The Wrong Normal

There is a phrase that has been thrown around a bunch since the pandemic— “our new normal.”

Some might say there is no such thing as normal, but there are certain things that our culture just assumes.

Occasionally, an event happens that radically redefines normal for us.

In my lifetime, I can think of a couple. The first was 9/11.

Things changed. People became more suspicious of outsiders, security became a part of our everyday lives, friends from high school were going off to war.

Most recently, it’s been the pandemic.

Words like “supply chain issues” and isolation have become a common part of our everyday lives.

Here’s what I want to challenge you to think about this morning as we look at God’s Word: Be careful what you consider normal.

Turn with me to Genesis 18-19.

That’s a lot of ground to cover, and I am going to warn you in advance that today’s passage is a heavy one.

We have spent the last few Sundays looking at a faithful God and flawed people.

This morning, we are going to continue that study, and it will bring us face to face with the darkness that we are capable of.

Portions of this passage are beautiful and demonstrate the faithfulness of God in fantastic ways.

Others, however, show just how sinful we can be.

We are continuing the accounts of the lives of Abraham and Sarah, and we are picking back up with some folks we have been introduced before.

We are going to spend a lot of time talking about Lot this morning, and we are going to see what he was dealing with in the city of Sodom.

As we will see, both Abraham and Lot received special visitors. However, they responded in different ways to the messengers and their messages.

From their lives this morning, I want to give us to consider this warning:

Be careful what you consider normal.

We aren’t going to have a lot of outline points for you on the screen this morning.

Instead, I want us to walk through this passage a piece at a time and draw lessons out along the way.

First, let’s see how these events begin.

Start in 18:1-5...

Abraham is sitting outside his tent one afternoon when he looks up and sees three visitors.

Scripture doesn’t tell us explicitly, but pulling together what we see in these chapters, it seems that two of these men are angels and one is God himself, similar to how he showed up to comfort Hagar.

We don’t know when he fully understood who these men were, but he is alert and responsive that he has some special guests who are traveling through.

He pulls out the stops and prepares a meal for them, and then it gets interesting. Pick up in verse 9-15...

I love this part of the story.

You again see the humanity of these people.

Sarah has been in the tent, helping prepare the meal and all, but she is within earshot of the conversation.

God promises that, in about a year, she will have a son.

Abraham laughed in Genesis 17 when God told him a similar thing, and now Sarah laughs to herself. It may be that it wasn’t even audible, but the Lord who knows our every thought, hears her.

He gives her an incredible reassurance in verse 14— “Is anything impossible for the Lord?”

Despite her doubt and her denial, God was able to do all of this.

Isn’t it beautiful to see how God was connecting some of his greatest promises? Here, God is telling Sarah that she will have a son, Isaac, even though it is impossible.

Almost 2000 years later, an angel would remind another mom-to-be of the same thing about a promised child.

Mary, who had never been with a man, is told she would become pregnant.

In her conversation with the angel, he reminds her:

Luke 1:37 CSB

For nothing will be impossible with God.”

This doesn’t mean that you will always achieve every dream you want or that you will always be happy with how life works out.

However, as we see in both these instances, the Bible assures us that God is completely able to accomplish everything he has promised he will do.

Again, God has reiterated his promise.

Abraham welcomed the visitors, and God has again shown himself faithful in spite of Sarah’s doubts here.

Now, the scene begins to shift.

As the men prepare to leave, they shift their attention to the city of Sodom that is off in the distance a ways.

If you’ve been with us, you may remember that Abraham had a nephew, Lot, who had moved to Canaan with him.

When their herds became too big to keep together, Lot chose to head towards the fertile land and larger cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.

When that happened, the Bible already hinted at bad things that were coming:

Genesis 13:13 CSB

(Now the men of Sodom were evil, sinning immensely against the Lord.)

We are going to see that in our account this morning.

After a discussion about whether or not to tell Abraham what his plan was, God reveals what is about to happen next. Look at Gen 18:20-21.

We believe that God is omniscient, which means he knows everything that can be known. There is nothing he does not know or understand.

Yet, in extraordinary times, God comes to earth to show his complete understanding of what is taking place.

He did this at the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11, and he is doing it again here.

He has heard about the wickedness of the city, and he is coming to see for himself.

The two men with the Lord, who chapter 19 identifies as angels, head towards Sodom while the Lord stays with Abraham.

Abraham begins to plead with God, calling on God’s justice to spare the righteous people who live in Sodom and not destroy them with the wicked.

He starts by asking God to spare the city on behalf of fifty righteous, then forty, then thirty, twenty, and finally ten.

The Lord agrees not to destroy the city if there are even ten righteous people living in it.

Before we pick up with what happens in Sodom, let’s stop and think for a minute about what we are seeing here.

Abraham has been growing in his faith for decades now, and we are seeing the fruit of that.

He is aware of the fact that this is God he is speaking with.

He is sensitive to what God is doing.

He knows God is just and can pray boldly based off what he knows of God’s character and nature.

He knows that the city is wicked, but he is interceding and praying for it to be spared on account of the righteous who might live there.

Of course, he knows Lot is there, so he has a personal interest in what is going on there.

He cares for his relative, but he also understands that God is a just and righteous God who can’t let sin go unpunished.

Compare Abraham’s reaction with what we find of Lot.

Pick up in 19:1-3...

This starts off very similarly to the encounter with Abraham.

Lot is sitting outside the gates like Abraham was his tent.

He sees the angels and calls them to come stay with him instead of just staying out in public.

However, from there, it changes dramatically.

Pick up in verses 4-11...

This scene is terrifying and horrific.

An angry mob of all the men in the city show up at Lot’s door.

They ask him to send the visitors out so they can rape them.

Did you see Lot’s suggestion? “Don’t harm my guests—have my daughters instead.”

The wickedness of this moment should shock us.

The people of Sodom had taken the beautiful gift of sexual intimacy, which God designed for a man and a woman to enjoy within the confines of the covenant of marriage, and they had twisted it.

They were living out what Paul would later describe as happening throughout humanity:

Romans 1:26–27 CSB

For this reason God delivered them over to disgraceful passions. Their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. The men in the same way also left natural relations with women and were inflamed in their lust for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the appropriate penalty of their error.

They were not only pursuing same-sex relations, they were doing so by force.

And what about Lot? How could any father possibly suggest such a horrific alternative?

Why would he offer his daughters into the hands of this mob?

The rumors were true—this town was horrifically depraved.

The angels strike the men with blindness and told Lot what was going on. They were there to destroy the city.

Lot went to his daughters’ fiances and told them what was going to happen, but they refused to come with him.

Pick up in verse 15-16...

After the events of the night before, wouldn’t you think you would get out of town as soon as you can?

You have come face to face with a wicked, angry mob. You hosted angels who were able to strike people blind. They have said they are going to destroy the city.

Look at Lot, though: “But he hesitated”

In light of all that, even surrounded by all the wickedness of Sodom and hearing about the judgment of God, Lot hesitated to leave.

We don’t know why, but there was something about this city that was his normal, and he didn’t want to leave it.

Look at the beauty of this passage, though: “Because of the Lord’s compassion for him...”

Doesn’t this astound you?

I would have left him there to die. I tried to warn you, I gave you every out, and yet you still aren’t listening. Fine; you are on your own.

Instead, the angels grab Lot, his wife, and his daughters by the hand and drag them out of the city.

If that wasn’t enough, Lot still deliberates with the angels! Read verses 17-20...

Lot still seems hesitant to go, and in his compassion, God allows him to escape to Zoar before judgment falls on the city.

Pick up in verse 23-26...

Lot made it to Zoar, and God spared him. However, there was something about Sodom that drew his wife back.

She disregarded what God said and turned to look back, and it cost her her life.

We have no way of knowing, but it makes me wonder what would have happened if they had escaped to the mountains like God initially told them.

Perhaps they wouldn’t have been able to see the destruction and she would have been spared. We will never know.

This account isn’t over yet, though. In fact, in some ways, it gets worse.

Eventually, Lot moves his daughters to a cave in the mountains.

The daughters’ fiances were killed in Sodom, and the daughters are convinced they will never have husbands, so they come up with a terrible plan.

Read 19:31-33.

They get their father drunk, and the older daughter sleeps with him the first night. They repeat this the next night with the younger daughter.

The sons who are born out of this become the Moabites and the Ammonites, two people groups who will cause Israel problems in the centuries that follow.

Let’s pull all of this together and see what we might find in it.

First, did you see the difference between Abraham and Lot here?

It’s as though Lot is asleep to all that is going on.

He insisted that the men sleep at his house that night because he knew what could happen to them if they stayed in the square.

Yet his solution to their wickedness is more wickedness and depravity as he offered his daughters to the mob.

He has to literally be drug out of the city, and he still resists getting as far away as he was told to initially.

What on earth can we draw from that?

Be careful what we consider normal.

You see, this was apparently the kind of thing that characterized the city of Sodom.

They were wicked and chose to reject God’s design for life, marriage, and sexuality, and Lot seems to have accepted that as normal at some level.

I would not believe that this man could be a follower of the one true God if it weren’t for what Peter tells us about him:

2 Peter 2:7–8 CSB

and if he rescued righteous Lot, distressed by the depraved behavior of the immoral (for as that righteous man lived among them day by day, his righteous soul was tormented by the lawless deeds he saw and heard)—

It’s a good thing Peter calls him righteous, because I sure wouldn’t.

He saw the lawless deeds, and he was tormented by what he saw, so why didn’t he leave?

Not only that, why didn’t he teach his family to reject them?

That’s the other observation we see here: the smell of Sodom was still on them as they left.

He may have been distressed by what he saw, but he caved to it that night in offering his daughters to the mob. Not only that, his daughters continued to carry distorted ideas about sexuality that they would later act on in getting themselves pregnant by Lot.

They may have gotten out, but the smell of Sodom and its way of living was still on them like clothes that have been near a fire.

Listen: this passage is a warning to us all.

We need to be so careful what we and our families are accepting as normal.

Let’s address a glaring issue from the text this morning.

Our culture is telling us that we need to affirm homosexuality as a valid way of life, yet the Bible makes it clear again and again that homosexual relationships are not his design for our lives or the lives of those around us.

Some would argue that this passage isn’t talking about monogamous same-sex relationships and they would condemn those who would seek to enter any kind of sexual relationship by force.

While I understand those arguments, the totality of Scripture makes it clear that part of the underlying issue here is the fact they had twisted God’s design for sexual relationships.

As our culture tries to tell us to do the same, we cannot compromise on what God says.

However, let me issue this warning as well:

There are some of us in this room who are disgusted and unsettled by the sinful acts we read about here, and we should be, but whose worldviews are no closer to true godliness.

You would “Amen” statements about our need to watch out for the influence of homosexuality in our culture, all the while turning a blind eye to the fact that you are viewing pornography that depicts similar depravity, or you are harboring hate for someone you went to church with, you are living life in pride, you look down on the poor or someone from a different racial background, or the like.

The Super Bowl is tonight, and you may rightly be upset by commercials that celebrate what God rejects.

While all of those sins have different ramifications in this life, we need to be careful that we are watching out for what we consider normal.

We want to be like Abraham, sensitive to the things of God and responsive to what he is doing.

We don’t want to be like Lot, where if people read the end of our stories, they think, “Really? He made it?”

Paul talks about this kind of person:

1 Corinthians 3:11–15 CSB

For no one can lay any foundation other than what has been laid down. That foundation is Jesus Christ. If anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay, or straw, each one’s work will become obvious. For the day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire; the fire will test the quality of each one’s work. If anyone’s work that he has built survives, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned up, he will experience loss, but he himself will be saved—but only as through fire.

This is talking about those who know Jesus; people who have trusted him as their Savior and Lord and are building their lives on him.

For those of us who are in that category, God is going to put a match to our works.

Anything we have done for him, we will receive back as a reward.

The rest will be destroyed.

Did you see the end of that verse? “He himself will be saved—but only as through fire”

That’s what we see with Lot. If we took 2 Peter out of the equation, we would never think he was saved.

Yet, he made it because of the compassion and grace of God.

Is that how you want to stand before God at the end of your life?

Jesus saved me, but I lived so much of my life in Sodom that I made compromises. I have that smell on me as my life still shows so little of Jesus in it.

In many ways, we are all like Lot, and really, like the people of Sodom as well.

We have rejected God’s commands and design for life, and we deserve to be destroyed because we have all sinned against a holy God.

If we are saved, it is only because God, in his grace and goodness, loved us enough to come to earth.

This time, it wasn’t to destroy a city. Instead, it was to rescue us through his own death and resurrection.

We are saved because when we were in our sin, God grabbed us and drew us to himself through Jesus.

However, now that he has saved us, let’s strive, through the grace of God with us, to be like Abraham and not like Lot.

Wake up!

What compromises are you making that are contrary to what God tells us to do?

What are you lingering on, and what are you looking back at?

What do you consider normal that the Bible says is wrong?

Turn from that today and turn to the merciful God who loves you so much that he would die for you.