A Review
You know the story of Noah taking the animals into the big boat, before the great flood came. But do you know why the flood came?
It was because the people had become so wicked. These first people lived very many years; now, a man is old at one hundred years; then, many lived several hundred years. They had time to learn and do many things, they all knew God’s power, yet did not honor Him, God saw what the people did, and also knew their thoughts were all for cruel, wicked deeds. God grieved for them but knew they would not stop their evil ways. But Noah believed in God, and God told him to build a great boat with rooms to keep a few animals of every kind, and food, because He would send a flood over all the earth.
Noah must have told the people of God’s words and what was right for them, as he is called “a preacher of righteousness” (2 Peter 2:55And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly; (2 Peter 2:5)). But they did not believe Noah. He built the boat just as God said; it was called the Ark, because that means a safe place.
When all was ready, and Noah, his family, and the animals inside the Ark, it began to rain, and continued day after day; water also overflowed from the seas and the earth was covered with waver. The ark floated, and all within were safe. But all the people and animals on the outside perished.
The water was over the earth many days after the rain stopped, until God sent a wind to dry it off. At last the ark rested on a high mountain in Asia. It was several months more until lower ground was dry and God told Noah to come out of the ark. They had lived in the big boat a little more than a year.
God told Noah that He would never again send a flood over all the earth, and that the seasons should be regular:
“While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” Genesis 8:28.
Those words show a complete year the same as we now know a year.
The flood is not told of in books of history and geography, yet could have been the cause of many things men wonder about, as the changes of rivers or strange fossils of animals found. The Lord Jesus spoke of the flood, and told what the people were doing when the flood came and took them all away. So it was a real event (Luke 17:26,2726And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man. 27They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all. (Luke 17:26‑27)).
ML 11/22/1942