The Thing About Noah

Did Noah Preach to the people of his day? Did he invite them to get on the Ark and be saved?

There is this popular belief out there that people use to make a point about people not listening to their end-time or salvation warnings. They claim that the people of Noah’s day didn’t listen to him either and they were destroyed in the flood because of it. The thing is that this is not even Biblical. There are no scriptures that say this or even imply it. Since we want to be like Bereans and search the scriptures to see if it be true, let’s take a look at the relevant scriptures.

First, turn in your Bibles to Genesis 6. We learn by reading this chapter that God has determined to wipe out humanity and all life on earth in a great flood. However, one man, Noah, has found favor in His sight. He decides to spare Noah and his wife along with Noah’s three sons and their wives. He tells Noah to build an ark. He gives Noah detailed instructions about how to build the ark and who and what to bring on the ark. Nowhere in the passage do we read about God telling Noah to preach to the world and invite others to come along on the journey and be saved from the flood.

I believe that doing so would actually have violated the word of Yahweh. Yahweh was not planning to save anyone except those eight souls as we read in Genesis 6:18 “But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark—you and your sons and your wife and your sons’ wives with you.”

You will note the absence of “and anyone who believes your preaching about the flood and decides to come with you.” There is nothing about inviting anyone else along. Noah and his family were chosen for one reason. We learn that reason in Genesis 6:9 and Genesis 7:1 NASB

These are the records of the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God.

Then the LORD said to Noah, “Enter the ark, you and all your household, for you alone I have seen to be righteous before Me in this generation.

The phrase “blameless in his generations” when researched in the Blue Letter Bible Strong’s Concordance we learn means whole, healthy, sound, complete. This has been shown by others to mean by the context that Noah had pure DNA not corrupted by Nephilim DNA.

The Lord was determined to wipe out all corruption. He also wanted to preserve a human line to bring Yeshua into the world. Yeshua had to come from an uncorrupted DNA line.

If others had been allowed to enter the ark then this might not have happened. As it was, Ham corrupted himself shortly after exiting the ark.

Another Scripture we see used to imply that Noah preached to the people of his day with the intent to invite them to get on the ark and be saved is found in Matthew 24:37-39:

“For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away; so will the coming of the Son of Man be.”

However, this verse does not say that Noah preached to the unrighteous or that they laughed at him and refused to listen. It does say that people will be living their life as they have always done and will be caught unaware just like in Noah’s day. People in Noah’s day were going about their normal routine and were caught unaware until the flood took them. This passage actually says, “and they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away;”

Now people say that this means that they did not understand what rain was. We must be careful though not to engage in making the Bible say what we want it to say. It does not say anything about not understanding rain. Context gives us a better clue as to what they did not understand. The context compares it to the coming of the Son of Man. The context is talking about destruction. I believe that they did not understand the danger they were in until danger took them. Maybe you can make an argument for the danger being caused by rain and because they did not understand what rain was then they didn’t understand the danger they were in. Possible, but again mostly speculation. They did have rivers and people probably drowned in them occasionally, so they would have understood drowning. Whether or not the people in Noah’s day understood rain or not is a whole different study.

One thing we can know for sure is that no one else was invited to join Noah and his family on the ark. Why? Because Genesis tells us exactly what God instructed Noah to do in detail and that detail does not include anything about preaching to other people and inviting them to be saved by getting on the ark.

In fact, the passages in Genesis chapters 6 and 7 tell us that no one else was allowed to get on the ark as God only authorized eight people to get on the ark. These verses tell us that Noah did everything that God commanded. It tells us in Matthew that they did not know what was going to happen until it did. If Noah had told them, then shouldn’t they have known what was coming and therefore, not been completely caught unaware or at the very least had some small understanding of what was going to happen?

The Bible does say in 2 Peter 2:5 that Noah was a preacher of righteousness, but preaching about righteousness is different from inviting people to get on the ark. Once again it is possible that while Noah was busy building the ark that he told some people to repent and they might get permission to enter the ark and be saved, too. However, there is no Biblical support for this belief. This doctrine is reading into scripture that which is not there. It actually undermines the purposes of God in saving Noah and his family. It is trying to connect a past event to a future event in an attempt to justify an eschatological point of view. I think we must be careful in interpreting the Bible to fit our own personal belief system. Rather we need to take 2 Timothy 2:15 to heart, especially the part about correctly handling the word of truth.

2 Timothy 2:15

New International Version

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.

I hope this has helped you in learning to be a Berean and search the scriptures to learn for yourself if what people teach is true or not. This is certainly not an exhaustive study on this topic, so please feel free to comment on this blog post and let me know what you think.

Shalom dear ones.