Dad’s Stay Away from Sodom
According to Hallmark, Father's Day is the fourth-largest card-sending occasion with 72 million cards given every year. Fifty percent of all Father's Day cards are purchased for fathers, according to Hallmark. Almost 20 percent of Father's Day cards are given to husbands. (https://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/11/us/fathers-day-fast-facts/index.html)
Looks like we are an amazing ‘card sending’ generation to fathers and husbands at this season…yet our generation is the most broken and devastated generation in all the history of mankind.
Funny…but sad!
Let’s look at Gen 13:10-13 very briefly.
10 And Lot lifted up his eyes, and beheld all the plain of Jordan, that it was well watered everywhere, before the LORD destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, even as the garden of the LORD, like the land of Egypt, as thou comest unto Zoar.
11 Then Lot chose him all the plain of Jordan; and Lot journeyed east: and they separated themselves the one from the other.
12 Abram dwelled in the land of Canaan, and Lot dwelled in the cities of the plain, and pitched his tent toward Sodom.
13 But the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the LORD exceedingly.
What kind of fathers we really need today? Just three things to learn our lessons wisely.
Firstly, Lot made up his mind to separate from Abraham and ‘beheld’ the well-watered plain of the Jordan. He did not consider the future, he only reflected on what he saw. Fathers who do not ‘see’ the future of their families are in a hazardous place. And rightly enough…when he entered Sodom, Lot got to know the wickedness and the iniquity there. He’d probably heard of it, but now he was exposing his own family to it.
Secondly, when fathers separate themselves from accountability and responsibility from a God-given ‘Abrahamic figure’ (Abraham was by the way Lot’s uncle), they set a treacherous model for their family. Lot was answerable to no one. Many fathers live ‘independent’ of the church and fellowship and are not very committed to the ‘church family’ as it were.
Lastly, Sodom was not a thriving place for the raising a family. The Apostle Peter, writing in his second epistle says… “for that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard”. Can you imagine the effect on Lot’s own family then?
Did you know that by the time we come to Genesis 19, some of Lot’s children chose to remain behind, and not leave with Lot, when the devastation was imminent on Sodom?
All too often fathers make many of life’s decisions with materialism as a central factor of their lives. And honestly, we do not need fathers today who will not contain their children and correct them…like the High Priest Eli of old. Eli ‘restrained them not’ (1 Samuel 3:13), because Eli’s sons Hophni and Phinehas were exceedingly wicked and sexually degenerate. I personally don’t see many fathers correct their own children.
Ours is a permissive age. Many children grow up and never see their own fathers set out boundary lines for their actions.
Permissive fathers are the paramount enemy of a child. We need fathers who not only are self-disciplined, but can also rightly discipline their own children.
We do not need fathers today who will pitch their tents toward Sodom as did ancient Lot.
Stay far from the Sodom of today.
Hey…Dads take time with your family!