Sodom and Gomorrah

Genesis 18:20-21 - The the LORD said, "The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know."

We usually think of the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah as the reason for their destruction. And it's true that that was the root cause. But notice what else God mentions as a sort of side effect of their sin and an additional reason for their demise. There was a great outcry against the cities. I wonder where that outcry was coming from. Apparently not from within the cities themselves. After all, God couldn't even find 10 righteous people there -- righteous in the same sense as Abraham who believed in God's promises.

So the complaints that reached God's hearing must have largely come from people of the surrounding cities and countryside. With no TV or radio or anything else resembling modern means of swift communication, the news had travelled over the years, probably by word of mouth, about just how bad life was in the Terrible Twin Cities. (No offense, Minneapolis and St. Paul.)

More than once God has condescended to see what people are up to. He did it at Babel and does it again here. He didn't need to "go down and see" what was going on there, but for the sake of Abraham and Lot (and us) he did it anyway.

We know he ended up destroying the whole area with "burning sulphur...out of the heavens." I wonder what this really was. God sometimes uses "natural" means to carry out his will. What this could have been, if natural, I don't know, nor have I read others' ideas about it. I often wonder how many of today's natural disasters -- hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, typhoons, volcanic eruptions, and the like -- are God's carrying out of his judgments on the unrighteous.