"As It Was in the Days of Noah," Part II

Narrative Arc and the Biblical Worldview

When Jesus likens the days before His return to the days of Noah, He shows that human history moves in a circle. And yet this circle is intriguingly different from the wheel of time found within the Eastern worldview. Rather than merely revolving in an eternal rotation of birth, death, and rebirth, human history in reality repeats itself in successively worsening degrees. Jesus makes this clear when He warns that it will be easier for Sodom and Gomorrah in the Day of Judgment than for the cities the disciples visit with the Gospel of Christ's kingdom (Matthew 10:15). He also makes this clear when He warns that the Great Tribulation will bring the greatest suffering human history has ever known. History is going somewhere, and the Eastern worldview which has been imbedded in so many modern movies not only misses this but also creates an almost hypnotic sense of complacency and even apathy.

When we take a look at the Western worldview which captures a more linear sense of time as found in traditional literature, we can recognize the five parts of Freytag's pyramid: inciting force, rising action and turning point, falling action, climax and catastrophe, and resolution. And yet, while this narrative arc seems to parallel the progress of civilization, it typically shows a straight line of resolution higher than the opening line of exposition. Would this mean that human history results in dynamic learning such as a literary hero would experience? Not at all, if we take to heart the words of Jesus. The depravity within the lost soul proves that, culturally, we have learned nothing. A Biblical worldview synthesizes the Eastern circle of time with the Western pyramidal timeline in a paradox found in the heart of our everyday lives.

Think of a clock and a calendar. The clock measures time in a circle. Noon will always become midnight in twelve hours, and midnight in twelve hours will invariably turn into noon. But the clock measures only the circular movement of time and, at that, only twelve hours in each day's twenty-four-hour cycle. While we need the clock to tell us what time it is, we also need the calendar to tell us what day it is. Day after day measures the linear movement of time. It is almost as if the bubble of human depravity that goes around and around without change is moving nevertheless up the narrative arc of prophecy into ultimate accountability at the Great White Throne of Judgment. Jesus says over and over that no man will know the day or the hour of His return. We will not be able to read either the clock or the calendar to prepare ourselves temporarily or artificially for His sudden coming.

What does all of this mean for us? We know in the story of Noah, to which Jesus likens our day, that most of humanity was living only in the Eastern circle of time, whereas Noah was living in two dimensions: both the clockwise movement of daily routine and the Western linear calendar as it passes into eternity. How do we know this? "Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God" (Genesis 6:9). Noah embraced the paradox of living in two worlds: the care he took to live justly in this present world arose directly from his walk with God in the eternal world. His great-grandfather Enoch had walked with God right into glory, and his untraceable journey proved the link between time and eternity. Although Noah did not know his great-grandfather Enoch, he did know his grandfather, Enoch's son Methuselah, whose life overlapped not only Noah's by 600 years but also Adam's by 243 years.

Methuselah is the only Bible character mentioned to have known both Adam and Noah. His longest recorded life of 969 years hints at eternal life in ways opposite to his father Enoch's life that was "cut short" by rapture after 365 years. It is almost as if God uses both men as metaphors of the circular and linear views of time, with Methuselah's life following a timeline of nearly a millennium and with Enoch's life never ending at all but being absorbed into the unending circle of eternity. Because both Methuselah and Enoch knew Adam, whom God created to be immortal, they carried the seeds of the Tree of Life in their soul's consciousness. Adam walked with God for at least a few days in a perfect world; Enoch, who knew Adam for 308 years, walked with God 365 years in a fallen world; and Noah walked with God for 600 years in a corrupt world. One thing is sure: God made certain each next generation knew how to walk with Him, and it is indeed possible to walk with God in every generation.

The Normalcy of Apostasy

When Jesus likens the days before His return to the days of Noah, He shows that Noah's depraved culture was living in one dimension of time with no thought of eternity as they were fulfilling the endless round of daily activities. Jesus said, "They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all" (Luke 17:26-27). This all sounds very "normal," but it wasn't. Their cyclical round of activities did indeed get worse and worse, for Genesis 6:5 tells us, "And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually" (Genesis 6:5). If we link these two passages together, we find something very interesting: a state of apostasy that felt like normalcy.

Noah's generation proves that the consequences of sin will be transmitted to our children and that our behavior will be exaggerated by them. In the very rhythms of life itself, Noah's culture had become more and more depraved. It doesn't sound like it from the picture Jesus describes, but when we think of our own culture, it begins to make sense. Where have we seen the greatest wickedness parade itself except in the pride of redefining marriage and "giving in marriage" that normalizes all those behaviors God abhors? We can be sure that every aberration known to man was to be found within the context of what Noah's culture called "marriage," from polygamy to bestiality. Remember that God destroyed the animals, too, except the ones He handpicked and sent to Noah's ark. This is not reading into the text, for we know that the Mosaic law addresses all the sins from the beginning of human history--sins that had somehow survived the Flood and which found habitation in the Canaanite nations.

We know this much: every culture, including historic Judaism, has drifted far indeed from the Biblical ideal of marriage which the Lord instituted with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. And yet in our day, we are taught to regard this as not only quaint but questionable. Even theistic evolutionists want us to abandon belief in a literal Adam and Eve. And down go all the beauties of marriage destiny when we once begin tampering with the truth. If it is true that the epicenter of wickedness begins in a false view of marriage, then we can understand that the rest of society is sure to follow its rebellion against every wholesome relationship. How interesting that Noah himself had one wife, when, if he had had many, that would have appeared to ensure a greater repopulation of the world after the Flood.

Jesus also tells us that Noah's generation was eating and drinking, which sounds normal enough, but not only do we see in this preoccupation with physical pleasure the seeds of Greek epicureanism and carpe diem, we have to realize that if, as Scripture says, every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually" (Genesis 6:5), this extends to diet. We don't even want to imagine what Noah's depraved generation was eating and drinking, but we know enough of cultures since then and of the prohibitions in the Mosaic law to imagine what they were likely eating and drinking--all flesh, even human, and blood. We also know that the Lord described Noah's generation as corrupt and filled with violence (Genesis 6:11-13). But not only had Noah's culture lost all boundaries in their pursuit of any pleasure, they had so dulled their consciences that these heinous activities seemed normal to them. This dullness made them deaf of hearing when Noah warned them of the wrath to come.

If history in a sense does move in a circle but with the circle ever spiraling forward in its embrace of evil, we can understand that, in our day, our evil is worse than that of Noah's day, not only in its compass but in its essence. That "thing" that seems so normal to most people--pornography, for instance, which polls say affects as much as 97% of men and 40% of women--is repugnant to God and will be judged one day. Not only will our generation be judged, we will be held accountable according to the light we have received, just as Jesus said. It is a sobering thought to realize that the Day of Grace will culminate in tribulation and Armageddon. But God is just in every generation, and, although Noah's culture did not have the Mosaic law or the Gospel of Christ, they had primary sources of living witness to the glory of God and were, therefore, without excuse. But, even with eyewitnesses to God's glory, Noah's generation degenerated into total depravity. Ultimately, they hardened into a state of apostasy in which they were unable to receive the truth delivered to them in dire and repeated warnings.

The Dailyness of Godliness

The great irony in the story of Noah is that God gave His warning to a righteous man. But what made Noah righteous? The writer to the Hebrews says that Noah "became heir of the righteousness which is by faith" (Hebrews 11:7). No amount of scrupulous living would have linked him to his ancestors who "walked with God" had Noah himself not walked by faith. Clearly, Noah put his faith in God's warning and acted appropriately, but his obedience in building the ark was the natural effect of his daily communion with God prior to receiving the warning. We could ask, in a world where evil was "normal," what was normal for Noah, such that he did not allow his culture to condition him to their idea of "normal" by imperceptible degrees? But we already know the answer from the Genesis account: Noah's communion with God protected him from evil.

Did Noah take long quiet walks into the sunset as he talked with God? Did he arise before sunrise while the dew was still on the roses to turn to his Creator? Did he stop midday in the marketplace to utter his weary cries to God? Quite probably, all of the above and more. Prayer has to have been his stock in trade, but I think Noah's times of prayer far surpassed what goes for "prayer" these days--"just a little talk with Jesus." I think Noah did something else that our culture has all but forgotten: I think he learned how to shut himself off completely from the world's mindset and recalibrate his worldview by eternal values. Instead of seeking the approval of man or even of fearing a hostile audience, I think he developed a holy callus on his soul and, like the young man climbing the Alps in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, cried ever and always, "Excelsior!"

Jesus shows us this secret by commanding us to shut the door when we pray (Matthew 6:6). I think this means more than praying in secret to avoid pretense and show. I think it means sealing ourselves off to God alone for significant portions of time so that we may "turn our eyes upon Jesus and look full into His wonderful face," that "the things of earth" may "grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace" (Helen Lemmel). After all, isn't this what being "spiritual" means? To see with the eyes of our spirit rather than merely with the eyes in our head? Old timers used to sing of the "trysting place" found "beneath the Cross of Jesus" (Elizabeth C. Clephane) and of being "alone with God" (Johnson Oatman), "the world forbidden . . . alone with God, O blest retreat! Alone with God, and in Him hidden, to hold with Him communion sweet!" Austris A. Wihtol wrote a song called, "My God and I" with this same theme. "Nothing between my soul and the Savior," wrote Charles Albert Tindley. I can remember all of these songs and the rugged saints in my church who sang them, including my own parents in sweet duets.

But social media has ruined us so that we think of even our spiritual lives as being performed onstage for the masses to see. This is wrong. If we return to the faith that Noah had, we will keep fresh and authentic in an evil day. Like Psalm 46:10, which follows a description very much like Noah's Flood, Noah learned to "Be still, and know that I am God." With Moses, he learned the truth of Psalm 90, itself a picture of the Flood: "For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up. So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it."

And, most of all, Noah learned with Psalm 91:1 that "he who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty." And, just as Noah had learned to shut the door to the world, when the Flood came, God Himself shut the door on Noah's ark. Noah had found his hiding place long before the storm. And this is the secret to daily godliness. "Day by day and with each passing moment, strength I find to meet my trials here" (Lina Sandell). And one more thing stands out to me in what Jesus says, when He uses the phrase, "As it was in the days of Noah": we might wonder why He doesn't say "years," since people lived so long back then, with Noah himself living 950 years, and 350 of them after the Flood. But Jesus draws our attention to the dailyness of life when each day seems precarious at best. Not only is our life a vapor, as the Psalmist says (Psalm 39:5-7; 62:9), or a mere dot on the timeline of history, it is lived, after all, only one day at a time. And this in itself is our chief comfort in evil days.

Jesus shows us this truth when He says of the last days, "And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened" (Matthew 24:22). Likewise, the Lord restricts the timeline of Noah's generation to 120 years in Genesis 6:3. Not only is it a profound comfort to know that Satan's days are numbered, it is also a comfort to know that, "as thy days, so shall thy strength be" (Deuteronomy 33:25). The secret to Noah's survival was walking with God every day, day by day, one day at a time, in private, sweet communion, until the timeclock of each of those days filled a calendar stretching almost a millennium. We may not live as long as Noah did, but we have as much time as he did: one day at a time. Let us spend it for God with eternity in view, resisting the merry-go-round of this present evil world.