Have you ever been to a God-forsaken place? Do you remember a time when you sensed the palpable presence of evil? Once when our sons were young, Melanie and I traveled abroad with a group from our church. We stopped in a city that I had visited as a boy. In fact, Baptists had really made their start in that very city. As we went outside to walk around town, both Melanie and I felt a real and present spiritual danger there. We returned quickly to our rooms.
Shouldn’t Lot and his family have felt the presence of evil and left Sodom and Gomorrah? When the angels visited Abraham and Sarah, they said the evil of those cities had risen to God’s attention. They came to evaluate and destroy the sinful cities. Abraham knew Lot and his family lived there so he negotiated with God. “What if you find fifty righteous people? Forty-five? Forty? Thirty? Twenty? Ten?” If there had been ten righteous people in Sodom and Gomorrah, God would not have destroyed them.
How wicked can a city really be? Lot knew. He snatched the messengers off the street to protect them. But the people of Sodom wanted to harm them. Lot pleaded but the neighbors pressed on his door. The angels struck the wicked men blind and led Lot and his family out, telling them not to look back.
Remember the old analogy of the frog and the kettle of hot water? If a frog were put in hot water, it would jump out to its safety. But if the temperature were changed incrementally, the frog would never feel the heat until it was cooked.
Lot and his family had become so familiar with sin that they had no desire to leave. There were not ten righteous people in the cities. In fact, there were not five. Tim Keller says that Abraham should have continued to bargain . . . “What if there were one righteous person?” For the sake of one righteous person who died for us, on the cross, God spared all who will believe. “God made him who had no sin to become sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
