27 And Abraham gat up early in the morning to the place where he stood before the Lord:

28 And he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.

29 And it came to pass, when God destroyed the cities of the plain, that God remembered Abraham, and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow, when he overthrew the cities in the which Lot dwelt.

When Abraham beseeched the Lord to spare Sodom and Gomorrah, much of his concern may have been based on the fact that Lot lived there. Yes, he pleaded for the lives of any righteous unknowns, but also for the one righteous that he already knew personally.

But in our record never shows Abraham speaking specifically for Lot. Abraham set the terms for preserving the cities at ten righteous, God had agreed to that plan, and the cities were accordingly destroyed. But even though Lot was not explicitly spoken of, God did not forget about him. God did not need Abraham to ask Him to do something good in Lot’s case. God cared for Abraham and He cared for Lot, and He would take care of them, even when He had not been requested to do so.

We think of God as not being aware of our desires because they so often go unmet. The things we explicitly ask for are usually not answered, at least not in the way we envisioned. That was how things were for Abraham, too. Abraham asked for Sodom and Gomorrah to be spared, and that was not what happened, but God still took care of Abraham even so.

When we stop gauging God’s care for us by whether we receive what we want for ourselves, then we can start to appreciate that we are already receiving what He wants for us instead. He may not care for us how we want, but He does care for us how we need, and He does so more than we give Him credit for.

26 But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.

The moment where Lot’s wife looks back to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and is turned to a pillar of salt is extremely abrupt and confusing. This one, fifteen-word sentence is crammed between two completely different paragraphs, dropping a shocking detail with absolutely no context! Clearly there is more to this story, but all that survives for us today is an extreme abbreviation.

Of course, we do know that the Lord’s instruction to them was “escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain.” Lot’s wife was clearly disobeying the middle instruction there, to not look back, but it seems likely that it was more than just that. The Lord was not just saying “don’t look over your shoulder,” he was saying “don’t hesitate, don’t falter, don’t contemplate returning.” And so when this verse says she “looked back” it may not mean that she was just curious to see the destruction of the city, but that she was affixing herself to return to it.

This interpretation is supported by the words of Jesus in Luke 17:26-33. Here Jesus refers to both the flood in Noah’s time and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and he stresses that when the moment of reckoning comes, one must run to safety without trying to return to their house for their belongings. And in that context he tells his listeners “remember Lot’s wife.”