Luke 17:26

THREE CRITICAL DAYS

‘And as it was in the days of Noe … when the Son of Man is revealed.’

Luke 17:26; Luke 17:28; Luke 17:30

The subject is the Kingdom of God. A number of Pharisees had forced themselves upon our Lord with the question, ‘when the Kingdom of God should come?’ And our Lord answered them. ‘The Kingdom of God,’ He said, ‘cometh not with observation’ or outward show. It is a spiritual kingdom in the hearts and consciences of men. To the inquiring Pharisees He said no more. But to His disciples He gives the further teaching contained in the passage in which our text occurs.

There can be no doubt that our Lord chose out from Old Testament history these two days, as being above all others typical of the day when the Son of Man should be revealed.

I. Days of Noah.—These, as we gather from the early Chapter s of Genesis, were—

(1) Days of astounding and widespread wickedness.

(2) Days of unbelief and careless ease.

(3) Days in which the mercy of God was especially manifested.

(4) Days of a long probation.

II. Days of Lot.—When we consider the days of Lot we find much the same characteristics as those which marked the days of Noah. A difference between the days of Noah and Lot is remarkable when we contrast the characters of these two men. Noah was a sincere man, walking with God, wholly consecrated to His service, separated from the evil world. With Lot it was different. He was a just man, vexed at the sinfulness around him, but this is almost all that can be said. There is nothing very lovely in his character. He was weak and selfish, a moral coward.

III. The day of the Son of Man.—And Christ says, As it was of Noah and Lot, ‘even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed.’ Thus—following our line of thought—we may expect that that day will be marked by abounding and widespread wickedness. There will be less sanctity surrounding the marriage state and family life; lawlessness will abound; unbelief will increase and men will scoff at the threatenings of judgments. And as it was in the days of Noah and Lot, so in that coming day it will be seen that the love and mercy of God have been fully manifested, yea, more fully than in the former days. Deliverance has been brought within the reach of man, not by a material ark or an angel, but by the eternal Son of God, incarnate for man.

Rev. Dr. Noyes.

Illustration

‘The ark itself was a token of God’s mercy, telling of a place of deliverance. Every plank added to the ark was a call to men to repentance and faith in God. Its extraordinary size, the length of time in which it was building—these were God’s warnings given in mercy to a guilty world that a day of judgment must come. Some during the one hundred and twenty years may have believed and died in faith; but it would seem at the time of the Flood there were none found faithful but Noah and those who entered with him into the ark. And so if the world was to be saved the corrupt must be destroyed. ‘The cause of righteousness had at length but one efficient representative in the person of Noah, and he, much like “a lodge in a garden of cucumbers—like a besieged city’—the object of profane mockery and scorn, taunted, reviled, plied with every weapon fitted to overcome his constancy, and if not in himself, at least in his family, in danger of suffering shipwreck amid the swelling wave of wickedness around him. It was to save him, and with him the cause of God, from this source of imminent danger and perdition that the Flood was sent; and it could only do so by effectually separating between him and the seed of evildoers, engulphing them in ruin, and sustaining him in his temporary home.’