"Abraham's Audacity"
Gen. 18:16-33
Feb. 16, 1997 

Text Comments

v.16 The conversation so far has been about Sarah's impending pregnancy. Nothing has been said about Sodom. The following verses have the form of a divine soliloquy, unless we are to understand the Lord speaking to the other two with him (angels as is said directly in 19:1).

v.19 So far, all we have been told that Abraham must do in regard to his children is that he must see to the circumcision of his sons. Here we learn that much more was involved; the spiritual nurture of their lives. Here we learn that the promise God made to be the God of Abraham's descendants was to be fulfilled by means of this godly nurture. The promise had a condition. Often the way the Scripture teaches the whole truth. The promise in one place, the condition in another

v.21 "The Lord said" at the beginning of v. 20 suggests that these words were said so that Abraham could hear them. His statement is ominous because it closely resembles what was said about the world before the flood in 6:5. That judgment should fall on the cities seems almost certain, but God's "if not, I will know" leaves a little hope and it is on this basis that Abraham now bases his appeal.

v.22 "Then the men..." "but Abraham stood before the Lord"...all through this passage, from 18:1 the exact identity of these men and the relationship between them and "the Lord" is shrouded in mystery. It is all mysterious, much unknown; as always when man stands before the divine world.

v.25 There is, of course, a sense in which Abraham's argument is not entirely valid. Later on we will be shown instances of the righteous suffering along with the wicked for the sins of the wicked and this theological problem is addressed in a number of places in the Bible, the book of Ecclesiastes but one of them. Jesus Christ himself is the supreme example of God's treating the righteous as if he were wicked for reasons of his sovereign plan and purpose for the world. Still, the point is ultimately valid. God will not finally treat the wicked and the righteous alike. In any case, God accepts the logic of Abraham's argument in this particular case.

In verse 23 we have the first instance in Holy Scripture of a man initiating a conversation with God. We will have many more as the Scripture unfolds and for that reason and because of an increasingly cavalier attitude about God that has developed in the church of late, we are in danger of not appreciating what an astonishing thing this conversation really is. What an astonishing thing is any conversation between a human being and Almighty God!

Abraham himself seems to have some sense of this and of the dangerous ground upon which he is treading when he presumes to speak to God. He has heard God speak to him before, of course, and in every case, the awe of God had fallen upon him. Twice in chapter 17 we read of God speaking to Abraham and of Abraham immediately falling on his face before God. Here he is very careful to indicate that he fully understands the unnatural, the seemingly altogether inappropriate place he has taken in speaking back to God. "Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes..." "May not the Lord be angry, but let me speak..." "May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more..."

But, there is not nearly enough of Abraham's reticence, his reserve, even his fear in approaching God among Christians today. The notion of God's tremendous holiness, of the Divine Mystery, of that glory that no man has seen or can see, is far removed from the consciousness of most Christian people today and far too far removed from yours and mine. We come into this house -- ostensibly to come into God's presence and to speak to him, as Abraham did -- but there is little of Abraham's worry that speaking to God, that uttering our mind to the Almighty is not always an entirely safe thing to do. Generations of Israel were destroyed because they came into God's house and spoke to him improperly, irreverently, because there was no fear of God before their eyes.

Listen to this recent description of the contemporary American church service and see if it does not expose you in just this carelessness about God and in coming to him.

Worshippers gather as though attending a football game or a movie, arriving breathless from the parking lot, laughing with ushers, waving at friends -- as though it were entirely natural for humans to meet God. No big deal, it seems, to encounter the Lord of the universe. In evangelical churches the service often moves through chatty certainties about God; happy smiles radiate from smooth-talking preachers who demonstrate absolutely no reticence to speak on behalf of the Almighty.... the affair has all the mystery of a meeting of the city zoning commission. [McCullough, The Trivialization of God, p. 57.]

It would do us all a great deal of God to recover the full conviction of the fact that God destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and the other three cities of the plain and destroyed them so completely that not a stone is left of those cities and the fertile plain they once occupied is now among the driest desert in the world, partly covered by the most lifeless body of water in the world, still today surrounded by pits of tar and the stench of sulphur. What Abraham and God were talking about was the catastrophic unleashing of divine wrath!

We have so far domesticated God, and trivialized him -- in large part by ignoring all that Holy Scripture so plainly and emphatically reveals of His terrible wrath -- that when we speak of God being holy we only mean that he is "polite" and when Christians speak of his love, they do not really mean that titanic emotion that alone, at the center of the world, turned away the ferocity of His vengeance against our sin and by the most desperate measures that could ever be conceived made a way for us to be saved -- to be saved, just saved from the vengeance of that same holy God. No, by the love of God, they just mean he is nice and well-intentioned and wants to do good to folk.

People don't exactly utter the words -- though some ministers do nowadays -- but they have come to think like Angelus Silesius, the Catholic mystic who thought he was being particularly spiritual, in his meditation on the text: God is love, that he came eventually to think it meant that God, being love, needed us as the objects of his love.

I know that without me God cannot an instant be.
He needs must perish at once, were death to come to me.
God loveth me alone, he holdeth me so dear
That if I love him not, he dieth of anxious fear.
Nought is but I and thou, and if we two are not,
Then God is no more God, and heaven itself is nought.

Karl Barth refers to this poem as pious blasphemy and wonders if the Roman Catholic bishop who gave it his imprimatur was an imbecile. God is love, absolutely, but his is a love of holiness, majesty, sovereignty, that existed without us for eternity past. The eternal God does not need us, even as the objects of his love. Yet, Silesius is not far off in describing the practical view of many evangelicals today, who have come to look at God as living for them.

In American Christianity today no longer do we exist to give glory to God. He exists to glorify us! The Word of God is true no longer because it comes from the Mouth of the Living God to whom we must subject ourselves absolutely, no questions asked, but because it helps me in some way, gives me a lift in the face of my problems. If it doesn't, if, in fact, it causes me more problems and pain and requires more sacrifice of me, I am free to ignore it. So much for trembling at the Word of God!

But think, with me, brothers and sisters, about some of the men in all of human history who got nearest to God, who knew him much better than you and I do, who saw him more clearly for what he is than you and I do.

Think of Jacob, who not only talked, but actually wrestled with the Lord one long night. But, who stood amazed as the morning dawned because he saw God face to face and yet his life was spared (32:30). Or, consider Moses, who had to take off his shoes that he might stand on the holy ground where the bush was burning from which God spoke to him. He, at one point, asked to see God's glory. He had already seen the terrible storm and lightning and heard the thunder that terrified Israel, cowering at the feet of Mt. Sinai. But he wanted to see God's glory itself. And you remember how God answered that request. He could not allow Moses -- even Moses, the great man -- to see his glory. It would destroy him. But he could see the aftereffects of it, but, even for that, God had to hide Moses in the cleft of a rock and cover him with his hand (Ex. 33:21-23).

Or take the prophet Isaiah, who, once when he was in the temple, was given to see a vision of God high and lifted up. And he saw the angels and heard them singing God's praise and declaring his glory. And even the angels, who are always beholding the face of God, always in the presence of his glory, were using two of their wings to cover their faces before God and two to cover their feet in his presence. And Isaiah had no sooner seen God and heard the thunder of the "Sanctus" sung by a great choir of seraphim, than he fell to his face crying "Woe to me! I am ruined!" This was a good man, a godly man, laid waste by the glory of God.

Or, consider Paul himself, next to the Lord Christ, history's greatest man. Not only was his first sight of the glory of Christ a catastrophic moment in his life, which left him blind, but, much later, he was granted a vision, perhaps a still greater vision than Isaiah was given to see, a vision of heaven and of the glory of God in heaven, and he tells us that so terrible and so wonderful was that vision that he was forbidden to speak of what he saw, even to other Christians! No wonder that near the end of his life he should write to Timothy of "God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see. To him be honor and might forever!"

Or, finally, think of John, the disciple whom Jesus loved. This is the man who, the night of the last supper in the Upper Room, laid his head on the Redeemer's chest. But, those were the days of our Lord's humiliation, the days when his deity, his Godhead, his divine glory were hidden. Only once had John seen a glimpse of Christ's divine glory -- on the Mountain the night of the Lord's transfiguration -- and then, the Gospels tell us, he was terrified. But, here he was laying his head on the Lord's chest, the night of his betrayal. But, jump forward to John, now an old man, on Patmos Island. Now he is given to see the same Jesus Christ again, but this time in the Lord's glory as God the Son. "His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. His feet were like bronze, glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance." When John saw him, he tells us "I fell at his feet as though dead."

All these men knew God better than you or I know Him, all of them had much more experience of God and of God's glory than you and I have had. And yet, the sight of that glory, just the sight of as much of it as a man could tolerate, could endure, absolute unmanned them, unnerved them, devastated them.

And we come tripping into church with nary a thought to what terror, to what stupefaction, it would be to us actually to the see the God we have come to worship.

You children remember the Narnia story of The Horse and His Boy. In that book, C.S. Lewis tells the tale of a horse, Bree, and the boy who rides him, Shasta. In their adventures they meet up with another horse, Hwin and her young rider, Aravis. And maybe you remember the scene, near the end of the story, when Bree is scoffing at Aravis' suggestion that Aslan, the great King of Narnia, might actually be a real lion. As he talks on so glibly, he fails to notice that Hwin and Aravis are staring wide-eyed at something on the wall behind him

[While] Bree spoke they saw an enormous lion leap up from the outside and balance itself on the tope of the green wall; only it was a brighter yellow and it was bigger and more beautiful and more alarming than any lion they had ever seen. And at once it jumped down inside the wall and began approaching Bree from behind. It made no noise at all. And Hwin and Aravis couldn't make any noise themselves, no more than if they were frozen.

"No doubt," continued Bree, "when they speak of him as a Lion they only mean that he's as strong as a lion or...as fierce as a lion. Or something of that kind. Even a little girl like you, Aravis, must see it would be quite absurd to suppose he is a real lion. Indeed it would be disrespectful. If he was a lion he'd have to be a Beast just like the rest of us. Why!" (and here Bree began to laugh) "If he was a lion he'd have four paws, and a tail, and WHISKERS! ...Aie, ooh, hoo-hoo, Help!"

For just as he said the word WHISKERS one of Aslan's had actually tickled his ear. Bree shot away like an arrow to the other side of the enclosure and there turned; the wall was too high for him to jump and he could fly no farther. Aravis and Hwin both started back....

"Now, Bree," [Aslan] said, "you poor, proud, frightened Horse, draw near. Nearer still, my son. Do not dare not to dare. Touch me. Smell me. Here are my paws, here is my tail, there are my whiskers. I am a true Beast."

"Aslan," said Bree in a shaken voice, "I'm afraid I must be rather a fool."

"Happy the Horse who knows that while he is still young. Or the Human either."

[Version in McCullough, pp. 67-68]

Now, you see, it is the awareness of God's transcendent glory alone, it is the fear of God, it is the sense of his holiness, his perfection, his justice, and his power together as a genuine threat to us who are his sinful creatures, it is, even if I may so say, the sense of cowering before the Almighty in his terrible Majesty -- for that is the true and living God! -- that makes possible a true appreciation of the absolutely astonishing fact that Abraham is having what amounts to an argument with this God.

This is the really astonishing, the really surprising, the really breathtaking thing! Not that God is a God of terrible glory and infinite power and justice and holy vengeance. We can gather most of that from the creation and the awful realities of sin and punishment in this world -- if we will only stop to think about it with an honest mind. What is utterly unexpected is that a mere man, a sinful man, the merest creature of God's hand, should be permitted to stand and talk to God in the way Abraham talked to him.

And, of course, it is God who permits it, even invites it! That much is clear from the narrative. The initiative in Abraham's intercession with God was all with God himself. He broached the subject himself, to let Abraham know what he was intending to do. He stood waiting, inviting Abraham to speak, as v. 22 suggests. And God chose the point at which the conversation would end and the matter be closed, as v. 33 makes clear.

If you think of God as even the modern Christian now thinks of God, this conversation between Abraham and God will surprise you very little; you will hardly note it or think about it. But, if you have any notion of God as he is, and as he has been revealed to us in Holy Scripture -- the notion you would overwhelmingly have, to your own terror, in an instant as your knees went to water if you were to behold the glory of God, as a few men and women have in the history of this world, this would strike you as simply the most astonishing and the most wonderful thing that could be conceived. That you could speak to a God such as this God and that he would listen to what you have to say to him. Oh, how respectfully, and carefully, and cautiously you would speak, even more cautiously than Abraham spoke, who was speaking to God in a human guise, and who did not then see God's terrible glory. But, how wonderful it would be to be able to speak to the true and living God. What an unspeakable privilege! What an honor! Why, such a conversation would be to you the unlocking of all the secrets of human life and of the universe; just to have a few words of your own with the living God.

Through Isaiah the prophet (57:15) the Lord says:

"For this is what the High and Lofty One says--he who lives forever, whose name is holy: I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit..."

And that is, in a nutshell, what Christianity proclaims to the world: that the living God is very High, terribly High, and that to offend him and to incur his wrath exposes men and women to inevitable, inescapable devastation and desolation. But, this same God, when one comes to him on his knees, seeking forgiveness through his Son, Jesus Christ, is gracious, fatherly, gentle, patient, and generous of himself. And all the words in all possible worlds cannot tell how wonderful it is for a sinful man to know that glorious God. To know him so as to be able to speak to him, to open one's heart to him, and know that he will listen.

"Behold," Paul says, "the goodness and the severity of God."

And stand amazed, if you are a Christian, that you know both together!

This conversation -- Abraham's with God and your also if you are a Christian -- is the most wonderful thing that can be conceived -- and all eternity, in heaven before the glory of God -- will not persuade you otherwise.

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