Week 4 September 2025, Devotion Part 2

If he rescued righteous Lot…(for by what that righteous man saw and heard as he lived among them, he was vexed in his righteous soul day after day…), then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trial…  2 Peter 2:7-9

Given the sordid facts of his story, it is easy to judge Lot. Is Peter warning us that in doing so we risk putting God in the docket with the intent to judge Him? Is this the God who was willing to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if Abraham could find even ten good people living there? Is this the God who did not spare His own Son in order to impart the only righteousness worth having to you and me? Is He the one who knew Lot at the vexed-heart level and so was pleased to rescue him?

When a troubled Abraham pleaded with God to spare Sodom, surely fearing for his kin, he posed the question that answers ours, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” We who are in Christ fear for our Christless loved ones. God’s wrath rests on the brazen sinner and the smugly self-righteous churchgoer. Let Him sort out what vexes our soul and what sort of cure the Holy Spirit might suggest.  Part 2 of 2

Context:  Guilty as charged and frankly, quite shocked!  I bragged about reading the whole chapter for context and hating to run into iffy Lot. While Peter practically painted him as a saint, the word “sordid” had begun to roll off my tongue with the ease of repeated use. Then came the eye-opener that turned into my jaw-dropper. The verses I had strenuously objected to, in fact pointed in dramatic fashion to our loving and holy God’s unwavering commitment “to rescue the godly from trial.”  King David’s rescues from mad, murderous Saul would have come with less baggage, and the infant Moses’ rescue from drowning in the Nile would have had sweet overtones. How godly were these historic individuals?  Moses became a murderer and fugitive in a foreign land.  David turned into the adulterer who had a faithful husband killed.  And just like that, I’m beginning to see lots of good things to be learned from Lot’s situation.  He found himself stuck in it thanks to choices he had kept making as a flawed human being.  Let this ring a loud bell for us today as well.  In marked contrast to his benevolent uncle, Lot never built altars as Abraham consistently did. They served as tangible reminders of his tested relationship with God, who was eminently worthy of his wholehearted worship.  It hadn’t occurred to “righteous Lot” to build an altar even in Sodom, and so both his family and Israel paid the terrible price of God’s inevitable judgment as the Apostle Peter had warned.  If Lot seemed stuck in a tough place, so are many of our contemporaries both nationwide and in our neighborhoods.  Some trapped in toxic relationships, financial hardships, failing health, or bad neighborhoods, sit next to us in the church pew.  God forbid that we covertly probe into degrees of “godliness” that would guarantee their sure rescue from trial.  Feel Peter’s jab in the ribs that says to keep reading from his two books and so get the kind of ear he won’t want to cut off…  2 Peter 2