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.