Yes, Sodom and Gomorrah is a tale of sexual immorality
Ezekiel 16 and the case for always reading the original story
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is a morality tale about sex.
Do not be deceived: Sodom and Gomorrah were not destroyed because they were bad tithers. They were bad men, willing to take sex from anyone they pleased.
We live in an age where the only sin is being mean. Our leftist friends, never ones to judge, have offered a new spin on the story of Sodom, one that removes sexual immorality from the tale. They don’t even bother quoting from Genesis 19.
One day we must consider how Gomorrah got lumped into all this. It reads like a matter of pure proximity, as its sins are never accounted. Was Gomorrah collateral damage? The fireball hits the just and the unjust.
Our friends tell us to look to Ezekiel 16 to understand Sodom's downfall. God spoke to Ezekiel:
“Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.” — Ezekiel 16:49
From reading that, you’d think Sodom was a Real Housewives reunion. Haughty? Arrogant? Who isn’t?
The actual story, in Genesis, tells it differently. Revisionist accounts don’t want to touch Genesis, because it disproves their arguments.
The Sodom story is about men. Not women.
In speaking allegorically about peoples or nations, context is zapped from the story. This was a story about men, to the specific exclusion of women.
And Ezekiel 16 could itself be read as referring to sex, multiple times.
“Did you not add lewdness to all your other detestable practices?” God says in Ezekiel 16:43.
Ezekiel 16:47: “You not only walked in their ways and copied their detestable practices, but in all your ways soon became more depraved than they.”
Ezekiel 16 is not an endorsement or minimizing of Sodom.
By invoking God’s most famous destruction this side of the Flood, God is saying that Israel is worse. Only by God’s grace has it avoided Sodom’s fate.
“Then, when I make atonement for you for all you have done,” God says in Ezekiel 16:63, “you will remember and be ashamed and never again open your mouth because of your humiliation.”
Genesis 19 tells of two angels of God, in human form as men, arriving in Sodom, and being taken into Lot’s home.
“Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of Sodom — both young and old — surrounded the house. They called to Lot: ‘Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so we can have sex with them.’” — Genesis 19:4-5
The townsmen won’t relent. In lieu of a mass rape, the angels of the Lord destroy the city that night.
“The outcry of the Lord against its people is so great that he has sent us to destroy it,” the angels tell Lot in Genesis 19:13.
Then they tell him: Grab your family, and Hurry!
Sodom had been tested. It failed. The age range of the men present, “both young and old,” meant Sodom was doomed. This was a town without pity, and without male leadership.
Lot had offered his two daughters to the mob instead, as a consolation prize. The men of Sodom didn’t accept.
They didn’t want women, and they didn’t want consensual sex. They wanted to impose themselves.
Sexual immorality is up and down the Sodom and Gomorrah story. In the aftermath, Lot’s daughters get him drunk, have sex with him and bear his children.
They had fled Sodom by then, but carried its values with them.
Their mom, and Lot’s wife, had become a pillar of salt after taking one last look at Sodom. We never learn her name.
In the Sodom and Gomorrah story, the fireball immediately follows the specter of rape, and a father offering his daughters to a sex-thirsty mob.
Anytime a Bible story mentions another Bible story, read the original. Not just the secondhand account.
Ezekiel doesn’t get anyone off the hook.
And yet we see churches allow or even embrace sexual sin in the name of kindness. It's an interesting conversation and one that needs an answer. What do churches allow and for how long? If the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and I believe it is - the answer lies there.
I'm not sure how I let this one go without comment and a like until now. Let's chalk it up to a lapse in the protocol on my part.
The idea of weaponizing sex has been around for a long time as has the human ability to take pleasure in the pain of others. It's one thing to set boundaries between what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own homes and celebrating kink at a parade. I think easily accessible and destigmatized use of pornography has been partly to blame. The push to turn sexual morality on its head has been a disaster.