And Lot said unto them, Oh! not so, my Lord
The infirmities of the heirs of salvation
I. THESE INFIRMITIES ARE SEEN DURING THE PROGRESS OF THEIR DELIVERANCE.
1. The infirmity of fear (Genesis 19:19).
2. Wilfulness (Genesis 19:20).
3. Forgetfulness of past mercies.
4. A lingering selfishness.
II. GOD IS GRACIOUS TOWARDS SUCH INFIRMITIES (Genesis 19:21).
III. THERE ARE CERTAIN CONDITIONS WHICH FIT THEM FOR SUCH MERCIFUL INDULGENCE.
1. When they have already commenced the flight from danger.
2. When, though they have not reached it, they are still seeking a sure refuge.
3. When they are satisfied not to rest in anything short of God’s command. (T. H. Leale.)
Lessons
1. Gracious souls in their weaknesses will acknowledge the freeness and greatness of God’s mercy to them.
2. Infirmity yet turns such confession aside, to a wrong use, even to desire things against God’s will.
3. Saving souls alive in the midst of destructions is a free and great mercy.
4. Weakness of faith and strength of sense may make God’s Word seem impossible unto His servants.
5. Infirmity of faith creates many fears of evil even against God’s promise.
6. Saints through infirmity apprehend death where God clearly promiseth and giveth life. (G. Hughes, B. D.)
Lot’s prayer as contrasted with that of Abraham
Abraham had never prayed for himself with a tithe of the persistent earnestness with which he prayed for Sodom--a town which was much indebted to him, but towards which, for more reasons than one, a smaller man would have borne a grudge. Lot, on the other hand, much indebted to Sodom, identified indeed with it, one of its leading citizens, connected by marriage with its inhabitants, is in no agony about its destruction, and has indeed but one prayer to offer, and that is, that when all his fellow-townsmen are destroyed, he may be comfortably provided for. While the men he has bargained and feasted with, the men he has made money out of and married his daughters to, are in the agonies of an appalling catastrophe and so near that the smoke of their torment sweeps across his retreat, he is so disengaged from regrets and compassion that he can nicely weigh the comparative comfort and advantage of city and rural life. One would have thought better of the man if he had declined the angelic rescue and resolved to stand by those in death whose society he had so coveted in life. And it is significant that while the generous, large-hearted, devout pleading of Abraham is in vain, the miserable, timorous, selfish petition of Lot is heard and answered. It would seem as if sometimes God were hopeless of men, and threw to them in contempt the gifts they crave, giving them the poor stations in this life their ambition is set upon, because He sees they have made themselves incapable of enduring hardness, and so quelling their lower nature. An answered prayer is not always a blessing, sometimes it is a doom: “He sent them meat to the full: but while their meat was yet in their mouths, the wrath of God came upon them and slew the fattest of them.” Probably had Lot felt any inclination to pray for his townsmen he would have seen that for him to do so would be unseemly. His circumstances, his long association with the Sodomites, and his accommodation of himself to their ways, had both eaten the soul out of him and set him on quite a different footing towards God from that occupied by Abraham. A man cannot on a sudden emergency lift himself out of the circumstances in which he has been rooted, nor peel off his character as if it were only skin deep. Abraham had been living an unworldly life, in which intercourse with God was a familiar employment. His prayer was but the seasonable flower of his life, nourished to all its beauty by the habitual nutriment of past years. Lot in his need could only utter a peevish, pitiful, childish cry. He had aimed all his life at being comfortable, he could not now wish anything more than to be comfortable. “Stand out of my sunshine” was all he could say when he held by the hand the plenipotentiary of heaven, and when the roar of the conflict of moral good and evil was filling his ears--a decent man, a righteous man, but the world had eaten out his heart till he had nothing to keep him in sympathy with heaven. Such is the state to which men in our society, as in Sodom, are brought by risking their spiritual life to make the most of this world. (M. Dods, D. D.)