Below are the charts used in the Sunday morning message at Tradewinds Church on January 3, 2016. (The chart used for a more in-depth study of Lot given at the adult Sunday School at Tradewinds on Dec. 27, 2015, are here). A printer friendly pdf of these charts is available here.
The resources for further study on Lot in 2016 (cited on Chart 24 of the below charts) are given here.
Of course at that time, some 4,000 years ago there was neither electricity nor satellite imagery. But the prosperity of the land of the Nile River, what we call Egypt today, was anything like the Egypt we know today. The land of the Nile at the time of Abram was wealthy and luxurious beyond anything they had seen. The pyramids, were then some 800 years old, but were encased in a shell of gleaming white, smooth and perfectly joined, stone. (What we see today is the inner layer of stair step stones because the valuable outer was stolen and ‘repurposed’ over the centuries). There was no climbing the pyramids as they stood at that time. The slight of the gleaming stone reflecting the bright, near-equatorial sun must have been breathtaking.
Lot, of course, did not look east from New Jersey to see New York City on the Hudson River Valley. But what he did see, was a dramatic contrast to the barren, city-less hills and valleys of “the hill country” where Abram was called to and where he settled.
And what he did see called to mind the spectacle of both the Mesopotamian River Valley (founded by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers), the land of his youth, and what must have been a powerful experience seeing the cities and wealth of the land of the Nile River Valley (what we now call Egypt).
Lot, in choosing to settle in the Jordan River Valley likely became the unique man in history to have lived in all the three great river valley civilizations at the juncture of the three great continents (Europe, Asia, and Africa). Yet, the end ‘home’ and residence of Lot was a cave, being sheltered from the terror of what judgment he saw.
There is a typo in the below chart: where it has Gen. 12:11, it should have been Gen. 13:11.
