Genesis 19

Updated
2001-05-26; 14:31:29utc

I wished we could skip this chapter. It is probably one of the saddest chapters in the Bible. It shows the depth of man's depravity and the fury of God's wrath.

When the angels arrive at Sodom, they find Lot sitting in the gate. The gate was the most important part of the city, where dignitaries would take their seat and where disputes were settled. It has been inferred that Lot had acquired the status of a magistrate. Some commentators draw this conclusion from the remark of the man of Sodom in vs.9 "He wants to play the judge!" The context in which the latter remark was made surely does not make the inference conclusive.

But we have to remember that Lot came to Sodom as a wealthy man, and it seems that he had not lost anything during the raid by the Babylonian kings since Abraham recovered all the loot that was taken. This would have given Lot a position of influence in the city. The men of Sodom may even have endured some of his criticism of their immoral behavior. Peter remarks that Lot remained a righteous man in the midst of the licentiousness of Sodom. II Peter 2:7-8 says about Lot: "And if he (God) rescued Lot, a righteous man, who was distressed by the filthy lives of lawless men (For that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard)--." So Lot's sitting in the gate may have more significance beyond the fact that he happened to sit there. It is also obvious that Lot had moved within the city walls.

Some commentators believe that Lot sat in the gate in order to intercept visitors and protect them from the violence of the inhabitants. But this is of course conjecture. We do not know. It is obvious that although Lot may not have participated in the sins of Sodom, he had compromised himself considerably by living there and accepting the position he had. The rest of the chapter shows the influence of Sodom upon his family. This point has important applications. We should always consider what the influence of the surrounding in which we choose to live and work will have upon our family. The atmosphere of a place will affect our children. Some people have no choice, and they have to pray that the Lord will protect them and their family from the world around them and from the devil. Lot choose the valley of Siddim and his move into the city was no doubt his free choice also.

There is a noticeable contrast between the stay of the angels with Abraham and with Lot. Lot receives them politely, like Abraham did; but Lot's offer of hospitality is refused off hand. The angels answer Lot that they intend to spend the night in the square. This throws Lot into a panic. Evidently, he knows what to expect. He may have witnessed scenes similar to the one that is to follow before. But this had not convinced him that he should move out of the city. Vs.3 tells us that he insisted strongly, and so the angels consent to spend the night indoors with him. We should remember that they are on a fact-finding mission. We learn this from the previous chapter, where God says to Abraham: "...I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know."

Lot prepares a meal, or probably his wife did. The KJV and RSV say that "he made them a feast," but that is probably an overstatement. Time must have been rather short for that. I believe that this is the first time that unleavened bread is mentioned in the Bible. The mention of this bread has probably no significance apart from the fact that it took less time to prepare than bread with yeast.

Vs.4-9 describe one of the most disgusting scenes in the Bible. Some liberal Christians have tried to down-play the fact that there is a strong condemnation of homosexual behavior in this portion of Scripture. It is true that the scene portrays also gang-rape and other forms of violence, but to deny that homosexual practice is condemned violates the principles of biblical interpretation. God warns the Israelites not to commit the sins that must have been common practice among the Canaanites at that time. It groups homosexual practice with intercourse with animals. We read: "Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable."[ 1 ] And Paul says: "In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion."[ 2 ]

The story of Sodom shatters the myth that homosexual tendencies are inborn, so that the person who finds himself to be so orientated can not really be held responsible for it. The fact that the whole male population turns out for this event makes such a theory hardly plausible. Homosexuality is a perversion. If we say that God invented human sexuality, we can conclude that homosexuality comes from the devil. I firmly believe that there is a strong demonic influence behind it.

It is also obvious that the effort of the men of Sodom to engage in this gang-rape seals their doom. The Lord now has the proof He has been looking for. This sounds like something redundant because God does not need proofs like these, but the proofs justify God's actions before men and angels and prove His righteousness.

Lot's reaction is almost as detestable as the actions of the Sodomites. Commentaries state that oriental hospitality requires that the host defend his guests with his own life. But Lot does not offer his own life. He is not willing to die himself, but rather to sacrifice his daughters instead. Imagine the effect upon the girls to hear their father say such a thing. Whatever respect they may have had for him was certainly lost at this point. Lot's proposal shows how much he had come under the influence of the spirit of Sodom himself. The ethical boundaries have almost been wiped out in his mind. It makes one wonder how much righteousness was left in Lot.

His life and that of his daughters is saved by the angels. They pull him inside and strike the people of Sodom with blindness. This blindness may very well have been more a blindness of rage than a physical inability to see. The men must have been in a frenzy. The mentality of a mob is the most unreasonable and inhuman feature humanity can acquired. If the devil can take possession of a mass of humans then he can make them ungovernable and closed for any argument. It is amazing that even at this point Lot does not realize that he has lived all those years on a powder keg. He and his family still find it extremely difficult to separate themselves from Sodom.

Verse 13 and 14 make painfully clear how much of a testimony Lot had in the city of Sodom even within the smaller circle of his daughters' in-laws. At this point the angels reveal themselves as angels and tell Lot what their mission is. Lot believes it because he does go and announces the judgment to come to his sons-in-law. "But his sons-in-law thought he was joking." They must not have seen enough evidence of the presence of God in Lot's life to give any credibility to his announcement. We can imagine Lot's excitement. He had just barely escaped the mob that wanted to rape the angels. He must have been shaken up by the experience. But his sons-in-law either seriously thought that he did a good job in faking it, or they were so far removed from any spiritual reality that they could not bring themselves to give any consideration to Lot's announcement. Treating a matter as a joke is a very effective cover for any emotional disturbance. The poor boys, however, did not live long enough to enjoy the joke or to pass it on to others.

We should note God's generosity in wanting to include anyone whom Lot wanted under Lot's umbrella. If the two sons-in-law would have joined the refugees, nobody would have asked questions of their motives. They did not have to be righteous in order to be saved. It was enough that they were connected with Lot. This arrangement gives us a glimpse of what God does for us in Jesus Christ. Our salvation is dependent upon our relationship with Him.

In the morning not much of Lot's conviction of the night before is left. He can not bring himself to leave his home and the city. His considerable wealth prevented him from seeing his priorities. Most wealthy people are possessed by their possessions. You do not even have to be wealthy! Most often things have us instead of our having them. Vs.16 says that it was the mercy of the Lord that the angels pushed Lot and his wife and daughters out of the door and out of the city. "When he hesitated, the men grasped his hand and the hands of his wife and of his two daughters and led them safely out of the city, for the LORD was merciful to them." God does not often push us, but when He does it is for our salvation. What a sad way to go! It is always said to have to flee, but how tragic when we have lost sight of our most elementary priorities. Life is more than clothing, house, livestock or any other kind of stock. That fact did not seem to penetrate to Lot.

When the angels tell Lot to flee for his life, he thinks he will not be able to make it to the mountains. Lot must have been an old man. If Abraham was ninety nine, Lot must have been at least in his seventies, maybe in his eighties. He figures that he will not have the stamina to run that far and that long. So he drives a hard bargain to go to the city of Zoar. His request is granted. The presence of Lot at that place guarantees the safety of the city. The town is said to be small. We do not know how small small is, but Lot saved at least a few more lives by running to Zoar.

The fact that Zoar is spared for Lot's sake is an amazing thing. It shows first of all how much liberty the angels had in carrying out their orders. It also demonstrates the compassion of the Lord through these angels. Lot must have been a sorry sight at this point, an excited, haggard old man on the run. I am sure that Lot found out that he could run much faster than he thought when the first rumblings of judgment were heard. I think of the story of the flight of the horse Bree and his girlfriend in C.S. Lewis' book The Horse and His Boy. The horses are chased by lions; at least they think there are two lions. In reality only Aslan pursues them. Anyone can break the speed record if he thinks he is chased by death.

As we mentioned already, the fact that the presence of Lot in Sodom would have made it impossible for the angels to carry out the destruction of the city shows the infinite mercy of God. Abraham's thought that God would let the righteous perish with the wicked was completely unfounded. God was at least ten times as merciful as Abraham.

The sun had come up when Lot reached Zoar. The angel had said that judgment would not start until Lot had arrived, so the overturning of the cities of the plain of Siddim happened early in the morning in daylight. It is hard to determine what actually caused the destruction. We read in vs.24 - "Then the LORD rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah; from the LORD out of the heavens." We know that the area was rather unstable and that there were tar pits that would swallow up men. (Ch. 14:10). So it could be that the stuff that rained down from heaven actually was thrown towards heaven first in a volcanic eruption. The disaster may have taken only a few minutes. The inhabitants of Sodom must have been taken completely by surprise. They may never have known what happened to them.

In Matt.11:24 Jesus says to the people of Capernaum: "But I tell you that it will be more bearable for Sodom on the day of judgment than for you." We conclude from this that the overturning of the cities was not the actual judgment. It was a prelude to the day of judgment, when the inhabitants of the whole earth will stand before God. It seems bad enough to be wiped off the face of the earth in seconds. If this is only a shadow of the actual punishment, what will punishment then be? As the writer of the Hebrew epistle says: "It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." "For our God is a consuming fire." (Heb.10:31;12:29)

If the eruption did not start until Lot and family reached Sodom, we must conclude that the looking back of Lot's wife does not mean that she only turned her head to take a peek. It must be a euphemism for her setting out to return to the city. I take it that the catastrophe began as she turned around and started out on her way back.

Jesus puts the event in the right perspective by comparing the judgment on the cities with the day of His coming. He warns people against wanting to hang on to their possessions. We read: "It will be just like this on the day the Son of Man is revealed. On that day no one who is on the roof of his house, with his goods inside, should go down to get them. Likewise, no one in the field should go back for anything. Remember Lot's wife! Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it." (Luke 17:30-33) So her undoing must have been that she wanted to go back and collect some of her possessions.

When Abraham gets up in the morning, he walks to the place where the Lord had stood before him the night before, where he interceded for the cities. He can only see a dense smoke rising up from the place where yesterday there were at least four cities with lush pastures. We read in vs.29 - "So when God destroyed the cities of the plain, he remembered Abraham, and he brought Lot out of the catastrophe that overthrew the cities where Lot had lived." I take this to mean that God gave Abraham this assurance at that moment. We do not read that there ever was any other contact between Abraham and Lot. Surely Abraham would have taken in Lot if he and his daughters would have come to him.

At the place where formerly the valley of Siddim was we now find the Dead Sea, or as the Bible calls it the Salt Sea. (Ch. 14:3) From the Westminster Dictionary of the Bible I copy that Josephus called it Asphaltites. The designation Dead Sea comes from the Greeks who called it so as early as 200 AD. The water is chiefly supplied by the Jordan river, which flows into it from the North. The water level is said to be about 1292 feet below sea level. The sea is about 47 by 9 miles. At some points the depth of the sea is about 1300 feet. The salt content of the water is almost five times as high as normal ocean water. (100 lbs. of Dead Sea water is said to contain up to 27.8 lbs. of salt).

When Abraham looked down he only saw the smoke. We can imagine what the burning tar must have looked like. The water must have come in gradually when the Jordan river found its way into this insatiable hole. The Dead Sea is a landmark of God's judgment, even up to this day. But Ezekiel gives us the promise that one day the water of the Salt Sea will become fresh, and the Dead Sea will come to life. Ezekiel 47:8-10 - "He said to me, 'This water [that is the water that trickled out of the sanctuary] flows toward the eastern region and goes down into the Arabah, where it enters the Sea. When it empties into the Sea, the water there becomes fresh. Swarms of living creatures will live wherever the river flows. There will be large numbers of fish, because this water flows there and makes the salt water fresh; so where the river flows everything will live. Fishermen will stand along the shore; from En Gedi to En Eglaim there will be places for spreading nets. The fish will be of many kinds; like the fish of the Great Sea.'"

The last part of this chapter, from verse 30 through 38 tell a story of almost worse human depravity than the first part. Lot and his daughters left Sodom, but Sodom had not left them. I do not have the stomach to go into the details. Lot's moving out of Zoar seems to be reasonable. But his fear was unfounded and it showed a lack of faith in the Word of God. The angel had promised Lot that Zoar would not be destroyed. But Lot takes nothing for granted and he moves into the mountains to live in a cave. He was just as inconsiderate as far as the lives of his daughters were concerned in this move as he was when he moved into Sodom. It condemned the girls to a hermit's life. For them celibacy meant a living death. No offspring was equal to ceasing to exist.

We cannot blame Lot for having been shocked to the depth of his being, but the fact that this turned him into a psychopath shows that he was unable to obtain healing in fellowship with God. Lot must have been a broken man when he went to live in a cave. He had lost everything he had lived for, and evidently he had become an alcoholic. If he would have been able to bestow love upon his daughters, he might have been able to experience healing; but the fact that his daughters showed him no respect, to say the least, shows how utterly beyond hope he was. But the worst was still to come. Lot's wife had turned into a pillar of salt; Lot himself turns into the only example the Bible gives of incest. It is true that Lot did not purposely do anything. His daughters did this to him. But he reaped the harvest of what he had sown earlier in his life. If Lot had tortured his righteous soul living in Sodom, as Peter says in 2 Pet 2:8 (For that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard)-- it must have been his undoing when he discovered that he was the father of his own grandchildren. If Lot was saved and went to heaven, he was saved "by the skin of his teeth" as D.L. Moody called it once.

And yet, miracle of God's grace, our Lord Jesus Christ would not have been born if it weren't for Ruth, a daughter of Moab! God can even make the deepest pit into a mountain top

[ 1 ] Lev.18:22

[ 2 ] Rom.1:27