Starting on New Year’s Day (well, technically, on New Year’s Ever), I switched from using One Year Bible Online for my daily Bible reading to the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net”.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 19-20.

    When the angels arrived in Sodom, they made plans to spend the night in the city square. From several passages in the Bible and other sources we learn that it was an expected norm that travelers could and would “camp” in the city square as they passed through a town. Lot insisted that the men stay with him because he knew it was not safe for them to stay in the city square. When the men of the city discover what Lot has done, they demand he send the men out to them. I do not think the men outside of Lot’s door were all of the men of the city, but none of the rest were willing to stand up to this gang. The key factor here was that it was not safe to be a stranger in the city of Sodom. When I read this passage I think about stories I am seeing about many cities in this country. Cities where increasingly it is not safe to be a stranger. Any city where it is not safe for strangers to visit will be destroyed. Perhaps not as dramatically as Sodom, but nevertheless destroyed. There are cities which are dying, which everyone knows are dying. There are discussions about what went wrong, but in every case, those cities gained a reputation that it was not safe to visit them.

    Once again Abraham was afraid that the people of a land would kill him in order to take his wife, Sarah. So, Abraham concocted the story that she was his sister (a story with apparently some truth to it: Abraham told Abimelech that they had the same father but different mothers). Once again, God prevented Sarah from being made another man’s wife. Abraham had seen what God had done in Egypt when the Pharaoh tried to take Sarah as his wife. This is yet another example of how Abraham, a man held up to us as a man of great faith, struggled with trusting God to protect him. Reading this reminds me that God will forgive me for the times when I fail to fully trust Him…and that He will still act to protect me even then.