Lot went outside to meet them and shut the door behind him and said, “No, my friends. Don’t do this wicked thing. Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.” – Genesis 19:6-8
If the Bible was merely an invention of man’s wild imagination, like many people suggest, Genesis 19 would simply not exist in Scripture. Man, in all his pride and pretense, would paint a much more glorifying portrait of himself. He would boast about his goodness, his kindness, and his charity. He would talk at great length not about his failures and shortcomings, but about all the impressive things he’s accomplished in his endeavor to enrich humanity. One of the things he would not do, however, is document a time in his life when he offered up his own daughters to be gang-raped by wicked people.
So the next time someone tries to tell you that the Bible is just a bunch of made-up stories by ancient men, remind them of that truth.
That aside…
God’s Word also tells us over and over that the world is not a “good” place. And He also gives us the reason why: because man has taken what God has created and broken it beyond human repair.
So when we come to Genesis 19 (which is notable – considering that God had just destroyed the earth with the Great Flood roughly 350 years earlier) most of us are not shocked to read that evil has once again overtaken the world. Some wicked men from the town of Sodom show up to Lot’s front door with an unthinkable demand: send out the men who are visiting you so that we may have sex with them.
But then, Lot steps outside, shuts the door behind him, and proposes a solution that is just as morally horrific. He offers his daughters – his own flesh and blood – to a violent mob. This is not the action of a monster from a horror story – it is a man the New Testament calls righteous (2 Peter 2:7-8). That is what most of us find shocking.
This is an example of where the Bible refuses to flatter us. It tells the truth about the human heart. Lot is religious – he knows the Lord. He is distressed by the wickedness around him. And yet, when pressed and afraid and trying to control a situation spiraling beyond him, he offers up an evil compromise as a bargaining chip. He attempts to restrain sin by committing another sin. He tries to preserve the hospitality of his guests by sacrificing the innocence of his own children. That is the depravity of mankind laid bare. Not just the mob outside the door, but the man standing behind it willing to compromise.
Genesis 19:8 shows us that evil is not only something “out there” among the obviously corrupt. It is something that lives uncomfortably close, even in the hearts of the very people who fear God.
Lot’s instincts are warped by the culture he has lived in for far too long, and his moral reasoning has eroded as a result. Prolonged exposure to sin has done to Lot what it likewise does to us: it has dulled his sense of what should never be negotiable. And under pressure, what comes out of him is not courage or clarity, but compromise of the worst kind.
This is hard for us to read because some of us have experienced that pressure, on some level, to compromise what we believe. We may never face a mob at our door, but we know what it’s like to justify sin in the name of peace, or safety, or reputation, or control. We know what it is like to tell ourselves that a lesser evil is acceptable if it prevents a greater one. We know how quickly fear can twist our judgment and how easily self-preservation can masquerade as wisdom.
The story does not excuse Lot. Scripture does not pause to defend him or explain his logic. It simply records what he did and lets the weight of it fall on us. Righteous does not mean sinless. It does not mean untouched by corruption. It means, at best, a man still desperately in need of rescue. In a sermon I recently listened to from one of my favorite teaching pastors, he said: “Even the best of men are men at best.”
And that may be the most important thing Genesis 19:8 teaches us. Salvation does not come because Lot makes the right choice in the moment…. he doesn’t. It comes because God intervenes despite Lot’s lack of judgment. The angels pull him back inside. The door is shut by hands stronger than his own. And it’s there that judgment and mercy move forward together, and not because humanity proves worthy, but because God remains faithful.
This story leaves me humbled. It strips away the illusion that religious talk or moral concern makes me immune to darkness. It drives me to admit that if God does not restrain me, if He does not rescue me, I’m capable of far more evil than I want to believe. And in that uncomfortable truth, it quietly points me to a hill in Golgotha, where such a great price was paid for my rescue.
Former Blackout Artist 