November 23, 2023
Passage Read: Genesis 17-20
Meditation Verses: 18:32-33
Thought
Sodom and Gomorrah are exceedingly wicked; complaints about them have reached heaven. People want justice and God is sending messengers to confirm the complaints. They stop at Abraham's place and God explains what He's about to do. Abraham, perhaps thinking specifically of his nephew, begins to ask if God would sweep away the righteous with the wicked. He doesn't get down far enough, but stops at ten. If there are ten righteous people in Sodom and Gomorrah, God will not destroy them. God will let the wicked remain and continue to do evil and continue to harm people and continue to produce complaints and cries for justice. For ten righteous people, God will let evil endure. Fortunately, God only found Lot to be righteous, and graciously brought him out of the city, so that all the wicked of the plain could be destroyed.
Application
We wonder why evil persists. It is because of the righteous who are sprinkled among them, who plead for the life of the wicked so that the lives of the righteous will not also be cut off. If the righteous would separate from the wicked, then they could perhaps be more often eradicated. It is both a mercy, if perhaps some of the wicked might be turned to God, but it is also a cause for great harm on many. As a believer, do we harden our hearts against the victims for the sake of a few righteous, or do we allow for the cutting short of the lives of a few righteous that the wicked could be cut off? How many of the righteous don't realize they're asking for their own death when they pray against the wicked? How many of the righteous realize their prayers go unanswered because they dwell in the midst of the people they want punished? We are salt, but we're also supposed to be light. We preserve what is going bad, but we should also call what is going bad to repentance, so that they can be rescued, that evil can be pushed back. God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but would rather they repent. I just hate evil and desire is removal, but there are two ways to remove it: Call sinners to repentance, or call for their destruction. Ignoring it all to live my life in feigned ignorance is not love, but only selfishness.