Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Am I Too Far Gone? | Torah | Genesis 19:30-38

Episode Date: February 16, 2022

Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Is your sin too big and too dark for God to use you? Do you feel beyond the grace of God? In today's episode, Jensen uses Genesis 19:30-38 to look at the destruction surrounding Lot's life and share how God used him as an example of God's faithfulness. Listen to find out how God can use you (even through your sin). Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Passages: Genesis 19:30-38 Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Jensen Holt McNair. Right now, we're going through the first book of the Bible, Genesis. Have you ever heard of rubbernecking? You know how sometimes when you're driving on the highway and you hit traffic from an accident. And you're annoyed that it's taking so long, especially when you get closer to see that it's actually mostly cleared by now. So the traffic shouldn't have been as bad except everyone is slowing down to say, see what happened in the crash. And then all of a sudden you realize you've also slowed down and are looking to see what happened in the crash and oops, the car in front of you is gone and you've become the problem. That's rubbernecking. Not you becoming the problem, but the looking at the wreck.

It's a thing we do as humans because we tend to have this morbid curiosity. See, even if it's a horrible crash and we don't want to look, we can't look away. That's today's passage for me. It's a train wreck of human depravity. I don't really want to look at it, but sometimes when scripture is this messy and confusing, we do really need to slow down and take our time to examine it even if we don't really want to. See, right now we're going through Genesis and we're currently in chapter 19. Chapter 19 starts out, with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. In the account, we learned that Lot and his family are to be spared by the mercy of God

as long as they flee and don't look back. But his wife looks back and she dies. So now we find ourselves with Lot, a widower, and his two daughters fleeing their home that's just been violently destroyed with all its people. Now, we're going to pick up the story in verse 30 and just read it straight through. So buckle up because it gets messy fast. Lott and his two daughters left Zohr and settled in the mountains, for he was afraid to stay in Zohr. He and his two daughters lived in a cave.

One day the older daughter said to the younger, Our father is old and there's no man around here to give us children, as is the custom all over the earth. Let's get our father to drink wine and then sleep with him and preserve our family line through our father. That night they got their father to drink wine, and the older daughter went in and slept with him. He was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up. The next day, the older daughter said to the younger, Last night, I slept with my father. Let's get him to drink wine again tonight, and you go in and sleep with him so we can preserve our family line through our father.

So they got their father to drink wine that night also, and the younger daughter went in and slept with him. again, he was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up. So both of Lott's daughters became pregnant by their father. The older daughter had a son. She named him Moab. He is the father of the Moabites of today. The younger daughter also had a son, and she named him Ben Ami. He is the father of the Ammonites today.

Okay. If you're like me, your initial thoughts might be shock, disgust, judgment, and maybe even confusion as to why this is even in the Bible. Why include this story? Let's remember our goal. We're going to try to slow down and take this story in stride to see if there might be something that we can learn from this account. As messy and distasteful as it is, it is scripture.

So right off the bat in verse 30, I want us to notice that Lott is moving his family out of Zohr. It tells us he, He does so because he's afraid. And so he takes his daughter and he moves them into a cave. The text indicates that it's because of this choice to move into a cave that his daughters feel like they won't have access to a man to continue their line. And so they choose to get their father intoxicated so they can have incestuous relations with him and get pregnant. And what I want us to recognize here is the fact that law is leaving Zohar.

This is significant. Only a few verses earlier, when Lot mercifully learns that he must flee Sodom and Gomorrah with his family, he asks for one more favor. Rather than flee to the mountains, he asks to be allowed to flee to a small town nearby, believing that living in this town will spare his life. And the Lord grants his request. He spares the town and allows Lot to flee to Zohar. And yet, here we're seeing Lot fleeing this city,

out of fear. I can imagine the memories of the destruction, of his wife's death, of all that has so recently happened in his life leads him to make this decision out of fear. I can understand his choice. Really, I can. Who hasn't ever made a decision out of fear, out of self-preservation? When we fear the future in all that could go wrong, it's easy to want to take things into our hands, isn't it? And that's what Lot does. His fear so quickly blinds his memory to the mercy and provision of God. Rather than trusting in the Lord to continue to provide for him and his family, he runs. And his daughters do the same. Rather than trusting in the Lord to provide for them and their future, they too make a really shocking choice to take control of the situation and provide for

themselves, even if it's far outside of God's will for humanity. See, if you've been following along in our current series going through the book of Genesis, I hope you see this theme. Again and again as humans attempt to take control apart from God, it never goes well. Lot and his daughters fail to trust God and his provision, and they end up falling into drunkenness and incest. It's not a pretty picture. and it's the last picture we get of Lot's life.

But it's not actually the last time we hear Lot mentioned in Scripture. Now, stick with me here. If we fast forward to 2 Peter 2, we hear about Lot one last time. Now, just for context, we're jumping into a teaching on false prophets. The author, Simon Peter, is going through Old Testament stories to remind his audience about who God is and what he has done in the past in order to reassure them of how God will act in the future. And so, in the midst of all of that, we read, And if he rescued Lot, a righteous man who was distressed by the depraved conduct of the lawless,

then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to hold the unrighteous for punishment on the day of judgment. Okay. I'm sorry. one more time. If he rescued Lot, our lot, Lot, who got really drunk and had incestuous relations with his daughters, our lot, a righteous man. Hmm, I'll be honest. I don't love that at first glance. Like, what's going on here? Well, first, I want to rule out the thought that you might be thinking, does this mean that God is, okay with what is happening in our passage in Genesis. No. And we can be sure of this. One, because later,

when God gives the law to his people, he explicitly condemns and forbids incest. But also, within our own text, we get a big hint that these encounters were not positive. In the last verses, we learned that both Lott's daughters do become pregnant by their father, and they both have sons. They succeed in what they wanted. Their lines will continue, but we learned that out of their lines will become the Moabites and the Ammonites. While this may not seem significant, these two people groups are notorious for their evil actions throughout the Old Testament. They're not a friend to God's people, and so our original audience would have known that within this text, there's a negative connotation to the outcome, despite the daughter's plan to bear sons coming to fruition. So why?

Why does Simon Peter commend him as righteous? It's simple, really. It's because of the gospel. Men like Abraham and Noah and Lot in the Old Testament are deemed righteous because they had faith in the promises of God. But as we've learned, men like Abraham and Noah and Lot were not perfect men. We've seen each one make mistakes. And while at times it has seemed that Lot has taken place,

part in deeper, darker, harder to grapple with sins, scripture tells us he too was counted righteous and therefore we can know that he too had faith. Second Corinthians 521 tells us, He, God, made Him Jesus who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. See, Lot lived a life of God. sin, but he's found righteous through the grace and gospel of Jesus Christ. Even the deepest, darkest parts of the Bible are not out of reach of the gospel. This does not mean that what happened in Genesis 19 is okay. It doesn't mean that we can gloss over lots sin, that it doesn't matter. His sin was punished, but he didn't take that punishment. Jesus Christ, the true righteous one, became sin on his behalf.

See, grace has a price and Jesus paid it so that Simon Peter could look at a broken, sinful lot and call him righteous. Lot, the man who fathered two sons by his daughters is counted righteous in Jesus Christ. No one is beyond the grace of our God. And that is good news. Good news for me and my sinful heart. As much as I want to point the finger at Lott and look away and disgust at these verses, when I look at the life of Lott, I see myself, running away from the mercy of my loving father,

grasping for control rather than trusting in his promise to provide for me. I have sat in shame before and felt far beyond the reach of the gospel. No one could forgive this. I'm such a failure. I keep making the same mistakes over. and over again. Why would Jesus want to die for me? Where do you feel beyond the grace of God? Are there spots of shame rooted in your life that keep you from feeling worthy of forgiveness? Are there sins that you can't seem to kick, constantly returning to them, constantly trying to

take control of your life? You're not alone. Let this hard, messy story, of redemption remind you that no one is beyond the grace of our God, not lot, not you, not me. Our sin is not okay. But we have a Savior who said, I will take that. I will bear that punishment and I will make a way for you to be counted righteousness because I am righteous. Look to Jesus. Give your choices, your allegiance, your life to the one who has died to make you righteous. We look to Jesus so that we as messy, broken, sinful people might be counted as the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. Amen. Before you forget, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talks newsletter. Hit the link in the show notes and you'll get an email every Wednesday that will

help encourage you in the middle of the work week and bring you deeper in your walk with Jesus. Thanks for listening.