Evil is on the move, and death is claiming its prey. It is a terrible thing to fall into the hand of the enemy, and all around us that is exactly what is happening. Families are failing, leaving each other. Children are growing up without their Daddies. Women are left to play both parents to young souls in their most vulnerable times. In the absence of parenting, children are being raised by alternatives, none of them good. The majority of our children daily attend public schools where, with the exception of a few holdouts, Christians have been driven away, and the teaching of the truth with them. Many in western churches are Biblically illiterate, including ministers, leaving us to ask what chance there is for those outside the church. Children are being sexualized at ever-younger ages. Children. Many are being given unlimited and unsupervised access to the internet, and the statistics on their exposure to pornography should crush our hearts. This is sobering truth, and would be devastating were it not for our knowledge of the One over whom evil never held sway, the One who reversed death itself forever.
In Mark 1:15 Jesus preached that "the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel." We still live in the fulfilled time that Jesus spoke of, but it will not last forever, and the signs, that serve to warn those who watch for them, indicate that it is quickly coming to a close. The gospel of which Jesus spoke, the very power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, has been entrusted to us. But "how then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without a preacher?" (Romans 10:14).
Noah was not just a man who found grace in the eyes of the Lord because he believed God. He was not just the man who believed God and was therefore saved from the wrath of God's judgment. He was also a "preacher of righteousness" (2 Peter 2:5).