1. Lot made request because the city was near to flee unto / the LORD is also near to the broken in heart & spirit (Psalm 34:18)

2. the word ‘escape’ is a word connected to deliverance. Lot requested to be able to escape to Zoar (i.e. find salvation)

3. Among the five cities of the plain marked for destruction Zoar was a little city pointing to the fact that out of the whole world marked for destruction God spared a remnant (many called few chosen) who would become part of new Jerusalem, the heavenly city of God.

4. Lot specifically asks the two messengers (God appearing as two men) to allow him to flee to Zoar and “my soul shall live” (Genesis 19:20). Spiritually, the language of entering a city in order that one’s soul lives clearly points to salvation.

5. God (in the form of the two men) accepted Lot concerning the word which he had spoken. That is, God accepted Lot’s intercessory plea for Zoar and accepted Lot’s prayer of entering in that his soul live (see Genesis 19:21).

6. God says He will not overthrow the city for the which Lot spake. When God rained down fire and brimstone the little city Zoar was not destroyed by it. Zoar’s inhabitants survived the fiery destruction while all the inhabitants of all the other cities were destroyed. Again, clearly pointing to God’s elect being spared when the ultimate destruction of this world occurs.

7. God tells Lot to haste and escape to the city Zoar because He cannot do anything until he reaches and enters into the city. This agrees with the Biblical principle that God would not bring about the final judgment of mankind until the last one of the elect (whom Lot typified) became saved (Genesis 19:22, compare with James 5:7).

8. The moment Lot entered into Zoar, THEN God rained down fire and brimstone from heaven. Lot is used as a picture of all the elect of God. And his crossing the city limit and entering into Zoar illustrates the last one of the elect entering into the glorious eternal city of God via salvation---at that point God ceases to be longsuffering with the unsaved people of this world (typified by the cities of the plain) and pours out His wrath upon them (Genesis 19:23,24).

9. Zoar was one of the five cities of the plain of Jordan. It was near to Sodom. Once Sodom and Gomorrah and the other two cities were destroyed by the fire and brimstone, an awful cloud of smoke went up like the smoke of furnace. Lot was not raptured (as fleeing to the mountain might have given that idea) but he was right there in the very plain where the wrath of God was being angrily poured out. This points to the fact that God’s elect are not raptured out of the world once the judgment begins. No, they are alive and remain on the earth to go through the final judgment of mankind just as Lot and other inhabitants of Zoar were alive and remaining in the plain while all the people of the other four cities were all killed.

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