On the surface, the story of the angels' visit to Sodom is about an aggressive rape threat against innocents. It's an ugly story. In its internal, spiritual sense, the story is about the way that, in our minds, our evil, selfish loves will attack the remnants of good, mutual love that we have. If, like Lot and his daughters, we follow the angels out of the city, we can be saved. If, like the men of Sodom, we are so mired in self-love that we attack the very loves and truths that could save us, we destroy ourselves. We reject salvation.
In terms of spiritual history, Genesis 19 describes the final judgment of what the Writings call the Ancient Church, the second in a succession of churches which had true knowledge about the Lord.
The first – the Most Ancient Church – is represented by Adam in the Garden of Eden, and was centered on a pure love of the Lord. It fell, however, as people began to trust their senses and their own intelligence instead of the Lord – a fall which began with the serpent and ended with the flood. The Ancient Church was formed from a remnant represented by Noah, was inspired by mutual love of people for each other, and possessed tremendous knowledge of the relationships between the natural world and the spiritual world. The people of that church eventually began to value the natural knowledge more than the underlying spiritual reality, however – represented in the story of the Tower of Babel – and began a descent into evil and falsity. The story of Sodom illustrates the end of that descent.
The people of Sodom represent the people of the Ancient Church, who still had forms of worship based on their knowledge, but were consumed by love of self and serving themselves. Lot represents a remnant within that church which still had an idea of mutual love – a representation much like Noah’s. The two angels represent the Lord preparing to judge the evil remains of the Ancient Church and start a new one.
That new church could be formed in part from the group of people represented by Lot. But for it to happen those people had to choose between Sodom and the angels. Most of this story is about that choice.
At first the good people welcomed the Lord’s presence, the new ideas and new spirit that came to them. They internalized them, and were fortified – represented by Lot taking the angels to his house and feeding them. But when the rest of the people of the Ancient Church realized what was going on, they went on the attack. Their first move was against the idea that the new presence was from the Lord, represented by the Sodomites’ desire to rape the angels.
Lot’s response – offering his virgin daughters to the crowd instead – is nothing short of horrifying. Its spiritual meaning, though, is quite different. The good people welcomed the Lord’s new presence, but didn’t want to give up their lives, either, didn’t want to believe that their church was truly corrupt. So they tried to appeal to the good they believed was still there. The daughters here represent affections for what is good and true, and offering them to the crowd represents inviting the people of the church to share the delights of mutual love.
The people of the church were having none of it, however, and prepared an even more furious attack on the idea of mutual love itself – represented by the threat directed at Lot himself. But the Lord pulled the good people away from the evil and filled the evil with so much falsity that they could no longer pose a threat, represented by the angels pulling Lot into the house and striking the men with blindness.
Like most stories in the Word, this story also offers a more personal lesson, describing stages we go through as we grow spiritually.
As we come to new desires to be good and new ideas of how to be good, we at first embrace them. They seem wonderful and happy, and we feel purified. But the hells don’t want us going there, and will attack those ideas inside our minds. Our first inclination, like Lot, is to try to reconcile the two – enjoy the new state without giving up the evil delights and comforting falsities of the old one. The doesn’t work, though, and the two end up in conflict, a conflict we call temptation.
If we persist in that battle, though, the Lord will step in, will bring us into a peaceful goof state and render the evils powerless, even as the angels did for Lot.
As the story in the Bible continues, of course, we witness the actual judgment of the Ancient Church in the destruction of Sodom. Lot, meanwhile, is rescued and taken to Abram as part of the third great church, the Israelitish Church.
