REMEMBER LOT'S WIFE by Arthur Tappan Pierson

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 23, 1887

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 13, No. 24.

REMEMBER LOT'S WIFE.

By Arthur Tappan Pierson

Lot's wife looked back. The command was explicit: it forbade looking behind—and the word for "look" implies a deliberate contemplation, steady regard, the look of consideration, desire. She looked back wistfully, longingly. The fact was, her heart was yet in Sodom, where all her treasures were. She had become identified with her home there, and even the threatened wrath of God could not avert her eyes or quicken her steps. Abraham also "looked" toward Sodom, but the word signifies a rapid, and even unintentional, or casual, glance. He glanced with grief and awe: she gazed with longing and regret.

She doubtless looked back, as the Israelites did toward Egypt, longing to return, more willing to stay there amid the sins of the Sodomites than to abide apart with God. And so her heart's wish became a fact; her real prayer was strangely answered: where she lingered, there she should stay. She would look back, and henceforth should never look ahead. So sins become habits, and habits incrust us with fixedness, and transform us into immovable pillars, monuments of wrath. God fixed and rooted her where she was; his curse transfixed her, as it blighted, blasted, withered the barren fig-tree; and so Lot's wife, to this day, is herself the personification of Sodom, its sins, and its punishment.

The only safe obedience is a prompt, implicit, and exact conformity to God's command. No part of his word can be unheeded without risk; we may run from one peril only to fall a prey to another. A divided heart is like the "double" eye, and singleness of aim is as important as singleness of vision. A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.

Religion at bottom means renunciation. We cannot serve God and mammon. We are to give up what is sinful, selfish, sensual, devilish, leave them behind, and not even look back. God will have the whole heart or none. The narrow gate compels him who would enter to drop from his shoulder all worldly incumbrances. We go into God's Eden as naked as we come into life; we may not wear even the goodly Babylonian garment or bear the wedge of gold. A heart separated unto God is the prime necessity. Backward looks betray backward longings, and beget backward steps.

Lot's wife has always had more followers than God's angels have. Look at the worldly-minded disciples in the church today. Roused by fear to flee from the wrath to come, stirred by the warning of some special providence, or by the pressing entreaty of grace, they profess to leave Sodom behind. But they linger about the edge of destruction. They look back with longing, and linger and loiter on the way. And you may see them all about you, mere pillars of salt, without life or action, motion or emotion. The world has turned them to salt, not of the saving and savoring sort, but that which represents sterility. If they are saved from the fire, it is so as by fire, and their works are burned up. They have lost their testimony for God, and have become only a warning to backsliders.

Oh, ye who are making homes, where are you choosing to pitch your household tent? Where are you, husbands, leading your wives, and you, parents, your sons and daughters, to find their social and moral atmosphere? And you who have professed to flee from Sodom lest you partake of her crimes, look not back lest you partake of her plagues!—A. T. Pierson, D. D.