God is both power and mercy

It’s not surprising that God wanted to wipe Sodom off the map, seeing what happened to two of his angels there. Men from all over the city, young and old, had gathered at Lot’s home where the angels were staying, demanding Lot push his visitors out the door so they could homosexually gang rape them (Genesis 19:4-5). 

One has to wonder how Lot got himself in this situation in the first place. We know he liked the look of that land (13:10), but somehow he’d ended up living in the city, and even “sitting in the gateway of the city” as one of its elders and judges (19:1) – probably because his uncle Abraham had done such a great favour to the king of Sodom back in Genesis 14:11-17.  

But why did Lot stay in the city, when 2 Peter 2:7 tells us he was “distressed by the filthy lives of the lawless men” in it? There’s a clue in Genesis 19:7, because when Lot steps outside his home to reason with the mob he addresses these filthy-minded men as “brothers.”  

Brothers? But according to Ezekiel 16:49-50, the people of Sodom were “arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me.” Sodom sounds like the typical snobbish attitude of the urban elite today, that so easily sucks people into thinking they’re a superior breed of humans who are entitled to doing whatever they please, no matter how detestable it is, or how much their personal excesses and weird ideas about how the world should be run destroy the lives of others. For Lot to consider such an entitled, lust-filled, selfish mob as brothers suggests he may have become such a political animal as a city elder that he was afraid to make waves – a very dangerous situation for him to be in, because in verse 50 God says of Sodom, “Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.”

And here was Lot, about to be done away along with them – and deservedly so too, because when he finally did stand up against the mob in defence of the two angels in Genesis 19:7, he offered his two virgin daughters to the mob instead (8). 

Fortunately – very fortunately – God is both power and mercy, “for the Lord was merciful” to Lot and his family (19:16) and got them out of the city before he unleashed his power on it. Which made me hope, as our world descends into a Sodom-like hole too, that God will extend his mercy to the good people who are also distressed today, and he helps them rise above its suffocating influence and escape the catastrophe that comes to a society “When there’s no fear of God” in it….(next blog)