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

The Warning to Lost People

The faithfulness of God in fulfilling His Word resounds in His warnings and in His blessings. The rainbow follows the Flood, but both are the fulfillment of promise. So many Christians today want to cherry pick their promises--they want to take all the blessings and ignore all the warnings. I wonder what the reaction would be in a modern worship service if the praise team suddenly turned into a spiritual EMS team that belted out songs of impending doom instead of songs reiterating God's favor. What if they spent hours composing a song called "The Warning" instead of "The Blessing"? For those of us who can remember hymns like, "Work, for the Night Is Coming!" this would be a welcome change. Why? I will speak for myself, but I dare to hope I don't stand alone in saying that seeing huge crowds of people on their knees would be the best sight we have seen in a very long time in this nation--perhaps the best we have seen in our lifetime. Christians left and right are saying that Jesus is coming soon. And I have already been feeling this for weeks, months, years. Isn't it time for a reality check? Isn't it high time for a Doomsday drill?

The Shelter amid the Destruction

But where would you hide when things fall apart? Psalm 46 reminds me so much of Noah. I feel as if I am there as the Holy Spirit carries my imagination away with the words. "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah. There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her, and that right early. The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah. Come, behold the works of the Lord, what desolations he hath made in the earth. He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire. Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah."

Moses utters a central truth much like this in Psalm 90. "Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men. 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. In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth. For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath are we troubled.

"Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance. For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told. The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath. So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. Return, O Lord, how long? and let it repent thee concerning thy servants. O satisfy us early with thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil. Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children. 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."

Oh, could there be any words more beautiful and more poignant than these? Moses did not witness the Great Flood, but he did witness the Egyptians being drowned in the depths of the Red Sea, and he felt in his very soul the destruction of the enemies of God that all too often resided among his own people. How helpless he must have felt amid the frequent judgments of God against his rebellious and stiff-necked people! And yet he calls God our dwelling place in all generations--when everything else is shifting and crumbling away. Oh, dear friend, do you feel like that these days? Just read what Moses writes next, in Psalm 91, in what is believed to be a continuation of Psalm 90 by contrast. Psalm 91 offers the best secret hiding place of all: "He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty." Moses and Elijah found the shelter in the rock--a shelter from God's own passing glory.

And this is a forgotten truth indeed. We need God to shelter us from God--in the day of His wrath, for His glory is indeed revealed in His wrath. We see this secret hiding place, this shelter from wrath, in the tenth plague of Egypt when the blood on the doorposts had to be applied to ward off the Death Angel. And finding the secret place amid moral danger is exactly what Noah did long before the Flood: he dwelt in the secret place of Almighty God--a place so secret that the whole world combined hadn't found it--and he found shelter in the shadow of God's Presence every day of his life. The same safety that kept Noah all his life kept him in the cataclysm of the Flood. It was as if he heeded God's warnings long before they had been given. He didn't have to scramble to get his house in order for Doomsday. He was already ready. Perhaps it is always the people who are already prepared who take warnings seriously. And this, too, is a fundamental truth of Scripture.

The Normalcy of Apostasy

Long before Noah entertained the thought of doom in meeting God's judgment unprepared, we can be sure he agonized over the dangers surrounding him in his own culture. Noah's generation proves the teaching that the consequences of sin will be transmitted to our children and that our behavior will be exaggerated by them. Rather than bringing the wisdom of experience and new clarity of vision, sin slays all the finer sensibilities of life and renders the soul dull to reality. When Jesus says, "And as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man," He explains, "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). But how is this possible amid worldwide disasters and global catastrophes as foretold in the Book of Revelation? It is sobering indeed to hear just how stiff-necked people will become in their apostasy.

But we can't afford to forget that, in all those years between Adam and Noah, God had appeared to keep silent, with the exception of Enoch and a few trickles of godliness here and there. To those who are already deaf, God's perceived silence creates that much more ease of disregarding the warning. (Job 42:6). But God was pleased with Noah's faith. "This is the genealogy of Noah. Noah was a just man, perfect in his generations. Noah walked with God" (Genesis 6:9). Noah was honest, holy, and humble--honest because he was "just," holy because he was "perfect," and humble because he "walked with God." While it is true that the man who walks with God will find that his own legs are pretty short to keep up, we realize that, if we take a closer look at Jesus' words regarding the activity in Noah's day, we see that Noah stood out in the very things Jesus identifies as normal for the unjust: he didn't simply eat, drink, and marry or give away in marriage, even though his culture did.

If we think of what this might mean in the context of our own times, many of the worst sins do indeed involve those surrounding people's views and habits of marriage. Perhaps the shock is that people in Noah's day were at least getting married, but we don't really know what that meant since every sin known to mankind characterized Noah's day in excess. Polygamy was no doubt part of the meaning behind Jesus' words of "marrying" and "giving in marriage," but most likely also was a violation of marriage as set forth in the Garden of Eden between one man and one woman. And even when the marriage ceremony was not involved, people's behavior in Noah's day no doubt sealed themselves as good as married, as the Apostle Paul explains regarding those who are joined to a harlot.

It is discouraging indeed to dwell too long on this sordid picture, but neither can we smother our ears under a pillow. Noah wasn't allowed to disengage with his world, no matter how evil it became. And this alone required tremendous circumspection in every detail of his life. If he compromised with the evil around him, he would not have entered the ark he himself built. He would have become numb to the warning and given in the scoffer's taunt, "Where is the promise of His coming?" that Peter prophesies will come in the last days (II Peter 3:4). But because Noah put faith in God on a daily basis, he could put faith in God in a global crisis. And herein lies the same secret that the Psalmist found in Psalm 91:1. It isn't the person who occasionally darkens the door of God's sanctuary but the one who dwells--as Psalm 90:1 also shows--in God's Presence who finds that his sacred daily habit will not abandon him in the day of reckoning.

The really scary thing is that the same is true for Noah's generation: they weren't able to break their vile habits even in the face of repeated warnings. Someone has said that habits are cobwebs at first and cables at last, and that is true. Paul said we are slaves of the one we obey (Romans 6:16). But this teaching flies in the face of every false comfort people hear today. When what is so repugnant to God that He must destroy the entire world is normal to the world, that proves that God is just in His punishments--for, not one more person would listen, and not one more person would be saved. What a horrid world that would be and what a horrible fate in which to be sealed! The Book of Revelation shows this same reality: no matter how much people were tortured in the undying wrath of God, they would not repent (Revelation 9:20-21; 16:9). But, unlike the people of Noah's day, they long for death and do not find it.

The Warnings to God's People

It's hard to write about what Paul calls "the terror of the Lord" in II Corinthians 5:11, but this is the very reason we must "persuade men." We are accountable so that blood will not be on our own head for keeping still when we should have stood up for Jesus. The fact that no one's listening does not exempt us from blame. We cannot become numb to others' apathy, and neither can we afford to lose all sense of shock over evil or to shrug our shoulders, "Oh, that's just the way they are." That isn't how Noah escaped the Flood, and even the greatest Apostle of all sobered himself with the fear of becoming a castaway (I Corinthians 9:27). And why was that? He outlines the need to keep his body under and to bring it into subjection. We don't hear much about that, do we? But personal holiness is always the best sermon against sin, for if we lose all sense of what IS evil, how will we warn others against it? But Noah's day was doing anything BUT bringing their bodies under; they were eating and drinking up the epicurean carpe diem life until they did indeed become castaways.

No wonder God gave Noah the rainbow after everything was over, and we can't forget that the worst that can happen in this world will bring the best that is yet to be: a new heaven and a new earth with Jesus as King in the hearts of those who washed their robes in the Blood of the Lamb. We will sing His praise and blessing throughout all eternity!