Tormented Souls

We don’t remember Lot as particularly righteous. Instead of settling in Canaan he chose Sodom where the men were wicked, great sinners against the Lord (Gen. 13:13).  Even worse, when it came time to flee the soon-to-be-destroyed city, Lot lingered (Gen. 19:16). And after he escaped the city he got drunk and had sex with his daughters (at their instigating). All in all, not a great track record for Lot.

But Peter still manages to call him “righteous.” And if the Lord repeatedly assured Abraham he would not punish the righteous with the wicked (Gen. 18:25) then it stands to reason the Lord considered Lot righteous too. So what made him righteous? At least in part, it was his torment. Lot was “greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked” (2 Peter 2:7). His righteous soul was “tormented” over the lawless deeds he saw and heard in Sodom (2 Peter 2:8). For all his failings, Lot is worthy example in this one respect: sin bothered him.

A Difficult Balance

How to be tormented by sin without being a torment to sinners is surely a great challenge for us, one that requires extraordinary maturity and wisdom. On the one hand, we want to show love and respect to our Muslim neighbors. We want our churches to be safe places for homosexuals to find grace, community, and the power to repent and change. We want those steeped in sensuality, those drowning in drunkenness, those who have visited Planned Parenthood, those with police records to know Jesus bids them to come, and they’ll find his lavish mercy in our churches.

We desperately want sinners in the world to find peace with God. And yet, we can never make peace with the sin in the world.

As much as we want to show kindness to our Muslim friends, their rejection of Christ crucified pains us. As much as we want to extend grace to homosexuals and your run-of-the-mill sex crazed American, their rejection of God’s law saddens us. We do not object to the sins in the world merely because they are wrong. We object to their sins, and ours, because we find them ugly, distasteful, and distressing.

In this respect, Lot is an example for us. J.C. Ryle remarked:

[Lot] did not at lengthy become cool and lukewarm about sin, as many do. Familiarity and habit did not take off the fine edge of his feelings, as to often is the case. Many a man is shocked and startles at the first sight of wickedness, and yet becomes at last so accustomed to see it that he views it with comparative unconcern” (Holiness, 180).

The Sanity of Shock

We must realize the strategy of the world and the devil is to make sin look and feel normal. As one theologian put it, “Our great security against sin lies in being shocked at it.” But in a world awash with sensuality in everything from beer commercials to teeny-bopper shows on Nickelodeon we are in grave danger of becoming insensitive to sin.

I’ll never forget the time in seminary a bunch of us were watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade–relatively speaking, a pretty safe movie. But there’s a scene where it comes out (verbally, not visually) that Indiana Jones and his father have slept with the same Nazi woman. This little revelation is meant as comic relief, and indeed the line from the father and the expression of his son when he finds out his dad had sex with the woman he did are delivered with good effect. Many people in the seminary room, men and women, laughed. At this point an older seminary student piped up, “Guys, that’s fornication. A man and his father should not be sleeping with the same woman. It’s not funny.” This man was not very popular at that moment, but he was right.

Can we truly say our righteous souls are tormented over the lawless deeds we see and hear? Or is more accurate to say we find them funny? Have we made peace with sins that once shocked us? Are we entertained by the things that used to appall us? Have we grown calloused to impurity and comfortable with iniquity?

At bottom, we are not tormented because we do love. We do not love the lost enough to be pained by their poor choices. And we do not love God’s law enough to lament the breaking of it. Truth be told, we are tickled by the world’s sensuality, not tormented. We may weep out of laughter or even cry out over the all the mistakes the church has made. But few of us can honestly say, “My eyes shed streams of tears, because people do not keep your law” (Psalm 119:136).