Genesis 19:29, 17-26, 30-32, 36
And it came to pass, when God destroyed the cities of the plain, that God remembered Abraham, and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow, when he overthrew the cities in the which Lot dwelt…And it came to pass, when they had brought them forth abroad, that he said, Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed.
And Lot said unto them, Oh, not so, my Lord: Behold now, thy servant hath found grace in thy sight, and thou hast magnified thy mercy, which thou hast shewed unto me in saving my life; and I cannot escape to the mountain, lest some evil take me, and I die: Behold now, this city is near to flee unto, and it is a little one: Oh, let me escape thither, (is it not a little one?) and my soul shall live.
And he said unto him, See, I have accepted thee concerning this thing also, that I will not overthrow this city, for the which thou hast spoken. Haste thee, escape thither; for I cannot do any thing till thou be come thither. Therefore the name of the city was called Zoar.
The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar. Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.
But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt…
And Lot went up out of Zoar, and dwelt in the mountain, and his two daughters with him; for he feared to dwell in Zoar: and he dwelt in a cave, he and his two daughters. And the firstborn said unto the younger, Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth: Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father…Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father.
THOMAS COKE (1747-1814): Lot’s shameful and scandalous fall. Lord, What is man! Drunk and incestuous, and thus repeatedly too.
JOHN BUNYAN (1628-1688): I have sometimes wondered at Lot. His wife looked behind her, and died immediately; but he would not so much as look behind him to see her. We do not read that he did so much as once look where she was, or what was become of her.
A. W. PINK (1886-1952): Whoever would have concluded that Lot was a “righteous man” had not the New Testament told us so!
JOHN CALVIN (1509-1564): Lot, when commanded to take himself to the mountain, chose rather to dwell in Zoar.
WILLIAM GURNALL (1617-1679): And how fares he at Zoar?
THOMAS COKE: He is scarcely arrived there, before he thinks himself not in sufficient safety.
JOHN CALVIN: After this habitation was granted to him, according to his own wish, he soon repents and is sorry for he trembles at the thought that destruction is every moment hastening on a place so near to Sodom, in which perhaps the same impiety and wickedness was reigning.
CHARLES SIMEON (1759-1836): From this time we hear nothing of him except his drunkenness and incest; and, if Peter had not given us reason to believe that he became truly penitent, 2 Peter 2:6-8, we should have had ground to apprehend that he was, after all, an outcast from heaven.
MATTHEW HENRY (1662-1714): One would wonder how the fire of lust could possibly kindle upon those who had so lately been the eye-witnesses of Sodom’s flames.
JOHN CALVIN: It is no new thing for the sins of the fathers to be cast into the bosom of the children.
JOHN TRAPP (1601-1699): Lot offended against both their chastities in offering them up to the Sodomites, Genesis 19:8: and they both now conspire against his chastity.
WILLIAM GURNALL: Do not his own daughters bring a spark of Sodom’s fire into his own bed, whereby he is inflamed with lust?
JOHN CALVIN: It was only through the wonderful kindness of God, that Lot did not receive either immediate, or very severe punishment [for wanting to go to Zoar]. For the Lord, by pardoning him at that time, caused him finally to become judge of his own sin. For he was neither expelled from Zoar by force nor by the hand of man; but a blind anxiety of mind drove him and hurried him into a cavern, because he had followed the lust of his flesh rather than the command of God. And thus in chastising the faithful, God mitigates their punishments so as to render it their best medicine. For if he were to deal strictly with their folly they would fall down in utter confusion. He therefore gives them space for repentance that they may willingly acknowledge their fault.
ROBERT HAWKER (1753-1827): Lot removes to the mountain.
JOHN TRAPP: So he should have done at first; and so he had obeyed God, saved his wife, and prevented that sin of incest with his daughters…Say not of this, as Lot did of Zoar, Is it not a little one? The smallness of a sin taketh not away the depravity of it: and a less maketh way for a greater, as wedges do in wood cleaving.
CHARLES BRIDGES (1794-1869): Little did Lot consider that his haste to be rich was the highroad to poverty. But step by step he “entered into temptation.” Every worldly prospect was blasted; and he ends his days, a poor, forlorn, degraded tenant of the desolate cave of Zoar.
D. L. MOODY (1837-1899): Now, just take an inventory of what that man lost. He lost twenty years of time. We do not find that he did any good down there at all; he did not get one inhabitant out of the doomed city…He lost all his property; everything he gained in Sodom—he lost it all; he lost all his family, but his two daughters, and they were so stained by the sins of Sodom that they soon fell into an awful sin; and the last thing we see of Lot is on the mountain side, where he has fallen into that sin and become the father of the Moabites and the Ammonites that ever afterwards were the enemies of God and His people. What a dark picture it is, the end of a poor backslider; the end of a man that went to Sodom and lived for Sodom.
ALEXANDER MacLAREN (1826-1910): Nor is this all; but at the last, when the fiery rain bursts on the doomed city, Lot has to leave all the wealth for which he has sacrificed conscience and peace, and escapes with bare life; he suffers loss even if he himself is ‘saved as dragged through the fire.’
D. L. MOODY: Lot was one of those characters who are easily influenced―and I think, perhaps, that is just the key to his character…So long as he stayed with Abraham he got on very well. His mistake was in leaving him. Some men all through life have to be bolstered up by others. When they are at home, home has an influence over them; or while they are among their relatives or friends they stand well, but when they are away, and trial and temptation come, and the world comes in like a flood upon them, they are carried away.
C. H. SPURGEON (1834-1892): Abraham was a man of very different metal.
A. W. PINK: In almost every respect Lot compares unfavourably with Abraham. Abraham walked by faith, Lot by sight. Abraham was generous and magnanimous; Lot greedy and worldly. Abraham looked for a city whose builder and maker was God; Lot made his home in a city that was built by man and destroyed by God. Abraham was the father of all who believe; Lot was father of those whose name is a perpetual infamy. Abraham was made “heir of the world,” Romans 4:3; while the curtain falls upon Lot with all his possessions destroyed in Sodom, and himself dwelling in a cave…Lot is a concrete warning, a danger signal, for all Christians who feel a tendency to be carried away by the things of the world.
A. W. TOZER (1897-1963): God will wean us from the earth some way―the easy way if possible, the hard way if necessary.
