The Great Rescue
Several famous people narrowly missed boarding the Titanic. One of them was John Raleigh Mott. He was an influential evangelist and YMCA official who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946. He and a colleague were offered free passage on the Titanic by a White Star Line official interested in their work, but they declined and instead took a humbler liner named Lapland. Apparently, when they reached New York and heard about the disaster, they looked at each other and exclaimed, “The Good Lord must have more work for us to do!” Presumably, Mott and his colleague lived the rest of their lives in the shadow of that disaster, with the knowledge that they had been spared—even rescued—from disaster. They were grateful to the Lord and worked zealously for God’s Kingdom in the aftermath.
Genesis 19 tells us about a man named Lot and his family who had a near-death experience in Sodom. They only narrowly escaped God’s destruction of Sodom—a judgement that God accomplished by raining sulfur and fire. Verse 15 states: “As morning dawned, the angels urged Lot, saying, “’Up! Take your wife and your two daughters who are here, lest you be swept away in the punishment of the city.’ But he lingered. So the men seized him and his wife and his two daughters by the hand, the Lord being merciful to him, and they brought him out and set him outside the city.” It was a rescue accomplished by divine agency, and by the sheer mercy of God.
This rescue is a picture for us of the rescue God has achieved for all his saved people. God rescued Lot because He remembered the covenant promises He had made to Abraham. As verse 29 states, “So it was that, when God destroyed the cities of the valley, God remembered Abraham…” Like Lot, we who know and trust Jesus rely on God’s covenant promises. We believe that He will spare us in the judgment to come because of the promises He has made – promises going back to Abraham and pointing forward to Jesus and His saving work. As Romans 5:9 declares, “Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.”
But there is a lesson here in taking God’s mercy seriously. When Lot received the warning, he lingered in the stricken city and practically had to be dragged out. His wife was instructed not to look back, but she did not take this warning seriously. She didn’t really see the true value of her rescue, and so she looked back to Sodom and perished. Lot’s daughters had been rescued from a city marked by sexual immortality, but they clearly weren’t chastened by the experience. Genesis 19 ends with one of the ugliest incidents of sexual sin found in the Bible as Lot’s daughters degraded themselves in a profound way. Tragically, their near-death experience—their experience of divine rescue—did not reshape their lives accordingly.
This begs some profound questions. Has your experience of God’s mercy reshaped your life? Do you daily live as a person who has narrowly escaped destruction – and whose values and priorities have been transformed as a result? Do you have a real abhorrence of sin because you have been rescued from its penalty? Do you have a light hold on this passing world or do you continue to grasp tightly the things of this stricken city? Today, set your mind on things above (Col.3:2), and allow God’s mercy to reshape your life for His glory.