
The great flood
Although God sought out mankind and already had a plan to save at least part of humanity, the hearts and thoughts of men became increasingly evil.
God felt a deep sadness, a sadness so great that you cannot imagine it. First, He tried to shorten human life to 120 years so that people would have less time to sin, but it did no good.
Then He thought, “I should not have created humanity. Therefore, I will destroy them all in a great flood, along with all of creation.”
However, there was one man on earth who moved God, someone He did not want to destroy, and that man was Noah.
Who was Noah? Noah was a man who respected God, did what pleased Him, and had God as the central part of his life.
Noah’s father was Lamech. When Noah was born, Lamech had hope. He pronounced a blessing over baby Noah and said, “This one will comfort us concerning our work and the toil of our hands because of the ground which the Lord has cursed.”
Lamech said this because the time in which he lived was very sorrowful. By then, Adam, the first man, was already old, and he became the first to die a natural death. I’ve done the math, and you can check for yourself who lived at the same time as whom in that era.
Lamech’s father was Methuselah, the man who lived the longest on earth and who died in the great flood. Methuselah’s father was Enoch, who lived only 365 years, but because he walked with God every day, he did not have to die; God simply took him directly to heaven.
Let’s return to Noah: To save him and the animals of the earth, God gave Noah instructions to build an ark out of gopher wood. It was enormous, and God was very precise in describing how it should be built. He also did not hide from Noah that He would send a great flood to destroy all life on earth. God gave specific instructions about how many of each animal he should take onto the ark.
Building the ark was a massive task for Noah, and surely he invited his friends and acquaintances to join him. But in the end, only he, his family, and the animals entered the ark.
There were clear signs that something extraordinary was happening, especially when Noah began loading the animals onto the ark.
Perhaps people thought it was due to changes in nature or the climate. In any case, they did not believe Noah and likely mocked him for building an ark in a place where there was no sea.
After seven days, God closed the ark, and it rained for 40 days and 40 nights. A great flood covered everything, and only Noah and his family, along with the animals in the ark, survived.
