Week 2 Genesis 18
The story is about one of the rare times when the Lord actually visibly appeared to someone. Abraham’s tents were pitched in a grove of oak trees and the Lord just came walking down the road.
The two talked for a bit. The Lord said he’d heard that Sodom & Gomorrah (S&G) were very corrupt communities. That he was here to check-it-out. Abraham instinctively knew that trouble was brewing. He knew about S&G – the terrible twins. He figured they were marked for annihilation.
So Abraham asked the Lord: will you destroy both innocent and guilty alike? (Abraham didn’t wait for an answer): surely you wouldn’t do such a thing, destroying the innocent with the guilty. Abraham figured that if the Lord destroyed people willy-nilly then he would be treating the innocent and the guilty exactly the same. He said surely you wouldn’t do that because – after all – should not the Judge of all the earth do what is right? Abraham’s line of thinking was like this:
The world’s judge has to do what’s right
Judicial “rightness” means making distinctions between people
Innocent people are treated one way
Guilty people are treated a different way
Innocent people in S&G would be saved. It was the guilty people who’d be destroyed.
So early-on in my reading-year I get a useful tip-off about how things work in the bible:
There are two sorts of people in the world – Guilty People & Innocent People.
And they get treated differently.
Note: quotes from Genesis 18:23 25 (NLT)