Righteous Lot
Published on
Facebook, September 24, 2010
By Bud Powell
If the Bible
hadn't called him "just" we probably wouldn't have suspected. [2Peter
2:7] He was so compromised over living in Sodom that his own daughters
and their husbands mocked him that last fatal night. His wife didn't
believe and lagged behind famously and became that pillar of salt.
But the angels
dragged him out of the doomed city. The only concrete witness that we
have that his soul was righteous was this: his soul was "vexed"
[worn down, oppressed] with the manner of life of the Sodomites. He had
even offered his two virgin daughters to the men of Sodom to satisfy their
lusts in place of the angelic visitors. These were the same daughters who
were dragged out of Sodom with their father, and therein lies the story, a
sordid depressing story, recorded in Genesis 19.
After
fleeing from Sodom, the father and his two daughters holed up in a cave.
The girls were worried about having children for the males they had known were
toast by then. So they got their father drunk and one had sex with him
one night and the other the next night. Sure enough, they conceived and
each bore a son, one the father of the Ammonites, the other the father of the
Moabites. These were two very evil nations that ultimately would have
vanished from history except for one notable event, so important that it is
told in the Bible.
Many centuries
later, after the frying of Sodom and Gomorrah, during a famine a man of
Bethlehem takes his wife and two sons and makes the long and difficult journey
to the land of Moab. His sons marry Moabitish women, but nothing much
else went well for the exiles from Bethlehem. The sons die, the father
dies, and only the three women are left, without children and prospects.
Naomi, the mother, decides to go home and tries to talk the girls into staying
in Moab with their families and their gods. Naomi was one of the worse
witnesses in the history of Biblical faith.
But one of the
girls, Ruth, insisted on going back to Bethlehem with her mother-in-law.
That is the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey would say. She meets Boaz,
they get married, and their great grandson is King David, placing Ruth and her
ancestor Lot in the line of Christ, making the Lord Jesus in his human nature a
possessor of the genes of the Moabites.
We might argue
about whether a person's righteousness is rewarded in their offspring, although
you will lose that argument for it is unquestioned that the faith of parents
brings blessing to their offspring, but here is one instance where the
offspring brought blessing to the ancestor. If there was in God's wise
providence to be a Moabite ancestor in the line of Christ, then Lot must be
saved from Sodom. Hence, the angels and the moving of Abraham to pray for
the city. The city was not saved by the prayers of Abraham for
there were not ten righteous souls--perhaps there was only one--but he bore the
seed of the Christ, by whom God would bless the world. Amen and Amen.
