Slouching Toward Gomorrah

If you’re like me, you might have grown up being taught that God destroyed Sodom & Gomorrah because of homosexuality.  On Facebook, Instagram, & The Christian Post, when the topic veers into LGBTQ issues, it seems like the comboxes light up with post after post from people who seize the opportunity to talk down about LGBTQ people, & you can almost always count on someone from the Christian community to reference Sodom & Gomorrah.  

The idea that God destroyed Sodom & Gomorrah because of homosexuality by itself or as part of a litany of their offenses has no biblical basis whatsoever.  The truth of the matter is that no text of the Bible explicitly teaches that to be the case, & when those who appeal to Genesis 19 deploy this argument in their case against homosexuality, their conclusion runs through an interpretive grid that cashes out with their audience being left to stitch together the apologist’s conclusions based on any number of inferences.  If you just understood the subtext, you ought to be able to draw the same conclusion. 

Others, like Robert Gagnon, seem to see homosexuality everywhere they look - even in the story of Noah & his 3 sons in the post-diluvian world; You, the reader, in order to conclude that Genesis is a proverb God intends for us to understand as a strong statement against all species of homosexual behavior, require Dr. Gagnon’s encyclopedic knowledge of the culture in which the story was written & the cultural setting of the story itself.   If you only knew what he knows, you would agree with him too.

When reading Gagnon, you ought to ask yourself, “Why God would deliver this proverb for us today in a manner that requires what amounts to a short monograph about the Ancient Near East in which the story takes place?”  In other words, on the one hand, Dr. Gagnon, as a Protestant, hopefully believes that God reveals His universal moral will in terms that don’t require us to depart from the text of the Bible in order to find & sift the relevant information like a graduate or post-graduate university student or an archeologist. While on the other he at times sounds like a peddler of truth, to whom we should listen in order to understand the requisite amount of sociological, anthropological, & archeological data to understand what the Bible really says. 

In truth, we don’t require Dr. Gagnon’s detailed analysis of ANE social conditions & customs in order to understand the story & the meaning God intends for it to convey.  All we really need to do is understand the biblical texts in which Sodom & Gomorrah (of just Sodom) appear & put the pieces together, thus living out what the Bible teaches about the clarity & sufficiency of theopneustos Scripture. 

Jude 

Jude 5–7 (ESV): Now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe. 6 And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day— 7 just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire. 

Jude’s indictment of Sodom & Gomorrah & its neighbors begins in Jude 4, which refers to Genesis 6 & its descriptive explanation of the origin of the Nephilim, which picks up again in Chapter 14.  The Nephilim were warlords who thought of themselves as the sons of the gods. They were gluttonous warmongers who dedicated their children to demons & idols.  

 

Jude compares false teachers to Sodomites & demons.  Demons are the territorial spirits who underwrote the idols in cultures dedicated to witchcraft, idolatry, cultic sex rites, warmongering, & gluttony.   A Sodomite, according to the Bible, is not defined as a homosexual.  Biblical sodomy encompasses all these evils.   

Exactly how many modern homosexuals are in the business of forming lynch mobs who are in it for reasons analogous to the mobs in Genesis 19, Judges 19, & Acts 19?  Most likely, very few.  If we’re supposed to analogize from Genesis to Jude to the present day, then we ought to keep the bigger picture in mind.  Modern homosexuals who want us to paraclete them like Matthew 5:41 commands aren’t out to brutally conquer their opponents on account of their own or their opponents’ manhood while involved in polytheism, witchcraft, & warmongering.  The mobs in Genesis & Judges were out to conquer & defile the manhood of their opponents in the name of their gods. 

Genesis 6

These people in Genesis 6 were not having sex with angels and demons on the Earth & having children with them in a literal sense.  The story is informing us that people, who were surrounded idolatry and witchcraft, were dedicating themselves and their children to territorial spirits, & both demons and angels took sides.  Demons underwrote idols.  Angels defended humans and animals.  It also informs us that these were  reciprocating relationships. 

 

What does it mean for these daughters to bear children from them?  The humans on earth were dedicating children to idols through witchcraft &  demons came to both accept and reject these children.  The text is describing something akin to Molech worship, & people living in that age were accustomed to their rulers claiming divine ancestry.

What sorts of activities were involved? The human “sons of God” took women and mated with them via cultic rituals.  Evil men who worshipped idols underwritten by demons, were known to kidnap, rape, & romance women who bore them children.  Sometimes the women were complicit; sometimes they were not complicit. 

They also went in to men, some of whom cross dressed & served as shrine prostitutes.  Their idols at the time took the form of animals and animalian people.  They also offered animal & human sacrifices to their gods.  Jude most certainly has this in mind when he touches on sexual immorality and strange flesh while informing us that demons do the same thing.  He is educating us about what Greco-Roman religion was doing.

Genesis 19

Genesis 18 says that God had already determined to destroy them.  Abraham dickered God down to ten literal righteous men.  If the messengers could find just ten righteous people, God would have relented.  The messengers are faced with a mob of angry villagers, like Village Bigots, who did not like the messengers message.  

The messengers are like Jonah in Nineveh & were there to preach the Gospel & investigate & if necessary indict the cities.  We know this because Luke 10 references Sodom and connects it to the commissioning of the 72. The messengers went into Sodom and Gomorrah the same way that Jonah entered Nineveh.  

Luke 10:10–12 (ESV): But whenever you enter a town and they do not receive you, go into its streets and say, 11 ‘Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet we wipe off against you. Nevertheless know this, that the kingdom of God has come near.’ 12 I tell you, it will be more bearable on that day for Sodom than for that town. 

Likewise in Matthew, the Lord denounces the towns which had rejected the miracles done in them.  They rejected His preaching in doing so, insofar as all miracles emanating from the LORD qualify as prophecy and a demonstration of His Control, Authority, Presence, Law, & Gospel.

Lot’s rescuers state that there was a great outcry (Genesis 19:13).   The text quotes the mob stating that they are angry because they feel judged by Lot & the messengers (19:9). Yet somehow the mob’s threat has been transformed by ecclesiastical tradition into evidence that the men were representationally analogous to all homosexuals everywhen-and-where & homosexuality itself is the reason or a major reason for Sodom & Gomorrah’s destruction. 

What happened in Sodom? The proximate reason was the failure to find ten righteous people, and the men who rejected them were a mob of Angry Religious Bigots who very likely planned to either rape them or intoxicate the messengers and involve them in a pagan rite. They were doing the same thing the people in Ephesus did to Paul & the Ephesian church. They too were angry religious bigots.  Angry religious bigots beware, if you use Sodom and Gomorrah as an example, you should know that the proximate cause that led to their destruction was their angry religious bigotry. 

Ezekiel 16

Ezekiel 16:49–50 (ESV): Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. 50 They were haughty and did an abomination before me. So I removed them, when I saw it.

This text is part of an indictment against Israel for their tolerance of idolatry - idolatry that included sexual practices they intended to use in divination & witchcraft.  Sodom is called out because what Israel (Jerusalem) was doing was worse.

Pride here is not pride in who you are in the face of oppression.  Pride here is haughtiness in the face of your enemies.  Some people say that pointing to Ezekiel 16 is a means of trying to negate what people who believe as you do by lessening the charges against Sodom to something like inhospitality.  In reality, the reverse is true.  Sodom was guilty of kitchen sink immorality with an epic gluttony component- defined as failing to to execute justice, systemic bigotry that abuses and oppresses people, especially the least of these. 

Conclusion

The only path to the conclusion that God destroyed Sodom & Gomorrah because of homosexuality itself is the same path that says that all homosexuals & homosexual behavior is represented by the lynch mob.  On that view, the tale is meant to teach the reader that homosexuality results in the destruction of a nation. 

There’s a huge problem with that. Judges 19 recapitulates the same narrative. In that narrative, the mob rape-murders a female servant - concubine. If all homosexuals are representationally in the men of Sodom, then by parity of logic, all heterosexuals or bisexuals are in the men of Gibeah.  Nobody ever argues that.  

God intends for us to view Sodom, Gibeah, Jerusalem, Ninevah, Ephesus, & Rome together.  Each of them were engaged in the same practices.  In each case, angry religious bigotry was a major component.  

Genesis 19, Judges 19, & Acts 19 are parallel texts.  Gen. 19 & Judges 19 deploy the exact same narrative.   In both narratives, prophetic Law & Order arrive, are greeted by a man who was barely holding on, whom prophectic L&O recognize as a good man & with whom they break bread intending to stay the night, only to be interrupted by angry polytheistic villagers who are there delivering the same ultimatum, & one or more people were almost were or were given to the rape squad. 

In Acts 19, while in a city belonging to, in the minds of the mob, Artemis, Paul was teaching & breaking bread with like minded people. Because he realized that this new religion was eating into his bottom line, Demetrius organized a lynch mob in Artemis’ name that captured 2 hostages, & they really do represent Rome, which is described as a den of idolatry, witchcraft, cultic sex rites, gluttony, bigotry, & so on (Romans 1).

These 3 accounts have all been providentially ordered by God so that they are located in Chapter 19 of each book. It’s almost as if God is trumpeting that these 3 accounts should be understood together.   Taken together individually first then harmonized afterwards, we can see a picture of Sodom & Gomorrah emerge that has less to do with homosexuality itself & more to do with warmongering, idolatry, witchcraft, epic levels of biblical gluttony, high-handed rejection of the Law & Gospel, & angry religiously motivated bigotry. 

As a reminder, we in the United States, are living out a narrative in which people are looking for ways to circumvent Matt. 5:41 on the basis of their religion.  As I noted in my earlier article on that subject, they are willing to deploy secular ethics (Situational Ethics) in order to engage in acts of civil disobedience, & that results in a flow chart when it comes to paracleting LGBTQ people.  They take the side of the majority of the Sanhedrin 2000 years ago, & the Sanhedrin was full of bigoted religionists as were the Zealots, as were many worshippers of the Greco-Roman gods.  Our society & our churches have forgotten that these biblical texts come from a time in which people’s lives revolved around their temples & their religion, resulting in a great deal of bigotry in the name of God Almighty &/or any number of pseudo-deities. God destroyed Sodom & Gomorrah, Gibeah, Jerusalem, & 2/3 of Rome for that reason. 

The next time we address this, we will look briefly at the manner in which we Christians have failed the LGBTQ community & what God has to say about the necessity to do justice by way of replication & restoration.  Until then, may the LORD bless you & keep you, & go & sin no more.