Let us turn to 2 Peter 3. We are going to be going through several of the verses here. I was praying for wisdom as to where to go and what to talk about. Sometimes, I really feel stuck and burdened, “Where do I go in the Bible?” So I am reading in different places, which is probably very beneficial for me because I am reading here and reading there, trying to discover what I should talk about.
I was praying last night and ended up on this passage that I think is becoming very familiar to us. But then I thought, “If we were to spend the rest of our time on this passage, from now until the end, it probably would not be enough time.” This is because we are living in a day when what we are reading in 2 Peter 3 is coming to pass and will shortly be here.
Over in 2 Peter 1, God gives us some information on learning from the Bible, because we have to be patient and learning from the Bible is often very repetitive. Again and again and again, we are going over the same information.
For instance, how many times has God told us that His judgment is on the churches and congregations of the world? As we read the book of Jeremiah—chapter after chapter after chapter, and within those chapters, verse after verse—we are finding that there is a great deal of information that is given to us in different ways. For example, the Lord speaks of the Moabites or the Ammonites or the Egyptians or the Syrians, and yet we are finding that they are all synonyms for the New Testament churches and congregations, just like Jerusalem or Israel or Judah are all synonyms for the New Testament churches and congregations.
So God is really emphasizing and re-emphasizing and, as we would say, driving the point home that there will come a time when “judgment must begin at the house of God,” which is the time of the great tribulation. This is so important to know, because then we know that we are right up next against the end of the world.
If you find people who are struggling with this and do not want to recognize that the church age is over, part of the reason might be that the next step after seeing this is seeing that the Judge is standing at the door and that the world is soon going to be destroyed and come to an end.
So God is very repetitive in His teaching and He tells us in 2 Peter 1:12-13:
Wherefore I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things, though ye know them, and be established in the present truth. Yea, I think it meet, as long as I am in this tabernacle, to stir you up by putting you in remembrance;
And then verse 15, 2 Peter 1:15:
Moreover I will endeavour that ye may be able after my decease to have these things always in remembrance.
Three times we read that it is His purpose that we be reminded of what the Bible says. This is because…well, there are a thousand reasons why. We are dull of hearing, dull of seeing, dull of understanding. This is our nature. Yes, even after being born again, there can be troubles in our life as far as coming to the Bible and listening to what the Bible has to say and learning what the Bible has to say.
We could, without even knowing it, have taken on some of the attitude of the world where everything has to be fresh and everything has to be new. This was the attitude of the people of Athens. They always wanted “to tell, or to hear some new thing.” “Tell me something new; you ‘seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods,’” as they set the Apostle Paul up to speak to them.
Well, of course! We hate re-runs. We hate re-runs. We cannot wait for the new season to start, something new, when everything will be a new story. This is the whole nature of Hollywood. And Hollywood is very big, not only in our country but in the world. We want something dramatic and new and exciting.
Then the Bible comes with that “still small voice,” with its repetition, with its information, which is basically teaching over and over again that we are sinners, that we are under the wrath of God, and that we need a Saviour. And in our present time, there is more additional information in that God is judging the church and that He is soon to judge the whole world on May 21st in 2011.
So when we come to the Bible, we want to be patient with what the Bible says. And in 2 Peter 3:1, we read:
This second epistle, beloved, I now write unto you; in both which I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance:
This word “pure” is translated as “sincere” in another place.
Then 2 Peter 3:2:
That ye may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets, and of the commandment of us the apostles of the Lord and Saviour:
This verse is one reference that lets us know that the New Testament writers are on the same level as the Old Testament writers. It is all Scripture and it is “given by inspiration of God, and profitable for doctrine,” for doing things God’s way.
Then in verse 3, 2 Peter 3:3:
Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts,
This word “scoffers” is a word that is related to the word “play.” It is also translated as “mockers.” It has to do with individuals who are not receiving the Word of God with a sincere mind, but they are receiving it in a way where they are not taking what they are hearing seriously. They are not listening to what the Bible has to say in a serious way.
Over in Jude 1:16, it speaks of the ungodly within the churches and congregations, and it says:
These are murmurers, complainers, walking after their own lusts; and their mouth speaketh great swelling words, having men’s persons in admiration because of advantage.
Then verse 18, Jude 1:18:
How that they told you there should be mockers in the last time, who should walk after their own ungodly lusts.
So this is characteristic of people living in our day, in these last times, in the end times.
The Word is going to get out to all the world. Anyone who has the ability or the capability to understand will hear. There may be some infants and there may be some little babies whom God intends to save, and yet they will not understand these things. Or there could be a few people here and there who do not have the mental ability to understand these things, yet God could save some of them. But as far as the world itself, the Lord is going to bring this message to the people of the world, to all the nations, and they are going to hear.
We know that God is going to save “a great multitude, which no man could number” that will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 million people. It will not be this number exactly, because the Lord has saved some in the past. But it will be a huge number of individuals. This will still leave over six or six and a half billion people. I do not know the exact number, but this will still leave large, large numbers of people who are not God’s elect but who are going to hear this information.
For whatever reason, these people are not going to respond. If they responded, they would be a child of God; they would be saved. But they are not going to respond, for example, like the Ninevites responded when Jonah went into Nineveh and said, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” The Ninevites listened to God and obeyed God and cried out to God for mercy.
However, there will be a response from the world, especially from those in the churches and congregations. They are going to dismiss this information. They are going to write it off and they are going to ignore it or they are going to avoid it. If you try to give them a tract, their response will most likely be, “I do not need that. I know that God loves me.” If you try to give them the May 21, 2011 information, they will most likely respond, “No man knows the day or hour.”
There is always something that a person can come up with to avoid the Gospel, to avoid hearing the news from the Word of God. It is easy; it is so easy to sidestep the declarations of the Word of God if you are of a mind to. People will do this. Even though they have been faced and confronted with this information, they dismiss it.
This is just like it says here in the next couple of verses of 2 Peter 3, referring to those who are walking after their own lusts. 2 Peter 3:4-6:
And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:
The Lord is telling us that there are mockers who walk after their own ideas, their own lusts, who are asking this question in 2 Peter 3:4:
Where is the promise of his coming?
Of course, the Bible does promise that Christ is coming, that God is coming. And it is amazing that people want to insist of themselves, “No, He is not coming now. He is not coming. You cannot know if He is coming,” when everything is perfectly in place.
Look at the world. Look at the world! Has there ever been, in the history of mankind, the situation that we have today in the world? Well, yes, maybe you could find a city. If you go back in history, maybe you could find a nation that was very perverse, perhaps, but this is the whole world. It is the whole world today; everyone is the same.
This really proves the Bible true, does it not, that “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God”? It is not just the lower criminal element; we find people from all classes who do things that are so horrible. If we did not have our senses dulled to the point that we do, we would just shake our heads, “How could man do something like this to his fellowman?”
Yes, the world has grown cold and is ripe for judgment. Now would be a perfect time, would it not, for God to return to judge the people of the world for their increased wickedness?
He judged the mankind of the world of Noah’s day for their wickedness because the thoughts of their hearts were “only evil continually.” The people of that day maybe numbered a million or two, a handful, a million maybe, and we would not even count that anymore as a major city today. Right? There are so many cities today that have five, ten, fifteen million people.
But here was a whole world that had begun going its own way apart from God. Their wickedness was observed by God and noted. God pronounced a judgment upon them. He gave them 120 years. Then at the end of the 120 years, He fulfilled His Word. He kept His promise and He destroyed the world of Noah’s day because they deserved destruction.
Sin is rebellion against God and we deserve to die, each one of us. Yet God made a big example of the flood. He has really blown this up and magnified it. It was probably a million or a little over a million, maybe a couple of million people, yet the Bible goes into detail about this flood and the Lord uses it as a type and a figure of the coming of the Son of Man. God also destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah in much the same way, and He also uses them as a type and a figure of His coming, and yet they were just a few cities of the plain.
So He is showing us that He will judge sin and that sin does not go unobserved. It is seen by God, “All things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do.” He sees the condition of the world today, as He has lifted His hand of restraint and the world is daily, through their sins, crying out to God for His judgment.
And here in 2 Peter 3:4, it speaks of individuals who are saying:
Where is the promise of his coming?
They are making a declaration. They are saying:
… all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.
Yet there is evidence that there was a flood. When the scientists do their studies and the archaeologists do their digs and they find bones of animals, they are finding the fossil record. Yet they are using this information, which actually proves that there was a flood, to indicate that this means that the earth has been around for hundreds of millions of years and that there is an evolutionary process that is underway.
The Lord is looking at individuals who are saying these things in verse 5, 2 Peter 3:5, and saying:
For this they willingly are ignorant of, …
This is because you cannot have both, even though there are some theologians who try to interweave both together. They say that there were long days of creation back in Genesis, that God created and then allowed evolution to take over.
But, no, you cannot have that. The six days of creation are six, 24-hour days. The Lord created the world a little over 13,000 years ago and there is no evidence of evolution. Evolution is a very ridiculous idea. It really is, if you stop and think about this: from nothing, things can evolve and turn into the complex creatures that we see everywhere in the world today.
I was in the world for twenty-something years. I grew up with animals all around me. Before I was a child of God, I saw the birds flying in the sky and the things of this nature, but I do not know what it is. Maybe our minds and our concerns are so wrapped up in ourselves and our wants and our desires that we see all of these things and we just take them all for granted. We are kind of trained not to think, not to consider, and not to ponder the world around us. But actually, God created the world in order to testify to each one of us.
Do you remember what God says in the first couple of verses of Psalm 19? We read in Psalm 19:1-3:
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.
So the Lord created the sun and the moon and the stars and everything that we see on this earth: the birds taking flight, the cat, the mouse, the dog, the rabbit.
Just stop and think a second, which I think the world would really not want anyone to do. Take a look at the creation that is all around us. Look at the design of these creatures, from the little ant, to the spider, to the snake. Just take a look at this world and how amazingly these creatures inhabit this earth.
If you do this, you just have to admit, even if you do not want to, that something made this. Of course, the Bible explains that it was God Himself. He created the world and the world itself, the creation, testifies to the Creator.
This is spoken of in Romans 1, where God addresses the problem of mankind not wanting to admit that there is a Creator. This is because if they were to do this, then they would have to take the next step and recognize that the Bible is true. So it says in Romans 1:18:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;
This word “hold” means “hold back” or “suppress.” They are resisting it, “they willingly [willfully] are ignorant,” willfully.
It is a huge plot. It is. It is, is it not? It is a huge plot and an unspoken plot from the peoples of the world, “No, there is evolution. Yes, I know that the idea of evolution is as strange as thinking that a tornado can go through a junkyard and leave, in its aftermath, a completely-built Boeing 747 that has all of its controls working and operating. Yes, I know, if I actually think about it, that this would probably never happen, even if you were to give me a hundred million years; but, however, the scientists say that we evolved. They are very smart people, so I trust them.”
You do? You trust men: tiny, finite men with puny, little minds? Wow! What faith! What faith you must have to trust men rather than God, rather than the Word of God, rather than an all-powerful God who explains life and who explains everything.
“In the beginning,” God spoke and the world came into existence. So here we are. We look around and we see the tree shooting up into the sky. We see the ocean waves and the creatures that are in the sea: majestic whales and dolphins. We see all of these things testifying that there is a Creator who created all things. We hold this back because we want to live our lives in peace. Yet the Bible says, “There is no peace, saith the LORD, unto the wicked.” However, there is peace as far as not thinking about these things that are really very restrictive to our wants and our desires, to our lusts.
This is why the Bible says that they are “walking after their own lusts.” Nobody wants to be hindered from fulfilling their wishes, their dreams. They are afraid to be honest that their dream is a fancy word for a lust apart from God. It is to do our own will and our own desires and to have things our way, like that song says, “I did it my way.” Unfortunately, their way leads to destruction, which the Bible warns us against. “Broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction.”
Let us go back to 2 Peter. It says in 2 Peter 3:7:
But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.
The Lord has been talking about the flood. In verse 7, He is speaking of our present world. It is still the same world, but the way in which God addresses it is as though there were two worlds. The first was destroyed by water. The second, this current world, will be destroyed be fire. It was only the face of the earth that was destroyed in the flood, that which had the breath of life, but it was a worldwide destruction that was incredible in the degree that God poured out that deluge, fifteen cubits higher than the highest mountain of that day. This would have compacted all of the creatures that had drowned and it would have fossilized them quickly, and we do have these fossil records today.
Yet God did all of this to teach us and to warn us. One of the big reasons that He brought the flood was the statement that we find next in 2 Peter 3:8:
But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, …
If you want to be ignorant, if you want to willfully be ignorant, you can. Nobody can stop somebody from being willfully ignorant. This is something within them. It is something that is within their spirit and their mind, and all kinds of people are going to choose this path. But God is speaking to the beloved, and the beloved are the believers.
If we go over to Colossians 3:12, it says:
Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, …
And then it goes on.
God is addressing the elect and He calls them “holy and beloved.” Beloved is a term of endearment for the Lord Jesus and His Bride. This is referring to the body of believers who are the beloved of Christ.
So God is addressing His people in 2 Peter 3:8:
… beloved, be not ignorant …
This word “ignorant” is found in Hebrews 13:2, where it says:
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
John was discussing angels earlier. This is an interesting verse all by itself in reference to:
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: …
How do we entertain strangers? We grab a stack of tracts (about so big) and we go stand on a corner; you will meet a lot of strangers. “Here you go…here you go…,” but keep what we read in Hebrews 13:2 in mind:
… for thereby some have entertained angels …
Or aggelos, which is the word “messengers,” too.
… unawares.
It could be that this person is a believer or that person is a believer.
This reminds me of a few weeks ago when someone went down by the train station and met someone else reading the Bible who also knew the truths of the Gospel. They just never had met before. They were strangers.
So in sharing the Gospel with that person, they “entertained angels unawares,” and “unawares” is the word “ignorant.” When we are handing out tracts, we have no knowledge nor do we know who might be one of God’s elect people or who might not be one of God’s elect people.
This is what God is saying in 2 Peter 3:8:
But, beloved, be not [unaware] of this one thing, …
Each word in this verse is really giving us a lot of information to help us at this time. We are to “be not [unaware] of this one thing.”
Mr. Camping did a study on this awhile back at one of the Towson Bible Conferences. He went to a verse in Luke 10 where there were sisters, Mary and Martha, who were serving. It seemed that Martha was doing all of the work while Mary was sitting at Jesus’ feet because Christ was speaking. This is a good verse, is it not? It says in Luke 10:39:
And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus’ feet, and heard his word.
This is what we do every time we open up the Bible. We are sitting at Christ’s feet, and this has always been true. The principle that God is going to establish here has always been true.
Yes, we have to do other things in this life sometimes: we have to work or we have to clean house, etc. Yes, there are other things to do. But the greatest thing that we have to do, the “one thing” that is of the utmost importance is to read the Bible.
However, there are times when I have not done this. I should never wake up and say, “Oh, I have so many things to do,” and I am off running: going to the store, fixing this or that, cutting the grass, whatever it is.
No. “One thing is needful,” which Jesus will tell Martha here in verse 42, as Martha complains that Mary is not helping her. We read in Luke 10:42:
But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.
Therefore, when we get up, the Bible tells us, “seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness.” We are to go to the Bible first and pray first; then the rest of the day will be much better. We will have a better plan and be able to handle the day in a more God-glorifying way than if we are running around as Martha was here, so anxious, “Oh, I have so much to do.” Plus, if Martha would have stopped what she was doing, it would have been fine with Christ, “Take a seat right next to your sister. That is the solution, Martha. Do not worry about the cups and the pots and the pans. Do not worry about these things. Just for now, sit down and be calm and hear My Word.”
Well, you see, Jesus, in using this term, this phrase, “one thing is needful,” means that one thing is most important, which is the same word that we find in 2 Peter 3:8:
But, beloved, …
That is, true believers:
… be not [unaware] of this one thing …
So “be not [unaware] of this one thing” that is more important than anything else. And it is especially important now that we know this, that we have knowledge of this.
God speaks of this time of the Latter Rain when He is opening up the seals—when He is opening up His Word—as a time of increased knowledge, and “none of the wicked shall understand; but the wise shall understand.” He is teaching us from the Bible things that have been hidden, especially this, especially this.
Maybe you cannot understand everything that the Bible is saying about Jesus being “slain from before the foundation of the world.” Maybe you cannot understand how it fits in with so many other verses. Or maybe you cannot understand that He was resurrected from before the foundation of the world and “declared to be the Son,” which He was. Maybe some of these things are very difficult, but know this “one thing” because this will help you greatly to know that May 21st in 2011 is the rapture, that it is the “day of the Lord,” the day of His wrath, which will continue for five months. That whole five-month period is called the “day of the Lord.” This information will help you, so what is it? It is:
… that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
This is the statement that God wants us to think about and to consider and to be not ignorant of. Do not miss this.
Well, why is this so important? It is important because Genesis 7 tells us this. The 120-year period was up and the ark was completed. It was at the point where it was necessary to just take care of some additional details in order to be fully ready. It is like when you pack for a trip. It seems like it is the last hour when you always have so many things that you have to do because you did not think of these earlier. Well, they are packing the ark for a long voyage. They are going to sail the oceans of the world, because that will be all there is. The whole world will be under water.
Of course, God helped them with all of this. He had been using Noah as a “preacher of righteousness” to preach to the people of the world of his day, which would have been a lot easier than it is to preach to the people of the world today in several ways.
The world of that day was one language. Noah did not have to have his words translated into one hundred and fifty different languages. There was one language. It was not until later that there was the tower of Babel when God confounded people’s languages. Plus, there was one continent. It was one huge land mass.
So Noah had his home and I am sure that the vast majority of these million or so people lived in cities, just like people live today. They were gathered together, even though there could have been a few nomads or wanderers. But for the most part, as we see with the tower of Babel, man wanted to come together. This world, which was closely knit by language because they could not be on a continent over here or they could not be on an island out there, was one land. It would not be until a few thousand years later during the days of Peleg that the continents were divided.
So here was Noah building the ark in their midst as a witness and a testimony to every one of them as to what was going to happen. He was preaching to them and yet they did not listen; they did not listen at all.
In Genesis 7:4, it says:
For yet seven days, …
This is the Lord speaking to Noah:
… and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; …
We know that seven days later, historically, the rain came, the flood came. God opened up the firmament of the Heaven and there were just tremendous amounts of water that covered the highest mountain by fifteen cubits, and the whole world perished. But it is the statement that there were “seven days” before the flood that God is connecting. This is because in 2 Peter 3, He was speaking about the flood.
If we look also at Psalm 90, which uses this language of “a thousand years,” the only Psalm that the Lord moved Moses to write down, it says in Psalm 90:3-5:
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, …
God is telling us to go into the past, into history, by using this phrase “a thousand years.”
It continues:
… 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 the “thousand years” is used in connection with the flood, and we find in Genesis 7:4 the reference to “seven days.”
But the Bible does not do this kind of thing, does it? When there is a historical account of something? Or God does not use types and figures in the Bible, does He?
When does He not? When does He not? He told Ezekiel the prophet, “Lie upon thy side, three hundred and ninety days.” When he was done, he was told, “Lie again on thy right side…forty days.” Then He likened “each day for a year.” And it is His privilege to do so.
When Joseph interpreted the baker and the butler’s dreams, they were dreaming about branches or they were dreaming about vines and Joseph interpreted, “The three branches are three days.”
God does so many things like this in the Bible that it is not unusual; it is very typical. I almost did not want to mention this to you because I know that God’s people know that Christ spoke in parables; and without a parable, He did not speak to us.
But they say, “Yes, but this is history; this is history. I know that there are Proverbs; I know that there is Revelation, but that is hyperbolic language.” This is what theologians call it.
What a way of getting away from saying that it is parabolic! Hyperbole? They say, “The author is speaking in hyperbole,” referring to John who they think is the author of Revelation, when God is the author. No, when the beast comes up out of the sea, that is a parabolic picture. It is parabolic.
In Galatians 4, God refers back to the book of Genesis, this historical book, and He speaks of two wives of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar, who had two sons, and He says, “Which things are an allegory,” and “allegory” is another word for “parable.” This is true history and it is accurate history, but the Lord uses it to teach spiritual truth.
So we have this information from Genesis concerning “seven days” and God tells us to know this “one thing”: “one day is…as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” Therefore, we have full, Biblical justification to say, “Alright, this is seven thousand years, let us say. So we have this length of time to get into the ark, and the ark would represent Christ whom we are to find safety and refuge and deliverance in. After seven thousand years, the end comes because the flood came exactly seven days later.”
So someone might say, “Well, that is a nice teaching,” and all kinds of people would have no problem with this if we had not learned the Biblical calendar of history and were not able to connect events with dates.
However, this is the problem. If the seven thousandth year landed on 2185 A.D., their attitude might be, “Sure, tell me more.” But the problem is that the seven thousandth year is 2011 A.D., which is in our lifetime. And it is not only in our lifetime, but it is right around the corner.
If we were a runner who was running a race, as God likens the Christian life to “the race that is set before us,” it is as though we have turned that last bend and there is the finish line directly ahead. We can see it and we can know that this is how long it will take to get there.
This is the difficulty. This is the problem, because now we are coming up with a teaching from the Bible that demands action; it demands action or else we are not responding like the Ninevites. The Ninevites heard the message and responded. They took action. They sat in sackcloth and ashes and they cried mightily to God.
Let us go to 2 Peter 3 again. 2 Peter 3:9 says:
The Lord is not slack …
This word “slack” comes from a word that means “slow.”
… concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
The Lord is coming according to His perfect timetable. He is not off track at all. This has been His plan all along. Christ came in “fulness of the time.” And Jesus will return at the perfection of time and in full accord with the Biblical calendar of history, which has revealed when He will come.
Notice that it says, “The Lord is not slack concerning His promise”:
… but is longsuffering to us-ward, …
Before we close, I just want to look a little bit at the word “longsuffering.” If we go to Romans 9:22-23, it says:
What if God, willing to show his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory,
This is the Lord telling us why He is delaying, as far as not coming in judgment on the world that has grown so wicked. It is because He is longsuffering. He is patient and He is patient for a reason, which is because He wants to save His people. Therefore, He puts up with it. He allows it. He permits what is going on for a very specific reason, which is because He will save that “great multitude.”
Also, let us go to 1 Peter 3. This is getting into the question of the flood, speaking of Jesus in 1 Peter 3:19-20:
By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison; Which sometime …
This really means “aforetime.”
… were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.
God was longsuffering to the world for that 120-year period, waiting while Noah constructed the ark. But why did He not just help Noah build it a little faster? Why did He allow the world to continue on for that length of time?
We know that this was so the timeline would perfectly fit. It had to be the year 4990 B.C. so that He could have the 7,000 years leading to 2011. But God had His purposes, and one of them was that He was going to save some of the people of the world of that day, which was Noah’s family. Noah’s family were the only ones who escaped the flood. They are the eight souls. There was Noah, his wife, his three sons (Shem, Ham, and Japheth) and their wives.
But when did they become saved? At what point were they saved? When God first came to Noah? Probably not. As God told Noah to build the ark and Noah, in obedience, began to build the ark?
Look at Hebrews 11:7. The Lord does not really give Noah too much “press,” we would say, here in this chapter of faith, but He does make this statement about him in Hebrews 11:7:
By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, …
Exactly as each one of us has been and is being warned.
… moved with fear, …
Just like the Ninevites.
… prepared an ark to the saving of his house; …
Is it not interesting that he prepared the ark and, yes, his family got on board? His family got on board and they were rescued from the flood, but I think that God is telling us a little bit more than this. Not only did they get on board and not only were they delivered physically, but they were saved. God saved them.
As Noah kept hammering away, as he kept hammering away and measuring and cutting and fitting the pieces to the ark, in obedience to God, maybe one of his sons was saved by God early and maybe he began to help his dad. Then maybe sometime later, fifty or sixty years later, another son says, “Are you still doing this?” “Well, son, it is coming and it is coming soon.”
You see, especially in the family, they would have had that witness of the father who was obeying God and seeing him in the action that God had told him to take. Then another son maybe became saved. Then another one, or maybe it was his wife. We do not know who, but maybe not until that very year of 4990 B.C., maybe the wife, until maybe Mrs. Noah was just broken by God.
Of course, it is not just that we see the Gospel in the lives of others. God has to save people. They have to be His elect, but they were His elect. So He waited patiently for the whole length of time, until the last one of those elect was saved, no matter how few. They were eight people, eight souls, and yet they were very precious to God. He worked out circumstances so that they did become saved, and we can see how God blessed Noah for obeying Him.
But notice this part in Hebrews 11:7. Noah was “moved with fear” and:
… prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.
The act of building the ark was like nailing the world to the cross, “I am crucified with Christ.” Remember that the Apostle Paul was moved to say, “The world is crucified unto me.”
What are true believers doing today as we are not only hearing the information but acting upon it? There are people who are giving their notices at work. A couple of them have spoken to me. Why are they doing this? Because they have enough resources that God has provided and they want to redeem the time. They want to use the time that is left to the best of their ability to serve God by sharing this information with the people of the world. What a witness to those whom they used to work for and to their families! I know that one person was telling me that he was dreading telling his mother, but this is a witness to their families.
Not everyone is going to leave their work, but as we are going on, God’s people are going on mission trips, they are wearing T-shirts that state this, they are handing out tracts, and they are giving of their funds to support the Gospel, like the widow who gave of her “two mites,” which was “all her living.” And it is very significant that God places this information about this widow right at the beginning of Luke 21, which is a chapter dealing with our day.
God’s people are going to obey God and follow the Lord and try, as much as lies within them, to share the Word with the people around them. In doing so, if we have family members, I think that we can hope. We can be encouraged and pray for them that the Lord might have mercy on them and also maybe on some others whom we have had a chance to witness to.
Let us stop here.