This transcript was auto-generated.

For many readers the opening conversation described here between Abram and God teach some interesting spiritual truths. Firstly, as I pointed out last time, God reveals his truth to those he calls his friends, but in turn they should share those truths with other people. If you know the Lord and consider yourself as having a relationship with the Lord then you should as best you can share the spiritual insights, He gives you. But there is a second spiritual truth revealed here and it is that God intends to judge sin.

The big point is being made here is that God decides to tell Abraham about what he planned to do to Sodom and Gomorrah. Which is to judge them. God always shares his truth with believers and one of these great truths is his judgement and he is about to give Abraham an insight into what he's about to do in judging Sodom. Alright that's God’s plan, but what was God’s motivation.

20 Then the Lord said, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous 21 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.”
(Genesis 18: 20-21)

This is a very interesting little comment the wickedness of Sodom is so great that it's crying out to Him, so he is going to go investigate. God's making a case that, and the people of Sodom and Gomorrah have sinned so much so that God has heard about by the people themselves crying out to him. That's a very common Biblical motif by the way that the sins and noise of humanity can reach such a clamor that even God can hear it and be forced to intervene. What it means is that God can become so offended that he in a spiritual sense is drawn down. “I'm going to go see if it's as bad as what I'm hearing up here in heaven”. Obviously again God is taking on human characteristics here by identifying how we all feel them when we hear about an atrocity in the world. We all can hear those cries in our imagination I think I hear the cry of a child terrified and beaten by a drunken father or mother. The crime an elderly person being attacked. There is the cry of the wife being beaten or abandoned by her husband. I also hear the cry of a broken people so trapped by mental illness that they give up. I hear the echoing cries across thousands towns and cities, the cries of prostitutes and those in the grip of drug addiction. But wait but wait these cries are only a fraction of those millions of cries arising every minute of everyday from every village town around the world. Our nation cries out, our churches cry out, and we cry out and all are heard by God. Yet God's judgement must not fall too quickly or how should we escape. God hears the cries, yet God is saying bad as it is, understand the implication is for the response to you cry if it is for God to come and judge’s sin. The Bible is full of it, God judges sin any judges it justly. God is a just, God was fair is dealing with Hagar in chapter 17 and Sarah in chapter 18 and he has he been gracious to Sodom thus far. God had been just in his dealings with Sodom thus far but Sodom had refused to hear so his judgement on them eventually will fall and it will be just 

At this point Abraham gets the message he understands gods intent in judging so his response is to start praying and it's the type of prayer and for the first time in the Bible we see a certain type of pray  A prayer in which we can discover it is possible for us to intercede with God on behalf of people or a situation and in faith trust that God will respond in a way that is just and it called intercessory prayer. Our response should be to intercede not to call down judgement, but we will see how that plays out in the next episode.