Sodom’s evil culture was so powerful it nearly got Lot killed. Angels had to drag him and his family out of the city to prevent them being destroyed along with everyone else (Genesis 19:16).
So God “brought Lot out of the catastrophe that overthrew the cities where Lot had lived” (29), but the power of Sodom’s culture remained. It’s like the saying, “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy,” because Lot and his family had been taken out of Sodom, but Sodom was still having its effect on them.
Lot’s daughters’ solution, for instance, to preserving their family line when there were no men around, was to get themselves pregnant by their father (31-36). Lot had no idea what they’d done because his daughters had got him too drunk to know. Interesting that in their rush out of Sodom they still managed to bring enough wine with them to get their dear old Dad drunk out of his mind.
It’s also interesting that one of the telltale signs of Sodom’s descent into evil was the sexualizing of their culture, and look at the effect that then had on Lot’s daughters. How could they have excused such an obviously awful act with their father in their own minds? But that’s the power of an evil culture; it can twist one’s thinking into going along with it, and even believing it’s the right thing to do.
Witness the sexualizing of our own western culture, treading the same downward track that Sodom took, and how it’s influencing our most hallowed Christian institutions into excusing and even celebrating same sex unions, ordaining practicing homosexuals and lesbians, condoning drag queen story times for children, and accepting gender fluidity – all in blatant contradiction to Scripture.
But take a leaf out of Lot’s daughters’ book, who felt not the slightest twinge of guilt or even a question in their minds that what they were doing might not be what God would want them to do. The power of Sodom had clearly done a real number on them. So how scary is it to see that same power weaselling its way into our culture today – and especially into our most visible Christian institutions as well?
Are they so haughty they don’t care? If so, take a leaf out of God’s book and his reaction to Sodom: “They were haughty…Therefore I did away with them.” Ezekiel 16:50. But – on the other hand – “Did Sodom really exist?”….(next blog)
Buck To Basics 