I’ve been pondering on something I recently read in II Peter 2 for a couple of days, and I keep coming back to the way Peter speaks of Lot.
Knowing the story of his life, some of his actions are hard to reconcile with the word righteous.
Yet Peter calls him “just Lot,” and then explains,
“For that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds…” (2 Peter 2:8).
God chose to preserve that description of a man whose family suffered terribly in the place he had chosen to live.
Webster’s 1828 dictionary defines the following:
VEX'ED, participle passive Teased; provoked; irritated; troubled; agitated; disquieted; afflicted.
Those words help me understand something about Lot’s life in Sodom.
What he saw and heard troubled him, and Peter says it happened from day to day.
He lived with the knowledge that the people around him were doing wickedly.
I wonder how many evenings he went home grieved by something he had witnessed, while his children were growing up in the same city and learning to live among the same people.
We know how far things had gone by the night the angels came to his house.
The men of Sodom surrounded it and demanded that Lot bring his guests outside so they could sexually assault them.
Lot went out to plead with them and offered his two virgin daughters in their place.
I have trouble even reading that offer without thinking about those girls inside the house.
Their father was supposed to protect them.
Whatever we understand about Lot being righteous before God, we have to reckon with the harm in what he was willing to do.
Peter’s words give us no reason to approve that offer, and Genesis leaves it there for us to read in all its ugliness.
By morning, the family was being hurried out of Sodom ahead of its destruction.
Lot had warned his sons-in-law, but “he seemed as one that mocked unto his sons in law” (Genesis 19:14).
Even Lot lingered until the men took him by the hand, “the LORD being merciful unto him” (Genesis 19:16).
His wife looked back and became a pillar of salt.
The angels brought Lot and his two daughters out, while so much of the life he had built was left behind.
Then came the cave.
His daughters made him drunk and “lay” with him, and the passage says that he did not perceive when either daughter lay down or arose.
The children born from that incest became the fathers of Moab and Ammon, whose descendants would bring trouble to Israel in the years ahead.
I think about those daughters surviving the destruction of Sodom and then making that decision, and I find the whole account heartbreaking.
The family that escaped had already suffered damage that leaving the city would not immediately repair.
Lot had chosen that country when he and Abram separated.
Genesis 13 tells us that he saw the well-watered plain of Jordan, chose it for himself, and pitched his tent toward Sodom.
The same chapter tells us that the men of Sodom were “wicked and sinners before the LORD exceedingly.”
By Genesis 19, Lot was sitting in the gate of the city.
Whatever happened in the years between those passages, his family had become settled there.
He was troubled by its wickedness, and he continued to raise his children within its reach.
He made no effort to remove his family from this vile environment.
That is where this account begins to trouble me about our own homes.
We can recognize the sexual sin, violence, and contempt for God around us and speak against it with conviction, while giving very little thought to how deeply our families have become attached to the culture producing it.
Familiarity has a way of making things easier to live with.
Something that once disturbed us can become part of an ordinary evening, especially when taking it away would upset the household or require an uncomfortable conversation we have already put off several times.
I wonder whether Lot believed his disapproval was understood by everyone under his roof.
A child may hear a parent condemn something and still struggle to understand why it is welcome in the home.
When we keep making room for what we say grieves us, our children have to live with that confusion.
They are forming their understanding of what matters to us through the decisions we make, including the decisions we would rather leave unexplained.
I think this ought to make us willing to examine what we have allowed to become normal.
We may believe we are making a difference in the culture, and I hope we are.
God has given us people to love and truth to speak wherever He has placed us.
Even so, the thought of standing like Lot with empty hands ought to make us consider the cost of becoming entrenched.
Our families can be paying a price we have been slow to recognize because we feel settled, useful, or certain that we can handle the influence around us.
I believe we are living in a Laodicean age, and the warning to that church reaches into this same confidence.
The Lord told that church, “Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked:” (Revelation 3:17).
They had badly misjudged their condition. In verse 16 He said, “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”
As I look at the church today, I see enough of that spirit among us to make me read His words with our own homes and churches in mind.
I am aware that faithful parents also grieve over children who choose sin, and I would never want to place another burden on someone already carrying that sorrow.
Every child will answer to God for his own choices.
But, this passage does make me want to be honest about the choices that belong to us, while we still have the opportunity to make them.
We can ask God to show us where comfort has made us careless, and we can listen when the answer requires something of us.
The Lord’s words to Laodicea include this invitation: “As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent” (Revelation 3:19).
There is mercy in being shown what needs to change before we have lost more than we understood was at stake.
Lot’s righteous soul was vexed, and the remembrance of his family still leaves me grieving.
I want that warning to stay with us long enough to affect how we live, what we allow, and how carefully we attend to the families God has entrusted to our care.
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What does God say a home is meant to be?
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