When the morning dawned, the angels urged Lot to hurry, saying, “Arise, take your wife and your two daughters who are here, lest you be consumed in the punishment of the city.” And while he lingered, the men took hold of his hand, his wife’s hand, and the hands of his two daughters, the Lord being merciful to him, and they brought him out and set him outside the city. (Gen 19,15-16)

The messengers told Lot in no uncertain terms that they were coming from the Lord and that the city would be utterly destroyed. Lot knew full well that he was not dealing with strange men preaching nonsense. He knew this for a fact, and not just because of what they said themselves. (In that case they could still have been just a kind of hustlers). But that they weren't must have been clear to him, at least from the moment he witnessed them blinding the crowd that had converged on his house. From that moment on, he could be one hundred percent certain that he was in the center of God's action, that these men had been sent to him by God to save him and his loved ones. It's a strange feeling when a man realizes that his story becomes the story of God Himself, that God has His eyes on him right now, perhaps hitherto nameless and neglected.

Lot had that feeling, and yet - he was unable to walk away. "But he hesitated." How is this possible? Did he doubt whether what the messengers announced would happen? Surely he was utterly bewildered in such a situation. But this confusion came primarily from the fact that he was not inwardly in tune with God. We have already shown that he had no idea how God thought of him and Sodom, how He viewed things. He did not know because he did not have a living inner contact with God, and so he took what the messengers told him as external information. The kind of information that we ponder whether it is correct or not, that we consider. We may accept it, we may reject it, because it is alien in content to what we have within us. It is similar to the gospel reaching a person who does not know God. At the beginning it is a message from outside, it is unfamiliar to him, it surprises him, perhaps it humbles him. He has not yet heard it, he has not yet thought about it in this way, it does not yet correspond to the way he himself thinks inwardly. This is the normal state of every fallen being. But it's not normal if it remains so even years later.

Someone said that Lot is the only one in the whole Bible who was saved against his will. Here again, it should be added that this insistence of God towards him was only and only due to Abraham's intercessory prayer. The messengers used "mild coercion" when they took him by the hand and led him out. But if we were talking about salvation against one's will, it would apply more to his wife and daughters; with him, it was more a chronic inability to make a decision different from those around him, because after all, he trusted the messengers (otherwise he wouldn't have gone to warn his sons-in-law). God always and without exception honors the will of man. We can decide whether and to what extent we will submit to Him, and if we want to leave, He does not hinder us from doing so (Jn 6:67). In fact, God usually respects our will far more than we respect it in others or even in ourselves.

If we can get something from this story, it is how important it is that God's mindset resonates within us. Then it will not be necessary to use any violence toward us regarding accepting God's way. For as we will see in the later fates of Lot's family, those who listen to God more or less as a kind of outside information but do not know His heart wander in confusion and the outcome is destruction.