This is taken from The Berean Call, a ministry we regard highly. When I (Alan Franklin) flew to Israel last year I was fascinated to see, on the trip map on screen in front of me, that we flew over the historical site of Sodom.This was on a secular flight run by British Airways, so no hint of Biblical influence there, one assumes.

Yet there it was, just as San Francisco stands today, world capital of homosexuality. When we went there on a speaking tour, I was struck by the fact that a huge geological fault runs right through the city. As I say in our book Goodbye America, Goodbye Britain, "Sell real estate in San Francisco would be my advice....."

[TBC: Christians speak of apologetics as though it were a recent development. Yet, as this essay originally published in 1893 demonstrates, there have always been those willing to go toe-to-toe with those denying the historical record of the Scriptures.]

The story of the fate of Sodom is not credited by any of the "critics," and that of Lot's wife, given in connection with it, is regarded as not less preposterous than--the "rib story," or the story of Jonah in the fish.

But Jesus more than once held up the fate of Sodom as a warning to his generation, which he could not have done honestly if there was no truth in it; and he especially emphasizes the lesson to be drawn from the fate of Lot's wife.

In a speech recorded in Luke 17, after speaking of the flood, he says: "Likewise, even as it came to pass in the days of Lot, they ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded, but in the day that Lot went out from Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all; after the same manner shall it be in the day that the Son of man is revealed.

In that day, he who shall be on the housetop, and his goods in the house, let him not go down to take them away; and let him that is in the field not return back. Remember Lot's wife." If this story was a legend, and if Jesus knew it to be such, it is impossible to reconcile his use of it here with the truthfulness and absolute sincerity which belong to his nature.

It would be impossible for him to thus use a fabulous tale which had been manufactured by some unknown writer of the middle Jewish age; for the whole force of the warning depended upon the reality of the event on which the warning is based (J. W. McGarvey, "Short Essays in Biblical Criticism" - 1910).