Hey, friends.
Welcome back to the Daily Bible Study.
We are jumping in.
If you have been going with us chronologically here,
it’s been a few days since we were together.
And we’re jumping at the end about a pretty tough story here.
Yeah, it’s kind of a
welcome back and a hard way
to start a Monday.
But we are at the end of that cycle of stories
about Sodom and Gomorrah and really the culmination
of God’s judgment.
God has expressed anger about the city.
The angels have been there.
They’ve been attacked by the men.
There’s been the threat of violence.
The
reports and rumors of how Sodom is
and why it is so terrible have been confirmed.
And today,
the bill comes due,
essentially.
So verse 12 in chapter 19,
the men said to Lot,
have you anyone here,
son-in-laws, daughters, anyone you have in the city,
bring them out of the place
for we’re about to destroy it because of the outcry
against the people that has become great before the Lord.
And the Lord sent us to destroy it.
So Lot went out and said to his son-in-laws,
who were about to marry his daughters up,
get out of the place for the Lord
is about to destroy the city.
But he seemed to his son-in-laws to be jesting.
When morning dawn, the angel urged Lot saying,
get up and take your wife,
your daughters who are here
or else you will be consumed.
But he lingered so the men seized him and his wife
and two daughters by the hand,
the Lord being merciful to him.
And they brought him out and left him outside the city.
When they brought him outside,
they said, flee for your life and do not look back
or stop anywhere in the plain.
Fleet of the hills or else you’ll be consumed.
Lot sent to them,
my Lord, your servants found favor
with you shows great kindness,
but I cannot flee to the hills
for disaster will overtake me and I’ll die.
Look, there’s a city,
let me escape there.
It’s, is it not a little one and my life will be saved.
And they said to him,
very well,
I grant you the favor.
We will not overthrow the city.
Hurry, escape there.
I can do nothing until you arrive.
Therefore the city would be called Zor
for the sun had risen on the earth
when the Lord came to Zor.
Zor means small or little.
That’s a big chunk of text,
a lot going on here.
The angels or these men,
these visitors who are now,
we learn as we’ve seen in the story appointed by God,
they now become messengers of destruction
and they tell Lot and his family, get out.
But there’s this, as there always is,
there’s this looseness in Genesis.
The fiancees of his two daughters don’t,
they think he’s joking.
They don’t really understand what he’s saying.
By the way, this is the first they’re mentioned,
but we assume they were in the house with Lot
and not in the crowd where it said
all the men of the city.
We also have this moment where they tell Lot,
think you’ve got to go,
it’s happening, you’ve got to go.
And it says Lot lingered.
And some of this is just the particulars of human nature.
Some of this is just the way the story is told.
Some of it’s the history,
a kind of
a little bit of a slight,
maybe a slightly negative take on Lot.
We’re going to see some more of that,
maybe see that even more clearly tomorrow.
But there’s some weirdness in this story,
but the end point is that Lot and his family flee
as they believe from these angels
that destruction is imminent.
I’m going to add to that idea here
that this may not be a holy charitable look at Lot.
I think one
frame for that is you’ve got to remember
the way that the story started was Abraham, or Abraham,
negotiating with God down.
How many people is it going to take God
for you to not destroy this city,
knowing that his nephew Lot is there?
And what we find out in this story
is that these men tell Lot, “Hey, look,
there’s not enough.
“That threshold’s not been met.
“This city’s going to be destroyed.”
Lot can’t even convince his future sons-in-law to go.
I mean, they think he’s joking.
And
I think that just sort of adds to this sort of idea
that Lot is now in a circumstance
in which he has been in a city,
and it has corrupted his family.
I mean,
it’s certainly his to-be family,
and we’re going to learn that his wife is later on
not even able to leave that city
without an attachment to it.
So there’s a sense in which the context that Lot has been in
at the very least has been a negative influence.
And potentially, if you want to be even less charitable,
Clint, I think you could end up saying
that here maybe even Lot has in some ways become,
I don’t think the right word is implicated,
but he’s certainly become
a part of or affected by the city in which he lives.
I think that Genesis is making it increasingly clear,
and we’ll see it at the end of this story and tomorrow,
that the covenant of God is with Abram,
and Lot is graciously included in it
because of his connection to Abram,
but it doesn’t extend to Lot.
Lot is not a favored one,
Lot is not a chosen one,
Lot is not the one who will be blessed and multiply
and become a great people on the earth.
And again, not to keep saying this,
but tomorrow that becomes crystal clear.
But we see it here in this idea that Lot is struggling
with his own family,
Lot is struggling to be believed
by his son-in-laws, he’s struggling to,
he’s bargaining to try and figure out where to go.
And we’ll see a little bit more of it
as we continue this story.
Verse 24,
the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah,
sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven
and over through the cities,
all along the plain
and all the inhabitants of the cities
and all that grew on the ground.
But Lot’s wife looked behind him
and she became a pillar of salt.
Abraham went early in the morning to the place
where he had stood before the Lord
and he looked down towards Sodom and Gomorrah
and toward the land of the plain
and saw the smoke of the land going up
like the smoke of a furnace.
So it was that when God destroyed the cities of the plain,
God remembered Abraham and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow,
when he overthrew the cities
in which Lot had settled.
So to work backwards in this,
we see very clearly
that when God acts,
he intervenes through Abraham
to the promise of Abraham.
Lot is,
Lot receives gracious treatment
but it’s not because of himself,
it’s because of the promise that God made
to Abraham and that becomes very clear.
Also,
there is this very strange verse
that’s got a lot of attention through the years
because it is so strange.
Lot’s wife looked back
and became a pillar of salt.
Now, there were salt formations in this area
and anthropologists,
geologists,
biblical historians say that at some point they became associated
with this story perhaps.
But the themes here are,
first of all, disobedience.
They’ve been told don’t look back.
Maybe longing,
maybe the idea that she looked
upon the punishment of God throughout the book of Genesis
when one looks directly at God or what God is doing,
that is risk to risk one’s life, that is dangerous.
It’s not exactly clear everything.
There is an amazing amount of tension
that has been given this one character
who gets one verse in an entire Bible
but it is a very strange detail
and a lot of people have done a lot with it.
I think I would be cautious to build
much of a theology on it.
There are some interesting jumping off points
about moving ahead versus looking backwards
and some of those things.
But I would be very careful to assume
that we somehow understand it or know what it means.
Yeah, so Clint,
this probably will either
make you smile or groan.
It won’t surprise you to know that I watched
a plethora of History Channel documentaries
on Finding Sodom and Gomorrah and all of those
sort of very public interest kinds of things
that come from this story.
And I do that mostly just because I love that kind of stuff.
But realistically, I do think you’re doing yourself
a disservice to try to read this story
looking for all of the nitty gritty historical details.
Like is this story really a story about a meteorite strike
and that it was retold in this way?
The point is clear.
You’ve already named the point,
Clint, that essentially God is faithful to Abraham
and that because of God’s faithfulness,
he also remembers Lot,
right?
That’s the point of the story.
What’s important though as we understand this
in the whole context of the larger story is remember,
God promised that you would no longer
ever send a flood that would destroy the entire earth.
But what now reigns from the heavens,
the same heavens, by the way, where God opened the floodgates
and water came down in the story of Noah,
now here at the midst of this city’s judgment,
the heavens are opened and here comes sulfur and fire.
And the point here,
of course, is that God is not
stepped down in the role of judge.
That ultimately,
where human lives transgress
God’s created order as we’ve already seen
that God reserves the right and indeed uses the right
to bend things back into order.
Now the reality is we see God’s salvific gracious work
in the midst of it.
If you were with us for the previous study,
I hope if you weren’t,
you would jump back and get caught up.
God went to great lengths actually to point out
in that story that there was no one in town
who was righteous, that all language was used very,
very liberally.
So this idea that there’s no one in this city,
the only ones left are the ones who God is going to save,
very similar to a kind of narrative we saw
in the Noah story.
When you read Genesis with this whole arc,
you begin to see these themes that are repeating themselves.
God creates humans because of our natural flaws.
We tend to move in the wrong direction and God is
continually faithful to that promise
to carry us through and there are moments in time
where this kind of recorrection happens
and here we see it again in Sodom and Gomorrah.
It’s a really good point,
Michael.
I’m glad you brought it up.
There are a number of ties here to the flood story.
There is that language of all that they were guilty,
all the time that every inclination of their heart
was always toward evil.
There is that idea of a remnant,
a small group of a person and family that are saved.
There is the idea of punishment again,
coming down from the heavens.
What’s interesting is that the flood story is so big,
it perhaps doesn’t disturb us as much
as the idea of these lesser number of people in two towns.
The flood story is overwhelming to think about,
but the idea of two towns being eradicated
is in some way more troubling or the idea of this woman
who looked back either out of fear or arrogance
or wanting to see what God was doing
or hoping the people got what they deserved
or wanting to go back instead of forward, whatever that is,
that idea again
is difficult for us
because it’s smaller and more personal.
But we see here this ongoing message
that we will encounter through Genesis.
Sin has a cost to turn one’s heart toward evil
and to act out in that fashion
is to invite correction,
punishment, and even destruction from God.
And in this case,
what is God doing?
Not only saving Lot and,
as it turns out, his daughters,
but what is the bigger promise?
That in Abraham,
a nation of the world will be delivered
and that nation will deliver
others, that it will be a blessing to the world
and that that group of people, that remnant,
that covenant people of God will live out faithfully
and not invite the kind of destruction and correction
that we’ve already seen twice in just 20 chapters.
Yeah, another thing to note here is,
remember how these men are telling Lot,
go up into the hills,
that’s where you’re gonna be saved.
It’s notable that when Abraham is described
as surveying the scene,
he’s doing so from above.
He’s looking down.
And you’re making some connections here,
so this is certainly not explicit.
But I think there’s something to be said for,
the men are calling Lot to go up
and instead Lot insists to go to another city.
He wants to go laterally.
And I think that’s just another sort of implicit
little nod in the text that Lot isn’t entirely the hero
of this story.
There’s something that’s a little off
about Lot and his decision making,
and yet God is faithful to Lot,
right?
Even though Lot may not be without blemish,
Lot still sees this exceeding mercy of these men
who are sent to do this task.
This part of the story,
let’s just be very clear,
has turned very abruptly from the beginning part
of the story, which may have even come across as being mundane.
These visitors coming,
showing hospitality,
making them bread,
then them coming down to the town.
Then you have that town’s response.
A really strange scene,
Clint, where all of these people come to beat down the doors.
Now you realize there’s something wrong with this story.
And then as the story progresses,
it turns out that these men sort of revealed,
no, we’re here Lot,
we’re gonna bring destruction.
You need to leave.
You have this pillar of salt happen.
As this story goes,
it turns in ways that are unexpected.
And that is not without any other
sort of sister stories in the scriptures,
but this is not common.
And so I do think it has been a particular note for people.
This has been one of those stories that sticks out for them.
Yeah, I would say that we’re still early enough
in the book of Genesis where there’s a lot of looseness
and a little strangeness.
Though,
in fairness,
whatever happened to Sodom and Gomorrah,
Sodom and Gomorrah stand throughout the rest
of the scripture, even into the New Testament,
as an example of what happens when God’s will is defiled,
when God’s commandments are disobeyed and disregarded.
And Sodom and Gomorrah were used as kind of code word,
really throughout the Old Testament
as in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah.
And just like Sodom,
this becomes a kind of rich symbol
of what happens when you disobey God.
And Genesis is, for the most part,
remarkably clear in that.
To obey God is to invite blessing,
and to disobey God is to invite punishment.
And Sodom and Gomorrah stands out as the epitome
of what happens when one
is disobedient.
I think a mistake that gets made
in interpreting Sodom and Gomorrah,
and I don’t wanna stray too far here,
but I think there does need to be a corrective.
This does get lifted up as example par excellence
of a moment in scripture where God brings
justice,
and in this case,
destruction in the form of justice.
And that is sometimes lifted up from the vantage
of those who are saying,
this is going to happen to you.
And then the finger gets pointed at whoever the you is, and say,
either get on board
or God’s going to do this to you.
I think that’s a misreading of this text, this is why.
Because you’re reading Sodom and Gomorrah
without the fundamental core lesson
that is God’s faithfulness to Abraham.
And if you are remembering that God is faithful to Abraham,
you’ll remember the universality of God’s promise
to Abraham, that all of the world would be blessed
because of what God would do for Abraham.
So God’s blessing in the beginning was this big umbrella
that was intended to have a universal import.
I’m trying to find a better word than universal.
An expansive understanding of God’s desire to do good.
This story, we’re told at the very end,
is an example to show us how God remains faithful
even in the midst of judgment,
even in the midst of destruction.
So I think it’s wrong-headed
and I don’t think it really is a fair interpretation
of this text to come back to it and to say
that this is an example of the people
whoever those people are are gonna get
what they have coming,
though what we see here rather
is that God is working in spite of this need for justice.
God is working towards a more full and faithful promise.
So I think there’s a worthwhile corrective
’cause I think Sodom and Gomorrah get sort of maybe used.
I don’t know if that’s the right word Clint,
but there’s some times this story is held up in a way
that I’m not sure is faithful to larger context.
Yeah, I think people have to some extent
been drawn to the idea of punishment,
but it’s always punishment of others,
punishment of our enemies and the idea of God
wiping out our enemies is,
and always has been somewhat appealing.
It is popular in the scripture
and people have gone back to ring that bell
really throughout Christian history.
And probably maybe unfairly and certainly too often, I would say.
Well, I think that ends it for us today friends.
We’re glad that you would spend some time with us
to end this story.
We now push on tomorrow and hope that you will be with us
again, until then, be blessed.
Thanks everybody.