19:16 The Merciful God The Lord rescued Lot because he was merciful, not because of Lot’s or his family’s righteousness. Sometimes God does save us from calamity, disaster, or other sources of suffering, but we must always acknowledge that he does so out of his mercy, not because we somehow deserve to be rescued.
19:30-38 The Origin of Rival Nations It is no accident that the Mosaic law spends significant time setting the proper boundaries for human sexual relations (Lev 18). Here we see that stepping outside of God’s intended plan for human intimacy resulted in the formation of two nations—the Moabites and the Ammonites—who would later become persistent thorns in the side of the nation of Israel and the source of much human suffering and misery.