they also recognize that He can graciously deliver people from their sin and its consequences.
We believers need to be convinced that sin is not only against the will of God but that it is also harmful and destructive. If we really believed this, our lives would be different. But we seldom think of sin as something that harms us. An occasional look of lust, a small element of selfish pride, a little bit of unrighteous anger—these sins just don’t seem that bad to most Christians.
The majority of believes think that “big” sins like sexual perversion, murder, and grand larceny are really horrible. But sin always leads us away from fellowship with God and has consequences that rob us of our joy.
When we accept God’s Word and act on what He says about sin, God’s commands will not seem onerous or burdensome. Doing the will of God will be a delight and will bring true freedom.
The Life Question in today’s lesson is “Why should we be concerned about sin and its consequences.” We pray that the impact of this lesson will make us constantly seek God’s help in avoiding sin and its consequences. Continue to pray as Jesus taught His disciples to pray in Matt. 6: 13, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.”
PLEASE READ GENESIS 1: 12-13.
The immediate background for this lesson is in Genesis 19:1-11.
Lot was Abraham’s nephew whose father Haran had died before the family departed from Ur of the Chaldees to go to Haran in Mesopotamia. Abraham treated Lot as if he were his own son. When Abraham left Haran and went to Canaan, Lot went with him.
Both men prospered so much that they needed to graze their animals in different parts of the land. Abraham gave Lot the first choice and he chose the fertile Jordan River valley. This move brought Lot close to the city Sodom. At some point Lot moved into the city and became a judge at the city gate.
In Ch. 14 when the five kings from the north raided Sodom, Lot was among the captives. Abraham and his servants rescued Lot. When the Lord told Abraham that He was going to destroy Sodom Abraham prayed that the city might be spared if there were enough righteous people to justify sparing it. Abraham’s concern was an expression of his hope that Lot would be delivered from the doomed city.
The two angels in vs. 1 are the same ones who visited Abraham in Gen. 18: 1-22. The Lord in 18: 22 had remained with Abraham who proceeded to intercede for the city of Sodom. The Lord agreed to spare the city if 50 righteous people could be found in the large city. Abraham kept pressing for a lower number and the Lord continued to agree until Abraham quit at 10.
One wonders if Abraham had asked, “Will you spare the city “for my sake,” what the answer might have been. But then Abraham was thinking, “there is Lot, his wife, two daughters and their two husbands to be. Surely there are at least two more that have been influenced by righteous Lot and his family to make ten or more righteous people in Sodom.
But while holding a position of authority in Sodom, Lot had utterly lost his testimony. In gaining civic influence he had lost power even in his own family. Sodom would have destroyed Lot if the Lord had not destroyed Sodom. In Luke 17:32 Jesus referred to Gen. 19:26 to warn of the destruction to come to unbelieving Israel: “Remember Lot’s wife.”
In
Gen. 18:33 the bargaining was over and the Lord returned to
heaven to rain down brimstone (combustible sulfur) and fire down on
the cities at the south end of the Dead Sea. Much of this country is
now covered by the waters of the Dead Sea.
Lot was at the city
gate when the two angels arrived. He insisted that they stay at his
house. That night the men of Sodom surrounded the house and asked Lot
to send out the two visitors so that the men of Sodom might have sex
with them. This incident gave rise to our word sodomy
to describe homosexuality. Notice further that the mob was
made up of old men and young men. All these features show the
depth of moral depravity in Sodom.
Lot tried to spare the guests. He showed courage in going outside to plead with the men of Sodom. In vs. 7 he said, “Don’t do this wicked thing.” The rules of hospitality in that day expected a host to protect any guests in his home. But Lot went too far by offering to send out his two virgin daughters to the men! The men of Sodom showed what they thought about Lot: “Get out of our way,” they replied. And they said, “This fellow came here as an alien, and now he wants to play as the judge! We’ll treat you worse than them.” The men of Sodom then tried to rush Lot’s door.
At this point the two angels intervened. They pulled Lot back into the house and shut the door. They then struck the men who were at the door of the house, young and old, with blindness so that they could not find the door.
Turning their attention to Lot, the angels warned Lot that he needed to gather his family together and take them out of Sodom. They told him to include anyone who was one of his family; including sons-in-law, a well as sons and daughters. They explained the urgency: “We will destroy this place.” They continued, “The Lord hath sent us to destroy it” Why such drastic action?” They said, “Because the cry of them is waxen great before the face of the Lord.” “The outcry to the Lord against its people is so great that He has sent us to destroy it.”
The Lord had used similar language when in Gen 18: 20-21 He explained His plans for Sodom to Abraham.
What was this outcry that caused God to act? One possibility is that it was the cry for retribution by those who had suffered at the hands of the people of Sodom. Another possibility is that the noise of Sodom’s sins was like a cry for punishment.
The Bible teaches that God is patient and long suffering, but it also says that unrestrained sin eventually results in divine judgment. God told Abraham in Gen. 15: 16, “In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.”
When Abraham’s
descendants returned, the sin of the Amorites had reached its full
measure, and they were destroyed. God had given Sodom time to repent:
but they only became worse, until the cry was so strong that its sins
doomed it.
TEACHER READ GENESIS 19: 14, SO LOT WENT OUT AND SPOKE TO HIS SONS-IN-LAW, WHO WERE GOING TO MARRY HIS DAUGHTERS. “GET UP,” he said. “GET OUT OF THIS PLACE, FOR THE LORD IS GOING TO DESTORY THE CITY!” BUT HIS SONS-IN-LAW THOUGHT HE WAS JOKING.
Instead of gathering their belongings and heading for the door, they though he was joking and felt humor rather than horror at the idea of God’s judgment. Laughing in the face of judgment is a sign that a person is not taking sin seriously. One can easily find bumper stickers that mock belief in Jesus’ return or in God’s judgment of sin. Unbelievers ridicule the thought that God would actually hold humanity accountable for sin, especially sins between consenting adults. But God’s judgment is no laughing matter.
While one can rightly criticize these sons-in-law for their complacency in the face of
God’s judgment, one can also understand their reaction to Lot. He apparently had never spoken to them about God at all. Rather than standing as a display of righteousness and urging his neighbors to repent. Lot became so cozy with the sins of Sodom that he found himself an elected official, which is the implication of his position at the city gate.
Although the Apostle Peter wrote in 2 Peter 2: 7-8 that Lot was “distressed by the unrestrained behavior of the immoral” and that he was a “righteous man” who was “tormented him self day by day with the lawless deeds he saw and heard, his sons-in-law apparently never were privy to that inner struggle.
Lot successfully lived as a secret follower of the Lord; so secret that his neighbors went to hell without ever knowing what Lot knew. Lot’s only attempt at taking a righteous stand was when he suggested that the men of Sodom use his daughters sexually instead of his guests. No wonder Lot’s sons-in-law laughed when he tried to tell them of God’s righteous judgment! Telling others of God’s judgment is difficult when we have not reflected His holiness in our own lives.
PLEASE READ GENESIS 19: 15-17.
Early in the morning the angels urged Lot to get his family and leave or else be swept away in the punishment of the city. Any objective person would know that the decision to leave town would today be called a “no brainer.” Lot had already witnessed the power of the angels when they struck blind the men of Sodom. He knew that God was angry with Sodom and the other cities of the plain and that He was going to pour out his wrath on the region because of their great sins. But God graciously offered Lot the opportunity to escape some of the consequences of his own participation in the sins of the city. Lot could have a fresh start and a new encounter with the God who spared him.
But Lot did not see what is painfully obvious to anyone who reads the story. Vs. 16 begins with the sad words, But he hesitated. Lot, like most people in modern society, had not accepted the truth that sin always hurts. In John 10: 10 Jesus described Satan “as a thief who comes to steal, kill, and destroy.” The sin that looks so enticing in the moment of temptation has such bitter poison hidden within it. Walk into a mall and you might see young, unmarried girls pushing babies in carriages.
Drive
down through any downtown city and you might see alcoholics begging
for a few dollars so they can have yet another drink. Visit an AIDS
hospital and you might see someone who contacted the disease because
of illicit sexual behavior. Why do even Christians hesitate to
flee not only from temptation but also from judgment?
Perhaps the
angels wondered the same thing. They might have been upset with Lot.
Angels have no firsthand experience of God’s forgiveness for sin,
His salvation, His grace. They only know His holiness that is without
compromise. But their feelings were not the basis of their
actions.
Because of the Lord’s compassion for Lot, the angels grabbed his hand, his wife’s hand, and the hands of his two daughters. The text implies that they had to drag them out against their will. So the angels brought him out and left him outside the city.
Here is a pathetic portrait of a believer who became accustomed to serving the flesh rather than the Spirit. God graciously spared Lot, but he had to be dragged away from the place of imminent wrath. His mind told him to follow the Lord, but his heart yearned for what Sodom had to offer. Lot apparently hated to think that Sodom would be no more.
The Lord’s love and mercy for Lot is unmistakable. Even though He would have been perfectly just to have just left Lot to reap the consequences of his choices, God nevertheless intervened and spared his life. But how can a follower of the Lord become so comfortable in sin that he feels a deeper affection for the things of the world around him than for the Lord?
The answer, simply put, it is habit. With each passing day sin can feel more comfortable and the conscience can become more numb. The spiritual senses become desensitized by the power of repetition until all feeling is gone. God’s children should pray that He will keep them from reaching that point of spiritual numbness. If God chastises and disciplines His people to keep them from finding themselves deaf to His voice and dead to His love, He is gracious indeed.
The only way to be delivered from God’s judgment is to receive God’s gracious offer of salvation.
PLEASE READ GENESIS 19: 23-25.
As soon as Lot left Sodom, he begged the angels to let him go to a nearby city rather than run to the hills. Lot had gone from herding flocks of sheep to sitting in the gates of Sodom, and he apparently did not want to go back to the agrarian lifestyle he once knew.
The angels granted his request and let him enter a town called Zoar, (which means little). Lot got there soon after the sun had risen over the land, and when he was safely in the city, the Lord rained burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah… out of the sky.
God did more to these cities than just lightly harm them. He overthrew these cities, the entire plain, all the inhabitants and whatever grew on the ground. He left nothing living in that region. Most conservative scholars place Sodom and Gomorrah in the region of the Dead Sea, and some even suggest that the Dead Sea stands exactly where Sodom and Gomorrah were. If that is the correct location, God certainly made it a desolate place. All that anyone can say with any certainty is that it was somewhere in that region and to this day it reeks with the smell of sulfur and naturally occurring minerals. This destruction was not the result of a natural disaster, but of supernatural verdict and execution.
No mater where those cities were located, their utter destruction is an indication of just how loathsome God finds sin and how great His judgment for sin will be. The day will come when the local judgment that God poured out on those cities will be a universal wrath poured out on all the earth. Just as God judged Sodom and other cities for their sins, so He will judge the entire world.
As the text makes clear, the primary sin for which Sodom was destroyed was homosexuality. God had clearly established the pattern for one man for one woman all the way back in the Garden of Eden. Neither in nature nor in His Word has God indicated that anything else is acceptable.
Several millennial later God’s view on the matter had not changed, for the law of Moses also made God’s perspective on the subject very clear. For the nation of Israel, a theocracy governed by divine law, God made homosexuality a capital offense. In the same passages n which God condemned bestiality and incest, He also forbid sex between people of the same sex in Lev. 18: 22-23; 20: 13, 15, 16. The N.T. also warns that homosexual behavior is completely inconsistent with Christian character and an affront to the holiness of God (Rom. 1: 26-27; 1 Cor. 6: 9; 1 Tim. 1: 10.)
We should be aware of these passages and study them because the world is increasingly opposed to any standard of behavior. Worse yet, the world objects to any standard of truth. Well-meaning Christians contribute to the confusion by making sharp distinctions between parts of the Bible as if the N.T. were more authoritative than the O.T., or as if the words of Jesus in Scripture were more inspired than the words of Paul. But the witness of the entire Bible is clear: Homosexuality is a sin that God abhors and finds abominable. Any person can reject that witness, but denying that is what the Bible says is simply dishonest.
But in light of a text about God’s judgment, can Christians offer any hope to people who are held captive by the sin of homosexuality. Absolutely! Paul explained in 1 Cor. 6: 9-11 that all sins can be washed clean by Christ’s blood, even sexual sins. God will save anyone who comes to Him through faith in Jesus Christ. No sin is so great that He cannot forgive it and remove it. If sin is truly as devastating as God’s Word says, then the greatest kindness a Christian can perform is to help someone out of his or her sin.
TEACHER READ GENESIS 19: 26. “BUT HIS WIFE LOOKED BACK AND BECAME A PILLAR OF SALT.”
As they ran away from the city, Lot’s wife seemed to be lagging behind the rest of the family. She must have kept looking back—perhaps she wanted one last glimpse of the old home place. Perhaps the tug of sin’s pleasures reached for her for her one last time. Whatever her motivation, salvation’s last invitation was lost; she violated the command not to look back and became a pillar of salt.
“Remember Lot’s wife!” Jesus warned in Luke 17: 32. Jesus condemned her sin of trying to make her life secure in a pagan society that God had judged. She starved her spirit and fed her flesh with the security of riches. In a land thirsty for a missionary’s zeal, she drank from the cistern of security and selfish pleasure. Along with all the Sodomites, she was judged as well. As a pillar of salt she became a monument to disobedience.
God judged Sodom and Gomorrah because of sins, including homosexuality. All sexual sin—homosexuality included,--- is offensive to God. All sinners,--- no one is excluded—can find grace and forgiveness in Christ. In His love, they can receive new life and victory in living.
PLEASE READ GENESIS 19: 27-28.
Abraham may have seen the distant smoke and fire on the previous day. Perhaps he had hidden himself safely away from the terror of God’s judgment. Early in the morning on the next day, Abraham went to survey the damage. He looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah… and he saw that smoke was going up…like the smoke of a furnace. What he saw when he climbed high enough to get a good perspective was fearsome and full of divine fury. Abraham saw that God had utterly wiped out the wicked cities of the plain. Nothing could bring Sodom back now.
Abraham saw the devastation while standing at the place where had had stood before the Lord. The text does not identify Abraham’s location by the name of a city, or a brook, or even a tree, only as the place where he had stood and pleaded with God to spare Sodom because of the righteous people who lived there.
7.TEACHER READ GENESIS 19: 29. “SO IT WAS, WHEN GOD DESTROYED THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN, HE REMEMBERED ABRAHAM AND BROUGHT LOT OUT OF THE MIDDLE OF THE UPHEAVAl; WHEN HE OVERTHREW THE CITIES WHERE LOT HAD LIVED.”
As Abraham surveyed the scorched earth and the smoldering ruins, he also knew the answer to his questions about the inhabitants. God could not find 10 righteous people in Sodom, but He had spared Lot’s life and had compassion on him. He spared Lot not only because of His love for him but also because He remembered Abraham. Abraham had prayed for Lot’s deliverance. James 5: 16 says, “The intense prayer of the righteous is very powerful.” And Abraham’s prayer for Lot brought him out of the middle of the upheaval.
Even in His judgment one can see God’s mercy at work. As terrible as the destruction of the cities of the plain might have been, His salvation of Lot and his family demonstrated that He is also merciful.
There are times when skill, ability, and charm simply do not work. When all else is lost, when nothing else works, there is prayer. Payer can be our first response and our lasting hope. When we trust actions people can do, we receive blessings people can give. When we trust promises God has given, we receive blessing He can give. That is the benefit of prayer.
THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN!
“Get ye up from the wrath of God’s terrible day!
Ungirded, unsandalled, arise and away!
‘Tis the vintage of blood. ‘Tis the fullness of time,
And vengeance shall gather the harvest of crime.”
The warning was spoken; the righteous had gone,
And the proud ones of Sodom were feasting alone;
All gay was the banquet; the revel was long,
With the pouring of wine and the breathing of song.
Hark! The growl of the thunder---the quaking of earth!
Woe, woe to the worship, and woe to the mirth!
The black sky was opened, ---there’s flame in the air--
The red arm of Vengeance is lifted and bare.
Down---down on the fallen the red ruin rained,
And the reveler sank with his wine-cup undrained.
The foot of the dancer, the music’s loved thrill,
And the shout and the laughter grew suddenly still---Whittier.
NEXT SUNDAY FROM GENESIS 22 ABRAHAM IS COMMANDED OF GOD TO OFFER ISAAC AS A BURNT OFFERING TO THE LORD. A.V. DAUGHERTY