Through him all the nations of the earth shall be blessed. He is the man whom I have called out to become great. God says, "I won't keep this from Abraham for two reasons: first, because he has been given by grace a favored position in my sight. The reasons God lists might be called, "the rights of friendship." Here is where Abraham earned the title which is given to him in both the Old and the New Testament, ".the friend of God. So we have here a picture of God talking to himself he says, "Shall I hide from Abraham the thing I am about to do?" and he begins to list to himself the reasons why he should include Abraham in his plan. Now when God proposes something, as he does here in proposing to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, he always enlists a man as his partner. In fact, this is why so many "works of faith" fail, when they otherwise might have been wonderfully blessed of God. That kind of thing is doomed at the outset. On the other hand, the prayer of presumption is discovering something we would like to do, and then asking God to bless it. It begins with a proposal which God makes, or a conviction he gives, or a warning he utters. The difference is simply this: The prayer of faith is acting on a previous knowledge of what God wants. If not, it is presumptuous of you to crawl out on a limb, expecting God to keep you there. If God makes it clear that he wants you out on a limb, fine - you will be perfectly safe there. Some people feel that the prayer of faith is crawling out on a limb and then begging God to keep someone from sawing it off, but that is not real prayer, that is presumption. In other words, unless we base our prayers on a promise, or a warning, or a conviction of God's will, we have no right to pray. Prayer enters in when God then enlists the partnership of man in carrying out his program. This marks a very important fact concerning prayer: Prayer never begins with man it begins with God! True prayer is never a man's plans which he brings to God for him to bless. The Lord said, "Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, seeing that Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall bless themselves by him? No, for I have chosen him, that he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice so that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has promised him." Then the Lord said, "Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is very grave, I will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry which has come to me and if not, I will know. Tradition still marks the spot where Abraham intervened with God for the city of Sodom.Īs we look at this section of Scripture, we can learn some valuable lessons on the nature of prayer: First, we see that prayer begins with the proposal of God: They come to a promontory at the edge of a steep ravine which leads down to the Dead Sea where they can see the doomed cities lying far below them in the afternoon sun.
Our next chapter takes up the amazing historical event of their destruction but now we are looking at the preview of it.Īs Abraham's visitors leave his tent and go on their way eastward to the valley of the Jordan, Abraham goes with them.
Archaeologists are now convinced that it is the remnants of the ancient cities of wickedness - Sodom and Gomorrah - that have been rediscovered lying under the waters of the Dead Sea. We will continue our account of the pattern man of faith by reading the sixteenth verse of Chapter 18 where these three visitors (who came out of the hot desert into Abraham's tent and who were unknown to him at first) now go their way to accomplish the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.