THE PURPOSE OF THIS DEVOTION IS TO DEMONSTRATE THAT FROM THE GREATEST EVIL GOD CAN BRING FORTH THE GREATEST GOOD.
We know the story of Sodom well: Abraham remained in the mountains where he continued his ministry of intercession and personal evangelization along with his covenant wife Sarah. Lot migrated to the place that was pleasing to his eye, and there he built his future among the most wicked sinners of the post-diluvial world.
When the time came for God to execute judgment on Sodom, Abraham’s intercession was able to go only so far. It was not enough to spare the entire culture of evil that was practiced in the cities of the plain. When the time came to flee—for only separation from evil assures any of us of escape from judgment when it falls—Lot’s wife turned back to see the destruction: she still had sons-in-law, and possibly some children, there in Sodom. Yeshua warned us, “Remember Lot’s wife.” She was overwhelmed by the fire as she turned.
When Lot and his two daughters, the eldest and the youngest, got away, they three eventually found shelter in a cave because they feared the inhabitants of the nearby city of Zoar, a village that barely avoided the overthrow that engulfed Sodom.
The two daughters made their father drunk and lay with him to conceive seed so that they might extend life from him.
The child of the oldest was named Moab; the child of the youngest was named Ben-Ammi.
The text concerning the conception by the eldest daughter reads (Gen 19:37a):
VA’TEI’LED HAB’KI’RAH BEIN
VAT’TIK’RA SHMO MOAV
And the elder bore a son
and called his name Moab.
So, then: what actually escaped from Sodom?
Follow this closely. The GREATEST thing that escaped from Sodom was the womb of the Aishet Chaiyil—the Woman of Valor—of Ruth 3:11, Proverbs 31, and Luke 1:27—the fulfillment of the Great Womb of Genesis 3:15!
It was the child of the eldest daughter of Lot that gave birth to the nation that eventually produced Ruth the Moabitess. She is the first woman called “Aishet Chayil”—Woman of Valor—in the Bible in Ruth 3:11! She is the great-grandmother of King David. Therefore from her, not merely from Sarah and the wife of Judah, came the King of Judah and of all Israel. David was one of the Great Escapees from Sodom!
But also from her came the woman whom Solomon in Proverbs called “Aishet Chayil.” This was probably Shulamite—the true love of Solomon in the Song of Songs. She was Solomon’s idealized woman! Her name is a female form of his own name Shlomo. She was his true Neged, the perfect correspondent of his own soul.
But even more than David and Solomon escaped from Sodom in the womb of the eldest daughter of Lot. For it was from David’s son Nathan that the Great Aishet Chayil—the fulfiller of the Archtypal prophecy of Genesis 3:15—came into the world. It was from the womb of Miriam, the virgin mother of the Son of God, that God brought forth his Son, according to the natural order, into the world.
So then—in a sense—the body of Jesus escaped from Sodom through the womb of the Greatest Aishet Chayil that descended from the eldest daughter of Lot.
This is breathtaking. What can God salvage from an evil world?
I wonder what he may cause to escape from the sordid time in which we now live?
I wonder what he may be salvaging even now from the ruin that you have experienced in your own life.
