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God may be seen to delay the effects of the sins of the majority by the individual righteousness of a few. That’s an absolutely amazing revelation and one which should move any of us who knows the Lord to compassion and urgency to pray for our fellow human beings. The natural ethical order of things had been seriously violated in Sodom and Gomorrah.

You know the way of faith is a narrow path and there aren't that many ways of doing things right but there are a whole lot of ways of doing things wrong. When we do things wrong the consequences of doing them wrong can be truly catastrophic not just for us but for other people. People who after the war were trying to understand what happened in places like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Their conclusions where, nearly everyone lied about it. In all the 20th centuries dictator led societies about 2 out of 5 people were government informers. They were truly terrible societies because the whole system was corrupt and terrible and Nihilistic because dystopian systems are always founded on a doctrine of man, not matter how they try to wrap it up and disguise it. Murderous. destructive and genocidal they got it wrong on every single level.

The idea what happened in Nazi Germany the Soviet Union etc was that a population people listened to a tiny % of bad people is not a good theory, being the Nazi ethos was there at every single level of the social organization.

I can only speak by I experienced growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1970’s and 80’s and I can tell you with authority it was not a tiny minority of people, it was a minority yes, but a significant minority. (Theory 20%) I just cannot see how after the 20th century people still don’t see the lessons we need to learn here. 

To understand that the Nazi concentration camp guard was a human like you or I and that in given circumstances you and I have the same potential to do what he did also, is vital. If you can't see you in that then you don't know who you really are. We must never forget how close we are to destruction. Less than 100 years ago within the lifetimes of our parents  6,000,000 people died in Europe. If you don't understand what you capable outside of a relationship and accountability to God then you are only one step away from disaster. This idea that Christ took the sins of the world unto himself is the full extrapolation of this . The God of the Old Testament is the same God who we can have a relationship with and is someone who can be negotiated with when it comes to interceding for others.

Abraham has been told that whatever is going on in Sodom and Gomorrah is seriously wrong and that God is going to do something about it and he takes it upon himself to ask God to show mercy. Asking God to be merciful is maybe what God always wants us to do. Indeed God can wipe out the city because bad things are happening there, but you know there's probably a few people in the city that aren't completely corrupted by what's going on there. Abraham decides to intercede with God on behalf of these people who are going to be destroyed he says. This is wonderful because surely this confirms for us that good is more powerful than evil. In a place that's corrupt, a minority of people who stand forth against the corruption can prevail.

One of the best examples of that again was so Aleksander Solzhenitsyn because he was in the terrible work camps when he wrote his book the Gulag Archipelago. The long view now is that his book, ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ was one of the things that brought down the Soviet Union. It was published in the 1970s, first of all in the West and then leaked back into Russia. It appears that what happened at least initially was that the communism as an ethical system lost credibility among most who was read it and where reasonably educated. Immediately upon the publication the book began to pull the moral slat out from underneath the communist system. Academics now recognize the book was definitely one of the reasons, there were many other also, but it was definitely one of the reasons why the whole rotten system crumbled and fell without a war. That's a great example of how one person can take on a tyranny and prevail. Leo Tolstoy was also a remarkable example of a single person intervening in a catastrophe and changing things more than he could have ever imagined.