“But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be” (Matt.24:37). There can be no doubt that we are living in the times that Jesus spoke of. “And GOD saw the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually… The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence” (Gen.6:5,11). There is no need to elaborate upon the evil that filled Noah’s world and that fills ours – the violence of man and his subsequent glorification of that violence, gross immorality, every man doing that which is “right in his own eyes” as depicted for us by the Apostle Paul in Romans chapter 1. But we need to ask ourselves the question, “What did Jesus mean when he spoke those familiar words as recorded in Matthew 24: “For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and knew not until the flood came, and took them all away” (Matt.24:38-39). In Luke 17 Jesus included the days of Lot with the days of Noah because both were epochs of gross wickedness brought to an end by the divine judgment of God, and so he went on to say, “Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded…” (Luke 17:28). We can take these two comments together and ask what our Lord meant by them. Why is there condemnation in marrying and giving in marriage, in eating and drinking and buying and selling? But God sees not as man sees, and it requires a lifetime’s education even to begin to view things from the divine and not fleshly point of view.
The world that Jesus described is the world you and I live in – a world of gross immorality and gross materialism. They married and gave in marriage, and married again, and married again; it was a continual process. Today the world has gone one step further – many don’t bother to marry. Jesus went on to say they were “eating and drinking”, and one half of our world gluttons itself in eating and drinking, reaching a surfeit around the 25th December, whilst it makes a pretense of religion and charitable works, and blasphemes the Name of God and His Son in pseudo-worship. “They bought, they sold, they builded, they planted…”. We buy and we sell, we buy and we buy and we buy – new car, new clothes, new furniture, new extension, new home! Materialism and self-indulgence were the motives of the antediluvian world, and it is the same in our capitalist Western society; everything must be newer and bigger and better.
The Eighth Person
So God looked down on the antediluvian world as He looks down on ours today in 1987, and He must see very little difference – “every imagination of the thoughts of his (man’s) heart was only evil continually. And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.” Jesus knew and understood the grief of heart his Father felt towards His creation that had so corrupted His way upon the earth, and it is a grief that surely will be repeated as the Almighty looks down upon our world in these last days before the appearing of His Son in power and great glory.
But there was one man who found grace in the eyes of God. “Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God” (Gen.6:9). Here was one man through whom God could continue His purpose, one man, the “Man of One”. Why do we say this? Peter interestingly refers to Noah as “the eighth person”. We know that 8 were saved in the ark, Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives; but Noah as the most important person should surely have been the first and not the eighth. However, if we take 8 to be representative, then Noah as the 8th person was a representative man.
When God looked down on that evil world, He saw only Noah as “a just man and perfect (upright)…and Noah walked with God. Yet in Genesis 7 we read, “And the LORD said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark”, and then that “the LORD shut him in” (Gen.7:1,16,), Here Noah is clearly seen as the representative of all his family, a “man of one”.
Let us now look at the prayer of Jesus in John 17:11: “Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one as we are”; and Ephesians 4: “But unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ…till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ…henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart” (v.7,13,18). Here is the one representing many, whom Noah in his day typified.
Thus in Noah we have one man representing the Ecclesia of his day, the faithful bride, who is saved by water; a perfect man who walked with God, and not as those Gentiles who walked in the vanity of their mind, having their understanding darkened. Such were the antediluvians of Noah’s day, and they perished for ever in the darkness that they had created.
`To the saving of his house’
When Noah was told to build the ark, it would seem that he had no family, his children had not yet been born; indeed, it would appear that he laboured for 20 years before Shem, his first son, was born to him. Yet Paul “tells us that Noah “moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house” (Heb.11:7). How great was the faith of this man, for he laboured for those who were not yet born! Of course the type can be seen so beautifully when we read Christ’s words, “I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me… Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word…” (John 17:9,11,20).
Noah laboured and preached for 120 years, and for nearly 2,000 years those of faith have also been laboring and preaching. We have two different types here; those who, like Noah, have through the generations faithfully built the ark, whilst warning the world of the judgments of God and the need for repentance; but also we see the ark representing Christ and his atoning work, built to the saving of his house, his Ecclesia. For our part, all we are called upon to do is to preserve it, for the work in that sense has already been done; when Christ died and rose again the ark was pitched within and without. The Hebrew word “pitch” as used in Genesis 6:14 is ‘kapher’, meaning “to cover”; so the saints are covered by the atoning work of Christ, that they might not drown in the destroying flood waters of the world.
‘Wherein few…’
120 years preaching, and Noah converted no one; sometimes the suggestion is made that we should be converting a multitude, and that something is wrong if we don’t. But Peter says that despite the patience and long-suffering of God in giving that world 120 years in which to repent, “few, that is eight souls were saved”. We cannot expect our world to be different. What we should be primarily concerned with is the example of Noah in that “he being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house and became the heir of the righteousness which is by faith”. It should be our aim to save our family and our ecclesia; but we will only be able to do this if we are walking in the ways of God.
We know that Noah’s preaching efforts fell upon deaf ears and met with derision and scorn. Peter tells us of this in 2 Peter 3:3-6. The argument that was brought to bear in Noah’s day by these mockers was the same as that which is used today; it is the argument of Uniformitarianism, in other words, that all things continue to go on unaltered from the beginning of time and will continue to do so; it is an argument which refuses to recognise divine intervention by God in the affairs of men. A world that does not believe in the existence of God will not bother itself about the warnings of a few that “God has appointed a day in the which he will judge the world in righteousness…”, so the eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, the buying, selling, building and planting continues. One can only speculate as to what in reality the world of Noah’s day was like, when men lived not 70 years, but 900 years; with increased length of days there would have been increased knowledge and skills to produce a civilisation of such magnitude as we may not even begin to comprehend, a society skilled in the arts of pleasure and materialism and vice, a society which promoted its heroes like those whose images leap up at us from the cinema and video posters, who glory in the violence they promote and whose names are on the lips of our children: Such was the antediluvian world, and such is ours!
The Ecclesia
How had this society come about? Genesis 6:2 gives us the answer: “The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.” The ecclesia married the world, and over the process of time, the truth in that generation died. But there was an ecclesia in the days of Noah; Lamech, Noah’s faithful father who died five years before the flood, his grandfather Methuselah who died in the year of the flood, and no doubt many others who knew the truth of God. And so we come to the conclusion that much of Noah’s preaching would have been to the ecclesia of his day. But it was an ecclesia which had lost its separateness and which saw no harm in socializing and worshipping with those who did not hold the truth of God.
When Peter and Jude wrote of mockers who would come in the last days, saying “Where is the promise of his coming?”, they were warning of a situation that was to arise within the ecclesias. Peter was specifically concerned with the Jewish Christian community, and he wrote to warn them of the coming judgments of God which were to be poured out against the Jewish nation in AD 70; but Peter knew that there would be those who would mock and scoff at his warnings from within:
Jude also, writing some time later, warned the Gentile Christian community that mockers would arise from within, “walking after their own ungodly lusts”, and like Paul before him, gave the same message: “Be not highminded, but fear: for if God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest he also spare not thee” (Rom.11:20,21).
This brings us to the question, What is our position today, nearly 120 years after the death of Bro. Thomas, nearly 120 years of preaching and laboring to preserve the ark in preparation for the judgments that are to be poured out upon this evil generation? There is laughter and scorn; but far from coming from without from those of the world, we hear it from within, among our own brethren and sisters.
Laughter and Scorn
We are drawing near to the end of the 6th millennium, and still the Lord has not come; doubts begin to arise and the urgency of Christ’s return is pushed into the background; eventually we hear the question, “Where is the promise of his coming?” Other voices are raised:
- Prophecy – too much emphasis is given to it.
- Revelation – a correct understanding of this book is not important for salvation (Christ’s words are ignored, “Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein”).
- Doctrine – too much emphasis is placed upon doctrine.
- Separation – What is the need for separation? Those who seek to keep themselves separate from the world are regarded as narrow and unrealistic.
How often do we find brethren and sisters discussing the Word with open Bibles in their hands at the conclusion of a meeting? How often is the conversation rather to be found around the trivia of the world? Brethren who dedicate themselves to the study of the Word, who pursue prophecy with open Bible and shameless enthusiasm are labelled “Bible bashers”! Here indeed is a mocking from within, and those who do so are guilty of beating their fellowservants (Matt.24).
Let me pose a few searching questions regarding our responsibility towards our children:
- What lengths are we prepared to go to (if any) to prevent them from becoming influenced by the world?
- Do we let them go to discos, pubs and nightclubs (all were viewed as acceptable places to visit at one youth weekend I attended last year).
- iii. Do we allow our children to socialize with school friends in the world? (I have personally been put to open ridicule because I have chosen to take a firm line on these matters; could you imagine Noah allowing his sons to participate in the world of his day?)
If we have a television in the home, do we restrict its use or is the filth, the blasphemy and violence it portrays allowed to penetrate our family, so that the children grow up enmeshed in the aspirations and materialism of our society, glorying in the immoral and violent characters who are gods and heroes to this generation? Those who are kept from these things, are they mocked by others for their innocence?
`They bought, they sold …’
Consider carefully Christ’s words again, “As it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man. They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage…they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded” (Luke 17:26-28). We preach from our platforms that this will be the state of the world when Christ returns to the earth; but do we fail to see what Christ was really describing? The picture he painted was of the ecclesia in Noah’s day, the ecclesia in Lot’s day and the ecclesia in our day. We eat, drink, buy and sell, and are so engrossed with all these things that we are in very grave danger as a community of losing our vision; if we lose our vision, we will perish. It was a very real question that Jesus asked, “When the Son of man cometh, will he find faith on the earth?” We must not be like those antediluvian who perished in the flood. The ark has been built, the judgments of God will soon be poured out upon this wicked world. In that day, may the Lord say to us, “Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation” (Gen.7:1).
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One