Genesis 18 – Approaching God

This sermon is from Genesis chapter 18 and is entitled, Approaching God.

Genesis 18 · chapter mention

It was delivered to Ekklesia churches on Sunday, August 16th, 2026.

In Genesis chapter 18, we're going to be interacting with this idea of how we should

Genesis 18 · chapter mention

approach God and even more incredibly, how God has approached us.

We'll see this interaction in which Abraham makes this feast and invites God to it without

completely understanding who God is.

And God actually honors the humility of Abraham and allows him to serve him a meal.

We'll see another interaction between Sarah and God, who has become bitter and disillusioned,

and God refuses to let her stay in the version of the world that she has created.

He calls her to an honesty that is painful, but it leads to a better place.

And finally, we'll have this uncomfortable exchange between God and Abraham that is really

based on the justice and the character of God.

And it shows us a God who really is merciful and points forward to the righteous one who

will take the punishment deserved by the many.

And of course, you shouldn't be surprised at this point that Genesis 18, like every chapter

before it and after it, is pointing in some way forward to the work of Jesus.

I want to tell you a brief story to set the scene with Abraham here.

When I was probably 16, my dad had, and still has to my knowledge, a good friend named

Marong.

Marong was from China originally and had escaped really difficult circumstances under a oppressive

regime to become a college professor in America. And he was absolutely brilliant in matters of the

law. He spoke several languages. He was extraordinarily kind. He invited our family

once to his house for dinner because among many other interests, he loved to cook traditional

Chinese food. And we enter his, you know, rather small house. And I remember it was already warm

and aromatic from the cooking.

And he came out to greet us

and shake our hands enthusiastically.

And his smile just spread across his entire face.

And he kept thanking us over and over for coming.

When I invite someone over for dinner,

we usually serve a main course and a side or two

and maybe a dessert at the end.

But Marang had made, I think, six or seven main dishes.

And they completely covered the table

and there was barely room for our plates on it.

It was incredible.

He finally sat down and fanned himself with a paper for a moment and smiled at us while

we sat in shock over the amount of food.

And he just kept coming out of the kitchen with more food and refilling our drinks and

just serving us and continued to do so until we left.

And that experience has always stuck with me as an example of someone who knew how to

humbly serve, someone who really showed hospitality.

He got so much joy out of our being there and serving us.

And I legitimately don't even remember if he ate because he was so happy that we had come.

And I tell you that story because I think we often forget what humility really looks like.

And it's a picture of how Abraham approached these travelers, not knowing that one of them

is God himself, but it's also a picture of the posture of God toward us.

and hopefully the posture of Christians toward others.

We should possess a humility that causes us to joyfully run to serve in his name,

particularly the people that he puts in our lives.

And that humility should also lead us to a posture of honesty,

not hiding our shortcomings, but coming to Jesus with them.

And finally, I think by the end of this passage,

we'll have a little insight into what it means to come to God in faith.

So there's a lot of application in this passage.

So keep a pen handy because I can't tell you what the Spirit of God will apply to each of

us through his word today.

I can tell you that the only way we are able to approach God is because he came to us and

made a way first.

And that is one truth that you can walk away from this passage with.

Let's start with this encounter between Abraham and these three men.

We're going to read chapter 18 of Genesis verses 1 through 8 to start.

And the Lord appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the door of his tent in

the heat of the day.

He lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, three men were standing in front of him.

When he saw them, he ran from the tent door to meet them and bowed himself to the earth

and said, O Lord, if I have found favor in your sight, do not pass by your servant.

Let a little water be brought and wash your feet and rest yourselves under the tree while

I bring a morsel of bread that you may refresh yourselves.

And after that, you may pass on since you have come to your servant.

So they said, do as you have said.

And Abraham went quickly into the tent to get Sarah and said, quick, three seeds of fine

flour, knead it and make cakes.

And Abraham ran to the herd and took a calf tender and good and gave it to a young man

who prepared it quickly.

Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared and set it before them.

And he stood by them under the tree while they ate.

So even by the high hospitality expectations and standards of that time and place,

the way Abraham responds is still pretty amazing and shows us this picture of a man

who has the heart of a servant.

We, the reader, know that this is God himself showing up in the form of a man.

And we find out later that the other two men with him are angels, but Abraham doesn't know that.

What he sees are three men traveling in the desert in the heat of the day,

and he is immediately concerned for their well-being.

During the high point of the day in the Middle East, you do not continue to travel.

Even today, you don't continue to travel in the heat of the day.

You find some shade, you wait it out, just like Abraham is doing in the entrance to his

tent.

But there's some other details that we don't want to miss concerning Abraham.

First, he's a 99-year-old man, and he is the leader of his clan.

So it would not have been considered dignified or necessary for this man to run at all.

The standard would have been to have someone else run out and greet them on your behalf

and then take care of them under your hospitality.

But second, we know from the end of chapter 17 that Abraham has just finished a very painful

procedure and is healing from it.

Yet none of these things seem to matter to Abraham who runs to meet these strangers and

then he practically begs them to come rest under the tree with him.

Also, to be clear, while he says, O Lord, in verse 3, this is not a greeting reserved for God,

but it is a general Middle Eastern greeting of respect, similar to, O Sir. In fact, this whole

greeting is pretty standard greeting in the culture where that would have been highly valued,

everything except for the running. But Abraham doesn't stop there. He invites them to stay for

essentially a snack and a drink, to which they agree, before Abraham goes on to prepare for them

absolute feast. Like this guy knows how to honor his guest. He tells Sarah to take what is about

six gallons of flour and turn it into flatbread. Then he runs again out to his herd of cattle and

selects not an older animal, but a younger one who will produce the most tender meat. And he has it

butchered and cooked for his guests, which would have really been extravagant to have meat,

especially fresh meat available. Finally, he brings out this like charcuterie tray,

the biggest one you've ever seen, and he sets it before his guests and stands with them while they

eat. So Abraham has shown enormous humility and for all his prestige as the leader of his people

and the eldest among them, he takes the posture of a servant. Meals and particularly sharing a table

meant more to them than it might mean to us today. In this culture, sharing a table with someone

was to invite them into relationship with you, even to treat them like a friend. And humility

has led Abraham to invite these strangers to a feast in their honor, into a kind of

friendship with him. But he doesn't know that the honor is actually his,

because God has come to sit with him. He doesn't realize that he has unknowingly invited the Lord

of all creation to sit with him under these trees. And it's a kind of foretaste of what Jesus would

invite us to. The writer of Hebrews mentions this very event saying, do not neglect to show

hospitality to strangers for thereby some have entertained angels unaware. Which is good advice,

But Jesus makes an even more important connection for us in Matthew 25.

Jesus is talking about the coming day of judgment and how on that day,

he will recognize some people for caring for him when he was sick and hungry and thirsty and in need.

And these people will be momentarily confused, he says.

They'll say, Jesus, I don't remember doing any of those things for you.

To which Jesus responds, it's true.

The things that you did to the least of those among you, you did it to me.

see people who know that they have been given much by the grace of God tend to respond with a heart

that is full of humility and that humility causes us to treat the people around us with the same kind

of generosity that has been shown to us in Christ that humility tends to kind of bleed out of those

changed by Jesus in a few really distinct ways. Out in the world, it causes us to treat the most

lowly and needy people with dignity and respect. People who don't have the same desire for high

status in the eyes of the world tend to see the people that others overlook. And here in the church,

humility also has a huge impact on how we serve one another. When we come with a heart to serve,

the Sunday gathering isn't actually about our own preferences and desires to get something for

ourselves. We're actually gathering as a way to serve one another, right? It's not a checkbox that

makes me a better person for having my name on an attendance roll. It's an opportunity to encourage

other Christians to keep following Jesus. It's not a chance to get filled up necessarily by

listening to my favorite songs. It's a chance to sing my heart out to Jesus and for the sake of my

brother who needs to hear someone say, your grace is enough. Your grace is enough for me.

Followers of Jesus should be known as a people obsessed with serving the way that Jesus has

served us. A people who know just who has invited us to his table and who is ready to invite the

least of these to our table whenever we can. If Abraham, a 99-year-old man recovering from

surgery, can run in the heat of the day to serve strangers, you and I can strive to serve others

with humility and with joy, and we can do it for the sake of Jesus, right? In the next part of the

passage, God actually deals with someone who's close to Abraham, who is absolutely struggling

to find any joy at all. And it's Sarah. Abraham's wife is sitting in the tent overhearing this

conversation. And her response to these visitors is actually very different from Abraham. So let's

read verses 9 through 15. They said to him, where is Sarah, your wife? And he said, she is in the

tent. The Lord said, I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah, your wife,

shall have a son. And Sarah was listening at the tent door behind him. Now Abraham and Sarah were

old, advanced in years. The way of women had ceased to be with Sarah. So Sarah laughed to herself,

saying, After I am worn out, and my Lord is old, shall I have pleasure? The Lord said to Abraham,

Why did Sarah laugh and say, Shall I indeed bear a child now that I am old?

Is anything too hard for the Lord?

At the appointed time, I will return to you about this time next year, and Sarah shall have a son.

But Sarah denied it, saying, I did not laugh, for she was afraid.

He said, No, but you did laugh.

Sarah is in a really bad place at this point in her life.

And her laughter is not the same as Abraham's in the last chapter.

Even the passage recognizes that she has been barren her whole life.

And now she is even post-menopause.

There is no hope for her to have a child, short of a miracle.

And Sarah isn't betting on a miracle.

She is, by her own admission, worn out.

And so is her husband.

And she's living a life without a child,

which is the only thing that would bring her joy at this point.

Sarah has become cynical.

And that cynicism has bled into her faith,

leaving her in a place that is pretty hopeless and without joy.

And it's from this place that she laughs to herself.

Not the same laugh that Abraham burst out with in the last chapter,

but a dry laugh of unbelief at this promise of God.

The wild thing is, though, that God knows what she has said in her own heart.

For the record, this is something that truly only God is able to do and may have been the

first real indication to them both that this was actually God.

He repeats a promise that God has made, and then he calls out something that Sarah never

said out loud.

Nobody else in the natural or supernatural world has the ability to see what's going

on in your heart, but God does. And what he sees there in Sarah is problematic. God doesn't have to

do what he does here, but it's important that he does because it tells us what God cares about.

He could have not said anything and Sarah would have been proven wrong within a year when she gave

birth. But he questions her bitter laughter to herself. He calls out her struggling faith and he

doesn't let her live with a lie. Because God is not interested in maintaining a facade,

he cares about Sarah's heart. One of the greatest temptations when we are confronted by the truth

of God is to lie and cover. And this has been happening from the very beginning, and it was

Adam and Eve's first impulse when God began to uncover their sin in the garden. This feeling of

being exposed is deeply unsettling. Honestly, bringing our own heart with our flaws before God

goes against every fiber of our sinful nature, but it is the very antidote that we need.

It is so tempting to pretend that we are okay, that we are whole, to deny that we are broken and

pretend that we have everything together, but our God loves us so much that he would rather we come

to him and see that we are broken so that we can find healing. He would rather we deal with the

truth than continue to live in a lie. And I think knowing this helps us in a very few practical

ways. When dealing with ourselves, knowing our own inclination to hide allows us to push against

that toward transparency instead. We know that human nature no longer dictates how we deal

with the discomfort of the truth. Proverbs 27 verse 6 says that in fact, faithful are the wounds

Proverbs 27:6

of a friend. And God is the most faithful of friends. Which is why he calls us to the truth,

even when it hurts. When we're dealing with others, it helps us to have some patience and

understanding when people run from the truth. But it also gives us the courage to speak the truth

in love anyway, because it isn't love to allow someone to remain in a lie without calling them

to the truth. The remaining 17 verses of this chapter detail a conversation between God and

Abraham, in which God shares with Abraham his plans to pass judgment on a city, and Abraham

wrestles to understand who God is as a righteous judge. So let's read just a little bit of that

exchange. Let's go down to verse 22 and read through 26. So the men turned from there and went

toward Sodom, but Abraham still stood before the Lord. Then Abraham drew near and said,

Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are 50 righteous within the

city. Will you then sweep away the place and not spare it for the 50 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 it from you, shall not the 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.

Here again, and in the verses that came just before this,

we see Abraham and God conversing in a much closer way than we would expect.

God has drawn near to Abraham, and now Abraham is responding by drawing near to God and bringing

questions to him. He has a desire to understand who God is. In the first few verses that preceded

what we just read, we get some insight into God considering whether to even disclose his plans

for Sodom and Gomorrah to Abraham. He chooses to let Abraham into this conversation around this

plan, not because he needs Abraham's input, but because he wants Abraham to understand

his character. Let me just restate that once for us in case that kind of subtle point made it past

you. God does not need us or our input to accomplish his plans. He chooses to let us be a

heart of them to show us his character. God tells Abraham that he's about to pass judgment

and destroy these two cities because the outcry is so great from them. This word

outcry in verse 20 and 21 means a cry of agony from the oppressed. It's the same word that's used

to describe the Israelites crying to God for deliverance from slavery in Egypt. It's a plea

of the downtrodden, the abused. We know a little bit about Sodom from the story that follows this

that we'll get into next week, but also from Ezekiel chapter 16 and Job chapter 6. Their primary sin

Ezekiel 16 · chapter mention Job 6 · chapter mention

was pride. And this pride led them into all kinds of perversion and into sexual sin,

but just as significantly, it led them to exploit the vulnerable.

And they looked only to their own pleasure at whatever the cost of it.

God then talks about himself to Abraham using a very human language to communicate what he's

going to do. He says, I'm going down to see what they have done. Now, we know that God doesn't need

to go down. He doesn't need to investigate because he already knows. He's already seen it all.

But for the sake of Abraham, he communicates that he is acting as a fair judge. Remember,

this whole exchange is about showing Abraham who God is, that he's a fair judge. He evaluates the

conduct of the wicked before passing judgment. The response that we just read from Abraham

is the first part of a plea on behalf of people that he cares about, like Lot and his family,

for example. But the way that Abraham makes that argument is a kind of legal formulation that he

repeats, starting with 50 righteous people and then slowly working his way all the way down to

10. But this argument isn't based on trying to call the guilty innocent because he knows that

they're not. The argument or the logic is another word that we could use for this, that Abraham is

working off of is based on the goodness of God. Basically, Abraham is saying, God, you are so

good that I just know you won't act unjustly toward the righteous. His understanding of God

is that God is so good and so just that he would never unjustly punish the righteous.

And I want to invite you just to hold on tight here for a minute because we're going to have

to uncover where Abraham is right, but also where he is wrong.

Abraham rightly understands that God is a just judge who will only allow the guilty to be

condemned.

He will not condemn the innocent and he will not act unjustly.

But Abraham misunderstands one key detail about mankind.

and one key detail about earthly suffering. Abraham's argument fails first because

there is no one who is righteous. This is something that rings throughout all the history of the world,

and we've certainly seen it clearly in Genesis up to here. God's word also says it explicitly in

Isaiah, the prophets, all the way through the New Testament. There is no one righteous. All have

fallen short of the glory of God. Even Abraham is not righteous. But his righteousness comes from

his faith that God will save him from his unrighteousness. So he could have argued all

the way down to one with this argument, and the city would still deserve to be destroyed because

there was not even one righteous person in the city. The second thing, though, that Abraham

misunderstood is that justice will be done one day, but here on earth, the righteous will sometimes

suffer. He didn't have the benefit of scripture like Psalm 73, which talks about how difficult it

is to see the wicked seemingly prosper while the righteous by comparison often suffer.

And in Luke 13, Jesus clarifies this idea even further of delayed justice. What Abraham doesn't

yet understand is that true and complete justice will not come in this lifetime. We can look around

at the world around us and see plenty of examples of this, that a murderer cannot give back the life

that he took. The rain sometimes falls on the crops of the just and the unjust. We live in an

age during which sometimes the righteous suffer. And I think this is actually one way that

Christianity is so compelling because the truth of God's word gives us a way to understand

how life can seem so otherwise unfair. When we know that we are all unrighteous,

we stop thinking that we somehow deserve better and instead are grateful for the common grace of God.

Yet we are also able to witness the injustice of a fallen world where sometimes wicked people

seem to get away with doing horrible things, but still have hope that justice is indeed coming.

So before we close up this passage, I want us to see the part that Abraham got right.

The part that Abraham got right was there is a scenario in which the righteous minority

save the unrighteous majority. But it's even more extreme than that.

The plan of God for our salvation was actually to have a righteous one take the final just

punishment for our unrighteousness.

The plan of God was even better than just withholding earthly justice for a time to

spare the temporary suffering of a few.

His plan was to come himself, not just in the appearance of human form like he did here

with Abraham, but to come as a man of flesh and bone, born to a virgin named Mary. See, Jesus did

what Abraham couldn't because Jesus was the one truly righteous man. And he didn't argue for

temporary mercy for mankind. He said, I will take the just punishment for their sin. That's the

gospel. Without the work of Jesus, we are as far separated from the glory of God as any resident

of Sodom was. We don't have the ability to approach him, but Jesus has made a way for us to do that.

He came to us and he invites us to respond to him with faith. And when we put our faith in Jesus,

Jesus says here, take my righteousness in place of your shame and come follow me.

And while following Jesus does lead through suffering in this life,

we look forward to his unwavering presence with us through every moment of this life

and with the hope of eternity with him to come.

Ekklesia is a church of house churches gathering weekly in Council Bluffs, Iowa,

and in homes throughout the week.

We are a Bible-centered church focused on preaching from scripture

and making disciples of Jesus.

You can learn more about what we believe

and contact a pastor at ecclesiachurches.org.