About 20 years ago, there was a popular movement called the New Atheism.
The British scientist Richard Dawkins was maybe its most famous proponent, and this movement of New Atheism was different from the Old Atheism in the sense that it was, it was loud and proud and aggressive and bold, and there were a number of books
that came out by various scholars and writers. And Dawkins wrote a book called The God Delusion, and he was a passionate public crusader against God and religion. And I want to share a quote with you from the book.
But I'm not going to share the full quote because I think it's simply too evil. It's too, too dark to say out loud. It's so profoundly disrespectful towards God that I don't want to say it, but I'm going to share part of it with you.
He wrote that the God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction.
And he goes on to say, what makes my jaw drop is that people today should base their lives on such an appalling role model as Yahweh, and even worse, that they should bossily try to force the same evil monster, whether fact or fiction, on the rest of
us. Did you catch that? That's the the accusation that God is an evil monster. And there was a response by a great Christian scholar named Paul Copan, and he wrote a book called, Is God a Moral Monster?
So whether you call him an evil monster or a moral monster, the accusation is the same.
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Abrahamʼs Plea
And it's an accusation that we come face to face with in our text this morning. We're reading from Genesis chapter 18, verses 22 through 33. And God is about to utterly annihilate Sodom and Gomorrah.
He's gonna wipe out roughly 50,000 men, women, and children. And the text says that, we'll read it later on, that the judgment is so intense that the vegetation was literally like scorched from the earth. Not even the plants survived.
And Abraham is very concerned about this. Please stand for the reading of God's word. I'll read the text for us.
It's Genesis 18 verses 22 through 33. So the men turned from there and went towards Sodom, but Abraham still stood before the Lord. Then Abraham drew near and said, will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?
Suppose there are 50 righteous within the city. Will you then sweep away the place and not spare it for the 50 righteous who are in it?
Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked. Far be that from you. Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just?
And the Lord said, if I find at Sodom 50 righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake. Abraham answered and said, Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes.
Suppose five of the 50 righteous are lacking. Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five? And he said, I will not destroy it if I find 45 there.
And he spoke to him and said, Suppose 40 are found there. He answered, For the sake of 40, I will not do it. Then he said, Oh, let not the Lord be angry and I will speak.
Suppose 30 are found there. He answered, I will not do it if I find 30 there. He said, Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord.
Suppose 20 are found there. He answered, For the sake of 20, I will not destroy it. Then he said, Oh, let not the Lord be angry and I will speak again but this once.
Suppose 10 are found there. He answered, For the sake of 10, I will not destroy it. And the Lord went his way when he had finished speaking to Abraham and Abraham returned to his place.
This is the word of the Lord. Please be seated and join me as I pray for us. Father, I pray that you'd be with us this morning as we hear truth from your word, as we think about you and your character and your justice.
Oh Lord, we live in a world crying out for justice. Lord, we long for justice. We long for the wicked to be punished.
But Lord, we also recognize that that justice doesn't always look the way that we think it should. We recognize that if all the wicked were punished, we would deserve to be punished too, if not for your son, Jesus.
God, I pray that you would help us to think clearly, rightly, wisely about justice and about you, God. I pray that when this morning is done, that we would walk away more confident than ever in your justice and your goodness.
That we would trust you, that we would love you above all else. We pray in your name, Jesus. Amen.
So at the end of the text, there's a bit of a cliffhanger. They have this kind of a negotiation and they get all the way down to 10. God says, I will not destroy it for the sake of 10.
And then he leaves. And you're like, where is he going? What's he going to do?
And Abraham goes back to his place. But we soon find out in Genesis chapter 19, what's going to happen. So we, we can fast forward there for a moment.
And we know that God will spare the cities at Sodom and Gomorrah, and really that whole area. We know that God will spare all of those people if there are just 10 righteous people left. But here's what happens.
God sends two angels in human form to warn Abraham's nephew Lot, because Lot lives there among those people. And these two angels come and they warn him.
And then the men of the city see these men, these angels in the form of men, and they try to have relations with them. They try to sodomize them. But Lot protects them and they escape.
And then we read this in Genesis 19 verses 24 through 25. It says that the Lord reigned on Sodom and Gomorrah, sulfur 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. So every single person in those cities dies. Men, women, and children.
All the animals die. The judgment is so severe and intense, like I said earlier, that even the vegetation is scorched from the earth. So it makes you think, why would God do that?
Well, we learn in Genesis 18 20, that the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and their sin is very grave. That's why. It's a simple answer.
Their sin was very grave, and it had gotten to the point where there are people within these cities who are crying out to God for help. The word outcry there refers to the desperate, agonized screams of the oppressed.
They weren't crying out to God for help because minimum wage wasn't high enough, and they were barely scraping by. They weren't crying out to God for help because there was the occasional theft in vandalism. They were crying out to God for help.
They were screaming desperately because they were being brutalized. They were screaming for God's help because they were being massively oppressed and their lies were miserable. That's how wicked it was.
That's the first thing that we need to understand when it comes to God's execution of justice throughout the Old Testament. God executes justice. God punishes people in response to extreme wickedness.
We'll come back to that point later, but I want to note in Ezekiel 16, God describes the Sodomites there as arrogant, uncaring, indulgent, and he describes their sin as an abomination.
In that Ezekiel 16 passage, the focus is on issues of social justice. The rich of Sodom and Gomorrah were brutalizing the poor. They were extremely uncaring, totally indulgent, totally oppressive.
But then of course, there was also the prevalent sin of homosexuality, and we'll talk about that at length in a few weeks. When it says abomination, it says that their sin was an abomination, that means that it was deeply abhorrent to God.
You can't just read past these words and not think about what's being said. Sometimes we read the Bible so quickly, so thoughtlessly, so you have to pause at words like outcry. You've got to investigate, think.
What does that mean? Were the people just kind of, you know, mentioning to God here and there in their prayers that things were a little rough? No, they were crying out desperately.
Was their sin displeasing to God? No, it was an abomination. It was vile, it was disgusting, it was abhorrent.
10:28
Godʼs Justice
Therefore, as a result of these conditions, God wiped the guilty off the face of the earth. And God does this a number of times throughout the Old Testament, to many different groups of people.
To the point where sometimes people read the Bible and they get to the Gospels and they see Jesus, and they're like, who's this guy? What happened to the God in the Old Testament?
And it seems so completely different, like this, the God of the Old Testament is so violent and so brutal, it seems, that you read about Jesus and his compassion and his love and his gentleness, and you're like, he's meek and lowly, and how could
that be the same God, but it is the same God? But in the Old Testament, we see all of these executions of judgment. Joshua 1040 summarizes the destruction of the Canaanites. So the Canaanites were the people who occupied the land of Canaan.
The land of Canaan was the promised land that God promised to Abraham and his descendants, but then they go down to Egypt, they get stuck there for 400 years, they escape from Egypt by God's miraculous power, and they wander through the wilderness
all the way to Canaan, and God sends them on a military campaign to wipe out the people of Canaan so that they can take over the land that he had promised them centuries before. And Joshua summarizes that.
The book of Joshua summarizes it in chapter 10, verse 40. It says, so Joshua struck the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb, and the lowlands and the slopes and all their kings.
He left none remaining, but devoted to destruction all that breathed, just as the Lord God of Israel commanded. And people read that or people hear about that, and they say genocide. There it is, God commanding genocide.
He sends the people of Israel in, and he commands them to wipe out all of the Canaanites, that whole ethnic group. Therefore, the Bible condones genocide. But they don't pay attention to the parts where God wipes out the Israelites, too.
The Bible doesn't condone genocide. The Bible condones justice for sin. God's not targeting one group of people, one ethnic group.
God is bringing justice to sinners, whatever their race, whatever their ethnicity is. So there's a number of occasions where he wipes out Israelites. In 2 Samuel 24, he wipes out 70,000 Israelites.
In Numbers 25, he wipes out 24,000. In Numbers 16, he wipes out 14,000.
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Godʼs Character
But the question that arises through all of this, is God the moral monster that Richard Dawkins says that he is? Is God the moral monster that Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and countless others have said that he is?
That's the question I want to answer today, and I want to prove to you definitively that he is not. We worship a good God. But before we come back to that question, I want to say something very important.
When we read passages like this, there's a headline that jumps off the page, and we cannot look past the headline. The headline is this. This is how much God hates sin.
This is how much God hates sin. Repeatedly, we see that human sin leads to God wiping out thousands and tens of thousands of people, not to mention the flood.
When he wiped out every person on earth, besides Noah and his family, that's how God feels about sin, including my sin, including your sin. So if you love God, how could you live in sin?
We're Christians, so we know that our sins are forgiven, but that does not change the way that God feels about sin.
As Christians, we know that God forgives us for all of our sins, past, present, and future, but we must not ever let our guarantee of forgiveness cause us to trivialize our sin. God won't hold it against you, but he still hates it.
Now, let me show you why God is justified in wiping people out for their sin. And this is a point that is just really hard for people to understand.
A few months ago, I started posting short videos on social media, and I like to post stuff about the Bible, about theology and philosophy and apologetics, and sometimes I'll post things for my sermons or things on prayer.
But a lot of non-Christians see the stuff that I'm posting online, and they hate it. They absolutely hate it.
I've gotten literally hundreds of comments from people raging at me, mocking me, ridiculing me, saying all kinds of terrible things about God in the Bible. And one of the most consistent things I hear from people is this.
They love to bring up the Old Testament passages where God executes justice on people. They love to talk about the Canaanites. They love to say that the Bible condones genocide.
They love to say that God is horribly immoral, the Bible's immoral, and anybody who bases their life on that is just an idiot. How could you use God in the Bible as a moral foundation? God is unjust.
And that's essentially the issue that Abraham is worried about in our passage. Abraham expresses this concern in a very powerful way in verse 25.
He says to God, Far be it from you to do such a thing, To put the righteous to death with the wicked, So that the righteous fare as the wicked, Far be that from you, Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just? Shall not God do what is just?
Did God do what is just? Can we count on him to be a good and just God? Well, I want you to notice what God says in response to Abraham's questions there in verse 25.
Look again at verse 26. He says, If I find at Sodom 50 righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake. Are you kidding me?
Scholars estimate that the population in that region was anywhere between 40,000 and 100,000 people. So, this means that 99.9% of the people could be wicked and deserving of death.
But if just one tenth of one percent are righteous, God will spare all of them. Does that sound like a moral monster to you? No, that sounds incredibly gracious, incredibly merciful.
But if just one tenth of one percent of the people are righteous, God will spare everybody. And then look at the rest of the passage. Verse 28, what if there are only 45 righteous?
Then God will spare everybody. Imagine a group of 70,000 people. What if there are only 40 out of the 70,000 people?
Then God will spare everybody. And what if there are only 10? Verse 32, God answered, for the sake of 10, I will not destroy it.
And I want you to notice what Abraham does to convince God of this. What did Abraham do to make God relent? Absolutely nothing.
He didn't have to do anything. He just asks. He doesn't have to twist God's arm.
He doesn't have to beg or bargain. God is more than willing, even eager to forgive the sins of tens of thousands of people. It really speaks to the character of God, doesn't it?
Is God a moral monster? Is God unjust? No.
God is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, and giving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty.
Exodus 34 verses six through seven. Moses is in that passage interacting with God up on Mount Sinai, and he's wanting to know, what should I tell the people of Israel about you, God? Like, who are you?
What is your name? What is your character? Tell me, God.
And that's what God says. That is the very essence of who God is.
Merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty.
That formulation describing his character is repeated over and over again throughout the Bible. Merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, but who will by no means clear the guilty.
And that's the issue in Sodom and Gomorrah. That was the issue with the Canaanites. They were guilty, and God is just.
And if you are a judge, and you always let the guilty go, then you are not a just judge, are you? Then you're not good. So after showing an abundance of grace and mercy, God executed justice, because he's a good judge.
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Desensitization to Evil
There's a great Christian scholar named Clay Jones. He was one of my professors at Biola, and he's done a lot of work on this topic. And I want to share some of his insights with you.
The first thing that he points out about this issue, all of these executions of justice by God in the Old Testament.
The first thing he points out is that modern people are really disturbed by passages like this because modern people are massively desensitized to evil and wickedness.
As Johnny Artovanis says, the devil makes sin seem normal and righteousness seem strange. The devil makes sin seem normal and righteousness seem strange. I mean, virtually every show on TV is some kind of crime show filled with violence and murder.
Maybe it's just my TV, but whenever I scroll through like Netflix or Amazon or something, looking for a show to watch, it's like every single one is about crime and about murder. Every other show is about secrets and lies and adultery.
And then you spend time with people in our world today, and you quickly see gossip is normal. Lying is normal, greed is normal, sex outside of marriage is normal, divorce is normal, sin is normalized, and trivialized, trivialized.
But then you have somebody like Mike Pence, the former vice president of the United States. And to be honest, I don't really know much about Mike Pence and his policies.
So just whatever you think about Mike Pence, the only thing I want to point out is that he has a rule to not eat dinner alone with a woman who is not his wife. He has a rule. It's a very simple rule.
I think a very common sense rule. He won't eat dinner alone with a woman who's not his wife. Any man who's married should know, don't do that.
But the media found out about that and they were baffled. They, some of them were angry. They thought it was so weird.
Because the devil makes sin seem normal and righteousness seem strange. The devil has normalized wickedness, so how could God punish human beings for normal behavior? Do you see the logic there?
If sin is normal, why do people get punished for it? We are so used to sin that we cannot see it for what it is. And as I've said many times before, but I think it's so important, God does not grade on a curve.
Just because everybody sins, that doesn't make it okay. The sinfulness of Sodom and Gomorrah was so terrible that normal sinful people were screaming out, crying to God for help. We have to recognize what was really happening in these places.
It was bad. Take the Canaanites, for example. The Canaanites regularly burned their children alive.
From infants all the way up to age four, they would regularly burn them alive as a sacrifice to their god, Moloch. Incest and bestiality and all kinds of sexual immorality were not just widespread, they were institutionalized.
That was their religion. That was their culture. That's what everybody did.
And still, listen to this, this is shocking, still, God gave them 400 years to repent.
If you look at the book of Genesis, God promises Abraham the land of Canaan, the promised land, but he says their sin is still not yet complete, so you have to wait.
And that's when they eventually go down to Egypt and come back 400 years later is when the sin is declared to be complete, when God has had enough, when they've had enough chances to repent.
God is merciful and gracious and slow, like 400 years slow to anger, but he will by no means clear the guilty.
As hard as this is for us modern people to accept, the reality is that these cultures, the Canaanites, the people of Sodom, the people of Gomorrah, they were so full of wickedness that they were like a cancer to humanity.
God needed to remove the cancer like a surgeon for the sake of humanity as a whole.
26:34
Childrenʼs Fate
But what about the children? What about the babies who lived in these places? Were they guilty too?
Of course, Sodom and Gomorrah had many children. And we know from the Bible and Chapter 19 of the Book of Genesis, they are all going to die. So how do we make sense of that?
Well, think about it like this. The parents were guilty, and they were going to be wiped out in the judgment. There's no question about that.
So what to do with the children? God could have sent the children out into the wilderness to fend for themselves. Parents get wiped out, and well, the children are now on their own.
He could have spared them in that way, but that seems cruel, doesn't it? To leave thousands or tens of thousands of children alone in the wilderness without parents.
God could have had Abraham take all the children into his family, but in their culture, that probably would have led to those children growing up and trying to kill Abraham and his family. That sort of vengeance was ingrained in their culture.
So if Abraham spares all these kids, those kids, it has been taught to them from the earliest of days that they would then have an obligation to kill Abraham and everybody in his family. So how's it going to go if he tries to adopt those children?
Not well, not to mention the corruption that would have occurred from the older children. We know from the Bible that whenever people are left who are guilty, who should have been wiped out, they end up corrupting God's people.
So they'll take vengeance on Abraham, they'll corrupt Abraham and his family. And how could of Abraham, how could Abraham have adopted thousands of children all at once? Could you adopt thousands of kids all at once?
Do you have enough money for that? Can you support thousands of children and take care of all of them? Of course not.
Abraham couldn't do that without neglecting his own family. You see, there are no easy answers when it comes to the fate of these children. But there are possible answers, possible good reasons that God could have.
And I think in the end, God has the best answer. There are two passages where the Bible indicates that infants and little kids who die will go straight to heaven.
In Matthew 19, 14, Jesus says, Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven. To such belongs the kingdom of heaven. And in 2 Samuel, chapter 12, verses 22 through 23, King David says this.
He said, while the child was still alive, he's talking about his son who passed away as a result of his sin, and he's mourning his son, but then he says this.
While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept, for I said, who knows whether the Lord will be gracious to me that the child may live. But now he is dead. Why should I fast?
Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me. David knows that he will see his son again.
There's not complete perfect proof of this in the Bible, but there's enough that I believe that infants and little kids who die before they understand their sin, before they believe the gospel, they will go to heaven, including the kids of Sodom and
Gomorrah, and the kids of the land of Canaan. After all, God is merciful and gracious, and abounding and steadfast love. That is the character of God.
30:42
Ultimate Sacrifice
Now, I don't think we'll be able to answer every question. I don't know if we'll ever, as human beings, be fully comfortable with God wiping out thousands of people. And we probably shouldn't be.
But I do know this. Whatever we might say about God executing judgment, the fact is that God was willing to take judgment on himself.
We can look at all of these executions of justice and think about God up there, sitting on his throne, you know, just raining justice down on the earth, and thinking, is he, is this justified? Is this right? Is this good?
Well, God is so committed to justice that he was willing to send his own son in order to die to pay for our sins. God loves us so much that he was willing to send his own son to receive the justice that we deserve.
So whatever we might say about God punishing people for sin, let's not forget what he did. He took the punishment himself for his enemies so that we could be saved.