Why God Destroyed Sodom & Gomorrah Series

18:1-15 God comes to Abraham, promises Sarah will have a baby in the year to come. She laughs, God says “why did you laugh” She says she didn’t laugh . . . God says, yep. You did. When the baby was born the next year they called him Laughter=Isaac.

18:16-33 God Tells Abraham he will destroy Sodom & Gomorrah. Abraham asks if God will spare the cities for 50, 40, 30, 20, even 10 righteous. God says He’ll not destroy the city, even if there are only 10 righteous souls there.

19 1-11 God seems to have returned to wherever it is He came from. The two angels go down to Sodom and find Lot at the gate. Lot pressures them to stay with him, though the seem reluctant. When they get home the men of the city, young and old, surround the house and demand to have the two men/angels out so they can abuse them sexually. It doesn’t look like Lot & his family will survive until the angles pull Lot back into the house and strike the men with blindness. The depth of their depravity is clear.

12-16 The angels tell Lot to get any loved ones out of the city. They all hesitate to the point that the angles have to take them by the hand and lead them out.

17-22 Lot doesn’t want to go up to the mountains, so the angles give him permission to move to Zoar.

23 By the time Lot reached Zoar, the sun had risen over the land. 24 Then the LORD rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the LORD out of the heavens. 25 Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the land. 26 But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.

Why did God destroy Sodom & Gomorrah?

It is pretty clear that it’s because they had given themselves over to homosexuality.

The Bible is clear and unequivocal on the subject.

Paul said

18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness . . . 21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. . . 24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

Jesus said

18 But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these make a man ‘unclean.’ 19 For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.

Homosexuality in the Culture of Biblical Times

Was VERY common

For the Greeks, a man of means was expected to have a wife to have legitimate children with, and a concubine to have sex with. But a male sexual “friendship” was thought of by the Greeks as a more noble kind of intimacy than normal, male-female relations.

Ravi Zacharias [SLIDE 16] (BEGIN AT 1 MINUTE, STOP AT 4:51

--Ravi Zacharias answers a question “Can an sincere, honest Christian live as a practicing homosexual”. His answer is that there are standards for any group, and higher standards for leaders within that group. For Christians, part of what is expected is that we not indulge our fleshly proclivities. He says any healthy married man endures temptation on a daily basis to betray his marriage vows. He is expected to rise above those temptations and live a godly, faithful life.