Scripture Daily

Context No. 1101 of 4322 · Genesis

Context · Reflection

Genesis 19:29-38: in context

29When God destroyed the cities of the plain, God remembered Abraham, and sent Lot out of the middle of the overthrow, when he overthrew the cities in which Lot lived. 30Lot went up out of Zoar, and lived in the mountain, and his two daughters with him; for he was afraid to live in Zoar. He lived in a cave with his two daughters. 31The firstborn said to the younger, “Our father is old, and there is not a man on the earth to come in to us in the way of all the earth. 32Come, let’s make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve our father’s family line.” 33They made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father. He didn’t know when she lay down, nor when she arose. 34It came to pass on the next day, that the firstborn said to the younger, “Behold, I lay last night with my father. Let’s make him drink wine again tonight. You go in, and lie with him, that we may preserve our father’s family line.” 35They made their father drink wine that night also. The younger went and lay with him. He didn’t know when she lay down, nor when she got up. 36Thus both of Lot’s daughters were with child by their father. 37The firstborn bore a son, and named him Moab. He is the father of the Moabites to this day. 38The younger also bore a son, and called his name Ben Ammi. He is the father of the children of Ammon to this day.

This is a sordid, sad aftermath to the destruction of Sodom. The passage opens with a note of grace, that when God destroyed the cities, he remembered Abraham and sent Lot out of the overthrow. But Lot, terrified, hides in a mountain cave with his two daughters. The daughters, believing there is no man left to give them children, get their father drunk on successive nights and lie with him, each conceiving a son. The firstborn's son becomes the father of the Moabites, the younger's the father of the Ammonites, two nations that will trouble Israel for centuries.

This is the bible telling an ugly truth without flinching, and there is a lot of ruin packed into it. Lot, who chose to live near Sodom for its prosperity, ends up a broken man in a cave, and his daughters, shaped by the moral wreckage of the city they came from, do something shocking to preserve a family line. It is the bitter fruit of a long compromise: Lot pitched his tent toward Sodom, moved into it, lost his wife looking back at it, and now his daughters carry its distortions into his own family. But notice how the passage opens, God remembered Abraham. Even this sad chapter is bracketed by grace; Lot is alive at all only because God remembered his uncle's prayers. And there is a stranger grace still. Ruth the Moabite, descended from this very night, will become the great-grandmother of David and an ancestor of Christ. God does not erase the sordid origin; he redeems a line out of it. Scripture neither hides the wreckage nor lets it have the last word.

Do I see where compromise with a corrupt world, like Lot's drift toward Sodom, bears bitter fruit in my own household, and can I still trust the God who remembers and redeems even sordid histories?

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