The Beginning of Compromise

In the last post I wrote, we examined the result of Lot's hesitation and bartering with God. We saw how the ultimate result was that Lot ended up exactly where God told him to go in the first place, but that he lost people that he was responsible for by not leading his family in the way God had appointed. But how did Lot get to the position he was in? When did this all come about?

In Genesis 13:5-8 we see that Abraham and Lot's herdsmen were fighting over the land, because between the two of them they had too much stuff for the land to support them. So Abraham decides that it would be best to separate in Genesis 13:8, and gives Lot the choice of where to go in Genesis 13:9.

And Lot chose the plain of the Jordan, where Sodom and Gomorrah were (Genesis 13:10-11). We see in Genesis 13:12 that Abraham went to Canaan, but Lot had ignored that the land he had chosen was already corrupted by sin, and chose to pitch his tents near it. We know that God already knew how this was going to end, because in Genesis 13:14 God promised all of the land to Abraham, even the land that Lot had chosen.

By the time we get to Genesis 14:12, Lot had moved from having his tents near Sodom, and was now living "in" Sodom. Sodom was overthrown and Abraham rescued the people and their goods (Genesis 14:11-17). We see that Abraham was already aware of the problems, and in Genesis 14:21-24 that Abraham refused to take anything that the king of Sodom offered as a reward. It is never uplifting to God when a man profits from service to the world, or from service to sin. According to Genesis 14:18-19 Abraham paid tithes to Melchizedek though, whom Abraham had also rescued.

So we can see through this that Lot's problems had arisen a long time before he lost his wife to sin. We see that Lot chose something that looked good, ignoring the taint of sin. And once he had chosen to possess the land containing sin, he pitched his tents right next to it, eventually moving into it himself. Whatever the sin in our lives that we've chosen to pitch our tents next to, we need to remove it from our land, or we're going to end up living in it. We must as men for the sake of our families remove all sin from around us, not ignore it because everything around it looks pretty. If we can't eradicate it from our land, then we need to get as far from it as we can, fleeing to the mountain.