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The Bible teaches that a person can become so morally reprobate as to be beyond the reach of conscience and beyond the pale of grace. Grace has its limits! “For as touching those who were once enlightened and tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Spirit, and tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then fell away, it is impossible to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame” (Heb. 6:4-6).

The carnival of lust and vice, in Noah's day, reached its worldwide prominence because the sons of God had married the daughters of men. Evil had existed from the beginning, but the Sethites, at least, were godly and regarded as the children of Jehovah. But they made compromise with sin and lost their innocence and purity. It is always a mistake to strike a bargain with falsehood. When righteousness attempts to accommodate unrighteousness, it always works to the disadvantage of righteousness. Light can have no communion with darkness! Christ has no concord with Baal! Righteousness cannot fellowship iniquity!

To crack the door a little, as some may think, and let in a tiny bit of wrong can do no harm. But through the crack comes a gush of  “little” wrongs and the door is knocked off its hinges. Don’t be like a turtle with a greenish growth of algae over its back, but relax a little and permit just one departure, we are urged. But when the mechanical instrument of music corrupts the worship of the church, it isn’t long until the people are groveling at the foot of every idol. Witness what happened from the time of the Council of Nicea to the time of Luther. The apostasy did not develop by leaps and bounds but by inches. Let us have the good sense to slam the door shut, and lock it tight, against every innovation.

The tide of moral decay, in Noah's day, made scoundrels of them all. There was none righteous, no, not one. Even Methuselah and Lamech were caught up in the wickedness. Both were alive when God pronounced the sentence of death upon the world, saying, “man's day shall be one hundred and twenty years.”  They, together with their contemporaries, were shut up in that prison of condemnation.  And both were included in that terrible indictment “the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”

“But Noah, found favor in the sight of the Lord.” Noah was a solitary figure.  He lived in the midst of runaway immorality.  All about man was stinking, foul, disgusting crime and total departure from God and his laws. “Among the faithless, faithful only he.”  His own father and grandfather had succumbed to the fatal attraction and influence of the daughters of men, for “they were fair to look upon.” The unprincipled men that were everywhere about him had no influence for bad upon the godly and saintly Noah.

It is possible to be righteous in the midst of wickedness. Daniel did it. Abraham did it. Moses did it. Jeremiah did it. Paul and Silas did it. There were saints even in Caesar’s household. And you, too, can be pure and good even though you live in a world gone mad. It is not easy, but it is possible. You will have to steel yourself against the pressure of society and the demands of the multitude, but, with the help of the all-sufficient word of the ever loving God, you can be right in the midst of wrong. “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.”

H. A. Buster Dobbs, Taken from The Great Lessons of the Life of Noah, The Book of Genesis, eds, Garland Elkins and Thomas B. Warren

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