Genesis 18.1–26
A sermon preached at Geraldton Anglican Cathedral 19th January 2025
God made a promise to Abraham, which changed the history of the world. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all begin with this promise. And it gets personal; if you align yourself with Abraham’s promise, it will connect you to God, and mark you out for a share in his promised new world. I use the word “aligned” with purpose.
We learned last week that God counted Abraham as a righteous man—he reckoned righteousness to him—though he was far from being good, which raises the question what righteousness is, and whether doing the right thing matters. If I am saved by God’s mercy, and my good or evil deeds do not figure, does righteousness matter? Today we will see that it does. Abraham aligned himself with God’s purpose, and that was enough for God to move in beside him; the problems that entailed would be dealt with later. For now, he is about to give Abraham and Sarah a son, and he wants him to be raised in the way of righteousness—that is different to having righteousness reckoned; he wants him to be a good man, in the midst of a world that is intent on evil.
Abraham was seventy-five when he arrived in Canaan and God promised him the land. Ten years later and confused about the promise, he had a surrogate child with Sarah’s concubine, but God made it clear this was not the promised child. Another fourteen years—and now they are sure Ishmael must be the promise-bearer—and God appears again and confirms his original promise; the covenant-carrying child was yet to be born and would come from Sarah.
And God said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover, I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall become nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.” Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed and said to himself, “Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Shall Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?” And Abraham said to God, “Oh that Ishmael might live before you!” God said, “No, but Sarah your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him.
I imagine we are dealing here with one visit, not two. Three men visited their tent, and promised that in the following year Sarah would bear a son. Sarah was listening when the men were speaking, and she laughed. It was not a laugh of delight, but of disbelief; this nonsense had been going on long enough. One of the three angels speaks for God.
The LORD said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?’ Is anything too hard for the LORD? At the appointed time I will return to you—about this time next year—and Sarah shall have a son.” But Sarah denied it, saying, “I did not laugh,” for she was afraid. He said, “No, but you did laugh.”
The next step in the main story happens a year later: Sarah gives birth and they name the boy Isaac, “Laughing-boy,” or something like that. The story is told matter-of-factly; like it was obvious. God promised it, it happened, what would you expect? But there are two interruptions to the main story, both of which are important. The second is the flashback to Abraham’s sojourn with King Abimelech, down Gaza way. The first is the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; we will deal with this first.
Abraham is involved in the fortunes of Sodom because his nephew Lot is there, and also because God wants to teach him about righteousness, so he in turn will teach his son, and so on down through the generations. God’s desire is that this family of promise should be a righteous family, not just reckoned righteous, but living righteously. Don’t make the mistake of thinking goodness doesn’t matter to God.
“Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, seeing that Abraham will surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth will be blessed in him? For I have chosen him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice, so that the LORD may bring to Abraham what he has promised him.”
So, what is “righteousness?” It has a range of meanings; all of them are about—you guessed it—doing what is right, or being in the right. In the 1960’s—my student days—people were questioning what most people accepted as the right way to live—which was mostly drawn from Christianity. “Why should we act like Christians when we are not? That’s what people said. It was mostly about sex. Birth control meant you could have sex without having a baby; the fear of getting pregnant had reinforced Christian teaching, but was no longer a deterrent. I was a new Christian and remember the debates. “It’s not right that Christians should force their morality onto us, if we don’t believe in it.” When Christians thought about it, most of us agreed. Little did we know that in time their pagan morality would become so widely accepted, that they would try to force it on us.
The next debate was whether it was OK to sleep with someone you loved, if you weren’t married to them. Christians said no on the basis of what the Bible says about fornication; but now people said it was all right, so long as you were in love. Soon the argument changed and sex was seen as like any other bodily appetite. If you wanted sex, why should you not indulge? It wasn’t right to deny your natural instincts. Soon recreational sex was OK—and then, homosexual sex, and anything else people might want to indulge in; those who spoke against them were judged to be in the wrong.
Have you noticed how often I have used the word “right,” and its opposite, “wrong.” Moderns are as much concerned about right and wrong as Christians ever were, though no one can tell you how these things are to be determined. And a problem has arisen: you must now have consent. Of course you must, but a new fear is rising among men—unmarried or married—that their woman might turn against them in the future and say she never consented. Falling in love is in danger of destruction at the hands of a modern-day Puritanism.
There is something important hidden in this insistence on consent. What does it mean that sex is so special that you have to be able to prove consent? Imagine taking your boss to court, because he wanted to discuss a business proposal and insisted on doing it over a meal. You were looking forward to being at home with your husband. “I was pressured to have a meal; that’s not right.” The idea of taking someone to court over something so trivial is ridiculous. But if sex is just another appetite, why is it so different if he pressures you to have sex or to have a meal? There is a difference, and we all feel it. There is something special about sexual relations which Christianity has acknowledged, but the practical atheism which presently rules cannot explain, even when it recognizes it instinctively. It is why the story of Sodom and Gomorrah continues to generate horror—the attempted homosexual rape of the two “men”, and the proposed gang-rape of Lot’s daughters; it is not just the lack of consent, as though if they were robbed it would be just as bad.
What does it mean that something should be right and something else wrong? The Greeks were intrigued by the idea. Socrates and his friends debated whether rightness (the Greek word is dike) meant keeping the law—doing what the ruler says, even when the ruler is a tyrant (“might is right”), or something else. It is an important question. The practical atheism of Western culture does away with God, and has no answer to the question, accept what is acceptable in society—but this is constantly changing. Whoever can change the law to agree with their values gets to define what is right and wrong, and use the law to enforce it. We are back with might is right! But we all know instinctively that this is wrong.
The Hebrew words tzedakah and tsedek (righteousness) carry the idea of straightness, something being in line with something else. But what? How do we measure what is straight and what is crooked—what is in line, and what is out of line? Is a thing right because God says so and it is in line with his will? Clearly, yes, if God has spoken; it is. He made the world—he is the ultimate power—what he says is right must be right. But is it right just because God says it is (might is right), or does God say it is right, because it is right? You might think this last possibility cannot be right; surely there is no standard higher than God! And yet the Bible often speaks as though there is. The Psalms praise God for his righteousness. If this just means God does whatever he wants, this would be meaningless. Is there a measure other than God, against which ever God’s actions are judged? There is, and this is instinctively recognized by people who are forever questioning what God has allowed to happen. If God allowed the Californian fires, he would have to be in the wrong, they say.
So, what is this standard against which even God is judged? The answer is that he has created things a certain way, and acting in line with this is righteousness; acting at cross-purposes is evil—resha’, which means crookedness. Let me give you an example: God made humans to desire happiness; if he also made things so that this desire will always be frustrated, he would be working at cross-purposes with what he has created. Another example: if he has given a law which promotes human happiness better than any other way, he would be acting righteously. His law would be righteous. This is why Moses can say that the other nations will praise Israel’s law as more righteous than their own, and imitate it—as most nations have, for example, with the law that mandates at least one day of leisure in the week. It is when we come to the Bible’s sexual laws that things get difficult.
I was walking through the library at George Whitefield College and passed a table of students working on their ethics assignment. A young women looked up at me and said, “Why shouldn’tI sleep with my boyfriend?” She was attractive and I was thrown by her question. I probably coloured up, and my brain froze; I gave them a pathetic answer, and only later realized what I should have said. God’s law requires that sexual relations should be in the context of marriage, because that will best promote the most happiness in individuals and in human society. He knows it, because he made it. God’s law is about happiness, and when we flout it, we create misery.
Sodom flouted it and gave itself to every kind of vice, and finally God judged that so much unhappiness was resulting, that the only thing was to destroy the city.
Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is very grave, I will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me. And if not, I will know.[1]
The only example Genesis gives us of the evils of Sodom is the attempted homosexual rape of Lot’s visitors. Modern scholars, determined to line the Bible up with modern culture, use all sorts of arguments to change what has always been seen to be the meaning. It was “sex without consent,” not the homosexual act, they say, as though the story would be the same, if they had hurt their feelings. No, Sodom was condemned for being a culture that encouraged behaviour of the worst kind. The horror has been felt by readers throughout the ages and always will be. This was before the giving of the law, remember. Doing what is right matters, even if you do not know God’s law. Right and wrong are wired into us.
Some people would like to remove the Bible from libraries and schools. Some of its stories are horrific, it is true. But they are there because they happened, and because they are told from God’s perspective. Where else can we get this? Children brought up on daily reading of the Bible with their parents will grow up to know God. It stands to reason: the Bible is God’s word, and being exposed to it helps us know him. This is true even with the difficult parts.
With the frequent warnings in the New Testament against the sin we are talking about, the scholars will say, “No, it is sex which a master forces on his slave, which is condemned.” Surely this was a great evil, but nowhere is that limitation made.
But what could be wrong with two men who love each other having sex? Paul tells us what is wrong. There is nothing wrong with two men loving each other. “About brotherly love you need no one to teach you,” he says to the Thessalonians.[2] But men having sex with men is not in line with the way God has made things; it is a distortion of our created nature:
… men gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.[3]
Such behaviour, according to Paul, is a consequence of rejecting a knowledge of God. The penalty he speaks of is not an act of judgement like Sodom’s, but the natural consequence of acting out of line with what God reveals about his creation. There are eighty thousand Australians living with HIV at the present moment, not to mention various other diseases that go with the practice and the many wives who are unknowingly infected by their husbands also having sex with men. The politician who said the practice was more dangerous to health than smoking was right, though he was howled down when he said it. And this doesn’t count the damage to human relationships which is invisible to the eye, but you can be sure is very real.
Our story goes on to relate an act of judgement. According to Paul in Romans 1, judgement consists first of God giving us up—“If that’s the way you want to go, the go that way!”—and second, of the inevitable consequences of living that way. But third, the Bible also warns us of a final great judgement, and fourth, from time to time he gives painful warning of this in natural disasters and the like. Of course, God executing judgement on a city raises the question of the righteous people who live there. Abraham argues with God about right and wrong. Surely God will do what is right, won’t he? “Surely you wouldn’t destroy the city if fifty good people lived there?” “No,” says God, “even if I find ten, I will spare it.” But he is unable to find even five:
Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulphur and fire from the LORD out of heaven. And he overthrew those cities, and all the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. And Abraham went early in the morning to the place where he had stood before the LORD. And he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the valley, and he looked and, behold, the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace.[4]
But come back to Abraham and Sarah. One of the things we learn from that story is that sexuality and marriage matter. It goes back to the creation story, which surprises us that it so clearly advocate monogamy, though in Abraham’s time and afterwards polygamy was the norm.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.[5]
Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.[6]
Once again we are dealing with behaviour which is in line with the way God has made things. It stands to reason that if there is no God, you can mess around with things as much as you like, but if God is “the Possessor of heaven and earth,” as Abraham knew, and he has made things to work in a certain way, then acting out of line with this is unrighteousness and will have serious consequences. Mostly people can work things out for themselves: stealing and murder are not right. But when it comes to relationships between the sexes it is harder to figure, though most cultures at most times have got it approximately right, and men and women have been marrying since the beginning of time. It is something most cultures at most times have recognized as good; only our own with its determination to exclude God, has thought to change it. Abraham and Sarah were married in the way that people married back then.
A golden thread which runs through the Abraham story is God’s care for Sarah. When they first came to Caanan and had to go to Egypt because of a famine, Abraham did the wrong thing, but God protected Sarah from threatened sexual abuse and righted the situation. Later in the story when surrogacy seemed the best way of helping God fulfil his promise, God said, “No.” His blessing of Abraham was a promise to him and his wife. And just before Isaac was born we get the story of Abraham and Abimelech. Again, Sarah is in danger, but God intervenes. The story isn’t in chronological order; it must have happened years before, when Sarah was a more attractive woman. But it is told to assure us once again that God has always had Sarah’s back. The promised son belongs to Abraham and Sarah, and to no one else. There is something very right about God’s protection of Sarah, quite apart from his achieving salvation for the world through her. Note also that he takes care of Hagar and blesses her; this too is right.
We should weep for our generation where casual sex, and shacking up have almost become the norm. Has there been a noticeable increase in human happiness? A barrister-friend once joked with me that marriage for a man was a licence to have sex; for a woman it was security. Now you don’t need to have a licence for sex, and women have no security. And the net result is human misery and a generation of angry children—not to speak of the eighty thousand that get killed in this country every year before they see the light of day. How long will God tolerate such things?
Righteousness matters, and in the area of sex we need God to guide us. If we ignore his instruction, we bring unhappiness down on ourselves and generations to come, whether or not we are Christians. For righteousness is not different for Christians and non-Christians, even if certain things are legal, and it may not be right to insist on Christian behaviour for non-Christians. But the evil consequences of unrighteousness will be the same, because of the way God has created us. I must leave it here, conscious that there are now a thousand questions to answer. You will have to answer most of these, and I pray God will give you the wisdom and courage to do so in a way that is true to his word, and balanced, and loving towards all whom he has made. In two-weeks’ time we will take a closer look at marriage.
[1] Genesis 18.20.
[2] 1 Thessalonians 4.9.
[3] Romans 1.27.
[4] Genesis 19.24–28.
[5] Genesis 1.27.
[6] Genesis 2.24.