Scripture Daily

Context No. 1422 of 4322 · Genesis

Context · Reflection

Genesis 19:6-11: in context

6Lot went out to them through the door, and shut the door after himself. 7He said, “Please, my brothers, don’t act so wickedly. 8See now, I have two virgin daughters. Please let me bring them out to you, and you may do to them what seems good to you. Only don’t do anything to these men, because they have come under the shadow of my roof.” 9They said, “Stand back!” Then they said, “This one fellow came in to live as a foreigner, and he appoints himself a judge. Now we will deal worse with you than with them!” They pressed hard on the man Lot, and came near to break the door. 10But the men reached out their hand, and brought Lot into the house to them, and shut the door. 11They struck the men who were at the door of the house with blindness, both small and great, so that they wearied themselves to find the door.

The men of Sodom have surrounded Lot's house, demanding that he hand over his two guests, the angels who came to warn him, so that they can abuse them. Lot goes out, shuts the door behind him, and pleads with the mob not to act so wickedly. And then he makes a horrifying offer: he has two virgin daughters; let him bring them out instead, to do with as they please, only leave the men alone, because they have come under the shelter of his roof. The mob turns on Lot, threatening him, and presses to break down the door, until the angels pull him inside and strike the attackers with blindness.

There is no defending Lot's offer, and we should not try; that a father would offer his own daughters to a rapacious mob is monstrous, and the passage does not present it as anything else. But it is worth asking how a man the New Testament elsewhere calls righteous could sink to such a thing, and the answer lies in where Lot had chosen to live. He had settled in Sodom, made his home in a city given over to evil, raised his family in it, immersed himself in a place whose corruption ran deep; and living there had eroded his own moral sense until, in a crisis, he could make an offer as twisted as the evil around him. The environment we choose to live in works on us. Lot did not become a Sodomite in a day; the long immersion in a corrupt place had quietly deformed his conscience, so that his instincts in a crisis were themselves corrupted. There is a sober warning in that about the effect of the places and cultures we settle into. We are shaped, more than we like to think, by what surrounds us, by the moral atmosphere we breathe day after day; and the danger of making our home in what is corrupt is not only the evil we might openly embrace but the slow, unnoticed deforming of our own conscience until we can do things we would once have found unthinkable. And still, into even Lot's compromised situation, mercy reached; the angels pulled him back from the door he had gone out to bargain at, and struck his attackers blind. God's mercy rescued a man whose conscience the city had half destroyed, but the warning stands about where we choose to live.

Am I aware of how the places and moral atmosphere I choose to live in are quietly shaping my conscience, and do I heed the warning of Lot, whose long immersion in a corrupt city deformed him until he could do the unthinkable?

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