Monday, January 7, 2013

The Lord appeared in the form of a man to Abraham. accompanied by two angels, also in the form of men.  When Abraham saw them, he bowed down in respect.  Normally strangers passing through a land would have bowed down to Abraham.

It was the custom to greet strangers with great respect and to offer them food and lodging, which Abraham did. Preparing the food for the three men was no quick and easy task. The bread had to be kneaded and baked.  The animal for the meat had to be killed and cooked. 

Sarah overheard the conversation about her having a child at her advanced age and she laughed to herself at the prospect . God responded with
"Is anything too hard for the Lord?"
Isn't this a verse we should claim on a daily basis? Indeed, IS anything too hard for the Lord?

When Abraham interacted with the three men, he spoke of the… “Judge of all the earth…” Who is the Judge of all the earth? And how did Abraham know that? We know from John 5:22 that Jesus is the judge of all the earth, so that must mean that one of the three men was indeed the Son of God.

Why did Abraham bargain with the Lord for ten people? He started bargaining for 50 righteous people. Did he think that Lot had some influence on the sinful people there? He must have thought that surely Lot could have influenced that many people. How is it with us as Believers ? Do we have influence over at least 50 people?

Lot was very  hospitable to the two angels who appeared as men at the city gate.  Remember the customary hospitality toward total strangers is to offer them food and lodging.  The men (angels) seemed reluctant to go with Lot and offered instead to sleep in the city square.  Other historical writings relate that the people of Sodom did not abide by the customary hospitality rules.  They instead delighted in watching men suffer from hunger...so much so in fact that anyone living in the city showing hospitality to strangers was subject to the death sentence...and the Sodomite way of the death penalty was very inhumane.  The men (angels) knew that Lot would suffer consequences if they took him up on his hospitable offer. Any yet, Lot was persuasive and they went with him.

Evidence of the decadent lifestyle of the men of Sodom is evident in their demand for having sex with the two strangers (angels).  Equally repugnant is Lot's offer of his two virgin daughters instead. However, to his credit, 2 Peter 2:7-8 tells us that Lot was a righteous man.
and if he rescued Lot, a righteous man, who was distressed by the filthy lives of lawless men (for that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard)

The people of Sodom and the other four cities engaged in any evil perversion imaginable, homosexuality, pedophilia, adultery, fornication, rape, torture, and murder, to name a few.

Notice that the angels had to practically drag Lot and his family from Sodom. They didn't seem to want to leave.  The angels told Lot to take his wife and his "two daughters who are here...", implying that there may have been other daughters who were not there in the house with him at the time.  The mention of sons-in-law implies that Lot had other daughters as well who were pledged to be married.  The daughters living with him were not pledged to be married, otherwise Lot could not have offered them to the men of Sodom.  They would no longer have been considered Lot's property.

About the burning sulfur that rained down from heaven, could this have been a coronal mass ejection?  That would explain things. Volcanic eruptions have been used by some as an explanation for what happened with Sodom and Gomorrah but Scripture says that the sulfur came from heaven.  In a coronal mass ejection, plasma (sun's material that changes hydrogen to helium) is blown out into space and can strike the earth.  The sun's process of changing hydrogen to helium is essentially the same process employed in a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb.  Evidence on the ground around the Sodom area, such as silica sand turned to glass, support this explanation according to some archaeologists.  Certainly God could have used a coronal mass ejection, to accomplish His purposes. 2 Peter 2:6 tells us that Sodom is there as an example of what will  happen to the ungodly.
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/CMEs.shtml

John Wesley's comment on Gen 19:24: 
"Then the Lord rained - from the Lord - God the Son, from God the Father, for the Father has committed all judgment to the Son. He that is the Saviour will be the destroyer of those that reject the salvation."

Why did Lot’s wife look back? What exactly is a “pillar of salt”?  If this was a coronal mass ejection that destroyed Sodom and the other cities, then the concept of Lot's wife being changed to a pillar of salt could be a similar event as was observed at Hiroshima on a bridge near ground zero.  People were walking on the bridge when the bomb exploded.  The millions of degrees of heat from the blast of the bomb incinerated the people on the bridge in a microsecond.  But in that short period of time their bodies made a shadow on the concrete of the bridge.  Their shadows protected the concrete from the flash and the peoples' images were burned into the concrete.  Could it be that Lot's wife's shadow was burned into the column of salt by the flash from the coronal mass ejection?  Was the city of Sodom Lot's wife's hometown? Did she look longingly back at the life she had there? This city was definitely "sin city".

Before we become Believers in Jesus we are dead in our sins. We are citizens of "Sin City". Once we become believers in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior we are then citizens of "The Kingdom of Heaven". Shouldn't we live then as if we are citizens of the Kingdom? We should never look back at the life we had in "Sin City".
(Email us for the writing - "Kingdom Living in a Foreign Land".)

Concerning Lot's two daughters getting their father drunk - were they so desensitized to the sexual perversion in Sodom that they saw nothing wrong with having sexual relations with their father?

Now concerning Lot, "And they made their father drink wine that night: and the first-born went in, and lay with her father; and he knew not when she lay down, nor when she arose". The same thing happened with the second daughter.

This scripture does not say that Lot was unaware of the actual act of intercourse, only that he was unaware when his daughters lay down nor when they got up. It says nothing about the act itself. So was Lot aware of that? If he was aware, then we must conclude that he become desensitized to the sexual perversion of Sodom as well, but 2 Peter 2:7-8 tells us that he was tormented by what he saw in Sodom.

How is it with us as Believers in Jesus? Have we become desensitized to any and all sexual perversion?  Or are we tormented as well by what we see in our world today?

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