There are many themes from Genesis 19 worthy of reflection (e.g. Lot’s failed leadership of his home; the spiritually corrosive effects on Lot and every member of his family of longterm exposure to the wickedness of Sodom; the extravagant mercy of God in extricating him from Sodom before its destruction; or the perversity of his daughters’ incest). A chapter full of one sobering lesson after another.
But I’ll restrict my reflections in this post to vv.30-38, or rather, their stunning place within the wider arc of the story of redemption that Scripture presents to us. The question that concerns me is not what led to the incest of Lot’s daughters, but what God, in His grace, brought forth from it.
In verses 37-38, Moses explains the bitter consequences of the incest of Lot’s daughters. He tells the Exodus generation (his original audience) that the Moabite and the Ammonite peoples trace their respective lines back to Lot’s daughters. This doesn’t mean much to us, I’ll grant you, but to Moses’ original audience, this was an enormously relevant connecting of the dots, since the Moabites and Ammonites were bitter antagonists of the Israelites as they emerged from the wilderness on their way to the promised land. It was Moab that hired Balaam to curse Israel (Numbers 22; Deuteronomy 23:3-6). Later, as Moses charges Israel to remember this historical hostility in Deuteronomy 23, he concludes his warning with this note of God’s triumph on Israel’s behalf: “instead the LORD your God turned the curse into a blessing for you because the LORD your God loved you” (Deut. 23:6). God turned the curse into a blessing.
The rest of Scripture shows us that He continued to turn the curse of Moab into a blessing for His people. Remember that King David’s great grandmother was Ruth (Ruth 4:17-22), and consider that this Ruth was a Moabite (Ruth 1:4). This fact of Moabite blood flowing in David’s veins, by the way, explains why the book of Ruth (in our English Bibles) is situated so appropriately between Judges and 1 Samuel: it explains this fact about Israel’s King (who was a man after God’s own heart) by demonstrating that, even though she was a Moabite, his great grandmother Ruth was a woman after the Lord’s own heart. So, rather than besmirching David’s kingly credentials, his Moabite blood–given that he comes by it through Ruth–actually embellishes them!
So much so, in fact, that Ruth–the Moabitess–is given a place of honor in the opening chapter of the New Testament, as Matthew details the genealogy of our Lord Jesus: “and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of David the king” (Matthew 1:5-6). The clearest proof of Ruth’s greatness is not that her Moabite blood flowed in King David’s veins, but that it flowed in the veins of Jesus Christ, the sweetest fruit and purest seed of blessing that God, in His amazing grace, brought forth from the curse of Lot’s daughters.