The Devotional Journey
Bible Reading 13
Yahweh judges two wicked cities
Read Genesis 18:16–19:38.
Today’s reading is full of action. We read about a negotiation between God and Abraham, supernatural happenings, homosexuality, fierce judgment and incest.
After having lunch with Abraham, God first sent ahead the two angels who were with Him while He stayed on with Abraham. He told Abraham that the complaints about the evil people in two cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, were so great that He was going to deal with the people of the cities.
Actually, Yahweh did not need to tell Abraham any of this. After all, He is the Creator-Owner-Ruler of the universe and He can do anything He wants without reporting it to anyone. But like an intimate friend, God revealed His heart to Abraham. And He invited and allowed Abraham to speak to Him about the situation.
This is the kind of close, personal relationship God wants to have with each of us as well, not just with Abraham. God wants to reveal things to us. He wants to teach us more about Himself. And He wants to hear our thoughts about what He tells us! This kind of personal interaction results in us growing in our relationship and understanding of Him. It shows how God wants us to talk to Him (that is, pray) about others.
Meanwhile, the two angels had gone on ahead to Sodom, where Lot, Abraham’s nephew lived. God knew that Abraham when negotiating with Him, was thinking of Lot and his family. So the angels went to look for Lot.
But the city was full of wickedness and homosexual activity. The men in the city demanded to have sex with the two angels, whom they thought were human visitors. Some people today think that homosexual acts are something recent. But we see that the Bible records people engaging in such acts right from the early days of the world.
The angels supernaturally struck the men with blindness and told Lot and his family to get out of the city. Notice, however, how the angels insisted that Lot get out of the city before God destroyed it. Lot believed in Yahweh, and God would not destroy the righteous along with the wicked. We see that Lot was probably the only one who was righteous in all of Sodom. His future sons-in-laws and even his wife, were reluctant to leave the wicked city.
But we see that having living in such a wicked city, Lot’s two daughters had became corrupted in their minds. Even though God saved their lives, they did not have God’s morals and values. Now, living alone with Lot, they decided that the only way to have descendants was to make their father drunk and have sex with him in order to become pregnant. God was showing how the thinking of Lot’s daughters had become so corrupted and evil. They had been influenced by the pagan culture they lived in. This warns us that we have to be careful about the influences in our lives.
Today, we live in a world that is very challenging. But we can be encouraged with two truths that we see.
First, God wants to reveal things to us and relate to us as personally as He did with Abraham. In fact, He planned it such that we have His written Word, the Bible, with us all the time! We allow Him to reveal things to us when we read the Bible. And He hears what we are thinking when we pray to Him. It’s such a privilege that Yahweh wants to have such a close relationship with us! Let us be diligent in reading God’s Word and praying to Him about what we’ve read, about our lives and for the lives of others.
Second, God will always save the righteous. It seems that Lot was the only righteous person living in those cities. And God ensured that He was safe before sending the judgment. We can be certain that because we have put our faith in Him, that He has saved us and will ensure we will be with Him for all eternity. Let us thank God for that today.