Passage Read: Genesis 17-20
Meditation Verse: 18:32
Thought
"Why is there evil in the world?" Because there are also righteous in it, and God doesn't want to destroy the righteous with the wicked. This is how the righteous serve as salt, allowing the wicked to persist in the land. We are scattered everywhere, and we have a mission to go and proclaim the Gospel in all the world, including the darkest of places. God desires to have mercy on the wicked and to give them opportunity to repent; He takes no joy in destroying them. But He also intensely hates their wickedness, and the time always comes when He must put an end to their reign of evil. If there had been just ten righteous people in all their cities, God would have allowed the men of Sodom and Gomorrah to continue their wickedness. How horrible is that? How tragic if they would have been allowed to continue abusing strangers and neighbors! How incredibly merciful to exceedingly wicked men! But He didn't even find four righteous people, and so all the cities of the plain were destroyed, except the town to which Lot fled. His wife looked back and was killed; his daughters justified incest with their father, and they produced two wicked nations that warred against Abraham's descendants. Was it worth it to rescue them? For the sake of the comparably few righteous that would be saved from the generations of evil men, yes. Ruth would not have been born, saved and become an ancestor of King David and Jesus.
Application
There is a time coming when all those chosen for salvation will be saved. Then the end will come. The wicked will suffer the reign of the righteous for a thousand years, then all sinners will be eradicated from God's earth and eternal Kingdom. But if it were not for the mercy of God on the wicked, none of us would be saved. Even the wicked hate those more wicked than themselves, until they realize that they too deserve condemnation. Then they have one of two responses: stop condemning those more wicked than themselves or repent and flee to Christ for mercy. It is easy to complain about those more wicked than myself, but having been saved, I'm the reason they are not destroyed, and I'm supposed to be a cause for some of them to be saved. The continued existence of the wicked should be a reminder of my own humble state, the condemnation I too deserve outside of Christ and the praise I owe Jesus for saving me. It should also be a reminder of why I remain among the unrepentant: the mission I have to bring the message of reconciliation to the wicked and the preservation of this wicked generation for the sake of those in it and in the following generations who will believe. I should be quicker to preach the message of reconciliation than to seek the destruction of those I consider worse than me. And when God decides to remove wicked men from the face of the earth, that too should be a reminder to be busier about preaching the Gospel, rather than celebrating their demise in my own safe cocoon.