Matins Devotion: March 14, 2025

Genesis 13

When Lot chooses to settle in the Jordan Valley, he does so because, as Moses tells us, “it was well-watered everywhere, like the Garden of the Lord.” In other words, it was so well-watered that it wouldn’t take much effort to grow your crops and have an abundant, comfortable life. That’s essentially what Adam and Eve had in the garden of the Lord. It’s what they lost in the fall when the world became a place filled with thorns and thistles, a world where they had to undertake brutal labor to grow their food and survive. “So,” Lot seems to think to himself, “let Abram labor in the land of thorns and thistles. I’m going to labor in the land where it seems that the curse was never spoken.”

But we all know the end result. The valley, Sodom and Gomorrah, is filled with perverse, vile men who end up destroyed by the Lord. The suffering-free land is filled with immense suffering and judgment. Lot is forced to flee, loses his wife, becomes a joint father-grandfather of incest to two sons who will become nations devoted to idolatry and wickedness.

And so, let us learn the lesson of Lot. If you want to escape the curse of Adam, there’s only one way out–through the blood of the New Adam, through the redemption and salvation of Jesus Christ, through the nail-pierced foot of our Lord that has destroyed the sins of man and crushed the head of the serpent. Every other attempt to build paradise on earth will fail, and every other attempt will only attract the perverse and the vile, the slothful and the arrogant, the liars and murderers and thieves. So it was for Lot, so it is with communism, with trans-humanism, with cults of all stripes throughout history. If you want to live in the garden of the Lord, only the Lord will take you there.

Believe in him and he will. Cling to Jesus Christ, cling to his death and resurrection, his victory over the grave, and when he lifts you up from the grave, you will see the paradise that no sinful hands could build, the paradise built by the sinless, nail-pierced hands of God’s own son.