Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies. And it's an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

So we'll go ahead and get started.

When we get started in just a moment, we'll be picking up at the beginning of Genesis

chapter 20.

So last time, by way of catch up, we read about, we read two connected stories that sometimes maybe in our heads aren't as connected as they are here in the text, right?

Because the first one is when God and two angels come and receive hospitality from Abraham and Sarah at the Oak of Mamry.

Hospitality of Abraham, we kind of know that story.

And then the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, right? We kind of know that story. And then story of the destruction of

Sodom and Gomorrah, right? We kind of know that separate story. But these, of course,

as we saw, are linked in the text, right? Because the two angels who come to Sodom and Gamora

are the two angels who were there with God. And Abraham, remember Abraham stayed and talked with God after the meal, try and say,

hey, if there's 50 righteous people, if there's 45, if there's 40, if there's 25, right?

While the two angels went down into Sodom to get Lot and his family. And we read about the events that

unfolded without going back through the wall, including what happened with Lot's daughters after

the destruction of the cities of the plain. And that really is where we're picking up now

in chapter 20 is after that story. And as we mentioned last time, the way the story of Abraham

is structured, there are these sort of time lapses, right? We're not getting like a continuous narrative of

every day of his life. We've seen when his age has been given. We've been skipping like

sometimes 10 years, sometimes, yeah, like a series of years in between stories. A lot of them

are framed in terms of the appearances of God to Abraham.

That's sort of what started the last couple of the narrative sections.

...