Genesis 18:17-33 – Being Human

So the reading today is from Genesis chapter eighteen and verse seventeen to thirty-three.

The Lord said, Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him?

For I have chosen him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice, so that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has promised him.

Then the Lord said, Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and their sin is very grave, I will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me, and if not, I will know.

So the men turned from there and went toward Sodom.

Then Abraham drew near and said, Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?

Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city.

Will you then sweep away the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it?

Far be it from you to do such a thing to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked.

Far be that from you.

Shall not a judge of all the earth do what is just?

And the Lord said, If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake.

Abraham answered and said, Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord.

I who am but dust and ashes.

Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking.

Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?

And he said, I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.

Again he spoke to him and said, Suppose forty are found there.

He answered, For the sake of forty, I will not do it.

Then he said, Oh, let the Lord not be angry, and I will speak.

Suppose thirty are found there.

He answered, I will not do it.

If I find thirty there, he said, Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord.

Suppose twenty are found there.

He answered, For the sake of twenty, I will not destroy it.

Then he said, Oh, let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak again but this once.

Suppose ten are found there.

He answered, For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it.

And the Lord went his way when he had finished speaking to Abraham, and Abraham returned to his place, and so reads God's word.

Let me add my welcome to Peter's, to Mark's, and to anybody else who may have welcomed you here this morning.

My name is Ben.

I'm one of the leaders here, and I will be sharing from the passage that Orina graciously shared with us just a few minutes ago.

When we look at this passage on its on its surface, just on the on the very face of it, this is a guy talking to God.

What do we call that?

Prayer, thank you.

All right, very good.

Are you still with me?

All right, ten seconds in.

And this is this is a special kind of prayer.

It's a specific kind of prayer.

It is intercessory prayer.

It's Abraham interceding, right?

He's standing between God and the people of Sodom.

He's he's stepping in between, you know, so this is the this is an intercessory prayer.

This is actually, I believe, the first place in Scripture that we see any example of an intercessory prayer.

All right, so it's an important one.

It's one for us to take notice of and learn something from here.

But maybe you're like me.

You know, I can I can think of various times as I've grown up in the faith, and you know, I've been a Christian a long time, but I've questioned, you know, what is the purpose of prayer?

What is the purpose of asking God for things?

Because when you really think about it, the discussion, right, between God and me.

On one side, you've got the Lord of all creation, the guy who made it all, the guy who set it all in motion, the guy who has all the wisdom, all the plan, has everything sorted out, worked out, figured out, eternal plan, works all things together for the good of those who loved him and are called according to his purposes.

And on the other side of the equation, me.

Right?

I mean, I like to think of myself as a pretty smart guy.

I like to think of myself as, you know, having some idea, but you know, you put me up next to God, and it's not a very fair comparison, not a very even comparison.

Obviously, if I think that something should be one way and God thinks it should be another way, which one of us is wrong?

It's not God.

I'll tell you that much.

And really, we could take a look at this passage here, and we could say, here is Abraham interceding for Sodom.

And I don't want to give away too many spoilers.

Don't want to steal Mark's thunder for next week.

But uh, you know, next week.

Sorry?

Thank you, thank you.

Like that.

The uh that's great.

No, no.

Um spoiler alert for next week: God does wind up destroying the city of Sodom.

So it would be very easy, just even without our own experience and without our own thoughts, to look at this passage and say, here is Abraham interceding for a city, you know, that they might not be destroyed.

And at the end of the day, God destroys them anyway.

So, you know, could we look at this and say, what's the point of intercessory prayer?

Why, why, why should we intercede?

Why should we come to the Lord?

I always did it, you know, because we're commanded to, but I never quite understood it.

But as you may have guessed, by the way, I'm building all of this up here, there is a point to intercessory prayer.

And it's maybe not the point that we thought it would be.

But I'm going to uh dig us, dig through this and we can see what we can find out about that.

So before we get into all of that, I want to give us a little bit of context because I think it's important that we see where we've come from.

Last week's passage, right?

God came down and he visited Abraham and gave him great news.

He said, You know, this son that I've promised you, this promise that I made to you, and it's like 25 years later, quarter century later, God says, that is happening now.

Now is the time, right?

I come back next time, this time next year, that son is gonna be born.

And that's great news.

So Abraham's got to be feeling pretty good about that, but at the same time, God calls out and also says, Hey, I wanna tell you about something that's going on.

The city of Sodom here, they're quite bad.

I'm going to check it out and see if I if I need to intervene here, if I need to do some stuff here to take care of them.

Now, if we look back in the in the Abraham narrative here over the course of the last few chapters, starting with with chapter 12, we've already seen something about Sodom.

And generally speaking, the stuff about Sodom is not good stuff.

We see in chapter 13 it says, Now the men of Sodom were wicked, great sinners against the Lord.

We see in chapter 14 that Abraham refuses treasure, refuses reward from the king of Sodom.

He says, I don't want you to be able to say that you enriched Abraham, right?

I'm I'm I'm keeping that uh boundary in place there.

All right.

So God brings Sodom up before Abraham here.

He brings them into the discussion.

He didn't have to do this, right?

He chose to.

We can even see a little bit of God's perhaps internal monologue where it says here, you know, shall I shall I hide from Abraham what I'm about to do?

And he decides to bring Abraham into it.

And that's our first point.

Our first point here is that it is God.

God is the one who invites into intercessory prayer.

All right, we see this here in the passage.

Before I look at the passage, I do want to make a disclaimer, though.

God doesn't invite us into interceding for others so that we can change his mind.

Right?

God's not set up with a with a folding table at a college campus saying, you know, I'm gonna destroy Sodom.

Change my mind.

That's not what's going on here.

All right?

God has a purpose.

God has a plan.

God has motion, uh things set in motion to achieve his purposes.

But what we know about God is that he is kind, he is merciful, and he uses prayer for the good of his people.

So we're gonna talk more about that in a minute here, but but God may, in his goodness and kindness towards us, delay what he's going to do.

What he was gonna do anyway, but he may delay it and time it when we ask for his help.

That way we can see more clearly what he's about.

We can see his hand more readily.

All right.

So as we look at this, take a look in your Bibles there, chapter 18.

We're gonna be looking from verse 17 here, and we can see that Abraham isn't the one to initiate the conversation.

God didn't have to let Abraham into the discussion about Sodom in any way.

But he says here, I'm gonna bring Abraham into this, I'm going to invite him into this.

God makes a statement about what he's going to do, but it's kind of a loaded statement, right?

Earlier this week, or last week, I guess it was, I said to Doreen at the beginning of the day, I said, I think I'm going to go and buy that guitar that I've been saving up for.

Now, that wasn't me just making a statement.

That wasn't me just saying, yep, this is what's happening.

This was me, you know, kind of feeling out, gauging out what's she gonna, how's she gonna respond to this, um, you know, as husbands do.

But uh, you know, it seems that God is doing the same thing here.

He has He has dropped this information on Abraham, and he's inviting a response.

You can see that when we skip over into verse 22, says the men turned from there and went towards Sodom, but Abraham still stood before the Lord.

So God says, okay, angels, we know they're angels from the next chapter there.

Angels, you go ahead and head towards Sodom.

I'm gonna stay here and talk this through with Abraham.

So there's there's an implicit, an implied invitation for Abraham to have some conversation about this.

Abraham seems to understand this too.

You look at the way that he responds to God, right?

You look at verse 27 and it says, Behold, I have undertaken to speak with the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes.

Multiple times he says, you know, let not the Lord be angry.

All right, so he's understanding that he's in this position because God has brought him into it.

And he's not placing himself in the position of God, but he's understanding that he's in a humble place.

And at the end of the conversation, right, we see in verse 33 it says, The Lord went his way when he'd finished speaking to Abraham, and Abraham returned to his place.

So there's a sense here that Abraham has had his time with the Lord.

He has he's brought his concerns to the Lord, he's had his conversation with the Lord, and at the end of the day, he's leaving it with the Lord because the Lord invited him into it, but he's not pulled him into to replace God in this.

Even the way that all of the events kind of unfold here, we don't we don't want to look at the events of this chapter and say this is how God always works.

You know, where it says God is gonna come down and have a look and see what's going on with Sodom.

Obviously, we know God is God is all-seeing, all-knowing.

He not only knows what's going on in Sodom, he knows the name of every person living in that city.

He knows the thoughts in their heads, he knows the intentions of their hearts, knows all the all the hairs on their head, he knows all of this stuff.

He doesn't need to come down physically and see it for himself, because he already knows.

But there's a sense here that he's playing this out, that he's doing this in a way that Abraham can see, right?

And by extension, so that we can see.

This is, you know, he's he's letting us see, this is not just an arbitrary decision.

This is something that he's taking care with.

You know, it's not like God just had a you know a slow day up in heaven.

He's like, I think I'll stretch my legs, go see my boy Abraham, and then go walk over to Sodom and see what's going on over there.

No, no, no.

He's he's playing this out because he's inviting Abraham into the discussion.

It's kind of like when I took my Irish driving test.

Anybody take their Irish driving test here?

Put up your hands.

Oh, yeah, one person.

Great job, guys.

Hey, nice.

Um I knew that there was a lot of stuff that I needed to make sure that the tester could see that I was doing.

And so I narrated as I was driving through.

She was like, okay, make a left at the signal up here.

And I said, okay, so I'm slowing down here, checking my mirror, putting on my signal, kind of talking it through.

Believe it or not, when I'm driving normally, I don't narrate it.

But I did that for her benefit so she would have some awareness.

And in case she was looking the other way, when I looked in my mirror, you know, she'd be able to know that I was doing it right.

And I think that's I think that's the same idea, you know, that God has here.

He's bringing Abraham in.

He's he's walking this all.

Even the idea that there's two angels going along with them.

You get down a few hundred years after this, and the law is given.

There's a few places in the law where it says, you know, nobody shall be put to death except on the testimony of two or more witnesses.

You've got two angels who are gonna be the witnesses, who are gonna go and look and see what's going on in Sodom.

You've got God standing in the role of judge, who's gonna take their testimony there.

So all of this is more or less played out for Abraham's benefit and by extension for our benefit, so we can see something about God in this.

Now, how does this help us?

What does this tell us?

Well, it's important for us to see that God is inviting us into prayer.

When we find out about a situation that we want to pray about, we don't need to think, gosh, I really don't want to bother God with this.

I really don't want to bring this to him.

I haven't really got my thoughts worked out, I haven't really got my ideas sorted out with this.

So let me wait on this.

No, God is calling you to it.

The question we have to ask is, you know, what are the situations that God may be calling us to enter into prayer, enter into a discussion with him about?

And sometimes those can be situations that we know we have no control in.

That's that's an easy one, right?

Um, if we find out about somebody, you know, with a bad diagnosis, yeah, we can pray for them because what else can we do?

Right?

If we find, if we if we know about people in our lives, maybe friends, coworkers, loved ones who don't yet know Jesus, we can't change their hearts, right?

We can't change their thinking, but the Lord can.

So those are easy things for us to put before Him.

But really, I think what we're seeing here is that all of the circumstances of our lives are the right thing to be praying about, the things that God is inviting us to pray about.

So I think we just need to pray.

I think that's what this is this is telling us.

God is inviting us to pray, so let's be people of prayer.

All right, so we've seen God is inviting us into prayer.

Second thing that we're gonna see is prayer is about God and his character and his plans and his designs.

Prayer is about God.

It's not about us.

We can see how Abraham approaches God, right?

Look at look at verse 23 here.

He says, Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?

And skip down from there to verse 25.

He says, Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked.

Far be that from you.

He's working off of what he knows about God, and he says, You you wouldn't do that.

That's not how you are, that's not who you are.

He says, Shall not the judge of the earth do what is just?

So he's recognizing God's character, he's recognizing what he knows about God, and he's bringing that back to the Lord.

Notice that he doesn't bring in his own thoughts.

You know, God, I was really thinking about Sodom the other day, and I had this other idea.

Maybe this would be better.

He doesn't bring in his own feelings, he doesn't appeal.

You know, God, I'm your guy, right?

You picked me to be a blessing to all nations.

So I've got some stuff that we can we can talk about with this.

No, he doesn't he doesn't bring himself in.

He doesn't try to call in a favor with God, he doesn't try to strike a bargain.

You know, God, if you don't do this, you know what, I'll do this for you.

Right?

We do that sometimes, don't we?

He also doesn't downplay Sodom's wickedness.

He doesn't call for justice to be subverted.

He doesn't say, oh, you know, they're not that bad.

Or maybe, you know, you could just let it go for now, God.

He calls on God based on what he knows about God because he knows God's character.

And if you contrast the character of this unchanging, loving, and just God with the pagan deities that would have been, you know, believed in in Abraham's day and time and place, they were not in this way.

They were petty, they were capricious.

Even if you come down, you know, centuries and you look at the Greeks and the Romans and their gods and their legends and myths about these gods who would who would smite you and strike you and, you know, you know, punish an entire city for uh for small things.

It's a very different view that Abraham has of God.

And it's it's amazing.

And this is likely the result of him walking with this God for a quarter of a century and being mature in this.

But he calls on God based on God's own character.

So it's it's a prayer that is to God and about God, not about his own agenda, not about putting God in a box or saying this is the only way that I think you could possibly work in this situation, Lord.

I can think of situations in my own life where I have, you know, had a very specific set of parameters that I really wanted God to work in.

And I'd I'd bring the situation, I can think of one in particular.

I was praying for months that God would do something.

And I was like, God, I just want, I just want what you want.

I don't want, I want this thing to work out in your way as long as it fits into this box over here, Lord.

I really want, I really want what you want, but I as long as it's over here.

And I really felt like there's, you know, nothing's really happening in this situation.

God's not doing anything.

And what am I supposed to learn from this?

And I didn't see it at the time.

But I remember the day, the day.

And I'd love to tell you that I came to this day because of some great theological reflection and wisdom that I came to, but really, it just came because I had run out of things to think of to do, right?

I'd come to the end of it and I said, you know what, Lord, maybe this little box that I have for you to act in is not the right box.

Maybe I need to, instead of saying, Lord, I want you to act in my way, I need to ask you to act in your way.

And the reason that I that I think that that was the lesson God was teaching me was within 24 hours, he started to answer my prayer.

Right?

He started to do something.

We started to see movement on something that had been stagnant and discouraging and frustrating for probably the better part of a year.

So prayer is about God.

It's not about us.

And this should really shape how we pray.

We don't we don't come to God simply based on, you know, I really, really, really, really, really, really, really think this is the way you should do it, God.

That may be our heart.

We may we may have that in our hearts, but we need to come and ask ourselves, how does what I want line up with who God is, with what God has already revealed, with what God wants.

And we don't come to God with this kind of accusatory, you know, you said, you said you would do it this way, you know.

But to have that change in our focus and our purpose in how we pray, that takes it out of our own agenda and our own ideas, and it lets God do work within us, make changes in us.

And so that's that's what we can see there from this idea that God is the one who prayers about.

And that takes us into our final point, guys.

Final point here is that prayer isn't about us changing God.

It's an old Christian adage, right?

Prayer isn't about us changing God, it's about God changing us.

It's one of the ways that God changes us.

Like what I said up at the top there, you know, sometimes God has his purposes, but his purposes are timed to match up with when we might pray about something.

Why would he do that?

Well, he does that to change our view of him, to help us to see him that little bit better, or to be encouraged by him when we need to be.

Right?

When I was praying through that situation, I was just talking about, and suddenly my prayers changed, and all of a sudden I could see something happening.

I didn't just go, wow, that's a coincidence.

I said, Wow, God, God is there and he's doing something here.

And that's amazing.

So it was an encouragement to me.

You look at what Abraham does here, and he asks six times, six times, God, would you would you spare the city if there were 50 people righteous.

And he brings that all the way down through six steps.

Would you spare the city if there was, you know, just 10 people righteous?

And what does he find in that?

He finds that God's compassion, God's kindness, probably more amazing than he could recognize in that moment.

Question that I always ask myself was, how big is this city?

Is this a city the size of Dublin?

No, it's not the city, it's a city the size of Dublin.

Seems that it's probably a city somewhere 100 to 200 people, right?

And that matches up with some of the other context that we have in here.

100 to 200 people, that's not a very big city.

So Abraham starts off saying, you know what, God, if there's 200 people in this city and 50 of them are righteous, right?

If out of every four people in this city, one of them is righteous, would you spare the city?

God says, yes.

Yes, I would.

And he gets all the way down to if there were out of every 20 people in this city, 19 of them are violently opposed to your reign.

19 of them want nothing to do with you.

19 of them are acting wickedly.

But one of them is righteous.

Would you spare the city?

And what does God say?

Does God say, nope, nope, nope, that's too much, too much.

Gotta have the math here.

No, God says, for the sake of those 10 people in this city of 100 to 200 people, I would spare the city.

Abraham never comes to a point where God says, nope, that's too much for my grace.

That's too much for my compassion.

And what he finds out, not only is God this compassionate and gracious, loving God, but also that the city of Sodom, there's nobody who's righteous, nobody who's following God there.

So how is Abraham changed in this?

Well, he's got a better picture of God's mercy.

And really, if we think about it, if prayer is one of the ways that God changes us, that he grows us, that he gives us a better picture of who he is, that he brings us closer to the image of Jesus, all of the things that we're talking about here, doesn't that tell us that we should be praying?

We should be praying more, we should be opening ourselves up to that process more.

I remember reading about a pastor, I think he was from like the 19th century, and he said, you know, every morning I get up and I pray for an hour.

I was like, ooh, that's that's pretty cool.

And he says, Oh, unless.

Unless it's a really busy day.

Okay, all right, here we go.

And then he says, Then I pray for two hours.

Because I know I'm gonna need it, right?

I know that I'm gonna need God's help in that really, really busy day.

So prayer is is one way that God grows, shapes, and changes us.

So I think the takeaway for us there is let's not just make our, let's not just make our prayers, you know, uh a data dump on God.

Okay, God, I've got this, this, this, this, this, and this.

Can you help me with this?

Can you show me this?

Can you work with this?

Can you do this?

You know, not that we're just having a big laundry list of prayers and demands for the Lord, but that we are seeking him in prayer.

We are, we are approaching him so that he might have his say in us, that he might do his work in us.

Let's seek God as we pray and see how he grows us.

Now, we look ahead in scripture and we can see some pretty exciting things about intercession.

Because this passage prefigures what the church in our day and age enjoys, right?

In Romans chapter 8, it says, likewise the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, God Himself, right?

Romans 8 · chapter mention

Third person of the Trinity.

Likewise, the Spirit helps in our weaknesses, for we do not know what to pray as we ought, but the Spirit Himself intercedes with us, for us, with groanings too deep for words.

So God's own Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, is interceding for us, standing between us and the Father, the Judge.

That's amazing.

But it doesn't stop there.

Nope, there's another one here.

Hebrews 7, it says about Jesus.

Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.

So Jesus is interceding for us.

That's part of his work.

So we have the second and third person of the Trinity interceding for us to the first person of the Trinity.

We see in in our passage this morning in Genesis that God sent two witnesses to see if the city of Sodom needed to be condemned.

Now he sends two intercessors to us to look out for us, to intercede for us.

Now, maybe you're here this morning and you're not following Jesus yet.

You haven't come to that moment in your life where you find that his way is best.

And if that's you, I'm glad you're here.

Thanks for coming.

Glad to have you with us.

I'd love to talk to you more afterwards.

But if that's you, maybe, maybe you come to this passage and you say, oh, here, you know, Christians just give their God an out, right?

If you pray for something and it happens, well, God answered my prayer.

And if if if you pray for something and it doesn't happen, well, it must not have been God's plan.

You know, it's it's it's it's all very convenient.

But we need to look no further.

Talk about modern philosophical uh sources here.

You need to look no further than the late great Matthew Perry in 17 again, where he found out the hard way that we don't always ask for the right things.

He thought he wanted his life to go one way, and he got the chance to redo it, and he found out nope, my life was better the other way.

Right?

So we don't always ask for the right things.

We don't always have the right ideas for ourselves, we don't always know, we don't see the big picture.

And isn't it better that we can see this God?

We can put our faith in this God who is not arbitrary, who is not, you know, just doing whatever he wants, but he has this consistent character.

He has this compassion that is so much greater than we can possibly see there.

So I would encourage you, if you're not a follower of Jesus yet, then give some thought to this God who's not arbitrary, who's not capricious, if you like that word.

And see if his way is not better than what we have in this world.

And for the church, for the gathered body of believers, whether that's in this room, in this city, or around the world, I think probably the best thing that we can take from this is to pray.

Pray first.

Pray early, pray often.

And let's watch what God does.

All right, it's in those moments that God changes us, and it's in that in the in those moments that we are tuned into what God might do in a certain situation.

Thank you for listening to this week's sermon.

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