A visit to Pompeii

Have you ever wondered what happened in the story of Sodom and Gomorrha? I mean, have you ever imagined how the people responded and all the chaos that surrounded God's destruction of those cities? Well, if you want to get a real glimpse in to what those people must have experienced, visit Pompeii, Italy.

I had head about Pompeii and saw historical information about the destruction of Pompeii, but I was not prepared for what I saw when we visited Pompeii, last week.

For those who do not know, Pompeii was a city that sat directly under Mt. Vesuvius. It was known as a totally corrupted and erotic city. Even in those days, the godly people of that generation regarded Pompeii as a modern day Sodom. During the days of the first church, Pompeii was totally given to sensual living in the extreme and even today, there are some historical venues about Pompeii that require people that enter to be 18 or have written parental permission to enter the site. Obviously, we weren't interested at all in those sites, but the fact that the historical evidence for this city has to be guarded so carefully from innocent minds, speaks volumes about what the city was like.

Anyway, in the year 79 A.D, Mt. Vesuvius erupted and buried the city of Pompeii in a heavy layer of ash. Now you can go to the city and see remarkably preserved remains of a once great city. I went expecting to see a few buildings in ruins, but the significance of Pompeii is that basically the whole city was preserved. We walked across the city for four hours looking in houses, businesses, temples and stadiums and still we didn't see half of the city. Because the city was buried in ash, most things in the city are very similar to what they were on the day it was buried. We saw paintings on the walls of houses, beautifully tiled floors, cart ruts on the road, and graffiti that the inhabitants had scrawled on places around the city--again, some of it, obscene. Pompeii has one piece of graffiti that says "Sodom and Gomorrah" and no one has been able to discern if it was written before, during or after the eruption. Either way, it was apparently an appropriate description of the city.

The most grim part of it all was seeing the plaster casts of the people and animals trying to flee the city. One of the first archeologists to work with this city did future generations a service, by pouring plaster into the body-shaped cavities that were in the ash and preserving the actual figures of the people and animals. The people tried to escape as the city filled with ash and poisonous gas and their postures and positions are perfectly preserved in these casts as well as the positions of animals as they tried to escape. A fully harnessed mule was in one shop and both adults and children are preserved in the "garden of the fugitives."

Pompeii is an experience that I won't forget for a long time, and I sometimes wonder if this city wasn't preserved for a warning to future generations. Whether the destruction of Pompeii was a destructive act of God or a tragic natural occurrence may never be known, but the picture of this city starkly reminds me that we are leaving footprints on the sands of time and future generations will certainly judge us by what they see.