In a Roman world caught up with sexual immorality, Pompeii was the beacon, shining its light to lead the way. The Roman world was filled with promiscuity, divorce, homosexual acts with minors, orgies and every other imaginable debauchery, but Pompeii was the city to rule them all for sex.

From 79 to 1599 AD the city lay forgotten. For all that time humanity only had the writings of Pliny the Younger to attest to its existence. But when Pompeii was discovered in 1599, its discoverer walked away from it. Domenico Fontana was so shocked by what he saw, he didn’t believe it was fit to release upon the world. He wasn’t shocked by any body cavities he found, but the images he saw on the walls of Pompeii’s perfectly preserved buildings.

Pompeii was the manufacturer of pornographic pleasures unlike any time in Western history until—now. The artifacts and perfectly preserved fresco paintings in Pompeii rival and even surpass any Eastern notions of sexual depravity preserved through history. Pompeii was apparently the Western world’s play place for sex. The level of depravity they lived under was perfectly preserved by Vesuvius’ eruption for all the world to see today.

The Judgment of God

And that begs the question, why did the eruption so quickly and completely envelope Vesuvius?
Sometimes it is difficult, and even ridiculously vain, to try and uncover the judgment of God from events that it simply doesn’t exist in. Some things happen and the Lord doesn’t give an explanation of why. Thornton Wilder wrote The Bridge of San Luis Rey about just that. We must not seek to find the judgment of God when it is not there.

But Pompeii’s situation screams for attention to be paid to it. Pompeii was more than a few people who died on a bridge—it was a city wholly devoted to one thing: sexual immorality. There are far too many biblical passages to list that show God’s hatred for sexual immorality (Ephesians 5, 1 Thessalonians 4, Galatians 5, Romans 1, Revelation 2-3, etc.). And it is not that sexual sin makes you any more a sinner than any other kind of sin. The devastating problem with sexual sin is that it defiles us more than anything else we can engage in.

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In Pompeii’s case, it stands as a warning to all on the earth who would seek to walk in such a level of depravity. It is hard to look at Pompeii and not see the judgment of God. The problem with that is that it is always easier with hindsight. We today are at a loss to see our own depravity in the same way the Pompeiians were even up to the point of their demise.