I invite you to turn with me in your Bibles to the first book of Moses, the book of Genesis, and the 19th chapter. Genesis chapter 19. And we'll read the entirety of this chapter. Please give your hearing to the Word of God. And there came two angels to Sodom at Even. And Lot sat in the gate of Sodom. And Lot, seeing them, rose up to meet them. And he bound himself with his face toward the ground and he said, Behold now, my lords, turn in, I pray you, in thy servant's house, and tarry all night. And wash your feet, and ye shall rise up early, and go on your ways.' And they said, Nay, but we will abide in the street all night. And he pressed upon them greatly, and they turned in unto him, and entered into his house. And he made them a feast, and did bake unleavened bread, and they did eat. But before they lay down, the men of the city, even the men of Sodom, compassed the house round, both old and young, all the people from every quarter. And they called unto Lot and said unto him, Where are the men which came into thee this night? Bring them out unto us, that we may know them. And Lot went out at the door unto them, and shut the door after him, and said, I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly. Behold now, I have two daughters, which have not known man. Let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you. And do ye to them as is good in your eyes, only unto these men do nothing. For therefore came they under the shadow of my roof. And they said, stand back. And they said again, this one fellow came in to sojourn, and he will needs be a judge. Now will we deal worse with thee than with them. And they pressed sore upon the man, even Lot, and came near to break the door. But the men put forth their hand and pulled Lot into the house to shut to them and shut to the door. And they smote the men that were at the door of the house with blindness, both small and great, so that they wearied themselves to find the door. And the men said unto Lot, Hast thou any here besides, son-in-law, and thy sons, and thy daughters, and whatsoever thou hast in the city, bring them out of this place. For we will destroy this place, because the cry of them is waxing great before the face of the Lord, and the Lord has sent us to destroy it. And Lot went out and spake unto his sons-in-law, which married his daughters, and said, Up, get you out of this place, for the Lord will destroy this city. But he seemed as one that mocked unto his sons-in-law. And when the morning arose, then the angels hastened Lot, saying, Arise, take thy wife and thy two daughters which are here, lest thou be consumed in the iniquity of the city. And while he lingered, the men laid hold upon his hand, and upon the hand of his wife, and upon the hand of his two daughters, the Lord being merciful unto him. And they brought him forth and set him without the city. And it came to pass, when they had brought them forth abroad, that he said, Escape for thy life. Look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain. Escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed. And Lot said unto them, O not so, my lord. Behold now, thy servant hath found grace in thy sight, and now hath magnified thy mercy, which thou hast shown unto me in saving my life. And I cannot escape to the mountain, lest some evil take me, and I die. Behold now, this city is nearer to flee unto, and it is a little one. O let me escape thither. Is it not a little one? And my soul shall live. And he said unto him, See, I have accepted thee concerning this thing also, that I will not overthrow the city for the which thou hast spoken. Haste there, escape thither, for I cannot do anything till thou become thither. Therefore the name of the city was called Zoar. The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered Zoar, and the Lord reigned upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah, brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven. And he overthrew those cities and all the plain and all the inhabitants of the cities and that which grew upon the ground. But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt. And Abraham got up early in the morning to the place where he stood before the Lord. And he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the plain. And behold, and lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace. And it came to pass, when God destroyed the cities of the plain, that God remembered Abraham and set Lot out of the midst of the overthrow, when he overthrew the cities in which Lot dwelt. And Lot went up out of Zoar and dwelt in the mountain with his two daughters with him. For he feared to dwell in Zoar, and he dwelt in a cave, he and his two daughters. And the firstborn said unto the younger, Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come unto us after the manner of all the earth. Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father. And they made their father drink wine that night, and the firstborn went in and lay with her father, and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose. And it came to pass on the morrow that the firstborn said unto the younger, Behold, I lay yesternight with my father, let us make him drink wine this night also, and go thou in and lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father. And they made their father drink wine that night also. And the younger rose and lay with him, and he perceived not when she lay down nor when she rose. Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father. And the firstborn bare a son and called his name Moab, the same as the father of the Moabites unto this day. And the younger she also bare a son and named his name Benami, the same as the father of the children of Ammon unto this day. Let's bow in a word of prayer. Lord, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the recording that Moses gave us here of the story of Lot in Sodom. We pray that you would help us as we look into this to open our eyes and to see the value and the relevance of this text with us today. Help us to learn the things you have for us. Help us to show forth your word faithfully, to exegete it faithfully, to not go too far, but to not omit saying that which must be said. We pray that you would go with us now and meet with us, and we thank you for that in Jesus' name. Amen. It's often helpful when reading a portion of scripture to be able to summarize it and to be able to think about it in our own words to be able to make sure we understand what it is that we've read. And I want to just do that very briefly here. We've read quite a few verses. But in summary, we begin the chapter here with a man named Lot who lived in a city named Sodom. And some angels came and told Lot that he needed to leave the city because it was going to be destroyed and that he needed to take his family with him. Lot was somewhat hesitant in order to do that and we see that he was unsuccessful in calling out his family with him other than his wife and two of his daughters. And you have here an accounting of Lot's own hesitation to leave himself. And before it's all said and done, he goes to Zohar. He's not able to stay there. He realizes it's not safe, so he goes even further than that, and he finishes out his life in a cave. And so that's a high-level overview of this text here. We have in this text one of the clearest examples or contrasts that I can think of in the Bible between the righteousness of God and the powers of darkness here in the city of Sodom. We have an example that is so stark that for the rest of the Bible, we hear about the city of Sodom. And so that tells us that what happens here in this chapter, in this book of Sodom, is very, very important. And I want to just name off the books of the Bible that either refer to the city or to the people of the city. You've got this mentioned in Deuteronomy, in 1 Kings, 2 Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Amos, Zephaniah, Matthew, Mark, Luke, 2 Peter, Jude, and Revelation. And it's a total of 16 books if we include Genesis here, where it all started. So there's five things that I want to look at today about this. First of all, the site of Sodom. That's S-I-T-E, the location of Sodom. The sin of Sodom, secondly. We want to look thirdly at the similarity to modern man. Fourthly, a summons to evangelize. And fifth, a signal to repent. So we have a lot to go over here in a short amount of time. We'll see how it goes. First of all, just very briefly, the site of Sodom. It's helpful to think about this in terms of an event that occurred in time. If we really believe that this is the Word of God, this is something that happened. And so we ask, well, where did it happen? There's some dispute as to exactly where it is. No one seems to know for sure. There's a few things, though, that we can narrow it down with by just observing some scripture. In Genesis 13, verse 18, we read that Abraham removed his tent and came and dwelt in the Oaks of Mamre, which is in Hebron. And we know that this is to the west of the Dead Sea. So that's one clue that we have as to where all this happened. And we'll look at the relationship between Abraham and Sodom here. You might have noticed that I called it the Oaks of Mamre. There was an oak grove in Mamre. The authorized version calls it the Plains of Mamre. The correct translation is Oaks. The Hebrew scholars agree as well as the Septuagint on this. The Septuagint, as you know, is a 3rd century Greek translation of the Old Testament. It came out of Alexandria. And it's interesting to note that 90% of the time that Jesus quotes from the Old Testament, he's using the Septuagint. And so the way that Jesus would have read this is this oak grove that's in Mamre, or of Mamre. There was a person, an Amorite named Mamre, who was a confederate, we read in Genesis, with Abraham. And so this is where Abraham was, west of the Dead Sea. And we see that this is where the Lord visited Abraham, in the chapter before us, prior to our text, in chapter 18, verse 1, it says, And the Lord appeared unto him in the oaks of Mamre, and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day. And so they went and they looked out upon Sodom. So wherever they were, they could see Sodom from where this was. And so Sodom was somewhere around the vicinity of the Dead Sea. Now you've got mountains to the north and to the south of the Dead Sea. And so you've got some plain country here of where Sodom was. The mountains are not habitable. So the best guesses that we can do, that we can make here, are that it was probably, Sodom was probably somewhere to the east, maybe to the south. of the Dead Sea. One possible site that some people have tried to make a lot of compelling arguments for is this place called Bab Edra. I assume I'm butchering the pronunciation of it, but this was a small city that definitely had fire destruction in it and we can see bones buried under ash. One of the problematic things about this city is that it was only 9 or 10 acres and some feel that the site of Sodom should be bigger than that. It was heavily fortified so that might have been one of the locations. It would have had a population of 6 to 1200 people, had these very thick fortified walls. But the evidence is inconclusive. debate about whether Babidra is the place or not. That gives us an idea though that it was somewhere around the Dead Sea area. It might have been underneath the Dead Sea where the levels of the Dead Sea rise and fall and stuff. Anyway, so much for that. Let's move on to the sin of Sodom. We get our first clue of what was the problem with Sodom in verse 13 of Genesis 13. It says, But the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly. So, we know that there is a problem here with the city. In Genesis 18.20 it says, And the Lord said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous, I will go down now and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it which is coming to me. And if not, I will know. So we ask ourselves, what was the problem with Sodom? We get our first hint about this in Genesis 19 verse 45. Here we read this in our text just now. But before they lay down, it says, the men of the city, even the men of Sodom, compassed the house round, both young and old, all the people from every quarter. And they called unto Lot and said unto him, Where are the men that came in unto thee this night? Bring them out unto us, that we may know them. So what we're seeing here is we're seeing a city that has given itself over to homosexuality, to use a modern word. And we live in a day and age in which those who practice what they did in this city are trying to reconcile this with Christianity. And this is near and dear in my heart because we're in the midst of conversations just rampantly right now debating these issues. And so we want to look briefly here at a few objections that people tried to make to explain away this and to say that it's not relevant today. The subject today, by the way, is on evangelism. We're going to get to that in a bit. But we want to lay some groundwork here so that we can enter into what Lott was dealing with here. So one objection that we hear to what was going on here in Sodom and why that's irrelevant is that people say, well, the Bible only condemns a violent, non-consensual kind of homosexuality. And it's incredible we're even having to address these things in this day, but we are. And we're going to look at some examples of where things are being said from pulpits in what have been considered orthodox places that are really raising some eyebrows. This first objection, though, about the Bible condemning just violent homosexuality. This objection is making a category distinction that the Bible just doesn't recognize in any meaningful way. The Bible never attempts to make a distinction of, well, here's some people that are doing men and boys or stuff like that versus a more consensual, long-term kind of arrangement. We could bring out a lot of passages to try to prove this, but let's just stick to our text here for now. If we look at what Lot's response is to the demands here of the people that are wanting to have these angels, he doesn't say, That's violent. Let's not do violence. He's saying, no, you can still do something violent, but let's make sure it's not homosexuality. Let's make it heterosexuality. Why is Lott making that distinction? Well, Lott innately realized that there was a grossness of homosexuality that is not found, and that's against nature in a way that even just what we would think of as a regular rape, as horrendous as that is, is not the same thing. So Lot's biggest objection wasn't the fact that they were being violent, but the fact that they were pursuing a homosexual act. I think it's important to see that right here in the text. We come to another objection. Well, that was for Israel in the Old Testament, and God required all kinds of laws for Israel in the Old Testament that he doesn't require today. And this is a dangerous objection because it's partly true on the surface, right? There are some things that God used to command to us that he doesn't command anymore in the New Testament. But this right here is a failure to make a category distinction that should exist. There are those who want to say that laws on homosexuality only apply to Israel long ago and far away, and they failed to see distinctions in the kinds of law that God has given us. And when it comes specifically to the Old Testament and Israel, God gave three divisions of law. He gave ceremonial, he gave judicial, and he gave moral law. The ceremonial law commanded for things like Levitical priesthood and sacrifices, and those things are done away in Christ. I mean, the book of Hebrews, and there's a lot of passages we could use to prove that. The judicial law commanded concerning things like property redemption, landmarks, and warfare rules. The judicial law had some overlap to the moral law, but in broad strokes, it was specific to Israel in the Old Testament, and it also no longer applies. We could categorize both the ceremonial and the judicial law as being positive law, which is laws that God made that are not intrinsically good, such that violating them would violate his nature and character, but they're just laws that he gave because he's God and he can give the laws that he chooses to give. the laws regarding Levitical priesthood and the laws regarding things like landmarks and the year of jubilee and things like that. It's not that we're sinning today because we're not doing them. They were at a specific time and a specific place. Well, that brings us to the third kind of law, which is moral law. And the moral law is summarized in the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, and it's a reflection of God's unchanging and holy character. And this moral law applies to all times and all people, all places, everywhere. The homosexuality would be covered in the moral law in the 7th and the 10th commandments. If you think about sexual purity being talked about in the 7th commandment and then covetousness and kind of some ancillary things in the 10th commandment. So if you're trying to prove that God's law against sodomy applied to just the Old Testament, you're in trouble with our text here as well. And we want to look at something here about this that's really important that's being, I think, forgotten today. And that is that this is pre-Israel. Jacob, who was renamed Israel, hadn't even been born yet in the story before us here in Genesis 19. And so we can see very clearly that God's commandment on these things was not specific to just the children of Israel. It applied to everyone in the Old Testament. And if you would turn with me real quick to Leviticus chapter 18, we want to look at a proof for this. Leviticus 18 verse 22. It says, Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind, it is abomination. Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith, neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereunto, it is confusion. Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things, for in all these things the nations are defiled which I cast out before you. And the land is defiled, therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomited out her inhabitants. And we'll go on here. You shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments, and shall not commit any of these abominations, neither any of your nations, nor any strangers that sojourn among you. For these abominations have the men of the land done which were before you, and the land is defiled. That the land spew not you out also when ye defile it, as it spewed out the nations that were before you. So what are we seeing here? God's commanding in Leviticus here to the children of Israel. But what he is saying is that the nations that they had conquered, one of the reasons that they had to be conquered was because they were practicing these very things. And it says that the land was spewing them out. And he's saying, now, if you fail to also observe these commandments, then the land's going to spew you out, too. And so this is not just a commandment that's just for Israel in a specific time, the way that the judicial and the ceremonial laws were. This is clearly moral law that we're seeing here that applied to all persons in the Old Testament. Well, then we get to the next objection. Well, that was for everyone in the Old Testament. What about the New Testament? And we hear this one a lot. Here's the short answer. Man changes, and man's laws change, but God does not change, and God's laws do not change. Man incorrectly thinks that God is like him. We read in Psalm 50, verse 21, that very thing. God says to the wicked, Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself. Man, in his mind, thinks that God is just like him and that if we were able to change laws and get to more information about things, that God does the same thing. And that kind of thinking creeps into the church. This isn't how God works though. Man thinks that God changes with the times like man does, but God does not. God is unchanging. Interestingly, if anything, Jesus makes the law even more explicit in the New Testament, not less. In Matthew 5, 27 and 28, he says, You have heard that it was said by them of old, Thou shalt not commit adultery. But I say unto you that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. And so what Jesus is doing here is he's not saying, yeah, the 7th commandment no longer applies. He's saying, you know what, here's a version of the 7th commandment that began to get passed down about an explicit violation of it. We're going to take this and I'm going to make it very clear to you that the 7th commandment is not just interested in physical acts. It's interested in your heart and what you're doing inside your own heart. And so when it comes to the subject of homosexuals, when we look in the New Testament, we do not find a single passage that mentions them in a positive light. And instead, what we repeatedly find is that it's condemned in all of its forms. And just a few texts here, we're not going to look at all of them, but we're going to look at some of them. We have Matthew 10.15, 11.23-24, Mark 6.1, Luke 10.12, Luke 17.29, a lot of just the first chapter of Romans, 1 Corinthians 6.9-10, 1 Timothy 1.10, 2 Peter 2.6, Jude 1.7, Revelation 11.8, and Revelation 22.15. So let's just look at a few of these briefly. The first thing we want to look at is Jesus' own teaching in the book of Matthew. In verse 20-24 of the 11th chapter, Jesus was teaching about how that it was the duty of Sodom to repent and that it would have repented if it had been given more light the way that Chorazin and Bethsaida were given. And we'll look at that verse a little bit later, that section. But in saying this, Jesus is clearly teaching that God's moral law hasn't changed with the New Covenant. And I think it's helpful to think about how we would expect modern man to read this verse. If you were listening to some Christians, so-called today, you would expect the verse to read like this, "...Woe to you, Sodom and Gomorrah, because you existed in the Old Testament. For if you had lived in the present age of love, you would not have been judged, but rather remained to this day." I mean, that's the kind of rhetoric that we're hearing. And again, we're going to quote some of this here in a bit. But that's not at all what Jesus was saying here, right? And there's not a tension, by the way, between what Jesus said and what the Apostles said. We're about to look at some of what the Apostles wrote about this, too. We live in a day and age in which everyone's talking about this tension between the Gospels and the Apostles. And well, there's what Jesus said, and then there's what Paul said. You know, the Muslims try to do that and say, well, there's this divide here and Jesus didn't claim divinity and also Paul tried to take things and run with it and go in a different direction and Jesus was really nice to women and Paul wasn't very nice to women and Jesus was just loving on everybody and then Paul's saying, you know, homosexuals and all this stuff. And what that's doing is it's trying to rest the scriptures and create tensions that are not there. The New Testament is in harmony on these things. And if you look at this, Jesus is teaching on this subject here when he's talking about Sodom's responsibility to repent, he's showing that there was sin there that they needed to repent of. He's not saying that was an old thing that's passed away. And it's also interesting to see that If you think about this passage of Jesus talking about the importance for Sodom and Gomorrah, that it's going to be more tolerant than the Day of Judgment, he's saying this for shock factor in a sense, right? He's talking to a very religious people, a very moral people, and he's saying, look, in the Day of Judgment, it's going to be more tolerable for these people. Well, it wouldn't make sense if he had used an illustration of people that we knew were good. So if he had said, it's going to be more tolerant in the Day of Judgment for Noah than for the people of Chorazin, That doesn't make sense. We know that, right? Noah walked with the God and he was holy. And so this makes it very clear that, yeah, it's not that Sodom and Gomorrah are off the hook, that it's going to be tolerant and everything's going to be great for them. He's saying, look, as bad as everyone here says that they are, it's going to be even worse on the Day of Judgment for this other group over here. But in saying that, he's not saying that it's not going to be a problem for Sodom. It's a lot of negatives, but I think you get what I'm saying. It's interesting, you know, one of the reasons that people say, well, why didn't Jesus talk about this more? Well, it's because the sin of sodomy was not being practiced that much in Israel. The New Testament doesn't really have to go into full-blown mode addressing it until the Gospel reaches the Gentiles. That had less common grace and homosexuality was more of a practice. And so Jesus doesn't talk about it much, but the little that he does is very clear that he's in good harmony with what the apostles are going to be saying about it. Well, let's look then at what the apostles had to say. So we'll start with Romans 1, 26 through 28. For this cause, God gave them up unto vile affections, for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature, and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman burned in their lusts one toward another, men with men working that which is unseemly and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error, which was meat. There's really no way you can read this and be faithful to the text and come out with any conclusion other than God is not in favor in the New Testament of homosexuality. But let's move on. 1 Corinthians 6, 9, and 10. Be not deceived, neither fornicators, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners shall inherit the kingdom of God. And that abusers of themselves with mankind, we've looked at that same phrase in 1 Timothy, in our studies in Timothy. It's a single word. In the original, the word is arsenokutai. And it's a compound of two words. It's a compound of male and bed. And if you take these two words together, it's arsenokutai. And it's one word, the literal translation is those who are lying with man as though they were lying with woman. I mean, that's what that means. And it says right there in 1 Corinthians 6, 9, and 10 that they will not inherit the kingdom of God. And we're going to get back to that here in a minute. And then in Revelation 22, 14, and 15, blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city. For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and adulterers, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie. Now, there's some debate about, well, what's this dog's thing all about, this kunas here? There's a good chance that it's referring to Deuteronomy 23, 17, and 18, which reads like this. There shall be no whore of the daughters of Israel, nor a sodomite of the sons of Israel. Thou shalt not bring the hire of a whore or the price of a dog into the house of the Lord thy God for any vow, for even both of these are abomination unto the Lord thy God. So what's Revelation saying here? Revelation is confirming what the Old Testament had to say about this. There is not a, well, God's love now and He's changing things. No, the moral law hasn't changed. And it's confirming what's happening here in Deuteronomy, saying that you're not allowed to bring the price of a dog into the house of the Lord thy God. It's talking about sodomizing. It just mentioned that explicitly on the 17th verse. So what are we saying here? Well, we're saying that there's harmony between the New Testament and the Old Testament on these subjects. There's no debate about this. If you're faithfully exegeting the scripture, there's no way to get around this. So the last objection that we'll look at here is probably the most common one, sadly. And it's one that I've heard from professing Christians. I just don't understand why it's a big deal. That's what we hear. I don't understand why it's a big deal. Why are we even talking about this? Just let people, you know, competition of ideas is vital to a free society. Just let things run their course. Well, I think it's clear here that this argument is not based on scripture, and instead it's just a purely subjective argument. My answer to that would be scripture. And let's look at Romans 1.32, who knowing the judgment of God, and it's talking about the homosexuals here, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them. So it's saying right there that even people, through natural revealed will of God, know that these things are worthy of death. Now they won't come out and say that, but I think that deep down inside most people know that these things are against nature, they're against God's way, and that they're deserving of death. So, in conjunction with this, what is it that makes homosexuality wrong, other than the fact that God commanded it? If God commands something, then that's the way it is, right? And there's no question about it. But if we want to take a step back and say, well, what is it that makes it wrong? God tells us what makes it wrong. And the answer is, also we can find that in Romans 1, in that it's against nature. It's a rejection of God's very clearly defined plan for how humans should relate to one another. You know, God's a trinity and he's a relational being. There's the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And the Bible says that God is love. He can be love apart from the need for a creation in order to love. In the Muslim world where you have Allah, Allah cannot be love in that same sense apart from showing his love since there's a oneness of Allah. For Allah to have love, he would be dependent on a creation in order to be able to have that love, which means that he's dependent upon that which he creates to have that attribute. God's not that way. God is innately love. The reason for that is because there's the Trinity. There's inner Trinitarian love right there that's not dependent upon a creation. And so God is a relational person and God values love. It's an innate part of his character. And so when God goes and creates mankind, he also builds into that reflections of himself with this ability to have these interpersonal relations and for there to be love. These are gifts from God. The problem with homosexuality is that it's taking that thing that God created and it's twisting it against nature very clearly and there is no room for it in scripture. It's a denial and a rebellion and an abomination in his sight. So that's what makes it wrong. Well, we see that the Bible's made it very clear that independent practicers of Sodom's sin will have no place in the kingdom of God. This is something that's not really popular today to talk about. I don't think I have to say that twice. There's very clear animosity towards these things amongst the secular community and, sadly, among professing Christians. Those who insist that God is okay with homosexuality are at best showing their ignorance and lack of commitment to God's word. I would say that you cannot call yourself a follower of Jesus if you don't follow his teaching in this. Well, we've established this is a sin. Let's move on. We want to ask, well, what was the cause of the sin of Sodom? We get a really interesting answer in Ezekiel 16, 49 and 50, where we read, Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom. Pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters. Neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty and committed abomination before me. Therefore, I took them away as I saw good. Pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness. This is fertile ground for sin to germinate. Matthew Henry had this to say. Their country was fruitful. And the abundance they had, they came easily by, which was a temptation to them to indulge themselves in sloth, which disposed them to all that abominable filthiness, which kindled their flames. Note, idleness is an inlet to much sin, end quote. Jude 1.7 says this, even as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication and going after strange flesh, are set forth an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire. So when we ask what was the sin of Sodom, what started in these sins of pride, fullness of bread, abundance of vileness, failure to help the hand of the poor and needy, and then that in turn led to even greater and darker sin. The most flagrant of Sodom's sin was its homosexual perversion. In fact, it's such that even in our text in Genesis 19, that's the only thing that it addresses. And it's interesting, as we note, that this sin became so closely identified with Sodom that for most the rest of the Bible, when it's wanting to talk about this sin, that's what it's referring to as. It's talking about sodomy. Well, let's move on to the third point. What's the similarity to modern man? What are some parallels to Sodom today? Well, when you go back to that Ezekiel passage of what was wrong here, pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness, does that sound like anything like the world we live in today? You think about pride, you know, it's funny how to this day there's this association of pride with this sin. We're coming up on what's called Pride Month in June, where every year you have this entire month where there's this celebration of this sin, and it's a prideful celebration. They're very open about that, and they're okay with that. And we see parallels also in the sheer numbers of people here today that are openly identifying with this sin. I want to give you just a couple statistics here. There are 4.5% of Americans that identify as active participants in the sin of sodomy. That's roughly 11 million adults in the United States. And here's an even more devastating statistic. In millennials, people born between 1980 and 1999, that number is at 8.2%. Now, I was talking with someone the other day that was shocked to hear that number, but that's validated. So, people are like, ah, it's just 1%. It's actually 8.2% of people my age who are active participants in this sin. As we exchange the truth of God for a lie, we further witness a death culture that results from this. It's interesting to see in the news that 47,000 Americans committed suicide in 2017. It's now the second leading cause of death in Americans under the age of 35. We're seeing a decline in life expectancy, and that's something that we've not seen since World War I. Life expectancy is declining partly among males because of suicide. That's a huge reason that this number is declining. What we see in Romans 1.32, who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them. You could summarize this, give hearty approval to them. Do we see that in this city? Do we see that among those that we work with? This giving hearty approval. I want to look at a couple of cultural references here that talk about these things. There's a 1989 book titled, After the Ball, How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90s. Authors Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen put together a three-step plan Step one, desensitize. Step two, jam. And step three, convert. Under desensitize it says, the goal is to desensitize straights to gays and gayness, inundate them with a continuous flood of gay-related advertising presented in the least offensive fashion possible. Gays must launch a large-scale campaign to reach straights through the mainstream media. Step two is jam. Redefine the homosexual as the victim. Portray their opponents as mean-spirited and bigoted and extremist. And then number three, we mean conversion of the average American's emotions, mind, and will through a planned psychological attack in the form of propaganda fed to the nation via the media. And it's true, we're force-fed these things without our choice. Those who are overseas and come back and watch things like the ads that run during the Super Bowl and things like that, it's difficult to watch modern TV without seeing a same-sex couple at some point. We're force-fed these things, we don't have any choice. And one thing I thought about while I was preparing this sermon is even our phones that have these keyboards on them have sodomite emoji on them. So when you pull up your keyboard and you go from the QWERTY keyboard to show emoji, you've got these same-sex couples, two men and two women, there's a heart between them, and there's rainbow flags and all this stuff. So built into the operating system of the phones that you buy at a store today is an approval of these things. So we have to ask the question, are we living in Sodom? What other similarities do you see in a modern man? In 1958, there's a book called The Naked Communist by a communist named Klienskusen. He laid out what he saw as the communist goals. I just want to do goals 25 through 27 here because they're pertinent. 25, break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV. 26, present homosexuality, degeneracy, and promiscuity as natural, healthy, and normal. And then 27, infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with social religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity, which does not need a religious crutch. And we're seeing this infiltration into the churches that Skewson talked about. Many today are trying to downplay the seriousness of the sin of Sodom. And I just want to give a couple of examples here. James David Greer is the president of the Southern Baptist Convention. He's been going through a series on the book of Romans, and he had this to say in Romans chapter 1 in a sermon that he preached in January this year. And I quote, let me say something very clearly. Homosexuality does not send you to hell. And here's how I know that. Being heterosexual doesn't send you to heaven. President of Southern Baptist Convention said that in January this year. It's a direct contradiction of Jude 1, 7, where we read that those in Sodom suffered the vengeance of eternal fire. And we also read, I think, Corinthians 6, 9, Be not deceived, neither fornicators, nor adulterers, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, that's the Ars Enochotai, shall be inheriting the kingdom of God. And so I have to ask this, would the incinerated men of Sodom agree with J.D. Greer about his statement that being a homosexual won't send you to hell? These are serious and sobering questions to ask. And then we get to something that's even worse. Faithful America is a website and an organization that calls itself the largest and fastest-growing online community of Christians putting faith into action for social justice. Dr. Votie Botman got me interested in this group when he was at the G3 conference this year. And I want to tell you one of the achievements that they put on their website as something that they're doing for the sake of social justice. And I quote, Pennsylvania United Methodist pastor Frank Schaefer was put on trial and defrocked for officiating at the wedding of his gay son. But after local Methodists made headlines with a petition signed by 35,000 Faithful America members, his bishop publicly committed to doing everything in her power to prevent future trials, helping prompt other bishops to make the same promise. Schaefer's defrocking was ultimately overturned on appeal, end quote. So that's kind of a tourist thing. Let me just unpackage that real quick. You have here in the United Methodist Church a pastor who gave a wedding for his sodomite son. Well, that's against the rules of the United Methodist Church, to their credit. And so they said, no, you can't be a minister anymore. Well, this social justice group put together 35,000 petitions to say, no, no, no, no, it's going to be okay. He should still be pastor. That kind of thing is okay. And so they overturned his defrocking or his bishop status within the church. Now, I want you to think about this for a minute. Social justice, this isn't a sermon about social justice, but in the phrase social justice, justice is not optional for the Christian. Justice is God and then man on earth doing that which is right. And so this group here, this Faithful America group, and they've got a strong coalition, 35,000 signatures to this thing. What they're saying is it is a sin to remove someone as a preacher for marrying their sodomite son in a sodomite marriage. So there are people who go around saying that this right here is their rule of life, who are playing these kinds of games. The point in looking at all these things is this. Are we living in Sodom? Are we living in Sodom? Well, that's the introduction. Let's talk about some good stuff now. This is a summons to evangelize. We want to shift gears and look at the story of Lot from the perspective of a New Testament Christian. And we want to put ourselves into Lot's story, and we want to pretend that the time frame of the story is set in the New Testament. We're going to stay in Genesis 19, but we want to look at it through an evangelistic filter of the New Testament. We want to say, well, if we were Lot, and I think we've established that there are a lot of similarities to today, What did Lot do and what should we be doing? Like Lot, we're living in Sodom. And like Lot, we've been told that our city is going to burn with fire and judgment for its sin. 2 Peter 3.12 says, So, we're in a city that's going to burn. We're living in a city that is openly supportive of homosexuality. So, what can we learn from Lot about what we should and should not do? Well, sadly we see that Lot failed to make a serious effort in evangelizing Sodom. Now, again, remember, we're looking at this through the filter of the New Testament. But what we see is that even though he didn't have the commission to go into the world and preach the gospel, yet he missed, at the same time, evangelistic opportunities, which we're going to see, that came and went. And we can deduce this from a few passages of scripture, Matthew 11, 23, and Al Capernaum, which are exalted unto heaven and shall be brought down to hell. For if the mighty works which have been done in thee had been done in Sodom, it should have remained unto this day. But I say unto you that it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment than for thee. Lot was not a miracle worker, but this does indicate to us that Sodom would have been receptive to the truth if it had heard it. Mark 6, 10 and 11 says, And he said unto them, In what place soever ye enter into a house, there abide till ye depart from that place. And whatsoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when you depart thence, shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against them. Verily I say unto you, it will be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city. Now we have to ask the question, why would it be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the Day of Judgment? The reason is this. It was because Sodom hadn't rejected the truth, the Gospel. Sodom didn't have a chance to reject to that truth. It was living in darkness. Imagine if Lot knew that Sodom could have remained if it had heard and repented. You think about when Lot's hearing, if Lot could have heard what Jesus told them, that it was going to be more tolerable for Capernaum than for Sodom. Would it have given him boldness to speak? He was the only righteous person the city knew. Abraham said there's ten people righteous in the city. Well, there weren't ten. It turns out there was one. He was the only person in the city. And I want to enter into this a little bit. Imagine that you're living a comfortable, non-confrontational Christian life, and you die, and you get to heaven, and you find out that if the preaching that had been given to Chorazin and Bethsaida had been given to Tulsa, they would have long ago repented in sackcloth and ashes. If we had something like that, would we do anything any differently? What would your reaction be? Oh, if I had known, I would have prayed more earnestly. I would have evangelized with greater zeal. And I know that our time is running short here, but I want to jump over here to a book called The Unexpected Adventure by Lee Strobel and Mark Middleburg. And he has a lot of stories in here of evangelism that he did, but I want to talk about this one story here. He had a friend named Tim. And he said, except for my occasional rants against Christianity, which were fairly common back in my teenage days as a budding atheist, I don't think we ever discussed spiritual matters. Tim and his family didn't go to church, even though he didn't seem as hostile to religious faith as I was. He was simply indifferent toward God. After high school, we left for different universities. Unlike today with the advent of text messaging, email, and cell phones, friends at that time often drifted apart when they went away to college. And that's what happened to Tim and me. Many years later I heard through the grapevine that he was working for a large corporation, living in a distant city, and had gotten married but subsequently went through a divorce. In the meantime, I had lost my faith in atheism and had become a Christian. Then the news came that Tim and his new wife were moving to a city not far from where I was living. I was ecstatic. Maybe we could reconnect and I could talk with him about Jesus. But I wanted to do things right. First, I was determined to renew and deepen our relationship, and then I would broach the topic of faith at the perfect moment after trust and credibility had been established. There was a lot at stake, I thought. I wanted to look for the ideal opportunity so I don't blow things. Leslie, which is Strobel's wife, and I invited Tim and his wife over to dinner. Over a meal of barbecue chicken, we chatted about the Chicago Bulls, the Chicago Cubs, and the Chicago Bears, or as we Chicagoans call them, the Bulls, the Cubs, and the Bears. Another get-togethers, Tim and I watched sports on television. I kept looking for the perfect opportunity to bring up God, but I never felt the setting was quite right. Once we were too engrossed in the game. Another time his wife was there, and I wanted to talk to him when he was alone. Then one day he called with the urgent news that he had been transferred to a city on the other side of the country. He had to leave right away. Suddenly both Tim and time were gone, and in our busyness we drifted apart again. I was kicking myself. Surely I could have found some way to bring up the most important topic in the world to someone I really cared about. I recalled the advice my mother had given me when I got married. If you wait until the perfect time to have children, she said, you'll never have them. And by insisting on the perfect time to broach a spiritual conversation, I ended up never having it. A while later, I heard soon after that Tim had moved, he became friends with a Christian who rather promptly engaged him in a spiritual discussion and invited him to his church. Unbeknownst to me, Tim was primed for God, and he immediately and enthusiastically received Christ. I was thrilled when I heard the news. At the same time, I wondered when I would have ever found that elusive, ideal moment to have the same kind of conversation with him. In fact, long after he became a Christian, Tim confessed to me that he wondered why I had chosen to remain silent for so long about something as supremely important as the gospel. Patience is important in personal evangelism. We want to validate the seeking process of others, and we don't want to push someone any faster than he or she is able to go. All of that is fine, but if we go too far, waiting for that absolutely perfect opportunity to talk about Christ, then there's a good chance we'll never get around to talking about spiritual matters at all. If I lived with my own mortality in mind, however, surely things would be different. If I knew I only had a short time to live, there would be a new urgency injected in my evangelical efforts. I would probably be more upfront about spiritual matters. I wouldn't wait endlessly for those ever-elusive ideal circumstances before I talked to others about Jesus. Let's face it, those perfect moments rarely come anyway. More often, if we're alert to opportunities and attuned to the Holy Spirit's promptings, we're going to find some appropriate way to get into a conversation about Jesus. It may not be the ideal circumstance, but if we approach the situation with sensitivity and empathy, chances are that God will take our meager efforts and use them in the life of our friend. Because the truth is, we don't have all the time in the world. And even more important, our friends don't either. Have you ever experienced anything like that, where there was someone that you could have talked to about Jesus and you didn't, and that opportunity has come and gone? When I think about Lot living in the cave after Sodom was destroyed, I wonder how many people he thought about that he had seen day after day after day. And he was scared to say anything about it because he knew they were going to hate what he had to say. And yet, we have the word that Sodom and Gomorrah would have presented at the preaching. What kind of opportunities do you have now that you're not going to have later on? Again, we know our city is going to burn. What are we doing about it? And one interesting question is, if we knew what our life was going to end in 30 days, would we do anything different? Would we? 2 Corinthians 3.12 says, Seeing then that we have such hope, we use great plainness, and this could be translated boldness, of speech. The confidence that we have in the truth of what we have and the superiority of the gospel over our bondage to sin gives us a boldness for speech. Your job and mine is to make it more tolerable on the Day of Judgment for Sodom and Gomorrah than for our city. How are we doing? Well, there's more to this that I want to get to. Our time is gone. So let me hasten now to a signal to repent. As we close here, I want to talk to those who are not followers of Christ. We've talked about some different things here, and I know that it's not all maybe made sense. So I want to be just as clear as I can here, and that's this. Though Sodom was a sinful city, it could have avoided its destruction. If the mighty works which had been done in Capernaum had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. And here's the thing, this world cannot avoid its destruction. But you, as a lost sinner, can avoid being destroyed with it. God can save anyone, including homosexuals. 1 Corinthians 6.11 says, And such were some of you. Do we have this love for the lost? Well, you might be thinking, well, I'm sure glad it wasn't a part of Sodom. It didn't end well for them. But here's the thing. You know about the Gospel. So, yeah, you're not in Sodom, but you are a Capernaum situation. If you're lost today, you know more than Sodom did and you're going to be held to a higher standard. If you don't repent, the day is going to come in which you're worse off. than those who perished in Sodom. I mean, really think about that. Let's say you live a mostly moral life, the way the world defines it. You don't participate in these things. But you die, and you're before the judgment seat of Christ. And you're held to a higher standard than the people in Sodom were because of the light you've been given. Jesus' warning was to those who were outwardly more moral than the Sodomites. You're in danger of judgment so long as you're not a follower of Christ. Another thing I want to consider to the lost is Christ's return and the destruction of the unrepentant will be as swift as Sodom's destruction. Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot, they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they built, but the same day that Lot went out of Sodom, it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed. Christ's first coming to this earth was peaceful. But his second coming will be nothing like his first. It will be with authority and with power, and then it will be too late. Today is the day of salvation. William Secker writes this, if God's today be too soon for thy repentance, thy tomorrow may be too late for his acceptance. Everything that you love and cherish is going to burn. We have that guarantee that everything in this world is going to burn. God's calling you to something that's going to be harder but happier than anything you've ever known. We looked this morning about the joy, the peace of forgiveness. There is nothing that can compare with the forgiveness of being right with God. There is no temporal, carnal pleasure that can be compared to that. And so I urge you to forsake all your sin and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Savior of sins, and never look back. Remember Lot's wife.