Abraham, my Friend 44

God loved Sodom

We know this passage so well, perhaps too well. It is an amazing record of Abraham’s relationship with the God who referred to him as Abraham, My Friend. I want to challenge some assumptions about these verses. There are some who see these verses as a blueprint for answered prayer and the role of intercessor. There is much we can learn about both prayer and pray-er in these verses but they ought not to be regarded as a methodology. The passage speaks to us, not about technique, but about relationship.

Some see in this passage the eastern bazaar and its traders. In this view Abraham is ‘haggling’ with God, trying to get God down to ‘his price’. Some supporters of this view have even condemned Abraham for breaking off his bartering too quickly when a little more persistence might have saved Sodom; if he had got God ‘down to five’ they say Sodom might have been saved.

This view conveniently omits the fact that it was God who ended this particular conversation and not Abraham:

And he said, Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak yet but this once: peradventure ten shall be found there. And he said, I will not destroy it for the ten’s sake. And Jehovah went his way, as soon as he had left off communing with Abraham: and Abraham returned unto his place. (Gen 18:32–33 ASV)

The notion that God can be cajoled or brow-beaten tells us much more about contemporary Christianity than it does about Abraham.

Intercession, communion with God

That was a happy choice of word by the translators when they tell us that…

Jehovah went his way, as soon as he had left off communing with Abraham: and Abraham returned unto his place. (Gen 18:33 ASV)

This is an account of God ‘communing’ with Abraham, not Abraham ‘bartering’ with God. The word translated left off here is significant too; it has the sense of something accomplished or completed. The purpose of God’s communing with Abraham was accomplished; God’s purposes were achieved. Abraham’s prayer was no failure; the will of God was achieved. This, surely, is the purpose of all prayer.

Let’s remove the concept of ‘haggling’ even more thoroughly. Abraham is in the presence of God. Before God, Abraham lies prostrate or stands in readiness to serve. This is no bustling merchant set on getting a bargain. And this Abraham is the Friend of God. We don’t bargain with our God or our friends.

On the anvil

The story of Abraham has led up to this point. This is not the man who was born in Ur, he has changed. Oswald Chambers often quoted snippets of a Tennyson poem:

Life is not as idle ore,
But iron dug from central gloom,
And heated hot with burning fears,
And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
And batter’d with the shocks of doom,
To shape and use.

It is the figure of the blacksmith. ‘Battering,’ said Chambers, ‘conveys the idea of a blacksmith putting good metal into right useful shape. The batterings of God come in commonplace days and commonplace ways, God is using the anvil to bring us into the shape of the vision.’

Abraham’s life had been on the anvil for more than a quarter of a century when we arrive at Chapter 18. This is not a man to ‘bargain’ with God. We have traced Abraham through many of his ‘shocks of doom’ but now we are coming ‘to shape and use’. We have seen his devotion and sacrifice, his faith and abandonment; now God will begin to ‘use’ him. What a privilege to be ‘used’ by God. Don’t despise the batterings; they are all part of God’s preparations. This is the man that God knows may be safely ‘taken into His confidence’ — God’s privy counsellor.

God examines the evidence

God is omniscient, having all knowledge. Why then would He say:

And Jehovah said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous; I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me; and if not, I will know. (Gen 18:20–21 ASV)

We know so little about angels and their work but there is a consistent theme in the Scriptures that they are ‘recorders of events’. It seems they have a limited authority for judgment and action. Here are a couple of examples of individuals who came under angelic judgments:

The sentence is by the decree of the watchers, and the demand by the word of the holy ones; to the intent that the living may know that the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will, and setteth up over it the lowest of men. (Dan 4:17 ASV)

So on a set day Herod, arrayed in royal apparel, sat on his throne and gave an oration to them. And the people kept shouting, “The voice of a god and not of a man!” Then immediately an angel of the Lord struck him, because he did not give glory to God. And he was eaten by worms and died. (Acts 12:21–23 NKJV)

Both Nebuchadnezzar and Herod received a summary judgment, and it was the angels who were judge, jury and executioners. Sometimes, however, it seems their evidence is presented to God himself. God does not visit Sodom and Gomorrah because he is in need of information but as a due process of law. Why would God do such a thing? To whom is he accountable that justice should not only be done but be seen to be done? Only to himself, but God’s rule is not arbitrary or capricious. Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? asked Abraham, right on cue.

The courtroom

In the thoughts of men and women, God is constantly in court as the ‘accused’. It is part of Paul’s purpose in Romans to bring a verdict of ‘not guilty’ for God himself.

…whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. (Rom 3:25–26 NKJV)

Paul is aware that what he is saying may lay God open to a charge of being ‘unjust’ and he is as anxious to ‘justify’ God as he is to show how God justifies the ungodly. God’s honour was of essential importance to what Paul called ‘my gospel’.

In the final Assize, it will be seen that all God’s dealings with his universe have been utterly righteous. Every cry of ‘unfair’ will be silenced. God’s charge against his creation will be utterly proven:

Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. (Rom 3:19 NKJV)

In that day God will have no more ‘accusers’, every mouth will be stopped. Not, I think, out of fear, but because God’s case will be carried and mankind will acknowledge that it never had any excuse or defence. At that day we shall give our own account:

So then each of us shall give account of himself to God. (Rom 14:12 NKJV)

Is that the day when we shall ‘judge angels’? God rules in righteousness, always has and always will.

But to the Son He says:
“Your throne, O God, is forever and ever;
A scepter of righteousness is the scepter of Your kingdom.
You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness;
Therefore God, Your God, has anointed You
With the oil of gladness more than Your companions.” (Heb 1:8–9 NKJV)

As the psalmist said:

…Before Jehovah; for he cometh to judge the earth:
He will judge the world with righteousness,
And the peoples with equity. (Ps 98:9 ASV)

God himself then, must do all that he does righteously; he cannot behave in any way that is inconsistent with his character.

A cry and a response

And Jehovah said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous; I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me; and if not, I will know. (Gen 18:20–21 ASV)

It is in response to this cry that God sends his two witnesses to Sodom and Gomorrah now; this is the due process for God’s policing of his universe. The ‘cry’ of Sodom and Gomorrah is great. There are mysterious things here that we can only grasp faintly. The very first thing that we are told about ‘blood’ in the Scriptures is that it ‘cries’ to God:

And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now cursed art thou from the ground, which hath opened its mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand… (Gen 4:10–11 ASV)

The stain is indelible and the cry cannot be silenced. The cry of ‘the blood’ must result in God’s righteous judgment sooner or later. We were placed as guardians of our planet and our deeds are written into its fabric.

…Their sin is very grievous (Gen 18:20 ASV) says the Lord. ‘Grievous’ is ‘heavy’. One day he would carry them all in his body on the tree but all sin is ‘heavy’ on the Lord’s heart.

Some relish the thought of God on the rampage — giving Sodom and Gomorrah what they deserve. This is man’s view of sin, not God’s. Listen to the note that Ezekiel heard in God’s voice:

Say unto them, As I live, saith the Lord Jehovah, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel? (Ezek 33:11 ASV)

Robert Murray M’Cheyne and DL Moody

There is a story told of Horatius Bonar talking to his friend Robert Murray M’Cheyne. ‘What text did you preach on?’ said M’Cheyne. ‘The wicked shall be turned into hell,’ (Ps 9:17a KJV) replied Bonar. ‘And did you preach it with tears?’ asked M’Cheyne.

Dr RW Dale once told Campbell Morgan that he had known one man who, he felt, had perfect right to talk about Hell, and that man was DL Moody. He stated that the reason he so felt was that he never heard Moody refer to Hell without tears in his voice.

Isaiah spoke of God’s impending judgments and called them God’s ‘strange work’:

For Jehovah will rise up as in mount Perazim, he will be wroth as in the valley of Gibeon; that he may do his work, his strange work, and bring to pass his act, his strange act. (Isa 28:21 ASV)

God does not rush to judgment; neither do his friends

Listen to the tears in God’s voice:

And it repented Jehovah that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. (Gen 6:6 ASV)

The word grieved means to pierce or carve. It cut Him to the heart. If we cannot feel like this about the sinner and his sin we cannot speak for God. If we cannot ‘grieve’ for Sodom and Gomorrah we cannot pray as Abraham prayed.

Let’s leave our devotional at this point — God grieving, cut to the heart, the witnesses on their way to Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham, the Friend of God, still standing before his Lord.