Lot is sitting in the gate of Sodom when the two angels arrive, and he does what Abraham did earlier the same day. He rises, bows with his face to the earth, and presses them to turn aside to his house. Abraham welcomed three strangers into a quiet field. Lot has to get two of them safely off a city street, and he does not manage it for long. Before bedtime the whole city surrounds the house, and the narrator says plainly that no one is missing from the crowd. Cornered, Lot makes a shameful offer of his own daughters, and Genesis simply records what a compromised man does under pressure.
The rescue comes before his words run out. 10"the men reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them." Hands do what his argument could not. The mob is struck blind and 11"wore themselves out groping for the door." Men who came to look are left unable to see anything.
Warned that the city will fall, Lot goes to his sons-in-law with the plainest command he can give, and 14"he seemed to his sons-in-law to be jesting." A warning meant to save a family sounds like a joke to the people who need it most. Lot himself stays put while angels urge him out. 16"he lingered. So the men seized him and his wife and his two daughters by the hand, the LORD being merciful to him." Mercy here looks like being dragged by the wrist.
Judgment then falls in full and in detail. The fire takes the cities, the valley, the people, and even what grew on the ground. Then one more line, almost clinical. 26"Lot's wife, behind him, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt." A single glance gave away where her heart was still living while her feet walked the other way. Jesus reaches for exactly this when he speaks of his return, and his whole warning is three words: "Remember Lot's wife" (Luke 17:32).
Then the chapter turns to a different figure. 27"Abraham went early in the morning to the place where he had stood before the LORD," the spot of yesterday's bargaining, and watches the smoke go up like a furnace. What the narrator tells us next is the point of the whole story. 29"God remembered Abraham and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow." Of the flood Genesis says God remembered Noah (Genesis 8:1), the righteous man kept alive. Here God remembers Abraham, and Lot is saved on the strength of a conversation held the day before, when Abraham asked God to spare the city for ten righteous people. Ten were never found. One relative was pulled out anyway, for the sake of the man who had asked.
That is the shape grace keeps taking in this book. Judgment falls exactly as promised on people who did what they wanted, and in the middle of it someone who did nothing to earn rescue is carried out because another man's standing covered him. Peter looks back on this chapter and says the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials (2 Peter 2:9). No one in Sodom argued their way out of the fire, and Lot did not reason his way out either. Somebody remembered, and somebody was sent out because of it.
Prayer
Father, we have stood closer to Sodom's fire than we like to admit, rescued by mercy we did not earn. Forgive us for lingering when we already know what you have told us to leave. Thank you that we are not asked to survive judgment on our own account, and that we are remembered for the sake of the one who stands in the gap for us. In Jesus' name, amen.