I want to call your attention to a text that you will find in the seventh chapter of Genesis, the first verse. When God speaks, you and I can afford to listen. It is not man speaking now, but it is God. “The Lord said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark.”
Perhaps some skeptic is reading this, and perhaps some church member will join him and say,
“I hope Mr. Moody is not going to preach about the ark. I thought that was given up by all intelligent people.”
But I want to say that I haven’t given it up. When I do, I am going to give up the whole Bible. There is hardly any portion of the Old Testament Scripture but that the Son of God set His seal to it when He was down here in the world.
Men say, “I don’t believe in the story of the flood.”
Christ connected His own return to this world with that flood: “And as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man. They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.”
I believe the story of the flood just as much as I do the third chapter of John. I pity any man that is picking the old Book to pieces. The moment that we give up any one of these things, we touch the deity of the Son of God. I have noticed that when a man does begin to pick the Bible to pieces, it doesn’t take him long to tear it all to pieces. What is the use of being five years about what you can do in five minutes?
A Solemn Message.
One hundred and twenty years before God spake the words of my text, Noah had received the most awful communication that ever came from heaven to earth. No man up to that time, and I think no man since, has ever received such communication. God said that on account of the wickedness of the world He was going to destroy the world by water. We can have no idea of the extent and character of that antediluvian wickedness. The Bible piles one expression on another, in an effort to emphasize it. “God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at His heart. . . . The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.” Men lived five hundred years and more then, and they had time to mature in their sins.
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