How Many People Would Have Saved Sodom and Gomorrah?

Growing up Christian, I’ve often heard our country compared to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Jesus says it will be better for Sodom and Gomorrah on judgment day than cities that reject his disciples. I think we pick up that language when talking about judgment in our current culture.

I think we say that as a threat, “you better behave or you’ll get it worse than Sodom and Gomorrah.” I don’t want to make light of God’s judgment, it’s not fun.

But if you actually read the story in Genesis, what sticks out to you?

What sticks out to me isn’t that they’re both bad places and deserve God’s judgment (they do). What sticks out to me is that God is willing to have mercy on them if he finds righteous people there.

This super evil place, that wants to rape visitors, God is willing to withhold judgment if he finds righteous people there.

This seems to be from Abram’s asking. His first plea starts at 50 righteous people, then works its way down to 10. If God had found 10 righteous people he would have had mercy on both cities.

Are you more committed to seeing God’s judgment handed out to people? Or being the 10 righteous people in your current situation?

That was Jonah’s problem. He just wanted God’s judgment, he didn’t want to see his enemies turn to God.

Jesus calls us the salt of the earth. This analogy is probably lost on us Americans today, because we have refrigerators and freezers. But salt used to be one of the only ways to preserve meat.

Salt allowed meat to be saved for later. Without it, the meat would spoil.

I think that’s a high calling that we lose perspective on. It’s easy to get caught up in battles, culture wars, whatever we want to call it. But I don’t think that’s primarily what our calling is.

None of Paul’s letters are particularly concerned with the politics of the day. They’re focused on the needs and issues of his churches.

It’s clean the inside of the bowl. Take the log from your own eye. We cannot be salt if we’re focusing on the external.

We need to take a step back and realize what our calling is, then commit to live that out.

10 righteous people would have saved Sodom and Gomorrah. Maybe Abraham should have asked to save the cities if only one righteous person was found?

Are we committed to being those people? Are we committed to preserving our culture? Our cities?

Why not?