To prepare is not to build a boat in the backyard, but to eat and drink, speak and marry all while looking and waiting for Christ’s promised coming. We live mindful of eternal souls. We live expecting rain. We live in reverent fear of God. What does the world see you building? Is there anything in your life that can only be explained by Christ and his return?

Life as usual, many will come to realize, was never life as usual.
When Christ returns, many will discover too late that they lived within a dream. Years came and years went. Spring turned to autumn, autumn to winter. They grew and grew old but never awoke. “Normal life” lied to them. So, Jesus foretells,
As were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. (Matthew 24:37–39)
The world-ending return of Jesus will be as the world-ending days of Noah. Of what did Noah’s days consist? Busy people unaware — eating, drinking, marrying, and giving in marriage, going about life “as usual.” The very morning of the flood, people simply concerned themselves with whatever laid before them. The immediate seemed most urgent, most real. Planning meals, changing diapers, preparing weddings, working, buying, and selling — these seemed to them the greatest verities of life. Until the rain began to fall.
Texture of Days
Like many today, the people of Noah’s day abstracted the meaning of life from the texture of their average days.
They touched Wednesday and it felt like every other Wednesday. They began work and finished work. They ate, ate again, and finished their work to eat. They played with kids on the floor. Busied with homework and house projects. They talked and listened, laughed and yawned, rose from sleep and slept — nothing extraordinary. Each day didn’t feel like it held eternal significance. Nothing otherworldly felt at stake. Today didn’t feel like anything but today.
God, demons, souls, eternity didn’t grow before their eyes like grass that needs mowing. They did not stir to consider the unseen. And when they did, the unreality of it seemed as implausible as rain drowning a dry land days away from sea. They intuited what is ultimate about life from the ordinary experiences of life. A fatal mistake. And as the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.
Man and His Boat
While they considered their daily planners, anxious about what they considered the real contents of Mondays, Tuesdays, and Saturdays, Noah worked with his sons on the unlikely, the unthinkable. While the world ate and drank, he labored. While they went on with things as usual, he and his sons prepared a stadium-sized boat to shelter the family. “By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household” (Hebrews 11:7).
Imagine the scene. Decade after decade, children were born, diapers were changed, houses were built, adults looked out their window and saw what they had seen since childhood: Noah and his sons laboring on the ship. And Noah spoke a message as strange as the boat he was building: he warned of divine judgment. Perhaps some listened the first week. But eventually, the listeners needed to get back to real life.
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Written by Stanley D. Gale |
Monday, January 30, 2023
What we see unleashed in our society today is not the product of an enlightened mind, but rather a willing descent into the darkness of sin, fueled by an aspiration to be as God. The lid has been lifted, giving license to depravity. As the biblical diagnostic puts it: “Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more” (Eph. 4:19–20).

Before Pandora was a personalized radio service, she was a figure of Greek mythology. She was given a box with the instruction not to open it. Curiosity as her key, she lifted the lid and so streamed miseries, maladies, and all sorts of malice into the world to plague mankind.
The expression “opening Pandora’s box” relates to that story to warn of consequences and ramifications of certain actions. It provides counsel for avoiding unwanted trouble. It also suggests a metaphor for the unraveling moral fabric that endangers American society.
God’s diagnosis of the human heart is not an optimistic one. He speaks of the heart in bondage to sin, filled with wickedness, and inclined to evil.
Theologically speaking, human hearts are totally depraved. Not that people are as evil as they could be, but there is nothing in the operating system of people’s inner being that is unaffected and uncorrupted by the fallen condition of sin. Sin warps. It distorts. It incapacitates for honoring God and pursuing righteousness.
Parents are told that this waywardness, this misalignment, is bound up in the heart of a child. Therefore, they are to guard and guide their children. To protect a child from the foolishness bound up in the heart is to exercise love, as is direction in the way of righteousness.
Just as God has given parental authority to safeguard children, so He has given governmental authority to safeguard citizens. Societal structures represent common grace to restrain evil, to keep people from self-destructive behavior, and to promote community well-being.
When these restraints are lifted, depravity is unleashed.
Wickedness advances by being tolerated, then accepted, then promoted, then imposed. Psalm 1 traces this sort of progression.
Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night….
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Earlier this week, Christians were reminded, by a smudged cross on foreheads and with words first spoken to Adam and Eve, of our mortality: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” These words, delivered by clergy on Ash Wednesday, are God’s words about us, recorded in Genesis 3:19. 
Though it’s not pleasant to be reminded that we are dust, it is good. Ash Wednesday tells the truth about who we are. The Season that follows, Lent, helps us order our lives around that truth. And yet, dust is not merely our status after the fall, or because of sin. We were created from the dust of the earth. That meager beginning is what God intended for those who would bear His image before the rest of creation.   
Recently, an article was published critiquing how Christians often talk about identity. Under the provocative title, “Stop Finding Your Identity in Christ,” Caleb Morell rightly notes that throughout most of Church history, the theological emphasis was on union with Christ, not identity in Christ. He also rightly notes that how we talk about finding identity in Christ is, too often, a re-hashed postmodernism, more about self-discovery or, even worse, self-determination, than anything theological. 
While I agree with much of it, I don’t think that “finding your identity in Christ” is unbiblical. It is, however, incomplete if disconnected from our identity in creation. Any talk of who we are disconnected from who God originally created us to be misses essential truths of what it ultimately means to be in Christ. And, it leaves our thinking about a fundamental question of human existence, who are we as human beings, vulnerable to modern and postmodern ways of thinking. Is the self a “construct” of culture and bias? Do our feelings determine what is true about who we are? Are our bodies pliable and changeable according to our internal whims? Or are we created? What is given about who we are that we need to know, accept, and embrace? 
In the creation story, the answers to these questions are not up for grabs. When God reminded Adam he had been formed from dust scooped from the Earth, He’s taking Adam back to the creation narrative. Adam and Eve were the only members of God’s creation not merely spoken into existence. The difference in language is dramatic. Rather, than “let there be… and it was so,” God said: