Genesis 18:20-32 For The Sake Of One
[Abraham] said, “Please, do not be angry, my Lord, but I will speak just once more. What if ten are found there?” He said, “I will not destroy it for the sake of the ten.”
A half dozen US Presidents have been authors before they were President, and their books tell us something about them. There’s John F Kennedy with Profiles in Courage, that tells us the kind of person he admired, and Barack Obama with Dreams From My Father, that tells us what he aspired to. Teddy Roosevelt wrote Rough Riders about a war that shaped him. George Washington had been a soldier too, but his book didn’t have quite as much action and adventure. He wrote Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation, but that, too reflects the man and his times. Then there’s Donald Trump and his best known book, The Art of the Deal. That tells you all you need to know about what shapes his Presidency. It’s all about getting the best deal. The tough-negotiating approach that measures success by whether you got everything you want.
I wonder if people sometimes think of prayer the same way, as the art of the deal. It’s a negotiation; we’re trying to talk God into giving us what we want, and we know there are some things that God wants that we can maybe use as bargaining chips. When the negotiations really get desperate, people will actually bargain with God and say, “If you’ll just give me this one thing, I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll stop drinking or stop smoking or start going to church. Is it a deal?” But whatever you offer, it’s not much of a bargaining chip because you owe it to God already, whether he answers your prayer or not. You can’t say, “I’ll give up this one sin,” and think that means God owes you one wish.
Even if we don’t use good behavior as a bargaining chip, we may still treat prayer as the art of the deal when we think, “I just have to figure out the right way to ask him. The right words or the right level of intense meditation and devotion, or the right amount of faith and trust, mixed with humility, and yet bold and confident. If I do it right, I can talk God into giving me what I want. And, like the Art of the Deal, I’ll measure success by the end result of my prayer: did I negotiate God into giving me everything I asked for?”
I wonder if that’s what the disciples meant when they asked Jesus, “Teach us how to pray like John taught his disciples.” There’s got to be a trick to it. Praying is an art, and we want to become better negotiators. Apparently, Jesus never read Donald Trump’s book, because the first three things he taught them to pray were granting the things God wants most: “Hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” You’re giving up your best bargaining chips without requiring anything in return. God, I’ll grant you everything you want right off the bat. Now let’s negotiate what I want, when I have nothing left to bargain with. That’s all wrong. Or just maybe, prayer is not the art of the deal. It’s not negotiation between competitors who want different things and who are each trying to win, trying to get the better end of the deal. Prayer is communion, a sharing of oneness between two parties who want the same thing, who want what’s best for both of us, mutually, who just have to figure out what that is.
When we read the account of Abraham negotiating with the Lord for the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, we have a good example of prayer. We do not have a good example of the art of the deal. It’s all wrong from a negotiation standpoint. In negotiations, you start off, setting the bar high. You ask for everything you could possibly hope for first, and when your counterpart says No, you whittle down your demands until you reach a compromise. Abraham started low, with a request he thought God could easily agree to, knowing that might be where the negotiations would end. And God said, “Deal. You got it.” And then Abraham humbly, but encouragingly, asked for more and more, and God just kept agreeing to it every time. What kind of negotiation is that?
What’s worse, in the end, even though God granted every single request Abraham made, Abraham still didn’t get what he wanted from this negotiation from the start. Sodom and Gomorrah were still destroyed. Maybe that shows us why treating Abraham’s prayer, or prayer in general, as a negotiation is a mistake. Right from the start, God held all the cards; he had all the power, he knew what he was going to do, he knew how many righteous people there were in Sodom and Gomorrah. When Abraham said, “I don’t know how many righteous people there are, but if there are fifty, will you spare the city?” God could say Yes, because he knew there weren’t. He knew there weren’t forty. He knew there weren’t even ten. Lot, his wife, and two daughters makes four. But if Abraham had gone that one more step and said, “What if there are only four?” God could still say Yes, and still destroy the cities because he knew what Abraham couldn’t know, that Lot’s wife was too attached to the cities to leave them behind without looking back.
As the art of the deal, Abraham’s prayer was a complete failure. He prayed for God to spare the cities, and God didn’t. But prayer isn’t the art of the deal, so in what sense was his prayer a success? Prayer is communion, not competition. It’s not, “I want the cities spared; God wants them destroyed. Let’s see if we can find some compromise that will make us both happy and relatively satisfied.” Instead, both Abraham and God wanted justice and righteousness to prevail, and both Abraham and God wanted mercy and compassion.
They might have very different perspectives on both of these things. God’s perspective on righteousness is absolute. God could scour the entire earth, and not find one righteous person, for whose sake he might spare us all. In his righteousness, God saw the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah, and they angered him far more than they angered Abraham. He sees the smaller sins of Abraham and Lot, and of you and me, and they anger him too.
We might want to ask God, “What if I only commit fifty sins, or forty, or ten? Will you spare me for the sake of all the good things I’ve done? What if my sins are so small and harmless they’re easy to overlook?” From God’s perspective, there’s no room for compromise. He is righteous. We are sinners. There’s nothing to negotiate.
But God’s compassion is also without limit, and it also goes far beyond our own. The same thing Jesus once prayed for the city of Jerusalem, God could have said of the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah: “how I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.” Abraham didn’t have to talk God into being more like Abraham, full of compassion. God’s compassion, even for the worst of sinners, was already far greater than Abraham’s concern for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham just needed to understand where God’s righteousness and God’s compassion meet.
And that’s what Abraham’s prayer accomplished. When he saw the smoke rising from the cities, he knew it wasn’t because God is not compassionate. Abraham’s prayer didn’t succeed in sparing the cities; he didn’t out-negotiate God’s rival interests, but it did succeed in drawing Abraham and his Lord into closer communion. Their interests were the same.
We don’t need to pray, “Lord, would you please spare our nation or our community for the sake of fifty righteous people, or forty, or ten.” He has spared us all for the sake of one righteous person, his own Son, who fulfilled every single one of God’s righteous requirements his whole life, perfectly, and who bore the full wrath of God, greater than all the fire and brimstone that rained down upon Sodom and Gomorrah, poured out on him as he hung dying on the cross for our sins. For the sake of one, God has forgiven us, granted us life and entrance into heaven when we leave this sinful world, and given us the privilege of prayer, of approaching our heavenly Father as dear children that he loves to hear and answer.
We learn the lesson that prayer is not negotiation. God has so much more power, so much more knowledge, so much more righteousness and compassion, we have no chips to bargain with. And whatever happens will be God’s will, not ours. We’re kind of giving up our negotiating leverage every time we include in our prayer, “Not my will but thine be done.”
So should we just give up praying? What’s the use if God already knows what’s best—and we fully agree—and he already knows what he’s going to do? We pray because prayer is not negotiation, but children making their wants, concerns, and needs known to a loving Father. And he answers our prayers, not because we talked him into it, but because the best and most loving thing he can do is show us that he listens.
And for that, we don’t need to learn the art of the deal. We don’t need to learn the trick to praying the most powerful and effective prayer to get what we want. We don’t need to ask Jesus, “Teach us to pray,” like the disciples did. The prayer he taught them, the Lord’s Prayer, was a good lesson, not in the art of the deal, but in abandoning negotiation, setting aside what we want and getting into communion with what both God and his children want. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. Grant us daily bread, not everything we want, but all that we need for body and soul. Forgive us, preserve us from harm and from evil, from sin and from the Evil One. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.
[Abraham] said, “Please, do not be angry, my Lord, but I will speak just once more. What if ten are found there?” He said, “I will not destroy it for the sake of the ten.”
A half dozen US Presidents have been authors before they were President, and their books tell us something about them. There’s John F Kennedy with Profiles in Courage, that tells us the kind of person he admired, and Barack Obama with Dreams From My Father, that tells us what he aspired to. Teddy Roosevelt wrote Rough Riders about a war that shaped him. George Washington had been a soldier too, but his book didn’t have quite as much action and adventure. He wrote Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation, but that, too reflects the man and his times. Then there’s Donald Trump and his best known book, The Art of the Deal. That tells you all you need to know about what shapes his Presidency. It’s all about getting the best deal. The tough-negotiating approach that measures success by whether you got everything you want.
I wonder if people sometimes think of prayer the same way, as the art of the deal. It’s a negotiation; we’re trying to talk God into giving us what we want, and we know there are some things that God wants that we can maybe use as bargaining chips. When the negotiations really get desperate, people will actually bargain with God and say, “If you’ll just give me this one thing, I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll stop drinking or stop smoking or start going to church. Is it a deal?” But whatever you offer, it’s not much of a bargaining chip because you owe it to God already, whether he answers your prayer or not. You can’t say, “I’ll give up this one sin,” and think that means God owes you one wish.
Even if we don’t use good behavior as a bargaining chip, we may still treat prayer as the art of the deal when we think, “I just have to figure out the right way to ask him. The right words or the right level of intense meditation and devotion, or the right amount of faith and trust, mixed with humility, and yet bold and confident. If I do it right, I can talk God into giving me what I want. And, like the Art of the Deal, I’ll measure success by the end result of my prayer: did I negotiate God into giving me everything I asked for?”
I wonder if that’s what the disciples meant when they asked Jesus, “Teach us how to pray like John taught his disciples.” There’s got to be a trick to it. Praying is an art, and we want to become better negotiators. Apparently, Jesus never read Donald Trump’s book, because the first three things he taught them to pray were granting the things God wants most: “Hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” You’re giving up your best bargaining chips without requiring anything in return. God, I’ll grant you everything you want right off the bat. Now let’s negotiate what I want, when I have nothing left to bargain with. That’s all wrong. Or just maybe, prayer is not the art of the deal. It’s not negotiation between competitors who want different things and who are each trying to win, trying to get the better end of the deal. Prayer is communion, a sharing of oneness between two parties who want the same thing, who want what’s best for both of us, mutually, who just have to figure out what that is.
When we read the account of Abraham negotiating with the Lord for the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, we have a good example of prayer. We do not have a good example of the art of the deal. It’s all wrong from a negotiation standpoint. In negotiations, you start off, setting the bar high. You ask for everything you could possibly hope for first, and when your counterpart says No, you whittle down your demands until you reach a compromise. Abraham started low, with a request he thought God could easily agree to, knowing that might be where the negotiations would end. And God said, “Deal. You got it.” And then Abraham humbly, but encouragingly, asked for more and more, and God just kept agreeing to it every time. What kind of negotiation is that?
What’s worse, in the end, even though God granted every single request Abraham made, Abraham still didn’t get what he wanted from this negotiation from the start. Sodom and Gomorrah were still destroyed. Maybe that shows us why treating Abraham’s prayer, or prayer in general, as a negotiation is a mistake. Right from the start, God held all the cards; he had all the power, he knew what he was going to do, he knew how many righteous people there were in Sodom and Gomorrah. When Abraham said, “I don’t know how many righteous people there are, but if there are fifty, will you spare the city?” God could say Yes, because he knew there weren’t. He knew there weren’t forty. He knew there weren’t even ten. Lot, his wife, and two daughters makes four. But if Abraham had gone that one more step and said, “What if there are only four?” God could still say Yes, and still destroy the cities because he knew what Abraham couldn’t know, that Lot’s wife was too attached to the cities to leave them behind without looking back.
As the art of the deal, Abraham’s prayer was a complete failure. He prayed for God to spare the cities, and God didn’t. But prayer isn’t the art of the deal, so in what sense was his prayer a success? Prayer is communion, not competition. It’s not, “I want the cities spared; God wants them destroyed. Let’s see if we can find some compromise that will make us both happy and relatively satisfied.” Instead, both Abraham and God wanted justice and righteousness to prevail, and both Abraham and God wanted mercy and compassion.
They might have very different perspectives on both of these things. God’s perspective on righteousness is absolute. God could scour the entire earth, and not find one righteous person, for whose sake he might spare us all. In his righteousness, God saw the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah, and they angered him far more than they angered Abraham. He sees the smaller sins of Abraham and Lot, and of you and me, and they anger him too.
We might want to ask God, “What if I only commit fifty sins, or forty, or ten? Will you spare me for the sake of all the good things I’ve done? What if my sins are so small and harmless they’re easy to overlook?” From God’s perspective, there’s no room for compromise. He is righteous. We are sinners. There’s nothing to negotiate.
But God’s compassion is also without limit, and it also goes far beyond our own. The same thing Jesus once prayed for the city of Jerusalem, God could have said of the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah: “how I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.” Abraham didn’t have to talk God into being more like Abraham, full of compassion. God’s compassion, even for the worst of sinners, was already far greater than Abraham’s concern for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham just needed to understand where God’s righteousness and God’s compassion meet.
And that’s what Abraham’s prayer accomplished. When he saw the smoke rising from the cities, he knew it wasn’t because God is not compassionate. Abraham’s prayer didn’t succeed in sparing the cities; he didn’t out-negotiate God’s rival interests, but it did succeed in drawing Abraham and his Lord into closer communion. Their interests were the same.
We don’t need to pray, “Lord, would you please spare our nation or our community for the sake of fifty righteous people, or forty, or ten.” He has spared us all for the sake of one righteous person, his own Son, who fulfilled every single one of God’s righteous requirements his whole life, perfectly, and who bore the full wrath of God, greater than all the fire and brimstone that rained down upon Sodom and Gomorrah, poured out on him as he hung dying on the cross for our sins. For the sake of one, God has forgiven us, granted us life and entrance into heaven when we leave this sinful world, and given us the privilege of prayer, of approaching our heavenly Father as dear children that he loves to hear and answer.
We learn the lesson that prayer is not negotiation. God has so much more power, so much more knowledge, so much more righteousness and compassion, we have no chips to bargain with. And whatever happens will be God’s will, not ours. We’re kind of giving up our negotiating leverage every time we include in our prayer, “Not my will but thine be done.”
So should we just give up praying? What’s the use if God already knows what’s best—and we fully agree—and he already knows what he’s going to do? We pray because prayer is not negotiation, but children making their wants, concerns, and needs known to a loving Father. And he answers our prayers, not because we talked him into it, but because the best and most loving thing he can do is show us that he listens.
And for that, we don’t need to learn the art of the deal. We don’t need to learn the trick to praying the most powerful and effective prayer to get what we want. We don’t need to ask Jesus, “Teach us to pray,” like the disciples did. The prayer he taught them, the Lord’s Prayer, was a good lesson, not in the art of the deal, but in abandoning negotiation, setting aside what we want and getting into communion with what both God and his children want. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. Grant us daily bread, not everything we want, but all that we need for body and soul. Forgive us, preserve us from harm and from evil, from sin and from the Evil One. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.
