Sodom And Gomorrah Bible Quotes

Today we have a rebirth of ancient Sodom and Gomorrah. From seldom-read pages in dusty Bibles they come forth as real cities in a real world, depicting a real malady--pernicious permissiveness.

I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction. The sun was risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-ar, I read. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. So it goes. Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The World was better off without them. And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.

Once I told Ha�anala about the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. . . . I told her how Abraham bargained with God for the lives of ten righteous men who might have lived there. She said to me, �Abraham should have taken the babies from the cities. The babies were innocent.�

So, once more, the question is: Does the Bible forbid homosexual behavior? Well, I’ve already said that it does. The Bible is so realistic! You might not expect it to mention a topic like homosexual behavior, but in fact there are six places in the Bible—three in the Old Testament and three in the New Testament—where this issue is directly addressed—not to mention all the passages dealing with marriage and sexuality which have implications for this issue. In all six of these passages homosexual acts are unequivocally condemned. In Leviticus 18.22 it says that it is an abomination for a man to lie with another man as with a woman. In Lev. 20.13 the death penalty is prescribed in Israel for such an act, along with adultery, incest, and bestiality. Now sometimes homosexual advocates make light of these prohibitions by comparing them to prohibitions in the Old Testament against having contact with unclean animals like pigs. Just as Christians today don’t obey all of the Old Testament ceremonial laws, so, they say, we don’t have to obey the prohibitions of homosexual actions. But the problem with this argument is that the New Testament reaffirms the validity of the Old Testament prohibitions of homosexual behavior, as we’ll see below. This shows they were not just part of the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament, which were done away with, but were part of God’s everlasting moral law. Homosexual behavior is in God’s sight a serious sin. The third place where homosexual acts are mentioned in the Old Testament is the horrifying story in Genesis 19 of the attempted gang rape of Lot’s visitors by the men of Sodom, from which our word sodomy derives. God destroyed the city of Sodom because of their wickedness. Now if this weren’t enough, the New Testament also forbids homosexual behavior.

God in the Hebrew Bible, as it emerged from its editing process, is almighty; he creates heaven and earth with a word, and he is above all other gods-but he creates a serpent who undoes all his creative work. Often he acts like a large and powerful and somewhat bad-tempered human being. Like any landlord, he walks in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day. He gets angry. He bargains with his people. He changes his mind. He falls into vindictive rages, as in the case of Noah's flood or the Tower of Babel or the unfortunate cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and he plays atrocious games, as in the case of his command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. He has a somewhat bizarre preoccupation with the length of Samson's hair. He performs prodigious wonders, such as slaughtering the first-born sons of Egypt and leading the Israelites to safety through the parted waters of the Red Sea-only to discover that those who have witnessed those stupendous miracles quickly forget them and turn to complaint and the worship of other gods. Like all of us, the God of the Hebrew Bible is a mess of contradictions.

The Bible says that immediately before Jesus’s return, a mighty angel will come down from heaven crying out, “Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great!”2 Now that’s strange because historic Babylon has ceased to exist and according to biblical prophecy will never be rebuilt or inhabited again. So why harken back to a kingdom that’s already long gone? The answer is simple. Babylon is the personification of evil. Even at the end of human history, it will still represent to the angelic host the worst of the worst. Nothing will ever reach its depths of depravity. Not al Qaeda. Not Mexican drug lords. Not the Tower of Babel. Not Sodom. Not Gomorrah. Not even Nazi Germany.

So I took another look at Genesis …” “You know Genesis?” “And Nehemiah, Ezra, Proverbs, Lamentations—one of my favorites, hilarious subtext, but I can’t read it on airplanes, where people get upset with laughing fits. The whole book’s a classic.” “You read the whole Bible?” “Couple times. And you know how in Genesis, Lot’s the only good guy in the twin cities, Sodom and Gomorrah. These two male angels come to stay with him. Apparently they’re lookers. Think Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in Dogma. And these people from his street bang on Lot’s door, wanting him to let the houseguests out so they can have gay sex. Now Lot’s always been an accommodating neighbor, but this ain’t no potluck dinner. They argue back and forth, going nowhere. So, finally, in an attempt to show that sex with girls is much more fun and convert them to heterosexuality, Lot offers to turn over his two underage, virgin daughters for gang rape.” “It doesn’t say that!” “Let me see your Bible.” Serge executed a perfect sword drill, finding chapter nineteen in seconds. He turned the book around, slid it back across the table and tapped verse eight. Three youths crowded over the page. “It does say that. But how can it be?” “Because God blessed us with curiosity. Read it with an open mind and you realize it’s actually a brilliant satire on homophobia. Think as an individual: The Lord doesn’t want a train pulled on little kids. It’s like reading Swift’s Modest Proposal and thinking he really wants to eat babies. What the Bible’s trying to say is we’re all his children. But if you take Lot’s story literally, well, nice family values, eh? But that’s just my interpretation, which I’m now questioning. I could be way off.” The youths got up and went over to their pastor. “I think we’ve been wrong about gay people …” “… They’re fellow children of God.

Good listeners, I don’t need to tell you that now more than ever, we’re living in Godless times. We’re living in a time when the Bible is shunned in our schools in favour of scientific evolutionary lies, where many are expelling God from their hearts, where sodomites and baby murderers and heathens and Islamofascists have more rights in our country than good Christian men and women. Where Sodom and Gomorrah cast a pall over every aspect of our daily lives, and our world leaders are trying with all their might to construct the culture of globalisation favoured by the Antichrist.

Pastor Madison looked steadily at the jurors, cleared his throat and started to read.          “Marriage is what brings us together today. Where did the idea of marriage come from? What is marriage? Does marriage have any purpose in this modern age? Is it really a blessed arrangement? Why shouldn’t anyone, or any group of someones, be allowed to marry? Is marriage in danger of extinction? These are all questions, along with others, that we will examine today and in the next three week’s sermons.             “First, where did the idea of marriage come from? Who thought it up? I’m going to read to you a few sentences from a sermon given by a Swedish Pastor named Ake Green. Pay attention to what he said, because he was arrested and convicted by the Swedish judicial system for what he said. As you listen to the beginning of Pastor Green’s sermon, ask yourself if you think his words are hate words. The Swedish government charged and convicted Pastor Green with a hate crime for these words. Here are Pastor Green’s opening few paragraphs:             “From the beginning God created humans as man and woman. We begin in Genesis 1:27-28: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."             “Here, God's Word clearly states that you were created to be Father and Mother - as man and woman - designed for parenthood. The Lord states that very clearly here….The marriage institution is also clearly defined in Genesis 2:24, where it says: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh."             “Only man and wife are referred to here. It is not stated any other way; you can never imply or interpret it to mean that you can have whatever sexual partner you wish to have. ….”             “What was it that led to these cities (Sodom, mentioned 30 times in the Bible, and Gomorrah) perishing, losing their dignity, disappearing from the face of the Earth? It was because they lived in homosexuality. It will be the same on that day when the Son of Man is revealed; consequently, this is a sign of the times we are facing. As people lived in the time of Lot, so shall they live before Jesus returns. This is something we cannot deny in any way. Jesus says that the lifestyle of Sodom shall be active in the whole Earth before the coming of Jesus. The one who represents this lifestyle today goes against God's order of creation.

I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction. The sun was risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-ar, I read. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. So it goes. Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them. And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes. People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore. I’ve finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt.

10:15 The day of judgment will be more bearable for the wicked Old Testament towns of Sodom and Gomorrah than it will be for those who reject the message of Jesus.

I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction. The sun was risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-ar, I read. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. So it goes. Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them. And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.

So the LORD told Abraham, “I have heard a great outcry from Sodom and Gomorrah, because their sin is so flagrant. 21 I am going down to see if their actions are as wicked as I have heard. If not, I want to know.

Summing Up One must read biblical commands and prohibitions in terms of their underlying forms of moral logic. The moral logic underpinning the negative portrayal of same-sex eroticism in Scripture does not directly address committed, loving, consecrated same-sex relationships today. Although Scripture does not teach a normative form of gender complementarity, the experience of complementarity itself may be helpful and important in both heterosexual and same-sex relationships, even if complementarity is not construed along hard-wired gender lines. The stories of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19) and the Levite’s concubine (Judg. 19) focus on the horror of rape and the ancient abhorrence of the violation of male honor in rape. As such, they help to explain Scripture’s negative stance toward the types of same-sex eroticism the Bible addresses, but they do not directly address the case of committed and loving same-sex relationships. The prohibitions in Leviticus against “lying with a male as with a woman” (18: 22; 20: 13) make sense in an ancient context, where there were concerns about purity, pagan cults, the distinctiveness of Israel as a nation, violations of male honor, and anxieties concerning procreative processes. However, these prohibitions do not speak directly to committed and consecrated same-sex relationships. Nor are they based on a form of moral logic grounded in biology-based gender complementarity. The references to same-sex eroticism found in two New Testament vice lists (1 Cor. 6: 9 and 1 Tim. 1: 10) focus attention on the ancient practice of pederasty—the use of boy prostitutes in male-male sex. As such, they also do not address committed and mutual same-sex relationships today. There are many more questions to be explored, but this book has attempted to focus on core issues involving the interpretation of Scripture, as the church continues to wrestle with a multitude of questions that arise outside the heterosexual mainstream.

14If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. 15Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.