Gen 19

the judgment of sodom

(genesis 19)

Jason Procopio

We’re going to jump right in today, because we have a lot to see. Genesis 19 is one of the weightiest and most troubling passages in the entire Bible, for multiple reasons, so it’s important that we remember what’s going on here.

Chapter 19 begins immediately after the events we see in chapter 18. In chapter 18, we saw God visit Abraham, and tell him that he plans to bring down his judgment on two nearby cities: Sodom and Gomorrah. He says (18.20-21):  

“Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is very grave, 21 I will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me. And if not, I will know.”

Now this needs to be addressed right away—this threat of judgment against Sodom and Gomorrah is leveled because God is holy. When the Bible says that God is “holy,” the first thing that means is that God is “righteous.” That is, there is not a trace of anything impure or immoral or imperfect in his person, in his character, in his attributes, or in his actions. That’s the first thing “holiness” means—it is being perfectly righteous. The second thing it means for God to be holy is that there is no one like him. He is totally distinct, totally unique, totally separate from anything or anyone else.

Now here’s why that matters for this story. No matter how “good” we might be, none of us are holy as God as holy; none of us are righteous like God is righteous. And that’s what sin is. All of us are morally imperfect; we have all rebelled against God in our thoughts and in our actions. 

That’s why this discussion between Abraham and God is interesting. They have this kind of back-and-forth negotiation about how many righteous people God has to find to spare the city. But in the end, that’s just God being kind to Abraham, because he knows he’s not going to find ten righteous people in Sodom. In fact, he knows he’s not going to find anyone righteous there.

And that’s the point; Abraham at this point still doesn’t entirely understand the problem—that Sodom and Gomorrah stand as representatives of the entire human race. There is no one righteous in these cities, because there’s no one righteous anywhere. (We’ll come back to that later.)

So at the beginning of chapter 19, we see the angels go down to Sodom, and they immediately find Lot. This is no accident. Why? Because Lot is Abraham’s nephew. 

We’ve seen Lot sporadically throughout this story. He moved with Abraham from Haran, and when they had arrived to the place God had told Abraham to go, they decided where each of them would settle. In chapter 13, we see Lot “look in the direction” of Sodom, and when he saw that the land around was fertile, he decided to take this spot—the seemingly best spot—for himself. So Lot settles in the city of Sodom itself. And even then, in chapter 13, the author warns us that the men of Sodom were “wicked, great sinners against the Lord” (13.13). 

Maybe Lot knew this, maybe he didn’t. But we find that since then, Lot has embraced life in this wicked city, knowing all that came with it. He didn’t like all that came with it (we see in 2 Peter), but he accepted it.

So Lot sees the strangers, and he invites them to come stay with him that night (as common hospitality dictated). They object, saying they’ll sleep in the town square, but Lot knows this city; he knows what will happen if they stay there. So he convinces them to come stay with him.

And that’s where the trouble begins. 

So we’re going to look at the rest of this story bit by bit, because as shocking as it is, it is a display of what is going on in us—whether we are Christians or not. In this story we see four main things on display: we see who we are; who we are in Christ; what we deserve; and what God has offered to us. 

(And just to warn you, if you hadn’t noticed it in the text, there are some really shocking things we’ll be talking about today, so if you’ve got kids listening with you at home, just be aware of that, and use your best parental discretion about whether to let them keep listening or not.)

I. WHO WE ARE (v. 4-9) 

So Lot takes these two “men” into his house for the evening. And we read in v. 4:  

4 But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man, surrounded the house. 5 And they called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, that we may know them.” 

The biblical language here is unambiguous. This isn’t just a crowd. This is the entire city. Every man in Sodom. The author’s establishing the guilt of the entire city. And they are demanding that Lot send out his visitors to be raped by the mob. This is of course shocking, and it’s supposed to be. The people of Sodom have given themselves over completely and entirely to their sin, and what that looks like is an absolute horror.

And it gets worse. When this mob asks Lot to send these men out to be raped, Lot tries to intervene, because he understood (as anyone would) that this was wrong. According to Peter, Lot was tormenting himself the whole time he was there, seeing the wickedness done there and yet unwilling to leave the comfort of his new living situation.

So there is a dichotomy on display in Lot—a dichotomy many of us understand, because we act the same way. On the one hand, his heart is understanding of righteousness; he knows who God is, and he knows what God expects of him. On the other hand, he is still as callous and twisted as the men in this mob. 

He goes out and begs the men of the city to not act the way they are acting. That’s good.

But then he offers a solution. He offers to send out his two daughters, and essentially prostitute them to the crowd, to let them rape his daughters instead of the angels.

I can think of only a few events in the Bible as shocking as this one. Obviously. And like we said a few weeks ago with Sarah and Hagar, a lot of people get frustrated that the author of this book, Moses, doesn’t come out and say, “This is awful.” We’d hope the reason is obvious—he doesn’t need to. Of course it’s awful. Any human being who bears the image of God knows instinctively that it is awful. 

This proposal goes to show that even if Lot understands some things about his uncle Abraham’s God, he has been so conditioned by sin—his own sin, and the sin of the city—that his thinking has been totally skewed. What is clearly wrong, unimaginably seems right to him now.

This is disgusting stuff. The brazen wickedness we see on display here chills us—both that of the men of Sodom, and of Lot himself (particularly considering that all this time, the angels in the home were more than capable of protecting themselves). 

And the message here is abundantly clear. It is the same as with the story of the flood.

When we look at the wickedness we see here, when we look at Sodom, we should see that naturally, this is who we all are. 

The sin we see here is disgusting, and taken to the extreme. But God isn’t only destroying Sodom and Gomorrah because their sin is so bad. We see a very similar situation in the book of Jonah, with the city of Nineveh—their sin is so horrible that God calls Jonah to go there and do something about it. But what he calls Jonah to do is preach to them, and call them to repentance. And he could have done the same thing here. 

But he didn’t. Because in this story of God’s judgment against Sodom and Gomorrah, he’s trying to send a very specific, very clear message. It’s almost like he’s drawing a caricature: by showing us the awful sin in these cities, he’s trying to show us that really, this is what all sin looks like. He’s putting the horror of sin on display for us.

Make no mistake: the same root of sin which brought these men to this place is in every single one of us. Ever since Adam, every human being who has ever lived has been infected with the same evil, the same twisted desires, the same impulse to take what we want and do what we want, no matter what God has told us.

The apostle Paul says in Romans 3.10-12:  

“None is righteous, no, not one; 

11  no one understands; 

no one seeks for God. 

12  All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; 

no one does good, 

not even one.” 

Reading the story of Sodom should set us directly in front a mirror, because this is who we are.

II. WHO WE ARE IN CHRIST (v. 10-22)

So that’s the situation. Horror outside the house, and horror inside the house. What no one took into consideration were the two visitors.

In v. 9 the men of the city are coming to the house trying to break the door down. And in v. 10 we read:  

10 But the men [that is, the angels] reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them and shut the door. 11 And they struck with blindness the men who were at the entrance of the house, both small and great, so that they wore themselves out groping for the door. 

So now that that problem’s solved, it’s time to go. The men in the house implore Lot to find everyone he can and get them out. V. 13: 

“For we are about to destroy this place, because the outcry against its people has become great before the Lord, and the Lord has sent us to destroy it.”

God’s judgment is coming, and there will be no escaping it if you remain behind. 

So Lot tries to gather his family, but they won’t come; and you kind of get the impression he’s not trying all that hard, because his sons-in-law think he’s joking, and in v. 16 we see that Lot is lingering. He’s actually hesitating. 

It gets to the point where the angels actually have to seize him and remove him, along with his wife and daughters. 

So they take them outside, and basically tell them to run—go to the hills. Get out. And once again, we see just how far gone Lot is—he complains about his rescue. “I’m really more of a city guy…” And still, God is merciful, and lets him go to a nearby city called Zoar. And he even promises to not destroy that city because Lot is there.

So in v. 1-9, we just see several blatant examples of rampant wickedness. Given Lot’s behavior so far, it would be reasonable to expect that he deserves the same punishment as everyone else in Sodom. And that’s correct. 

Even so, in v. 10-22 we see God save Lot, by forcibly removing him from the city along with his family. Even though he’s sinful. Even though he hesitates. Even though he offers his daughters up to the crowd. His story is analogous to the story of the Good Samaritan—he’s like the guy who would have died bleeding in the ditch if the Samaritan hadn’t come along to save him.

Which begs the question, Why? Why is Lot saved? 

And the answer is simple. Lot’s not saved because he’s such a good guy (obviously not). In fact, Lot’s not saved because of Lot at all; he’s saved because of Abraham. Skip down just a bit to v. 29:  

So it was that, when God destroyed the cities of the valley, God remembered Abraham and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow when he overthrew the cities in which Lot had lived.  

This is where chapters 17 and 18 (which we saw over the last two Sundays) were leading. In chapter 17, God reaffirms his covenant with Abraham—the covenant in which he promised to be Abraham’s God, and to cause his family to be a blessing. In chapter 18, we saw the intimate relationship God established with Abraham, speaking and reasoning and exchanging with him like a friend. 

Lot is Abraham’s nephew; he is a member of his family. So for Abraham’s sake, because of the covenant he had made with Abraham, God saved Lot. He took him and removed him from the city, and spared his life.

Lot isn’t saved because of anything he was or anything he did; he’s saved because God honored his covenant with Abraham. Lot isn’t saved because he’s righteous; he’s declared righteous because he was rescued—because of God’s faithfulness to Abraham.

This is what so many of us have a hard time understanding—and even if we understand it, we don’t totally believe it. Most of us are constantly battling the idea that God doesn’t think too highly of us—that his love for us is somehow vacillating between tolerating us and actively disliking us. So when we come to church and sing songs and try to obey his commands, it’s like we’re trying to convince him to like us. 

But God’s feeling toward us has nothing to do with anything we do or don’t do. His feeling toward us has everything to do with how he chooses to see us, and what he chooses to do for us. He doesn’t save us because we’re worth saving—we saw that before. In and of ourselves, we are sinners, through and through. He doesn’t save us because we’re worth saving; he saves us because he is faithful. He saves us because he is merciful. He saves us because his Son died for us, and God is faithful to apply his Son’s work to his Son’s people.

We spoke earlier about looking in a mirror when we read this story. When we see the sin of the people of Sodom, we should see ourselves—that is who we are, left to ourselves. In the same way, the most despicable character in this story—Lot—is the one with whom we should most identify as Christians. For those of us who have placed our faith in Christ, we should see Lot, and realize that this is who we are, if we are in Christ.

Paul says in his letter to Titus (Titus 3.3-7):  

3 For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. 4 But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, 5 he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, 6 whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, 7 so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. 

God has saved us—absolutely. But he didn’t save us because of anything righteous we have done. He saved us according to his own mercy, by his own initiative, through the work of his own Son and his own Spirit in us. When we see Lot being seized and removed from his house and brought outside by the angels and told to hurry, because disaster is coming, we should realize that this is who we are, in Christ. This is what God did for us. He took us, and he pulled us out of the way of his wrath, and poured it all out on his Son instead of on us. 

If we are in Christ, we have escaped judgment—and that, only because of the grace and goodness of God, because of his faithfulness to his covenant with his people. And if we are in Christ, we have been declared righteous—not because of ourselves, but because of him.

III. WHAT WE DESERVE (v. 23-29)

So we’ve seen who we are; we’ve seen who we are in Christ; obviously, if you know the story, you know that next we see what we deserve. V. 24:  

24 Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven. 25 And he overthrew those cities, and all the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. 

God’s judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah is total. It’s hard for us to imagine what this must have looked like—sulfur and fire raining down. Think a volcano erupting from the sky. Fire is the most frequent image of God’s judgment because it consumes everything—when God’s wrath against sin is spent, there is nothing left.

This is a hard thing for us to accept in our day and age, because it seems so extreme. We look at the destruction on Sodom and Gomorrah, and then we look at ourselves, and we can’t accept that this is what we deserve.

But it is. We’re probably not as bad as those people were. We’re almost definitely not as bad as we could be. But even so—left to ourselves, there is not a corner of our hearts and souls and lives that is not touched by sin and infected by it. 

And that’s a big problem for us. We saw this at the beginning—God is holy. There is not a hint of injustice or sin in any of his thoughts or actions. So what he did to Sodom, as extreme as it is, was right; that is what all sin deserves. And if we think otherwise, it’s because our thinking in regards to sin is horribly skewed. It’s because we’re like Lot, thinking that something is right (or at least normal) when it is in fact an offense of the highest order. That’s how bad sin is, in any form.

So looking at the sin of the people of Sodom, and God’s judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah, and the way he spared Lot, we basically have God holding this mirror directly in front of our faces and saying, “This is who you are, this is what you deserve, and this is what I’ve saved you from.” 

As Peter said in 2 Peter 2.6:  

[By] turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly...

Not just the worst of the worst—but all the ungodly.

Put like that, it may seem kind of brutal; but our reaction to that information is of utmost importance. 

In v. 26, as Lot and his family are fleeing, we see a brief sentence which is important.  

But Lot’s wife, behind him, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.

So what happens here is just like how it sounds. This is a supernatural, divine judgment on Lot’s wife for looking back toward the city, back toward what she had left behind—just as the angels had told them all not to do in v. 17.

This striking image—of Lot’s wife looking back and being judged for it—would have been full of meaning for the first people to read this book, the people of Israel. When Moses wrote this book, the people of Israel were in the wilderness, after God had freed them slavery in Egypt. And what do we see in the book of Exodus? That they were constantly complaining about how much better things were in Egypt—even if they were in slavery, even if they had prayed for years to be freed from that slavery. At least there, they had a roof over their head. At least there, they knew where their meals were coming from. At least there, they didn’t have to depend on God to take care of them. They were constantly looking back with longing at the place from which God had saved them.

The image of Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt would have been just as evocative. 

We think of salt as a way of making food taste better; but at the time that is not all it was used for. At the time, salt was primarily a preservative. This is why Jesus spoke of Christians being the salt of the earth—they receive the message of the gospel, and share it and put it into practice…and in so doing, they keep it moving forward. They preserve the gospel in their own hearts, and for those who will come after; we have received the gospel today because faithful men and women who came before us lived as the salt of the earth.

The picture here is the same, but reversed. 

How many of you have placed your faith in Christ, have been forgiven and adopted by God, have been set free from sin…and yet still find yourself looking back with longing at that sin you left behind? How many of you have been set free from sin, and yet find yourselves missing it? 

Now ask yourself this question. If that is you, and you look back with longing at your former sin…how hard is it for you to resist sin when you’re tempted now? How often do you find yourself falling back into that old sin (because deep down, you still love it)?

Here’s the truth of the Bible, friends: the things we naturally want are killing us. As Jesus warned in Luke 17.32-33:  

32 Remember Lot’s wife. 33 Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it. 

Whoever lets go of what his life used to be, will find that his true and full life was still waiting ahead, just in front of him. And whoever looks back with longing on his former life will inevitably lock himself back up in his former prison. 

The big question here is, how do we see our sin? Some of us tolerate our sin with a bit of annoyance (like a mosquito that keeps buzzing around our face). Some of us actively miss the sin we left behind, thinking, Oh, I wish I could just do this again one more time. When we should be grieving of our sin—past and present. Thinking of our sin should break us—it certainly broke Jesus. We have a hard time seeing our sin as this awful…so this story is here to help. The picture of a mob trying to rape two visitors… The picture of Lot prostituting his daughters to be raped… The picture of Lot’s wife looking back to the comfort of her life in this terrible place… THAT is the horror of our sin.

So when we see the sin in this story, when we see destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the thought each of us should be thinking is, This is what I deserve, and this is what he saved me from. Why would I EVER go back?

EPILOGUE: WHAT WE ARE OFFERED (v. 30-38)

In v. 30, we see a kind of epilogue to this awful story, and if we thought there couldn’t possibly be more twisted stuff here, we were wrong. But in this dark ending, there is a hint of the hope which we spoke of earlier, when we saw how God rescued Lot by his grace.

Lot and his daughters go to live in the hills, because now he’s afraid to live in the city (understandable). The daughters’ fiancés died in Sodom, so now they’re afraid they won’t be able to have children. So they decide to get their father drunk, sleep with him, and thereby get pregnant. Which is exactly what happens. [Insert cold shivers here.]

Now, we should feel compassion for these young women. Their life in Sodom had probably been very difficult. Their fiancés have just died. At the time, a woman’s worth was largely dependent on three things: her virginity, her beauty, and her ability to bear children (look at how Sarah dealt with her own sterility—and unfortunately, this is a lie that still persists today). So for these women, they didn’t just lose their homes in Sodom; they lost their idea of their own value, because their fiancés are dead, and now they’re living in the hills alone with their father. So it’s fear that drive them to this extreme.

The question is, why does Moses tell us about them? We really didn’t need to see more awful stuff to get the point, after everything that came before. So what is the point of this final section? We find the point in v. 36-38:  

36 Thus both the daughters of Lot became pregnant by their father. 37 The firstborn bore a son and called his name Moab. He is the father of the Moabites to this day. 38 The younger also bore a son and called his name Ben-ammi. He is the father of the Ammonites to this day. 

The children these two young women bore from their father became enemies of the Israelites: the Moabites and the Ammonites. That’s the first reason Moses tells us about them: the first readers of this book would recognize that their enemies had been birthed of this terrible union between father and daughters.

But strangely, that is also where we see the glimmer of hope—a glimmer that Moses couldn’t possibly have foreseen when he wrote it, but which the Holy Spirit inspired him to write, and which would have spoken volumes to the Israelites in exile, and to the first Christians.

Remember the story of Ruth? Ruth is a Moabite. And yet she ends up marrying an Israelite, and becoming King David’s grandmother—a maternal ancestor of Jesus Christ. That’s why Matthew includes Ruth in his genealogy of Jesus, at the beginning of his gospel; it’s not just to include a woman in the list. He’s pointing out that this woman was a Moabite, a direct descendant of the result of one of the most extreme acts of sin and judgment we see in the entire Bible.

At the end of this terrible story, here is what we see: a child is born out of this horror, and that child’s descendant will be Jesus Christ. The Savior who will take all of God’s people, and do for them exactly what God did for Lot—rip them out of the path of judgment, and bring them to safety.

Conclusion

I know a lot of you may have checked out by now, because you’ve heard this all before. This is what we talk about every week. But I heard someone say once that the most profound changes God works in us don’t usually come from the most profound truths, but the most persistent ones. That’s why we talk about sin, and wrath, and grace, every week. That’s why we sing every week. That’s why we have a time of confession every week. That’s why we take Communion every week. These corporate acts help anchor in our hearts the truths that we take for granted—which stories like this one in the Bible bring home to us.

So we’re going to take Communion now—we’re going to take the bread that represents Christ’s body, broken for us, and the cup that represents his blood, shed for us. And as we do, let us pray—for ourselves and for one another. Pray that through his judgment on Sodom, God would help us better understand what Christ endured to save us. And through his saving Lot, that he would help us understand what he saved us from. Pray that God would help us both grieve over our past sin and rejoice that he has saved us from it; rejoice that we are no longer slaves to it, nor bound to its punishment.

I’m not naïve. I know it’s possible that this story might bring up concerns about God in some of you. I know that for some of you, after reading a text like this one, approaching God will feel like sidling up close to a ticking time bomb. 

And that is not a wrong feeling to have. God’s holiness is a dangerous thing for unholy people. But it’s important to also look at the other side of that coin. As Jackie Hill Perry put it: “If God is holy, then He can’t sin. If God can’t sin, then He can’t sin against you. If God can’t sin against you, shouldn’t that make him the most trustworthy being there is?”

Because God is holy, there is only one place we can go to escape his judgment, and that is in him. When we run away from him, his holiness comes at us, and finds us, and judges us for our sin, because he is just, and that is what our sin deserves. But when we run to him, knowing that we have nowhere else to go, asking for his help and his mercy, his holiness envelops us; it covers us like a shield. Christ takes our sin on himself and is punished in our place; and Christ’s perfect life is put on us, and we are declared righteous, because he was righteous for us.

This is what we want to remember over the next few minutes.

If you are not a Christian today, the call of this text, and of this time of Communion, is even simpler: let God rescue you. You’ve got nowhere else to go; no other possibility of escaping God’s wrath against your sin. Your only hope—the only hope any of us have—is to trust in Christ, who suffered God’s wrath for his people; to ask forgiveness for your sin; to turn away from it; and to place your faith in Christ, that he might save you. Don’t look at who you are or what you think you deserve—Lot didn’t deserve any better. But he was saved anyway, and he was declared righteous, because he let God save him.

Don’t run away from him. Don’t turn a blind eye or a deaf ear to this call. Come to him, and let him save you.