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You can trust what God says

I’d like to give you a brief history lesson.

Trust me, it gets interesting.

In the early Bronze Age there was a huge, and prosperous city near the Dead Sea called Tall el-Hamman, that is “Hill of the Hot Springs.”

As the name implies, Tall el-Hamman was a land of plenty with a massive natural water supply, thriving agriculture, large population, and all complete with gargantuan walls surrounding it. Some 3,700 years ago however, Tall el-Hamman was completely erased by an event known as an “air burst.” An air burst is what happens when a meteor enters Earth’s atmosphere but explodes in the air before hitting the ground; the destructive power of these very rare events is comparable to a nuclear bomb.

The explosion sent out a shockwave of such extreme heat and intensity that the city was completely leveled, with portions being turned into glass, all while sulfur and salt were sent outward for miles completely covering the land. In the aftermath, Tall el-Hamman’s soil was unable to support any agriculture, and the land was left totally uninhabited for centuries.

As you may have already guessed, and scholars currently theorize: Tall el-Hamman’s location, timeline, and exceptionally rare manner of destruction clearly parallels a certain Biblical account. In the 19th chapter of Genesis we read the account of Sodom and Gamorrah’s destruction.

Fire and brimstone (what we in the modern day would call sulfur) rained down from the sky, the city was destroyed, all people killed, and the land left barren. An air burst even offers explanation for how Lot’s wife could be turned into a pillar of salt. If Lot and his children fled to cover, they would have been spared from the shockwave; while his wife standing out in the open to see the destruction would have been encased in a cloud of super-heated salt.

While this historical evidence supporting the Biblical account is fascinating on its own, there’s a much more important spiritual lesson here: You can trust what God says. So dear reader, I hope you’ll hold onto Matthew 6:25 anytime you find yourself confronting worry and feeling hopeless.

If God’s word is proven true when describing something as astonishing as a city being instantly erased by fire from the sky, God’s word will also be proven true when telling you that you don’t have to worry.