Similitude

 Ignorance is not a rare thing. Whether willful or unintended, ignorance covers the earth like a net that has caught both rich and poor, the foolish and the wise in their own eyes in its snare. You can see by the things that seemingly sane people say with a straight face that once ignorant zealotry takes root, it’s nigh impossible to convince people otherwise. Either they’re Oscar-worthy actors, or they’re so far gone in their delusional beliefs that nothing safe for divine intervention can reach them.

I remember back in the day when Dallas was still a thing, and Bobby Ewing had magically come back to life that Virginia Slims was running nonstop ads trying to get women hooked on nicotine. Their tagline was you’ve come a long way, baby, and although, at that point in history, they might have, they’ve been going backward ever since.

A halfway-objective look at the human condition will tell you that any claim of progress is an outright lie, and any thought of ascent to a higher plane of consciousness is an illusion. Let’s recap just in case you were comatose for the last two decades or thereabout. Society has feminized men, masculinized women, and convinced women that a baggy black hoodie was their new uniform, while men wore skirts and dresses. The nuclear family became a punchline, out-of-wedlock pregnancies became the norm, murdering a baby was perceived as a constitutional right, and hedonism in all its varied flavors was normalized.

The joy of motherhood was replaced with careers that went nowhere, and now you have a plethora of fifty-something childless women with no purpose or reason for being, wandering aimlessly through life on their third box of wine by the time the noon bell chimes.  

Chivalry became toxic, kindness was seen as weakness, and common sense was murdered in such a way as to make Caesar think he got off easy. Those who ought to have been the plumb line sold out, the moral compass was smashed to bits like Hillary Clinton’s cell phones, and though we have the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, we’re dumber than any generation that came before us.

We call mental illness brave, we encourage debauchery, we sacrifice the innocent on the altars of perverted hedonism, and we consent to things others have no right to ask of us because we’re pressured into it by talking heads on television and incontinent fools pretending at being president.

Grown men give no thought to their eternal soul but throw an apoplectic tantrum if someone not wearing a face diaper comes within six feet, and though they down handfuls of pills every morning, they’re reticent to step outside and get a lungful of fresh air.

Man has replaced God as absolute authority, prosperity has replaced holiness, delivery has replaced substance, and compromise is deemed virtuous. I’m sure I’m missing something, but for the purpose of this writing, I think I’ve made my point.

Matthew 24:37-39, “But as the days of Noah were, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be. For as in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and did not know until the flood came and took them all away, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be.”

We can glean some practical truths from these two verses in Matthew, especially since we can look back on the time of Noah and intuit how it will play out in our modern day.

Noah spent 75 years building the ark, and no one came to help. By the time they realized that Noah wasn’t a fruitcake and what he was saying was the truth, it was already too late for them.

Whenever God warns an individual, a church body, or a nation, those who take the warning on faith and proceed to do as instructed will be saved. If Noah had waited for what God said to be confirmed, if he’d waited for the first raindrops to wet his beard, he would not have had the time to build the ark. He would have perished along with the others who’d never heard God’s voice.

The only difference, in practical terms, would have been that Noah would have died with a boatload of regret because had he obeyed, he would not have suffered the fate of those who did not walk with God.

There’s something deeper there. It’s on the edge, trying to take root. It’s not something most will like because it reiterates the importance of personal accountability and being responsible for one’s actions, or lack thereof. I’ll leave it be for now. The more it comes into focus, the more I realize most people aren’t ready for it. Most folks react violently when you shatter their comfort bubble. They kill the messenger before even asking who sent the message. Perhaps they reason that if the messenger is done away with, the message will be invalidated. It won’t.

It wasn’t enough for Noah to know that the flood was coming. It wasn’t enough for Noah to know what he needed to do to escape. It wasn’t enough for Noah to start building the ark. Noah had to finish it to the prescribed specifications. Only then did God tell Noah to go into the ark because he had been found righteous in his generation.

I know it should be as easy as showing up one Sunday morning and saying, “this is my Bible. I am what it says I am.” Do you even know what it says you are? Because it doesn’t say, you’re the apple of God’s eye.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.