Lot’s wife belonged to a family with a great name and trust in God’s promises. She even had angels visit her home! God sent them to personally escort her from His coming wrath to His safety (Gen.19:1-22). Yet, she fell into eternal judgment because she looked back to her life in Sodom. She longed to preserve what she had and became a pillar of salt–a crystalline substance used for preservation (Gen. 19:26). Friends, Jesus is kind to warns us in Luke 17:32-33: “Remember Lot’s wife. Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.”
Cornelius’ conversion account can teach us many things about the spread of the gospel to the Gentiles in the first century church. We see in this story that God’s salvation through Christ is for all the families of the earth. God shows no partiality but comes to redeem people from all nations. All this is true. But my focus today is on that small line in verse four. It makes me wonder: what if my service and prayers to God were like a memorial offering rising up as a pleasing aroma before His throne?
My two young daughters discovered glow sticks a few years ago. Bendable gleaming rods you can wear as bracelets became the craze in our home and an addition to our nighttime routine. My daughters would go to bed with a glow stick around their wrists but would wake up to find the light long gone. In many ways, Lysa TerKeurst’s What Happens When Women Walk in Faith reminds me of those glow sticks.
If Scripture is above all the story of God, then it reveals a God who honors and cares for women. The first poem we read in the Bible is an ode to Eve and these lyrics are the only human words recorded pre-Fall. Following the Fall, Scripture’s attention to Eve remains. Consider this: the protoevangelium—the first gospel announcement in Genesis 3:15—describes the promised Savior, not as the Son of God, but as the seed of the woman. That’s incredible—but it’s not isolated. Long before the resurrected Jesus made women His first witnesses, narratives of Old Testament women testified of Christ.
