Читать книгу The Grand Sweep - Large Print - J. Ellsworth Kalas - Страница 17

GENESIS 18–19; PSALMS 13–14

Week 2, Day 3

When the New Testament writer urges that we be hospitable to strangers because by doing so “some have entertained angels without knowing it” (Hebrews 13:2), he may well have had Abraham and Sarah in mind.

These desert visitors brought good news and bad news. Abraham and Sarah are told again, this time with a specific detail, that they will have a son. Sarah laughs—half, I think, in doubt and half in incredulous joy—but the strangers say it will be so. But then they confide to Abraham that Sodom and Gomorrah, whose sins are “very grave,” will soon be destroyed.

Abraham begins bargaining. He is half saint and half merchant in a Middle Eastern bazaar, and the marvel is this: that it is only when Abraham stops asking that God stops giving. The two cities will be saved if only there are ten righteous.

But the righteous element in Sodom and Gomorrah was almost nonexistent. Even Lot’s attempt to get together a Noah-like family contingent falls short; his sons-in-law think he is jesting. This may say as much about Lot’s quality of witness as about the young men’s sensitivity. At last even Lot’s wife shows how tied she has become to the life and culture of Sodom and Gomorrah.

It is a sad and instructive story, and the postscript about the Moabites and the Ammonites only accentuates the irony.

PRAYER: Give me, please, the faith of Abraham, to plead and work for the redemption of the times in which I live; to your glory. Amen.

Think of history—national, local, or even of a church or a family—and recall instances when a very small number of “righteous” saved the day.