The Grass is Always Greener in Sodom

“Lot raised his eyes and saw all the vicinity of the Jordan, that it was well watered everywhere ... So Lot chose for himself all the vicinity of the Jordan.”

I have a friend.

He and I made our commitment to live for the Lord around the same time. But I stayed in our home area, and he went away to Hollywood to make his fortune.

Two Roads

He did. And I worked in a normal career, in the normal way, and made fractions of what he made. I went and visited him a few times as well, and saw his prosperity and success. I was glad for him to have achieved his dreams. But I didn’t feel sorry for myself, either. I had a long and meaningful career, caring for people in one of life’s best situations for doing that. Like him, I throve where I was planted, but less spectacularly and a lot less lucratively than he did, perhaps.

California used to be beautiful in a way that is hard to describe. I remember stepping off the plane for the first time, catching the cool smell of jasmine in the air ... a sun that hits you so hard it nearly knocks you down ... the brightness of the light everywhere ... colors and movement ... traffic and rolling hills. The road from LA to San Fran has a spectacular ocean view with a highway along it so picturesque that any automotive ads you ever see are more than likely to have been taken there. The desert is gorgeous in an indescribable way, and the beaches are lovely, ringed by premium restaurants and palatial mansions. Wealth and beauty are everywhere in the people, too. The young, handsome and talented flock there in hopes of achieving fame. You’ll never see such a good-looking group of valets, delivery people or waitresses as you’ll find in LA.

Another Side to California

But even then there was another side to California. As beautiful as it was, it was also squalid — morally squalid. The definite stench of arrogance, of excess and privilege was on every corner. I remember saying to my wife that while I would have enjoyed living there, I would never conceive of raising children there — the atmosphere was too deranged and out-of-touch with the real world for them to escape its taint. For many Californians the world seemed to end at the Tetons, the small, desert mountain range that hedges coastal Cali off from the rest of “flyover America”. They were their own universe, confident, strident and self-satisfied.

Nowadays, I hear California’s not doing so well. Incompetent and corrupt leftist politicians rule the roost. Not surprisingly, taxes are astronomical and businesses are fleeing the state. Wildfires destroy whole communities, even the homes of the wealthy and privileged. California cities are filled with the bodies of the homeless and the addicted. Parks are full of filth, tents and needles. Every overpass is a homeless camp. In one case, the law allows people to defecate in public on the medians and not clean up their mess if they are 200 feet or more from a restroom.

Indeed, the grass is always greener in Sodom.

Life in Sodom

Likewise, the moral condition of the state seems to have only gotten worse. Old legends about the casting couch and loose-loined Hollywood fêtes have been replaced by more confirmed concerns — rapacious “freak offs”, predatory producers and drugged starlets, child sex-trafficking rings, and even mass occult rituals as requisites of the social calendar of the “in” crowd. All this to energize a culture the goal of which is to generate ever-harder and more refined pornography and politically-correct propaganda. Old fears of California falling into the ocean seem less likely than it merely sinking into the cesspool. How can such a geographically-enchanting place be also the locus of the basest moral corruption? The paradox is stunning.

My friend doesn’t talk to me anymore these days. I don’t know why. The shut off was sudden, unannounced, unilateral and absolute. I don’t think I did anything to offend him — I had little enough chance for that, and I can’t mark a moment when we fought. But suddenly, he was gone. Perhaps he senses that we have parted company — him going off to a world I will never understand, and I living a life that seems to him too pedestrian, too ordinary and lacking the values he now holds. I can’t say.

Making a Choice

But I don’t imagine that Lot ever bothered to shoot off an email to Abram, either. They’d chosen different roads. One was hard, and was going to involve some desert and some dangers from foes; a continual wandering across a land that God had promised Abram to be his inheritance, but that he would never really be able to settle and possess.

“By faith [Abraham] lived as a stranger in the land of promise, as in a foreign land ... for he was looking for the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” Meanwhile, Lot got to settle into the lush Jordan valley; but also into the midst of sodomites, predators, and men of debauched character. And while Abraham’s soul would be refined by obedience and fellowship with God, Lot’s would be “oppressed by the perverted conduct of unscrupulous people — for by what he saw and heard that righteous man, while living among them, felt his righteous soul tormented day after day by their lawless deeds.”

What I can say is that Lot made a choice, too. He saw where the grass was greener. It didn’t really matter to him what the moral condition of the place might be; it promised an easier life, a place where he could become a man of the city, not some homeless vagrant wandering up and down the Promised Land. He wanted to settle — and both physically and morally, he did.

But God was not done with Sodom. The grass is only greener until it isn’t.

The Promise of Rescue

I’m so grateful to read that God rescued Lot out of Sodom. “The Lord knows how to rescue the godly from a trial, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment”, says Peter. He still calls Lot “righteous Lot” too. But Lot lost a lot by being where he had chosen to be. He lost his wife, of course, and he lost his sons-in-law; but he also lost his two daughters in a different way. For while Lot himself had managed to keep his moral compass relatively straight, his daughters had been influenced more heavily by the place in which they grew up, and we can see from their conduct that the sexual climate of Sodom had not failed to make its permanent mark on them. There are places where you just ought not to raise kids.

I pray for my friend every day. I think he’s a righteous man — righteous by the imputed righteousness of Christ, in whom he put his trust so many years ago. But I can’t help but be troubled by the thought that the powerful gravitation of the place where he lives might be crippling and stunting his spiritual life, or doing damage to the lives of his children. I just pray the Lord will deliver him — and them — from that.

Gomorrah, and Gomorrah, and Gomorrah ...

Be careful where you set your habitation. What you expose yourself to makes deep inroads on your mind. You can arrange your environment and lifestyle to enable greater spiritual obedience, or you can find yourself in one where the whole flow of life is upstream against you.

I’m not saying nobody should live in wicked places — the world always needs prophets. But that sort of role, the missionary among the wicked, is not for the faint of heart or the weak of faith. It always comes with costs you didn’t predict.

Most of us aren’t living in Hollywood or any such dark place. But we are not immune to Sodom’s gravitation. Even the most serious of us is going to be exposed constantly to stuff that just pops up unbidden in all sorts of ways. Are we not constantly being offered inappropriate content on the internet, the latest Netflix comedy special with only a little bit of smut in it and a few blue words, or video games that invite us to fantasize just a little about theft or greed or sex or killing? And as we know, there’s always hot and cold 24-hour porn a click away.

Nowadays it takes a lot of self-discipline to stay out of all that. It’s hard. Sodom’s always open for business, it seems. Everybody’s playing, so it’s really hard to stay out of the game. The grass always looks a little greener for those who can find a way to compromise with it a bit. Not too much, but just enough to stay “normal”.

Staying Normal

Normal is sometimes just another word for compromised. The more wicked this world gets, the closer we find our tent is to Sodom. When you pitch your tent nearby, don’t be so sure you won’t end up living there yourself. The flesh has a powerful pull.

It all comes under judgment eventually. For us as Christians, that’s probably the most serious danger: we may escape the destruction of Sodom, but we might not have much to show for it when we do. “Saved so as by fire.” That’s what scripture calls it. Rescued from this world under judgment, but with nothing to show for it. Picture Lot fleeing the city where he made his life, with all that green grass going up in flames. Could that be the future?

I pray it that won’t happen to my friend. I also pray it won’t happen to me. But the decisions we make now are setting up our prospects. I’d like to think I’ll get out of here as the sojourner Abraham, not as the fleeing Lot. May the Lord give us the wisdom to see what really matters, and the courage we need to choose the right priorities now, and the fortitude to tough out life on the margins, with a view to the Kingdom.

A little bit of desert-dwelling today might make for a much better tomorrow.