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.