This week, we will be talking about the mysterious angels in disguise, what Lot did to make his neighbors angry, and what a city gate was.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB (Christian Standard Bible) tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.
All you grownups, this is a very harrowing chapter of the Bible so I strongly recommend that you listen to or read my adult teaching on Genesis 19 and all of the context so that if your kids have questions that I can’t answer here, you can be equipped and armed to do it yourself. I am very mindful about the age range of the audience here and so I have provided a supplemental context teaching on all of the difficult issues concerning Sodom over on Character in Context or on my theancientbridge.com website.
In chapter 18 of Genesis, God told Abraham that He had come to check out the claims of suffering people about the city of Sodom and He told Abraham that He was sharing all this because He knew Abraham. That’s a covenant term, knowing someone, but it can also mean other things. And it’s funny that God told Abraham this because if you remember the ancient rules of hospitality, Abraham could invite the three “men” for dinner but he wasn’t allowed to ask them anything about who they were or what they were doing. Of course, the three men were actually God and two angels in disguise, and so Abraham did know them, kinda, but he just didn’t realize it. God shared all of His plans with Abraham and Abraham begged God to be merciful with any of the people living there who were doing what was right and last time he checked, his nephew Lot and Lot’s wife and two daughters were living nearby. And if there were righteous people there, Abraham begged God to spare everyone. Wow, sounds like Abraham was taking his responsibility to bless all the nations of the earth very seriously! Had Lot been a good enough example that the angels would be able to find even just ten righteous people so that the whole city could be spared? We’re going to find out. Let’s read chapter 19:1-5:
The two angels got to Sodom in the evening as Lot was sitting in Sodom’s gateway. When Lot saw them, he got up to meet them. He bowed with his face to the ground and said, “My lords, please come with me to my house, wash your feet, and spend the night. Then you can get up early tomorrow morning and be on your way again.” “No,” they said. “We would rather spend the night in the city square.” But Lot begged them so much that they followed him and went into his house. He prepared a feast and baked unleavened bread for them, and they ate it. Before they went to bed, the men of the city of Sodom, both young and old, every single one, surrounded Lot’s house. They called out to Lot and said, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Send them out to us so we can know them!”
Uh oh. This sounds anything but good but let’s start at the beginning and talk about what a city gate was. It wasn’t like the gate of a castle that you would see in a movie or on TV. You know, the ones with the bars that can be raised and lowered and there is a moat outside and really just an opening in a big stone wall. When you see the word gate in the Bible, it generally means a building that makes an opening in a wall, really a building with buildings in it. Men would gather there if they were elders of the community or rich enough that they didn’t have to work and if people were fighting, they would take themselves over to the gate so the elders of the city could hear the problem and make decisions about who was right and who was wrong. That’s also where people would make agreements in front of witnesses or would have contracts written out and sealed on clay tablets or, if there wasn’t anyone who could write things down (most people couldn’t), the elders would watch people agree on something so that if something went wrong later, they could all say, “Yep, that’s what they said they would do. We all heard it!” A gate wasn’t just something you walked through—it was where you went to get important things done. So, if you have ever heard the story about how there was a gate into Jerusalem called the “eye of the needle” that was so tiny a camel couldn’t get through it, you will know it isn’t true because (1) we actually know the names of all the gates into Jerusalem and (2) a small gate wouldn’t be practical for doing business and there would just be no point because a small gate is worse than no gate at all. Not only could enemies get inside the city that way, but it would be hard to defend. It would be totally pointless because a gate wasn’t just about getting in and out of a city.
Right away, these travelers aren’t called men anymore like they were when they left Abraham. Now they are called angels, but only to us. Lot doesn’t know this but Moses wants us to know it. And it helps explain how fast they got there. So, Lot was standing there—maybe because he was rich or maybe because he was talking to the other men of Sodom or maybe because he had nothing else to do. He was definitely old enough to be an elder because they’ve been in the land of Canaan for twenty-four years now. But as we are going to see later, no one in the city respects Lot enough to go to him for advice. It must have been late in the day, because he seems to be alone when the angels arrive. And if you didn’t hear last week’s teaching on angels in the Bible, the fact that they are there so quickly is surprising to us. Abraham did a lot of cooking and so they had to have left his camp late in the afternoon but here they are arriving in Sodom the very same evening! Hebron, where Abraham is, was somewhere between eighteen and forty miles from Sodom—depending on where around the Dead Sea it was. We still don’t know for sure. That’s a really fast trip in just a few hours. They were walking and it wasn’t like they had a nice paved road to travel on. If humans were going three miles an hour walking on the dirt and rocks then they were doing really good, so that should have been at least a six-hour trip and probably more like a twelve hour trip. But they got there lickety-split. Of course, Lot didn’t know that—he figured they were just two regular guys. But he also knew what his neighbors were like when people came to the city and so he got up from where he was sitting and went to say hello.
Lot bowed down in front of them, which was strange because usually, strangers would do that when coming into a town and seeing an older man sitting at the gate. I think that Lot knew he needed to make a really good impression because he knew that if he didn’t get the strangers to trust him, they were going to be in terrible danger. Lot made what seemed to be a really nice offer—for them to come to his home inside the city, wash their feet, spend the night, and head out in the morning. What Lot was really saying was, “Please come into my house so that you will be protected and then tomorrow you need to get out of here early.” Do you remember when we talked about hospitality when we learned about Genesis 18? As long as the three visitors were in Abraham’s camp, eating and drinking, they were protected by Abraham and he wouldn’t allow anyone to hurt them. In this world, there are Bible commandments and commandments that we all agree to as a society. There wasn’t a law in the Bible telling anyone to do this—it was something important to just about everyone whether they worshiped our God or the pagan gods. A man who was accepted as a city resident could invite strangers into his home and everyone else had to leave them alone. But we are going to find out that the other men in Sodom don’t think that Lot really qualifies as a city resident. That’s going to cause problems and they are going to tell him that he doesn’t have the right to do what he is doing. He isn’t allowed to invite people into their city and expect them to be protected. Abraham was the head honcho in his camp, the patriarch, and he could do whatever he wanted. Lot wasn’t considered to be an actual citizen by the other men of Sodom, no matter how long he had lived there, and so when he invited the men to spend the night, it got him into big trouble. I don’t know if Lot knew that they felt that way about him or not—probably he did.
Let’s talk about something else here. Lot is now living inside the city of Sodom and we don’t know how that happened. Last time we checked, back in Genesis 14, Lot was living in a tent outside the city of Sodom with his flocks and herds of sheep, goats, and critters. Lot was a wealthy man with critters and slaves. But then the war happened in Genesis 14 and all his stuff got taken and we don’t know if he ever got it back. Maybe Lot isn’t a rich man anymore or maybe he still is. Maybe his animals are being taken care of by other people outside the city but he is living in a house instead of a tent. We don’t know. All we know is that Lot used to live outside of a wicked city and now he lives inside it and that probably isn’t a good thing. So, Lot may be rich or poor and may have lived in the city for twenty years or just one year. No clue. But we do know two things: Lot decided to live inside the city and Lot knows it’s an evil place to live.
So, Lot makes this super generous offer to keep the strangers safe and sound in his own home and they do something really strange. They say, “Nah, we’re good. We’ll just take out our sleeping pads and lay down in the square on the cold, hard, stones and sleep there.” Why would they say that? It’s easy to think that they were just insisting on sleeping in the open part of the city because they wanted to see what would happen, and that might have been part of it but they were also playing the kind of honor/shame game that was common in the world of Lot and Abraham. It was an honorable thing to do to offer travelers a place to stay for the night. But it could also make the guest look shameful if they weren’t careful—like they were men who needed someone else’s help. Even if they did need it and there is nothing wrong with needing help. So, they played a sort of game where someone asks, “Come to my home and eat and spend the night,” and the other person says, “No, we’re fine, thanks.” And then the first person offers again, “No, please, please come spend the night.” And then it makes it look like they are both doing one another a favor. The host gets to look generous, and the guest is giving the host the opportunity to be generous without seeming like they are needing help—even if they do need help. Everyone gets to look good. Which is really all they cared about in honor/shame societies. It’s not about being good but looking good. For all you grownups listening, it’s like being in High School, forever.
And so, they agree. After all, they have their orders to scout out what’s going on in Sodom and also to find out if there are ten people in the city doing what is right and fair. Nothing says they were working on some kind of schedule where they had to get it figured out by morning. Abraham had Sarah in charge of making all that bread and servants taking care of barbequing the fatted calf, but he did take care of the guests himself. Lot actually makes unleavened bread himself—which is what people ate when they weren’t having a regular meal because the bread dough didn’t have enough time to rise and get fluffier. And it says that he made them a feast, which meant food and wine too. Not just food. Lot was being very generous. It seems like maybe Lot doesn’t have any servants anymore. Remember that Lot didn’t even offer them food so they couldn’t ask for it, but he gave it to them anyway. And Lot wasn’t allowed to ask them who they were or what they were doing or where they were going or anything. They could share if they wanted but at this point, they obviously hadn’t told Lot who they really were—angels from God on a mission. If Lot had known, I bet he would have flipped out. I would have freaked out for sure. And again, the angels ate the food so we know that when they are disguised as humans that they can eat.
In fact, let’s look at a Bible verse from the New Testament from Hebrews chapter 13, verse 2. And I can’t tell you who wrote this because it doesn’t say. Some of it seems like what Paul wrote but a lot of it doesn’t sound like him at all. Some people think that Priscilla wrote it, but there is no way to know for sure. All we know is that the person was a Jew, a teacher, and really knew a lot about the Bible and the Temple and the Priesthood of Israel. Anyway, the verse goes like this—“Make sure to show hospitality to strangers, because some people have welcomed angels as guests in their homes without even knowing it.” And they were probably talking about Lot and what happened in this chapter. That being said, make sure you never do this without the permission of the grownups in your life, okay? Showing people hospitality when we don’t have permission can be very dangerous—as Lot is about to find out because as soon as his guests were putting down their bedrolls on the floor and going to sleep, every single man of the city of Sodom shows up outside his house and start yelling for him to send the visitors outside. They are wanting to know these men, and this is where the situations gets ugly and complicated really fast. The word “know” can mean a few different things and none of them are good right now. One of the rules of hospitality is that Lot wasn’t allowed to get any information out of his visitors. He couldn’t ask them any questions. He didn’t know if they were enemy spies or just people traveling from one place to another looking for work. Sodom was a very rich city from the asphalt mining, remember? That’s why the four kings came after them and took every person and everything they had. The people of Sodom and the four other cities close by, they were rich because of their mining and they used to pay taxes to the big king Chedorlaomer but one day they just stopped and the big king got even—and he would have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for Abraham and his pesky friends coming to Lot’s rescue and driving the four kings out of the country. The people of Sodom were probably suspicious of outsiders for good reason, as everyone should have been, but that doesn’t give them the right to be evil.
I believe that they wanted to take the visitors, the angels, and hurt them in very shameful and evil ways to get them to admit why they were in Sodom. It will make a lot more sense next week once they yell at Lot for refusing to hand the visitors over and tell him the reason why he had no right to do that. But we will get to that next week. This week, I want to talk about God’s laws protecting foreigners and visitors. The prophet Ezekiel would say, over a thousand years later, that the sin of the people of Sodom is that they were rich but they didn’t use their money to help the poor and they were oppressive—which means they were very cruel to people in terrible ways. We’ve talked about how important it was in the ancient world for people to be able to count on someone being kind to them and generous, and the people of Sodom were the opposite. Not only couldn’t you depend on any of them to be kind and generous, but you could count on them hurting anyone they could get their hands on! It’s like they learned nothing from how they were treated by the four kings.
God cares about everyone but in the Bible, the people we see Him especially concerned about are the people who are easy to hurt—people who are poor, hungry, homeless, don’t have parents, or far from home without anyone to protect them. God tells the people who have what they need, to help these people because when we help those people, Jesus says that we are actually helping Him. And so, God gave His people laws about how they were supposed to treat the people who are easy to hurt. One of the groups that God gives protection to are called foreigners, sojourners, or resident aliens, depending on which Bible you are reading. It can be easy to hurt them because they are alone, and they may not speak the same language, or have a lot of money. Lot’s visitors were outsiders—foreigners—which means they were from somewhere else. The people of Sodom all had each other—they were sticking together as a group or maybe we could call them a gang. They had the power to hurt absolutely anyone they wanted and no one could stop them. If they wanted to hurt the two strangers, they could do it and no one could stop them. Lot sure couldn’t stop them. But those are exactly the kinds of people that God tells us we must treat well and even protect. And He says over and over again that when we treat people badly, who have no one to care for them, that He will hear about it and He will do something about it. And we do not want to be on the wrong side of that.
When the children of Israel were trying to get to the Promised Land, they tried to go through two different nations to get there—Ammon and Moab. They promised not to hurt anyone and to pay for everything they ate or drank—because it wasn’t right to ask for hospitality—and the Ammonites and Moabites said no to them. God was really angry at them because He gave them their lands and told the children of Israel not to hurt them, because they were family. But the kings of Moab and Ammon treated them like dirt and said, “You can’t use our lands as a shortcut!” God was generous with them but they weren’t generous with God’s people. The people of Sodom were rich, but they weren’t generous with anyone and not even with God’s angels. God makes sure that we have what we need so that we can help people who don’t have what they need. And we can’t help absolutely everyone but we can help some people. That’s all that God asks. I wish I had a billion trillion dollars so I could feed everyone, but I don’t—but God does expect me to use what I do have to help people who need it.
Jesus got a lot of hospitality, a lot, and so did His disciples. That’s the only way He could travel around preaching. According to the Bible, it was mostly women who helped Jesus out but there were also others like Lazarus who shared the home he had with his two sisters whenever Jesus needed a place to stay when He was in Jerusalem. Jesus was from the Galilee, and so when He travelled to Judea, He had to get a place to stay. Jesus told His disciples to be good and grateful toward the people who gave them a home and food while they were visiting but if there was a town where no one would take them in, that they would be treated worse than Sodom on the day of judgment. Dang! God really wants us to be kind to people who have nowhere else to go.
What about the prophet Elijah? In his days, there was a terrible famine and no one had any food, but there was a widow who was making up the very last of her flour and oil into small bread cakes. She knew that she and her son would die because there was nothing left after that. But she shared what she had with Elijah and God took care of her for the rest of the famine and her oil and flour never ran out the entire time. When David and his men were hungry and had nothing to eat, Ahimelech the priest took the forbidden bread and gave it to them because it was all he had. God wants us to share what we have with others and He also wants us to be reasonable about it. It was against the commandments for Ahimelech to give David and his men that bread but it was an emergency situation so he went ahead and gave it to them anyway. That’s because our God is very hospitable. God wants to save lives and not destroy them. God wasn’t going to eat any of that special bread—it was given to the priests every Sabbath—but what would it say about God if those men all went hungry while the priests had plenty to eat from offering the sacrifices?! Doing what is good and right sometimes means that we don’t keep one of the commandments, because some commandments are much more important than others.
Jesus talked to the Pharisees about that a few times. They were being super careful to make sure they were keeping some commandments in some really extreme ways. When it came time to give 10% of what they had grown to the priests every year, they were so careful that they even measured out their spices so that everything was just right. But Jesus said that was fine—only there were more important commandments they were ignoring. They weren’t making sure that the people who were hurting and being mistreated were being taken care of. The priests didn’t need mint and cumin, two spices, more than hurting people needed help! God doesn’t care about spices—He cares about people! According to Jesus, the commandments are all important, but not one of them is more important than loving God and each other. Loving our neighbors is exactly what the people of Sodom aren’t going to be doing.
I love you, and I am praying for you. It’s good to talk to the grownups in your life about why some commandments, like saving people’s lives, are more important than others. Understanding that will help you keep God’s commandments in ways that show the world His goodness, mercy, and love.