Welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the Book of Genesis. Tonight is study #10 of Genesis, chapter 19. I will read Genesis 19:1-7:

And there came two angels to Sodom at even; and Lot sat in the gate of Sodom: and Lot seeing them rose up to meet them; and he bowed himself with his face toward the ground; And he said, Behold now, my lords, turn in, I pray you, into your servant’s house, and tarry all night, and wash your feet, and ye shall rise up early, and go on your ways. And they said, Nay; but we will abide in the street all night. And he pressed upon them greatly; and they turned in unto him, and entered into his house; and he made them a feast, and did bake unleavened bread, and they did eat. But before they lay down, the men of the city, even the men of Sodom, compassed the house round, both old and young, all the people from every quarter: And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the men which came in to thee this night? bring them out unto us, that we may know them. And Lot went out at the door unto them, and shut the door after him, And said, I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly.

We are interested tonight in looking at Genesis 19:4:

But before they lay down, the men of the city, even the men of Sodom, compassed the house round, both old and young, all the people from every quarter:

We will look at the word “compassed,” which is Strong’s #5437. It is found twice in verse 4. It is the same word that is translated as “round,” so we could say, “compassed the house compassed.” It was “doubled.” God uses this word twice, so He certainly wants us to look at this idea of the wicked men of Sodom compassing Lot’s house round about. That means they were in front of the house, behind the house and on either side of the house. They completed circled round the house.

In our last study, we looked at Luke 19 and we saw that Jesus made this statement in Luke 19:41-44:

And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, Saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, And shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.

Jesus was speaking of Jerusalem, historically, but this is the Bible and in the Bible God uses types and figures. Jerusalem can be used as a type and figure of the New Testament corporate church. Here, Christ says, “Thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side.” And that is exactly what the men of Sodom did when Lot and the two messengers were in Lot’s house. The men of the city were certainly enemies of Lot and enemies of God and they had compassed the house round and they were keeping them in on every side.

It also said in Luke 19, “and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another,” and we know this ties in with Matthew 24:1-3:

And Jesus went out, and departed from the temple: and his disciples came to him for to shew him the buildings of the temple. And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down. And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?

In the rest of the chapter, Christ proceeds to tell them about the sign of His coming and the end of the world and it has to do with the fall of the New Testament churches and congregations. That is when judgment began at the end of the world. That is when the end stage of earth’s history began. And it began in 1988 when the church age ended (and it became official 2300 evening mornings later in 1994), but God stopped using the churches in 1988. The Holy Spirit departed out of the midst of the congregations in the year 1988 and the events we are reading about in Sodom are connected, spiritually, because it has to do with the time of the end of the world. We can know this from Jesus’ statements where He first spoke of the days of Noah and then He spoke of the days of Lot and then He added, “Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed.” It is the time of the end of the world.

So, the compassing of the house round about in Sodom is a picture of the time when the enemies of the kingdom of God would compass the churches round about.

There is another historical picture found in 2Kings, but instead of an individual’s house, God uses the illustration of the city Jerusalem. It says in 2Kings 25:1-4:

And it came to pass in the ninth year of his reign, in the tenth month, in the tenth day of the month, that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came, he, and all his host, against Jerusalem, and pitched against it; and they built forts against it round about. And the city was besieged unto the eleventh year of king Zedekiah. And on the ninth day of the fourth month the famine prevailed in the city, and there was no bread for the people of the land. And the city was broken up, and all the men of war fled by night by the way of the gate between two walls, which is by the king’s garden: (now the Chaldees were against the city round about:) and the king went the way toward the plain.

Then the account continues to describe the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians. Many were taken captive and the king of Babylon was victorious over the king of Judah and over the city of Jerusalem. We know the king of Babylon is a type and figure of Satan. This historical battle pictures the events that would take place at the end of the world when the enemies of God (Satan and his emissaries) would come against the people of God in the place where the Bible was located, the corporate church. They compassed it round about. And the picture is one of utter destruction, because when they were compassed round about, they could not go out of the city to obtain food or bread and the water supply would dwindle. If the siege continued long enough, the people within the city would begin to starve. The Bible gives some terrible accounts of times in history when cities were besieged, and people starved. We do not even want to think about what people will do when they lack food.

This is the spiritual situation, as Lot is in his house with the two messengers and all the men of Sodom compassed the house around. It is the same picture we find in Luke 21, which is a parallel chapter to Matthew 24. It says in Luke 21:20-23:

And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh. Then let them which are in Judaea flee to the mountains; and let them which are in the midst of it depart out; and let not them that are in the countries enter thereinto. For these be the days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled. But woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck, in those days! for there shall be great distress in the land, and wrath upon this people.

What is this describing? By the way, there are people that take the Bible very literally and they think this only describes events that unfolded in 70 A.D. They think this was fulfilled (back then), because when they read of Jerusalem or Judea and of fleeing to the mountains, that is all they can see. They read the Bible like it is a natural history book, just look a history book that men have written about the history of a country like the United States, for example, and they describe the Revolutionary War, the Civil War or World War I. There were historical battles and you can just read the plain language. You do not try to seek a deeper, spiritual meaning. Of course, we would not do that with history books because they are not written by God, but they were written by men about the history of man and they have a very limited application.

But the Bible is written by God and the history in the Bible was written by God. And God tells us that “without a parable, He did not speak.” And God gives us all kinds of clues to that effect throughout the Bible, does He not? For example, there is the book of Proverbs or parables. The book of Job often says, “And Job continued his parable,” to help us realize that we must look at Job as a parabolic figure and a type of Christ. In Ezekiel, it says, “Doth he not speak parables?” It goes on, and on, and on. Regarding the book of Revelation, even the theologians that say we must take the Bible literally will say, “Revelation is written in hyperbolic language.” Well, what does that mean? It means it is written in parables. In Galatians, God told us of two Old Testament women, Sarah and Hagar. Sarah had a son Isaac and Hagar had a son Ishmael. God tell us that this was an allegory representing two covenants and, yet, He did not tell us that directly in the historical narrative in the Old Testament. But God interpreted it for us and the natural-minded church theologians respond, “Well, yes, because God interpreted it for us, it permits us to go back there.” It is nice for them to give us permission, but we do not look to the churches or their theologians for permission – we look to God for permission. But these theologians say, “Yes – you are permitted to look at it that way when the New Testament interprets the Old Testament.” And, yet, they would not permit us to learn that Christ spoke in parables to teach us how to understand the entire Bible. They would allow us to learn of a parabolic meaning from an excerpt that God took from the Old Testament and put in the New Testament, but they would not permit us to look at the entire book of Genesis in this manner, looking for spiritual meaning. But they are foolish in their blindness (and there is no other way of putting it), because they lack understanding of how God wrote the Bible.

I keep saying this and anyone who listens to our studies regularly will notice that I often speak of natural-minded theologians and natural-minded individuals. It is another way to say they are not saved and, therefore, they lack spiritual understanding and the ability to discern spiritual things. The spiritual realm is “dead” to them, because they are dead in their own souls. They have no life in their spirit to see and to hear spiritual things. Therefore, when they come to the Bible, that whole level of spiritual meaning is dead to them. They cannot perceive it, so they teach what they can perceive, which is the plain, literal meaning of the Scriptures. It is a natural understanding of the Bible. And that is fine on one level, but, again, it is the superficial level of the Bible. The real “meat” and the depth of spiritual meaning that provide the wonderful and glorious teachings of the Bible lies below the surface in the spiritual realm. And that is where God encourages His people to go. He tells us to search for wisdom, as for hid treasure. We must dig down through the surface level to find the truth of the spiritual teachings of the Word of God.

When we do that, we see that Galatians 4, which describes the two covenants, describes one covenant as “Jerusalem which now is” and the other as “Jerusalem which is above.” So, Jerusalem can point to other things and, likewise, Israel, Judah or Jerusalem can identify with the New Testament churches and congregations, like it does in Luke 21 and Matthew 24. Christ was speaking of the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place. You see, this is where the natural-minded man is inconsistent when they look for literal understanding. The “holy place” is wherever God dwells. In the Old Testament, God set up the figure inside the sanctuary within the temple, the “holiest of all.” God would dwell there, symbolically, in the ark. And because He dwelt there, it made the temple holy and because the temple was holy, it made the city of Jerusalem holy. It also made the people of Jerusalem holy. There was this sort of effect that God’s presence had and if you identified with that presence, you were holy, as it said in 1Corinthians when it spoke of a saved individual that is married to an unsaved person; God said their children were holy, but it did not mean that the children were necessarily saved. It meant that they were “holy” through their identification with the saved individual. Likewise, when God rent the veil of the temple in twain, it meant He had departed out of the temple and the temple without God was no longer a holy temple. And since the temple was no longer holy, the city of Jerusalem and the people of Israel were no longer holy. God had departed from them and He established the New Testament corporate church. We read in the book of Revelation that the Lord Jesus dwelt among the candlesticks. The Spirit of God was dwelling in the midst of the churches and congregations. The Bible was there. God’s Spirit was there. The churches became the holy place for the New Testament era after 33 A.D. Therefore, we need to understand the error people make regarding Matthew 24:15-16:

When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand:) Then let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains:

Therefore, it is an impossibility for this to refer to the temple in Jerusalem or to historical Jerusalem being destroyed in 70 A.D. or even to the Jews themselves, because the temple was no longer the holy place and Jerusalem was no longer the holy city. The veil of the temple had been rent in twain a few decades earlier. It must refer to the church that God established to be the new “holy place.” That is where Satan, who is called the “abomination of desolation,” was standing where he ought not to be. Remember, this was part of the response when the disciples asked Christ, “Tell us, …what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?” So, this has to do with the time of the end of the world, which began in 1988 when the church age came to a close. God loosed Satan. What did Satan do upon being loosed? It says in Revelation 20:7-8:

And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.

By the way, it said in Genesis 19:4:

But before they lay down, the men of the city, even the men of Sodom, compassed the house round, both old and young, all the people from every quarter:

They were from every “quarter.” That would be “four points,” pointing to universality, just as it indicates in Revelation 20:8: “And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.”

Then it says in Revelation 20:9:

And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.

This is the same spiritual picture as in Luke 21 and Luke 19. It was not 70 A.D. when Satan was loosed, was it? Of course not. He was bound at the cross (in 33 A.D.) for a figurative thousand years. Those natural-minded individuals that take the Bible literally now have a problem. They try to say that it refers to Jerusalem being compassed about in 70 A.D., but in Revelation it says it was after a thousand years. So, now they really have a problem because they would have to go a literal thousand years into the New Testament era before Satan was loosed. But the “thousand years” is also a figurative number that has to do with “completeness” and the completeness of Satan’s binding was tied to the church age; when the church age ended in 1988, then Satan was loosed, and he immediately gathered the nations together to come against the camp of the saints.

It is interesting that it is called the “camp of the saints.” Where is the camp of the saints? Why does God call it the camp of the saints? Lord willing, in our next Bible study we will try to look more closely at the term “camp of the saints.” And we will continue to look at this interesting historical parable in Genesis 19 when the wicked men of Sodom compassed round about Lot’s house.