#1 The Days of Noah: Their Conditions
How to recognize and respond to the times we live in
"As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man" (Luke 17:26).
When I read these words of Jesus, the opening words of A Tale of Two Cities come to mind: "It was the worst of times."
I think of the wickedness, the violence, and the corruption that Genesis 6 records.
So bad were the times that a father clutched his infant son and pined, "May this one comfort us from our work, from pain that is caused by our manual labor, and from the ground that the LORD has cursed" (Genesis 5:29, ISV).
Lamech named his son Noah, the word for rest.
Whenever his friends beckoned Noah to play, when his parents called him home, when he introduced himself to a stranger, Noah's name pricked like a sliver—an irritation his parents hoped he would help to heal. His name spoke of rest. He was a constant reminder of their unrest.
Who could be at ease when constantly threatened? The generations had strayed into injustice, oppression, extortion, and violence, all the while convinced they were progressive (the arts and technology were booming (Genesis 4:21–22)). Life, like the overgrown ground they plowed, was hard.
In today’s parlance, they were all bad apples.
Into this distress, Noah was born. In their discomfort, his generation cried out for comfort.
And Jesus said more days like this were coming.
"As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man."
Have those days arrived? Are we, like Noah's father, desperate for relief and longing for a comforter?
In this post and the next, I want to learn what Noah's generation has to say to ours. Of all the periods of history Jesus could relate to His return, why Noah's?
And I wonder why the conditions, more than the man who endured them, get my attention. What can Noah's character teach me?
"He who endures to the end shall be saved," Jesus said.
Noah endured in his generation and was saved. How can we in ours?
Progressives broke the norms long before Noah
To know if we are in the days of Noah that Jesus foretold, we must learn what Noah encountered. God cited three grievous faults:
Wickedness (Genesis 6:5).
Corruption (6:11–12).
Violence (6:11, 13).
The Hebrew behind our English translations tells the story.1
Wickedness. The noun derives from a verb that means to spoil by breaking into pieces. Wickedness demolishes what is whole and renders it good for nothing. It makes the useful useless. Its effect in Noah's community was a range of distress, from personal misery and injury to calamity and general evil.
Corruption is the decay that wickedness unleashes. Once broken, what had been whole spoils. We see corruption in ourselves—the decline that begins in youth accelerates in middle age and our senior years and climaxes in the grave. By Noah's generation, corruption permeated the creation on the heels of the wickedness that wrecked it.
Violence speaks of an unbridled population that is cruel, unjust, oppressive, fraudulent, and so on.
A biography shows how progressive thinking brought on the distress Noah encountered.
Another Lamech, on Cain's side of the human family and generations earlier than Noah's father, reimagined God's boundaries for marriage and justice (Genesis 4:19–24).
Lamech was born into a culture where God had prescribed a solitary man and woman—Adam and Eve—would bear children who were to cleave, man to woman. "A man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh" (Genesis 2:24).
An expansive thinker, Lamech reformed the family model on the premise that, if one wife is good, more must be better. He wed two women, Adah and Zillah.
His progressive notions extended to justice. God had sentenced Cain, the first murderer, to exile and hard labor and added another condition when Cain protested, "Anyone who finds me will kill me."
God conceded, "Whoever kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold."
Lamech, the second recorded murderer, reformed God's penal code. After confiding to his wives, "I have killed a man for wounding me, even a young man for hurting me," Lamech announced, "If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, then Lamech seventy-sevenfold."
By Noah's time, "the earth was filled with violence" (Genesis 6:11). Such was the progress of Lamech's progressive platform. Killing was easy, but punishing the killer was not.
Progressive thinking today
Progressive reformers today revile history and pursue new freedoms, similar to Lamech and his successors. This is the mindset:
The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against His Anointed, saying, "Let us break Their bonds in pieces and cast away Their cords from us." —Psalm 2:2-3
Consider the bonds we have broken since the 1960s:
Sunday: a day of worship. Blue Laws for centuries regulated various activities, especially commerce on Sundays. When they were challenged in the mid-20th century, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1961 upheld that laws with religious origins are constitutional (McGowan v. Maryland). But there was a twist: such laws must have a secular purpose. Before long, Sunday transmuted from a day of rest and worship to a family and recreation day. Stores opened, sports were played, and worship attendance declined. Without a day of rest, we are restless. We are the 24x7 generation, always "on".
Marriage: a binding covenant. Ronald Reagan signed the first no-fault divorce law in the U.S. as governor of California in 1969. "Irreconcilable differences" became enough reason to declare a marriage broken beyond repair, and couples quickly took advantage. Divorce rates that hovered between 10% and 25% in the early 1900s climbed to 40% in the 1970s and 50% in the 1980s. They are currently about 30% 2.
Marriage: for male-female couples. Marriage laws took another twist in 2003 when Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage—the first state to do so. The U.S. Supreme Court established it as federal law in the Obergefell v. Hodges case 12 years later.
Gender. The male-female construct has been the cornerstone of families and language (masculine and feminine nouns), but progressive ideology has stripped gender of its basic meaning, to the point that Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson replied, "I can't...I'm not a biologist" when she was asked to define "woman" during her nomination hearing. A gender that is fluid, trans, and non-binary supplants "male and female God created them."
Where will progress land us?
The world of 2024, compared to when I was born in 1952, convinces me that days like Noah's have returned, just as Jesus foretold. Reformers like Lamech have reshaped our social order. Norms have been broken—the work of wickedness. Violence and corruption, alighting on the wreckage, permeate the daily news.
Like Noah's father holding his infant, these events have me wondering, "Who will comfort us in our chaos?"
We can surmise no one thought to ask Lamech where his progressive thinking about marriage and justice would lead. If they had, the patriarch would probably never have foreseen a confrontation with The Creator and the destruction of mankind.
If no one asked then, history was young and we can forgive them, but we are much farther along. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," George Santayana reminds us in The Life of Reason, or The Phases of Human Progress.
Recalling the past, we must ask the progressives in our churches and our politics: Where is your progress taking us? Progress implies you see something improved and better ahead. Better than what? If we follow, where will we end? The present course doesn't look so promising.
I have yet to hear an answer from them, but history and the Bible tell me another confrontation with The Creator is imminent. And our destruction is destined, not because of climate change, but because of God's intervention.
This they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water.
But the heavens and the earth which are now preserved by the same word, are reserved for fire until the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. —2 Peter 3:5-7
How not to bend to the trends
Noah endured such conditions and pleased God. How can we?
Determine who shapes your outlook. We hear daily how democracy is on the verge of collapse, the earth is spinning toward an environmental cataclysm, and the world is on the cusp of World War III. Despair is in the air. Jesus tells us, "When these things begin to happen, look up and lift up your heads, because your redemption draws near" (Luke 21:38). The word for "look up" suggests being elated or joyful.
Who is right about what’s coming: The pundits or Jesus? Noah believed God and set himself to prepare for the future by doing in the present what God told him. Jesus has told us what's ahead. To the extent we believe Him, let’s set ourselves to doing now what He wants.Overcome evil with good. Adapting tit-for-tat with our adversaries is human nature, but God has called us by The Gospel to partake of His divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). Jesus exposed the difference in the Sermon on the Mount, saying, "You love those who love you" (Matthew 5:43–48). In short, we love because. Not only with each other but also with God, as John wrote, "We love Him because He first loved us" (1 John 4:19).
The divine nature washes the "because" out of our love. God loves unconditionally, as expressed in Greek by agape, and Jesus taught us, “Be like your Father in heaven.” Don’t love because. Just love.
Of course, this is easier said than done. Jesus even warned, "Without me, you can do nothing" (John 15:5). We cannot practice the divine nature unless we have it—a desire that the psalmist David expressed and only Jesus grants—"Create in me a clean heart, and renew a right spirit within me" (Psalm 51:10).
The conditions of Noah's days—and ours—have my attention. But I want to know more about the man who endured them. What can Noah teach us about finding God's favor in unfavorable times?
We'll explore this in #2 The Days of Noah: His Character.
These definitions are from Strong's Concordance
US Divorce Rates Over Time and What the Numbers Really Mean, cited 07/02/2024,
Jennifer L. Betts, updated 06/05/2023.