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Except for the increase in violence and crime, the times were pretty good. People were “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage” (Matt. 24:38), and life was going on as usual. When friends met at the market or at wedding feasts, they laughed about Noah and his family (“Imagine building that big boat on dry land!”) or discussed Methuselah, the world’s oldest man (“He’ll die one of these days, mark my word!”), or talked about Enoch, the man who suddenly disappeared (“Strangest thing I ever heard!”).
Methuselah was Noah’s grandfather, and Noah knew that when he died, nothing stood in the way of God’s judgment falling on a wicked world. For over a century, Noah had been warning people about the coming judgment, but only his own family had believed him and trusted the Lord.
Then Methuselah died and things began to happen. One day, Noah and his family entered their “boat” and the rains came. (“It can’t go on forever,” people said. “It’ll stop one of these days.”) But it rained for forty days and forty nights, and subterranean explosions discharged more water on the earth. Even after the rain stopped, the water continued to rise, and within five months, the whole earth was under water and everything that breathed was dead. Everything, that is, except Noah and his family, the eight people everybody laughed at.
What kind of a person was Noah? He was the kind of person you and I should be and can be as we live in our world today.