The closer we move toward God’s perfect will, the more the church will prosper. Moves in that direction will require faith. Faith cannot happen without trust. Trust often entails sacrifice. What is God’s purpose for His church, and where do we fit in it? If we are unwilling to examine ourselves daily [2 Cor 13:5], we have no right to even call ourselves the church. But if we’re willing to overcome our fear, we can find our way out of our stubborn disobedience and back into the perfect will of God.
Reason 10:
Disobedience
The instructions were fairly simple: (1) keep running, (2) don’t
look back. But, like so many helpless, silly women in so many
horror movies, she couldn’t resist turning away from God’s
promise to look back toward sin. And, in a flash, she was
destroyed. It’s as good a bedtime story as there is, this story
of Lot’s wife. Most of us miss the truer lessons of the story,
using this passage from Genesis 19 to justify our hatred of
gays, when this isn’t a story about homosexuality or even about
good versus righteous people. This is a story about obedience, about being part of God’s plan or choosing not to.
The surface-level look at the story tells us Lot, Abraham’s
nephew-in-law, was a righteous man, the one decent person living
in Sodom. What it doesn’t tell us, though, is that Lot may have
been ultimately judged as righteous, but Lot was weak. In
previous scripture we find Lot living outside the city [Genesis
3:10-12]. But, when we next see him, he’s living inside this
sinful place. Why would a righteous man take his wife and two
young daughters into such a hateful place? Why would a
prosperous farmer give up his livestock (Lot had so much
livestock, in fact, that he and Abraham could not graze their
flocks in the same place [Gen 13:6-7]) and move into an urban
hell? It makes no sense.
God
has created within each of us a free will. We are free to choose
God’s plan or to reject it. Going our own way is not, in and of
itself, sin—Lot could live wherever he wanted to live. But
diverging from God’s plan for us has consequences. Last month I
blogged about
romantic love versus God’s plan for us. Satan can and will
use our loneliness, our emotional needs, as a weapon against us.
So much so that we begin longing for someone’s touch more than
we long for the Lord’s presence in our lives and we become
impatient with God, deciding to “help God out” by moving His
agenda forward in a quicker fashion. But, it’s not God’s agenda
we are moving, it’s ours. We fall in love with Boo and what
have you, and next thing we know, we’re way, way off track from
where we’d been going before we got distracted. We’re wasting
time—years and decades of it—trying to make these romantic
relationships work because now we’re addicted to this person and
it’s like a coke habit; our obsession with this person to the
exclusion of our own aspirations and the vision God has given
us. We’re compromising everything—including God’s plan for our
lives—and giving time and resources that used to belong to God
to this knucklehead instead. We’re stressing and trying to
appease him or her, trying to work it out, trying to keep the
peace, struggling to hold the relationship together. And, in so
doing, we diminish the importance of God, the effectiveness of
God, the sovereignty of God, in our lives. We diminish
our own testimony, as your abandonment of God's plan demonstrates an impotent god, a dormant god, an ineffectual
god to the romantic partner you’re struggling to hold onto. Your
alleged convictions are meaningless to him or her because you are
unwilling to sacrifice for them in any measurable way. You've set no
boundaries, taken no stands. Your god takes
second place to the demands of your Boo. Instead of
following God’s plan, you are “following your heart.” Instead of
moving forward in righteousness, you're looking back at sin.
Then one day you wake up and you’re forty. Overweight. Broke.
Used up. Kids who neither know nor respect God because you’ve
made God a joke in your own life. And you look at yourself in
the mirror and wonder how your got so far off track.
That’s the truer moral of Lot’s story.
I can imagine Lot ended up in the city because he was too close
to the city in the first place. Heading into town for provisions,
supplies or even an entertaining night out was convenient and
tempting. Once we start dipping and
dabbling in sin, sin begins drawing us in. [James 1:15]. So,
here’s Lot, a farmer, blessed by God, waking up one day inside the
city of
Sodom. There is no further mention of the abundance of sheep and
goats, the best of Abraham and Lot's combined flock. It is unclear
that Lot is even a farmer anymore. He seems to have wandered
completely off of God's track. Yet, the bible calls him righteous. Righteous, yes.
Obedient, no.
Disobedience leads to poor judgment; Lot offering his virgin
daughters (by biblical standards, where girls routinely married
at fourteen or fifteen, I’d make these girls around twelve or
thirteen) up to the unruly mob who’d come to violently rape the
angels at Lot’s house [Gen 19:8]. Where was Lot’s righteousness
in that offer? These guys weren’t going to take his daughters
out for dinner and a movie. They wanted sex, and they wanted it
violently, a gang rape. And this was the best idea Lot had, to
protect strangers by offering up two little girls to be sexually
assaukted in front of their own house. This was Lot’s testimony to his wife, to his
kids. This was the "god" Lot demonstrated to his daughters (which
largely explains their later behavior). This was how far off the track Lot had strayed.
Even so, when God delivered Lot from his own poor choices, Lot’s
wife, his Boo, knew so little of God, believed so little of God,
perhaps because Lot had put her first, thus diminishing his
testimony and undermining his professed faith in God, that—for reasons the
Bible does not enumerate—she turned back toward sin. Longingly,
sad to leave sin.
This is the way sin works: it first convinces you to move away
from God’s plan, the it destroys your testimony to the point
where people around you think of your spirituality as a joke. Sin
then strips you of God’s blessing, of His promise, of
everything you have. Lot fled the city with nothing, the clothes
on his back. He lost everything, including his wife. Lot's
children, so disconnected from Lot’s God—Lot having so
destroyed his own testimony—saw God as impotent and
ineffectual. In spite of the terrible manifestation of God’s
power in destroying two cities in front of their very eyes, these two kids nonetheless
thought God needed them to help Him out, thinking, since Mom was
now a pillar of salt, it was their duty to re-populate the
destroyed cities. Lot’s two, innocent, pubescent daughters got
him drunk and had sex with him, deliberately getting themselves
knocked up by their own father in some warped attempt to help
out Lot’s impotent God.
A righteous man? Perhaps. But Lot’s behavior was much more in line with that of so many of us Church Folk. People who either knew God but strayed away, following their own path, or people who just grew up in a church environment, taking on the external behavior and traditions of Church Folk, but who do not have and likely never had a thriving personal relationship with Jesus Christ. So, we have people who have been made righteous through faith, but who nevertheless substituted their own judgment for God’s judgment, their own plan for God’s plan. It is a terribly simple formula, one of Satan’s most seductive and effective weapons against God’s church: disobedience.
