We pursue the God
who is passionately pursuing a lost world. We do this with one another
through worship, by the Word, to the world. Here's where I want to start--
on a very depressing note. We no longer live in a
Bible-friendly world. We've proved that. Niels Peter Lemche-- here he is. "The patriarchal narratives
are fiction, not reality." By the way, the book
from which this comes, called Prelude to
Israel's Past-- you know where I bought it? Bibles Plus. Look at this. "The patriarchal narratives
are fiction, not reality. That world does not
represent a real world. It stands outside the
usual representation of time and space. As a matter of fact, neither
the narratives nor their world can be dated to any
precise period." That's pretty much what
scholarship thinks of the Bible these days. Here's Israel Finkelstein. "Combination of archaeological
and historical research demonstrates that
the biblical account of the conquest and the
occupation of Canaan by the Israelites
is entirely divorced from historical reality." OK, I could give
you 1,000 quotes, but those two will suffice. We live in a world that is
not terribly Bible-friendly. Here's one more. This has specifically
to do with us. In the Wall Street
Journal a few years ago, William Dever, a
terrific archaeologist. I've had him here in Albuquerque
twice to speak to my students-- not about the patriarchs. He doesn't believe that part
of the Bible is historical. But he does a pretty good job
in the Iron Age with David and Solomon and all that. He says this, "No
responsible scholar goes out with a trowel in one
hand and a Bible in the other." And he was aiming
directly at me. Well, this is how I respond. "No responsible scholar
digging in the Holy Land goes out without a trowel in one
hand and a Bible in the other." You just don't do that. And I'll tell you why. And now, you've heard me say
it 13 times now over the years. That's simply because
the Bible is still the best historical,
geographical text we have preserved from
antiquity period, bar none. That's just the way it is. Sorry, liberal friends. That's just the fact. Now, we have been
involved in Sodom. And I want to bring
you-- by the way, we're going to end up with
the second coming tonight. I mean, not actually. I haven't made that
kind of an arrangement. We're not going to end
with the rapture tonight. I told Brian I was going to tell
you that we have figured out, with a team of mathematicians,
from the biblical text precisely when the rapture
and the second coming will occur right down, we
think, to the last hour or two. And I was going to take you
right up to the end and say, and it is-- oops,
we're out of time. But no, we're not
going to go that far. But we are going to end
up with the second coming. And we're going to tie Sodom
with the second coming, so we'll see how we can do that. But we've been
involved with Sodom. And at the bottom
line of it is this-- it is absolutely
the best possibility of providing a test case
to prove whether or not the Bible is historically
factual or not. It's absolutely the
perfect test case. Here's why-- because
it's accessible. Because the Bible geography
is so specific as to its location-- and I'm not
going into that tonight-- but it's so specific
as to its location that it was really easy to find. People credit me with having
discovered the city of Sodom-- kind of. But I can't really lay
claim to that discovery, simply because if someone
gave me a map of New Mexico and said, find Santa Fe. And if I followed the
map and drove to Santa Fe and I found Santa-- I said, what town is this? Santa Fe. I found it. The map is right. Could I take credit for
discovering Santa Fe? No. Well, I can't take credit
for discovering Sodom, because the biblical text is
so specific as to the location of Sodom that all we
did was follow the map, follow the biblical map. It took us to the location. And then we picked
it up from there with archeology to demonstrate-- or not-- that the Bible
was exactly correct about the city of Sodom and all
the other cities of the plain. So we were able to
get involved in that. We've been doing
it for 13 years. And it's the perfect test
case, because most people doubt the book of Genesis. Most scholars doubted that
Sodom and Gomorrah ever existed at all. And so it's perfect. And they say, well,
what about Noah's ark? Well, there is no archeology
associated with Noah's ark, because nobody
knows where it is. And everybody who thinks
they know where it is-- it's not there. There's nothing
associated with reality with Noah's ark right now. Does it exist? Did it exist? Certainly. But nobody knows. And but Sodom has a map. And if you go to
that location, we can deal with it
archaeologically, scientifically,
and historically. So it was the perfect case. And in fact, we were able to
do some very important things. And I'm going to
share those with you sequentially in a little bit. But first, I have to
update you on this season. Now, I know you woke
up this morning going, what I really need today is a
fix of lots of rocks and dirt. When I put these
things together, Danette always
says to me, nobody wants to look at rocks and dirt. I mean, cut the pictures
down, for Pete's sake. No, I love to-- I hope you like looking at this
stuff, because it's just cool. You're going to look
into a biblical city. We're going to see
some things that are talked about in the Bible. I mean, it's just cool. So here it is, for
better or worse-- here's this season. But I also want to show you
some archeology in process. Here's our site. It's really, really big. Here's our site from a distance. You see the Upper City-- you
can't even see the Lower City. All that area of green around-- that's all part of the site. It's all part of the city. They're growing bananas
all over the place. And sometimes, they wind up
destroying part of the city by planting bananas. But it's OK, because
the Upper City is such a big pile of rocks that
you can't plant anything there, so it's pretty safe. And so here, this red
circle represents where we're excavating right now. So the excavation from
the last-- in fact, the last three seasons-- is in that location. Let's draw it in
a little closer. And you see the first
glimpse of camel one. I love camel one. Camel one is our truck. It's our Mitsubishi
pickup truck, which we bought not this
season, but the previous season. And we never had one
up to this point. Man, it's amazing. It takes our stuff up
the hill, down the hill. Takes people to the hospital
when they fall and break legs-- that never happens. Well, it did once. But when we need stuff--
and we always need things. There's always errands to run. It goes and gets our hot
lunches, and so on, so on. So there it is. And I'll show you
a close up of her. But she's amazing. And Calvary Church was part
of purchasing that truck. I think that's really
cool, so I have to report-- they make me
report on all this stuff. What'd you spend our money on? So you get a little bit closer. Now, this draws it's a little
bit closer into the excavation. You can see that,
for those of you who have seen past pictures,
it's looking different. It's looking like
something's going on there. Tighten down just
a little bit more. That red arrow is
where we're digging. You can't see it. Why? Because it's down. It's down. We're three and
four meters down. So we'll get into that. Now we're looking down into it. Now, I want you to
look at that picture. This was taken on the first day
of the dig season this year. So there it is. This is the excavation as it
looked at the end of the 2017 dig season. Now, I want you to
look at that carefully. Now, I'm going to keep that
red circle in the picture, because it's going to
circle the same area in each of the next several slides. I want you to just
note the changes. So we're going to go
from that to this-- that's a few days in to
this season's excavations. This is the same area. Now I want to take you
to that end this season. That's the same
place, same area. So that's how it goes,
slowly but surely. Over the five and six
weeks of the dig season, the dirt comes off slowly. And what you're
looking at right there is the Middle Bronze Age
palace of King Bera, the city of Sodom, time of Abraham. That's what you're
looking at right there. So that's pretty cool. And I'll show you
some details of it. Here it is, looking at it from
a slightly different angle. Just showing the
excavation in progress. By the way, that whole area has
literally 40, 50, 60 gigantic-- the big dump trucks
you see moving dirt around town, five,
six yards of stuff-- about 40 or 50 of those total
taken out during this dig season, all by trowel,
dust pan, goofah, the recycled tire buckets that
we use, all going out by hand. It's a slow process. But boy, did we move some
dirt with our volunteers. And by the way, some of
you have been on the dig. Would you stand? If you've been on the
excavation, stand up. [APPLAUSE] Cool. Yeah, we love our-- and every one of
you could volunteer. If we had this many
diggers in a season-- wow. Could we get the dirt moving. And so this is
what it looks like. And that little bit right
there, just shaded it in a bit, that's mud brick. So the city is stone
foundations, mud brick superstructures, and
the palaces here, being swept for the first
time in almost 3,700 years. So sweeping the floor. We find a lot of pottery. And the pottery
gets scrubbed up. And then, of course, it
goes into its buckets and into the drying trays. From the drying tray-- by the way, that little
tag is important, because it follows the
pottery all the way through, from its field
bucket into the washing, soaking bucket, into
the drying tray, and eventually the drying
trays are all laid out. This is just a few of them. By the way, this season, we
registered almost 1,200 sherds from separate vessels. So over 1,200 distinct,
separate vessels from the palace that we excavated this year. Amazing. We keep about 10%, so
that just represents 10%. The rest we toss. We keep the best,
the ones that tell us what kind of pottery,
what kind of vessels we're dealing with. So it goes here, and then it
goes to the reading table. Once a week, on a
Friday or a Saturday, the end of the dig
week, on our day off-- it's really not a day off. The volunteers get
to go to neat places, like Petra and other places. But the staff has to
stay there and work. So we work, and
this is what we do. And we read, examine every
single diagnostic rim handle base, every
diagnostic sherd that comes through the
excavation, we examine it. And so it's a rigorous process. All of that stuff is
eventually packed up at the end of the season and
shipped by DHL back to the US. And we always pray
that it gets here. And Dr. Phil Silvia,
who's our director of scientific analysis,
always is in charge of packing everything up. And it eventually makes it
back here to Albuquerque. On the left, this
is Dr. Craig Olson. And on the right,
the newest member of our professional staff
is Dr. Mohammed Najjar, who is Jordan's top archaeologist. Last year, he finished
a 20-year project down in the southern
desert of Jordan. And he called me one day
and he said, need some help? And I said, yes, of
course, because I've known Mohammed for a long time. In fact, he was
working for the DOA 13 years ago when
we first started. And so I said, absolutely. And now, he is official
with the excavation. He is our-- we call him
the chief consulting, or senior consulting,
archaeologist. And what a jewel he is. What a jewel he is. I wish I could tell you some
things that he has said, but I'm not going to risk
that to the public eye. But he's a terrific guy. We love having him. This brings us up. I mean, this really,
really pulls us up in terms of the
scholarly world, not that we don't have great
scholars on our team, but having Jordan's top
archaeologist is not going to hurt. So we are really
appreciative of his help. And boy, is he a digger. He's not a theoretician. You put a trowel in this
man's hand, and things happen. And so he's terrific to
have on the excavation. Oh, here's camel one. And you see what
it does every day. Up and down the
hill several times. It's wonderful. We absolutely love it. So well, what do you do with
it the rest of the time? Sultan Madhi, our director
of transportation, gets to keep it and take care
of it, pay the insurance on it, and use it as his vehicle
for the rest of the year. He has very limited driving,
so he takes care of it. He keeps it in his
compound, keeps it safe, keeps it polished, and keeps
it in good working order. This is an oven. Well, that's cool. If you've got a palace,
you've got to cook. Well, say, well, if you build
that thing up, what is this? This is a horno? Recognize horno? That's the foundation
of an horno. That's what kind
of oven they use. Well, if they build their
houses out of mud bricks, adobes, just like we do here,
just like the pueblos here, why wouldn't they
cook with hornos? Well, they do. It's exactly the same thing. Over there, in Arabic, it's
called a tabun, or a tannur, But it's an oven. It's a clay oven. And here's some more of the
walls, the palace walls. You say, well, why aren't the
bricks as wide as the wall, as wide as the foundation? Because we carved it away. We carved the brick
away, so we can see the absolute width
and the construction style of the foundation. We leave some of the
mud bricks in place, and here's another one. Look at the thickness
of these walls. These are palace walls. Some of them are almost
two meters thick. Some are meter and a half thick. It's amazing how
big these walls are. And to date, we've uncovered
150 square meters of the palace. We have never yet
seen an exterior wall. How do we know that? Because every wall we
find has an intersecting wall going further. We've never found the
exterior dimensions yet. It's huge. In fact, it is of truly
Mesopotamian proportions. And that's not my words. That's the word of
every archaeologist who comes out and looks at it. It's just gigantic, which
is one of the reasons why we're digging it. These are the photos we do
at the end of the season. We're just carefully
documenting everything. It has to be photographed. I love this. This is the first interior
doorway of the Sodom palace that we've discovered. So there it is. And we love this doorway,
because it gives us a sense that people were here. They walked through this door. I can't guarantee that
Abraham and Lot walked through that door, but
they knew King Bera. They talked to King Bera. They hung out sometimes
with King Bera. Remember, King Bera
accompanied Abraham to go visit Melchizedek,
king of Jerusalem. So they knew each other,
and here we are, right in the patriarchal world. It's like a time machine,
going back and being able to see where they were. Here's some more. Now, that beautiful, big wall--
do you see that big thing at the top? That's not old. We built that thing
during the season, because we have a
big area of ruins that we excavated previously
in the previous seasons up above it. And now, we're going
down well below that. So to keep that from
eroding away and coming down on where we are now, we
built this gigantic retaining wall. And we're kind of proud of it. It's kind of cool. A little landscaping for
the old Sodom palace. Now, we have so many of these. I could show you 1,000 pictures
of the destruction later. But I want you to see something
about-- what are these? These are jars. Do you see the rims? Do you see the bases there? Do you see that
the walls and some of the handles of the vessels? These are storage
jars in the palace, and they're all full of grain. Do you see the dark
material around them? That's all grain. When the jars were
mashed, smashed, exploded, it sent grain everywhere. It's all black and carbonized. What's interesting about
virtually everything we're finding in the palace-- now, we do find some
things on the floor smashed and moving in a
northeasterly direction, yes. We even have a saddle
quern-- it might appear in one of the photos tonight. It's a large grinding stone. Weighs about 400 pounds. It's about this big around. It's about that thick. Has a nice grinding-- you
know what a metate is? This is like a
metate on steroids. It's this big, gigantic thing. And it sat on a
pedestal, but it's knocked off the pedestal
toward the northeast. And you can see where the grain
that was on it hit the ground and was running up
against the wall. And hundreds of pottery
vessels smashed and moving across the floor, because the
direction of the destruction is moving in that direction. And so everything in this
photograph right here-- I'd say there's nothing
in this photograph was found on the floor. Wouldn't you expect to find
the jars and big vessels-- found one vessel that
would be about this high-- full of grain. We never found the
bottom half of it. We found the top half. It was still full of grain. But it was smashed up against
the wall very close to these. But it's all airborne. All of this stuff is airborne. It's in the destruction
matrix off the floor. It's churned in and
mixed with bricks and other kinds of artifacts
and many different kinds of pottery. It's all just-- we call
it the cuisinart effect, like you put it in there
and hit the button. Just destroys-- and
this stuff is floating. We find vessels, all
this high off the floor, smashed in the bricks
up against the wall. Everything is moving. It's violent. In this same area-- I'll show you a little
piece in a minute-- we found many, many,
many melted mud bricks. Melted. Turned into glass. Just melted. Buckets and buckets
and buckets of it. And we're going to
find a lot more as we continue to expose this area. It came from the
second, third story. It's all coming down. This must have been
way up there on the top of the outside of
the building, right in the exposure
of the main blast. And it's just melting
and it's falling down. We just sent it off-- in fact, yesterday or
the day before, we just sent off a bunch of samples
of that to our air burst team, our astrophysicist and so on,
who are testing all this stuff. But it's amazing
the destruction. It is violent and it's ugly. And oh, there's Dr.
Najjar doing the-- I don't know, hula or
whatever he's doing. No, it's a yee-haw
moment, because he's in that doorway, standing in the
doorway of that first doorway that we discovered. And hey, you get excited. And even if you have a
PhD, you get excited. Oh, here's more of
the destruction layer. I love this. Look at this. Just this ugly, dark
matrix of stuff. It's just amazing. Here's some more. The entire floor of this
particular part of the palace is just covered with pottery. Now, that pottery
was on the floor. It got smashed by stuff
coming down on top of it. But there's just gobs of it. Just a few little
excavation shots. We should put on there,
this could be you. Oh, joy. Oh, joy. I always wanted to
just go dig up dirt. It is cool. It's fun. This is what we do. There's some more. You recognize those? These are new. These are fresh adobes
that we're making. And they have a little bit of
emulsified asphalt in them, which makes them waterproof. And so right here in this mix,
we have four different recipes. And so we're testing the
four different recipes to see how they hold up for next year. So here I am, putting
the new bricks on top of the old bricks. Now, we're not
tying them together. We're not putting mortar
or anything on them yet. But eventually, what
we're doing here is we're going to see
which recipes hold up to next year's or later this
year in the 2019 rainy season. The rainy season--
how will they hold up? And so we're stacking them. And so each of our
preserved mud brick walls from the Middle Bronze Age,
from the time of Abraham, gets a layer of the new bricks. And we'll see what happens. See if they hold up. If they hold up,
we will eventually do some major reconstruction. You'll get to see the palace
sort of come back, at least partially. And we're really
excited about that. So the end of the season-- you see Salah. See him? Our guy with the kofia
on, sitting there. Give you a sense of the size
of the amount of material we moved this season. Salah? sitting there, sort of
resting, going, ah, it's over. It's over. He's one of our local workers,
really hard working guy. And got his bonus, by the way. He's really, really good. And so he's just relaxing. But there it is at
the end of the season. And then, of course, we
put our fence back up, put the signs back up, and
hope everybody respects it. And that's the end
of the dig season. So there's a little
bit of an overview of what we had this year. In 13 years of this project,
we have demonstrated, I think, seven important things. Now, I could extend that
list, I think, to 100 things. But seven really important
things relative to the Bible. OK, so here they are-- and by the way, if we don't-- I just wanted you to get a
sense from those photos of what we do year after-- day
after day after day for six or seven weeks
a year, year after year after year after year. What does it end up doing? Where do we go? Well, here's where we go. Number one, Sodom--
here's what we've proved. Sodom was an extremely ancient
city of great importance. Well, the Bible told us that. But now, we know it factually. Absolutely, it is true. Sodom was an extremely ancient
city of great importance. It survived, it thrived as
one of the largest cities in the Levant without a
break for almost 3,000 years before it was destroyed. So it's an amazing site. And it's become actually
what archaeologists call a type site, which
means it has all the periods. It has everything. It has all the evolution
of the pottery. You can see all the subtle
movements of history at it. And so this is very
important, because it is, in fact, the city of Sodom. How big is it? Well, it's 62 acres surrounded
by massive fortifications. If you spread out the settlement
footprint of the site, it goes well over
150 acres, which makes it the largest
continuously occupied city in the southern Levant
in the Bronze Age. The largest one that's
continuously occupied. There are only two
others that even get larger than it, but only
for short periods of time, and they are not occupied
during some of the periods where Tall el-Hammam is occupied. So Sodom is the biggest,
longest running successful city in the southern Levant up until
the time of its destruction. And here it is. Dr. Leen Ritmeyer's drawing
of the Middle Bronze Age city with its upper city
and lower city. And of course, we are excavating
in that upper upper city, right on the top to the right. Second thing we've proved-- Sodom was a large
wealthy city-state with many satellite towns and
villages, exactly as described in Genesis. Archeology proves that. We have Sodom and Gomorrah
and Admah and Zeboim. These are the
satellites of Sodom. Sodom's the big one. It's always mentioned first. It's the only one ever
mentioned by itself. It's the big one of all. Now, what's interesting
is is that this is the way the map looked
before we started our project. Oh, I'm sorry. You can take everything out. I thought I had
another slide in there. But the whole eastern
side of the Jordan River north of the Dead
Sea was a blank before we started our project. On the archaeological
maps, it was blank. But from our discoveries, here
are the cities and towns-- I mean, let's look
at it this way. These are archaeological sites
in the land of the Kikkar-- that's Genesis 19:28,
the land of the Kikkar-- identifiable today as
a result of the Tall el-Hammam excavation project. That's what the map looks like. It used to be blank. So there it is. Well, which ones are
Sodom and Gomorrah? How did you tell? There's too many. That's more than you need, yes. But some are bigger than others. And it's fairly obvious
which ones are which. And Gomorrah is just 20
minute walk up the road. And Admah and Zeboim, a little
bit further up the road. And they're in south
to north order, as we believe the
Bible gives them. So there they are. Third thing, Sodom and
the cities of the Kikkar thrived during the
time of Abraham in the Middle Bronze Age. Abraham was a wealthy man. He had many flocks and herds,
very wealthy individual. The Middle Bronze
Age is the height of the great Canaanite
civilizations. He fits into that
period so well, because if there was
a period in the Levant when you could become a
wealthy man, as a nomad, as a tent-dwelling clan
leader, this was the time. And so we've proved it. Now, one of the
ways we proved it-- many, many ways, but
I'm a pottery guy. Ceramics is my deal. And I love this. In the palace of Sodom-- by the way, this has never
been seen at any other palace that we know of in the Levant. But at the palace of Sodom,
common vessels that you would find almost everywhere-- I mean, you need storage
jars, you need cups and bowls and plates, you need
lamps, for various functions, you need the common pottery. We find it all over the site
in other places, administrative and in domestic contexts. But it's not finished. It's plain. It's not decorated in any way. And we know of no
pottery, even in palaces in other cities
around the Levant during this same
period, that decorate all of their common ware
and make it uncommon. Now, in the palace, we
have fine burnished wares and what we call quality ware,
fine ware, beautiful things. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about everyday,
garden variety plates, bowls, and storage jars. But this is what they look like. The exterior of virtually
every common vessel we find in the palace is-- and I had to come up
with a term for it, because it's so unique-- it is multi-slip cross
wiped palace ware. That's what we call it now. And every vessel
has multiple colors of slip or paint put on it
in different directions. Not only that, but look at this. This blew my mind. Who finishes the
bottom of a bowl? Look at the base. Even under the base, inside
the base, it's finished. We have three or
four colors of slip here-- white and black
and yellowish and so on. It's all wiped on. Every vessel is unique. And it comes in like 20
different shades of styles, but it's all this multi-slipped,
cross wiped stuff. Here's another vessel. This is a side of
a big storage jar. Who does this to a storage jar? It's just a crate
for putting grain in. In the palace of Sodom,
there are no common vessels in this sense. Everything is special. We think they have a
special set of potters working for the palace. We also have proved that,
as the Bible suggests, in the attempted
abduction of the angels by the men of Sodom-- men and
boys of Sodom, you recall. I've talked about that here. I'm not going to
repeat that tonight. But we have, in
Sodom, roots that go back into the Bronze Age
world of the Minoans of Crete of the middle Mediterranean
of the Aegean area. And their culture had a
way of raising their boys, their adolescent young men,
in a homosexual, pederastic relationship with an
older man for eight years. Required. Everybody had to do that. And so it was quite a
stunning thing for us to look back at that and
go, well, that's not right. You shouldn't do that. But you recall in
the book of Genesis, says there was a great outcry
against the city of Sodom. Well, who was crying out
against the city of Sodom? Canaanites crying out
against the city of Sodom? Why? Well, the Canaanites
sacrificed their children and they had temple prostitutes. And I mean, the
Canaanites didn't exactly have a moral culture. But they were appalled
and crying out against the city of Sodom
because of its perceived departure from something
that would be acceptable, even in Canaanite culture. And the Bible tells
us about that. you remember what
happened to the angels. At our site, we have pillared,
Minoan-style architecture. This is in our gateway
on the lower tell. Nobody builds gates like this. They have chambered gates,
no pillars, just gate houses with some chambers. That's it. No pillars. We have a pillared gateway, and
it's probably got a light well. And this is Leen
Ritmeyer's model of it. It's a multi-story
building with a light well, so we can get light
into the lower stories. This is Minoan-style
architecture. We have Minoan-style appliques,
the decorations on our pottery, the down horn bowls that
we see in the upper left. That's from Hammam. The upper right,
that's from Hammam. All those other
ones are from Crete. Very interesting. We have these connections. We found something really cool. I love this thing. This is a top of
an incense burner, or a very large ritual
lamp from the palace. And has this crossing, kind
of snake-ish decoration. And then on the outside,
around the collar, it actually has a decoration--
a part of it's broken off, but when you restore
it, it looks like this. And what does that
look like to you? It's a proto-Ionic column
capital and column. This is where it comes from. This is the proto-Ionic. There it is. This is from the Aegean. This is where it comes from. And now, it shows
up at our site. In other words, the top
of the incense burner is artistically held up by a
series of proto-Ionic columns from the Aegean world. It's really amazing. And then we have
beautiful pieces like this that are totally
a departure from the rather crude geometric Canaanite
designs on some of the pottery. This is a beautiful, beautiful
execution of a flowering vine. And this can be traced
also to the Minoan culture of the Aegean world. The fifth thing we've done is
to show that these cities were destroyed violently during
the time of Abraham, during the Middle Bronze Age. Now, how do we know it was
destroyed during the Middle Bronze Age, during that time? Well, the pottery tells us that. But also confirmed by
radiocarbon dating. And we take samples-- here we are taking
some samples of carbon. We really look for grain
and things like that. We're taking that carbon and
we're putting it in jars. And it comes back to our
lab here in Albuquerque, and then it's shipped off to
the various radiocarbon labs around the country for analysis. And those dates are
coming back square on around 1,700 BC, which is
what our pottery also tells us. So we have a firm date now on
the destruction of Sodom, which helps us date Abraham as well. Sixth thing-- Sodom and
the land of the Kikkar were wiped out in an instant. They just weren't destroyed. They were destroyed
in an instant. 400 square kilometers
of intense civilization wiped out by a super heated
plasmic impact produced by a meteoritic airburst event. By the way, that's exactly
what Genesis 19 says. Not in this exact same
terminology, but it's close. It actually says, "And God
rained down fire and--" not sulfur. [NON-ENGLISH],, burning stones,
from Yahweh out of the heavens. Well, it sounds like a
cosmic airburst to me. It's coming right out of the
sky and destroying this area. And of course, you've
seen this if you've seen my presentations. The pottery sherd melted
with the melted glass on the surface and the
trinitite from ground zero of the first atomic
bomb explosion. They're identical, because
the heat index is the same. That sherd was subjected to
about 15,000 to 20,000 degrees Fahrenheit for a fraction of a
second and melted into glass. We have lots of that stuff. Here's one of our
melted mud bricks, or a piece of melted mud
brick from this season, and of course, a glass melt
product from close by the site, proving that we have
a high heat event, exactly as the Bible describes. The seventh thing-- Sodom
and the land of the Kikkar remained uninhabited
for seven centuries after its cosmic destruction. I've just wrote a paper
for a secular book that I was asked to write a
chapter on Tall el-Hammam. And this is a diagram. It goes from right to
left, because that diagram was produced in Israel. But it goes right
to left, and it's tracking the rise and fall
of the Dead Sea levels through time. So when the Dead Sea levels
are going up or it's high, what does that tell you? Lots of rainfall
during that time frame. When it's dropping, the
rainfall is stopping. It's famine time. It's a drought. Now, I want you to look at this. Here is the precise moment
of Sodom's destruction. Look what happens to the
regional climate and the Dead Sea level right in
conjunction with the time of this destruction. It was such a massive
event that it actually affected the climate
for a while and made it really difficult for folks
going into the Late Bronze Age. So we can actually see it in
the climatological studies that something drastic
happened about 3,700 BC-- I'm sorry, about 3,700
years ago, about 1,700 BC. Now, here's my
second coming thing. "As it was in the days
of Sodom and Gomorrah"-- remember that statement? Or we could put it this
way, slouching toward Sodom. I sort of took that
from Judge Bork's-- remember him?-- book
Slouching Toward Gomorrah. What did he mean by that? That's what our culture's doing. We're slouching in the
direction of Sodom. And let's look at it biblically. Here's Luke 17. "As happened in the days
of Lot, they were eating, they were drinking, they were
buying, they were selling, they were planting,
they were building. But on the day that Lot
went out from Sodom, it rained fire and
burning stone"-- or sulfur, if you like-- "from heaven and
destroyed them all. It will be just the same on
the day that the Son of Man is revealed." Ezekiel, now, say, "As it was in
the days of Sodom and Gomorrah, so shall it be at the
coming of the Son of Man." How was it in the days
of Sodom and Gomorrah? Well, God tells
us in Ezekiel 16. "Now this was the sin
of your sister Sodom"-- by the way, who's the sister? Jerusalem. But he's bringing up
Sodom to make a point. "This was the sin of
your sister Sodom. She and her daughters"-- those are the other
satellite cities-- "she and her daughters
were arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned. They did not help
the poor and needy. They were haughty and did
detestable things before me. Therefore, I did away with
them as you have seen." By the way, what does that mean? "As you have seen." It means that God left
enough ruins around that they could see it. It's just a half a day from
Jerusalem, just a half a day's walk. Many of them passed it. He said, you've seen this. And that's why I destroyed these
cities because of these things. Now, let's do a little
comparison between Sodom and current Western culture. I could've just said America. "As it was in the
days of Sodom, so shall it be at the coming
of the Son of Man." How close are we? Are we close? Well, arrogant--
they were arrogant. I say it's this phrase,
it's all about me. It's all about me and
mine and what I do. They were arrogant. Little concern for other people. Oh, let's get off that one. Overfed-- I heard yesterday
or the day before, 35% of people in
the United States are considered overweight. Another 30% are
considered obese. Now, I'm not saying there
was anybody overweight or obese in Sodom. That's not the point. That's not what this means. In fact, some of the
other translations go a little bit different. What this means is overfed-- this was an idiom for uber
wealthy, just filthy rich, just oozing with money. They could do
anything they want. They thought they
were invincible. They could build
whatever they wanted, buy whatever they wanted,
buy whomever they wanted. They could do anything. That's what they thought. They were overfed. Unconcerned--
they're unconcerned. I have my own problems. I have my own
stuff to deal with. Yes. Yeah, we've totally
turned in on ourself. I mean, can you see it? Can you see our time and day? Yes. Ignore the poor and the needy. I call this the
accumulation of stuff. Why? Well, because as I encounter
people in houses and garages, do we have stuff? We have so much stuff we
can't even pull it out. We can't even use it all. We have just stuff just
oozing and popping out that we can't even store. I know people-- I know several people-- that own or rent storage
places, because they don't have enough room at their
house for all their stuff. They never use it. They never touch it. But they have to
store it somewhere. We have stuff. In the city of San Francisco--
this just came out yesterday or the day before-- in the city of San Francisco,
we have the wealthiest per capita neighborhoods
in America. And do you know that
the charities that deal with the poor
and the needy, those who need help of all
kinds up and down society, that those charities who try
to help those people in San Francisco are going broke,
because the people in San Francisco are not
giving them money? They're not supporting them. They're the wealthiest
people in the country, but they're not givers. They're takers. Well, I think you could
multiply that across America. Haughty-- the
exultation of self. They're haughty. Yeah, we love where we are. We wouldn't trade who
we are and where we are. We like it the way it is. We like it safe. We like it not having
to touch the people who are needy and so on. Haughty, arrogant. And of course, this
one had to come along-- detestable practices. People call this the new normal. What's the new normal? Did you know that
Albuquerque public schools, within recent years, brought
their teachers together to teach them how to be
sensitive to the dozens and dozens of potential sexual
orientations of their students? Everything's normal. If your child has a
sexual orientation to trees or automobiles or-- it's normal. I don't know what to say. By the way, I know
teachers that literally got up shortly thereafter,
walked out of the classroom. You just can't control anymore. Can't do that anymore. There is no morality
left in America. There is nothing that could
be classed as immoral, because everything is just
interpreted as normal. You're just normal. And then we'll put you in
with all the other kids. Well, joy. One more scripture-- I like what Paul says here. "Mark this-- there
will be terrible times in the last days. People will be
lovers of themselves, lovers of money,
boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their
parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love,
unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal,
not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited,
lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having
a form of godliness, but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them. They are the kind who worm their
way into homes and gain control over weak-willed women who are
loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds
of evil desires, always learning but never
able to come to the knowledge of the truth"-- or
in this translation, "able to acknowledge the truth." Sounds like America. Close with this. What does Isaiah say? In his day-- and I think
this applies to our day. Goes right back to
Sodom and Gomorrah. "Hear the word of Yahweh,
you rulers of Sodom"-- who's he talking to? Any government-- in
this case, Israel. But you could apply this to any
government, anywhere, anytime, any people. "Hear the words of your
way, you rulers of Sodom. Listen to the law of our
God, you people of Gomorrah. Take your evil deeds
out of My sight. Stop doing wrong, learn to do
right, seek justice, encourage the oppressed, defend the
cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow. Come now"-- by
the way, we always take this out of context. We quote this. We forget to quote
what comes before it. "Come now, let us reason
together, says Yahweh. Though your sins
are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Though they are red as crimson,
they shall be like wool." We don't need to
stand with the crowd. We can stand out in the
redemption of Jesus. Sodom is real. That's the point. Sodom is real. This is not some rhetorical
literary metaphor. It's real. The warning against
Sodom was real. The destruction
of Sodom was real. And so is the second
coming of Jesus. So is the second
coming of our Lord, who will purge this world
with His righteousness. Well, that's the end of that. Let's pray. Father, we stand
amazed in the presence of a holy and righteous God
who gives us every opportunity to lay down our will, to repent,
to submit to our creator, to His messiah,
to You, Jesus, who died on the cross for our sins,
who gives us every opportunity, gives us every mercy. But yet somehow, as a
nation, as a civilization, we have collectively turned
our hearts and our minds against You and have opted for
our own will and our own way. Father, lead us to seek You. Lead us to repentance. And it's all because of Jesus. In His name we pray, amen. What binds us
together is devotion to worshipping our Heavenly
Father, dedication to studying His word, and determination
to proclaim our eternal hope in Jesus Christ.
