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Sin's Downgrade In thisway we are taught to fear sin as that which has effects long after -- years after in this case -- that were never calculated, never imagined, and yet, once certain original choices have been made, can scarcely be avoided. Sin is a poison, but a sweet-tasting and, at least very often and in one respect, a slow-acting poison. One drinks with pleasure and only discovers that he has killed himself when it is too late. Now the progress of evil, the final and fatal consequences of Lot's sinful choices early on, are presented to us here in a kind of ascending order of magnitude. We begin in a cave and end in the pagan rituals of Canaan. I. We begin with the obvious losses of worldly status, pleasure, and prestige that Lot suffered on account of his choosing to settle in Sodom, to make his peace with the worldly men who lived there rather than to remain a pilgrim at his Uncle Abraham's side. At least by the time Lot returned to Canaan with his Uncle after the sojourn in Egypt, he was a wealthy man with large herds and a sizeable household, including a large number of retainers, men who watched his flocks and herds and protected his family. It was precisely his wealth, the size of his herds and the number of his servants that made it impossible for Lot and Abraham to occupy the same real estate. We find him at the last living in a cave, his household, his flocks, his homes, his money gone. He is the Lord of a hole in the rock and a dirt floor where he lives with his two daughters, miserable young women whose lives have likewise been devastated with loss. Now, it is certain Lot never intended this exchange when he chose Sodom for his place of residence. He came there because he imagined that he would prosper and enjoy a good life and much pleasure, which he did for a time -- apart from his troubled conscience. It was no part of his plan, when he chose to live in the valley among wicked men, to end up destitute. But, looking back on that history, it is obvious that his first decision had led inexorably to that result and could have led to no other. And in how many ways is this an illustration of the wages of sin and even of sin in a Christian's life -- for, we have already said, as the Bible teaches us to say, that Lot was a believing man. Think of Israel in Solomon's day, when they hardly bothered to weigh and count the silver in the imperial treasury because there was so much gold and then think of that same kingdom reduced to the ruins of Jerusalem, stripped of all her former glory, and the nearby suburbs -- not unlike the last days of the Third Reich, once the ruler of all Europe, now a few city blocks of rubble near the center of what remained of Berlin. What explains the fall of Solomon's great kingdom --at one time the greatest empire in the world, the wealthiest, the envy of all kingdoms-- except that sins committed already then, sins injected into the well-head of the national life already in Solomon's day, had eventually poisoned the whole broad stream of Israel's life. But, this is the least part of this dismal story of downgrade. II. Second, Lot's early sins led to the systemic moral corruption of his family, a corruption that by an unchanging principle could only grow deeper with time. We see this in Lot, of course. This proud, confident, worldly man, this successful man, who, with so little regard for the interests of God or his own soul, chose a course he thought would bring him still greater prosperity and worldly success, we see now timid, heartless, afraid to stay in Zoar even though he had been given by an angel of God an assurance of his safety there. And then, in the next scene, we see him more than slightly pathetic, the dupe of his own daughters. Far from controlling his fields and his workforce any longer, he doesn't even have control of his own body. This did not happen all at once. It takes some time for the first hit to become full blown addiction, for the first drink to become drunkenness, for the first entertainment of the thought of one's own superiority to become bigotry and hatred. And so it was with Lot. First he sowed a thought and then he reaped a deed; then he sowed some further deeds and reaped a habit; then he sowed some habits and reaped a character and out of that character came other thoughts -- worse still -- and the process began again, taking Lot deeper and deeper into the patterns, the attitudes, the responses and the consequences of sin. [Plantinga on Sin, p. 70] And, what of the daughters themselves, raised in this believing man's family, but willing, for their own sakes, to dishonor their father, to get him to do what they knew he would never do if he were not drunk; to commit a crime that nature itself recoils from as do all men and women with any vestiges of a conscience left. His daughters had become true Sodomites. It is not impossible; perhaps it is quite likely, that they had heard their father on many occasions warn them of the ways of Sodom, Peter tells us that Lot knew how evil his neighbors were and that Lot had a conscience about it. If that is so, is it not likely that he had spoken to his daughters and taught them right and wrong and trust in God. But, his own example had rendered his words powerless. If Sodom was that bad, his daughters had concluded, then why did their father choose it for a place to live? And so Sodom exerted its influence upon them and we see that influence full-blown here. They are willing to betray the most sacred of relationships for their own personal gain -- with total disregard of any consideration of the will of God --, not only do they have the sophistication to justify the unjustifiable, as they do in v. 31 (it is unpleasant but necessary; there is no other way; the ends justify the means; etc.), but, what is more, they have the worldly savoir-faire to know how to do it. Their righteous father -- so weakened by his sins -- is just befuddled. But they are in control and their wicked plan goes off like clockwork. And so it was that Lot's sinful choice, his inconsistency as a believer, his failure to live as becomes the followers of God and Christ, became in the next generation not only the open embrace of wickedness, but a skillful, determined practice of it. As Augustine put it, "Sin becomes the punishment of sin." Why does God visit sin as punishment for sin? Because it is the most fitting and the truest punishment, it best fits the crime. It is what the sinner has asked for! Now every sin holds within itself every conceivable evil development and will produce it if left alone. It not only will produce it, it must, by a fixed law. Or, as Daniel Rowland, the great preacher of Wales during the Great Awakening, once put it: "Where there is one true grace, there is every true grace; by allowing one sin we receive thousands of sins, they are like beggars, once you receive one you must receive many, the second more persistent than the first, so that there is no way to get rid of them but to close the door against them. A thousand sins lie in the womb of one sin, and they are like bees, one lot swarming from another." [Evans, p. 361] That is, in fact, what hell is: the full development, the ripe fruit of the sins that the unsaved have committed. It is the place where simple unkindness has finally developed into full-blown malice and murderous hatred -- always wishing to kill, never being able to destroy. It is the place where selfishness becomes the full-blown adoration of oneself that excludes from view all other human beings, and turns them into nothing more than the servants of one's self-love. It is the place where all lust becomes rape, the using of one human being for oneself without regard to the other person. But, already in this world, the tendency of sin to foster still deeper sin, to corrupt and defile, to deaden hearts and deafen consciences, is a great fact, if not the great fact of human society. Paul makes this point in Romans 1 in his exposition of the sinfulness of man. He puts it there not in terms of sin's intrinsic power to corrupt and to increase its hold on the human mind and will, but in terms of God's punishing the sinful choices of men by giving them over to their sins. If this is what they wish to do, he will let them do it. And as their sinfulness increases, God judges it by giving them over to still more of the same that they have chosen. The picture he paints there is of consciences becoming gradually, step by step, more and more seared, of lusts requiring more and more deeply sinful practices to sate them, of human life become increasingly unnatural and ugly but, at the same time, increasingly unwilling and unable to admit it. Paul says that the process is completed when evil is not only tolerated but actively approved and fostered. A society, in other words, may begin by worshipping pleasure or power instead of God, but the result is that finally that society worships evil itself. And we have the proof of that before our very eyes. It is so blatant that one does not have to be a Bible-believing Christian to see it. In a column that might have been a reflection on Paul's discussion of sin's descent in Romans 1, George Will, commenting on the vicious lyrics of some modern music, wrote: "America's slide into the sewer is greased by praise." Execrable 'lyrics' by rap groups -- lyrics that exult in hurting and humiliating women -- get defended by the nation's most prestigious newspaper editors. Do rap groups celebrate busting and sucking and puking? Do they package the celebration and sell it to teens? 'Not to worry,' yawn the New York Times editorialists. 'The history of music is the story of innovative, even outrageous styles that interacted, adapted, and became mainstream.' When busting...women becomes 'mainstream' entertainment,' says Will, 'this will be an interesting country.' But, that slide will not be the first. It has happened to societies all through history as it is happening to ours, because God visits sin with sin, his punishment of those who rebel against him is to give them over to their rebellion and to let it run its course. And when that happens men can be found defending the most vicious evil, the most disgusting impurities with the highest sounding moral fervor. As an ancient Jewish rabbi once put it: "At first, sin is like an occasional visitor, then like a guest who stays for awhile, and finally like the master of the house." And the terrible thing, the frightening thing, is that the person who has lost all moral bearings because of his or her sins, because the effect of sin in him or her has been to pollute the mind and weaken the will and corrupt the conscience so thoroughly that good is thought to be evil and evil good, and so the downward spiral to hell is thought all the while to be an ascent to heaven. Chuck Colson tells us that one of his witnessing tools is Woody Allen's film "Crimes and Misdemeanors," which is a study of sin and its effect on a man's conscience. The film's protagonist is a successful ophthalmologist, Judah Rosenthal, loving husband and father, respected community leader. But his pleasant life is shattered one day when he opens a letter meant for his wife. It is from his mistress and threatens to expose the good doctor's dark side. Judah isn't normally religious, but in panic he consults a rabbi friend. The rabbi urges him to confess his sin to God and to his wife and seek forgiveness. Rosenthal isn't ready to do that however. God, he says, is a luxury one cannot afford in the real world in which he must live. Remembering the teachings of his childhood, he worries about an all-seeing God but he worries more about disrupting his successful, well-ordered life. And all the more when his mistress demands blackmail. So, Rosenthal confides in his mobster brother who offers a way out. For a price, the mistress can be killed. He agonizes, but as the woman's demands continue he finally agrees. She must be silenced. Judah's brother comes calling one night during a cocktail party at the Rosenthal home to tell Judah that the deed has been done, the mistress has been shot and killed opening a door for a delivery man. As his guests clink their glasses in the background, we see Judah agonizing over the terrible deed he has done. But, then, concern for himself reasserts itself. He rushes to his mistress' apartment to remove any evidence of their affair. Her body is lying on the floor in a pool of blood as he searches. For a time he is tormented by the sight of her body; he cannot sleep or he has nightmares of her dead eyes staring at the ceiling. Those images merge in his dreams with images of the Holocaust and of an Avenging God. He teeters on the brink of breakdown or confession, but, as it happens, he does neither. As time passes, he is amazed to discover that his wife never learns of the affair, the crime is blamed on a burglar convicted of similar killings, his marriage prospers, his business thrives and he manages to lie convincingly to his rabbi. Finally, the nightmares stop. As the movie ends, Rosenthal recounts what he has learned: rationalize sin, deny guilt, and then "life can go on better than ever." But, of course, it is not one murder but two that have been committed: the mistress and Rosenthal's conscience. [CT (2/11/91)] Now, how poignant, how frightening, several years later to listen to Woody Allen himself, trying to explain his affair with the young daughter of Mia Farrow, saying simply, "The heart wants what it wants." If I want it, in other words, it must be good! And, if you don't like what I'm doing, you must be evil." The director has become his character. The conscience is silent, no, not silent; rather, approving of what it once deplored. There is an almost perfect description of the moral landscape of our time. Lot didn't plan on this either when he chose to settle among the worldly folk who lived in the cities of the plain. He thought he was only choosing prosperity and ease. But what he was really choosing was a principle of corruption that would turn his daughters into women who would degrade themselves with their own father and think it a triumph of ingenuity! III. Third, and, if you can believe it, still worse, Lot's sins in his own generation led, through the generations to entire peoples whose sojourn in this world was a grief to God and misery to man. Now, the author of Genesis was Moses and he wrote the book when Israel was in the wilderness, a pilgrim people on their way to the Promised Land. No wonder that he should be interested in the origins of those peoples who would be Israel's neighbors and, also, Israel's tempters. Ammon and Moab were two such peoples. And the history of Israel's encounter with these peoples would prove to be the history of unending trouble and misery for Israel. Imagine Lot -- the nephew of Abraham and himself a righteous man -- siring, Moab, the nation that was destined to lead Israel into one of the worst episodes of debauchery in its history (the incident reported in Numbers 25) and Ammon, who was to prove one of Israel's longest lived enemies and its undoing -- spiritually and militarily -- many times. Some of the wives that led Solomon astray were Ammonite women, and, no wonder. Their religion was so debauched that in Deuteronomy 23:3 we read in the law that no Ammonite or Moabite may enter the assembly of the Lord down to the 10th generation. How many times has this happened in our world! A great evil, a greatly evil people that had their origins in righteous people making sinful choices in the teeth of God's truth and goodness and the Lord granting them their evil as the punishment for choosing it. I have seen this with my own eyes, my friends, and it is a terrible thing to see; the greatest loss, the greatest waste in all the world. Young people, especially, listen to me. The warning of this text is that you should be afraid of sin. As John Bunyan wrote: "Be afraid of sins: they are like bloodhounds at the heels." But, the warning here is more than just that. It is this: the greatest thing to fear in sinning against God is not what may come immediately from that sin -- bad as that may be. The greatest thing to fear by far is that by choosing to let that sin into your life you have let into your heart and your mind and your conscience a seed of corruption, a drop of poison that may, in time, carry you far from God and from righteousness, so far that you won't even be able any longer to tell the difference between good and evil. You will be like Lot's daughters and be offended that Christian people condemn you for what you have done. Who are they to judge me, you will say, in that high tone of moral outrage. I have seen this too, and it is a terrifying thing to see -- young men and women whose first sins led to others, to habits of life that have completely blinded them to their later sins which are greater and more ugly and more dangerous by far. What we have in this sordid history in Genesis 19 is a warning to reckon not with the immediate consequences of sin, but far more with the eventual consequences of that seed of sin, that principle of sin which sins we commit inject into our souls. Where that may take us and how far from God and the hope of salvation, no one knows. But, where sin so terribly abounds, as in this disgusting and tragic tale, God has not left his grace and mercy without a witness. In the midst of this solemn warning, there is some encouragement too! For you remember the history of Moab. A dismal history all in all, but with one very bright moment. For centuries later there would be a Moabitess named Ruth who came to live in Israel. And she was a woman of true faith in God and of a pure conscience. And she married an Israelite man of good conscience himself, and they had children and from their descendants would finally come Jesus of Nazareth, the Savior of the world! |
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