SODOM REBORN
Did you know that Abram tried to save Sodom? He had relations there. One cannot blame him. Its human nature to ignore the big picture and concern yourself, only with your flesh and blood. The story is found in Genesis 13 and 14.
Life was very different and unsettled back then. You took your family and your tent and your four- footed wealth along and stopped where there was grazing and a water hole. Abram (his name had not yet been changed to Abraham) and his nephew Lot for a while shared their destiny until strife broke out among their herdsmen, and they agreed that it was time to go their own ways. Lot chose the lush plains alongside Jordan and ended up in Sodom.
Meanwhile Sodom featured in a rather dramatic episode featuring the father of the Israel peoples.
Sodom, Gomorrah and Zoar, appears to have been a confederation of sorts, which was invaded by an alliance of four kings with strange sounding names. The invasion was a success.
One is tempted to ask oneself, considering what followed at a later date, whether the historical social conduct of those three well-known communities was perhaps the cause of the said invasion. If that was in fact the case one would think that in terms of moral values it was an exercise in moral sanitization and it lasted for twelve years.
Then a new battle took place at the earlier venue. They fought among slime pits, it was messy. But the Allies made off with people and goods, which included Lot and his property. The news reached uncle Abram in whose belly burned the familiar courageous and warlike germs of the Israel peoples. He made ready for the scrap and launched a commando attack with some 300 trained men and went after Chedorlaomer. He returned from the action, not alone with all the captives, but also their looted property.
Then occurred an unexpected event with a spiritual flavour. He was met by Melchizedek the King/ Priest of the Most High of Jerusalem, who brought him bread and wine. Then he blessed Abram with the words, “Blessed be Abram of the Most High God, Possessor of heaven and Earth, and blessed be the Most High God, who hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand.”
In return Abram paid to the King/Priest a tithe of all he had.
After uncle and nephew said their goodbyes Abram returned with his men to Mamre.
But all was not well in Sodom. Of this Abram was soon to be made aware by an unexpected visit from three strangers who turned out to be angels, but they looked all the world just like ordinary people . Moreover, they dined upon a delicious dish of ‘a calf tender and good’ prepared with ‘butter and milk’ These supernatural people ate man’s food just as Jesus had done in his resurrection body, ‘when they gave him a piece of broiled fish and an honeycomb. And he took it and, did eat before them’. (Lu. 24/41-43)
These strangers brought Abram two hugely significant pieces of news. This was the first “I will certainly return unto thee according to the time of life, and, lo, Sarah, thy wife, shall have a son at the time appointed I will return unto thee, according to the time of life, and Sarah shall have a son.”
The significance of this statement cannot be overstressed because it did not simply signify the restoration of his and Sarah’s lost regeneration capacity but the implantation of a very special seed from which would come forth a people of whom Almighty God would say things like “Is Ephraim my dear son? Is he a pleasant child I will surely have mercy upon him, saith the Lord” (Jer. 31/20), “When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt” (Hos 11/1); and of his backsliding family, “A son honoureth his father,… if I then be a father, where is mine honour.. .saith the Lord?” Mal. 1/6).
Abraham and Sarah were to become the parents of that little boy, whom they would call Isaac, when he was a hundred and she 90 years of age. That boy child would be conceived not out of passion, but of long years of desperate desire and a thousand prayers.
That was the good news. The bad news was that Sodom was all but doomed.
Abram’s mind raced, he remembered the glory days: the triumphant battle; Melchizedek; Lot. LOT!!! That family thing again. If any man’s prayers had influence with God, that man was Abram. If any body’s prayers could save Sodom it was Abram’s prayers. Flesh and blood had unhinged Abram temporarily from his sense of sober judgment, as it does with most of us. God had decreed death upon a city soaked in wickedness. Abram pleaded in mitigation of the death sentence. His tactics were clever, “Wilt thou destroy the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there were fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the 50 righteous that are in it? That be far from thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked: … shall not the judge of all the earth do right? And the Lord said, If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes.” Abram had his foot in the door, and he knew it. By little steps he brought down the figure to a rock bottom ten righteous people, and hoped that his nephew’s family of four had half a dozen decent friends to make up the numbers.
Homosexuality was rife in Sodom and its surroundings and the matter came to a head when a mob set out to gang-rape the ‘young men’. That was IT! The angels blinded the rabble and hurried Lot and his family with the words, “Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain lest thou be consumed.” There were two irreligious sons-in-law who laughed at the warning. Mrs Lot couldn’t make the break. It was a good life, gay and liberal. She decided to stay with the boys and alas! was caught in a shower of brimstone and became a pillar of salt.
As the other three made their way out of the city the pathetic Lot pleaded for Zoar, “Oh, not so my Lord!…I cannot escape to the mountain, lest some evil overtake me and I die. Behold now, this city is near to flee unto, and it is a little one, oh let me escape there, is it not a little one? and my soul shall live.”
“Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah Brimstone and fire….and He overthrew those cities and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities.”
From a distance Abraham watched as his hapless prayers dissolved in the smoke of Sodom that ‘went up as the smoke of a furnace.
Meanwhile Lot’s reduced family fled for their lives from the wicked little city he had saved from the flames ‘for he feared to dwell in Zoar’. So they bolted and made their temporary home in a cave. And this is where Sodom was reborn.
Lot’s girls were not unaffected by the spirit of Sodom, I’m sorry to say. They were raised in a seedy environment. This is clearly evident from the mother’s refusal to escape from the decadence, despite pleas from visible angels, no less. Like mother like daughter? Anyway, their husbands were lost in the flames, and the only male left was their father. So the girls put their heads together and ladled gin, or what-have you, down the throat of their father, and when he was drunk they raped him, first the elder then the younger, on successive nights. Perhaps you will pardon my use of such a strong word as rape in this affair. But to be perfectly honest, when somebody is deliberately intoxicated, regardless of the gender, for the purpose of illicit sexual relations, it must be regarded as rape.
Both the daughters became pregnant and little Moab was, by conception one day older than baby Ben-ammi. And so there came about a new race tribally distinguished as Moabites and Ammonites. These peoples became inveterate enemies of God and of Israel. Their gods Chemosh and Mikom were the focus of, not surprisingly, abominable heathen cults. Jeremiah said of Moab: “Against Moab, thus saith the Lord… ‘Moab is destroyed … give wings to Moab, that it may flee and get away; for its cities shall be desolate, without any to dwell in them… The calamity of Moab is near to come, and his, affliction hasteneth fast”
Of the Ammonites Ezekiel wrote, “Say unto the Ammonites, Thus saith the Lord God. Because thou hast clapped thine hands, and stamped with the feet; and rejoiced in heart with all thy despite against the land of Israel .. I will cut thee off from the people … that the Ammonites may not be remembered among the nations.” (Ezek 25)
It is extraordinary that the Islamic, Esau/ Edomitish, Moabite and Ammonitish peoples, all of whom are violent enemies of God’s elect peoples, have close links with the House of Abraham, and all come into being in curious ways.
The seeds of Sodom perpetuated by Lot’s girls continue to defile our lands.
The rumpus underway in the British Parliament regarding gay marriage is a symptom of a society utterly bereft of moral scruple or common sense.
When Britain believed the Bible there were standards. What is now public debate was only whispered in alleys and dark rooms. God’s law prevailed, decency and good manners were taken for granted: right and wrong, good and bad, male and female were never in dispute until the spirit of Sodom got in as Jesus said it would. He said, “As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of Man.” Genesis 6 shows that there was something amiss in indiscriminate marriage, and God gave that generation a hundred and twenty years to restore normality. Instead things got worse until “God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.’ Then ‘the flood came and destroyed them all.’
Those conditions alone were enough to wipe the planet clean, and start again. But our Lord’s return to earth finds our peoples in a state of double perversion, because the newborn fruit of Sodom has come to full bloom just as Jesus foretold it in these words: “Also as it was in the days of Lot; they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they built; but the same day that Lot went out of Sodom, it rained fire and brimstone, and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed.” Jesus mentioned marriage in his reference to Noah, but nothing of marriage in the Sodom section. Is that deliberate, I wonder.
David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, the charismatic London Mayor, former Prime Minister John Major, hundreds of members of the British Parliament all voted in favour of ‘Gay Marriage’ ‘The ‘Church of England has dropped its prohibition on gay clergy, in civil partnerships becoming bishops.’
There is now no dispute that the pre-conditions prophesied by our Lord regarding His return to earth
are well and truly in place.
What a family the Lots were: a mother who abandons her husband, and daughters for a sex-sick society; in-laws, who dump their wives for the same preference; two daughters who rape their father twice; and an uncle, our founding father, who tried to overrule God’s judgment to save that rotten mess.
