We have already said that Lot may not have been a worse man than Abraham. At least, we can't make any judgment about that from the Scriptures, but we certainly don't see that Lot did anything wrong. He was an excellent farmer, a good citizen, and the father of a family that he managed to provide for and protect well until that fateful evening. How is it that there was such a difference between his end and Abraham's end, how is it that the goodness of good people does not in itself ensure that they turn out well before God?

We have said many times that Lot did not actively seek God and subordinate his judgments and ways to anything higher than his own benefits. If we have two similar people at the beginning of the journey, then by them both then operating in different internal settings, (a "mode" if you will), their mindsets and actions gradually change. As Emperor Marcus Aurelius once rightly said, "our life is the result of our thinking", and this is where things start to break. Lot stayed with his family in the mindset of consumerism, Abraham, after all, was getting into the mindset of a worshiper of God, and that (interesting to note) never ended in his life. There wasn't some set benchmark that he was to reach, to have enough and be done with seeking God - we will yet witness him moving higher and higher on this journey. He actually reached the highest points of his pilgrimage at the age of a hundred years or even later!

Lot, on the other hand, was going no higher; rather, he was spinning in a vicious circle. From an unchanging, carnal mindset, this led to an incomprehension of God; as a result, he was blind to the situation and the times, so that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and had no comprehension of it. Consequently, he did come to a reluctant obedience to come out, but no longer to where he was instructed to go. Bargaining with God ensued, going to Zoar, until perhaps in a cave on a mountain he finally realized how wrong he had actually been about everything in his life before God. Perhaps then he glimpsed what the fruit of his life really was. However, can we expect that he got an insight, and then lived differently - that he changed his internal "mode"?

If only he had, but we know nothing of this; the Scriptures do not reveal it to us. For the question whose answer we would need to know is not whether he saw it, but whether he personally acknowledged it and deeply regretted it, so that it led him to an inner transformation. It seems to me, however, that if this had happened, the Scriptures would not have failed to give us at least a brief mention of such a happy ending. This, however, is sadly lacking here.

Then Lot went up out of Zoar and dwelt in the mountains, and his two daughters were with him; for he was afraid to dwell in Zoar. And he and his two daughters dwelt in a cave. (Gen 19,30)

Do you remember how Lot convinced God that he wanted to go to Zoar, not to the mountain where God was sending him? He thought he knew better, or at least that even though God was giving him a very specific instruction, it didn't really matter if he obeyed it, he thought he had a choice. Lot hadn't learned in his entire life to obey God and put His will above his own. As long as he didn't get into a crisis, he could go through life paying no price for this ignorance of the higher ways. It might even have seemed to him that Abraham, on the contrary, was paying too great a price for it by avoiding the cities and remaining on the uncomfortable mountains. But in the end it was just the opposite: it was Lot who paid with all he had.

So Lot arrived in Zoar, but very quickly left from there - but where to? To the very place where God had originally sent him, to the mountain. Why did he leave the city? We don't have an answer to that, except that the Scriptures tell us that "he was afraid to settle there." We can only surmise that it was most likely for one of the following two reasons.

Lot, on arriving at Zoar, may have found that the city was in exactly the same condition as Sodom, whose final destruction he had experienced the night before. For God told him: "I have favored you concerning this thing... I will not overthrow this city" (19:21), which means that Zoar was on the "black list" with God, and the moral conditions there must have been very similar to those in Sodom. Lot may have realized upon arriving that the same thing was likely to happen here sooner or later, and he feared the destruction of the city.

Or he may simply have noticed shortly after his arrival the clear indications that he could very quickly become a target for violence similar to what God's messengers had experienced in Sodom and fled quickly.

In any case, Lot left Sodom reluctantly; he was reluctant to admit that God was right about the change of destination and that it was a waste of time to argue about it. And in the end, he was just as reluctant to get to where God had wanted to take him from the beginning. Something like this can hardly be called a path of pursuit of God, only a virtue out of necessity. And if only at least some virtue...

So when God destroyed the cities of the plain, he remembered Abraham, and he brought Lot out of the catastrophe that overthrew the cities where Lot had lived. (Gen 19,29)

One is almost breathless: God remembered... not Lot, whose life was at stake, but Abraham! Lot was a righteous man, and did not have just some showy form of piety. Scripture says he was "afflicted" by the reality of Sodom (2 Pet. 2:7). Not only did he have the façade of a better man, but we have already seen that while he believed in God, we do not see in him a living relationship with Him, a familiarity, or a conscious willingness to obey. Lot resembles a believer who is morally higher than those around him, he does not commit iniquity, people see his righteous exterior; but unlike with Abraham, no longer the substance from which it flows.

But how shocking is the discovery that Lot would not have been saved because of this righteousness! Until a man knows God (not in moral doctrines and commandments, but as a person), such a world view must be repugnant to him, because it is contrary to simple human righteousness. Will not the better among us be saved? And am I not one of them? (He usually says it differently: I am certainly not among the worst. They may belong in the burning hell, but me? Who else could possibly go to heaven, if not me?)

But to be saved it is not enough to be a good person outwardly, but to enter into a specific relationship with God in which one experiences forgiveness and transformation. A friend of mine once pondered the question, who will actually be in heaven one day? A simple answer came to him: only those who want to be there can be sure. And therein lies the fundamental difference between Abraham and Lot. Not in the external level of morality they held. Perhaps they were very similar in this, and perhaps Lot was even outwardly better, as we have already mentioned, because he had not yet committed so many blunders. But Abraham, in spite of his failures, wanted to be where his God led him, on the heights where he found Him, and when he lost Him, sought Him again. Lot made no choice toward God in his life because he had no living relationship with Him, no desire for Him. He stayed where it suited his disposition - in a place of comfort and ostentatious luxury, far from the God he did not miss, for whom he did not thirst. If he consoled himself that he was morally superior to his surroundings, and God must respect that, it appeared that in the moment of judgment this alone would not save him - nor any other man.

And Abraham went early in the morning to the place where he had stood before the Lord. Then he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain; and he saw, and behold, the smoke of the land which went up like the smoke of a furnace. 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 which Lot had dwelt. (Gen 19,27-29)

Abraham returned to the place of his remarkable prayer, where he had last spoken face to face with God. We know that the patriarchs were in the habit of erecting an altar at some of the places of their encounters with God, but we cannot simply conclude that this is always the way to do it because "it is in the Bible." For even Old Testament figures did not always have the correct theology - after all, their lives, if they were positive examples at all, show us the gradual transformation of idolaters in mind or soul (or both) into worshippers of the living God. They commemorated those places for various reasons - sometimes as a reminder of that precious moment, sometimes out of a (maybe rather superstitious) belief that God dwelt in a special way in certain places on earth (while the whole earth belongs to Him Ps. 24:1), and often simply because it was their confession against the deities of the surrounding tribes. The people always erected sacred signs to their idols, especially on the tops of mountains. "Our God is here too," the patriarchs meant to say - and unlike yours, He is indeed alive.

Abraham came back, and it is not wrong for us too to return to the moments when God last visited us. It's worth reflecting on whether it ultimately had the meaning for us that God intended. Abraham went to see what was going on in Sodom because he foresaw its fall. And indeed - he saw its destruction in the far plains. It was like seeing rocket missiles falling on a city where we would have relatives today - his heart suddenly clenched at the thought of Lot and his family. At that moment, he didn't know if he was dying there at the moment. Was he looking to God for an answer? Had he been assured of his salvation? Although the text doesn't say so, we can rightly assume that he did. For we know that God revealed His mind to him as to His friend and told him of His intention to destroy Sodom. If there was anything Abraham needed to know now, it was what would happen to Lot. That was the most important thing concerning Sodom to him, and very likely he was looking to God for reassurance in his spirit.

But "when God destroyed the cities of the plain, He remembered Abraham, and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow..." This phrase is a unique evidence that God did indeed bring out Lot mainly for Abraham's sake, as we have mentioned several times. - Only eternity will tell how many of those who would not have gone out on their own were saved because of the intercession of God's friends.

See now, this city is near enough to flee to, and it is a little one; please let me escape there (is it not a little one?) and my soul shall live.” And he said to him, “See, I have favored you concerning this thing also, in that I will not overthrow this city for which you have spoken. Hurry, escape there. For I cannot do anything until you arrive there.” (Gen 19,20-22)

"I can't do anything..." What is meant by "can't"? Isn't he God, so he can do whatever? Of course he can, but he won't, because he has placed the principle of the salvation of his people above the principle of the judgment of the world. See 1 Peter 3:20 - until Noah stepped aboard the ark, the world was not flooded. Until Lot came out of Sodom, it would not be destroyed.

But God can't either because a friend stands in the way. Abraham pleaded for the salvation of Sodom up to the number of ten righteous. They were not found, and therefore Sodom will not be saved, but God will not let his nephew perish, whom Abraham no doubt had in mind. God limits his will because he has respect for the will of his friend. So the word "I cannot" here more accurately means "I do not want". God's friends influence events on this earth, even though they are mostly unknown to the world. After all, who then knew of Abraham's prayer on the high place above Sodom? No one who was concerned - none of the Sodomites, but not even Lot himself. And it is possible that he may even never have known about it.

Certain things will be different in the world if God's friends cry out to God. But that order cannot be skipped. First one must become a friend; then he comes and asks. It doesn't work the other way around, simply because a friend pleads like no one else - out of familiarity, out of a closeness that a stranger doesn't have.

Lot wandered out of Sodom at the end of the night, from "morning to dawn." He was ascending to a city that was, in his words, "near." The climb was not easy, but it certainly seemed easier to him than going up the mountain where God had sent him. But God rarely sends us on a journey about which we exclaim: sure, this is easy, why not give it a go? We often think: and why only not somewhere closer? Isn't there a more comfortable way? And why not somewhere else that's not so high?

A group of four people were leaving the city, but none of them with joy in their hearts. As its destruction began, Lot's wife, who (as characteristically described) "walked behind", looked back at Sodom. That was where her heart remained, her life belonged there, and she wanted no other. The pillar of salt into which she was transformed remains a memento that without consciously stepping out, one does not escape the fate of this world.