Very quickly after Adam and Eve died, their children, and their children’s children got more and more sinful, and at last things got to such a condition that God said He would not let the wickedness go on; and He also cut down man’s days to one hundred and twenty years. He saw what bad hearts those people had, and that all they thought about, and all they said and did, was only evil all the time, yet He was so patient, and so slow to anger that He did not leave them without someone to speak to them about their ways and to warn them of the certainly coming day of judgment.
‘Noah’s great-grandfather Enoch, about whom we read last time, had spoken to the people of his day in a very solemn way. God has told us in the Bible, part of what Enoch said to them; it is written in the short little Epistle of Jude, verses 14 and 15. Will you take your Bible and find it?
“Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of His saints, to execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.” ‘
Noah, too, was 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).) We don’t know how many listened to his preaching, but we can be sure that hundreds, and it may be thousands, came to see the ark God told him to build, and not very many of them, we would think, went away without hearing his solemn warnings. Perhaps they laughed at what they may have called Noah’s crazy notion, that a great flood was coming to drown them all, but the time came when there was no laughing left.
God indeed had said to Noah, “The end of all flesh is come before Me make thee an ark of gopher wood”. It. was to have many rooms, and it would need to have very many to allow a place for each kind of creature that would have to find a home in the ark for a year. It had to have a place for all that would believe Goo’ and be saved, too. This big house-ship was to be painted inside and outside with pitch: it was about four hundred and fifty feet long, seventy-five feet wide, and forty-five feet high, with three floors. There was just one window and it was about a foot and a half, on the roof of the ark. I don’t suppose this ark was very much like the “Noah’s arks” that boys and girls, when they ark not too big, sometimes have to play with; when the ark was built. God told Noah and his family to come into it. Do you notice that word “Come”? not “go” into the ark. God, through Jesus, invites us to come to Hirai and be saved, foo, not from being drowned, but from the judgment that is surely coming soon, and that will be to be shut out from Him and shut in with Satan forever.