"My lords, please turn aside to your servant's house and spend the night and wash your feet. Then you may rise up early and go on your way." They said, "No; we will spend the night in the town square." But he pressed them strongly; so they turned aside to him and entered his house. And he made them a feast and baked unleavened bread, and they ate.The Bible says that Lot made them a great feast, and they ate. I correlate this with the story in Luke 24:36-43. After Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead, he appeared to some of his disciples who were walking down the road. When they saw him, they were scared because they thought that he was a ghost:
- Genesis 19:2, 3
As they were talking about these things, Jesus himself stood among them, and said to them, "Peace to you!" But they were startled and frightened and thought they saw a spirit. And he said to them, "Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? "See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have." And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. And while they still disbelieved for joy and were marveling, he said to them, "Have you anything here to eat?" They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them.
In my last post I used this passage to prove that some angels, being spirits, do not have flesh and bones. As we can see, these verses also prove that by eating food, Lot's visitors were physical beings even though they were angelic beings. Instead of pulling out the scrolls and teaching his disciples that spirits don't exist or that spirits can't appear to the living, Jesus taught them “a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have." Then he proved that he himself wasn't a spirit by eating the meat they had with them. Regarding this passage Matthew Henry says, “He eats with them, to show that he had a real and true body.” If Jesus can prove to his disciples by eating “before them” that he has a physical body, then surely the angels in Genesis 19 are proving the same thing by eating with Lot and his family.
It is unclear if Lot was aware at this time that these men were angels (Heb. 13:2). What we do know is that Sodom was full of evil people and they didn't like visitors. When they heard that Lot had visitors, all the men in the city surrounded the house and demanded that Lot allow them to rape his guests. Lot went outside to try to reason with the men of the city, but the mob only grew angrier with Lot:
Then they pressed hard against the man Lot, and drew near to break the door down. But the men reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them and shut the door. And they struck with blindness the men who were at the entrance of the house, both small and great.
- Genesis 19:9-11
The next morning the angels urged Lot to leave the city quickly.
But he lingered. So the men seized him and his wife and his two daughters by the hand, the Lord being merciful to him, and they brought him out and set him outside the city.
- Genesis 19:16
This is a remarkable story on many levels but for the scope of this post we will only concentrate on what this story tells us about the physical nature of Lot's visitors. Note that on two different occasions they use their strength to physically move people. First they pull Lot inside the house to rescue him from an angry mob (Gen. 19:10) then, when Lot lingered in the city, the angels “seized him and his wife and his two daughters by the hand” and placed them outside the city themselves (Gen. 19:16). As John Milor writes in Aliens in the Bible, “In order to talk with Lot like a normal person, eat food, and grab and pull Lot's arm on two occasions, they had to be physical entities.”
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Really good post! You were clear, concise, and logical. I agree with your perception that they had to be in physical form. Man reacts quite differently to a spiritual visitation. To offer food is to acknowledge a physical form. I think when you're done with this, you should write a paper about angels. You seem to have found a great way to observe the phenomenon.
ReplyDeleteJude's epistle mentions angels in verse 6 and then in verse 7 that the residents of the plains including Sodom gave themselves over to sexual immorality and went after strange flesh. The Greek word for strange flesh includes the root _hetero_. This root means other or different and indicates that strange is reaching a bit. It paints Lot's neighboring males (from young to old) having an insatiable appetite for every type of sex. It shows that they thought the angels were flesh and perhaps that because the angels were different or "other" they either knew these "men" were something special or maybe even angels. Maybe they thought that the angelic relations that led to nephalim were now available to them eventhough consumation of relations would not possibly have led to offspring as it did earlier in Genesis.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous, that's a very astute observation and one I have considered many times. The Nephilim series will follow this one about angels. Stay tuned.
ReplyDeletecould you spend some time on gen 18 and 19? The LORD appears to Abraham as three men and Abe addresses them as LORD. Later all the men go to Sodom but the LORD remains. Lot is visited by two. Very confusing.
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