These are mysteries of which the Book of God is full. And thus is it again and afresh witnessed to us, what we are and where we are, though travelling on, to all appearance, in the common track of everyday human life, with a generation, in the spirit of their mind, still, as ever, saying, "Where is the promise of His coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation."
Many incidental things might occur to the mind in this, as in other sections of this wonderful history; such as the visit of the Son of God to Abraham; Abraham’s intercession for Sodom; the angels’ reserve towards Lot; and the contrasted characters of the two saints--the saint of the tent, and the saint in Sodom. But my purpose, in this little book, does not take in such details. But I would ask, in closing this action in chapters xviii. xix. Are we, beloved, apprehensive of the moment in which we are living? Is "man’s day" brightening up to its meridian before us, ascending to its noontide splendour? And what think we of that? Are we joining in the congratulations of man with his fellow, that thus it is? Or is all this brightness suspected and challenged by us, as the sure precursor of God’s judgment? Do we know that the god of this world finds a house "swept and garnished" as thoroughly a scene for his evil and destructive energy as a Sodom? Do we judge, with our generation, that this cannot be? Or do we hold it in mind, that it is in such a house that he will work at the closing of Christendom’s history? And are we waiting for the Son of God to take us up to that mystic eminence where of old He took His Abraham? The Lord give us grace to occupy such ground! And we shall the more easily and naturally do so, if, like Abraham, we are saints of the tent and not of the city--such saints (again like Abraham) as rejoice, "in the heat of the day," to hold communion with the Lord of glory.
After this we go, with our patriarch, into the land of the Philistines, where he sojourns during the times of chapters xx. xxi.
The old compact between Abraham and Sarah is acted on again, after so long a time--acted on now at Gerar, as before it had been in Egypt. It had been made between them ere they left their native country. It was brought out with them from the very place of their birth. It was, I may say, in them older than anything of God; and after many changes and exercises it is in them and with them the same thing still.