And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.
— Galatians 3:29

We know that Abraham and Lot were righteous men. They are often given as examples, as two types of believer. Abraham is the ideal believer, while Lot is usually taken to be the believer who lives in Sodom [sin], parties, drinks and gets up to all kinds of foolishness. Is that really so, or are we simply looking at Lot with fleshly eyes rather than spiritual ones?

At first Lot went with Abraham and Sarah, and everything was fine with him. When he left them and went to the other side of the Jordan, his problems began. Abraham in this case is a type of faith, and Sarah of grace. [Gal.4:22] So what does it mean to leave faith and grace? It is what the unbelieving Jews did, who rejected their Messiah and the righteousness of faith, and also insulted the Spirit of grace. [Rom.10:3; Heb.10:29] So Lot is a type of the one who is righteous by the law, who left faith and grace and went into law and works. Just as the children of Israel in the wilderness left the covenant of Abraham [faith] and Isaac [grace] and threw themselves into works when they said to Moses [the law] with one voice: “All that the LORD has spoken we will do” [Exd.19:8] In the same way the Galatians repeated the foolish act of the Jews in the wilderness when they tried to return to the law. From a human point of view, the Galatians did not get up to foolishness like the Corinthians, who went to sleep in pagan temples, took each other to court and got drunk, but Paul called them foolish.

Interestingly, the name Lot in Hebrew means “veil”, the veil of the law. Lot is a type of the righteous man living under the veil of the law of Moses. [2 Cor.3:15] “But didn’t Lot live in Sodom, the Las Vegas of its day, the city of sin? I’ve seen lots of believers in casinos!” And what were you doing there? Sodom in Hebrew means “burning”. Isn’t that the fire of condemnation, or of God’s judgment, from which Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt? And Lot himself sat in the gate of Sodom. The gate is the place of judgment, where the law dwells. After all, it was at the gate that Boaz, a type of Jesus, met the nearest relative, the law. It was condemnation Jesus was speaking of when He told Peter that the gates of Hades would not prevail against His church.

Abraham is in fact a type of every believer in Jesus, for believers in Christ are Abraham’s seed. Although at times he left his first love [out of fear], like the pastor of the church in Ephesus, he spent most of his time with her. The first time he left her was when he gave her to the Egyptian Pharaoh while he himself sat with Lot. Isn’t that just like when Christians say that grace is only for salvation from Egypt and from sin, while they themselves walk about with the veil of the law? Then with Hagar, when he thought he would bear fruit for God through his flesh and by keeping His commandments. Then when he gave her to Abimelech [My father is king]. That’s when Christians say that grace is also for unbelieving Jews and for backslidden Christians, who are called up to the front again to repent, although they themselves say that there is no more repentance for those who have fallen away. [Heb.6:6] Thank God that today’s Abrahams have begun to return to their Sarahs. For only with grace can a believer bear the fruit of the promise, or show forth Christ in his life. [Gen.21:1]