God, Righteous and Just
Notes
Transcript
God, Righteous and Just
Genesis 18:16-33
Open with prayer.
The covenant meal was over. Abraham had become the only mortal to ever dine with God prior to the incarnation of God the Son. Over that meal Abraham heard God reaffirm his covenant promise to doubting Sarah, saying, “Is anything too hard for the Lord? At the appointed time I will return to you about this time next year, and Sarah shall have a son” (v. 14).
This announcement would have its messianic fulfilment in the announcement to the Virgin Mary that she would bear Abraham’s ultimate seed, Christ Jesus. Believing Mary asked, “‘How will this be …?’ And the angel answered her, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you’” (Luke 1:34, 35).
Clearly, again, this was because nothing was too hard for God!
Abraham, ever the good host, escorted his guests as they departed from his tents. So, having just dined with God, he then literally walked with God like Enoch. Joyous, as no doubt the departure was, it was also ominous because as his heavenly guests got up to leave:
Then the men set out from there, and they looked down toward Sodom. And Abraham went with them to set them on their way.
The traditional site for this is the mountaintop village of Beni Na’im, three miles east of Hebron where the Dead Sea and its surrounding plains are visible through gaps in the hills.
The covenant feast had extended late into the afternoon, so that the sun hung low in the west, radiating off the golden, leathered faces of Abraham and his heavenly guests. Below them sparkled the turquoise of the Dead Sea. Just to the south of the sea, Sodom and Gomorrah could be seen in the slanting rays.
The next time Abraham is recorded to have looked down from this vantage is at the end of the episode:
And he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the valley, and he looked and, behold, the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace.
The first thing we’ll look at is:
Abraham Informed
Abraham Informed
Apparently, Abraham did not have the slightest inkling of what was coming because as the parting company surveyed the Jordan Valley’s cities glowing in the setting sun, God raised the question,
The Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do,
Answering his own question, God proceeded to give reasons why Abraham must be informed of the impending destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The first two had to do with Abraham’s responsibility, and the third with the condition of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Abraham’s responsibility
Abraham’s responsibility
First, Abraham was to become a channel of blessing to the world:
seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him?
As such Abraham had been “chosen” (literally, “known”) by God (v. 19). He had then dined with God face to face and finally walked with him. He was accorded the singular title “friend of God” (James 2:23). Servants may not know their master’s purposes, but friends do. So as God’s friend and conduit of blessing to the whole world, it was essential that Abraham know what was going down in respect to the neighboring cities where his nephew Lot dwelt.
In addition to this, Abraham was also responsible to teach righteousness and justice to his offspring.
For I have chosen him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice, so that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has promised him.”
God desired that his covenant people be a people who did righteousness and justice to everyone, regardless. This would become a major purpose of the law—to love your neighbor as yourself (cf. Leviticus 19:18; Galatians 5:14).
It is here that Sodom and Gomorrah provide the starkest, darkest contrast because their lifestyle was the absolute antithesis of righteousness and justice. And when God judged Sodom and Gomorrah, their ruins would become a powerful teaching tool to Abraham and his descendants.
There on the border of Israel, the eerie, burnt-out remains of Sodom and Gomorrah permanently testified to what happens to a people who reject righteousness and justice.
Atop Beni Na’im, Yahweh elected to apprise Abraham of what he was going to do to these wicked cities in order to strengthen Abraham’s resolve and ability to instruct his children in godliness. “My children, do you want to know what God thinks of an unjust culture? Take a look! Do you want to know what God does to such a people? Take a walk through the ruins.”
The example was still powerful in Jesus’ day as the apostle Peter explained that God burned Sodom and Gomorrah as “an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly” (2 Peter 2:6). Today the grave-like mounds of those cities under the surface of the southern waters of the Dead Sea testify to the permanence of God’s judgment.
Sodom’s condition
Sodom’s condition
Having thus far underlined Abraham’s responsibility to bless the nations and to teach his own children to do righteousness and justice, Yahweh next emphasized the depth of Sodom’s sin, perhaps gesturing toward the cities as he spoke.
Then the Lord said, “Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is very grave,
We naturally think of the sins of these cities as largely sexual in nature.
But if we imagine the sins of these cities only in sexual terms, we miss the depth of their depravity. The Hebrew word for “outcry” is used in Scripture to describe the cries of the oppressed and brutalized.
· It is used for the cry of the oppressed widow or orphan, (Exodus 22:22, 23), the cry of the oppressed servant (Deuteronomy 24:15), and the cries of the Israelites in Egypt (Exodus 2:23; 3:7, 9).
· Jeremiah uses it to refer to the scream of terror by an individual or city when it is attacked (Jeremiah 18:22; 20:16; 25:36; 48:3–5, 34; 49:21; 50:46; 51:54).
Such an outcry is the miserable wail of the oppressed and brutalized. Nahum Sarna says of the terms as used here:
They connote the anguished cry of the oppressed, the agonized plea of the victim for help in the face of some great injustice. In the Bible these terms are suffused with poignancy and pathos, with moral outrage and soul-stirring passion.… The sin of Sodom, then, is heinous moral and social corruption, an arrogant disregard of basic human rights, a cynical insensitivity to the sufferings of others.
This is confirmed by Ezekiel:
Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.
Sodom and Gomorrah were terrible little towns in which the inhabitants cared only for themselves while they brutalized and oppressed each other. Social violence was common. There were no human rights. The poor and needy and defenseless were especially brutalized.
The great outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah came from the inhabitants of the cities themselves! Unpunished sin cried out to heaven for vengeance, like the blood of Abel.
Ominously, the Lord described “the outcry” as “very grave.” Terrifying little towns indeed. And so reminiscent of today, as historian David Wells has written:
There is violence on the earth. The liberated search only for power. Industry despoils the earth. The powerful ride roughshod over the weak. The poor are left to die on street grates. The unborn are killed before they can ever see the rich and beautiful world that God has made. The elderly are encouraged to get on with the business of dying so that we might take their places. The many forms that violence takes in our world provide stunning reminders of how false have been the illusions about freedom with which we have, for two centuries, been enticed in the West.
We still see Sodom and Gomorrah today.
There are real terrors here for all who take God’s word seriously. But those who take God’s word to heart are not the ones who ought to shake. Sadly, it is those who believe nothing—who fear nothing—until it is too late!
Investigation
Investigation
Earlier that day God had confirmed his omniscience, that he knows everything, when he revealed Sarah’s hidden thoughts while dining with Abraham. And a God who knows “all thoughts, all mysteries, all enigmas, every unuttered secret” (Tozer) has no trouble understanding the depth of people’s sins.
God knows everything!
But through a huge act of condescension, the Lord responded to Abraham like a mere human being saying,
I will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me. And if not, I will know.”
By this he assured Abraham that he would base his judgment on full, accurate information. God would send his angels on a fact-finding mission—to gather information he already perfectly knew.
Abraham Intercedes
Abraham Intercedes
On this great day Abraham had dined with God (the only man to do so in the old covenant), he had walked with God (joining the select company of Enoch and Noah), and here atop Beni Na’im he interceded with God face-to-face.
Bold intercession
Bold intercession
Verses 23–25 record his bold but flawed intercession.
Then Abraham drew near and said, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?
Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city. Will you then sweep away the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it?
Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?”
There was so much that was right about Abraham’s prayer. The passion with which Abraham interceded for the cities on the plain showed a new side of Abraham. Earlier he had stepped up to save Lot from the invading kings from the east, selflessly risking everything for his kinsman. The deliverance of the Dead Sea kings had been a side effect of saving Lot. But here he prayed not for Lot but for the sinful inhabitants of Sodom.
He demonstrated a God-like compassion for others. Abraham, the friend of God, has become a true friend of men. He acted as a morally compassionate man. He knew people in those wicked cities, and he cared for them despite their paganism and depravity.
Abraham was also bold, but not too bold because he based his approach upon his absolute confidence in the righteousness of God. His confidence was this: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?”
He has no doubt that God is the author and arbiter of all righteousness and justice. He was convinced that God cannot and will not do wrong.
God is righteous in his being and just in his actions. Abraham’s whole intercession rested on this awesome understanding of God.
This said, Abraham was wrong in supposing that the righteous cannot suffer the same tragedies as sinners. Abraham was wrongheaded (not wrong-hearted) in his bold admonishment, “Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you!”
Abraham’s bold charge came from his having never imagined that it could be possible for the righteous and sinners to fall to the same trauma at the sovereign hand of God. Abraham thought he was appealing to an immutable law.
Unlike us, Abraham did not have the benefit of all the Scriptures. He did not have Psalm 73, which wonders at the prosperity of the wicked and the difficulties of the righteous, nor did he have the marvelous answers that God there provides. It is apparent that Abraham had not reflected that, as Alexander Maclaren put it:
In widespread calamities the righteous are blended with the wicked in one bloody ruin; and it is the very misery of such judgments that often the sufferers are not the wrongdoers.… The whirlwind of temporal judgments makes no distinctions between the dwellings of the righteous and the wicked, but levels them both.
Neither did Abraham have the words of Christ explaining that the victims of the fallen tower of Siloam were not greater sinners than the rest of Jerusalem’s populace. And, of course, he did not have the benefit of the new-covenant teaching that earthly judgment cannot touch the righteous in the ultimate sense because they are in Christ. Abraham was wrong, but the spirit of his intercession was so right!
And the Lord said, “If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”
Abraham answered and said, “Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes.
Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking. Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?” And he said, “I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.”
Again he spoke to him and said, “Suppose forty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of forty I will not do it.”
Then he said, “Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak. Suppose thirty are found there.” He answered, “I will not do it, if I find thirty there.”
He said, “Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord. Suppose twenty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of twenty I will not destroy it.”
Then he said, “Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak again but this once. Suppose ten are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it.”
Bold exploration
Bold exploration
The six “what ifs”—What if … fifty?… forty-five?… forty?… thirty?… twenty?… ten?—are instructive. In all of this Abraham “hangs on to God’s skirt like a burr.” He wrestled with God like Jacob later did with the angel.
And amazingly, Abraham’s boldness grew, for notice that the last three petitions lowered the number of the necessary righteous by tens! Jesus would teach his disciples that “they ought always to pray and not lose heart” (Luke 18:1). This first patriarch and disciple set the pace.
And we should note that Abraham’s prayers were not without effect. As the cities of the plain went up in flames, we read that “God remembered Abraham and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow” (19:29). Lot, the alien, was the only righteous person in Sodom. And God saved him because God remembered Abraham.
Along with this we learn that God would have spared Sodom if anyone apart from Lot was righteous (Lot was only an alien, and not a full citizen). The lurid details of the following episode indicate that there simply were no righteous people in Sodom—not one!
When Abraham realized where the statistics were going, coupled with Yahweh’s introduction of the word “destroy” into the final phrases of the exchange, he ceased his intercession, and Yahweh departed. Yahweh disappeared into the lengthening shadows, and Abraham descended the heights for the lights of his camp. The Lord would have shown mercy if there had been anyone upon whom he could bestow it. Such is the heart of God.
Now darkness had fallen, and the two angels had arrived in Sodom for its final black night.
The essential truth that transcends everything in this section is that God is righteous and just, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?”
Righteousness is an attribute of God’s moral being, and because of that, all his actions are just. It is impossible for God to do anything that is unjust. His judgments are righteous and just. His mercies are righteous and just. We can rest everything in life on this truth. It will never change. The Judge of all the earth will do right!
Next, we must understand that God hears the outcries of humanity. The cries go up all at once in a deafening roar, and God hears them all—even the whimpers and the silent screams.
Because God hears all and knows all, judgment is coming—as sure as God is righteous and just. Still, nothing is more offensive to the unbelieving heart than the coming judgment. No doubt, the inhabitants of Sodom would have shouted God down for being so unfair. “Why should you single us out for punishment?” they would have thought. But God must act in a way in agreement with his perfections, for such action is always right.
Jesus did what Abraham could never do.
He became sin on the cross, bearing all the unrighteousness and injustices of those who come to him. Our sins were focused on Christ on the cross. On the cross Christ was robed in all that is heinous and hateful as the mass of our corruption poured over him. With horror Christ found his entire being to be sin in the Father’s sight.
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”—
On the cross Christ suffered the fiery wrath of God’s righteous judgment. This he did to redeem us from our sins. As Paul explained:
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
In this world it is God’s people who are called to mediate his hope—like Abraham in his day. Jesus has become for them the righteousness of God.
As his people, we are to live lives of righteousness and justice. As God’s people, we reach out to the needy, we love the sinner, we give of our resources, we sacrifice ourselves for the lost, we pray for their souls. And through Christ God calls a people to himself.