SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 2/4/2024 7:55 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-3 “Alertness”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
24:37-42
Message of the verses: “37 “For the coming
of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah. 38 “For as in those days
before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in
marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, 39 and they did not understand
until the flood came and took them all away; so will the coming of the Son of
Man be. 40 "Then there will be two men in the field; one will be taken and
one will be left. 41 “Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will
be taken and one will be left. 42 “Therefore be on the alert, for you do not
know which day your Lord is coming.”
I put quotation marks around a paragraph in my
MacArthur commentary on Matthew to remind me to quote this paragraph as I begin
this Spiritual Diary. “As people run amok
in sin and every form of debauchery and ungodliness, they will become more and
more impervious to God’s truth and resentful of His standards of
righteousness. They will be so vile, wretched,
and preoccupied with sex, drugs, alcohol, materialism, and pleasure seeking
that they will believe every explanation for the end time signs except the one
given in Scripture. Rather than turning
to God in repentance, they will curse Him (Rev. 9:21).” This is not a good place to be in, for in
being in this kind of place a person will have a cold hard heart and will not
likely respond to the message of salvation.
Another thing is that as I look around the world today, especially in
our country this seems to be happening right before my eyes.
As
we look back into the book of Genesis and read about what was going on in the
days of Noah, the days which the Lord is referring to we will see that before
the flood that they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage. We have talked that it took Noah 120 years to
build the ark and so the people that were around him would have a witness to
the harm that was going to come upon them, as Noah preached to them. 2 Peter 2:5 speaks of this as Peter writes
the following in verses 4-5, with five focused in on the days of Noah. 4 For if God did not spare angels when they
sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness,
reserved for judgment; 5 and did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a preacher of
righteousness, with seven others, when He brought a flood upon the world
of the ungodly.” The people were not
paying attention to his preaching nor in the building of the ark, only for
their way of life which will be similar to what will be going on during the
tribulation period. Once more you have
to realize that when God created the world, He created it so that it was
perfect, and there was no need of having rain because the world was watered by
a mist coming up out of the ground and so the people of Noah’s day including
Noah had never seen rain before, much less had never a flood, and probably did
not know what a flood was, but in 120 years they would find out. I can imagine that people would make fun of
Noah and his sons as they were building the ark, and so they just went on with
their daily sinful lives while this preacher of righteous was pleading with
them to repent. Jesus said that they
were eating and drinking and of marrying and giving in marriage. It was business as usual until the day Noah
entered the ark and it started to rain.
MacArthur
writes “Even when his prediction began to be fulfilled before their eyes they
did not take his warning to heart. Noah
ahd built and preached for 120 years, yet without having the slightest impact
on anyone outside his immediate family.
The people were so untouched by God’s truth that they did not understand
their perilous situation until the flood came and took them all away into a
godless eternity. Flood translates kataklusmos, which means deluge or
washing away, and is the term from which the English cataclysm is derived. Only
after it was too late did the people of that generation understand their tragic
destiny.”
I
have studied what different people whom I trust have said happened when this
flood of Noah’s day happened and when you think about it, it makes sense. What probably happened was the earth was tilt
on its axes which caused a dramatic change in climate. There was water inside the earth, as
mentioned the earth was watered from a midst coming up out of the ground. There was a vapor barrier over the earth that
kept the sun’s radiation from coming down on the earth, thus caused people to
live a very long time during that period of time. So the water came up from the earth and the
vapor barrier let lose that the earth became flooded almost instantly. Rain came down for forty days and nights and
all as of this happened the earth was changed in the shape that it is in
now. I have read that in the polar
regions which are covered with ice that elephants were found in the ice
preserved because of the ice and actually had food in their mouths. This indicates the quickness of what happened
during the flood. In a recent Facebook
post it was stated that on top of Mount Everest they ground had in it things
from the bottom of the sea. I believe that
the world before the flood was all together in one land mass and the flood
caused it to split apart in the way it is now.
I am living on the island of Maui, vacating in my sister-in-laws house
while they are on vacation, and as I think of this island chain I truly don’t
believe that it existed like this before the flood. Our world is much different than it was in
the days of Noah, and it was sin that caused the Lord to bring about the
flood. I have to say that our world,
created by God is still very beautiful, but it is dangerous to live on now
because of the results of the flood.
In
the next SD, Lord willing we will begin to look at the attitude that will
happen before the coming of the Son of Man.
2/4/2024 8:35 AM
No comments:
Post a Comment