High Places pt 4. HIGH PLACES EXPLAINED
Have you found out where Lot and his family were when God rained fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah? If you haven’t seen Part 3 of ‘High Places’ don’t read any further right now, but go back to Lot’s Escape and see if you can answer the question. In fact, if you haven’t read any of the ‘High Places’ posts, why not start at Part 1 and see if you can answer all three questions?
Back to my third, and last, question. Just to refresh your mind, here it is:
‘Picture Lot and his family as God rained fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah. Where are they?’
Remember, I wasn’t after a specific place like, ‘Toronto, Canada’, but just something general, like ‘on the ocean’. If you can give the specific answer, then that’s terrific, but I have to say that it’s a rare person who even gets the general answer correct.
You’ll find the answer in Genesis 19:17-24. Lot had initially been instructed to flee to the mountains. However, he asked for favour to go to the nearby city of Zoar, and that favour was granted. He was then told to hurry there because nothing could be done until he and his family were safely in the city. Verse 23 tells us that Lot entered Zoar, and verse 24 says, ‘Then the Lord rained brimstone and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah.’
So the answer to my question is, ‘In a city’, or more specifically, ‘In the city of Zoar’.
Surprised? I was when I first discovered this. My mother was a Sunday School teacher and Ladies’ Bible study leader. My father was a lay preacher. Yet, if you had asked them this question, they too would have gotten it wrong. I still remember the beautiful picture, that was part of my parents’ teaching arsenal, of Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt, with mountains all around.
I’m not trying to make out that I’m clever or more spiritual by knowing the answer. It’s what’s in our heart that’s important – not what’s in our head.
The point of all this is not to test your memory but to reveal to each of us that we often think we know something when we don’t.
That in itself is of no real consequence if we’re talking about who won the last ball game, how many people live in Madagascar, when the Boer war began and such.
However, it can have serious repercussions in our daily living and ultimately on our destiny. You see, if we can get Biblical FACTS wrong, which are purely dependent upon our attention to detail and our memories, how much more likely are we to miss what God is trying to say to our hearts, including biblical principles, theological truth and a clear understanding of God’s message?
If we believed we knew the account of Jesus birth, or of Lot’s escape from destruction, and then discovered that we got it wrong, how likely is it that we think we know AND do what God instructs us - but in fact have that wrong too?
When it comes to our lives, we are competing against more than inattention to detail, or a poor memory. We are up against our own mindset. Our culture is at war with God, yet our culture has so influenced the minds of most Christians that we have become blind to just how far from God’s ways we have strayed. We can think that we have a biblical mindset, when in fact it is just a worldly mindset with a few Christian trimmings around the edges.
Lurking in this type of mindset are all sorts of beliefs, attitudes and ‘facts’ that we hold, sometimes with a passion. It is these things that I call ‘High Places’. Often without realising it, we esteem our High Places more than we esteem God and His Word to us, and as a result, it is these High Places that often stand between us and God’s solution to a problem. – just in the same way that the High Places destroyed the faith of the children of Israel in the time of the Kings.
In Bible history the high places involved worship of something other than God. They competed with pure worship of God in the same way as our high places block our true worship of God – and therefore block our ability to receive from God as well. In Bible times, the high places were to be removed, and so too today, we need to remove the high places that are in our heart and minds.
In the last few posts on ‘High Places’, we’ll look at a number of real life examples of statements people have made to me, and discuss why I consider them high places that need to be destroyed.