When The Cesspool Overflows, Part 1

Today on Fellowship in the Word, Pastor Bill Gebhardt challenges you to become a fully functioning follower of Jesus Christ. The smoke of the land descended like the smoke of a furnace. Thus it came about when God destroyed the cities of the valley that God remembered Abraham and sent Lot out in the midst of the overthrow when he overthrew the cities in which Lot lived. What does Abraham see?

Like a mushroom pod. Thank you for joining us today on this edition of Fellowship in the Word with Pastor Bill Gebhardt. Fellowship in the Word is the radio ministry of Fellowship Bible Church located in Metairie, Louisiana. Let's join Pastor Bill Gebhardt now as once again he shows us how God's Word meets our world.

I love the Word of God, but there are certain sections that I feel uneasy preaching and teaching. Genesis 19 is one of those sections. It deals with sin that is so graphic it seems almost unspeakable. It describes the utter destruction, as best as we can determine, of five cities, two of which have become infamous.

Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people destroyed completely. It would have been easier to skip this chapter and continue with the series of the life of Abraham, the friend of God. And Abraham only makes a cameo appearance in Genesis 19.

He is 20 miles west of the catastrophic event. But this chapter is filled with so many insights, so many principles, so many warnings for you and for me that it would be impossible in good conscience to skip it. This chapter is so sad that I've decided to title this message when the cesspool overflows. Would you open your Bibles to Genesis chapter 19? Let me give a little bit of background I think that can be helpful, especially among evangelical Christians. I think that we often have strong presuppositions about this chapter and about Sodom and Gomorrah.

And there's no question that this chapter contains homosexuality and sodomy. But Sodom and Gomorrah and the region around there had a lot more than simply homosexuality and sodomy going for it. In Ezekiel chapter 16, Ezekiel writes that the people of those cities, they were arrogant, proudful. They lived lives of careless ease. They were affluent.

They had abundant food. And yet they did not have any interest in helping the needy or the poor. They were morally bankrupt and they committed unlimited abominations before the Lord. And that's awful.

But I think to do it justice, listen to these words. Isaiah chapter 1, God tells Judah that they are just like Sodom. In Isaiah chapter 3, God says they display their sin just like Sodom displayed theirs. In Jeremiah 23, Jeremiah writes that you have become like Sodom. And in Lamentations 4, Jeremiah writes this, speaking for God, the iniquity of my people is greater than the sin of Sodom. So we have to have some sense of perspective here.

Jesus, speaking to Israel, to the cities in which he had performed so many miracles, in Matthew 11 says this, for if the miracles had occurred in Sodom, which occurred in you, it would have remained to this day. So let's get some sense of perspective here. And with that in mind, I want to approach this chapter as a four act play. And it's a tragedy.

And that's all it is. But I want to approach it in the sense that Sodom is our world, the world that we live in. So the first act of the play is verses 1 through 14.

And in this act, God warns us that he will destroy our world because of its grievous sin. Moses writes, Now the two angels came to Sodom in the evening as Lot was sitting at the gate of Sodom. The two angels are from Chapter 18. The two angels and the Lord had visited Abraham at his tent 20 miles away. And now the angels show up at Sodom and Lot is there.

And it's very important to understand this. He is sitting at the gate. Sitting at the gate is a place of prominence in any ancient city. That's where the judges of the city set. That's where the elders made decisions. That's where business was conducted.

In fact, the city gate of the ancient city is like City Hall today in our cities and towns. That tells me that Lot was no ordinary man. He was not a regular citizen. He was a man of prominence, probably to do with his great affluence that he had. He had tremendous political and businesslike influence. But as you'll see in the chapter, he had no spiritual significance at all.

So Lot then offers hospitality. And think of the parallel between this and what Abraham did last time. He says, When Lot saw them, he rose to meet them and bowed down with his face to the ground, just like Abraham. And he said, Now behold, my lords, please turn aside into your servant's house and spend the night and wash your feet. And then you may rise early and go on your way, just like Abraham said. It's a little different. They said, however, No, we shall spend the night in the square.

We'll just sleep out here. They're testing Lot. They know exactly what they're walking into. Now Lot's mind is working.

Should I tell them now how unsafe this would be, how terrible this would be for them if they tried that? So Lot presses on. And yet he urged them strongly. And so they turned aside to him and entered his house. And he prepared a feast for them, just like Abraham, and baked unleavened bread. And they ate. And before they lay down. The men of the city, the men of Sodom, surrounded the house, both young and old, all the people from every quarter. And they called out to Lot and said to him, Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out that numeric and standard that we may have relations with them. It's interesting to note in the culture in which we live that I have read some commentators have said that the only sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was that the men of Sodom and Gomorrah weren't very hospitable.

Now, I'm sure they weren't. But this isn't a sin of hospitality as it becomes abundantly clear at all. You see, when it says that we may have relations with him, it depends on your translation. But the Hebrew word is really the Hebrew word is saying that we may get to know them.

And this means no in a relational way. In fact, Moses uses it in Genesis earlier when he says Adam knew Eve and she conceived a son. OK, she conceived the son by him knowing her in a carnal way, not because he knew her name. After all, she was the only other person on the planet. He had to know who she was. It means to know in that sense. Lot, verse six, he went out to them at the doorway and he shut the door behind him.

You can just imagine the scene. You see, Lot's trying to protect his guests, he thinks. Now, one thing you've got to know, these messengers don't need protected. These are angels of God. They're there for judgment.

But they're letting a lot do this. And then something tragically happens. And he said, Please, my brothers, do not act wickedly. Now, behold, he said, I have two daughters who have had no relations with man. Please let me bring them out to you and do to them whatever you like. Only do nothing to these men in as much as they have come under the shelter of my roof. Wow. The compromising life. Of a carnal believer. It's unimaginable that you could say that.

I love what Chuck Swindoll writes here. Chuck says, Lot's offer makes me sick to my stomach. As a father, I would use any necessary violence to protect my daughters from horror to which Lot had just condemned his.

No custom or law would convince me to sacrifice my girls for anyone, least of all two strangers. His bizarre, deranged proposal illustrates just how twisted his brain had become after living for so many years in this moral sewage pit. I can't determine which disgust me more, the valeness of Sodom citizens or the depraved hypocrisy of Lot. Wow. As we continue, he said, They said, stand aside. Furthermore, they said, This one came in as an alien and already he's acting like a judge.

Now we will treat you worse than them. Wow. By the way, if we're to be salt and light in the world, how much spiritual influence does Lot have? None. They have no respect for him at all.

Zero. Except that they are saying the creed that almost all civilizations say at a certain stage in their decline is, Who are you to judge us? You ever hear that? Who are you to judge us? And that's what they're saying.

Who appointed you to be a judge? And so the real rescuers show up in verse 10, but the men reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with him and they shut the door. And then they struck the men who were at the doorway of the house with blindness, both small and great. So they wearied themselves trying to find the doorway. That word is not the typical word for blindness.

It's a word for a dazed condition. Kind of an interesting perspective. They couldn't see anything. You know what astounds me? They didn't give up. They didn't give up.

Now, I mean, obviously, if you've got a lot of people around you, you're all struck sort of blind and dazed. You think someone would say, Oh, we've got to get out of here. Nerve you is they were still determined. We're going to get in this house and we're going to get these guys.

So much for their culture and what it was like. You see, the angels are not victims at all. They are the messengers of God. They're here for judgment.

Then it says in verse 12, the two men said the lot. Whom else have you had here? You're a son in law and your sons and your daughters, whomever you have in the city, bring them out to the place. Whoever you influence, whoever you led to saving faith in God, whoever you got in your posse, whoever you have. Let's bring them out.

Let's get them all. How much influence did he have? Well, we'll see. He says, then the two men after they had said that said, for we are about to destroy this place because their outcry has become so great before the Lord and the Lord has sent us to destroy it. And Lot went out and spoke to his sons in law who were to be married to his daughters, probably an arranged marriage for financial advancement.

And he said to them, up, get out of this place, for the Lord will destroy the city. But he appeared to his sons in law to be justing. It's a joke to them.

Why would that be the case? Because they never heard Lot say anything spiritual in his whole life. They never heard him say anything. They never even heard him probably ever even talk about God.

Lot was just one of them. And he said, God's going to judge the whole place. Come on, you're just trying to tease us.

There's nothing funny about this, though. You see, when you see this particular act, what you see is God warns us that we're going to destroy our world because of its grievous sin. There's the warning. We're warned all the way through scripture. You can be warned of all the prophets about the world eventually being judged by God. You can be warned by the Olivet Discourse of Jesus Christ, the warning to the church in the Book of Thessalonians. Clearly the warning in the Book of Revelation. We're warned. God warns us. Now, the idea is the warning then should, in us, should produce something.

It should produce, in our case, a character of salt and light and a sense of urgency to the people we live with. With what? None of that happened at all. He never developed his character at all. And he really had no spiritual concern for them. Act two. In Act two, we're going to find something out that's just a little bit different. In Act two, we're going to change this idea that the influence of the world can be alluring to us, but it's contemptible to God. Verse 15, When morning dawned, the angels urged Lot, saying, Up, take your wife and your two daughters who are here, or you will be swept away in the punishment of the city. And it says he hesitated.

Wow. Now, I don't know about you, but when you start seeing angelic beings coming and angelic beings telling you we're here to judge the whole place. And they're telling you, Let's get up. Let's move this sense of the urgency.

The word order in Hebrew is sort of like exclamation points. Let's go. Let's go. And Lot's like, Well, I'm thinking about it. See, he hesitated. You see, what is it about Lot that's so disturbing? He has no convictions. Lot has no spiritual convictions. And a lot of us like that. We live in the world, we're of the world, but we don't even have any spiritual convictions.

Just a few observations. One, convictions must clearly be established before God or they will be weak before man. You see, if you don't have strong convictions in your relationship with God, when you get out among people, you won't have convictions at all. Secondly, convictions must be affirmed and modeled in the home, or I guarantee they will be compromised in the street. Lot had no convictions in his home.

In fact, this story is going to get a lot worse because of his home. And convictions must mean everything to us personally, or they'll mean nothing to us when we're under pressure. Lot was a man without conviction.

He didn't have it at all. And so he finds himself this alluring idea. He hesitates. Now watch the grace of God. So the men seized his hand in the hand of his wife in the hands of his two daughters, for the compassion of the Lord was upon him.

That's amazing. You see, under God's compassion, he said, grab him. I'm going to take him out.

Compassion of the Lord was upon him. And it says, and they brought him out and they put him outside the city. And it came about when they had brought them outside that one said, escape for your life. Do not look behind you and do not stay anywhere in the valley. He says, escape to the mountains or you'll be swept away.

Now, it's very specific. Run for your life. Don't look back. That's what they were told. There's only four of them, two daughters, a mother and Lot. Now watch what Lot does. And Lot said to them, Oh, no, my lords. Now, behold, your servant has found favor in your sight and you have magnified your loving kindness, which you have shown me by saving my life.

Hey, thanks a lot for saving me from the judgment. But I've got a couple of selfish little ideas of my own here. He says, but I cannot escape to the mountains for the disaster will overtake me and I will die. And behold, this town is near enough to flee to. And it is small. Please let me escape there.

Is it not small that my life would be really saved? And he said to him, behold, I grant you this request also not to overthrow the time to which you have spoken. He says, hurry, escape there, for I cannot do anything until you arrive there. And therefore, the name of the town was called Zoar. Zoar means little town. That's what Zoar is. In Hebrew, it means little time. This is the first small town in the Book of Genesis.

He's going to Zoar. What's going on here? You have to understand we're sophisticated people.

We're cosmopolitan type of people. You can't ask us to go live in the mountains. You see, what he's really saying this is, look, I'm willing to leave Vegas, but let me go to Reno. You see, that's what he is saying.

I'm willing. You see why this carnal Christianity is so tragic here. The great German scholar Leupold says it almost taxes the reader's patience to bear with this long-winded plea at a moment of such extreme danger.

Lot appreciated almost nothing that was being done for him. That's his standing, shows what his character was really like. God warns us that there will be, that he will destroy our world because of its grievous sin. The influence of our world can be alluring to us, but it's contemptible to God. Acts 3, the Lord will preserve us from the destruction of the world.

That's what we find. Here comes the judgment of God. He says the sun has risen over the earth when Lot came to Zoar. And then the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven. And he overthrew the cities and all the valley and all the inhabitants of the cities and what grew on the ground.

Wow. What happened there? Again, Leupold says the means causing the destruction are said to be sulfur and fire, which Yahweh brought down so plentifully upon these places that he is said to have rained them on Sodom and Gomorrah. On this point, the account is very concise. Whatever attempt is made to discover more, more nearly the details of what transpired, such an attempt must stay strictly within the limits of the textual statements. Nothing points directly to a volcanic eruption, he says, nor do lava, does lava remain there today in the immediate vicinity, nor does the expression overthrew necessarily mean there was an earthquake. The fire which rained down from heaven may have been lightning. The sulfur may have been miraculously wrought. And so it rained, he said, down together with the lightnings, although there are other possibilities of a huge explosion by these inflammable materials.

We don't know. I had someone after the first service tell me they had seen it on television. They had found a disk. And on that disk was an ancient inscription that said that there was a comet or a meteorite that actually came and hit the exact region of the world where the Sodom and Gomorrah are. I can't verify that.

They said it was on television. Is that possible? Yes. But the question is, if God wanted to tell me if it was a comet or meteor, he would have said so.

He just simply said, is it devastating judgment? It's beyond belief. You think about this. The surface of the water at the Dead Sea now is fourteen hundred feet below sea level. And it's twelve hundred feet more to the bottom of the Dead Sea. Just think of how devastating that is. All the people died. All the animals died.

All the plants died. I mean, it is an amazing, complete and total judgment. The reason for it is it becomes the example judgment for the end times in the whole world. I skipped one verse just to look at it for a moment or let's look at verse 26. It says, but his wife from behind him looked back and she became a pillar of salt. That word look back, by the way, she wasn't climbing away and just look back over shoulder and then. That word in Hebrew means she gazed intently.

Why did she stop and gaze intently? She didn't want to go. This was her life. She was somebody in Sodom. Her husband said at the gate, I love that place.

She was told specifically not to. Meanwhile, by the way, part of the story, notice verse 27. Now Abraham arose early in the morning and went to the place where he had stood before the Lord and pleaded with God through prayer.

Would you spare the cities if there were 10 righteous there? And God said he would. And he looked on towards Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the valley. And he saw and behold, the smoke of the land descended like the smoke of a furnace. Thus it came about when God destroyed the cities of the valley, that God remembered Abraham and sent Lot out in the midst of the overthrow when he overthrew the cities in which Lot lived. What does Abraham see?

Like a mushroom cloud. You've been listening to Pastor Bill Gebhardt on the Radio Ministry of Fellowship in the Word. If you ever miss one of our broadcasts or maybe you would just like to listen to the message one more time, remember that you can go to a great website called oneplace.com. That's oneplace.com and you can listen to Fellowship in the Word online.

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