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I find it interesting that there were two angels sent to Lot’s house to save four people. There was a hand for each person God desired to save. In other words, there is nothing lacking in God’s plan for Salvation. Before destruction, He always rescues His people, and that rescue is never inadequate. But after He saves us and removes us from the wreckage of our past, there is an expectation to move forward. There is a calling to obedience.
Then one of the angels said, “Run for your lives! Don’t look back and don’t stop in the valley. Run to the hills, so that you won’t be killed.”
Genesis 19:17 GNB
The Salvation of God is not experienced passively. He calls us to cooperate with His plan and often there is an urgency in following. There may not be a better verse in the Bible that more accurately sums up these thoughts than Gen 19:26.
But Lot’s wife looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt.
Genesis 19:26 GNB
The phrase “looked back” has a connotation of longing. It could have meant stopping entirely to gaze or even reversing coarse and turning back.
On the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and killed them all. 30 That is how it will be on the day the Son of Man is revealed. 31 “On that day someone who is on the roof of a house must not go down into the house to get any belongings; in the same way anyone who is out in the field must not go back to the house. 32 Remember Lot’s wife! 33 Those who try to save their own life will lose it; those who lose their life will save it.
Luke 17:29-33 GNB
Unfortunately, Lot’s wife looked back right at the threshold of deliverance. When we consider that she was just a short distance away from being saved, it makes us wonder how much she really wanted it. I don’t think she was looking back with good intentions, but with sorrow for the city. There was a part of her that possibly wanted to go back. She didn’t understand the gravity of what God was doing for her. She didn’t fathom the life that was up ahead.
Jesus’ analogy draws the attention back to our motives and drives us to relinquish our past life of sin and rebellion.
“Relinquish every thing, rather than lose your souls. She looked back, Gen_19:26; probably she turned back also to carry some of her goods away – for so much the preceding verse seems to intimate, and became a monument of the Divine displeasure, and of her own folly and sin. It is a proof that we have loved with a criminal affection that which we leave with grief and anxiety, though commanded by the Lord to abandon it.”
Adam Clarke