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.