...make the Kingdom of Heaven your primary concern...

There seemed to be an awful lot of bargaining in today's reading.

As God announces His plans to eradicate Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham asks God for mercy. He is allowed to use a rational, human based, thought process to keep God from visiting justice on both the just and the unjust without prejudice. He bargains God from 50 men down to 10 good men that would be enough to spare the remainder of Sodom. The point seems to be the number of times that Abraham is allowed to ask God, plus the mercy the God shows to continue to decrease the relative threshold He has for the conditionality of Sodom's destruction.

We go from there to Lot's request as he is being ushered out of Sodom. He asks for mercy in his instructions to flee to the mountains. He asks, instead, if he can go to a closer village. He is granted this request.

Two men of faith ask for special dispensation and it is given to them.

As we see in the New Testament reading, Jesus also describes the fruits of faith. You don't have to worry about material gain, for you are greater than that which God already blesses. You don't have to worry about tomorrow. You don't have to worry about "fixing" your brother, but you do have to remove the log from your own eye.

All these promises come without a request similar to what we see from Abraham and Lot, but they do come with a condition. And any condition implies a bargain...

"...and He will give you all you need from day to day if you live for Him and make the Kingdom of Heaven your primary concern."

The conditional "if" clause implies the fulfillment of a bargain. If we live for Him, our needs will be met. Our human brain, or mine at least, always pays more attention to the conditional "if" clause. How can I live for Him? What will I do? What will I give up? I have to remind myself of the non-conditional statement, "He will give you all you need..."

That awesome concept seems to be lost in the noise of man's insistent bargaining. What if, what if, what if..., as Abraham asked. It's not the "what if," it's the promise that you will receive all you need. Your focus, your primary concern, needs to be the Kingdom of Heaven, and He will give you all you need. He *will.* Concentrate on that, and the "what if" questions fade in their immediacy, or their relevance. The "He will" supersedes everything.

In the OT reading, we see examples of two women who fail at bargaining. Unwilling to wait for the fulfillment of God's mercies, they do something which touches on one of Christ's reasons for the evilness of divorce, that it forces another to sin.

By getting their father drunk, the daughters remove free will from their father, and he has no choice to avoid sin. The sin becomes greater by the daughter's "forcing" their father into doing something that he otherwise would not have done. The seed of that action becomes the Moabites and the Ammonites. How the deconstructionists or Chinese menu-ists choose to interpret the this "fable" as the twisted origin of a hated clan becomes less important, at least to me, than the underlying destructiveness of one person forcing another into sin. The downstream effect of their actions becomes a destructive influence.

Two further admonishments from Jesus for following the conditional path of the Kingdom of Heaven include a command to stop judging others and we will not be judged, as well as a command not to give that which is Holy to unholy people.

How often do I read the words and start to consider myself among the Holy, just because I am reading them. But, how often have I taken what is Holy from others and then done just as a swine would do, and turn around and attack them. Had I truly been following Him, I would not have taken what is Holy from someone else in the way I did. The words are not for others, they are for me.

In all of these points, I am yet again reminded of the need to seek His will, and wait for things in His time frame. He *will* grant me all I need.