Yahweh s visit to Abraham (18:1-15): The Three Visitors

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1 Genesis 18 & 19 Angels, Demons, & Destruction Copyright Gary K. G. Choong 6 th of 12 messages (Journey of faith with Abraham, Gen. 11:27-25:18) Preached August 17, 2014 Introduction (A brief overview on the life of Abraham to bring the sermon up to speed for those who had not been following the series) chapters18 and 19 seek to answer the questions, Does God keep His promises?, Does God answer prayers?, Does God judge fairly and mercifully? Chapters 18, and 19 have significant theological significance in the life of Abraham s life in this Genesis narrative (1) It strengthens the faith of Abraham and Sarah as they were visited by the Lord (via angels), and given a seventh revelation confirmation of God s promise of child to them in chapter 16; (2) That God is omnipotent, He can do the impossible, what man thought as impossible the promised supernatural birth of Isaac despite the old age of Abraham (100), and Sarah (90); (3) That God is a righteous God who rewards His saint when he intercedes on the righteous behalf to be spared from being punished together with the unrighteous, and God punishes the sinners for their wickedness (Sodom and Gomorrah). The purposes that I have set out for this sermon is that my listeners may increase his/her faith, pray persistently, and choose not to follow the ways of the world in its wickedness, but to choose to live a differentiated life, set apart to serve God, so that he/she will not be judged some day. Subject: How does God relate to those who belong to Him (those who acknowledge God) and those who belong to the world (those who choose to live their lives apart from God)? Complement: God relates to those who belong to Him with favour (in this instance, doing the impossible (promise-child, Isaac), and justice for the righteous, Lot and family); while to those who belong to the world (Sodom and Gomorrah), He destroys them. To the righteous, He shows grace and justice (the righteous will not be punished with the unrighteous), to the unrighteous (wicked and perverted), He will judge them for their sins. Yahweh s visit to Abraham (18:1-15): The Three Visitors The Lord showed up at Abraham s house at Mamre, and were treated to warm hospitality by Abraham (1-8) 18 The LORD appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. 2 Abraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby. When he saw them, he hurried from the entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed low to the ground. 3 He said, If I have found favor in your eyes, my lord, [a] do not pass your servant by. 4 Let a little water be brought, and then you may all wash your feet and rest under this tree. 5 Let me get you something to eat, so you can be refreshed and then go on your way now that you have come to your servant. Very well, they answered, do as you say. 6 So Abraham hurried into the tent to Sarah. Quick, he said, get three seahs [b] of the finest flour and knead it and bake some bread. 7 Then he ran to the herd and selected a choice, tender calf and gave it to a servant, who hurried to prepare it. 8 He then brought some curds and milk and the calf that had been prepared, and set these before them. While they ate, he stood near them under a tree. The significance of the Lord s visitation upon His people lies in the fact that He is about to announce an important message to the host, and usually involves a fellowship meal, e.g., in the Old Testament, an angel of the Lord visited Gideon to appoint him as a judge to free the Israelites from the oppressive powers of the Midianites (Judges 6); and in the New Testament, think of what our Lord Jesus said to Zacceeus in Luke 9, or even what He said to the disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24). The Lord announced the time of Sarah s giving birth to fulfill God s promise child to them, exclaiming that nothing was too difficult for the Lord in rebuke to Sarah s mocking laughter (9-15). 9 Where is your wife Sarah? they asked him. There, in the tent, he said. 10 Then one of them said, I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son. Now Sarah was listening at the entrance to the tent, which was behind him. 11 Abraham and Sarah were already very old, and Sarah was past the age of childbearing. 12 So Sarah laughed to herself as she thought, After I am worn out and my lord is old, will I now have this pleasure? 13 Then the LORD said to Abraham, Why did Sarah laugh and say, Will I really have a child,

2 now that I am old? 14 Is anything too hard for the LORD? I will return to you at the appointed time next year, and Sarah will have a son. 15 Sarah was afraid, so she lied and said, I did not laugh. But he said, Yes, you did laugh. The fact that the angel rebuked Sarah for her unbelief demonstrated the seriousness of God s character in question what deemed as impossible for man, was possible for God, Is anything too hard for the Lord? Abraham Pleads for Sodom (18:16-33) As the Lord reviewed and contemplated the reasons about the impending destruction of Sodom to share with Abraham about his investigation of the wicked conditions of the city of Sodom (16-21), Abraham pleaded with the Lord to deal justly with the righteous (among the wicked) in the city (22-25). 16 When the men got up to leave, they looked down toward Sodom, and Abraham walked along with them to see them on their way. 17 Then the LORD said, Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? 18 Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him. [c] 19 For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing what is right and just, so that the LORD will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him. 20 Then the LORD said, The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous 21 that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know. 22 The men turned away and went toward Sodom, but Abraham remained standing before the LORD. [d] 23 Then Abraham approached him and said: Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? 24 What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare [e] the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? 25 Far be it from you to do such a thing to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right? The Lord in His mercy, responded to the intercession of Abraham on behalf of the righteous He will not destroy the righteous with the wicked (26-33). 26 The LORD said, If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake. 27 Then Abraham spoke up again: Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes, 28 what if the number of the righteous is five less than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five people? If I find forty-five there, he said, I will not destroy it. 29 Once again he spoke to him, What if only forty are found there? He said, For the sake of forty, I will not do it. 30 Then he said, May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak. What if only thirty can be found there? He answered, I will not do it if I find thirty there. 31 Abraham said, Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, what if only twenty can be found there? He said, For the sake of twenty, I will not destroy it. 32 Then he said, May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more. What if only ten can be found there? He answered, For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it. 33 When the LORD had finished speaking with Abraham, he left, and Abraham returned home. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (19:1-38) When the angels visited Lot in Sodom, he tried to protect them from the sodomy of the men of the city in exchange for his daughters, but the angels repelled the men by striking them with blindness, and warned Lot of the impending judgment so that he might gather his family to flee from the judgment of God (1-14) 19 The two angels arrived at Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gateway of the city. When he saw them, he got up to meet them and bowed down with his face to the ground. 2 My lords, he said, please turn aside to your servant s house. You can wash your feet and spend the night and then go on your way early in the morning. No, they answered, we will spend the night in the square. 3 But he insisted so strongly that they did go with him and entered his house. He prepared a meal for them, baking bread without yeast, and they ate. 4 Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom both young and old surrounded the house. 5 They called to Lot, Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them. 6 Lot went outside to meet them and shut the door behind him 7 and said, No, my friends. Don t do this wicked thing. 8 Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don t 2

3 do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof. 9 Get out of our way, they replied. This fellow came here as a foreigner, and now he wants to play the judge! We ll treat you worse than them. They kept bringing pressure on Lot and moved forward to break down the door. 10 But the men inside reached out and pulled Lot back into the house and shut the door. 11 Then they struck the men who were at the door of the house, young and old, with blindness so that they could not find the door. 12 The two men said to Lot, Do you have anyone else here sons-in-law, sons or daughters, or anyone else in the city who belongs to you? Get them out of here, 13 because we are going to destroy this place. The outcry to the LORD against its people is so great that he has sent us to destroy it. 14 So Lot went out and spoke to his sons-inlaw, who were pledged to marry [f] his daughters. He said, Hurry and get out of this place, because the LORD is about to destroy the city! But his sons-in-law thought he was joking. The angels dragged Lot (and his reluctant family) from the doomed city with a promise to keep them safe as they headed toward a little town called Zoar (15-22). 15 With the coming of dawn, the angels urged Lot, saying, Hurry! Take your wife and your two daughters who are here, or you will be swept away when the city is punished. 16 When he hesitated, the men grasped his hand and the hands of his wife and of his two daughters and led them safely out of the city, for the LORD was merciful to them. 17 As soon as they had brought them out, one of them said, Flee for your lives! Don t look back, and don t stop anywhere in the plain! Flee to the mountains or you will be swept away! 18 But Lot said to them, No, my lords, [g] please! 19 Your [h] servant has found favor in your [i] eyes, and you [j] have shown great kindness to me in sparing my life. But I can t flee to the mountains; this disaster will overtake me, and I ll die. 20 Look, here is a town near enough to run to, and it is small. Let me flee to it it is very small, isn t it? Then my life will be spared. 21 He said to him, Very well, I will grant this request too; I will not overthrow the town you speak of. 22 But flee there quickly, because I cannot do anything until you reach it. (That is why the town was called Zoar. [k] ) When the angels brought down fire and brimstone on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah his wife turned back to look at the destruction and was not spared, but Lot, the angels spared for the sake of Abraham s intercession on their behalf (23-39). 23 By the time Lot reached Zoar, the sun had risen over the land. 24 Then the LORD rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah from the LORD out of the heavens. 25 Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities and also the vegetation in the land. 26 But Lot s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt. 27 Early the next morning Abraham got up and returned to the place where he had stood before the LORD. 28 He looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah, toward all the land of the plain, and he saw dense smoke rising from the land, like smoke from a furnace. 29 So when God destroyed the cities of the plain, he remembered Abraham, and he brought Lot out of the catastrophe that overthrew the cities where Lot had lived. Epilogue to the sad story: Lot s daughters thinking that they were the only survivors left of what the cities remained, schemed with each other to be impregnated by their father and consequently their offspring became two perennial enemies of Israel Moabites and Ammonites (37-38) 30 Lot and his two daughters left Zoar and settled in the mountains, for he was afraid to stay in Zoar. He and his two daughters lived in a cave. 31 One day the older daughter said to the younger, Our father is old, and there is no man around here to give us children as is the custom all over the earth. 32 Let s get our father to drink wine and then sleep with him and preserve our family line through our father. 33 That night they got their father to drink wine, and the older daughter went in and slept with him. He was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up. 34 The next day the older daughter said to the younger, Last night I slept with my father. Let s get him to drink wine again tonight, and you go in and sleep with him so we can preserve our family line through our father. 35 So they got their father to drink wine that night also, and the younger daughter went in and slept with him. Again he was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up. 36 So both of Lot s daughters became pregnant by their father. 37 The older daughter had a son, and she named him Moab [l] ; he is the father of the Moabites of today. 3

4 38 The younger daughter also had a son, and she named him Ben-Ammi [m] ; he is the father of the Ammonites [n] of today. Theological Reflections: God is the God of the impossible He gives supernatural births (OT and NT), That God is omnipotent, He can do the impossible, what man thought as impossible the supernatural birth of Isaac despite the old age of Abraham (100), and Sarah (90). He divinely intervenes in the lives of His people (men and women of faith), and the Son of God s bodily resurrection in the New Testament. That God is a righteous God who rewards His saint when he intercedes on the righteous behalf (Lot and his family) to be spared from being punished together with the unrighteous. When we see Lot in chapter 19, we saw him in chapter 13, first making the wrong choice (what seemed promising to the naked eye) choosing to live among the people of Sodom representing a worldly system of wickedness and evil. In chapter 14, we saw the bravery and compassion of Abram toward his nephew Lot by rescuing him and the people of Sodom. In chapter 19, we see Lot s perverted sense of morality as a father, to even suggest to offer his two virgin daughters for the evil and wicked ways of men (v. 8, see also Judges 19:23-25). The irony of this episode, was that the father who was willing to offer his two daughters to the perversity of the men in Sodom, fell into moral decay himself he became the object of the incestuous relationships with his own two daughters not once, but twice, in a row without realizing the incestuous plots of these two Sodomite daughters. The daughters might have come out of Sodom, but Sodom still lived in them. The choices made by Lot, and also his daughters demonstrate for us that it is foolish to attach oneself to the things of the world for the world will corrupt him/her but also the love for the world and all its allure and lusts await the sure judgment of God, if not now, but surely a later time to come. Lot in a true sense escaped by the skin of his teeth he had nothing to show, except wrong choices leading to harmful consequences to himself and to his family. God punishes the sinners for their wickedness (Sodom and Gomorrah). Sodom and Gomorrah represented a deep-seated perversion of what is moral and right. Their sexual immorality had reached a point of no return that the only recourse was for them to be decimated completely from earth, and hence the judgment meted out to them by God s angels of death. Sodom and Gomorrah represented what was antithetical to God s ideal of sexuality sex between a husband and wife within the context of a marital home. IMPLICATIONS for the contemporary church: God of the Impossible requires FAITH on the part of believers in His promises, goodness, grace, and generosity. How much faith do we have in God to fulfill His promises? We see things not as they are (whether perceived or real), we see things as we are (our perception of God limits our faith in Him). In other words, we choose to see what our minds tell us. Sarah laughed in Genesis 18 when she overheard what the angel told Abraham would take place in a year s time (even though she lied and denied she laughed when confronted by the angel), Abraham laughed in Genesis 17 when God reassured him that His promise of a child of his own would come true in a year s time they both laughed to themselves because they could not bring themselves to believe that God would honour His Word to them, even though it seemed it had taken more than twenty-four years to come to this point of having God reassuring them that God would keep His Word. Abraham would be one hundred years of age, Sarah would be 90, by next year, and both of them would be so old that it was just impossible to believe that God could pull off this miracle. And if HE did, the promised child s birth would be the joke of the century! 4

5 In a recent Economic Society of Singapore s annual dinner, the Minister for Social and Family Development, Mr. Chan Chun Sing, shared about the responses he received when he asked his audience which countries would be most successful by Most named the countries which had good demographics, endowed with resources, and the size of their markets. Unfortunately, if these are the three key criteria that people assess a country s potential success factor, then what of Singapore? If I may draw this analogy from the world of politics to the world of the spiritual Covenant Community Baptist Church may be liken to that of the tiny little red dot small and apparently insignificant in terms of demographics (aging), certainly resource scarce, and we certainly do not have a market share of the spiritual landscape. But do we dare to trust God for the impossible as we launch out into the open with a view toward becoming a healthy, growing disciple-making church? Do we dare to believe God for the impossible? Do we dare trust Him to keep His promise to grow the church as we remain faithful to the call of God to fulfill the Great Commission in our day and age? God of the righteous Because He is righteous, we have the boldness to PRAY for God to intervene in all impossible situations to act on our behalf. Abraham prayed (conversation with the angels) for Lot to be spared of the impending judgment of God upon Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham was concerned for the welfare of his nephew Lot, and to him, his nephew belonged to his household of faith Abraham s God was also Lot s God, even though Lot had chosen to part company with his uncle from chapter 13. Abraham s prayer for Lot and the righteous to be spared among the wicked is an example of God s mercy extended to those His own living in the midst of wicked people. Our prayers for others are not based upon our own righteousness that we can claim as our own, our prayers for others are based upon the righteousness of God to extend His mercies and grace to people and circumstances that we care about that are beyond our control. When we pray to God, the answers to our prayers are solely based on God s grace and mercy to accord as He sees fit, not our wishes and demands. God is Sovereign, and we are not. God is Righteous, and because He is righteous, He listens to His children whose prayers reaches Him to accord as He deems fit. The example of Abraham s supplicating and interceding on the righteous behalf must serve as an example for us to pray unceasingly for those we care about and for God to intervene in these lives that we trust in His good hands. Question is: Do we pray enough for those we genuinely care for that God might extend grace and mercy in their life circumstances that are beyond our reach? God will punish the wicked know this that God s call is for us not to live like the world lives question of morality and ethics. How are we living in this world? We need to live a differentiated life that distinguishes us from the world we are in the world, but not of the world. Our decisions and choices we make each day determine our character and destiny. The apostle Paul in Galatians talks about sowing and reaping (6:7) and depending on what we sow, we will reap in the end. In other words, we have a CHOICE to make either we choose the right way or the wrong way. Everyday we are confronted with choices to make in life from the trivial to the important ones. The choice to leave his uncle and settle in Sodom in chapter 13 led Lot onto a path of destruction as we see in today s text (Gen. 19) he chose what he could possibly see with his human naked eyes Sodom was appealing and promising. Lot made a wrong choice. Our Christian discipleship in daily clothes confronts us with choices to make as well when we make a choice to turn toward God that choice determines not only our habits, but our character and destiny as well. Conversely, we can make choices that turn away from God, and what s worst, sometimes against God these choices form the core of our inner being as well, they determine our future and our character. We as believers will be accountable for the choices we make in our lives, and if we are not careful, we may make choices that run counter to God s Word and will revealed in the Scripture. Today, what decisions or choices are you confronted that will determine how and why you decide, or choose one over the other? Because this decision or choice you make today, this same decision or choice 5

6 will make you tomorrow. Everyday, the decisions and choices we make test whether we love God or we love the world. Learning to live a differentiated kind of life calls us to choose between God and the world which one will you choose today? Subject: How does God relate to those who belong to Him (those who acknowledge God) and those who belong to the world (those who choose to live their lives apart from God)? Complement: God relates to those who belong to Him with favour (in this instance, doing the impossible (promise-child, Isaac), and justice for the righteous, Lot and family); while to those who belong to the world (Sodom and Gomorrah), He destroys them. To the righteous, He shows grace and justice (the righteous will not be punished with the unrighteous), to the unrighteous (wicked and perverted), He will judge them for their sins. 6