As in the Days of Noah.
By H. A. St. John
NoaH lived and preached when the judgments of a righteous God upon a guilty world were immediately impending. The life or death of all souls depended upon their acceptance or non-acceptance of that last message of heavenly mercy. The vast majority rejected the gracious warning. The love of sensuality and pleasure so blinded their understandings, that they knew not the time of their visitation. The appointed day arrived, Noah and his family were the only ones found sanctified through the truth, God shut them into the ark, "the windows of heaven were opened, the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished." But the earth which is now, is "reserved unto fire, against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men." It groans under its load of sin. Its dreadful doom is at the door. Justice will not always slumber. Vengeance belongeth to God, and he will speedily repay. But in accordance with his gracious manner of dealing with the human family, he sends message after message, to arouse and prepare those that heed them, for a shelter in the "secret of his pavilion, until his wrath be overpast." But of all the messages the Lord sends, there must be a last; and this last, most solemn message is now being given. But few heed it, the many as in the days of Noah, are slaves to gross sensualism, eating and drinking to excess, nullifying the force of truth upon the mind, and neutralizing true godliness and spirituality. But the few are striving to become "temperate in all things," thus getting ready to be found without fault before Christ at his coming.