Some scholars and theologians will debate why the Lord poured out His wrath on Sodom and Gomorrah, probably in an attempt to justify their bloated academic salaries but more likely to excuse the blatant sexual sin, such as homosexuality.
An obvious verse to cite is Ezekiel 16:49-50:
Look, this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: She and her daughter had pride, fullness of food, and abundance of idleness; neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty and committed abomination before Me; therefore I took them away as I saw fit.
Ezekiel 16:49-50
The argument would then be made that the mystery of Sodom and Gomorrah’s sin was that they were prideful and inhospitable because we know pride has nothing to do with homosexuality and other sexual sins, right?
Of course, in context, Ezekiel 16 condemns Israel for her harlotry and much more, comparing her to Sodom and other nations, accusing her of much worse to the point of them seeming almost guiltless by contrast.
There are 27 biblical references to Sodom outside of Genesis, and when taken together with what the Lord declared to be “grave sin,” a picture emerges of a grave, ongoing, lawless, sensuous activity—that Lot saw and heard and that tormented him as he witnessed it day after day.
They were going after strange flesh in pursuit of carnal pleasure to such an extent that not even the blindness the angels gave them could stop it.
It quickly becomes apparent to me that we do ourselves a disservice when we dismiss the mystery of Sodom and Gomorrah as being solely about homosexuality or not at all about it because the true point of the Lord’s destruction of Sodom is that the wages of sin is death and in this case, death valley with a dead sea.
We are witnessing the same thing today as the cult of self-love permeates so much of our society.
The United States just finished its celebration of pride month, that if we’re honest, never really ends. During this month, we championed the right of people to declare themselves to be whatever they wanted and literally paraded our debauchery through the streets of American cities and encouraging our children to cheer it on and even participate.
This week saw testimony before congress on abortion, where many women declared the sacrifice of their children on the altar of humanism to be an act of self-love, hence the term cult.
If we are honest, self-love brings about hatred. Ezekiel points this out in verse 44 when he points out that these women loath their husbands and children. Hatred in the heart leads to murder, as Jesus points out, not just the murder of children but of the very nature of reality itself.
The heart of the abortion argument is the idea that women should be the same as men in the ability not to be pregnant to the point of having sex without commitment and defining the resulting children as not living humans but mere clusters of cells.
Warping creation in this way doesn’t end in just the killing of children and the death of meaningful relationships between men and women but in the destruction of the foundations of humanity itself.
The very same testimony before congress that revealed the murder of children to be an act of self-love exposed the foolishness of the over-educated as they, with arrogance, declared that men could give birth too, along with so-called non-binary people.
At the same time, we have many men who call themselves women, though they are not, admitting that they compete against women and children in various sports to affirm who they are and because it feels good.
The mystery of why Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed is not such a mystery after all. The sin was grave. Homosexuality was certainly at the forefront, but that was only symptomatic of a vast number of sins.
What we witness in our society today reveals the true nature of this mystery which is revealed in Romans chapter one from verse 18 to the end of the chapter. When we deny God and suppress the truth, it leads to more sin.
The cult of self-love is deadly because it is self-loathing. Eventually, that sin gets so bad it destroys the people who embrace it.
The Lord has often stepped in and dealt with societies and nations through localized judgment, but I believe we are near tribulation’s edge where this is allowed to metastasize to a global scale for a final reckoning.
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