In continuation with our war against alcohol, we today tell the Biblical story of how two daughters of Lot, the nephew of Abraham, used alcohol to induce their father to sleep with them and produced the bastard sons called Moab and Ben- ammin or the peoples known notoriously as the Moabites and the Amorites, the Godless ones. The story is told in Genesis Chapter 19: 30-38.
As the Bible sometimes does, it does not dignify unjust, sinful or unfaithful men and women whose account it wants to give to act as a guide to our conduct by using their real names. And so the two daughters of Lot who did a bad thing in the eyes of the Lord, were simply designated as ‘’the first-born’’ and the other as ‘’the younger’’.
When you dwell in a place, it has a way of influencing your conduct. The spirit of the place enters you and begins to command you to act in the way and manner of that place.
When Lot parted ways from his uncle Abraham, the Bible tells us that he went South and settled in the Godless land called Sodom. At a point, the people of Sodom and Gomorrah took to many grievous sins including homosexuality and God decreed their destruction. But because of Abraham’s intercession for this city on account of his nephew Lot, God directed his avenging angels sent on that assignment to spare the lives of Lot and members of his household.
When the dateline for the destruction was given, the angels conscripted and forcibly relocated Lot and his people to a land called Zoar in order to spare them from the fire and brimstones used for the sacking of Sodom and Gomorrah. But Lot was still not comfortable staying in Zoar. He therefore decided to leave here and dwell in a cave in the mountain with his two daughters.
Surely, because the spirit of whoredom dwelled in Sodom and Gomorrah, the sprit of unspeakable sexual immorality had entered into the daughters of Lot. One day a demonic thought entered into the mind of the first-born daughter who told the younger one the following: ‘’ Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth’’.
‘’Come’’, continues the first-born, ‘’let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father’’.
The story continues in verse 33: ‘’And they made their father drink wine that night and the first-born went in; and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down ; nor when she arose’’.
The next day the same procedure or protocol was followed by the two daughters and the younger one did precisely what her older sister had done the previous day with the same result. Their father was violated, made a fool of and thoroughly dishonoured. And what was the outcome of their sinful adventure? Each conceived and gave birth to a son with the name of the first-born daughter’s own as Moab and that of the younger as Ben-ammin.
What is wrong here? First, the girls were faithless and wanted to play God to help themselves in the circumstances they felt they were helpless in. Second, I think the real motivation for the girls was that they wanted sexual gratification. They were burning with passion in a place where there were no men and needed a release from it and not their stated reason of preserving their father’s seed. If that was their real reason and for the sake of parental honour and respect, they ought to have discussed that matter with their father and not take a unilateral decision that will make their father an unconscious partaker in their sin. If they had told Lot of their fears, he would have prayed to God on their behalf and a solution would have been found. May be God would have commanded Lot to move back to Zoar or anywhere else and dwell among men who would have become husbands to his daughters.
God had made sexual relations between near relatives a taboo, an abomination, no matter the circumstance. If there had not once dwelled in Sodom and Gomorrah and imbibed their spirit, the taboo instinct in man would have dissuaded them from carrying on with their evil scheme.
Four, it looks like Lot himself was not entirely guiltless. He was an alcoholic in the first place which is why his girls came up with the idea of employing that instrument to achieve their goal and which also explains why when his girls doused him with it and he swallowed it hook, line and sinker and was virtually dead with inebriation.
Having once lived in the sexually charged atmosphere of Sodom where there were constant experimentations with all manner of sexual deviation, I think Lot must have displeased God by choosing to live in an arid sexual environment in a mountain with animals. Was he thinking of sexual bestiality for his daughters if he, on his part, had gone sterile after losing his wife in Sodom? I think Lot was unfair to himself and his daughters for that choice of habitation after Sodom. God is not against sex. What he abhors is the wrong use of it.
Five, God forbade looking at your father’s or mother’s nakedness not to talk of touching the vital members of their bodies.
I am, therefore, filled with goose pimples just imagining the things the girls must have each done to their father those two consecutive nights. How they each went in, probably naked or disrobed themselves without the decency and nicety of a man doing it for them; how they removed his clothes or whatever scanty covering he had on; how they took hold of his manhood, possibly fondled with it in order to activate it ( because the Bible said the man was practically dead as he did not perceive what was being done to him from the beginning to the end) and when it was activated, how they mounted the man; assuming a commanding position( because in that state of dead inebriation, he could not have been roused to even a state of semi-consciousness to assume his natural sexual position) and how he was left in a pool of the dirt of the seminal fluid, possibly mixed with sweat, released in the process.
The Bible does not withhold the truth about anything even if the sexual ones sound pornographic or indecent. I suspect that these girls were not virgins; for if they were the Bible would have said so. My hunch is that they were girls well versed in the art of copulation. If they did not mount their father in order to conceive, they must have spilled or extracted his seed and inserted it into themselves. Whatever may be the real details of what happened those two nights, their father was thoroughly violated and dishonoured, contrary to the decree of God.
And what was the facilitator of that act of violation and dishonour? It is alcohol, a complicit enabler in virtually most evils requiring foolish courage, bravado or the loss of inhibition done on earth. Why must we, therefore, not mount a war against alcohol, a substance that is so beguiling that urges men and women to do evil continually? It did not start its war against man today and it is not likely to end its war against man today or any day soon unless we ourselves decide to end its power over us and against us.