(#5 Session 2) Day 2 - Reflections (Keep the Faith)

Shalom Aleichem and welcome to my bi-monthly blog!

As we end our discussion on the Second Day of Creation and the events of the flood of judgment and ark of salvation, I want to draw to your attention the prophetic significance of this period of time for us today.

In Mt 24:37-39, Jesus tells us that when He comes back, the world will be like that during the days of Noah. For in those days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. We saw how the flood only came after 1656 years, which is a very long time indeed. Enoch was born 622 years after Creation, meaning mankind would have heard Enoch’s warning of God’s coming judgment almost a thousand years earlier. But since nothing happened to the world for a long time after that, they doubted and ignored his warnings. By the time Noah came along, no one was listening. This is how the world will also be like when Jesus returns.

Today, we live in precisely such a world. We are almost two thousand years from the time Jesus first came. The Bible warns us that Jesus will soon return but as nothing has happened for such a long time since then, we doubt and ignore God’s Word. As we will see in our coming sessions through the 7 Days of Creation, the days of Noah are indeed here.

The question therefore is, do we recognise the times that we live in now? Is our ark - our faith in Christ - secure? Are we like the wise or foolish builders Jesus spoke about (Mt 7:24-27), able to withstand the rains, storms and floods of trouble and persecution that will strike before He returns? Have we put on the full armour of God (Eph 6:10-17) so that when the day of evil comes, we may be able to stand our ground, and after we have done everything, to stand? Are we able to eventually declare as Paul did, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Tim 4:7)?

As we reflect on this, we need to:

First, change our perspective if we are to understand the times we live in and know what we should do. We need to listen to God’s Rhema - His Voice of Truth - in this Kairos rather than the lies and deception of the devil and even of our own flesh and human rationalisations.

Second, know who we are in Christ and where we are in our walk with Him. We need to turn on and be guided by our spiritual GPS as it were to where God wants us to be in the world that we live in today, according to His eternal purposes for us.

Lastly, live holy and separated lives. We can expect the end times to be like the days of Noah. Life will appear normal with people eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, not knowing what will happen until the end suddenly strikes. Consequently, we need to be in but not of this world, building not our worldly livelihood but our ark of faith in Christ so that we will keep the faith when the rains, storms and floods come.

Link to presentation.

(#4 Session 2) Day 2 - Ark of Salvation

Shalom Aleichem and welcome to my bi-monthly blog!

Although God had to judge the world through a worldwide flood, it was not as though He wasn't merciful or long-suffering. He did not destroy mankind immediately but waited patiently for over 1600 years, holding back His judgment so that they could return to Him in repentance.

And God did not just sit back and do nothing during this period.

He warned them through Enoch of the coming judgment. Enoch even named his son Methuselah (meaning “his death shall bring”) as God’s message to the wicked, for on the year Methuselah died, his death brought about the Flood (Genesis 5:25-29, 7:6).

And God not only just waited and warned. As the title of my blog today indicates, the Second Day also revealed God’s plan of salvation through Noah’s Ark - this vault as it were separating the flood water below it from the rain water above during the first judgment.

This first ark ultimately points to Jesus, our Spiritual Ark of salvation. In 1 Peter 3:20-22, Peter explained how just as Noah and his family were saved through water by the ark, rising above God’s judgment of mankind seen in the flood below it, we are now saved through the water of baptism as we put our faith in Jesus, who by His resurrection lifts us up from death to life and from the coming judgment of God at the end of time.

Indeed, when we look at the very names of the ten generations from Adam to Noah, they spell out God's wonderful plan of salvation in Christ!

Link to presentation.

(#3 Session 2) Day 2 - Flood of Judgment

Shalom Aleichem and welcome to my bi-monthly blog!

In the next three sessions, we will look at the Second Day of Creation, beginning here with the flood of judgment.

If the First Day of Creation is a picture of how we are in darkness, being separated from the light of the glory of God because of our sin, then the Second Day reveals firstly how we stand under judgment by a holy and righteous God. Sin demands a price, which must be paid, and this price is death. We see this fulfilled in the Great Flood, the first worldwide judgment, which we can read about in Genesis 6-8.

In order to better understand how this event could happen, remember in Gen 1:2, we were told how the world was formless, empty and dark in the beginning, and that the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. The Bible tells us that the world was initially covered in water, for it was only on the Second Day that part of this water was separated out and lifted up into the atmosphere, and the Third Day that dry ground first appeared when the remaining waters were gathered, probably in the deepest parts of the earth. The flood came about when God released all these waters stored above the sky and underneath the earth back onto the world. For those of you who doubt whether the flood really happened, there are over 270 accounts of this global catastrophe from people groups and cultures all over the world.

It is sobering to note that 1656 years passed from the time of Adam until the Flood. During this time, only 8 (Noah’s family) survived out of the possible 3-7 billion people that lived then. Noah’s father Lamech was 56 when Adam died at age 930, meaning that most of mankind would have heard first-hand from Adam about God, yet they still turned to evil. Imagine how heart-wrenching it was for Adam but even more so for God! You would also recall that following the Fall, God promised Adam and Eve in Gen 3:15 an offspring who would crush Satan’s head and so redeem mankind. They must have harboured this hope when Cain - literally the first “son of man” - was born. But instead of crushing Satan, Cain murdered his own brother, Abel. We are just so utterly sinful, unable to rescue ourselves. Only God Himself - when He came to us as Jesus the True “Son of Man” - is able to accomplish this - to crush Satan and cover the nakedness and shame of our sins.

Link to presentation.