Day 007 - Genesis 18-19

Following on from yesterday we have the reiteration of God's promise to Abraham and Sarah of a child, this time in the form of a personal visit from the Lord and a couple of angels who are on their way to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. There's an interesting passage where God talks to himself as he walks along with Abraham and decides to reveal his long term plan to Abraham. Whilst he is planning to make Abraham's descendants into a great nation, he is concerned with the entire world that he has created and his desire is to bless us.

Then we have the account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah which is one of those passage that seems to get talked about a lot, but for all the wrong reasons. I think there a couple of issues that people have here one of which is based on a misconception and the other requires a bit more thought.

The misconception comes from different perceptions of what the Bible is, particularly the idea of it being some kind of systematic instruction book for life. There are elements of that in it, but the passages I'm reading at the moment are simply recounting history and the actions of certain people and God. So if, for example we come across this passage and see the way that Lot and his daughters act and are repulsed by some of their actions, then that's OK. Just because an event is recorded in the Bible doesn't mean that God approves or disapproves of it, it just means that it happened. There isn't a running commentary where God passes judgement on every single event, we have to read between the lines sometimes in the knowledge of what we know about his character.

In the story of Noah we learnt that God was prepared to wipe out almost the entire human race because of its sinful behaviour. We see the same here but on a smaller scale as he destroys a couple of cities. There's no way of getting round the fact here that this God is capable of killing people and he does so because they have sinned greatly. This basically means that they were living in such a way as be a long way from the way that God had designed and intended them to live. It brings one up short to be reminded of this aspect of God's character sometimes, but we need to be aware of it.