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Dr. Manny Arango
Hey, Bible nerds. This is Dr. Manny Arango and I'm your host for the Bible department podcast powered by Arma. This podcast follows a Bible reading plan we created to help you read the entire Bible in a year. You can head to the show notes or thebibledepartment.com to download our reading plan and join the journey. To all my fellow pastors, I've got a question for you. Does your city know that your church exists? Listen, I get it. You're preaching, you're leading, you're discipling, you're doing ministry. We are in the same boat. And let's be honest, social media and marketing, not your strong suit. Not mine either. And that's probably the last thing on your mind. And that's why we chose to partner with Church Candy Marketing for our church. Plant the garden. We out here, y'all. They help churches get more actual guests walking through the doors on Sunday without your eye having to stress over ads or algorithms or trying to crack the social media code. Right now, Church Candy is helping nearly 400 churches reach their communities with simple invite ads. And it works. It's super effective. I can tell you from firsthand experience. So if you're tired of being your city's best kept secret, how about you do this? Go to churchcandy.com Manny and book a free consultation book a discovery call. Their team will break it all down and show you how to start seeing new faces at your church this Sunday. I'm in the trenches with you trying to grow the church. And how about we just start a whole campaign? No more empty churches. So let's partner with Church Candy and get our churches full for the glory of Jesus. Let's go. I'm excited. I feel like I'm excited about every day, but I'm really excited about today. We are in Genesis 18 through 20. If you haven't done the reading, if you haven't done Genesis chapter 18, 19, and 20, just go ahead, do the reading now. Pause the video, pause the audio. Go get the reading done. If you have done the reading, let's dive in. Okay, so chapter 18 opens. And the thing that is going to get highlighted, the context that I want to give everybody is that Abraham has extreme generosity, extreme hospitality. First of all, let's give context. The man has just been circumcised. Okay? The dude is in pain. And we're going to get three. Well, one word is going to get used three times. And I've got to kind of give some cultural context here because in a Semitic culture or Middle Eastern culture, patriarchs do not run. It's actually what makes the story of the prodigal son like, I mean, just mind blowing. You have this patriarch, like, running towards his son as his son is returning. And so patriarchs just don't run. Like, that is culturally a big no, no. Okay, but if you get Genesis, chapter 18, verse 2 says Abraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby. When he saw them, he hurried from the entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed low to the ground. The fact that he's hurrying is huge. And as Western readers, we may just breeze right past that as though it is not that important. Verse 6. So Abraham hurried into the tent to Sarah, quick. He said, get three seahs of the finest flour and knead it and bake some bread. Okay? And then we're going to get this one more time. The next verse, verse 7. Then he ran to the herd and selected a choice tender calf and gave it to a servant who hurried to prepare it. So we get the word hurried three times and the word ran one time. There is a pace to this story that is fast. Abraham is playing zero games. Remember, the man just got circumcised and he's scurrying around, hurrying around, running. Incredible. Like just a spirit of hospitality. This man is doing the most, I mean, rolling out the red carpet for these three guests. Next little, I guess you can call this a nerdy nugget. Next little kind of piece of this situation is that Abraham is going to tell Sarah, quick, get three seals of finest flour and knead it and bake some bread. Now, some, I've looked at a couple different references. Some say this is 36 pounds of flour. Some say it's even. It could be more. Okay, so I just went with the most. With the most, I don't know what's the word with the lowest amount. With the most conservative estimate for Asea, which is going to be 36 pounds of flour, which I think is something crazy. Like it's going to end up making, I think, 24 loaves of bread. Like, this is just. This is a ridiculous amount of food that Abraham and Sarah and their servants are going to make for these guests. The next just like piece of information that you really need to kind of wrap your mind around is that there are 318 servants that live in Abraham's house. Okay, so like, Abraham ain't like an empty nester. Like, this man has servants on servants on servants. And so, but he's the one hurrying. He's the One running the text wants to paint a picture of honor and hospitality and urgency. And there. I mean, just an elaborate amount of food. Now, hospitality is going to be in. I mean, a chief value in a Middle Eastern context, in a. In a. In a Semitic context, in a. In a context of people who are wandering around in a more of a nomadic lifestyle even to this day. I've been to Israel four times, and hospitality is at the tippity, tippity, tippity, tippity top of just, like, values, like. Like how you treat guests, how you treat people who are under the protection of your roof. Okay, so the. Obviously, Abraham and Sarah are going to get promised a son. Sarah's gonna laugh. But really, this gets. This immediately gets into this bargaining or this bartering that happens between God and Abraham. This is what the Lord said in verse 20. The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sins so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know. The men turned away and went to Sodom, but Abraham remained standing before the Lord. Then Abraham approached him and said, will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? And so he starts at 50, he goes to 45. He goes all the way down. This whole bartering thing. And then, for the sake of 20, I will not destroy it. May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more. What about 10? And he says, for the sake of 10, I will not destroy it. When the Lord had finished speaking with Abraham, he left and Abraham returned home. So there seems to be, like, an abrupt ending, right? They get to 10, and Abraham doesn't even have the chance to ask, well, what about five? What about two? What about one? Okay, it immediately cuts to the two angels now arrive at Sodom, and here's our nerdy nugget. Okay, because you got to do a little bit of counting to figure this out. Why is it that the scene immediately shifts from a conversation between God and Abraham to the two angels are now in Sodom? What. What has caused that shift? Because I would say it's actually not a change in the story. The narrative is continuing. But I do think that what we get starting in chapter 19 is actually God answering Abraham's question of whether or not there are 10. Okay, so let's just do a little bit of counting. It's our nerdy nugget for the day. Let's do some counting. Lot and his wife would be two people. The Bible lets us know that Lot has two son in laws. So that's four people. If he got two son in laws, that means he's got two married daughters. He also has two sons. So that's where up to eight people. And if he has two son in laws, that means in addition to the two married girls, he offers his two unmarried daughters to the mob. So there's actually 10 people in Lot's household, including him. So Abraham gets down to 10. But really that's Lot in his family. Okay, it takes a little bit of counting. Like the Bible's not going to spell that out for you. And so now Lot is running around his family trying to get them to leave. He's trying to get his sons and his son in laws and his whole crew to kind of leave. But the men inside reached out and pulled Lot back into the house and shut the door. And they struck the men who were at the door, young and old with blindness. Okay? The two men went to Lot and said, do you have anyone else here, Sons in law, sons, daughters, or anyone else in the city who belongs to you, get them out. So Lot went out and spoke to his sons in law who were pledged to marry his daughters. He said, hurry and get out of this place. But his sons in law thought he was joking on and on and on. Even his wife looks back. This is verse 26. But Lot's wife looks back and she became a pillar of salt. So the scene cuts and actually God goes, the ten righteous that you thought were righteous are actually not righteous. Now what? Then this leads us to actually our timeless truth. So kind of things have kind of gone really like they flowed well today. Proud of myself. Okay. The context clues flowed right into the nerdy nugget. And the nerdy nugget is flowing right into our timeless truth. How does God define righteous? Well, it seems like God defines righteous by a righteous person's ability to influence others. That influence is tied to righteousness. That I'm not righteous if I can't influence people to also be righteous. So when Abraham says, will you not spare it for 50? Will you not spare it for 10? Will you not spare it for 20? What he's saying is, well, if there's 50, then that does. That means that the city's not wicked. That means that there's hope for the city to progress. Because there's 50 people, then eventually there'll be 55. Eventually there'll be 60. Because righteousness spreads. Righteousness is influential. People are attracted to righteousness. Righteousness is not just, well, I didn't break the rules and I'm minding my business and I didn't break any of the rules. So you can punish them. Don't punish me because I didn't break any of the rules. That's actually like arrogance. That's. I didn't, I didn't, I didn't. Well, did you influence anybody else to be a rule follower? Did you influence anybody else to be righteous? Did you influence anybody around you to love God the way you love God? Now, for God, it seems like righteousness isn't in you following the rules as an individual, but righteousness is about your ability to. To actually influence the people that are around you. And Lot has spent year after year after year amongst wicked people that he's not able to win for the Lord. He's not able to influence. He's not able to rub off on them. And this is actually the downfall of Lot that he's attracted to this city in the first place. He lives amongst these people, and at no point in time does he have a positive influence on the people who he is dwelling amongst. Bible nerds. I have an announcement. My brand new book, Crushing Chaos, releases May of 2025 and pre orders are officially open. When I began to learn Genesis in its proper context, I learned that the creation account is not primarily about God creating something out of nothing, but rather God bringing divine order to the chaos of the cosmos. That one nugget was a game changer for me because I've been preaching to all the kids in my youth group that peace was a solution for their anxiety. But really, God's solution to chaos is never peace, but rather order. Peace isn't something that you stumble into, is something that you intentionally step into. And that starts with aligning your life with God's order. I think that this book is a game changer. It's nerdy, it's practical, it provides a very contextual understanding of the book of Genesis. And if you grab a copy, you'll learn why there's a huge dragon on the COVID Head to the link in the show notes to pre order or head to crushing chaos.com to see the really dope trailer that we made for this book. I think it's time for you to crush the chaos in your life, and that starts with grabbing a copy of this book. Now back to the podcast man. If there's a timeless truth for us today, it's that your righteousness is not just revealed in your ability to follow the rules and mind your business. But your righteousness is revealed in your ability to influence other people in the direction of righteousness. That righteousness includes leadership, especially leadership over those in your home. The stories here are actually juxtaposed to one another. There's hospitality in both elements, there's households in both elements. Literally, the two angels go from Abraham to Sodom while God states to barter or to bargain with Abraham. This now introduces this idea of what's called a righteous intercessor. And when we get to the book of Exodus, this theme is going to get picked up a ton. That if there's a righteous intercessor, that God will actually hold back his judgment, hold back his wrath. There's also. I don't have time to really get into it. There's so many parallels between the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and God banishing Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. So many parallels. About eight parallels that I counted just as I was studying. I don't have time to get into every single parallel, but tons and tons of parallels. There are angels, right? Angels guarding the entrance back into the Garden of Eden. Angels that are on their way to Sodom. The flaming sword that we see guarding the entrance back into Edom is that flaming sword. That same word gets used for the raining down of fire that is going to happen upon Sodom. There's tons of parallels in the story. But Abraham is concerned, is sure that there must be 10 righteous because I know that there's at least 10 people in my. In my nephew's household. But the reality is that there aren't 10 righteous because even the people in Lot's household are actually wicked, which is ultimately proven in what his daughters do. They get him drunk and they have sex with him. And you are going to get the foundation of the Moabites and. And the Ammonites as a result of Lot having sex with his daughters while he is drunk. Here's what they say. Last night I slept with my father. Let's get him to drink wine again tonight. And you go in to sleep with him so that we can preserve our family line through our father. I mean, that is just absolutely disgusting. My stomach is actually turning. Says this. So they got their father to drink wine that they. That night also. Who gets drunk with their daughters like that is just absolutely wild. And the younger daughter went in and slept with him again. He was not aware of it when she laid down or when she got up. So both of Lot's daughters became pregnant by their father. The older daughter had a son and she named him Moab. He is the father of the Moabites of today. The younger daughter also had a son and she named him Ben Ami. He is the father of the Ammonites of today. So that is that. We're going to get this last story, this ridiculousness with Abraham. He's going to try to pass his wife off as his sister one more time. As if he hasn't like done that enough. And that's actually going to get picked up. And Isaac's story way later. All right, I gave you some context clues. I gave you some dirty nuggets. And our timeless truth is that if you are going to be a righteous person, then you are going to have to be an influential person. You're going to have to be a leader. That leadership and influence are actually non negotiable parts of being righteous. That it's not enough to just watch out for you and yours, but you actually have to be the kind of person that lets your light shine. That is salt and light every single place that you go. That is our video for day 87. Hey, I'll see you right here for day 88 as we dive into Genesis chapter 21 and 23. Love you guys so much. If you're on a streak, don't break that streak. If you're not on a streak, well, today is a good day to start one. So if you did the reading for today, do it again tomorrow and let's get on a streak. I'll see you right here tomorrow. I'm proud of you. Love you guys. Thanks so much for joining us on the Bible Department podcast. You can find us online and learn more about the show at thebibledepartment.com and on Instagram hebibledepartment. If you enjoyed this episode and wanna dive deeper into the Bible, you can get free access to our library of courses@thebibledepartment.com we'll see you back here tomorrow.