FIRST POSTED ON 1 JANUARY 2019.
Shalom Aleichem and welcome to my Shabbat 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.
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