Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:34:03 — 65.5MB)
Subscribe: RSS
The “days of Noah” and the “days of Lot” (Luke 17:25–37) are examples of God’s judgement on mankind, one with water and the other with fire. The LORD never sends a judgement without communicating who and what He is judging. That’s a key lesson of the Torah reading Vayera וַיֵּרָא Vayera (“he appeared,” Genesis 18–22).
As Abraham asked God:
“Shall not you, the one who judges all the earth, do what is just?”
Genesis 18:25 New English Translation of the Septuagint
Abram prayed for mercy and deliverance for the people of Sodom, showing that God not only willing to judge the earth with justice but also with mercy.
Smoke of Sodom Inc. started rising long before it was destroyed
God will show up when He sees what is going on and He will act. Don’t think that God doesn’t see what is actually going on in the world. God not only shows up in our time of need, the Lord paid the ultimate price while we were still sinners. Abraham was the man of faith, which is a hallmark of his personality.
Abraham’s physical lineage was not as important as what goes along with that lineage which was his legacy of faith, Torah1Hebrew: “teaching.” Traditionally, it refers to the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.” See this primer for more. and Mashiakh2Hebrew: “anointed.” Most specifically, it refers to the Messiah (transliteration into Greek), the Christ (Greek for “anointed.. The Maschaikh, the direct revelation of God (Heb. 1:3), descended by flesh from Abraham.
Romans 1 is toxic to today’s culture, particularly, its assessment of human relations that are “natural” and “against nature” (Rom. 1:24–26). But what we see is that the smoke of Sodom’s destruction started rising up long before God destroyed with brimstone and fire — back to the beginning.
Humanity was deceived that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad was at the center of Gan (Garden of) Eden, then sinned and veered from God. By choosing the Tree of Good and Bad over the Tree of Life, that was really in the midst of it. Their desire overcame their trust in the Creator who gave them everything. If they had trusted God, He would have taught them what is clean and unclean, what is good and what is bad in His time, when they were ready to receive that knowledge, but because they didn’t trust Him, the desired to get that knowledge without Him.
The Kingdom of God is the real “big tent.” If you read in Revelation 19 and Ezekiel 40–48 about the dimension of the city of God, you see how large its footprint is. This suggests that God wants as many people as possible to enter in (2Pet. 3:9). But those who don’t wan to enter in and live with Him will not be forced to do so.
When Yeshua tells us that out of the heart the mouth speaks, we see that if one’s heart is dark, darkness comes out of your mouth. If one’s heart is light, then what comes out of your mouth will also be light.
What is the long-term impact of what you do?
… just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh, are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire. Yet in the same way these men, also by dreaming, defile the flesh, and reject authority, and revile angelic majesties…. But these men revile the things which they do not understand; and the things which they know by instinct, like unreasoning animals, by these things they are destroyed.
Jude 1:7–8, 10 NASB
Mankind was made in the image of God, not in the image of the animals. When we decide to act like animals rather than acting like God, we are in the same dangerous territory as the people of Sodom were.
If He rescued righteous Lot, oppressed by the sensual conduct of unprincipled men (for by what he saw and heard that righteous man, while living among them, felt his righteous soul tormented day after day by their lawless deeds), then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from temptation, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment, and especially those who indulge the flesh in its corrupt desires and despise authority.
2Peter 2:7–10 NASB
Just as the angels literally snatched Lot, his wife and two daughters out of Sodom, God is able to snatch us out of danger.
Lot responded to the culture around him by crying out to God day after day about the sin of Sodom, he did not allow his conscience to be completely seared by the evil going on around him. Lot knew that the people of Sodom were completely driven by selfishness and the animal nature. The only language they understand is power, domination and humiliation against others.
“It was the same as happened in the days of Lot: they were eating, they were drinking, they were buying, they were selling, they were planting, they were building; but on the day that Lot went out from Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all.
“It will be just the same on the day that the Son of Man is revealed. On that day, the one who is on the housetop and whose goods are in the house must not go down to take them out; and likewise the one who is in the field must not turn back. Remember Lot’s wife. Whoever seeks to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it.”
Luke 17:28–33 NASB
We see the passing of the seasons as the mercy of God but we should not take any of this for granted. The people of Sodom were completely oblivious about their true nature and what was coming for them. Life is not just about working, making money and buying and selling.
… and he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the valley, and he saw, and behold, the smoke of the land ascended like the smoke of a furnace.
Genesis 19:28 NASB
Now Mount Sinai was all in smoke because the LORD descended upon it in fire; and its smoke ascended like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked violently.
Exodus 19:18 NASB
The “smoke” of Sodom that ascends to us all the way to our day is its perpetual desolation, while the “smoke” that ascends from Sinai are the tablets of the testimony of the Lord.
Then another angel, a third one, followed them, saying with a loud voice, “If anyone worships the beast and his image, and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he also will drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is mixed in full strength in the cup of His anger; and he will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever; they have no rest day and night, those who worship the beast and his image, and whoever receives the mark of his name.”
Here is the perseverance of the saints who keep the commandments of God and their faith in Jesus.”
Revelation 14:9–12 NASB
The seal of God and mark of the beast harken back to Ezekiel 9:4. I would advise you to read Revelation alongside Ezekiel, because Revelation uses a lot of symbols and teachings from that and other prophetic books.
Ezekiel was writing just before the exile, though the exile and its aftermath. Thus, for those who were in exile in Babylon, who were weeping and crying were most likely weeping and crying out to God about the evil around them even before the exile.
Like the command in the Shema (Deut. 6:4–9) to wear memorials of the LORD’s words on the hand, forehead and home doorposts, the words of God should be at the forefront of your mind and also in what you do.
There are two kinds of people who will go along with the evil of the age: true believers (mark in the forehead) and capitulators (mark on the hand). We see examples of this in historical accounts of life under totalitarian regimes ancient and modern.
In Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, there were people who were the true believers. But many more just capitulated to the spirit of the age and when those regimes fell down, many of those who capitulated refused to admit that they favored the wrong side. The same was true in Sodom.
What is ‘eternal fire’?
How can Sodom be an example of eternal fire (Jude 1:7)? How can its smoke go up forever? How can death and hades be thrown into an eternal fire? The truth is that once God throws death and Hades into the fire, they are destroyed. The truth is that those who rebelled against God and end up in that fire, are destroyed.
In the eternal kingdom, the only tree in the midst of the kingdom will be the Tree of Life (Rev. 22:1–2). The former things will pass away (Rev. 21:4; Isa. 25:8), and those of mankind who live in that eternal kingdom will know what the Tree of Knowledge brought to the world. They will never want to repeat that.
Sodom is not burning anymore, but we still have the lesson with us 3,500-plus years later. We need to learn these things so they become a part of us. You have to study and practice until it becomes a part of you.
We see in this reading the difference between hospitality and intercession of Abraham and Lot with the inhospitality and oppression Sodom. Those who seek dominate others, want them to think and act like them and if they don’t follow along voluntarily, they will force you to do so. They don’t care if you are a true believer or a capitulator as long as they can exercise their dominion.
Sodom didn’t like outsiders whose wisdom didn’t bend to its truth
Abraham pleaded with God for mercy on the Sodom metro area. Lot’s sons in law laughed off his warnings, refusing to believe that God would judge them. The men of Sodom, even the “old” who should have known better chastised the “foreigner” Lot for judging them though Lot was the one of the elders who sat at the gate of Sodom issuing judgements on a daily basis. You see the same thing with Mordechai later, he was also a judge at the city gates helping make legal decisions.
It’s ironic that the people of Sodom were sneering at Lot about being a judge over them when he was telling them not to physically abuse his guests, when in truth, Lot had been a judge over the city for a long time. They were trying to force Lot to think about the world the way they wanted him to think. The people of Sodom, with their selfish and domineering spirit, made Sodom a toxic place to live and spread their toxic culture to the surrounding cities.
True wisdom confounds the foolish (Romans 1–2)
When Paul said in Romans 1 that he must proclaim the good news of the Messiah, he said that this message would be wisdom to those who know God and foolishness to those who don’t know God. Messiah offers deliverance for Israel (who know God) and the Greeks (who did not know God). Messiah offers deliverance from the way of death or “the law of sin” through the “law of the spirit.”
The Apostle Paul also said idolatry is the natural consequence of a denial of the self-evident truth that all that exists was created by Someone powerful, intelligent and praiseworthy.
All the so-called Elohim, or powerful ones, that societies have put forward don’t stack up and lead devotees down a deteriorating road of self-indulgence.
The ones who are most at fault are those who claim to be wise yet deny and suppress what is self-evident. These are the ones who lead people away, and dragging the innocent away with them. These “wise” men and women deny or ignore what they can observe with their own eyes.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
U.S. Declaration of Independence, 1776, National Archives
Paul wanted his readers to understand that there is something outside of the Ba’als, outside of Olympus that created the world.
But Paul warned that because people would not acknowledge the lessons of nature as self-evident, that God gave them over to an “enlightened pursuit” of unnatural desires. The church in Corinth, for example, tolerated a kind of relationship that even the pagans did not tolerate.
Because they didn’t want to keep the Creator at the forefront of their mind, God allows their minds to become depraved and unanchored to the point that they can’t understand the truth anymore. The intelligentsia are living on instinct like animals, rather than by the higher intellect, as God made humans to live.
Summary: Tammy