Genesis 18:26 “And the LORD said, If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes.”
Genesis 18:32 “And he said, Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak yet but this once: Peradventure ten shall be found there. And he said, I will not destroy it for ten’s sake.”
The terms ‘contingent promise’ or ‘conditional clause’ sound grandiose, as if the conditions must be magnificent in order to produce a meaningful outcome. In reality, the Lord asks very little from us. The magnificence lies in His output and not in our input. The ‘if’ is minute, and the ‘then’ is massive.
Abraham’s intercession for Sodom highlights this point. The fulfillment of the conditions originally required only fifty righteous people in the entire city. This already small requirement diminished to forty-five, then forty, then thirty, and then twenty. In the end, the Lord would spare the entire population IF only ten were righteous. The conditions went from very small to miniscule, while the outcome remained significant.
The small nature of God’s conditions demands an extra measure of individual responsibility (see the prior post – https://prayatlunch.us/free-riders/). Since the ‘if’ is so small, your contribution may be the difference between conditions fulfilled and conditions failed. Consider the following illustration related to Genesis 18. Maybe there were nine righteous found in Sodom, and one individual who was on the fence. Maybe that person thought that they could remain undecided or undedicated without consequence, straddling righteousness and worldliness. In the end, their decision to stop short of righteousness yielded horrible consequences. One person’s disobedience made all the difference.
PLEASE PRAY THAT EVERY CHRISTIAN WOULD RECOGNIZE HIS PERSONAL ROLE IN FULFILLING GOD’S SMALL CONDITIONS. You may be the proverbial tenth person in God’s plan for America today, and your absence will make all the difference.
