Originally published on the Doxa blog.
The meal under the oak is over. The three men get up from Abraham's table and look out toward Sodom, and Abraham walks along with them to see them off (Genesis 18:16). From the hills around Mamre the ground falls away east toward the plain where his nephew Lot lives.
Why did God tell Abraham about Sodom?
Then Genesis lets us overhear the LORD thinking out loud. "Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?" (Genesis 18:17).
He answers His own question with a reason. Our English Bible has "For I have chosen him" (Genesis 18:19), and the Hebrew verb underneath is yada, the everyday word for knowing someone. The LORD is saying, in effect, I have known him. Because He knows Abraham, He will tell him what He is about to do.
So He tells him. The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and "I will go down to see" (Genesis 18:21). Two of the men walk on down the road. "But Abraham remained standing before the LORD" (Genesis 18:22).
Abraham does something bold with what he has just heard. He steps forward and asks, "Will You really sweep away the righteous with the wicked?" (Genesis 18:23). What if there are fifty good people in the city? Then he asks the question the whole conversation rests on: "Will not the Judge of all the earth do what is right?" (Genesis 18:25).
Look at where Abraham got that question. A few lines earlier the LORD said He had chosen Abraham to teach his household to do "what is right and just" (Genesis 18:19). Abraham takes God's own words and holds them up to the One who said them, weighing what God is about to do against what he already knows God to be.
And the LORD agrees. Fifty. Then forty-five, forty, thirty, twenty. Abraham apologises as he goes, "though I am but dust and ashes" (Genesis 18:27), and keeps asking anyway. Six times he asks, and six times the LORD says yes. At ten Abraham stops, and the LORD leaves.
This is what it is to be known by God. He told Abraham His plan before He acted, and He stayed for every question. Abraham came to know God better on that road by pleading with Him in His own words. The next chapter shows what came of it. When the cities fell, "He remembered Abraham, and He brought Lot out of the catastrophe" (Genesis 19:29).
"Early the next morning, Abraham got up and returned to the place where he had stood before the LORD" (Genesis 19:27). He went back to the spot where God had spoken with him, to see what God had done.
How does Abraham's prayer for Sodom point to Jesus?
Sodom did not have ten. Centuries later God sent Jeremiah into the streets of Jerusalem with a smaller number still: "If you can find a single person, anyone who acts justly, anyone who seeks the truth, then I will forgive the city" (Jeremiah 5:1). Abraham stopped at ten, and God went all the way down to one. Then He sent the one. "Through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous" (Romans 5:19). That same man now stands where Abraham stood, before the Father, for us: "He always lives to intercede for them" (Hebrews 7:25).
So when God shows you something He is about to do, answer Him. Write down what He said, and write down what you asked Him about it. Then go back to that page when you see what He did.
What has God told you lately that you have not yet answered?
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Also please feel free to read the Doxa Deeper Dive below where we delve into the original language and historical context.
The Doxa Deeper Dive
The Outcry Against Sodom: Why Israel Heard Their Own Cry
Originally published on the Doxa blog.
When the LORD says He has chosen Abraham, the Hebrew verb is the ordinary word for knowing someone. When He says what He heard from Sodom, the Hebrew noun is the scream of a person being wronged. Between them they explain why God talks to Abraham at all.
What does "I have chosen him" mean in Genesis 18:19?
The verb is yada (H3045), to know. It covers knowing a fact, knowing a person, and the closest knowing there is between a husband and wife. When the LORD says of Abraham "I have chosen him" (Genesis 18:19),
The prophet Amos puts the same two things side by side that verses 17 to 19 hold together. To Israel: "Only you have I known from all the families of the earth" (Amos 3:2), the same yada. Five verses later: "Surely the Lord GOD does nothing without revealing His plan to His servants the prophets" (Amos 3:7). Known, then told. That is exactly the order of the LORD's thinking on the road above Sodom.
Two chapters later God gives Abraham a title no one in Scripture has carried before. He tells Abimelech, "he is a prophet; he will pray for you and you will live" (Genesis 20:7). That is the first time the word navi (H5030) appears in the Bible, and the first thing it says a prophet does is pray. Genesis 18 has already shown us what that looks like. The first prophet is the man God told His plan to, and he spends the conversation praying for a city that is not his own.
What was the outcry against Sodom?
God's reason for going down is "the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah" (Genesis 18:20). Verse 20 uses za'aqah (H2201) and verse 21 its twin tse'aqah (H6818). Both name the scream of someone being wronged who has nobody left to appeal to but God.
Follow the word back. After the first murder, "The voice of your brother's blood cries out to Me from the ground" (Genesis 4:10), with the same root. Follow it forward into Israel's law, where God warns what happens to anyone who mistreats a widow or an orphan: "they cry out to Me in distress, I will surely hear their cry" (Exodus 22:23). So the outcry against Sodom is the voice of Sodom's victims, and it has reached the Judge. The two visitors say as much to Lot the next night: "the outcry to the LORD against its people is so great that He has sent us to destroy it" (Genesis 19:13).
Set this beside the stories Abraham's world told. In the Babylonian Atrahasis epic, the gods send plague, drought and finally the flood because the noise of humanity keeps the god Enlil from sleeping. The racket of ordinary human life is the offence, and the gods simply want it to stop. In Genesis the LORD hears a cry from people being crushed, and He goes down to look for Himself before He acts: "I will go down to see if their actions fully justify the outcry that has reached Me. If not, I will find out" (Genesis 18:21). He investigates like a judge, and then He lets a man question Him about the verdict.
How did Israel first hear the outcry in Genesis 18?
The people who first heard Genesis read aloud had raised that cry themselves. Their own story began with it. "The Israelites groaned and cried out under their burden of slavery, and their cry for deliverance from bondage ascended to God" (Exodus 2:23). Then God spoke to Moses from the bush, and they knew His words by heart: "I have come down to rescue them" (Exodus 3:8), and "the cry of the Israelites has reached Me" (Exodus 3:9).
In Hebrew the match is almost word for word. Genesis 18:21 has God say He will go down, yarad (H3381), about the tse'aqah that has come to Him. Exodus 3 has God say He has come down, yarad, because the tse'aqah of Israel has come to Him. Israel heard Genesis 18 as the same God doing for the victims of Sodom what He had done for them in Egypt. The God who knew Abraham was the God who heard slaves.
Israel heard a warning in it too, and the prophets said it aloud. When Jerusalem grew cruel, Isaiah opened his book by addressing its leaders by the name of this city: "Hear the word of the LORD, you rulers of Sodom" (Isaiah 1:10). A people who had once cried out could become the reason someone else cried out.
What does Genesis 18 teach about knowing God?
Go back to the word Abraham used. In verse 19 the LORD said He chose Abraham to teach his household tsedaqah (H6666) and mishpat (H4941), "what is right and just" (Genesis 18:19). In verse 25 Abraham asks, "Will not the Judge of all the earth do what is right?" (Genesis 18:25), and the Hebrew behind what is right is mishpat, the word God had just used. The first prophet prayed God's own word back to Him.
Jesus gives His followers the same pattern, known and then told: "I have called you friends, because everything I have learned from My Father I have made known to you" (John 15:15). What He has made known is meant to be kept and prayed back to Him. Keep a record of what God has said about who He is, and when you pray, pray from it.
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