The Redemption of Lot

As most of us who are acquainted with Genesis know, the story of Lot is a bad one. Given the choice of where to live, he moves to the fertile plains around Sodom, a city now known most for the sin that bears its name. When Lot re-enters the narrative, he has been captured in a raid on Sodom. Abraham takes a retinue of servants and rescues him, meeting Melchizedek along the way.

The story continues by revealing that God will destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, and we find that Lot has moved from the plains directly into the city. Rather than fleeing that wicked city, he has entered it—and we may suppose it has entered him.

The most good we can say about Lot from the narrative following is that he admonished the people of the city not to do such wickedness as to assault the visitors under his protection. This is tempered somewhat by the offer to give them his daughters instead, even allowing for the cultural and social gaps between then and now.


When God destroys the city, he spares Lot, his wife, and his two daughters. His wife, as we know, turns into a pillar of salt. He moves into a cave with his daughters who bear children incestuously with him. These two children, Moab and Ben-Ammi, are the progenitors of two races that would hassle Israel for centuries to come (cf Numbers 22, 25.1; Joshua 24.9; Judges 3.12ff, 10.6, et c.).

God's decision to spare Lot leads in the near-term to ugly consequences: incestuous relationships that cause God's people to stumble.


But we find a redemptive sub-plot here:

In the days when the judges ruled there was a famine in the land, and a man of Bethlehem in Judah went to sojourn in the country of Moab, he and his wife and his two sons (Ruth 1.1).

It is in the land of Moab where we find Ruth. While popularized, I suppose, as a love story, the book of Ruth is a good place to understand the concept of redemption.


Those acquainted with the history of the kingdom of Israel will know that Ruth is David's great-grandmother (Ruth married Boaz and bore Obed, who bore Jesse, who bore David). It is the line of David that produced Jesus Christ. (It is worth mentioning that this is not the only sort of redemptive plot line in the Jesus' genealogy. Judah had Perez by his daughter-in-law, and David killed Uriah to have a child with Bathsheba.)

So there is in fact a thread of redemption in the story of Lot. While he is personally not the sort of person we would like to be, he does show that God works through some of the vilest people and actions to accomplish his purposes.

This goes hand in hand with the redemption story that's already obvious in the book of Ruth. It's one of the little trains of thought to pick up as we read.

Seedlings

So little time is available to me these days. There are lots of things I wish I could write about, and there's just not much time to develop them. It's late already—I need to be up in a little less than eight hours—and all I can do right now is chart a list of topics kicking around in my head:

• Kenotic Arianism (the name's not mine, though I dearly wish I were smart enough to coin it)


• Pictures of Christ in Genesis


• Chrysostom on 2d Corinthians 5.21


• The redemption of Lot in Ruth (among other things)

Someone else is supposed to be writing on the Arianism bit, since I'm undereducated for that sort of writing, but the others are more within my grasp.


On a personal note, I confess that the past months have made me sorry to write things down in journals; when I go back to read them, as I have been doing (pawing through memories during my drawn-out moving process), I inevitably learn worse things about myself than I wished to record. My memory is a bad one, and lately I have come to realize that this is another case of God's grace to me. He has granted me to hold on to good things in my memory and forget many of the bad ones, including some about myself.

What has been interesting, though, is to realize how different the spiritual journey of the past decade has been than I expected (if I expected anything at all). My personal writings reveal a great deal of stunning spiritual ignorance, and I am sure that in the coming years I will find the same true of these writings.

But in all things, I can say that God has been remarkably gracious and patient. I have learned a great deal through the valleys of the last 10 years—the mountains were fewer and farther between than you might guess. But it has been a decade of learning; I am much different spiritually today than I was then.