Days of Noah

 

As the days of Noah were, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be – Matthew 24:37

Yeshua (Jesus) of Nazareth will likely return to earth during the fall Biblical feasts (He fulfilled the spring feasts with His death and resurrection). We just don’t know the year. But the passage above might help us discern how close we are.

Genesis 6 describes Noah’s generation as wicked, violent and corrupt. It was so dark that God made this remarkable confession: He was sorry that He made man, and He was going to destroy man and beast from the face of the earth. But Noah found grace in the eyes of God, who is identified in the Hebrew text as YHVH, the name that expresses His attribute of mercy. Noah and seven family members build a wooden ark and survive the worldwide flood.

Did Noah’s generation commit a sin that crossed a line, provoking God to judge the earth? Is that transgression being repeated today? The Gospel of Luke offers a clue. Like Matthew, it links Yeshua’s return to the days of Noah. But Luke adds this:

Likewise as it was also in the days of Lot: They ate, they drank, they bought and sold, they planted, they built; but on the day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all – Luke 17:28-29

The root of Sodom’s sin was pride and complacency (Ezekiel 16:49). But Sodom’s lasting infamy, according to Christian author Jim Tetlow, stemmed from its aggressive homosexuality. World Net Daily reported recently that three ancient rabbinical texts speak of pagans and/or the people of Noah’s day practicing same-sex marriage. The commentary on Leviticus 18 suggests that something was going on among the Canaanites that caused them to be defiled in God’s sight:

According to the doings of the Land of Egypt . . . and the doings of the Land of Canaan . . . you shall not do (Leviticus 18:3): Can it be (that it means) don’t build buildings, and don’t plant plantings? Thus it (the verse) teaches (further), “And you shall not walk in their statutes.” I say (that the prohibition of the verse applies) only to (their) statutes – that statutes which are theirs and their fathers and their fathers’ fathers. And what did they do? A man got married to a man, and a woman to a woman, a man married a woman and her daughter, and a woman was married to two (men). Therefore it is said, “And you shall not walk in their statutes.”

Michael Brown, who holds a Ph.D in near Eastern languages and literature, told WND, “If these traditions are accurate – and one must wonder where they came from – that would mean that societies that did make such radical changes didn’t survive.”

Today same-sex marriage is legal in 22 countries, including the United States.

The illustration above is a media promotion for The Ark Encounter,  a theme attraction in Kentucky that will feature a full-size ark based on the dimensions provided in Genesis 6.

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