Lord, we ask You that, in the ministry of Your Word, we would be those who truly lay hold of the Word, keep it, and ponder it.
And Lord, we ask tonight that Your love would prepare us so that we might be those who are for building and the building up in love of Your saints in Your house.
Lord, we thank You for all that You have given us. And Lord, we know how You love to give good gifts to Your children. So we would say, “Lord, give us more. Give us even more.” And we will give You all the glory.
In Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
Well, a couple of months ago—and it might have been three or four months ago; I cannot remember—I was sitting right there on the end of the couch, and Kit was sitting down on the ground right over there. We were at a brothers’ meeting.
I think it was toward the end, and Kit said, “Do you know what I believe the Lord is saying to us in these days?”
Everybody sort of looked, and he said, “I think the first thing He is saying is warfare. And the second thing He is saying is love.”
Man, when I heard it, it was just sort of something I thought I could have finished myself—from his mouth to my mind, you know. It could have been, “Yes, that is it. Amen. Amen. Amen.”
So in those days, I had been thinking about what I would be sharing in California, in Santa Barbara, because in whatever time that was, it still was maybe possible—I do not know if it ever was—to go to Santa Barbara.
That afternoon, I was considering his remark, and these four things came to me:
Now, this warfare—do not be fooled—we are in this great warfare continually. I think the Lord is helping us to learn, and learn to pray, and learn to intercede. You know, we are small and not much, but the Lord is teaching us.
If we are not possessing these things, these things that the Lord has been very specific with us about—“A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you,” in John 13—then we are missing what He has charged us with.
This is My commandment, that ye love one another, even as I have loved you.
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
Ye are My friends, if ye do the things which I command you.
How did the Lord love us? He has no greater love than that He lays down His life for His friends. “You are My friends if you do what I tell you to do.”
So we are speaking of a love in our hearts for the Lord’s people, not just a kindly inclination, or finding one or two who are really my cup of tea and becoming a mutual admiration society. They wrote a song about that a zillion years ago.
But we are to love the unlovely. I mean, to really lay hold of this thing, not as though it is the Lord’s suggestion.
The enemy—powers and principalities, forces of darkness—would try to take it away from us. I do not think that Ephesus came to where she came in Revelation 2, when the Lord says, “I have this against you, that you have left your first love,” simply because they drifted. I think there was a force against them. There was war against them. There were powers and principalities coming against them.
So we have to learn warfare. And we also have to see the things the Lord has charged us with, so that we might be especially faithful in those things.
The first thing I thought of was warfare and the love of the Lord’s people. So that is what I would like to speak to you about tonight.
Since I am going to refer back to this, I will go ahead and read these Scriptures from Peter.
Second Peter 2, verse 5. These, by the way, are great mysteries that I do not understand. But I want to understand them, and I think the only way I will be able to understand them is with the eyes and the heart of God.
And spared not the ancient world, but preserved Noah with seven others, a preacher of righteousness, when He brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly.
And here we go:
And turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes condemned them with an overthrow, having made them an example unto those that should live ungodly;
and delivered righteous Lot, sore distressed by the lascivious life of the wicked
(for that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their lawless deeds):
the Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptation, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment unto the day of judgment.
Righteous Lot. His righteous soul. That righteous man.
Because if you had just left it to me to fill in some of these lines for Peter, I would not have said anything like this about Lot. I would have said, “What a guy. I do not know what he came to be. I do not know if he was, as we would say, saved.”
Righteous? That righteous man? His righteous soul? This is a mystery to me.
Let me tell you a little bit of the story of righteous Lot. But first, I would like to give a very brief description of the people of God, because what I wrote here is warfare and the love of the Lord’s people.
Now, who are the Lord’s people? The Lord’s people are everyone who belongs to the Lord.
You have believed on the Lord Jesus, and you have been given the Holy Spirit to come into your spirit, and He indwells you. Then, because you are a believer, the Holy Spirit has baptized you into Christ, so you are in Him. He is in you. You are in Him.
And you are a part of this one new man. God is building in this one new man, and He does not just build by Himself. Uh-uh. He has fellow builders. All of us are fellow builders.
It is not just, “Well, the Holy Spirit is doing this and doing that, and too bad these people did not make the right appropriation of the Holy Spirit.” No, the Lord has been training us, all of His people, so that we could be building one another up in love.
So that we could even come to the unlovely and not say, “Oh no, not that guy again. Oh, not that sister again. Man, I have been worn out with this one or that one for as much as I care to be,” as you sneak around the corner to make sure you do not have contact with somebody.
But it may be that you were the Lord’s portion for that one to finally come into a measure of fullness.
Now, is it everybody who is in Christ also meets in my assembly? No. It is everyone who is in Christ.
I cannot go out and love everybody in the whole world. You know, there is no time. But there are 168 hours in a week, and there are people who are given to me—not only in our assembly, but people through the week, other Christians someplace. You see them, and you know that you have a word for that person.
Sometimes we are so timid to say something because we do not want people to think ill of us, or to think that we feel ill of them, when this is our business: loving one another, building up the body of Christ in love.
Okay, we will come back to all this stuff, I think, as we go along. But I would like to tell you the first story about Lot.
Lot began with Abraham. I am going to use Abraham; I am not going to go from Abram to Abraham and try to do all that. You all know who he is.
Abraham, when he was called by God—the God of glory—was not called in Haran. Remember, that is where the father moved them to in Genesis 12.
It says clearly in Acts 7, when Stephen was very close to being stoned but before he gave this wonderful, glorious address—and I am so glad he did, because we can learn so much from the Old Testament through Acts 7—Stephen said:
Brethren and fathers, hearken. The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Haran.
Then Stephen begins quoting some of what Genesis 12 says. So Abraham must have come out of that encounter with the living God amazed.
The Lord told him three things. He said, “I want you to come out of this city and your country. I want you to come out from your father’s house, and I want you to come away from your relatives.”
But when he came out and spoke the vision to his family, it must have touched everybody. It seems to me, by all the things I can count by, that this happened when he was fifty-five.
At that time, he did not move out from his father. They did one of the three things: they moved away from their country. As Genesis says, Terah took his son Abraham, his other son Nahor, Lot, and their wives, and they were attempting to move into the land of Canaan.
But they could not. Something prevented them. They could only get as far as Haran, and Haran means crossroads.
So here they are, living in Haran. Abraham has only done one thing that the Lord told him to do, but the Lord begins to bless him in Haran. He begins to give him all sorts of servants, flocks, goats, sheep, camels—all sorts of things, tangible wealth—just blessing him greatly.
From fifty-five to seventy-five, he was in Haran, probably for about twenty years, when his father died.
Now I think he feels free. To tell you the truth, if you asked whether Abraham was doing a good thing when he stayed by his father, or a bad thing because he did not leave his father, I could not tell you that. He lived a long time. I know that the Scriptures say to honor your father and mother, and I also know that the Lord said, “Get away from your father’s house and your relatives.”
So he had been there for that period of time. Let us turn back to Genesis while we are talking about him and his nephew.
Genesis 12, verse 4:
So Abram went, as the Lord had spoken unto him; and Lot went with him.
And Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran.
And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother’s son, and all their substance that they had gathered, and the souls that they had gotten in Haran; and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan; and into the land of Canaan they came.
Now, this is interesting because Lot was his nephew, but he may have been older than Abraham. They had these three brothers: Abraham, Nahor, and Haran. Haran was mentioned last because he was the least important.
We know this because Nahor, one of the brothers, married one of his older brother Haran’s daughters. Haran, that third brother, died in Mesopotamia in the presence of his father.
So Terah takes the other two and Lot—Abraham, Nahor, and Lot, Abraham’s nephew. It could be that Abraham and Lot were the same age, but I think they were around the same age or something.
They entered the land of Canaan. You see throughout the account that Lot goes with Abraham.
Genesis 13, verse 1:
And Abram went up out of Egypt, he, and his wife, and all that he had, and Lot with him, into the South.
And verse 5:
And Lot also, who went with Abram, had flocks, and herds, and tents.
They went together to Egypt, and they came out of Egypt by the grace of God. Finally, they came to the point where the Lord had multiplied their stuff so much that their different herdsmen began to quarrel.
Abraham said, “Look, brother, it is too much for the land to contain this. So if you pick the right, I will go to the left. You pick the left, I will go to the right. You have first choice.”
What a man this is. Your first choice of the land.
Of course, Abraham lived in Canaan’s tableland. Lot looked around, looked down at the Jordan Valley, and saw that it looked like the garden of God. It was well-watered and looked like a paradise. He said, “Oh yeah, I will go there.”
Abraham continued to live where the Lord had called him to. So this finally is the separation of Abraham and his last relative.
After they were separated, the Lord said in Genesis 13:14:
And the Lord said unto Abram, after that Lot was separated from him, Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art northward and southward and eastward and westward:
for all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever.
And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth: so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered.
Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for unto thee will I give it.
Then Abram moved his tent and came and dwelt by the oaks of Mamre, which are in Hebron, and he built an altar to the Lord.
Now, when Lot went down to the valley of the Jordan, of all the places he could have lived, Sodom was probably the most cosmopolitan thing they had going.
I think it was a city of the arts, a city with schools for rich people, a city of philosophy, a city full of wonderful things that were a delight to the eye, desirable to make one wise, and good for food. It was full of those things.
So he went and pitched his tent toward Sodom. Not in Sodom—he was just going to pitch it toward Sodom.
The Lord continued to bless Abraham. Lot probably felt that he had the best of everything. He had all the culture of Sodom and all the riches with which he had been blessed, but he was just far enough removed from Sodom to say, “I have some sort of testimony.”
Then came the war of the kings.
These four kings speak of a lot. Chedorlaomer was king of Elam, and Elam was the country from which the Medes and Persians came—the Medo-Persian Empire. All these things are talking about empires that came later. You can read about them in Daniel, and we have talked about them from Daniel.
Arioch, king of Ellasar, speaks of Assyria, one of the other great empires. The only one almost represented here that we do not have is Rome.
Then Amraphel, king of Shinar. What is Shinar? Babylon. That is why they built Babel on the plains of Shinar.
The last one is Tidal, king of Goyim. The Goyim are the nations.
So you are looking here not just at some kings from someplace and some war happening. You are looking at most of the predecessors to the seven world empires, who all, in some way, shape, or form, persecuted Israel and took Israel captive.
Assyria took the northern ten tribes away into captivity. The Medo-Persian Empire had them in captivity. And I look at the king of Goyim, the king of nations, as the Greeks, who conquered the largest space there was, the largest empire there was.
So here come these mighty states—kings—looking for war. Not only that, they had already defeated giants, whole cultures of giants.
They went down to Sodom and Gomorrah and stretched out their troops against Sodom and Gomorrah. There was Lot right in the middle of everything because his tent was pitched toward Sodom.
When this war happened, righteous Lot was taken with all those wicked people. His righteous soul, which had been vexed so much by some of the evil of Sodom and Gomorrah, was taken captive with the rest of them.
One of the captives got loose from those kings and came running to Abraham and said, “Your nephew Lot is among those who have been taken captive.”
I am about to show you a man on a full variant. Wait a minute: are you telling me that Abraham and his friends were going after them? I think these men were more than just Abraham’s pals. Mamre and his brothers Aner and Eshcol were possessors of a covenant with Abraham.
When that man came to Abraham and said, “Lot has been captured,” Abraham turned to his friends and said, “Well, I have to go after my nephew.”
You are looking at a man going against all odds. He was going to go down, and he was a mighty prince himself. His army was three hundred and eighteen men, born in his house, who could fight with a sword. That discounts the women, the oldsters, and the youngsters, but he was a prince of a few thousand.
All he could lead out of his house was three hundred and eighteen against the king that speaks of Assyria, the king that speaks of Medo-Persia, the king that speaks of Babylon, and the king that speaks of the nations.
They said, “We are as you are,” and they took their men.
Now Abraham—and he was not a young man—is going to put his own life at risk because his nephew had eyes full of lust. Lot was in a place where you could lust after things.
I would have been awfully tempted to say, “Lot, you got yourself into this. You never should have been there. You were vexed every day, but not vexed enough to move away from it.”
That is not what he did.
They all went out. At night, they divided up their three hundred and eighteen and whatever those three brothers had. They attacked them and pursued them even north of Damascus.
It was a mighty victory, and probably as miraculous as anything you would ever want to see in the Bible.
So here is Abraham, Lot, and all these kings coming back, and out comes Melchizedek.
This is the first time we see in the Scriptures the bread and the wine.
Of course, what this speaks of is the Lord Jesus—the Lord’s table—which speaks of the Lord Jesus laying down His life for people who, if you will excuse the observation, are not worth it.
If you think that you are worth the Savior’s blood, praise God for His eyes.
Here is Abraham, who went at risk of his life and all the lives of the men with him. When the king of Sodom wanted to give him a great amount of the booty, he said, “You can have all the goods, all the art treasures, all the stuff. We will just take the people and go back to our cities.”
Abraham said, “I would not touch anything you have. I would not touch anything that you have—not even a shoelace—lest you say, ‘I have made Abram rich.’ I belong to the living God.”
So righteous Lot moves on back down to Sodom with everybody else. Now, you think, surely he has learned something. But righteous Lot has not learned anything.
He has now moved. His tent is not merely pitched toward Sodom. When we see him later, he is living in a house—probably the largest house, because he is probably the richest man—inside Sodom.
You remember the story.
Would you think that if Abraham did what he did out of love—it must have been love; there could not have been any other motive—when he risked his life and rescued his nephew, he would say, “Okay, maybe we need to have a little talk. Now I have done this, but my life is not all about rescuing you. Could you just stay out of trouble?”
Then the Lord God Himself came to Abraham’s tent when he was about ninety-nine.
The Lord was musing in His own heart, and He said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, since he will surely become a father of a great people?” He wanted to teach Abraham His ways so that those ways would come down to his descendants.
So He said, “The outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah has come to Me. I am going to go down and see if that is the truth, and if it is, I am going to destroy the place.”
Abraham goes into intercessory mode. He is brave enough to address God Almighty and say, “What if the place had fifty righteous people? You would not destroy it for the sake of fifty?”
The Lord said, “If it has fifty, I will not destroy it.”
So Abraham said, “Lord, forgive me for being so bold, but what if it had forty-five? You would not destroy it for the sake of five?”
He kept on bargaining with the Lord and finally got it down to ten people. The Lord said, “If I can find ten righteous people in the city, I will spare it.”
Genesis 19, verse 1:
And the two angels came to Sodom at even; and Lot sat in the gate of Sodom: and Lot saw them, and rose up to meet them; and he bowed himself with his face to the earth;
and he said, Behold now, my lords, turn aside, I pray you, into your servant’s house, and tarry all night, and wash your feet, and ye shall rise up early, and go on your ways. And they said, Nay; but we will abide in the street all night.
Lot was sitting in the gate, which usually means at that time that he was one of the city fathers, one of the men on the council.
But he urged them strongly, because he knew what would happen in the square. So they turned aside to him and entered his house. He prepared a feast for them, baked unleavened bread, and they ate.
But before they lay down, the men of the city, even the men of Sodom, compassed the house round, both young and old, all the people from every quarter;
and they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the men that came in to thee this night? Bring them out unto us, that we may know them.
And Lot went out unto them to the door, and shut the door after him.
And he said, I pray you, my brethren, do not so wickedly.
He knows who those so-called brothers are.
Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing, forasmuch as they are come under the shadow of my roof.
And they said, Stand back. And they said, This one fellow came in to sojourn, and he will needs be a judge: now will we deal worse with thee, than with them. And they pressed hard upon the man, even Lot, and drew near to break the door.
But the men put forth their hand, and brought Lot into the house to them, and shut to the door.
And they smote the men that were at the door of the house with blindness, both small and great, so that they wearied themselves to find the door.
Then the men said unto Lot, Hast thou here any besides? Son in law, and thy sons, and thy daughters, and whomsoever thou hast in the city, bring them out of the place:
for we will destroy this place, because the cry of them is waxen great before the Lord; and the Lord hath sent us to destroy it.
Lot went out and spoke to his sons-in-law, who were to marry his daughters, and said, “Get out of this place, for the Lord will destroy this city.” But he appeared to his sons-in-law to be jesting.
And when the morning arose, then the angels hastened Lot, saying, Arise, take thy wife, and thy two daughters that are here; lest thou be consumed in the iniquity of the city.
And while he lingered, the men laid hold upon his hand, and upon the hand of his wife, and upon the hand of his two daughters; the Lord being merciful unto him: and they brought him forth, and set him without the city.
The compassion of the Lord was upon him. Is that a mystery?
A man who had made the choices Lot had made, who first pitched his tent toward Sodom and now was living in a house in it, with all of his wealth and all of his stuff—and the New Testament calls him righteous Lot, righteous man, his righteous soul. Here we hear that he received compassion from the Lord.
I am amazed.
And it came to pass, when they had brought them forth abroad, that he said, Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the Plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed.
But Lot said to them, “Oh no, my lords.”
I mean, this is the most amazing thing. Everything that God has a plan for him to do is, “Oh no, let us do this other thing. Oh no.” I mean, everything.
Does he think the Lord is saying, “Oh, I did not have quite the judgment that you had, so I guess most of My ideas for you were wrong”? No, the Lord knew exactly what He was doing.
It was Lot who was so vexed now, not by what the wicked Sodomites were doing, but because he was about to lose everything. He had invested everything in that city, all of his herds in the places around it with his herdsmen, and it was all about to go up in smoke.
And Lot said unto them, Oh, not so, my lords:
behold now, thy servant hath found favor in thy sight, and thou hast magnified thy lovingkindness, which thou hast showed unto me in saving my life; and I cannot escape to the mountain, lest evil overtake me, and I die:
behold now, this city is near to flee unto, and it is a little one: Oh let me escape thither (is it not a little one?), and my soul shall live.
And he said unto him, See, I have accepted thee concerning this thing also, that I will not overthrow the city of which thou hast spoken.
Haste thee, escape thither; for I cannot do anything till thou be come thither. Therefore the name of the city was called Zoar.
The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot came unto Zoar.
Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven;
and He overthrew those cities, and all the Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.
But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.
And Abraham gat up early in the morning to the place where he had stood before the Lord:
and he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the Plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the land went up as the smoke of a furnace.
Genesis 19, verse 30:
And Lot went up out of Zoar, and dwelt in the mountain, and his two daughters with him; for he feared to dwell in Zoar: and he dwelt in a cave, he and his two daughters.
And the firstborn said unto the younger, Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth:
come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.
So they did that.
Here is a man who goes through this holocaust.
It is interesting when you read the New Testament, in Luke 17, I think, that the Lord says, “It will be as it was in the days of Noah,” and then He says, “It will be as it was in the days of Lot.”
People always just think that means a holocaust, that something terrible happens. But do you know Noah inherited the earth?
He saved his wife, his sons, their daughters, got all the animals through, and he came off that ark and inherited the earth.
Lot ended up living in a hole in the ground. He lost his wife; he could not save her. His sons-in-law, who were betrothed to his daughters, were lost. He became a drunkard, lying with his own daughters—debased.
So we will come back to our original question. I do not understand righteous Lot. Peter, what were you not thinking? Or what were you thinking?
Well, praise the Lord it is Peter and not me, because Peter wrote as the Lord moved him.
Second Peter 2 again: “If He rescued righteous Lot.”
This is already after he had pitched his tent toward Sodom, after he had even moved toward there. Did he not get anything when he went with Abraham all those years?
When he came out of Ur with Abraham, when he stayed in Haran with Abraham, when he went to Shechem, when he came into the land with Abraham, when he went between Bethel and Ai, when he went with Abraham to the Negev, when there was a famine and they went to Egypt, when he came out of Egypt—had he not learned anything in those almost thirty years?
Abraham was called to that land, and Lot was a man we would call a redeemed one. Yet the New Testament calls him righteous Lot.
He pitched his tent toward Sodom, came within a thread of being taken captive except for the love of Abraham, and then Abraham began to intercede for him the way he did.
At the end of it, Lot ended up such a derelict. His oldest daughter became the mother of Moab, one of the peoples always against the Israelites. The younger became the mother of Ammon, another enemy of the people of Israel.
How can the Scriptures call this one a righteous man? Call his soul righteous?
Vexed—his soul vexed every day by all the wickedness around him—but not vexed enough to move.
Do you know that the people of God—we are talking about warfare and the love of the Lord’s people—the people of God have people just like Lot, always making the wrong decisions.
In a sense, unlovely. In a sense, a whole project in themselves. And sometimes a project over and over and over again.
The Lord said in John 13, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another.” This “one another” has gotten so big that it includes everyone in the body of Christ.
Are we willing to fight these battles so that we will not become sort of jaded? I have to admit that in the past I may have been jaded toward this person or that person who just seemed—excuse me—not worth it.
Then I thought, “Not worth it?” They were worth the blood of the Lord Jesus, who died for them.
I always say, especially in a terrible case, you never know whether people were genuinely saved or not because they are just falling into one disaster after another.
But I cannot really say that. Maybe they were worse than Lot.
Every child that has been born of God is part of the body of Christ.
There are people the Lord sends our way, people the Lord sends some other way.
When the Lord sends people who are deeply damaged, I guess we could wash our hands and say, “Well, you know, this person is unreachable, unhelpable.”
People under addictions who just go on and on—a little progress, and then return back to it.
In these last days, what little one, who is a member of the body of Christ, would we withhold our love from? Love to the uttermost.
Who will we withhold it from? Would we say, “Well, we are going to help the worthy problems, but look at all these people who seem sort of helpless”? You can figure out ways to write people like that off.
The enemy would have us run problem people away. Amen.
He would use anything in his arsenal—deception, whipping up our self-love.
That ye love one another, even as I have loved you.
The Lord’s coming is very near. I just do not think that at this time of the age we should let ourselves be somehow dissuaded by the enemy from being willing to go not just the first mile, but the extra mile, the third mile, the fourth mile.
“Lord, what does it take? Lord, how? Show me how to help this one receive compassion for more.”
Even all those two thousand years later, Peter is saying he was a righteous man, for the righteous soul.
Warfare and the love of the Lord’s people.
Let us go out after this, tonight or sometime tomorrow, and ask the Lord, “Lord, You know all things. Lord, You know me and You know my heart. Lord, am I such a person?”
Will I be there for the seemingly hopeless cases that You bring our way?
People of God: everyone who is in Christ.
Will the enemy have his victory over a Lot, just like he did in Ephesus? They did not know it. They thought they were quite successful.
They left their first love.
Well, why do we not have a few prayers?