I remember once when I was a kid my little brother came home from Sunday School, and in all seriousness asked our mother at the dining table, “What was it like on the Ark Mum?”

I think, like him, there are a couple of little things about the days of Noah which the church has gotten wrong.
Not that they’re devastating or impact our salvation, but let’s always aim for the truth and avoid confusion.


Firstly…
When I was young there were way less people on the planet, less than 3 billion, and now we’re rapidly heading for 9 billion!
And it doesn’t feel like that’s a good thing…
Honestly, I felt way safer when I was young. We never locked our house, we caught the bus by ourselves, and rode bikes 3km to school, even when I was 8 or 9 years old. We would eat fish we caught in the river near our house, without having to worry if they were contaminated. People didn’t even lock their cars when they went somewhere.
And you could drive places without gridlock. You could catch trains and actually sit down.

It feels like the more people we got, the more evil and dangerous the world became.
Constantly in the news now we hear of crimes of all sorts, even murders.
And the world seems constantly on the brink of war.

Everyone seems to be driven along by fears of all kinds. We have more money, but it seems to buy less.
Houses are ridiculously expensive to buy, and almost unaffordable to rent.
People seem way more focused on self, even if their benefit comes at the expense of someone else.
Even if that someone else is already way worse off than them.

People damage property belonging to others and then claim it’s their right because the owners of the property are destroying the planet.
And some of them are! Some of them are making billions of dollars doing things which are suspect at best, and downright immoral at worst, even to the point that people die, but they don’t care. They’re making money.

And people are living sinful lives, and openly rejoicing in their freedom to do that. In fact, claiming a right to do that. With same sex or even transgender partners portrayed as common in the media. Paedophilia seems to have drastically increased to the point that parents are too afraid to let their children play outside unsupervised.
When I was a kid, all this was illegal.

So was killing babies through abortion. Now somehow it’s a woman’s right because it’s her body.
What happened to the baby’s rights? They have a body too!

In Genesis 6 we see Yahweh lamenting at how depraved and wicked the world has become since he made it.
The population has exploded, and with it evil has exploded too. He saw that every intention, every thought of our hearts was evil.
The whole earth was corrupt and filled with violence.
And completely unrepentant.

That sounds familiar right? It sounds just like now!

So God decided to wipe out the planet and start again. He reached out to Noah, to build the ark (basically a huge, 3 storey wooden ship), to keep him and his small family safe. (Along with pairs of every animal). While Yahweh brought a massive flood to destroy all the other animal and human life on the planet.

That was about 4,500 years ago.

About 2,500 years later, just before Yeshua left the Earth to return to his father, in Luke 17, he said, “And just as it was in the days of Noah, so too it’ll be in the days of the Son of Man.”

And now 2,000 years later, here we are. Life seems like it was in the days of Noah.
Could it really get much worse without descending into total anarchy?

But even though that seems to be the case. I don’t think this is what Yeshua was talking about.
He finished his sentence… “They were eating, they were drinking, they were marrying, up until the day Noah entered into the ark. And the deluge came and destroyed all of them.”

He wasn’t talking so much of what life was like then, but emphasising that they were sailing through life, ignoring God, living like it would go forever. And then suddenly, judgement.

He also mentioned the days of Lot. “And likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot — they were eating, they were drinking, they were buying, they were selling, they were planting, they were building.”

Lot lived in a corrupt and depraved city (Sodom), again, very much like the cities of today. Not just homosexuality, but homosexual rape seemed totally OK for them. They demanded it, even of visitors who had come to shelter in his house.

God reached out and saved Lot and his family (his wife and two unmarried daughters). But the day Lot left the city, they were carrying on life like it would go forever. And then suddenly, judgement.

In Noah’s day a massive flood was coming to destroy everyone. And they had no clue.
Some of them saw Noah building this massive ark. Maybe even asked him what it was, and why he was building it. But they ignored it. They went on with their lives dedicated to sin, and lived life like everything was normal.
And then it rained. Boy did it rain.
Suddenly their whole lives were upturned.
Instead of thinking where can I get some more wine, and some new sexual partners, they were suddenly realising that if this rain didn’t stop they were going to die. It was all over. Imagine the moment of that realisation.
They were so totally focused on having “fun”, and suddenly had that realisation that they’re going to die.

Yeshua is saying the same thing. The world will be ignoring him, just going about their business like everything is OK. Eating, drinking, like it could go on like this forever. Ignoring that inner voice which is urging them to repent and turn to Yahweh.
And suddenly he will return, and it will be all over, and it will be too late for them.
You can’t repent after he returns. You made your choice. It’s time for consequences.
Imagine that moment of realisation when they suddenly realise that Christianity, the whole church thing, the whole Yeshua thing, was actually true. And they missed it. They were too busy mocking it to realise it was their one and only hope for the future.

It might not be now. It might not be soon.
Hopefully your country will have revival before that happens.
It would be wonderful if the whole planet had revival.

But more likely, they’re going to keep partying, getting worse and worse, rejecting Yahweh and rebelling against his will.
Until that day.

But when it comes, it’s going to be sudden. Just like the rain and the flood of Noah’s day, just like the fire from heaven of Lot’s day.

Peter describes Noah as a “preacher of righteousness”. He was trying to save them, but they were carrying on the events of their lives without a single thought of the judgment of God. Just like now.

Are you willing to be the one standing for Yahweh? Willing to be the Noah, the Lot, begging for their life. Begging them to repent. Standing up for God, regardless. Even if you are alone. The only one on the entire planet.



Secondly… Since we’re here and talking about Noah.
I’ve heard many times that it took Noah a hundred years to build the ark. I even thought it was correct for a while.
It all comes from one verse in Genesis 6… “the days of man will be 120 years”.
Later in the chapter God tells Noah to build the ark.
So the idea is that God was saying I’ll destroy everything in 120 years. So get busy.

Another possibility is that it means that from then on humans will only live 120 years instead of the hundreds of years people lived before the flood?
Some dispute that, because after the flood some people lived longer than that. But since then, it has been pretty close to our upper limit. Even if a few did exceed it.

Another explanation is that Genesis 6 is not necessarily a chapter which all occurred on a single day.
It was some person thousands of years later who broke it into chapters.
Maybe Genesis 6:1-8 was a single day. And the 120 years is literal.
But Genesis 6:9-22 is the first part of the history of the generations of Noah, as it says in verse 9.

So what does it mean?
It’s definitely not “Build an ark, you’ve got 120 years to finish it because in 120 years I’m going to wipe them out”.
Let me show you why not.


Noah had three sons.
The last verse of Genesis 5 tells us he had them after he was 500 years old.
They weren’t triplets.

Genesis 7:6 tells us that Noah was 600 when the flood came.
Genesis 11:10 says that Shem was born 98 years before the flood. So Shem was born when Noah was 502.

Genesis 10:21 says that Shem was the older brother of Japheth.
Genesis 9:24 says that Ham was the youngest.
So Shem was born when Noah was 502, Japheth when he was 504, and Ham sometime after that.

Now that was all only vaguely interesting, but I had a reason for going through it.

I Genesis 6 God says “Man’s days will be 120 years” and the tells Noah that he’s going to destroy everyone, and that Noah should make the ark. And then tells him that he, his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives should enter the ark, and he will save them from the destruction.

But if the 120 years means God told Noah 120 years before the flood, (when Noah was 480), and then he spent the next 120 years building the ark, then why did Yahweh include his sons and their wives in the instruction. They weren’t even born until more than 20 years after that, let alone married.

So it must mean something else.
Not sure what, but it cannot be that.

We don’t really have much information on when people got married back then. Just on how long they usually lived.
But some time before they were all in their 90’s, (when the flood came), Shem, Ham, and Japheth all married wives. But none of them had children.
Genesis 11:10 again says that Shem only became a father two years after the flood. When he was 100 years old.
Noah himself only became a father when he was 500!

So they may have only been married a few years. Maybe longer, we just don’t know.
But if they married when they were in their 50’s. And then Yahweh called Noah to build the ark after that.
And Noah and his sons may have spent 50 years building the ark.
It would have been a massive job, but possibly they only spent 4-5 years.
And 1 Peter 3 tells us God waited patiently while it was being built.
(Also btw, that there were only 8 of them in the ark. so we know they had no children before then).

But definitely they did not spend 100 years building the ark.

Call me crazy, (I may be), but since 1 Peter 3 links the ark with our salvation and baptism into eternal life, I wouldn’t be surprised if Noah spent about 30 years building the ark, just as Yeshua spent 30 years from his birth, preparing for his death which saved us.
(Wild theory, but no proof at all).

This is an interesting link on Answers in Genesis about how long it took to build the ark.

I hope that was interesting for you. I hope you enjoyed looking a little deeper into a small part of the Bible in search for the truth.
I hope you found it.