Flee Quickly To Salvation!

Those of you who have touched one of the stove’s burners when it was on probably have a better chance than the rest of us to never touch one again. The pain was so intense that your mind still pays even closer attention than the average person would to those burners, making sure that you will never have to experience that again. This is normal behavior.

What would not be normal behavior is to pay less attention to those burners, or even to seek that pain out again. Yet, in some ways this is similar to how we behave with sin. You have dealt with sin’s burn many times. You have experienced the discipline that comes from it. Its ramifications. Its greatest affects. You know full well just how painful it is. Yet, you keep on walking over to the stove and hovering your hand over the burner. Don’t you hate that about yourself? Why is it that we do that? That we behave so irrationally?

Of all the people on the earth who should’ve wanted to run away from Sodom, it should’ve been Lot and his family. They had seen its sin. They had feared its evil mere hours beforehand. They had almost been forced to experience great harm because of its sinful people. Yet, when commanded by God’s own messengers to flee, what did he do? He hesitated.

What had happened is that God had laid out his plan to Abraham concerning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. There, Abraham prayed to God, asking him to spare that place for the sake of the righteous people. He asked first of all to spare them for the sake of 50 righteous ones, then 40, then 30, then 20, and finally 10. Yet, not even 10 could be found.

God, though, did not want to wipe away Lot’s family in his destruction, for the sake of Abraham. So, God sent two of his angels who apparently came in the appearance of men. As they made their way to Lot, the men of the city took notice of them. Then, as they were speaking with Lot in his home, those same men, a great deal of them, came in search of the angels to harm them. To prevent such things from happening, Lot, in one of the most crass and evil suggestions in Scripture, offered up his daughters in their place. The men, though, objected and promised to do even greater harm to Lot himself because he was standing in their way. Thankfully the angels protected Lot and his family by striking those evil men with blindness and prevented them from entering the house. Finally, God even gave Lot enough time to go out and warn his daughter’s fiancés about the upcoming destruction of the city, although they did not believe him.

After what had happened, Lot should have had his bags packed and ready to go. Yet, he was not. “With the coming of dawn, the angels urged Lot, saying, ‘Hurry! Take your wife and your two daughters who are here, or you will be swept away when the city is punished.’”

Why is it that Lot was so hesitant? Perhaps a big reason was because this was his home. Think of the people who know that a hurricane is approaching yet hunker down because their home is special to them, or because they may feel safe there. Maybe that was happening to him, too. But, even if this was the case, Lot is without excuse. God had commanded him to do something, and he did not listen properly.

We are quite similar to Lot in this regard. It is often not enough for us to simply accept God’s commands and to obey. Rather, we would want to know his reasons for them. Luther says about this verse that you are at times filled with a sort of foolish anxiety when commanded by the Lord. That right there nails down why it is that we become hesitant to obey, even when God offers us escape from sin and its pain. We are both fools, and anxious fools at that, failing to trust him at his Word.

Even in our foolishness, though, God remains merciful. Even in the midst of sin, God continues to love you. “When he hesitated, the men grasped his hand and the hands of his wife and of his two daughters and led them safely out of the city, for the Lord was merciful to them. 17 As soon as they had brought them out, one of them said, ‘Flee for your lives! Don’t look back, and don’t stop anywhere in the plain! Flee to the mountains or you will be swept away!’” Look at the mercy offered by God. He drags them. Lot was conflicted here, being drawn both to God and to sin, as all believers on this earth are. God could’ve decided to leave Lot in the city and rain down his destruction at that moment, but instead took compassion on his weakness and led him and his family away.