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Abraham has interceded with God and God has agreed that if Abraham can find 10 righteous people in the city he will save it. Does the fact that it stops at 10 mean anything is 10 a significant number? Why did Abraham come up with and settle on 10? It has been suggested by more than one Bible expert that he's talking about Lot and his family. There was Lot, his wife and he had children two of whom were married and famous commentators like Wiley have come up with that. The Lord will so he's willing to spare Sodom if he can just find 10 people.

There's more to the story and we're going to look at it later but today I want us to take a bit of a segway into Luke Chapter 11. There's a great lesson here and I don't want us to miss it and it has to do with prayer. What Abraham did was not just intercede, but he was persistent in his prayer. Look at Luke Chapter 11 verse 5 

“Then Jesus said to them, “Suppose you have a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have no food to offer him.’ And suppose the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give you the bread because of friendship, yet because of your shameless audacity he will surely get up and give you as much as you need. “So, I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened”.

(Luke 11: 5-10)

This suggest to me that we too are to be persistent in prayer. Are there will be things that your life that you have been praying for and have not yet had an answer, and you might sometime feel I can’t ask God for that again, he's obviously said no. This tells me don't give up, don't give up just keep praying. Jesus made taught this principle very clearly in his parable of the persistent widow contained within Luke Chapter 18

“Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’ “For some time he refused. But finally, he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’” And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly.”

(Luke 18: 1-7)

If don't get anything else out of what we are looking at today, learn the lesson of being persistence in prayer. Genesis 18 is the passage that is credited as having taught the great 19th century evangelist George Mueller how to pray, and pray persistently. In Genesis 18 the lesson is taught that we should always be persistent in prayer, but the other lesson found here is that God doesn't want to judge the righteous among the wicked. God is still going to judge, and he will judge fairly but the righteous will be overlooked.

Let's go back to the passage and the last verse in chapter 18.

“When the Lord had finished speaking with Abraham, he left, and Abraham returned home”.

(Gen 18: 33)

The Lord went his way as soon as he had finished speaking with Abraham. So now I just need to sum this all up and I want to link some observations about what this all means for us today, but I’ll plan to do that in the next episode.