I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a lot of really WEIRD stuff in the Bible. Personally, I like that it’s included in there because I think it makes the Bible more trustworthy. No one who was making stuff up to make God or God’s people look good would include these stories! Therefore, I can only conclude that they are true.
There’s are several rather disturbing stories among all the weirdness, especially in the Old Testament, and I'm highlighting one of them today. It’s the story of Lot. Tons of weirdness here, but also, much we can learn.
You may remember Lot as the nephew of Abraham and Sarah who left Ur, the land of their fathers, with them. Abraham, of course, is known as the father of the Jewish faith. He is one of the main patriarchs in the Old Testament. He was close to God and had a covenant with God that God would create a nation from his bloodline. Which God did: the nation of Israel, the Jewish people.
Abraham and Lot traveled together for a while towards the land God promised to Abraham and his descendants. Then conflict arose between Lot's guys and Abraham's guys, and it became difficult to share the land, so they parted ways. Abraham settled in the land God guided him to and was greatly blessed. Lot settled by the infamous cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and, well, things didn't go too well for him there.
Lesson #1: If we give into conflict, we may miss out on the blessings.
Sodom and Gomorrah are cities most people have heard of, and likely they associate these two cities with homosexuality. A closer read of the text, however, suggests there was more going on there. Ezekiel 16:49 states that Sodom was judged for having "pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy." Jude 1:7 does point to "sexual immorality and pervasion" as part of the reason for their judgment, but all Genesis 13:13 says is they were "wicked" and "sinned greatly" against God.
In the Talmud, Jewish Rabbinic sacred literature, it states that Sodom and Gomorrah were guilty of corrupt practices and injustice. They hated the poor and mistreated strangers. They failed to recognize their need for God. Some Biblical scholars therefore believe the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah was their injustice and inhospitality.
Whatever it was, God decides that the cities are so lawless and violent and out of control that He is going to destroy them. Abraham pleads for the cities, knowing his nephew Lot lives there. He gets God to agree that if God can find even 10 righteous people there, He will not destroy the city. Note it is because of God's relationship with Abraham, not because of Lot, that God agrees.
Lesson #2: God hears the prayers of the righteous.
God sends two heavenly messengers, or angels, to Sodom and Gomorrah. Their arrival into Sodom is noticed by all. Lot is at the city gate - a place of importance, meaning he had social standing in the city - and jumps up to welcome the two into his home. That night, the men of Sodom come banging on Lot's door. They demand he send out two messengers so they "may know them".
Likely, they wanted to have sex with them. But why?
Was it because they were male? Was it because they were new to town?
Or was it possibly because they could tell these two were not regular men? They could tell they were supernatural beings who walked with the Divine. Remember that while Lot and his family knew of God because of their relation to Abraham, the people in these cities were not believers. The Talmud states the people of Sodom and Gomorrah worshipped the sun and the moon. Possibly other gods as well. It wasn't uncommon in that time for people to go to the temples of their gods and have sex with prostitutes who worked there and offered themselves up as a sort of conduit ... as though having sex with the gods, in a way to connect to them.
I believe (and not just me, but commentators I have read as well), the crowd wanted to "know" the two new arrivals in order to draw near to the divine, or to worship the divine. Only, they did not know God. They worshipped manmade idols and God-created things. They sought not a true encounter with God, but merely something to make themselves feel better about their depravity or perhaps to earn favor from their gods.
Regardless of their reasoning, what is the most disturbing thing to me about this story is Lot's response. He says to them, "I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please." (Gen 19:7-8).
Umm, excuse me?
Lot is offering up his daughters to be gang raped, likely killed. How could any father do such a thing? And this is in the Bible??
Lesson #3: When you live too close to wickedness, you begin to be influenced by it.
In that time, especially in the non-believing world, men ruled supreme. They were allowed to do whatever they wanted to to anyone in their house, as well as pretty much any other woman out there who was unattached. Women were barely above the station of slaves. They were considered property of their fathers and then of their husbands. We actually see the influence of this threading through the church up until even today. But it did not come from God. The word of the Bible elevates the states of women, believe it or not. (Likely not, since the church has been preaching the opposite for a very long time.)
If Lot had stuck to the faith of Abraham, the faith in the one true God, he would never have offered his daughters in that way. He would have recognized their intrinsic value as image bearers of God and co-heirs in the covenant promise. But he didn’t. He saw them the way the world around them did, as his possessions to do with whatever he wished.
Lesson #4: When we let the culture around us poison our thoughts, we make bad choices. Bad choices which hurt others.
Here's the important thing in this story: the angels intervene. They grab Lot, pull him back inside, lock the doors and blind the men outside so they stumble around in confusion. The angels protected Lot's daughters. They did not allow his daughters to undergo the thing Lot was willing to happen to them. I think this is a key point of the story that is often overlooked.
Lesson #5: God cares about women.
Lot thought they were disposable. God did not. They mattered to God.
Later, Lot's daughters go on to make a similar error in showing a lack of faith in God and in God's provision, proving that they also were influenced by the society they were raised in or, perhaps, that Lot did an awful job teaching them God's truth. Which makes the whole story incredibly sad.
Lot and his family didn't do so good after going their own way. They let the culture around them influence them and shape their values. They may have been saved from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, but things still didn't turn out so well for them. If they had merely stuck with Abraham, they could have shared in the blessing. Which leads us to the final lesson from this story:
Lesson #6: Never underestimate the importance of being in a community of believers.
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