Saving a righteous coward
Passage: Genesis 19:1-29
Big Idea: God in his mercy saves us despite our cowardice, for Jesus the Righteous One, atoned and advocates for us.
The Lord visits Lot the Coward at Sodom
The Lord’s urgent compassion on the coward
Was Lot spared because he was righteous?
The Lord saves cowards made righteous
Over the past few days, many of us have prayed for the people of Queensland and northern New South Wales as Cyclone Alfred was making its way to the shore.
I’m very thankful to God for all those who prayed, but also for all the people the volunteers and front-line workers who were on location to help.
And I’m sure local hospital chaplains in the area would be there for support as well, right Sashi?
Now imagine a rescuer see a young boy struggling in the raging waters but rather than rescuing, walks away because he’s afraid of putting himself in the danger.
How would you describe someone like that?
That’s what happened on 13 January 2012.
On that day, a cruise ship by the name of Costa Concordia was sailing around the Mediterranean Sea when it struck a rock formation on the sea floor.
This caused the ship to partially sink at 9:42pm.
Although most people were saved, 32 people died.
One person who was didn’t die was the ship’s captain, Captain Francesco Schettino.
Schettino abandoned his duties to co-ordinate the evacuation of the ship.
In fact, Schettino got on one of the lifeboats at 11:30pm and was told to get back to the boat by another captain.
Despite being told what he should have been already doing, Schettino stayed on his lifeboat.
The ship was not evacuated until 4:46am, and 32 people have died as a result.
Schettino abandoned his duty, put his life ahead of others, failed to listen to instructions and caused a delay which costs the lives of 32 people.
What kind of person would you call Schettino?
An Italian newspaper published a piece called Schettino, ‘a cowardly and felon commander who shuns his responsibilities’.
For his cowardice, Schettino was sentenced to 16 years in prison.
In today’s passage, we meet another coward.
He was a cowardly father, who loved comfort more than righteousness.
What would God do with a coward like Lot?
That’s what we’re going to see in today’s passage.
Please open up with me to Genesis chapter 19, beginning from verse 1.
We’ll see four things in today’s passage:
The Lord visits Lot the Coward at Sodom
The Lord’s urgent compassion on the coward
Was Lot spared because he was righteous?
The Lord saves cowards made righteous
I promise not to add an extra hour to the talk.
Before we look into it, a quick word especially to the parents.
There are some sensitive material in today’s Bible passage.
While I tried to make it as appropriate as possible, if you would like to take yourself of your children outside, I completely understand it.
And so, let’s pray and ask God to help us understand and obey his word:
“Father, your word is a double edged sword. May it pierce our hearts today, and may it take root and grow in our lives, that we may live for your glory. For Jesus’ sake, Amen.”
The Lord visits Lot the Coward at Sodom
Who was Lot?
Lot was Abraham’s nephew; Lot went with Abraham when God called Abraham to leave his home and go to the place God would show him.
In time, both Abraham and Lot became wealthy, and the land they were staying on wasn’t enough to feed both Lot’s animals and Abraham’s.
Abraham then gave Lot a choice: You take the land on one side, and I’ll take the land on the other.
Lot saw a beautiful and fertile plain, as far as a little town called Zoar.
He chose to stay there, pitched a tent, and settled down near the city of Sodom.
Sodom was soon captured by foreign kings, but Abraham managed to rescue Lot and others with God’s help.
Now, as we come to Genesis chapter 19, Lot had really settled into Sodom.
He was sitting at the gateway, the traditional place in Ancient Near East where important decisions are made, a little bit like the Parliament House.
Lot even had a house, not just a tent.
Look with me at Genesis chapter 19 verse 1, “The two angels entered Sodom in the evening as Lot was sitting in Sodom’s gateway. When Lot saw them, he got up to meet them. He bowed with his face to the ground.”
Now notice that this was similar to the Lord’s visit to Abraham, except it was three visitors with Abraham, and it was during the hottest part of the day.
Two of the three visitors who had visited Abraham earlier that day in Mamre had arrived in Sodom that evening.
It would’ve been a supernatural journey because it would have been too far to walk in just a few hours.
Their arrival would be the beginning of the last hours for Sodom.
Lot invited the strangers to come, but they refused.
It would’ve been strange for anyone in the Ancient Near East to refuse an invitation to someone’s home.
You just don’t say no!
For example, in many cultures, including mine, food is shared around the table.
At the beginning of a meal, the host gives you food, and you receive it.
Refusing is seen as rude and a rejection of the host.
But the angels refused and decided to spend the night in the public square instead.
According to Lot, it’s not a great idea.
And so Lot insisted on them coming, and might had even grabbed their arms firmly but nicely to bring them back to his house.
Lot played the good host, and prepared a feast for them.
However, things are going to get a lot worse from there.
All the men of Sodom, both young and old, gathered around Lot’s house.
The two new men who were staying with Lot caught their attention.
They wanted to get to ‘know’ them intimately, without their consent.
These men of Sodom were hostile and wanted to assault these two visitors at Lot’s place.
Lot continued to try his best to be a good host by negotiating.
Lot begged the men of Sodom not to do this evil.
He even offered to give his virgin daughters to them, and suggested that the men of Sodom assault his daughters instead.
Lot tried to protect his visitors, but when the situation got too tough, he became a coward.
Any goodwill we had towards him vanished.
He might have seemed like a righteous man, like his Uncle Abraham was at the beginning of this passage, but not anymore.
Lot was a coward!
But here’s the thing, the Bible calls him righteous!
Look with me at 2 Peter 2:7-9,
“and if he rescued righteous Lot, distressed by the depraved behavior of the immoral 8 (for as that righteous man lived among them day by day, his righteous soul was tormented by the lawless deeds he saw and heard )— 9 then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment.
Why does Peter call Lot righteous?
Lot was the guy who would rather live in a comfortable place like Sodom than to live in a tent with his uncle Abraham.
He knew that the men of Sodom were evil.
He knew exactly what would happen if his visitors slept in the city square—they would be assaulted by the men of Sodom.
And yet, he settled there, and ended up being an influential person in Sodom, by sitting at the front gate.
Where was his integrity or his righteousness?
Did this coward have any?
The Bible says that Lot had a righteous soul and he was tormented by what he saw in Sodom.
He was torn between being allured and offended by what he witnessed.
He loved the prosperity of Sodom, but he hated its immorality.
They were wicked men, but they were making Lot comfortable and rich.
However, despite his cowardice and his flaws, he remained a believer in God.
In many ways, Lot’s a lot like us, is he not?
We don’t always agree with the moral standards of our society, and we might even verbally disagree with their views on sexuality.
Like Lot, we’re too weak, too afraid to stand up for what we believe in.
Even when we do, we do it so weakly, so feebly.
Sometimes, we might even end up compromising our principles and beliefs, just to try and please everyone.
We are living in a city of sin, knowing that we should hate it for its sin, but yet secretly loving it at the same time.
If we’re honest with ourselves, we’re probably more like Lot than we’d like to admit.
Not all of us would identify with Lot, of course.
Some of us will say that we’re not like Lot at all!
There are two main groups of people who don’t identify themselves with Lot.
The first group might identify more with Abraham, a man of integrity and honour (generally speaking, on a good day).
Abraham wasn’t living among the sinners, and he wasn’t tempted by the comforts of Sin City.
He was someone who would die before compromising his beliefs.
If that’s you, let me know; I would love to be your friend!
The second group doesn’t identify with Lot because they don’t think sins are inherently bad.
They think it’s perfectly okay to live as sinners.
They rationalise and make excuses for themselves to say that it’s okay to sin, just like the men of Sodom did.
Sinners who don’t see themselves as sinners aren’t tortured.
The righteous, on the other hand, struggles and fights against sin, with some doing better than others.
To be honest, I would rather you struggle and find yourselves tortured in your decisions than to not struggle with sin at all.
Struggling is a sign of life.
But just as a dead person doesn’t feel any struggle, a spiritually dead person doesn’t feel any struggles to fight against sin either.
The spiritually dead just give in to sin by default.
Before I became a minister, I was a pharmacist.
When I was thinking about becoming a minister, one of the things I kept in mind was my income. I knew that if I made a certain amount of money, I might be tempted to stay in my job for the money and not go into ministry.
So, I set a goal: once I reached that target, I would have to seriously consider my options before making a decision to stay or go.
By God’s grace, I reached that goal, and by God’s grace, I chose to give up my job. It wasn’t because I was strong, not at all.
If anything, it was because I knew that my cowardice to give in to comfort would be a very difficult thing to overcome by then.
Of course, God didn’t call everyone to give up their full-time job to go into ministry.
However, all of us need to be wise in setting limits on our wealth, our time, our relationships, and our comforts.
It’s easy to give in to cowardice, but setting limits can help you stay grounded and avoid compromising when things get tough.
Take some time to identify your struggles and pray for God’s wisdom and strength to help you navigate them.
Thanks God that he’s compassionate even when we mess up and fail as cowards.
The Lord’s urgent compassion on the coward
Look with me at verse 9, “Get out of the way!” they said, adding, “This one came here as an alien, but he’s acting like a judge! Now we’ll do more harm to you than to them.” They put pressure on Lot and came up to break down the door.
Basically, they were saying, “You’re an immigrant, how dare you judge our values and our behaviour!”
Sound familiar?
The men of Sodom then tried to break the door down.
They were violent, and they were determined to assault Lot’s guests and even Lot himself.
Instead of sitting passively in the house, Lot’s visitors saved Lot from the crowd, pulled him back inside the house, shut the door, and struck the men of Sodom with blindness.
Lot must have been confused, wondering who these visitors really were.
You’ve probably seen this in movies.
You have the strong-willed hero, like Mandalorian protecting someone small and fragile like Grogu.
Just when the hero was about to be defeated, the little unassuming Grogu shows his true power and saves the day.
Even though Lot thought he was protecting his visitors, it was the other way around.
God’s sent these visitors to protect him.
They were sent here to save Lot from the impending doom facing Sodom.
The angels told Lot to take with him everyone who belongs with him. He went to his engaged sons-in-laws. they thought it was a joke.
They laughed at Lot’s message.
Abraham laughed at God’s message about the promises of his son out of faith. Sarah laughed at God’s message out of weariness.
These men laughed at God’s message as told to them by Lot, out of contempt for God
It would almost certainly be the last thing they’ll ever laugh about.
God’s judgement was imminent.
And yet, Despite all that he had experienced and even shared to others about, Lot hesitated about God’s plan.
Look with me at verse 16, “But he hesitated. Because of the LORD’s compassion for him, the men grabbed his hand, his wife’s hand, and the hands of his two daughters. They brought him out and left him outside the city.”
Even at this stage, in these final hours of , Lot hesitated on what God’s said.
It’s out of God’s compassion that the men God’s sent grabbed his family, literally by the hand and led them out of the city.
They were told to flee from this beautiful plain that Lot chose when Abraham gave him the choice.
However, Lot asked God to spare the town of Zoar on the plain so that he can flee there instead of fleeing to the mountains.
Even now, Lot’s main concern was for his life.
Unlike Abraham, who pleaded for the righteous people of Sodom, Lot pleaded for his life, and not for the people of Sodom not even his sons-in-law.
Did he think that God would send his angels, rescued Lot from the men of Sodom, only to destroy Lot for running too slow?
Did he think that God would punish Lot for doing something that God himself had commanded him to do?
Even now, after everything he had gone through, Lot was ungrateful and cowardly.
How was God still so patient with a cowardly, ungrateful Lot?
God granted Lot’s request and allowed him to flee to Zoar.
As the sun rose, God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.
The once beautiful plain became hellscape.
On the way to Zoar, a pillar of salt stood; it was Lot’s wife.
She turned back to Sodom, despite the fact that she was actively fleeing the disaster that was about to come upon it.
Her heart was not convinced of God’s judgement.
She joined her husband Lot for the first part of the journey but failed to go him all the way.
Jesus mentioned her in Luke 17:31-32, “On that day, a man on the housetop, whose belongings are in the house, must not come down to get them. Likewise the man who is in the field must not turn back. 32 Remember Lot’s wife!”
She couldn’t leave her household belongings behind.
Attached to the goods of Sodom, she died on the plain.
Her heart was not convinced that Lot’s message about God’s judgement on Sodom was true, for her heart was still in the city of sin.
What sin has such a hold on us that we would rather hold on to that sin than to be rescued by God?
What in our sinful city attracts us so much that we would turn our back on God’s rescue?
Is it a healthy salary, a comfortable life, or a balanced life where God only owns a portion but not the whole?
Listen to what Jesus says, “Remember Lot’s wife. Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it” (Luke 17:32, 33).
God’s judgement is coming.
It could be today, tomorrow, or when your heart stops.
Don’t hesitate, delay, or make excuses.
Don’t be like Lot’s wife.
Was Lot spared because he was righteous?
Look with me at Genesis 19:27-28, “Early in the morning Abraham went to the place where he had stood before the LORD. 28 He looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and all the land of the plain, and he saw that smoke was going up from the land like the smoke of a furnace.”
Abraham had prayed for the righteous in Sodom to be spared.
He didn’t mention Lot by name, only appealing to God’s justice to protect the righteous.
What was he thinking when he looked over Sodom and Gomorrah after it was destroyed by God?
Did he know whether Lot would be counted as righteous?
Was he saddened or relieved when the saw the smoke coming out of Sodom and Gomorrah?
The passage doesn’t say.
If we have just read this passage on its own, Lot was cowardly and self-centred, but for some reason, God considered him righteous.
Look with me at verse 29, “So it was, when God destroyed the cities of the plain, he remembered Abraham and brought Lot out of the middle of the upheaval when he demolished the cities where Lot had lived.
God remembered Abraham and Lot was saved.
That is, God answered Abraham’s prayer by rescuing Lot because he was righteous. The apostle Peter confirmed it in 2 Peter 2:7, God ‘rescued righteous Lot’
How was Lot considered righteous?
He compromised, ready to give up his daughters to be assaulted, and even hesitated when he was about to be rescued.
How could this man be righteous?
Lot wasn’t righteous by his works.
If he had been, he wouldn’t have been considered righteous; no way!
No, to be righteous with God is not something you work towards.
Righteousness with God is something that happens when you believe in God.
We see this in Genesis 15:6, “Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness.”
And we’ll see it in the rest of the Bible as well.
As the Bible has mentioned righteousness is based on trust and faith, not works. Righteousness with God is about trusting in God.
Lot wasn’t perfect, far from it!
He made many mistakes.
He was no hero of faith, but even so, he was an example of faith.
He showed that no matter how small our trust in God is, we’re right with God if we the God we believe in is the right God.
Our faith is genuine not because of how faithful we are but because of how true and faithful God is.
It’s God himself who establishes our righteousness in him.
It’s not the amount of faith you have, but the One in whom you trust.
It’s the faith that says, “Lord, I know I’m weak and prone to fail.
Please grab me by the hand and let me trust you.”
“Lord, change my sinful and wandering heart into one that is filed with wonder and love for you so that I can follow you to your home in heaven.
Lot wasn’t righteous according to his acts.
The Bible made sure we know about his flaws.
But he’s still considered righteous because he trusts in God.
He moves slowly and hesitantly, but he still follows God’s direction.
He was an example of someone who wasn’t saved by works but by faith.
The Lord saves cowards made righteous
I’m glad God didn’t give up on cowards like Lot and other cowards in history.
Another coward was Apostle Peter, who denied Jesus three times despite claiming to be loyal to him.
Imagine Peter’s shame and guilt when Jesus rose from the dead and spoke to him. And yet, despite Peter’s actions, Jesus restored their relationship and commanded him to take care for his sheep.
In time, Peter became a key leader of the Church, who, according to extra-Biblical literature, would rather be crucified upside down than to deny Jesus.
Abraham advocated for the righteous in Sodom, asking God to judge fairly when he judges city, perhaps hoping that Lot was still trusting in God and so counted as righteous.
We’ve got a better Advocate than even Abraham himself.
Our Lord Jesus advocates for us now.
1 John 2:1-2, “My little children, I am writing you these things so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ the righteous one. 2 He himself is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours, but also for those of the whole world.”
When we do sin, when we fail and choose the cowardly option, Jesus will advocate our righteousness on our behalf, not because we’re righteous in and of ourselves.
Jesus advocates for the righteousness of those who trusted in what he had done for them on the cross.
On the cross, Jesus died as the atoning sacrifice, paying for the sins of all who trusts in him.
It’s by his death that we’ve been made clean and so Jesus advocates for us in God’s presence.
Jesus himself is the perfectly Righteous One.
It’s through him and him alone that we, the weak, the cowardly, are made righteous.
That’s why the Gospel of Jesus is good news for cowards.
He’s come to save cowards so that they can me made righteous in God’s eyes.
And we need to remember that He saved us not to return to our sinful ways, but to follow him, despite our hesitations.
He saved us to follow him; out of compassion, he grabs our hands, as it were, to save us from certain destruction, despite our sinful hesitations.
Thank God that he’s come to save sinners and cowards like us.
Why does God save a coward like Lot?
It’s because of his mercy to us in Jesus.
Friends, God in his mercy saves us despite our cowardice, for Jesus the Righteous One, atoned and advocates for us.
Here are three questions for us to think about this week.
What does a coward who calls himself / herself a Christian look like?
In what situations are you more likely to become a coward?
Who can help you overcome your cowardice?
Let’s pray, “From cowardice defend usFrom lethargy awake!Forth on Thine errands send usTo labour for Thy sake
We go to all the worldWith kingdom hope unfurledNo other name has power to saveBut Jesus Christ The Lord”
Father, thank you for saving cowards like us. Thank you for sending Jesus to be our Atoning Sacrifice and our Advocate. Please hold on to us. Please keep us, grab hold of our hands, and take us to where you are. For Jesus’ sake, Amen”