John Calvin Commentary Genesis 19:24

"Then Jehovah rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from Jehovah out of heaven;" — Genesis 19:24 (ASV)

Then the Lord rained. Moses here succinctly relates in very unostentatious language the destruction of Sodom and of the other cities. The atrocity of the case might well demand a fuller narration, expressed in tragic terms; but Moses, according to his manner, simply recites the judgment of God, which no words would be sufficiently vehement to describe, and then leaves the subject to the meditation of his readers.

It is therefore our duty to concentrate all our thoughts on that terrible vengeance. The mere mention of it, as it did not take place without such a mighty shaking of heaven and earth, should rightly make us tremble; and that is why it is so frequently mentioned in the Scriptures. And it was not the will of God that those cities should be simply swallowed up by an earthquake; but in order to make the example of His judgment more conspicuous, He hurled fire and brimstone upon them out of heaven.

To this point belongs what Moses says, that the Lord rained fire from the Lord. The repetition is emphatic, because the Lord did not then cause it to rain in the ordinary course of nature; but, as if with a stretched-out hand, He openly fulminated in an unaccustomed manner, to make it sufficiently plain that this rain of fire and brimstone was produced by no natural causes.

It is indeed true that the air is never agitated by chance, and that God should be acknowledged as the Author of even the least shower of rain. It is impossible to excuse the profane subtlety of Aristotle, who, when he argues so acutely concerning secondary causes in his Book on Meteors, buries God Himself in profound silence.

Moses, however, here expressly points out to us the extraordinary work of God, so that we may know that Sodom was not destroyed without a manifest miracle. The proof that the ancients have attempted to derive from this testimony for the Deity of Christ is by no means conclusive. And, in my judgment, those who severely censure the Jews because they do not admit this kind of evidence are angry without cause.

I confess, indeed, that God always acts by the hand of His Son, and I have no doubt that the Son presided over such a memorable example of vengeance. But I say that those who from this infer a plurality of Persons reason inconclusively, while Moses’s design was to raise the minds of the readers to a more lively contemplation of the hand of God.

And as it is often asked from this passage, ‘What had infants done, to deserve to be swallowed up in the same destruction with their parents?’ the solution of the question is easy; namely, that the human race is in God’s hand, so that He may devote whomever He wills to destruction, and may follow whomever He wills with His mercy.

Again, whatever we are not able to comprehend with our limited understanding should be submitted to His secret judgment.

Lastly, the whole of that seed was accursed and execrable, so that God could not justly have spared even the least of them.