Remember I said that as an organization gets larger and becomes more complex, government becomes more and more difficult; and it is more and more important that there be consent of the governed toward the constituted authority. And that is exactly what we begin to see here in chapter 6. As the population increased on earth, the problems became greater and greater because that population was not submitting to the constituted authority—which was God!
What is God doing here? God is showing what will result, generally, when the rejection of government occurs and, specifically, when God's government is rejected. When government is rejected it produces anarchy, which usually begins first to be seen in the home. That's why this chapter is introduced the way it is—focusing on marriage. That is where the breakdown first begins to appear. The homes begin to be places of instability, rather than places of stability because the government within the home is also being rejected.
Then it begins to appear in society—out on the street. And it keeps getting stronger and stronger (unless something is done about it) until it will lead to anarchy. But even that is not the end of it. What does this chapter show you? How does it conclude? This section concludes with the extinction of mankind. That is pretty sobering.
Again, remember that God is showing us these principles in great, broad strokes, but there are wonderfully clear principles that we can gather from it. When government begins to be rejected, it will lead to the extinction of the institution—whether family, whether organization, whether it even be life on the earth. So either mankind submits, or it becomes extinct. Either we will wipe ourselves out through the anarchy, or God will intervene and do it for us (to save us the agony of experiencing the anarchy).
In each of the cases that we've covered so far the person fled, or was taken because of the anger or the hatred—maybe the two of them combined—anger and hatred of others that threatened the life and limb of the servants of God. Now we're going to examine a somewhat different condition. Let's go to Noah in Genesis 6.
Here we have very clear evidence of an escape that was originated, planned and engineered by God. It required the cooperative preparation of those who were escaping, because Noah and his sons had to prepare by building the place in which they were going to escape. They were surrounded by worldwide trouble that they could not completely flee from, and so God gathered them into one place while the devastation was going on.
They were prepared both physically in making the ark and spiritually in being righteous before God. The two were working together, the physical and the spiritual.
But what does He lead with? He leads with forbearance. But His forbearance is not limitless. Let's get that straight.
He had reached that point where forbearance was no longer a possibility. It had gotten so bad that He did what this commentator wondered about (why He hadn't done that earlier). He just went whoosh! and everything on the earth was dead except what was found in the ark.
He had a limit. He's forbearing, but He has a limit, and if we combine this with Matthew 24:37 where it says the end is going to be like the days of Noah, then we can surmise that this world is going to soon reach that limit with God again, and it's going to be a whole lot worse because this time it's going to be not just quick death, it's going to be three and one-half years of literal hell on earth.
This is what the world is once again building toward. It reached it once before and in a small way it reached it in Sodom and Gomorrah. As we would say today, God blew them away. He did that in order to save their minds, so that they might be resurrected in the second resurrection and have an opportunity. So it was actually in one sense a mercy killing. He did it too, in the days of Noah as well. Intervening before those people's minds became so perverted and twisted that repentance would be impossible. We are building toward that kind of a circumstance once again.
