Lesson 69

Responsibility of the Believer – 29:21-24

 

Deut. 29 is the finale to the offer of the treaty.  Moses is going to give the nation an opportunity for an invitation.  I want you to understand what an invitation is because many of you have come out of churches where the moment I mention it I know what you’re thinking.  What you’re seeing in Deuteronomy is a public invitation and I want you to see the elements of this public invitation and I want you to see what Moses does.  We have said in verses 1-9 that in there he is giving the historic facts.  This is why Moses in verse 2 says “Ye have seen all that the LORD did before your eyes in the land of Egypt,”  he’s saying look, you’ve got the history in front of you, you’ve got the words that God has given in front of you, you’ve got all these things.  So he gives a reason for their belief first, before he asks them to believe.  There’s always reason that evidence is given first, then the invitation to believe.  So verses 1-9 give the evidence. 

 

Then verses 10-15 he is laying out or defining what the invitation is all about.  This isn’t clear; oftentimes I have heard in evangelistic situations and I’ve been in the counseling rooms where I’ve counseled people that have come forward and they don’t know why they came forward, they have no idea how they got down to the front.  This is tragic because that’s not what an invitation is.  So Moses defines it in verse 10-15, he tells you look, this is what you’re doing.  I’ve given you the reason and now I’m telling you the facts.  I’m defining what the issue is.

 

Verses 16 thru the end of the chapter, Moses is going to tell them what is going to happen if you choose one way and in chapter 30 he’s going to tell you what’s going to happen if you chose the other way.  So we have a progression. We have reasons to believe, then we have a definition of the issue, and then we have a clarification of the results.  He’s laying it on the line, he says if you choose this way then this is what’s going to happen and if you choose that way this is what’s going to happen.  So he clarifies the issue and lets them know what’s going to happen. 

 

We’ve been dealing with the cursings first in verses 16-the end, there’s a smart aleck in verse 19, he sits up there and says oh yes, I believe, I believe, but inwardly he says “I shall have peace, though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart.”  And he says this person is going to be destroyed; this person is going to bring down the wrath of God and not only is that individual person going to be in trouble but he is going to make things and draw down judgment upon the whole community and mess everything up because of his smart attitude.  So here we have the laying it on the line.

 

In verses 22-23, which we’ll work with tonight, he applies the information, and he says he looks forward in time, into the future, from where he sits in the 14th century he looks into the future, down through the centuries to the time of Christ, and he says all this history that’s coming upon you, this is what’s going to happen Israel because don’t forget, Moses was with these people forty years and he had absolutely no illusions what would happen the day he dropped dead.  Of course, when he finished this sermon, for the book of Deuteronomy is a sermon, he dropped dead.  He died after he preached this sermon and he had no illusions what would happen to these people after he ceased.  So in verse 22 he assumes that the cursings are going to take place and he does so by means of a dramatic dialogue.  In here he sets up a hypothetical conversation and he says I want paint for you a fantastic picture of destruction and desolation and here it is, he’s going to say it’s just like Sodom and Gomorrah, complete devastation, and there are two people standing over the ruins and they are talking to one another. 

 

And this is their conversation, “So that the generation to come of your children who shall rise up after you, and the foreigner who shall come from a far land, shall say, when they see the plagues of that land, and the sicknesses which the LORD hath laid upon it, [23] And that the whole land thereof is brimstone, and salt, and burning, that it is now sown, nor beareth, nor any grass grows on it, [like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboim, which the LORD overthrew in His anger, and in His wrath,”] Verse 24, “Even all nations shall say, Wherefore has the LORD done this unto this land? What means the heart of this great anger?” Verse 15, “Then the men shall say, Because they have forsaken the covenant of the LORD God of their fathers,” etc.  So you see it’s a conversation that he’s setting up to get across the truth that there are horrible consequences to this decision. 

 

Volition in the Bible is important; it is the base of freedom, it is absolutely the base of freedom.  You don’t have the right to choose on a firm foundation apart from the Word of God.  This is why when the Biblical message, every where it’s gone socially, it has emphasized the freedom for men, freedom though within a framework so it doesn’t turn into anarchy.  But nevertheless, freedom and the right to choose what you will and will not do because if you look back on Biblical history you could have said listen, God made a mistake in the Garden of Eden.  If God was like Big Brother He would have said to Adam, oh-oh Adam, I’m not going to let you go on negative volition, here you are and you just listened to your wife, now she’s all fouled up and she came back and you sent her out to get supper and she came back and brought you back this thing and now she’s in trouble.  And by the way, it’s interesting that the first man loved his wife more than the Lord, and you see what happened, he got in trouble. So this is why the authority always has to be the man has to love the Lord more than his wife, because there are times when the decision has to be made. 

 

So you have negative volition at this point.  And what Moses is saying, what God said back in Adam’s day is that this is important when you choose, this is not flippant.  In our day, for example, we have people come down the aisle and get married, and then they go out and get divorced the first time they have trouble.  To them there’s no responsibility for the decision they have made.  Right in the marriage ceremony you are doing this and pledging in front of God; I realize that to most people that come down the aisle that’s a lot of malarkey.  This is why I will not marry a Christian and a non-Christian.  I have authority in the Word of God to marry a Christian and a Christian, or a non-Christian and a non-Christian and I get that from the state, I don’t get it from the Bible, but I do not have the authority at any time, I’d be out of line completely to marry a Christian and a non-Christian, and this is why, because the volition, the act of volition is crucial.  God holds you to the things that you choose. 

 

This is uncomfortable, we don’t like to be held responsible for our own decisions but that is the way the Lord does it.  And this is why God did not interfere when He saw Adam, He didn’t say oh-oh Adam, don’t do it Adam, don’t do it.  He didn’t say a think he let Adam just go right ahead and drop the ball.  Why?  Because God is a gentleman and He respects your freedom and sometimes you have to learn and you know you don’t really learn until you do it yourself and flop.  So this is the way God treats us anyway.  You can tell a child, it’s amazing, you can tell them, it doesn’t make any difference; they’ve got to go out and get burned.  So go out and get burned, you have to monitor it so they don’t get burned too badly, but that’s evidently the only way of learning some issues.  So God uses this technique in the Scripture.

 

Moses is simply saying Israel, I can see the day when absolute total destruction is coming upon you, so when you get to this invitation, see the invitation is back here, he says there’s the definition of the issue but I want to clarify certain results, if you go negative then you’re going to get cursing; if you go positive then you’re going to get blessing.  And he’s not threatening, this is not a threat, he’s just asking the people to consider the weight of the decision that they face.  Consider the weight and what’s going to happen, what’s going to result, cause/effect. 

 

Then he says this strange verse in verse 23, “the whole land thereof is brimstone, and burning salt, it’s not sown, it does not bear, grass can’t grow thereon, like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah,” now when we come to the Sodom and Gomorrah incident, we’re going to spend the rest of our time together discussing the Sodom and Gomorrah incident from the standpoint of God’s judgments in history.  The Sodom and Gomorrah incident is one that began in Gen. 19; these four cities that you see in verse 23 were four out of a five city pentapolis in the Dead Sea.  If you draw the Dead Sea today there’s a little projection that sticks out on the southern end today, and then there’s a small area to the south.  Evidently in the time before Sodom and Gomorrah the Dead Sea extended something like this.  If you get the overall picture of geography and you have a map in your Bible, here’s the eastern end of the Mediterranean, here’s the Nile, up here you have the Sea of Galilee, etc. there’s a geological rift that runs north/northeast, south/southwest; it starts up here near Ararat, up here in Turkey, and runs south/southwest down through this Jordan Valley, the Jordan Valley is a rift valley, all the way down to the east coast of Africa.  It’s one long geological fault, and the Dead Sea is a body of water that’s collected in part of this gorge.

 

Now the incident of Sodom and Gomorrah is one that is used throughout Scripture and a sign of God’s judgment.  Notice the word “overthrow,” that word in verse 23, if you look in the Hebrew is only used for Sodom and Gomorrah.   For example in Isaiah 13:19 you’ll read, where Isaiah is preaching to his generation, and in Isaiah 13:19 he gives the illustration of Gomorrah, and he says, “And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldeans excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.”  You find this used of Edom, etc. you find it used for many, many things, “you will be as the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah.”  The very fact that the Bible uses a special word for this incident in history should tell us something; it should tell us that this historical incident was very highly unusual.  There was a catastrophe that happened at this time in history that left its imprint on the memory of Israel and the surrounding nations. 

 

This incident is found in Gen. 19 so turn there and we’ll see the original account of Sodom and Gomorrah.  We’ll start in Gen. 13:10, that’s where it’s first mentioned.  This is what it was before the catastrophe.  Remember Lot, Abraham had a very interesting family.  Abraham had a queer guy in the previous generation called Nahor; Nahor means to snore in the Hebrew, and it’s interesting that Abraham doesn’t do anything until this guy drops dead and when he drops dead then Abraham got moving.  Now whether he was a drag on the whole family or something, or he always went to sleep or something, his name just means snore.  So there’s something wrong with him, but anyway, Abraham got out from there and then he had Lot, and he no sooner went into this area than Lot started to fool around, and Lot decided he was going to go over and have a good time in the party town and that was Sodom and Gomorrah.  In verse 10, “And Lot lifted up his eyes, and beheld all the plain of Jordan,” he had his eye on the real estate, “that it was well-watered everywhere, before the LORD destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.”  So there you have a historical reference to the fact that this area was well-watered, and obviously this means crops grew like crazy all over this place, tremendous agricultural region. 

 

Then in Gen. 14 we find Abraham doing a fantastic thing.  We find Abraham killing the king, Chedorlaomer, who came from the east.  We don’t know exactly who he was though archeologists are finding more hints about actually who he was, but this was a tremendous king with a mighty army that came out of the east and he subjected the pentapolis to his domination and Abraham went down there and got hold of this man and destroyed him, so he freed these five cities.  It’s very interesting in history, these five cities that were so corrupt, see here you have God’s grace in operation, He frees them, He gives them opportunity to do what they want to do. 

 

And then in Genesis 19 we come down to the final judgment and here we have one of the preincarnate appearances of Jesus Christ, and after Jesus Christ appears to Abraham and Sarah as He does several times and as He does here to announce destruction, there are three angels that come to them, and these three angels come before Abraham’s tent, one leaves, and it says the Lord left.  Two of the angels in verse 1 then go down to Sodom and there they meet Lot. And Lot recognized who they were, etc. and then he got in town, and verse 14, the men of the city, homosexuals, etc. and it’s kind of a gruesome little picture that’s painted for us, homosexuality was not just the one sin that threw down judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah, there were many others besides, as Ezekiel tells us.  But nevertheless, the point is that the city has gotten pretty solidly on negative volition and God is going to destroy it. 

 

Then in verse 15, the angels tell him, “Lot, Arise, take they wife, and thy two daughters, which are here; lest thou be consumed in the iniquity of the city.”  Now Lot was the kind of fellow that had paralysis of judgment.  He couldn’t make up his mind to do anything.  So [16] “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 outside of the city.”  Now in the movie, The Bible, they didn’t quite show that.  It’s very humorous actually, here’s Lot is there, he’s biting his nails, he doesn’t know whether they should leave or not, so the angels just grab them  and say you’re coming with us and they escorted them personally out of the city.  Then finally the angels say now we’ve gotten you out of the city, now just take off, just get out of here.  And then Lot starts to cry on them, verse 18, “And Lot said unto them, Oh, not so, my Lord! [19] Behold now, thy servant has found grace in thy sight, and thou has magnified thy mercy, which thou hast shown unto me in saving my life; and I cannot escape to the mountain, lest some evil overtake me, and I die.”  So now he wants a personal escort all the way over to these mountains that are located just down to the south here. 

 

In verse 20 the Lord is very merciful, and He says all right, Lot, we make compensations for the weak brethren, and we have one city down here and we’ll save that city.  So that, to this day, is called Zoar; that was one of the five cities in the pentapolis that was not destroyed because God used that as a relief station for Lot.  And when we get down to verse 21 the angels say something very interesting, “See, I have accepted thee concerning this thing also, that I will not overthrow this city, for which thou hast spoken. [22] Haste thee,” I think this is a fantastic verse because it shows you that God never lowers the boom of judgment until He allows you perfect grace. See what He’s doing in verse 22, “Haste thee,” get out of here, “escape there; for I cannot do anything till thou be come there.”  What the angel says is I’ve got an order from the Lord to blast this city but I can’t do it as long as you’re sitting here, so get out. And that’s a perfect illustration of how God saves His believers, His children from judgment.  You see this again and again in Scripture.  You see it in the ark, Noah and all the people get in the ark and who shuts the door?  It says the Lord shut the door. We don’t know what that means, but it means the Lord took care of it.  And here you have the same thing, the angel has this order to blast the city but he says I can’t do it, I have to leave hands off the city Lot, until you are personally removed.  So we have here again a sign of God’s grace. 

 

This is a judgment that comes upon the area here and now we come to the cause of this disaster.  We don’t really know what happened, but as we continue reading through Gen. 19 we pick up incidents of a tremendous geological cataclysm.  Verse 23, “The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar.”  This is early in the morning.  In verse 24 it says “Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven; [25] And He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. [26] And his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.” She evidently picked this up from her husband, he couldn’t move two feet without assistance, so she picked this up, you get like the people you live with.  She just had to turn around, you know a woman’s curiosity, well she just had to turn around and see what the Lord was doing.  This means more than turn around or look back, it means she hesitated, how we don’t know but she just hesitated and stayed in the area with the fallout or something and got herself plastered.

 

In verse 27, this is meanwhile back at the ranch, Abraham is completely out of the area and he got up in the morning early and went “to the place where he stood before the LORD. [28] And he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.”  So whatever God used it completely blasted out this whole area.  We have testimony from history as well as from the New Testament that this was one of the greatest cataclysms in history outside of the flood of Noah. 

 

To show you that this is something that is not just a sweet little Sunday School story, I want to take you to Luke 17, and I want you to see how the Bible is one unity, and how one piece fits into the next piece, and you can’t pick and choose.  In Luke 17:29, there are always a few Christians that want to say well, I can’t believe this, I like the rest of it but I can’t believe this.  Now what do you do with this problem, this is the Lord Jesus Christ speaking, and He is talking about His Second Advent, and He is saying in verse 29, “The same day that Lot went out of Sodom, it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all. [30] Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed.”  What do you do about that?  Does the Lord Jesus Christ accept the historicity of the Sodom account?  He obviously did; if He didn’t, then what is He using, an example for some future event in history that’s never going to occur either because it’s not real literal.  He’s using a literal example as a fore view of a literal future event; the two hang together. 

 

Look down in verse 32, “Remember Lot’s wife.”  In verse 31 He says, “In that day, let him that shall be on the housetop, and his stuff in the house, not come down to take it away,” get out, this is instruction to the believers in the city of Jerusalem at the time the Lord is going to return and He says when you see these signs I tell you, you don’t stay here, you move and you get out of this city, and He said as a warning or as an illustration of this, “Remember Lot’s wife.”  So here the Lord Jesus Christ is making use of a historical section of Genesis to say that this is not history is to impugn the character of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Jesus Christ accepted Genesis and He accepted it literally. 

 

Now what caused this?  We have certain hints from history and I have gone through various historical sources and listed some of these sources so that you can see that this is not just a little Bible story.  This was something that had reverberations throughout the entire Ancient Near East. We have accounts of this in Philo, in Tacitus, in Strabo, for example in Josephus, in Wars of the Jews, Book IV he says this, and he’s talking about going down there, Josephus said I heard about this Sodom and Gomorrah incident, so I personally when I did my research, I went down there and I rode around and I came back and I’m going to report to you what I found.  So here’s Josephus’ report of what it looked like in his day.  “Lake Asphaltus,” that tells you immediately what the observation is, there’s asphalt and bitumen deposits all over this area and you can see these today.  “Lake Asphaltus is bitter and unfruitful; it’s so thick that it bears up the heaviest of things.  It casts up black clods of bitumen; it changes its color appearance thrice every day as the rays of the sun fall differently upon it.”  This, of course, shows you there’s oil slick on the water, you’ve seen this, when you wash the car or something and there’s a puddle in the driveway and there’s a little grease on the driveway and it starts to dissolve on the top of the water and the sun begins to hit that thing and you begin to see colors.  That’s where the oil slick has come across the water and that’s obviously what Josephus is talking about, there’s an oil slick on the Dead Sea at this area.

 

And he says this, a remarkable thing: “The traces of the five cities are still to be seen, as well as the ashes growing in their fruits, which fruits have a color as if they were fit to be eaten.”  In his Antiquities to the Jews Josephus says, “Lot’s wife was changed into a pillar of salt, I have seen it and it remains at this day.”  This observation was also made by Clement of Rome and by Araneus in the 2nd century.  Evidently at that time there was a pillar of salt; now today the trouble with it is it’s one big hake that’s hundreds and hundreds of feet thick with a lot of pillars on it, so the liberals have said well, it’s just a figment of somebody’s imagination.  But these men had in their minds a specific pillar of salt down there when they said at the time of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the 2nd century it was there. 

 

Then in 1848 W. F. Lynch, a geologist from the United States led an expedition to the Dead Sea.  He found something amazing.  As he began to conduct probe studies of the Dead Sea, he found the depth of this thing was 1200 feet, and it dropped off almost like a sheer wall.  So it’s obvious a very, very deep thing, so if you want to do some water skiing you’d better have a life jacket, of course there’s one thing that will save you, the Dead Sea is so thick with salt, 25% sodium chloride content, so that at one time Titus had a way of executing people, he’d tie their hands behind their back and toss them over a cliff and then Titus said, when he was hitting Jerusalem, he said I want to that so he dumped some people off in the Dead Sea and he looked down and all of a sudden people popped up and he tried it again, and he was so impressed that he said come on, you win, and he untied them and let them go.  But this was one of the historical instances where the buoyancy of this water is fantastic, absolutely fantastic, 25% salt. 

 

That’s remarkable, but then when he started his probes in the southern end he found the depth was only 50 feet, which tells you that this southern section is basically a sunken plain and it’s there where we believe the ruins of the pentapolis are that are spoken of in the book of Genesis.  He also says that if you take a rowboat across the Salt Sea to the southernmost point, you shall see, if the sun is shining the right direction, something quite fantastic.  Some distance from the shore and clearly visible under the surface of the water stretch the outlines of forests which the extraordinarily high salt water content of the Dead Sea has kept in preservation.  That should amaze you because all around the Dead Sea for miles and miles and miles, is nothing but a plantless waterless dessert, no trees are growing, and yet underneath this section are the trees of the great once fertile plain that the Genesis narrative tells us existed. 

 

We have records from Sanchuniathon, a Phoenician priest, etc. in his ancient history he tells about the same thing.  And finally we have a report by Frederick Clap from the Bulletin of American Association of Petroleum Geologists in 1936, Vol. 20, Number 7, where he reported on his investigation of this area.  “The vast areas exist in which petroleum source rocks may be present and in some places they contain 10-16% of crude oil.  Whether commercial supplies exist in the Dead Sea area or not, the region is on record as having produced bitumen and petroleum since earliest known habitation and is hence of definite scientific and historic importance.

 

So evidently what happened when God did this, the secondary means that He used was that underneath this plain of Sodom and Gomorrah were these tremendous petroleum and gas deposits and the Bible says that He rained fire and brimstone, which is obviously a result of an explosion of some sort, and God evidently ignited millions and millions of cubic feet of gas and oil and blew four out of the five cities.  So we have here a case where God literally judged a city.

 

Now I want to trace for you how this is used in Scripture so that once you get this Sodom and Gomorrah in your mind you can use it when you study the rest of the Bible.  Turn to Amos 1.  The prophets of the Old Testament always looked back in past history to see what God did and they looked back to the Law. We’re studying Deuteronomy.  What is Deuteronomy?  Deuteronomy is setting up the framework for these prophets.  This is what’s so terribly wrong with the liberal approach to the Old Testament, they keep saying Isaiah and Amos and all these men were the radical reformers of their day.  They weren’t, they were calling the nations back to the Mosaic Framework Moses had laid out.  They were strict constitutionalists; they brought the nation back to this ideal that they had left with Moses.

 

So Amos is going back and he makes a prediction in verse 1, a very strange prediction, “The words of Amos, who was among the herdsmen of Tekoa, which he saw concerning Israel in the days of Uzziah, king of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam, the son of Joash, king of Israel, two years before the earthquake,” this is in the divided kingdom, “two years before the ra‘ash and this is a word that is sometimes used for an earthquake, other times it’s used for strange catastrophes.  And he says “two years before this catastrophe” is to hit the nation, he writes this book and lays it on the line.  He says you learn from Moses Law that just as God would overthrow Sodom and Gomorrah He’s going to do it to you; now get with it. And it’s a warning that this rule that was found in Deuteronomy, this principle is going to come to fruition in two years. 

 

Notice, however, in Amos 4:11 that some of the disasters have already come to the nation because he says, quoting God, “I have,” past tense, “overthrown some of you, as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and ye were like a firebrand plucked out of the burning; yet have ye not returned unto Me, saith the Lord.”  And again Sodom and Gomorrah is the keystone, Sodom and Gomorrah is THE illustration of God’s judgment.  And Amos says look, God is already slowly setting the wheels of judgment in motion in history; now you’ve already, he says, experienced one or two cities, we don’t know what these cities were but they were lost in a natural catastrophe, how many more cities have to go before the nation wakes up.

 

We’re told in 2 Chron. 26, you remember Uzziah got fatheaded during his reign, and he decided he was going to be the great high priest, and we never know exactly what motivated Uzziah, but somehow he got worried and all shook up, and instead of letting the high priest take care of his job he was going to butt into it.  And he walked up into the Temple and started offering sacrifices.  Now the king, in the Old Testament, thought he was number one but he never was in God’s sight; the prophet is always above the king in the Old Testament.  And so he walked in there thinking he was going to run the show, the only thing, something happened, and when he got into that Temple, all of a sudden he turned into a leper.  Now the Bible doesn’t relate to us what happened, we have to go to extra-Biblical sources to find out.  And evidently what happened, and Josephus testifies to this, the Mishna testifies to this, is that as Uzziah walked up to offer the sacrifice, suddenly there was a tremendous earthquake, the Temple split open, one part along the top of the roof, and to the west of Jerusalem a whole hill fell in, there was a tremendous size of catastrophe in that day. 

 

We don’t have that at that point in the Bible, but if you turn to Zechariah 14:5 you have reference to this strange cataclysm in Uzziah’s time.  This is a prophecy of the Second Advent of Jesus Christ; it’s talking about the day of the Lord.  In verse 4 is that famous verse that many of you that have studied prophecy know, but have you ever looked at the next one.  Look at verse 4, “And His feet” that’s Messiah, “shall stand in that day upon the Mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east, and the Mount of Olives shall cleave in its midst toward the east and toward the west,” and I’ve told you how Pan American tried to build a hotel there for sightseers, and when the geologists crawled down to the Mount of Olives, they found out there’s a fault and it’s running east and west, so it’s as though God has already set into motion the geological mechanisms that one day will be used.  Remember in the book of Acts Jesus ascended from the Mount of Olives, and He’s going to descend to the same position. 

 

But then in verse 5 there’s an accompanying condition that’s going to happen when this occurs, “And you shall flee to the valley of the mountains; for the valley of the mountains shall reach unto Azel; yea, ye shall flee, as ye fled from before thee earthquake in the days of Uzziah, king of Judah,” so there was a tremendous catastrophe that happened, and that catastrophe is a model on a small scale of what the major catastrophe is going to be when Messiah comes again.  I want you to see this, this prophecy in the Bible, you have to have a consistent system of interpreting Scripture and you have to interpret the way it would be interpreted.  Would a person interpret this allegorically if he had been sitting in Jerusalem; if he had seen these earthquakes; if it had been in his time, for example if I were to say to you just as hurricane Carla and hurricane Camille hit so and so, so this will happen, would you take that allegorically?  No you wouldn’t, you’d take it literally.  And so we’re faced with the fact, there’s a literal thing here and they’re going to be literal catastrophes that happen in history at the Second Advent.

So turn to Isaiah 1 and we’ll see another instance of this and we’ll close with this.  Isaiah began to write his book just after the catastrophe that Amos had predicted.  In other words you have this kind of a situation.  Amos is here, two years after Amos finishes the writing of his book, there’s a fantastic catastrophe that hits; that catastrophe hits under King Uzziah.  After the catastrophe hits, and of course there had been previous catastrophes that Amos talks about, previous to this one, and after the catastrophe hits Isaiah then takes over from Amos. Amos dies and Isaiah replaces him as the prophet of Israel and now Isaiah writes this in verse 7, “Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire, your land, strangers devour it in your presence,’ and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.”  And the word “overthrown” there is the same word used of the phenomeon of Sodom and Gomorrah.  [2] “And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city.  ]3] And except the LORD of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have been like Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah.” 

 

So you see Isaiah is using Sodom and Gomorrah as a picture of his day and he’s saying the wheels of history are turning, Israel, and you’re right in the middle of it.  And these are what the prophets are saying, they are not radicals that are just pulling these things out of the air; they are men who have carefully studied Moses; they’ve carefully studied history and they see there’s a pattern, there’s a program in history. They are not just wildly threatening the people to emotionally jack them up; these men are students of history, they are students of the Law and the tension that they feel is that in that day they see their country going down and down and down into the wheels of judgment and they say see these events, don’t you read Moses, don’t you know that God is going to do these things.  And then we find the same thing in Jeremiah 49:17, [“Also Edom shall be a desolation; every one that goes by it shall be appalled, and shall hiss at all its plagues, [18] As in the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah and their neighboring cities, saith the LORD, no man shall bide there; neither shall a son of man dwell in it.”] and Jeremiah 50:40 [“As God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah and their neighboring cities, saith the LORD, so shall no man abide there, neither shall any son of man dwell in her.”] gives you another reference, where again he uses Sodom and Gomorrah as an example.

 

Now what are we to do with this?  Many Christians will read Isaiah 1 and they look at verse 7 and 9 and say oh, isn’t that sweet poetic language.  Now what’s wrong with that kind of thing?  Would that have been taken as poetic language by the people of that day?  That’s not poetic language, it’s literal.  Velikovsky has written in Worlds in Collision a very interesting statement.  “Is the way Isaiah expressed himself obscure?  Is it … it is a kind of collective psychological blind spot which prevents the understanding of the clearly revealed and scores of times repeated description of astronomical geological and meteorological phenomenon.” 

 

So what do we conclude that when the Lord Jesus Christ says as it happened in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah, so it will happen today, how do we interpret prophecy?  Many people have asked, what do you do to interpret prophecy?  You interpret it just the way the people would have interpreted it.  How would they have interpreted it?  How do they interpret this? Literally, literally; the events literally come about in history.

 

Summarizing, turn back to Deut. 29; in Deut. 29 Moses is setting up the framework of history; he is looking forward in time and he says Israel, I’m going to warn you, that when you make this invitation, if you foul up and get out of line, then you are going to experience judgment and the kind of judgment you are going to experience is in verse 23 where you’re going to have the same kind of judgment that came down upon Sodom and Gomorrah.  I have taken you through the prophets very briefly to show you that these things literally came true in history.  And I’ve taken you to the Gospels and shown you that when the Lord in Luke 17 says the same thing is going to happen, it means it, literally.  So this is a mechanism of history and this is why the book of Deuteronomy is so important.

 

Verse 23, “…the LORD overthrew [them] in His anger, and in His wrath.”  This looks forward in time to a judgment inside of history that God is actually going to bring about.  That is how you interpret prophecy.  Next week we’ll deal with the details of the cursings and the blessings of chapter 30.