THE WAGES OF SIN
Genesis 18:1-19:38
It is hard to decide whether this week is about God’s mercy, God’s wrath or Lot’s choices. But perhaps, in the wonderful way Scripture puts these matters side-by-side, the truth is that we cannot separate them from each other. They all have a hand in determining reality.
We are not used to God’s wrath and in the many brutal accounts in the Old Testament, we find it difficult to justify the killing of even women and children. The descriptions in Genesis 19 at least give us some idea of what prompts God to “cleanse the land”. My only advice is that we not be too quick to judge “he who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all” on matters of mercy.
But if God’s wrath is fully warranted (and surely it is many times over), then mercy is man’s only hope and God reveals to Abraham that he is indeed a just and merciful God, far more than Abraham’s idealistic ideas of justice. There were not 10 righteous men that day to avert the disaster but he went out of his way to save Lot and his family, even granting his request to spare Zoar.
But while God spared Lot, sin did not loosen its grip on him and his family. It is difficult to imagine the horror when your father offered you and your sister to the crowd bent on rape, or when your daughters commit incest with you drunk. But this was the horror of Lot’s family and unless God killed off everyone, sin will continue on.
And so when you look a little deeper you see that it is about sin—how sin causes God to do the necessary, and how sin ruined a family. But in that little, almost casual announcement about an impending birth (is anything too hard for the Lord?) that set off the long game that culminated in Jesus, the one righteous man, trading himself for the world, we catch a glimpse of how far God was willing to go to be just yet merciful.