1.13. Sodom's Judgment and Her Final Restoration

Sodom’s Judgment and Her Final Restoration

Perhaps the leading example used to express God’s wrath and the finality of His judgments is the example of Sodom and Gomorra. Those who wish to project their own vengeful wrath upon our Creator who is love often use this example to consign the basest of society to everlasting torture. They point to the passage in Jude where Jude describes them as examples of "suffering the vengeance of eternal fire" (Jude 1:7, KJV). Peter said they were condemned to destruction (2 Peter 2:6). We are presently going to take these five words and dig a little deeper than the level the King James translators dug. The theology of the Anglican Bishops who presided over the translating work was not far removed from Roman Catholicism. Do not forget that the Anglican church was formed due to Henry VIII’s love life, and not from a love of the scriptures, mind you.

We must keep in mind, when we read our Bibles, men, for the most part, did the translating. As to the King James Bible, all 46 or so people involved were males filled with the knowledge and superstition of their times. The scholarship of King James day has been grossly exaggerated. I will not spend any more time on this point other than to give one example to provoke you to study this out further yourself.

One of King James’ favorite medicines, which he swore by as did many other leading "intellectuals" of his days, was a salve for the healing of sword wounds. The following is an account of how it was made and applied: "Take of moss growing on the head of a thief who has been hanged and left in the air; of real mummy; of human blood, still warm, of each, one ounce; on human suet, two ounces; of linseed oil, turpentine, and Armenian bole - of each, two drachmas. Mix all well in a mortar, and keep the salve in an oblong, narrow urn. With this salve the weapon, after being dipped in the blood from the wound, was to be carefully anointed, and then laid by in a cool place. In the mean time, the wound was to be duly washed with fair clean water, covered with a clean, soft, linen rag, and opened once a day to cleanse of purulent or other matter." As we can see from the above example, the scholastic community had a mixture of truth mixed with gross darkness.

One last point dealing with King James and his translators, be very careful about consigning homosexuals to "hell" as if this sin was "the unpardonable sin." While doing some research on the King James Bible, I came across some love letters written by King James to men. In The Wisest Fool in Christendom by William McElwee, we read: "The cheerful, unaffected and unselfconscious ordinariness of James’s behavior in public, though it lacked dignity, had hitherto been in many ways an asset in his dealings with his subjects. But now it led him to treat Carr in public with the same exaggerated, gross affection as in private, and what had already been a little odd in a sixteen year old boy when he was worshipping at the shrine of Esme’ Stuart, became grotesque in the middle-aged man. He appeared everywhere with his arm round Carr’s neck, constantly kissed and fondled him, lovingly feeling the texture of the expensive suits he choose and bought for him, pinching his cheeks and smoothing his hair." James considered himself to be a brilliant intellectual and scholar.

James selected the scholars who were to be on the King James Bible translation committee. The leading Hebrew scholar of that day in England, Hugh Broughton, when asked to endorse the translation said he would rather "be rent to pieces by wild horses than have had any part in the urging of such a wretched version of the Bible on the poor people" (Men and their Motives by Jimmie H. Heflin and many other sources). It would be very unwise to believe that the superstitions, politics, and religious biases of sixteenth century England did not find their way into the English Bible of that time. Even today, when comparing twentieth century translations, the doctrinal positions of the translators finds itself on the pages of the Bibles they produce. Calvinists, for example, will translate predestination and "total depravity" type scriptures quite differently than Arminianists. With this in mind, let us examine the "vengeance of eternal fire" and see if we cannot get past fifteenth century and twentieth century scholarship with their doctrinal biases. Let us look at this scripture as it appears in the Greek and leave the theology to the theologians.