Genesis 18:20-33
Then the Lord said, “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.”
So the men turned from there and went toward 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 fifty righteous within the city. Will you then sweep away the place and not spare it for the fifty 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 fifty 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 fifty righteous are lacking. Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?” And he said, “I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.” Again he spoke to him and said, “Suppose forty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of forty I will not do it.” Then he said, “Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak. Suppose thirty are found there.” He answered, “I will not do it, if I find thirty there.” He said, “Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord. Suppose twenty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of twenty I will not destroy it.” Then he said, “Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak again but this once. Suppose ten are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it.” And the Lord went his way, when he had finished speaking to Abraham, and Abraham returned to his place.
God cannot and will never contradict Himself.
Contrariness is our evil, not His. Our moral elasticity is particularly ominous when ”tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.” (Eph. 4:14) There is no end to the ingenious excuse making and apologetics of sinners who exonerate themselves, so cock-sure until a change in the wind.
If anything and everything is excusable, as it was in Sodom and Gomorrah, then anyone can make himself a believer. Just pick your own favorite object. That’s when people create faith in their own judgments, trust in their own instincts and bank on whatever case they make for themselves. In this sense, all human beings are “believers.” In this sense, faith is just one’s own invention and an easy thing to have because that faith is fluid and adaptive. Then one chooses to believe whatever they wish to believe.
But such is not saving faith.
We Lutherans take a very strong stand on the fact that saving Christian faith is not formed by anyone’s own wisdom or preference. Saving faith is not of our choosing nor can it rest upon any other object than Christ. The faith that saves sinners is a pure gift of God the Holy Spirit which comes by the Word of God. Without hearing the Gospel of Christ—the impregnable Word of the cross by which faith is generated—a person cannot be saved.
Saving faith has one granite-solid object, the sure Word of Christ. The power of God is Christ, the Word, the one fixed object of our hope. He is the Word of God which cannot and will never contradict itself.
That is what gave Abraham the stones to return again and again with his questions. Abraham believed, and believed rightly that God would not be of one mind when fifty righteous might remain in Sodom and of another mind should there only be ten righteous there. Abraham appealed to God repeatedly upon the basis of his understanding that God is indeed righteous and just. Neither the statistics, the atmosphere, nor the number of times a petitioner comes before Him should make any difference.
And Abraham was right. If Abraham had asked fifty separate times, each time dropping the number by one, God would have been unchanged. Most of us go by a “three strikes and you’re out” system. I’ll be patient once. I’ll bite my tongue a second time. I may even swallow an insult a third time, but enough is enough. Keep pushing me and out you go.
What if God were that way with us?
Instead we see our Lord Jesus walk the talk. “If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.” (Luke 17:3-4)
Peter came up and said to [Jesus], “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven. (Matthew 18:21-22)
The lesson here is that if we can depend on God only to a degree—only so far--then He is no different than our own worthless ambiguities.
Listen! Everybody is a believer. Everybody believes in something. Sodom and Gomorrah’s sin was that the Living God, the One staunch in His goodness and unbendable in the Truth, didn’t feature in their environs. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes and therein lost the one great object of saving faith.
Abraham, by contrast, hung on to his belief that God is God and will not change. He pressed forward in that faith way beyond reason and way beyond civility. Had he lost his sanity, to push God so?
You tell me.
