THIS TIME THERE WAS NO NOAH

Reva Lachica Moore

In our local newspaper an article, This time there was no Noah, caught my eye. Someone wrote about being part of the crew that did a survey of the New Orleans State Buildings months after the levees broke and flooded the city.
The person wrote:
“As we walked the halls, all of us were in awe and despair at the many items left by the fleeing citizens who worked in the building. Personalized cups half-full of coffee with lipstick prints; vases with dead flowers, and calendars with that dreadful day still hanging on the sides of the cubicles.
“How quickly they must have been forced to leave to abandon pictures of loved ones! One calendar was of a religious nature with quotes from the Bible for every month, and this one in particular was ironic, to say the least. It had a picture of Noah’s ark for the month of August. I can’t tell you the size of the chill bumps I got from seeing that. I had to walk away so no one would see my eyes filling up.
“I know most of those people will be in heaven for they’ve already been through hell.”

The writer was right. There was no Noah to warn the people at that time. Or even if there was a “real” Noah, would the people have believed him?
In Genesis 6: 5-7 it says: “Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that He made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. So the Lord said, “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.”
The earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence, and so God said to Noah that He will destroy man with the earth. He asked Noah to build an ark of gopherwood and gave him the dimensions. It was a huge ship that God wanted built.
Try to imagine an old man and his family building a huge boat in your subdivision because God asked him to do so. At first the neighbors probably didn’t take much notice, but as time went by, and one by one the huge wooden ribs of the ship were secured in place, and it became clear that it was a ship and not a shed that he was building, they began to make fun of him. How they laughed, for they could see no reason for building such a thing! I’m sure he was the talk of town.
Noah tried to explain and warn the people about the Flood that was coming. And that God told him to build a place of refuge for those who wanted to be saved. But it was no use. The more he warned the people, the more they mocked him. What a sad thing.
Two years ago, before the approaching Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans , many modern Noahs using Doppler radar and the latest technology, warned the people through television, the Internet, and the radio. It was a voluntary evacuation, and many left for higher grounds. At the height of the mass exodus, it took half a day to reach Baton Rouge from New Orleans what would normally take an hour. But many did not heed the warnings and stayed in their homes.
The hurricane came with utter fury. Those who were left behind compared the 135 mile per hour wind to that of a succession of explosions. After the wind died down, people heaved sighs of relief, for they had “dodged the bullet,” as what the Louisiana governor said, only to be surprised hours later by rising water.
The storm surge breached the city's levees at several points, leaving 80 percent of the city submerged, tens of thousands of victims clinging to rooftops, and hundreds of thousands scattered to shelters around the country. The modern Noahs failed to warn the people about the levees breaking.
In the end, there were over 1800 people who died during the two hurricanes that deluged New Orleans and vicinity.
In the past 3 months, town after town in the Midwestern states had been flooded in spite of the massive sandbagging efforts of the people. Nothing seemed to contain such violent force of nature. And as I write this, the Pin Oak levee just broke in Winfield , MO.
God has promised not to destroy all of the earth again by flood, but still, floods will come as well as other natural calamities such as: drought, earthquakes, wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes. Jesus Christ will come again and before His coming, all of these calamities will come and even more in greater successions and magnitude.
We are living when there is so much wickedness on this earth again. And God is indeed grieved and sorrowful for creating man. Jesus will come, just like in the days of Noah, when people are busy, unaware of the impending event and He will take to heaven with Him those who have accepted Him as their Savior. Are you ready?
Matthew 24: 37-39 says: “But as the days of Noah were, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be. For as in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and did not know until the flood came and took them all away, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be.”