"7 By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith."
Hebrews 11:7
We have only to remember our Lord's words in Matthew 24:37 - "As the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be" - to realise that what we read here is not merely ancient history, but a word harshly topical for our own time. The story of the corruption in Noah's day (Genesis 6) makes grim reading, but it is perhaps significant that what our Lord focused attention upon was not the acts of violence and depravity but the fact that in all they did God was left out - "eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage... and knew not until the flood came and took them all away" (Matthew 24:38, 39). It was the complete secularisation of life that finally brought judgment upon that evil generation. It was this that Noah's faith discerned, and it led him to do two things - he preached righteousness (2 Peter 2:5), warning his generation of things not seen as yet by the eye of the flesh but plainly visible to that of faith; and he prepared an ark of refuge which finally brought his family - and could have brought many, many more - through the judgment of the Flood to a new world beyond it. The important phrase here is 'things not seen as yet'. Faith, as we saw in 1, is the evidence or certainty of things not seen, and it would be well for any generation, and perhaps particularly ours, to beware of dismissing as far-fetched and fanatical the warning voices that men of God raise when with the eye of faith they truly discern the signs of the times. But alas!, like Noah's, theirs are voices crying in the wilderness, voices not heeded, and warnings scorned and neglected by a generation that refuses to see its coming doom, H- bombs and radioactivity notwithstanding. History proved Noah's so- called 'lunatic fringe' fanaticism to be sober, grim fact. This is a habit history has. For us also, time will tell.