Don't Look BackНамуна

When the global pandemic hit in 2020, and then continued on into 2021, like most everyone, I was tempted to look back. To want to go back. To 2019. Or any year of our lives before 2020. To go back to normal, whatever our normal was. To forget all the new normal that we were all desperately trying to create. Yet, no matter how much I longed to go back to normal, there was no going back. That world as we knew it was finished, and God was beckoning me, along with everyone else, to move forward, to lay hold of his purpose and promises in the future.

Sorting through the tension of not looking back and trying to move forward, I began reminding myself that while the world had changed, God had not. He was the same as he’d always been, and I could depend on him to guide me forward.

During that same season of doing my best to not look back and to keep moving forward, I was reminded of a woman in the Bible who looked back when she wasn’t supposed to, and it didn’t go well for her. Do you remember Lot’s wife? She was the woman running for her life with her family in Genesis 19. As they ran, destruction was raining down on their hometown of Sodom, and despite being told not to look back by an angel who was holding her hand, she turned and looked back. Scripture tells us, “But Lot’s wife looked back and became a pillar of salt.”

What makes Lot’s wife especially significant is that Jesus said for us to remember her. In the middle of an eschatological discourse in the New Testament, Jesus dropped in three words “Remember Lot’s wife.”

If you’ve ever read Luke 17, it’s all too easy to miss these three words. I know because I did for years. I read them, of course, but that’s all. I flew past them. But Jesus never wastes a word, let alone three, so there must be some significance in this second shortest verse in the Bible. (If you didn’t know that fun fact, now you do. Perhaps it will help you win your next Bible quiz.) These three words began to show me the importance of not looking back. Of always moving forward. Even in the midst of a pandemic or a war or something far more normal. They became words I couldn’t forget and words that showed me the way forward.

“Remember Lot’s wife.”

For 30 plus years now, I’ve been going to women’s conferences, and I don’t remember ever hearing a message on Lot’s wife, nor do I ever remember teaching one. And yet, of the possible 170 women mentioned in Scripture, she is the only one that Jesus tells us to remember. Why her? Why not Eve, Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Ruth, Rahab, Esther, Elizabeth, or even Mary, his own mother? Of all the women Jesus could have told us to remember, he mentioned only one, Lot’s wife.4 (For all the Bible scholars reading this, Jesus did tell us that the deed of the woman who poured oil over him would be remembered forever,12 but he only told us to remember one woman—Lot’s wife.) This is astonishing to me. Why her? There had to be a reason.

Lot’s wife gets one cameo in the Old Testament and one in the New Testament. That’s it. That’s all the Scripture records. Why would Jesus tell us to remember a woman who appears on the pages of Scripture only long enough to disappear? A woman who has the shortest bio ever? A woman whose proper name we don’t even know? What is it about her that we’re to remember?

As I began to study her life, I noted something very important. This woman was told one thing: “Don’t look back,” and the one thing she was told not to do is the one thing she did. Why did she do that? Why do we do that?