All the facts in this history are simple truths. They happened just as recorded. But there is this twofold design in them: either to give samples of the life of faith in a saint, or to give illustrations of some great ways and purposes of God. And such illustrations of the divine counsels and mysteries is the common way of divine wisdom throughout Scripture. What was the tabernacle or the temple but a place for the constant rehearsal of mysteries, such as atonement and intercession, and the varied order of God in the worship and services of His house, or in the ministry of grace? For such were the sacrifices and the services there, the feasts, and the holy days, and the jubilees. What, in like manner, were the exodus, and the journey through the wilderness, and the entrance into Canaan, the wars there, and then the throne of the peaceful one? Were not all these, whether institutes of the sanctuary, or facts in the history, exhibitions of the hidden, eternal counsels of the divine bosom? Now chapters xviii. xix. of this history suggest this recollection. These chapters are to be read together, and afford us a large and vivid exhibition of certain great truths, which concern us at this moment, in as full a sense as ever the facts themselves, which convey them to us as in a parable, concerned Abraham and his generation. Sodom, in that day, was the _world_. It had been warned, but had refused instruction. It had proved incurably departed from God, and beyond correction. Sodom had been visited and chastened in the day of the victory of the confederated kings--as we saw in chapter xiv.; but it was Sodom still, and was, at this time, in advanced iniquity, in a state of ripened apostasy, her last state worse than her first. Sodom was the _world_ in this day. The Lord Jesus, in His teaching, gives it morally that place, just as another generation had been the world in Noah’s day. See Matt. xxiv.; Luke xvii. They are like figures, presenting to our thoughts "this present evil world," which is ripening itself for the judgment of God. At such a crisis, however, in this day of the judgment of Sodom, or the overthrow of the cities of the plain, as in every other like day, there are two incidental matters to be deeply pondered by our souls; there is _deliverance out of the judgment_, and there is _separation before it come_. There is Lot, and there is Abraham. Lot is delivered, when the hour of the crisis comes; Abraham is separated before it comes. All this is much to be weighed in our thoughts. _Judgment_, _deliverance_, _separation_--these are the elements of the action here, and these are full of meaning, and of application to our own history as the Church of God, and to the world around us.