"...YHWH being merciful to him ..."

A few thoughts on Genesis 18:16-19:38 have been on my mind since I started writing this blog: in fact, finding a place to publish them is one reason I started. The passage concerns Sodom and Gomorrah, and in all the fuss about what all the sin of Sodom was and all the postmodern reaction to fire and brimstone (19:24), I guess others have like me missed that the passage is, like all of the story of Abraham, about the God who saves.
It kicks off with Abraham's intercession. God's chosen one has special access to God, that he might intercede for others and their salvation: Abraham is here a type of Christ - he shows us the work of Christ foreshadowed.
In Abraham's intercession, he prays on the basis that the righteousness of some is not just sufficient to find some way of getting them out of the city, but is sufficient grounds to save the whole city: again we see Christ foreshadowed, who, by virtue of His righteousness delivers the entire church of all ages - the righteousness of One delivering a great people, not of ten delivering a city.
Then there's the escape of Lot. Notice how he's dragged out of the city? C S Lewis recounts similarly being dragged into salvation by God. Free will? Praise God - He loves us too much.
God's mercy to Lot is again quite dramatic: it extends to delivering the town of Zoar too. So committed is God to saving Lot that His deliverance is extended to others - that's what I call a wideness in God's mercy.
Finally, the story ends with the strange story of Lot becoming the father of his daughters' sons. We assume the sin of Sodom is that of homosexuality, first called a sin in Leviticus 18:22. Lot and his daughters commit sins listed in Leviticus 18:5-17, the same chapter but, by virtue of their positioning in the chapter, worse sins. If the traditional assumption is right, then the final story speaks a powerful message to all, but particularly those who single out sexual sins as particularly bad: our God saves sinners, even the ones we consider the worst (cf 1 Timothy 1:15).