It must be held therefore that the promises made to Abraham really include a prophecy of Christ. We could not infer from the record in Genesis how well Abraham understood the reference to the Messiah. But the allusions to this point in the New Testament give us light, our Savior most distinctly declaring――Abraham rejoiced that he might see my day; _he saw it_――with great joy. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, speaking of Abraham and the patriarchs as not having received the promised blessings but as seeing them from afar and embracing them, has in mind specially their faith in the promised heavenly city (Heb. 11: 10, 13, 14, 16), yet not to the exclusion of him who prepares those mansions for his people (Jno. 14: 2, 3). His testimony is in point to show that Abraham looked beyond the earthly side of those blessings to the heavenly; rested not in the earthly Canaan, not in the multitude of his lineal sons and daughters; but reached out beyond these to the city that hath eternal foundations and to the blessings of the Great Messiah, good for all the nations of the earth. The nearer and lesser blessings had a power of suggestion, lifting his thought to the more remote and greater. A man who talked with God so intimately can not be supposed to have missed these grand ideas of the gospel age and of the heavenly state which we are sometimes wont to regard as the special, not to say exclusive, revelations of the New Testament. _Sodom and Gomorrah._ Involved in this history of Abraham, there occurs this ever memorable case of sudden and most fearful judgment upon the ungodly in this world――the overthrow of the cities of the plain. Sodom and Gomorrah only are mentioned by name in Gen. 13: 10 and 19: 24, 28); in several cases for brevity, Sodom only; but Moses (Deut. 20: 23) and Hosea (11: 8) speak of Admah and Zeboim as also overthrown. These were contiguous and (in Gen. 14: 2) confederate cities. The narrative sets forth their appalling and absolutely universal wickedness. Other references suggest the causes or occasions (Ezek. 16: 49, 50), and intimate that the better life and the reproving testimony of Lot were powerless (2 Pet. 2: 7, 8). The narrative also makes prominent the immediate agency of God in this destruction. “The Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah fire and brimstone from the Lord out of heaven” (Gen. 19: 24). “When Abraham looked toward Sodom and all the land of the plain, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a great furnace” (v. 28).