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I. DIVINE JUDGMENT IS DISCRIMINATIVE. — The Scripture will not have us fall into the belief that there is no radical difference between the good and the evil. It would have us know that they are as unlike as the wheat and the chaff. Divine judgments are a winnowing-fan to separate the two. If the sifting and winnowing process which goes on in this world is only partially accomplished, yet it is carried far enough to let us know that some time it will be completed.

II. DIVINE JUDGMENT, THOUGH LONG DELAYED, IS AT LAST PRECIPITATED BY PRESUMPTUOUS SINS. The men of Sodom, lusting after God's messengers, launched upon themselves the fire and brimstone. They hastened and fixed the city's doom. No doubt, God's judgments are exactly timed. The hour and minute of visitation are determined. But the timing has been done by One who foreknows the moral history of men. He has set a bound for human iniquity. It cannot be passed. He knows at what hour it will be reached. Until that hour judgment impends; then it falls. Let Joab escape punishment for the murder of Abner, and, so far from coming to repentance, he will be found reddening his hand with the blood of Amasa. Yet his second crime hastens on the time when the horns of the altar will not be for him a sanctuary of refuge. Let Napoleon

III. succeed in his transcendent crime of founding the Second Empire in France, and thereafter he will despise the will of the people, in destroying the freedom of the press, and will hasten the hour of doom by all the surprising splendours and follies of the Imperial court at Compiegne. The Bible reiterates the lesson for all rulers, all governments, all individuals: that a limit of transgression has been fixed, beyond which judgment waits. Presumptuous sins, therefore, hasten the hour of judgment.

III. AMONG PRESUMPTUOUS SINS WE MUST NUMBER DISOBEDIENCE TO THE LORD'S DIRECT COMMAND. This was the sin of Lot's wife. No doubt she loved Sodom.

IV. DIVINE JUDGMENT, WHICH IS PRECIPITATED BY ACTS OF PRESUMPTUOUS SIN, IS SOMETIMES AVERTED FOR THE SAKE OF THE RIGHTEOUS. What would have been realized in Sodom, had ten righteous men dwelt there, was done in Zoar when Lot and his two daughters made it a place of refuge. The little city of Zoar was saved for-their-sake. A leaven of goodness saved it.

V. THE DIVINE JUDGMENTS OF THIS WORLD ARE NOT FINAL. We might be inclined to say, in the case of Sodom and Gomorrah, that their wickedness was sufficiently punished. The sweeping tempest of fire did its strange work throughly, but our Lord has left some sobering words (Matthew 10:15) to teach that this sudden, awful event was not the day of judgment for Sodom. In that day it shall be "more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for some who, despising the sin of the Sodomites, have yet sinned against greater light."

(W. G. Sperry.)

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KJV: Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven;

WEB: Then Yahweh rained on Sodom and on Gomorrah sulfur and fire from Yahweh out of the sky.