Sometimes the purest image of divine mercy in Torah is also the most embarrassing. Genesis 19:16 in the Targum reads this way.
"But he delayed: and the men laid hold on his hand, and on the hand of his wife, and on the hand of his two daughters, for mercy from the Lord was upon them. And they brought them forth, and set them without the city."
The rabbis of Bereshit Rabbah and the Talmud loved this verse for its candor. Lot is not walking out of Sedom. He is being dragged. Four hands are needed — one for him, one for his wife, two for his daughters — and two angels have only four hands between them. Every hand is full.
And the verse offers the explanation plainly: for mercy from the Lord was upon them. In Aramaic, b'rachmanutha da-Hashem. This is not a reward for merit. This is rescue on credit, extended because Abraham had pleaded for his nephew a chapter earlier. Genesis 19:29 will confirm it: "when God destroyed the cities of the plain, He remembered Abraham."
The theological point is blunt. Lot is saved not because he deserves salvation but because someone who loves him interceded for him. The rabbis called this zekhut avot — the merit of the ancestors — and it became one of the load-bearing ideas of Jewish prayer. When you cannot save yourself, sometimes you can still be carried by the prayers of someone who loved you, or by the merit of an ancestor you never met.
The takeaway: being dragged to safety is not glorious, but it is, at least, being alive.