Saved, But Scorched
August 5, 2025 - Genesis 19
I’m Pastor Rich Bitterman, a country preacher from the Ozarks. Guy Howard, the old Walking Preacher, once wore out his boots traveling from church to church, meeting strangers and sharing the gospel. I’m doing the same today on digital roads. Each post is a visit. Each verse is a step. Let’s walk the Word together.
🪔 Today’s Truth:
Some believers walk with God. Others get dragged by mercy.
Lot didn’t run from Sodom. He was pulled. Saved, but scorched.
At first light, Abraham stood where he had stood before. The same ridge. The same hush. The same place where heaven had bent low and listened to his prayer.
He looked toward the valley, and smoke clawed into the sky like the breath of a furnace. The cities were gone. The laughter, the markets, the banners and rooftops, the polished streets…all of it buried beneath ash.
He said nothing. What could be said? When a man sees the wrath of God fall on a place he once pleaded for, the only sound left is silence.
But this is not a story about fire. It is a story about two believers.
Lot was not an outsider. He was not one of the pagans swept away in judgment. He was one of us. Scripture calls him righteous. Justified. Tormented in soul by the evil around him. And yet he stayed. He stayed until the rot soaked into his skin and softened his backbone. He stayed long enough to be made a leader…a man of the gate, a man of reputation.
When the angels arrived, he recognized their danger before he recognized their glory. He knew the streets too well. The hour too late. The looks too hungry. He begged them to stay in his home, not because he loved to serve, but because he feared what the city might do to them.
And the angels hesitated.
They had dined with Abraham beneath trees and stars. They had tasted the cakes and the calf and the laughter of a man whose tent opened toward heaven.
But Lot’s house was another story. There was no delight in their faces. No eagerness to enter. They stepped over the threshold with the reluctance of men walking into a trap.
The meal was flatbread. Quick. Barely risen. A nod toward hospitality but stripped of joy. Then the night pressed its face to the windows.
Every man in the city came. Every one. Old and young. Every neighborhood. A sea of pounding fists and snarling mouths. They demanded the strangers. Lot begged. He offered reason.
Then he offered his daughters.
That moment is where many look away. But stay here. Hear it. A father offered his children to a mob to protect his name and his guests. Righteous? Yes. But so far from wisdom that even the angels had to intervene.
They yanked him inside. They blinded the men outside. But still the crowd groped for the door like dogs driven mad by blood. Judgment had not yet fallen, but you could already smell the sulfur.
At dawn, they told him to run.
“Take your wife. Take your daughters. Get out. Now.”
He hesitated. The house was still his. The curtains still hung. The bed still held the shape of the night before. His possessions, his plans, his pride…still there.
So they grabbed his wrist.
Lot did not walk out of Sodom. He was pulled. Dragged. A man who belonged to God, but not enough to move on his own. Mercy took him by the arm. Mercy led him past the city limits. Mercy, not obedience, got him out.
Even then, he argued.
“Let me go to that small town instead. It’s just a little place. Let me have something. Let me keep a piece of what I lost.”
God allowed it. And Lot, that half-wrecked man, entered Zoar as the sky split open behind him.
His wife looked back. She turned toward the fire and was stilled forever. Not for curiosity, but for longing. Her heart had not left. So her body stayed behind too.
Later, Lot climbed into the hills. He no longer asked for cities. He no longer bartered for towns. He lived in a cave. With his daughters. And nothing else.
There was no flock. No wealth. No tents or servants. Just the moan of the wind across rock and the shame that settled like dust. His daughters, shaped by the city that had burned, gave him wine. Then they gave him sons. Moab. Ammon. Sons of silence and incest. Nations that would war against God’s people for generations.
This is what remained of the man who once traveled with Abraham. The man who once stood beside the patriarch under the stars of promise. A body in a cave. A legacy of compromise.
And now, return to the ridge.
Abraham watches the smoke. He had asked the Lord, “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” He had counted down to ten. But there were not ten.
Still, God remembered Abraham.
Lot was saved because someone else prayed. He was spared because someone else stood before the Lord. His rescue had more to do with the intercession of a friend than the strength of his own walk.
Abraham lost nothing in that fire. Lot lost everything but his life.
There are two kinds of believers.
One pitches his tent near Sodom, calculates success by what the world can give, rises in status, and withers in soul.
The other builds his altar where heaven speaks, waits beneath trees for God to appear, and finds that though the world may pass him by, eternity knows his name.
This is not a story about unbelievers. It is a story about us.
You may be justified. You may belong to God. But are you walking with him, or must you be dragged?
Are you Abraham, waking early to speak with God, or Lot, asleep while fire gathers?
Are you climbing the mountain in obedience, or hiding in a cave, waiting for your regrets to die?
Only one question remains.
What kind of believer are you?
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🫐 Breakfast worth writing home about.
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