Then the men turned away from there and went toward Sodom, but Abraham still stood before the Lord. (Gen 18,22)
We mentioned that Abraham was being transformed so that he could experience God's rest and indwelling, even friendship. When a man is changed, he is not really aware of many changes in himself; they are more easily noticed by outsiders, and this was certainly the case with Abraham. We do not find in the Scriptures a life stage-by-life stage account of Abraham's life where his qualities are evaluated in order to accurately observe his personal growth. If we want to see it, we must (as with other characters in the Bible) deduce it from the story.
We read that Abraham "stood before the Lord." The Hebrew original here supposedly even states "the Lord before Abraham." Be that as it may, it does not begin with a conversation. And the following prayer of Abraham, one of the most remarkable in the whole Bible, does not begin by listing the urgent needs, of what God should do. It is, as we shall see, primarily a meeting of the two characters.
Jesus said that "the Gentiles think that they will be heard for the multitude of their words." (Matt. 6:7) The Gentiles do not listen to God or perceive Him. If they are really interested in God at all, He is only a means to an end. Therefore, they spew their requests and petitions into the places where they imagine him (usually somewhere upstairs). But they don't have a personal relationship with Him, and therefore they don't perceive God - and they don't stop before Him.
"Standing still" meant, first of all, stopping, quieting down and becoming still. Now Abraham's daily cares had to be set aside, as well as the cares of preparing the feast which had occupied him for the last few hours. And then came the perception of the other side. We assume, as it were automatically, that God always perceives us, understands what state of mind we are in, can "tune in" to us. But we can't always tune in to him, it's certainly not an automatic thing that every believer possesses. It is not possible without spending time with God and making God the center of one's life. This is where we can see one of the signs of Abraham's inner transformation. He was perhaps the only one in the whole world who was willing to "stand before the Lord" in those days.
