In the context of a countdown of end-of-the-world events it is often said that God will not give a message through His prophets unless that message is relevant to that time. The relevance of a particular teaching is often referred to as present truth. But it is not always true that God only allows that which we regard as relevant to the time. If that were so then He wouldn't have allowed the preaching of the Second Coming until our time.
The prophetic countdown of events pointing us to the consummation of all things in the end of the world was preached to the world centuries before Noah's dispensation. Subsequent to that era, a similar message was proclaimed, specifically rebuking the apostasy of a world which was threatened with divine retribution in the form of an impending destruction of the earth by a flood.
The proliferation of evil that existed in Noah's day was cited as a point of comparison to the godlessness that will prevail in the last-days just before the Second Coming of Christ (Matt. 24:37-39).
Prior to Noah's ministry to warn the world of this coming cataclysmic event, it was said that Enoch, was already out there sounding the Second Advent message to his generation!
In the book of Jude, verse 14, it was thus declared:
"And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousand of his saints, To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him."
It appears a bit strange that the Lord has considered it fit to issue a countdown of end-of-the-world events from as early as the seventh generation from Adam. But it was the same God who, hundreds of years later, predicted the destruction of the world by a flood, a prediction that was dramatically fulfilled more than a century later despite the skepticism of the masses.
We today who have the record of that event need to take an object lesson from the whole scenario leading up to the flood. We really need to do this for the very reason that the moral decadence of Noah's day is but a mirror image of what is now prevalent in our day. The Genesis account of the punishment that was meted out to the ungodly of the then-known world was cited by the apostle Peter, pointing us to the execution of the final judgment in the end of the world (2Pet. 2:5-9).
The certainty of the warning of a coming flood in Noah's day was confirmed by its fulfillment, yet the prophetic countdown of end-time events by Enoch, though yet to be fulfilled, is even more certain!
While we can vouch for the absolute accuracy of Noah's prediction by virtue of its precise fulfillment, we can be more certain of Enoch's prophecy, not only because it comes to us from the same God, but it is confirmed by a multitude of witnesses in the form of apostles and prophets who got the same vision with the same countdown of events pointing us to the end of the world.
Like the apostle Peter, we today have "a more sure word of prophecy" that merits more of our confidence than any eye witness account (2Pet. 1:16-19)!
The end-of-the-world countdown of events from the first millennium prediction is much more relevant to our day than at any other time. If it was expected to be taken seriously more than 5000 years ago when the prediction was made, how much more critical it is today when we are seeing the very signs of its fulfillment.
Certainly, there is no other event worth preparing for as if today is our last day on earth. As the apostle Paul says, in his epistle to the Romans, "And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed." Rom. 13:11
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Steve Sterling is a prophecy researcher who has been studying end-time Bible prophecy for over 25 years. He has written many articles and makes many presentations on the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation. His latest contribution to the ongoing debates on the book of Revelation is the End-time Prophecy Ecourse.
