The Sin Of Sodom

TITLE: THE SIN OF SODOM

TEXT: EZEKIEL 16:49

INTRODUCTION: For many years Monterey, a California coast town, was a pelican’s paradise. As the fisherman cleaned their fish, they flung the offal to the pelicans. The birds grew fat, lazy and contented. Eventually, however, the offal was utilized, and there were no longer snacks for the pelicans.

When the change came the pelicans made no effort to fish for themselves. They waited around, grew gaunt and thin. Many starved to death. They had forgotten how to fish for themselves. The problem was solved by importing new pelicans from the south, birds accustomed to foraging for themselves. They were placed among their starving cousins, and the newcomers immediately started catching fish. Before long, the hungry pelicans followed suit, and the famine was ended. Laziness is a deadly sin. It often leads to other even more deadly sins. Ezekiel 16:49 "Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had arrogance, abundant food, and careless ease, but she did not help the poor and needy.”

PROP: BELIEVERS NEED TO BE AWARE OF SIN.

TRAN: LET US CONSIDER EZEKIEL 16:49

I. THE SIN OF ARROGANCE

“Behold, this was guilt of your sister Sodom…she and her daughters had arrogance….” When we think of Sodom and Gommorah we often think of sexual sins. Especially those of the kind which makes our skin crawl. Men with men. Call it what it is – arrogance. “We do not answer to God. We are not sinners. After all it was God who made us this way.” Blasphemy – God will judge the sin of arrogance – the sin of homosexuality. Friends, let us not be taken in by the heathenistic attitude. Many are on the road to destruction and yet they seem not to care. They mock God asking, “Where is the promise of His coming?” Where is the judgment of God? Friends, how arrogant. When God’s wrath is revealed it will be like a consuming fire!

II. THE SIN OF AFFLUENCE “abundant food.”

To have abundant food is to be wealthy. We have so much food. We can buy what we desire. How different the rest of the world. In most of Africa if there is one crop failure then the people go without. If one pestilence and the crops

III. THE SIN OF ABATEMENT “careless ease”

Abatement means not to give your whole force to something. In this case life. God did not create us to use up our whole lives in doing nothing of worth. Consider the ant in Proverbs. There is a new world coming and we need to be prepared to enter it.

IV. THE SIN OF ABANDONMENT “but she did not help the poor and needy.”

To have the means to help the poor and needy and not to do it is poor stewardship and a sin of great neglect in the eyes of God. The poor are everywhere according to Jesus and we must invest our lives to help them as much as superhumanly possible. One time I saw a man by the side of the road in Cameroon who was demonized man. He had been by the side of the road at the same place for 30 years. I asked how he lived. I was told that the villagers (who were poor and needy themselves) gave of their substance to take care of this man.

CONCLUSION: A writer in the Edinburgh Review said, "A Swiss traveler describes a village situated on the slope of a great mountain. Huge crags, directly overhanging the village, and massive enough to sweep the whole of it into the torrent below, have become separated from the main body of the mountain in the course of ages by great fissures and now barely adhere to it. When they give way, the village must perish; it is only a question of time, and the catastrophe may happen any day. The villagers, for more than one generation, have been aware of their danger. They have been encouraged to move, yet they live on in their doomed dwellings, from year to year, fortified against the ultimate certainty and daily probability of destruction by the common sentiment, ’Things may last their time and longer.’"

Like the dwellers in this doomed village, the world’s inhabitants have grown careless and secure in sin. The scoffers of the last days are around us, saying, "Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation." But in saying this, they are too confident. Nothing is permanent that has sin about it, nothing secure that has wrath above it, and flames of fire beneath it. Sin has once deluged the world with water, it shall deluge it again with waves of fire. Sodom and Gomorrah are the types that foreshadow the doom of those that live ungodly in these latter times, and he who can walk this reeling world unmoved by all the tokens of its fiery doom, must either have a rock of refuge where his soul may rest secure, or else must have fallen into a strange carelessness, and a sad forgetfulness of God.

-- Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Quotable Spurgeon, (Wheaton: Harold Shaw Publishers, Inc, 1990)