Thought on Genesis 19

I am now in the late teen chapters of Genesis in my daily reading. I was reading the story in chapter 19—you know, the one about all the adventures Lot had when he lived in Sodom and Gomorrah. I’d gotten to the part where two strangers came to visit Lot’s fair town and he invited them to stay at his home for the night. They tried to refuse him, at first, but his continued urging made them relent and they accepted his offer of hospitality.

The Book says that he fed them a great meal and just before they were getting ready to head to bed, Lot and his visitors heard a large amount of yelling coming from outside the house. It turned out that all the men of the city of Sodom, “both young and old, all the people from every quarter” (19:4) had surrounded Lot’s house and were demanding that the two visitors be sent out to them so that they could "have relations with them.” (19:5)

Now there is a lot of clamor around ‘Christendom’ as to what it was these men wanted to do with the two strangers. I’m not really going to delve into that issue; however, I can state definitively that whatever they wanted to do was sinful because Lot pleaded with them not to act “wickedly.”

As most people are wont to do, the men of Sodom did not exactly appreciate being called wicked so they pressed their case even more vehemently to the point that they were squishing Lot against his door and almost breaking it--and him!
Fortunately for poor old squished Lot, the two angel visitors were keeping and eye on things and they reached out and hauled Lot into the house, threw a curse at the wicked men--blinding them, and then quickly shut the door behind him.

What amazes me most about this story is that the men of Sodom didn’t just quit at this point. You know, “Well, let’s take stock of our situation here. Lot’s gone back into the house and shut the door. It doesn’t look like he is going to be willing to send those men out here so we can act wickedly with them, and--WE'RE BLIND! Maybe we should just crawl back the way we came.” Nope. The Text says that those men wearied themselves trying to find the door so that they could get to the two strangers.

In case ya didn’t know, ‘Weary’ is an adjective that means “physically or mentally exhausted by hard work, exertion, or strain.” Normally, I’d admire someone who had a goal and worked diligently to achieve it. This time, however, these men became weary because they were trying to be wicked. Though BLIND, they grew exhausted in striving to do something evil.

I guess I really don’t have much of a point here. I was just so amazed at how stridently these men were working to sin. It isn’t as if they were just there in a group of friends and the sin was this really simple thing to do—like putting your hand out, accepting a joint and smoking it. Nope, their actions were equivalent of trekking through 2 miles of mountains, then running through a large and dense forest at top speed for an hour from federal agents, finding the hidden garden of 'herbs', cutting them down, making the return trip home, rolling the marijuana into papers, lighting it and smoking it. Their efforts were clearly on the side of wanting to do sin so much that they put themselves in physical harm to do it. YIKES!!

It sounds terrible, doesn’t it—putting your body in physical danger in order to sin? And while I imagine none of us often go to that kind of extreme—physically--in order that we might sin, I wonder if I or you or any of us ever realize that no matter the sin we do, we are wearying out spiritual ‘body’ to the point where we will die if we don’t straighten up and fly right.

You know, I can imagine what some of those men of Sodom looked like when they went home that night. I believe that their hands and knees were probably nicked and scratched up from crawling around in the sandy and pebbled streets. I imagine that they were covered in bruises everywhere from bumping into all the other blind, wicked sinners who were crawling around with them, unable to see where they were going. I even wondered if—maybe—some of their clothes were torn cos their fellow sinners got tired of waiting or perhaps mistook them for the two angels. Just imagine walking into your home looking that way! I know one thing—I don’t want to walk into the place of Judgment looking the same.

Just a little food for thought, y’all.
Love,
ME,
Loralee 