Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came upon the earth . And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives with him went into the ark to escape the waters of the flood Gen 7:6,7.
I have missed this for decades and I bet you have too. Noah was 600 when the flood began. Now back up into chapter 6 of Genesis. Then the LORD said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years” Gen 6:3. Most commentaries believe this means that from that time God would wait 120 years before the flood came. Noah had that long to build the ark and be “a preacher of righteousness,” as Peter calls him in 2 Peter 2:5. That means he was 480 when God told him about the Flood. Now here is the interesting thing: Noah did not have his first child until he was 500 years old, Gen 5:32. That means that he and his wife knew for 20 years that the world was so wicked that God was going to destroy it in the foreseeable (for them) future, yet they had the faith to conceive and raise three righteous sons.
How many Christians have you heard say that they were not going to have children because of how wicked the world was? Maybe not often, but in my lifetime at least three or four couples or individuals have told me that or asked my opinion about it In Noah’s day, it wasn’t just a wicked world. It was a completely wicked world. God only found eight to save, a fact Peter states in each of his epistles, 1 Pet 3:20; 2 Pet 2:5. Their world was, according to Moses, “only evil continually” Gen 6:5. Yet they not only brought children into it, they successfully raised them when, if anyone had an excuse not to do so, they did.
If Noah and his wife could do it in a world like that, surely we can do it now. At least this world has more than 8 righteous people in it, and I know a few others who may not sit on a pew with you, but are still good and decent people. In our North Florida home, we had some pretty wonderful neighbors.
If the state of this world causes you to do anything, it should cause you not to avoid having those children but to be especially diligent about how you raise them, like their souls depended upon it because, even if this world is not as bad as Noah’s, they still do.
...when the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls, were saved through water1Pet 3:19,20.
Dene Ward
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