The scripture reading is from the book of Genesis in the Old Testament, chapter 18, verses 16 through 33. Genesis chapter 18, verses 16 through 33. Then the man set out from there and they followed down toward Sodom. And Abraham went with them to set them on their way. The Lord said, shall I hide from Abraham what I'm about to do? Seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation. And all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him. For I have chosen him that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice so that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has promised him. 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 towards Sodom. But Abraham still stood before the Lord. Then Abraham drew near and said, will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are 50 righteous within the city. Will you then sweep away the place and not spare it for the 50 righteous who are in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked so that the righteous fair is the wicked. Far be that from you. Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just? And the Lord said, if I find at Sodom 50 righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake. Abraham asked and said, behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord, I who am but thus denashes. Suppose five of the 50 righteous are lacking. Will you destroy the whole city for the lack of five? And he said, I will not destroy it if I find 45 there. Again, he spoke to them and said, suppose 40 are found there, he answered, for the sake of 40 I will not do it. Then he said, O let not the Lord be angry and I will speak. Suppose 30 are found there. He answered, I will not do it if I find 30 there. He said, behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord, suppose 20 are found there. He answered, for the sake of 20 I will not destroy it. Then he said, O let not the Lord be angry and I will speak again but this once. Suppose 10 are found there. He answered, for the sake of 10 I will not destroy it. And the Lord went on his way when he had finished speaking to Abraham and Abraham returned to his place. The word of the Lord. Let's pray and ask for his blessing as we look at this very difficult passage. Lord, thanks for your truth that we stand upon. We don't stand upon human opinions or emotions, circumstances we stand on the rock of who you are communicated through your inherent word. And so we now ask for you Holy Spirit to help us to see this word and be transformed by it. We thank you and pray in Jesus' name, amen. Oh, this past week, I can't remember which day it was, opened up the Houston Chronicle and turned to the sports section. And if you're like me, when you saw that, your first reaction was you're irritated because they had this giant tombstone on there, rest in peace, and then astros. And basically saying, okay, yes, it's just the beginning of June, but season's over. Come on, this season's over. And I was upset, but then I thought, no, that's reality. That's reality. Now, there could be a miracle that could trump that reality, but that's right. We just don't like to face reality, do we? Ladies, some of you've had this experience. You've seen it certainly about, you know, in the dating realm where there is a young man who's pursuing you, and you try to give those, you know, Southern Gentile clues that you don't have any interest in this guy. And he's just absolutely the most oblivious person in the world. He doesn't catch those clues. You have to be a little bit more direct, a little bit more in your face and say, hello, reality check, and he just doesn't get it. And we don't like to face reality. Maybe that's the reason for that. And as I was talking to friend of mine who's in counseling, he was saying, yeah, I mean, you see that all the time in counseling relationships, how people, you know, you're working with them. And then it's like you hold up this giant poster and you show them reality. Here's who you are. And they're like, I'm out of here. We don't want to face reality. And so what we do is then, typically, we pour ourselves into other people. We give ourselves to someone else because their reality is a little bit easier to stomach than our own. And I found this when I was first thinking about this subject, I found it very ironic, an odd confliction that on the one hand, we don't like to face reality. But what has been the number one craze in the television industry the last five years? Reality television. How do you make sense? Well, I think it's that. It's much easier for me to see Donald Trump look at someone else and say, you're fired, you know, or to see Simon, whatever his name is say, they are awful. You know, it's much easier for me to experience someone else saying that or someone else eating a bunch of worms and whatever that show is. Then for me to deal with that in my own experience and face reality, why? Because I don't want a confront reality. But if we don't face reality, reality is like a boomerang, isn't it? We can throw it off, but it comes hurling right back at us. For instance, if, you know, on the light side of things, if someone points out to me that I've got some food stuck in my teeth at lunch, and I say, well, that doesn't really matter what you think. I don't care about it. I'm okay. Reality is people are going to be looking at me the rest of the day going, oh my goodness, they just don't have the guts to say anything like the other person did. See? And so it's coming back at me, but I'm oblivious to it. Now, on the more harsh side of things, think of 9-11. What if our national leaders decided, you know, it was horribly tragic, but this was an anomaly? This is not indicative of future things, so I think we just stay the course. We'd be freaking out. We wanted to see radical changes, might make things more difficult for us, travel becomes a lot more, you know, insane. I take off your shoes and so on and so forth, but you expect when you face sobering reality for there to be some massive adjustments to your own life. Well, we are looking at the life of one of the great individuals of the Bible, Abraham, the patriarch Abraham and we're looking at his life as he is the the promise bear. God said, Abraham, I'm going to call you out of the rest of humanity and I'm going to bless you. I'm going to bless your family in miraculous ways and I'm going to furthermore make you a blessing to all the nations. And so you and I are heirs of that. We are people of promise because all the way back to Abraham. And we're talking about this. It will come to the climax and conclusion next Sunday. And this Sunday, you get to a passage that you read and you go, I mean, in one sense, you might hear it and you might say it sounds like a couple of, you know, people in a Middle Eastern marketplace haggling over how much something's going to cost. I'll give you 50 for that. No, I'll give you 35. 35 for it, you know. But you say, this is bizarre. And in other sense, when you read on to chapter 19, you say, this, I can't even stomach this. This is talking about judgment, the likes of which I hope I never have to experience or see it anyway. How do you make sense of this passage? It is reality that Abraham has come face to face with. It's a reality check. And I think what we can learn from this passage is how we can better face reality instead of, you know, escaping and diving into someone else's reality. How we can own up to the reality before us, to our own lives, the disappointments, the issue of judgment, how we face that, by looking into the experience of the patriarch Adrian. So how do we confront reality? Well, the passage, I think, tells us you can only confront reality in and through the reality. There is this one who is the creator of the heavens and the earth, the judge of all the universe, and you can only begin to grapple with the things of life that are complicated, the mishaps, the things that you don't want to think are out there, like judgment. You can only make sense of these kinds of things in and through the one who is reality, because we tend to live our life in some sort of subtext of reality. Our own little worlds, our experiences, our fears, our delights, our obsessions. And the interesting thing is these things are very visible to us. They're appealing to our sensory perception. We see them, we smell them, we experience them. And God seems to be just kind of out there from a practical standpoint. These other things are more real than the one who is reality. And yet if you want to make sense of all these other things, like family and career, disappointments, promotions, you're fired. You got to see them in light of the reality. The Psalmist says before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. He's saying imagine the most massive visible object now living in Houston. Maybe this would say before the skyscrapers were brought forth. I don't know, but you can't really see the mountains here. I grew up where your reference point was always the Franklin Mountains, the tail end of the Rocky Mountain chain. Before the mountains were brought forth Leo, imagine there nothing compared to him who is from everlasting to everlasting. He is the reference point. Compass always points to him. If you want to make sense of things, you master that which is real. If you want to become in the secret service division of counterfeit intelligence, you want to figure out how to distinguish between counterfeit currency and that which is authentic, you aren't trained evidently in analyzing all the different forms of inauthentic currency. You master that which is authentic. You pour yourself into it. Then you can much more easily, in light of reality, distinguish that which is not based on that which is. And so reality steers Abraham in the face like a bucket of cold water poured on him. He gets it in this amazing chapter. Contrast him, though, with the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. They're clueless. They're going around in their unbelievable, they're the poster children for the zenith of wickedness and evil. Sodom and Gomorrah, you don't even have to read the Bible. Venture to guess that 98% of the people in our country, you just say Sodom and Gomorrah, and they go, yes, absolute evil, right? Why didn't they get it? Even lots, sons-in-law, when they were confronted with it, they're like, yeah, judgment, that's an agronistic, nice, that's nice, you know, granny talk. But we're mature individuals now. We've arrived. That's passé. Come on. Why did Abraham get it? And they didn't because he entered into the reality. And it's because the reality entered into him. God pursued him. God visited him. Remember, this is right after Sarah laughs in the face of God. You've got these three visitors, two angels and the angel of the Lord, God himself. Two of the two angels are now headed to Sodom and Gomorrah to do basically due diligence for God to ensure this God who is never capricious or arbitrary that indeed this place Sodom and Gomorrah is absolutely due the judgment of Almighty God. And so now God stays back and has first this internal conversation with himself and then a conversation with Abraham. And he lets Abraham into the divine counsel. He envelops Abraham so that he gets it by being connected to the reality while the people of Sodom and Gomorrah miss it. And I want to point out the amazing word here in verse 19. If you have the ESV version, which I'm reading from, it says, for I have chosen him. God speaking about Abraham might have a little footnote or in your translation, it might say the word no. It's the Hebrew word Yadda and it means it means a lot more than cognitive knowledge. You know, a lot of people, especially in reformed theological circles, we are experts at cognitive knowledge of theology, right. But this is talking about a lot more. It is a deep, intimate, experiential knowledge. In fact, you may know this same word is used to speak of the most intimate physical relationship between human beings in marriage. It's already been used that way in the book of Genesis. You know, it talks about so and so knowing another person. It's a euphemism, but it's a beautiful picture. As if to say, a relationship with God is far more than just bare knowledge. It's more than being religious. It's more than doing good deeds. It is being in a uniquely intimate relationship with the Creator God. And when you get in to him and he into you, only then can you make sense of reality. Jesus picked up on this in the New Testament. One of the high watermarks, Gospel of John, chapter 17, Jesus is high priestly prayer. It's the true Lord's prayer and there, Jesus defining reality, said, now, Lord, this is eternal life that they may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. If you want to understand life, if you want to make sense of the ups and downs and the swings of the pendulum of our circumstances, you've got to understand them in light of him who is reality in life. If you want to understand how to, what it's like to swim in the ocean, you don't just read books about it. You don't just get near it. You immerse yourself in it. If you want to understand about what it's like to fly in an airplane, you don't just watch movies on aviation. You get in an airplane and you go fly and you experience it. You've got to get into God so that the rest of the disjointed aspects of life come back into their whole. He was a friend of mine who started a PCA church, our denomination in the village, Greenwich Village of New York City. He recognized that we, after week, this one individual would show up. A man, he would sit on the back row, none of you do, he'd show up late after the service started, and then he'd leave right before the benediction. He was like, gone. And he would always weep in the service. Finally, one Sunday, caught up with this guy and got to know him a little bit, learned that he'd just been through horrific circumstances. He had lost his only child due to terrible illness and as is not uncommon when that happens, led to the repercussions of horrible marital discord and they were going through a divorce right now. And so my friend said, well, why do you come? And the guy answered this way, he said, I come and hold the bread and drink the wine because it reminds me that in spite of everything that I experienced day by day, this, this is real. See, that's the only way to make sense of life. And your temptation, my temptation, is to allow Christianity to allow God to remain kind of in the periphery, abstract. Yeah, we might know our theology, but what is really real to us, our own experiences. And in order for those experiences, those fears, those obsessions, to begin to make sense, we have to bathe ourselves. We have to get into, we have to know God through Jesus Christ. How do you confront reality only in God who is the reality? And then secondly, we can confront the negative bad things about our experience. Now, Sodom and Gomorrah as we've said, was the epitome of evil and wickedness. Wickedness of Sodom left to itself is inevitably doomed. It's the boomerang effect of evil that always comes back. And the people of Sodom had been rescued already once we discovered from Abraham in Genesis 14, but now the axe is beginning to descend and judgment is at hand. It'd be nice if this were just one episode in God's history of things. One little story that we can package night and night and need, and that's that judgment place in the Bible. But the reality is, is that strung throughout the pages of the Bible, ever since our first parents thumb their nose at their creator, this is an issue to deal with. And some of you might have come into your mind a sermon. You may have had, I had to read it freshman year at the University of Texas in an American literature class, Jonathan Edwards centers in the hands of an angry God. And you say, you know, that's just that just seemed so. In fact, I remember in the class, there's supposed to be an example of puritanical colonial America. That's the way it was in the olden days. See, you can find it to one little place. But the Bible throughout is talking about this, the prophets. It's one of their consistent herrings. And you think of the prophet Joel, who would talk about the impending great and terrible day of the Lord, and pictured it as this mass of locust that would descend upon humanity, devouring it. Wow, that just sounds horrible. Jesus himself talked about this day when he would come again in great glory and splendor, that he would separate the sheep from the goats, that everyone, every man, woman and child, regardless of your background, regardless of your religiosity, your irreligiosity, regardless of how righteous or unrighteous you were, you would stand before the judgment seat of Christ. And I don't have a delight. You're going, boy, you get kind of a kick out of talking about this. Now, bad news is not fun to tell anyone. It's not fun to get into these things. But look, if we are not confronted with the bad news, not only does it undermine the amazing goodness of the good news, but it means destruction. You know, just like if I sneaky guy that I am put in a glass of what you thought was a glass of water, a bunch of poison and handed it to you, very thirsty. Just run five miles in the Houston afternoon in the middle of summer. You drink it down. You've just drunk your last glass of anything, right? You say, yeah, but no, I mean, I could say that's your truth, Leo. My truth is that that's water and it's going to nourish me and strengthen me and revitalize me. Hogwash. See, poison is always poison, regardless of whether you believe it to be poison. It will have its impact by definition. And regardless of lots, sun and laws, thoughts that talk of impending judgment was just a joke, it nevertheless is there. And we will all face that. You say, I don't see that in my reality because I've made my reality for myself and I live there. And that's so quintessentially postmodern. But think about it, even in your own reality. When you have all, when you've got your plan all straight, it never goes according to plan. Remember the guy from other movie, Princess Bride, the ball, short guy, inconceivable. You have this little list, you know. And because he had this plan very tightly, you know, he's a tightly one guy anyway and he's got this plan very well put together. And yet at seemingly every turn, it doesn't go the way he planned it. And so he looks in the camera, inconceivable. That's how it is in life. We feel that way, but it's God's plan that is being unfolded progressively. And you say, I don't like to think of God as so harsh and judgmental. Well, really? Do you really not want God to be judgmental? You familiar with PD James, a wonderful British mystery novelist. One of her books, Original Sin, she's got this character named Kate, who's talking to one of her Jewish colleagues. And she says this, there were dozens of different religions among the children at my school. The official line was that all religions were equally important. I must say that the result was to leave me with the conviction that they were equally unimportant. I suppose if you don't teach religion with conviction, it becomes just one more boring subject. Perhaps I'm a natural pagan. I don't go in for all this emphasis on sin, suffering, and judgment. If I had a God, I'd like you to be intelligent. Cheerful. I'm using. And his Jewish colleague said, I doubt whether you'd find him much of a comfort when they heard you into the gas chambers. You might prefer a God of vengeance. You see what he was saying? You see what he was getting at? He's saying, first of all, PD James is saying, look, liberal Christianity may have defanged God, may have taken the bite out of God, but in so doing, he's pretty boring at that point. The spectacular wonder of God's grace shines in the context of his potential and his right to judge. And I mean, you can just look statistically, denominations and churches in our country over the last 50 years that have tended to defang God and throw out the rough edge of his judgment. Those are the churches that are declining in size. And those that have held to the Bible and its understanding, fuller understanding of God, are those churches that have tended to grow. But the main point that is being made by PD James here is, look, you don't want God to be a kindler, gentler being. You don't want him to wink at evil. Because look, think of it in terms of a great example, great meaning horrific. What do you do with the Holocaust? What do you do with Hitler? See, you want there to be a God of vengeance, don't you? You want there to be a day of reckoning where all those wrongs have converged at a judgment seat of a perfectly righteous being who never does wrong. And one of the interesting things about this passage is as God sends his two messengers, these two angels to Sodom. They're going there to ensure what he already knows, but anthropomorphically for our understanding, for our minds. So we understand God is not capricious in arbitrary. That he has surveyed things perfectly and he always does what is just and fair and right. We don't want God to be defamed. So what do I do when I'm confronted by bad news? Well, you immerse yourself in the reality of God himself as we've said and you do so by immersing yourself in his word. See, that's the difference between Abraham and the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham was responding to God's word and he was praying. He was engaging with God. He was known by God and knowing God and pursuing Him. And we need to allow, as Abraham did, the word of God to challenge us. John Stott has put it this way, we need to repent of the hottie way in which we sometimes stand in judgment upon Scripture and must learn to sit humbly under its judgment instead. If we come to Scripture with our minds made up expecting to hear from it only an echo of our own thoughts and never the thunder clap of God's, then indeed he will not speak to us and we shall only be confirmed in our own prejudices. We must allow the word of God to confront us, to disturb our security, to undermine our complacency and to overthrow our patterns of thought and behavior. How do we confront reality by confronting it in the one who is reality? Then we've got the context. We're armed to be able to deal with the disappointments of life and the difficult things that otherwise don't make sense like God's judgment. But it doesn't end there. The Christian message never ends with the bad news, as you know. Upon the canvas of God's word, the bad news forms the context for the spectacular brilliance of the good news to shine forth. And you're saying, Leo, that's my flowery language, but I'm looking at this passage and you're doing some fancy maneuvering here because I don't see any good news in this passage. I see a lot of sinners in the hands of an angry God and bizarre goings on between Abraham and God going back and forth on this. What in the world can you say is good about this? Abraham was in a panic, no doubt. And he is, you know, if you've ever found yourself in a conversation where your words are a little bit ahead of your thought process. I mean, you know, you're kind of stumbling over himself here, grasping, groping, reaching, but not in vain. He's reaching for something future, a future reality. And Dick Lucas, who is a great Bible teacher in London, pointed me in this direction, that what Abraham is dealing with here is a notion that is mysterious and veiled in the Old Testament and emerges brightly, concretely in the New, that the righteous can save the unrighteous. I think God, certainly you're not going to get rid of this entire city. I'll beat it. It's wicked. It's evil. But if there's 50 people that are righteous there, will you spare the whole city? Abraham is a concern for the whole city. Will you spare the whole city for the sake of the righteous? What about if there's 45? I know I'm ash and dust as I don't have any reason to be able to talk to you, but what about 30 and 20 and 10 and then the conversations over? Because Abraham's probably doing some of the math in his head and he's realizing, well, but I know all those people. And chapter 19 makes it very clear. There aren't any righteous there. You say, what about lot? Well, we've already learned a lot about lot and it's not very good. Lot himself dishonored his senior uncle. He was prideful and arrogant. Remember and chose the fertile land when he should have deferred to his uncle. And what about his family? Well, you just have to read a little further in chapter 19. After Sodom and Gomorrah has been destroyed, you'd think, boy, that would sober them to reality. And all sorts of wickedness pursued by his daughters. See, there's no righteous in Sodom and Gomorrah. And the interesting thing is in Ezekiel 16, God actually says that Jerusalem, the city of God, was more wicked than Sodom and Gomorrah. No righteous in the good city. What about Houston? You say, yeah, I know there's all sorts of centers out there. You just have to drive down this street to Mewsee. All those Sodomites, right? Just see Abraham wasn't righteous either. And yet there was some amazing way in which God was willing to bless him. In this veiled shorthand language, he says in verse 18, that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation. All the nations of the earth will be blessed in him. If you're connected to Abraham, you can experience those blessings. But Abraham himself, we've seen over and over and over again, was a frail man. He shifted and shaded the truth on occasion. He took around about way on following God's will. He wasn't the righteous man that could save the unrighteous. But he pointed to the promised one who was. Jesus, the perfectly righteous one, the only perfectly righteous one, fulfills what is given to us in preview. Shadow, we form here that yes, the righteous can save the unrighteous. And that's not because God passes over evil. It's because he brought judgment upon the one righteous one. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me, Jesus, cried out? It's a rhetorical question to point us back to the old testament to remind us why the father turned his face from the son for a time. Because in his beloved son in whom he was well pleased, who was perfectly righteous, the father of great glory and judgment poured out his wrath in the one place he would have been least inclined to do so upon his son. And through the righteous son, the wicked, we are saved. Do you believe that? Do you know that reality check that if you want to live in reality, ironically you have to live in someone else's reality? Maybe that's why we like reality TV, I don't know. Because we want to live in order to live. We have to live in the reality of Jesus, his death for us. Do you live in that reality? It doesn't end there. We're almost through. But in this passage, what God makes clear in this internal conversation he has with himself is that Abraham would be a blessing to his family and to the entire world. It's Abraham's instrumental role now to be the one through whom the righteous saving work of Jesus Christ is experienced by others. So the blessings that were given to Abraham fully coming to fruition in Jesus might be known by him. And that same legacy, that same beautiful responsibility is yours in mind. Let me ask you the question in your home, and this is deeply convicting to me, in your home, are you a blessing bearer? Are you an instrument of grace? Or are you like the soup Nazi? It's one of my favorite episodes in Seinfeld. The soup Nazi who's this very peculiar, eccentric master chef of soup with an erratic temper, and if you don't order just correctly, he says, no soup for you, one year. All right, are you like the soup Nazi in your home in the workplace? Doing transactions? People who don't do the things you want them to do. You say, no grace for you, one year. Is that your motto? It's deeply convicting to me. But because we see ourselves as no different than the people who lived in Sodom and Gomorrah, equally deserving of God's wrath and displeasure and yet the recipients only of his amazing inimitable love because of that, because the righteous one saved the unrighteous. We can in turn be the incarnation of that grace and love to people that we would not otherwise love. The people we look down our nose that. Do you look down your nose at rich people? Do you look down your nose at the person on the street corner holding up the will work for food sign? Do you look down your nose at people that don't look like you that don't smell right? Jesus poured out his life for us. And where the recipients of that blessing and the instrument now to take that blessing to others. Proverbs 11-11 says, by the blessing of the upright, a city is exalted. By the blessing of Jesus Christ, through those he has declared righteous by his blood, this city, Houston, Texas, can experience the redemption of Almighty God. How do you confront reality? Only in God who is the reality. And then you can confront the reality of the bad news head on because you know it provides the context for the amazing news of God's love. Father, thank you for your inimitable love that there is now no condemnation, no judgment for those who are in Jesus, the promised sign, in his name we pray. Amen.