Lot's Warning in Sodom: Why Did They Think He Was Joking? (Genesis 19)

It is evening when the two strangers walk into Sodom, and Lot is sitting in the gateway of the city (Genesis 19:1). The gate was where a town's older men sat to settle disputes. Lot has lived here long enough to have a seat.

He does what his uncle Abraham did under the oak at Mamre. He gets up, bows to the ground, and begs the strangers to stay. "He prepared a feast for them and baked unleavened bread, and they ate" (Genesis 19:3).

Before anyone is in bed, the house is surrounded by "all the men of the city of Sodom, both young and old" (Genesis 19:4). They want the guests brought out. Lot steps outside, shuts the door behind him, and offers them his own two daughters instead. Genesis records it without comment. The crowd turns on him: "This one came here as a foreigner, and he is already acting like a judge!" (Genesis 19:9).

The strangers reach out, pull Lot inside, and shut the door. The guests strike the men outside with blindness, and they wear themselves out trying to find the door.

What did the angels tell Lot to do?

Now the guests say why they came. "Get them out of here, because we are about to destroy this place" (Genesis 19:12–13). For the first time in the story, Lot is carrying a message from the LORD.

He goes out into the dark to the men pledged to marry his daughters. "Get up," he said. "Get out of this place, for the LORD is about to destroy the city!" (Genesis 19:14).

"But his sons-in-law thought he was joking" (Genesis 19:14).

The Hebrew behind joking is tsachaq, the ordinary word for laughing. It is the same word from the tent at Mamre, when Sarah heard God promise her a son and "she laughed to herself" (Genesis 18:12). Sarah laughed at a promise, and God gave her the son and had him named Isaac, he laughs. The sons-in-law laughed at a warning, and they stayed where they were.

Why would they laugh? Look at what they knew of Lot. Years earlier he had seen that this plain was "well watered like the garden of the LORD, like the land of Egypt" (Genesis 13:10), and he chose it for that. He moved toward Sodom, then into it, then into its gate. Nothing in how he lived had looked like a man who listened to God, so when he said the LORD's name in the dark, it sounded like a bad joke.

This is what it costs to not know God. Those men had never known Him, so His warning meant nothing to them. Lot had once walked beside Abraham and heard what God said to him, and he had kept so little of it that his own family could not take him seriously.

How does Genesis 19 point to Jesus?

Jesus told this story Himself. "It was the same in the days of Lot: People were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building. But on the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all" (Luke 17:28–29). The warning came in the middle of ordinary days like those, and to the men who laughed it stayed a joke until the morning the fire fell.

He also stands at a door. In Sodom a crowd pushed at a door to break it. Jesus says, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in and dine with him, and he with Me" (Revelation 3:20).

So when God says something to you that sounds too big or too strange, weigh it before you laugh it off. Write it down the way you heard it, with the date, and read it again next week.

What has God said to you that you were tempted to laugh off?

Deeper study today in the Doxa Deeper Dive: the bread Lot baked, the door he shut, and the night Israel heard in both. Read it here.