After God gave Noah the instructions regarding the number and kinds of animals to bring into the ark, male and female, God informed him that the coming rain, which would bring about a worldwide flood, was about to start. It will happen in the next week. We learn more about the event with each paragraph beginning in Chapter 7. Hughes writes, “Each of the brief paragraphs reveals something more about the event. Verse 2, which commands Noah to ‘Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals,’ anticipates Noah’s offering sacrifices at the end of the voyage and also anticipates the sacrificial system that would develop after the flood. Noah and his family were sinners who would carry into the new world the sin of the old. Verse 4 records God’s final spoken sentence before the flood, one of total destruction: ‘… and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground.’” In Genesis 7:4-5, God tells Noah, “For in seven days, I will send rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground. And Noah did all that the Lord had commanded him.” Hughes also believes that the seven-day warning was to give them time to mourn the death of Methuselah. He died in the year of the flood as predicted by his very name, which means “when he dies it will come.”[1]
Noah was told exactly when the floods would come. He had a year or more to prepare the ark, and now he’s told when the catastrophe will begin. Now he is told that it will begin in exactly seven days. According to the Bible, another great day of destruction awaits us, but when Jesus was questioned regarding when that would happen, he made it clear that no one knew when except God the Father. But Jesus did give us some things that would give us a clue as to the cause of the coming events. The gospel writers tell us that Jesus told his disciples that the coming of the Son of man would be like the days of Noah. There are two things we might look for in a society that could be a sign of the coming of the end. The first thing is that nobody believed it would happen. They would just be eating their dinner, marrying and burying, and living their life as if everything is just fine. It would be a surprise. This is how it was in Noah’s day. No one believed it would actually happen. It wasn’t until the rains started that society began to question their unbelief.
The second thing we might look for is the increase in violence in society. You will remember that in Genesis chapter six, God explained that it was the atrocities that man committed against one another that caused God’s heart to fill with pain. It was then he purposed to bring an end to it all. A web blogger writes, “A major reason for God’s bringing the great Flood was that the earth was filled with violence (Genesis 6:13). Consider the age we live in. There’s been an alarming increase in global violence just in the past 100 years. Wars in the past 90 years killed more people than during the previous 500 years combined. An estimated 203 million people were killed by wars just in the 20th century. Between 170 and 360 million people were killed by governments in the 20th century, apart from war. Recently, more civilians have been dying in armed conflicts than combatants themselves, accounting for 90 percent of casualties since 1945. Just in the last decade, war has claimed the lives of an estimated 2 million children and has disabled another 4 to 5 million children.” This Web blogger adds, “A silent form of violence is perpetrated around the world by deliberate abortions of innocents. Each year about 44 million abortions are performed globally.”[2] We do not have the luxury of knowing exactly when the Lord will return as Noah did, but we have Jesus’ exhortation in Mark 13:33, “Be on guard, keep awake. For you do not know when the time will come.”
[1] Hughes, R. Kent. 2004. Genesis: Beginning and Blessing. Preaching the Word. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books.
[2] https://lifehopeandtruth.com/prophecy/end-times/as-in-the-days-of-noah/