One biblical passage that may puzzle readers at first is Gen 18:20-21, where God says, "How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin! I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me; and if not, I will know."
At this point in the narrative, God has just demonstrated his omniscience by reading Sarah's mind (vv 12-15), so there is no question that he knows what is going on in Sodom and Gomorrah. But it seems that he wants to model, for Abraham and all his descendants (vv 17-19), how to conduct a proper judicial proceeding, with a public trial based on the eyewitness testimony of multiple witnesses. (One scholar who has explored this approach to Gen 18-19 is James Bruckner.) Conducting such a trial also gives the people of Sodom and Gomorrah one more opportunity to repent.
The evidence is presented in Gen 19, when two angels arrive in Sodom. The first person to be examined is Lot, who shows great hospitality to his guests (vv 1-3), much as Abraham had in Gen 18.
However, that night an angry mob came to Lot's house, demanding that Lot surrender his guests to them. Lot could not dissuade the mob from its evil intentions, and the angels finally immobilized them by striking them blind.(vv 4-11).
At this point the evidence was in, and the cities of the plain were destroyed after Lot and his two daughters escaped to safety.
As readers we struggle to make a fair evaluation of Lot. Lot initially settled at Sodom because of the wealth in that region (Gen 13:10-13). Was he wrongly valuing wealth and ignoring the spiritual problems there? The fact that he offers his virgin daughters to the mob (Gen 19:8) suggests that his own morality has been compromised by his time in Sodom.
The Genesis narrative implicitly compares Lot to Abraham in a number of places, and the comparisons tend to be unfavorable to Lot. For example, while Abraham is a father of many nations (Gen 17:4-6), Lot is the father of two, and they both begin with acts of incest (Gen 19:30-38). Lot is saved from the cataclysm partly for Abraham's sake (v 29). He seems to be an example of 1 Cor 3:15, someone who is saved but whose work does not survive the fire.
On the other hand, Lot can be seen as a kind of Noah figure, maintaining a righteous witness before a corrupt society. The apostle Peter later described Lot as "a righteous man greatly distressed by the licentiousness of the lawless" (2 Peter 2:7).
Rob Wilson shared further reflections on Lot, Christian witness, and "radical hospitality" in a sermon on Seder 17 given on July 11, 2020.
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