This applies to nations also. We are very much against those who teach that England or any other nation is dealt with as if it was a modern counterpart of Israel. The modern counterpart of Israel is the church, or any local church. But nevertheless there is a degree, a measure, to which God deals in token ways with nations even in this life, although the full judgment is later. Judgment may wait a while, but God will judge. Privileges will be taken, or wealth; maybe God will even send war. Our nation ought to tremble. There will be a token judgment before the end. The more light a nation has, the worse their sin when they ignore it, therefore we cry out for mercy for our land, for God must send one form of judgment or another before too long.
When notable personalities in the Christian world become known for teaching Christians that they are only fully relevant if they are reforming the world and the community, and in order to do that they have got to get into it and understand it and share its culture and try to steer and shape it. When people preach this so-called dominion theology – Christians taking over their country or taking over the world – they should be listening to one of the first lessons of the church in Genesis 18. If you try to do that, you will fail and it will ruin you. So Abraham has to be made aware about Sodom and Gomorrah and why God will judge it, and the effect it will have on that branch of the church which has gone wandering off, Lot’s branch. Even though he himself had a righteous soul that was vexed from day to day, he led his family into doom, and his descendants became the Moabites and the Ammonites, who, right through the Old Testament, were the enemies of God's people. What a sad thing that a man who was saved, who was a nephew of Abraham, who knew everything that was precious to know, could be the one who took his family into disaster. Be culturally relevant, they tell us, but they haven't read Genesis 18 and noted this cable of instruction.
Does God need to investigate Sodom and Gomorrah? This troubles some people: that God is represented as needing to go down to find out what is going on. What is being taught here is the fairness of God. He will not judge without being sure that the evil is real. He does not have to do it in this way, but he chooses to do so here so that Abraham and all of us can understand that this is the way that he works.