As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be … (Matthew 24:37).

Today’s text was spoken by Jesus in a chapter of the New Testament in which he was telling his friends that he was going to come a second time. His first coming fulfilled hundreds of Old Testament prophecies of the coming of the Messiah as a suffering servant. There are about the same number of unfulfilled prophecies of the return of Messiah as a conquering king.

I was motivated to use this text by the unveiling of a full-size replica of Noah’s ark built by a wealthy Dutch businessman. Using the dimensions laid out in the Bible, Johan Huibers, spent four years building his ark. Supposedly, his intention was to actually sail it to theOlympics! Can you imagine the craft shown above sailing up the Thames?

The implication of what Jesus said in this passage is that a time is coming when the conditions that led to the Flood of Genesis will again exist in the modern world. The word that comes to mind when I read about the state of Noah’s world is “unsalvageable”. The author of Genesis notes that wickedness on Earth had reached the place where the inclinations of the heart of humanity was “only evil continually.” When conditions reached this level of dysfunction, God decided to start over.

With the spiritual state of the world in our time, and predictions such as the end of the Mayan calendar cycle pointing to the Apocalypse, Huibers has had numerous people contact him to “book passage” on the new ark. What should our response be to this kind of thinking? First, the original ark was what scholars call a “type”. It symbolically pointed to the ultimate “ark” – Jesus. We don’t need a boat; we need a Savior! Once we have our “ticket” on Ark Jesus, we should have a radically different take on our world. Rather than despair about all that is wrong, I think Jesus continues to call us to turn up the “volume’ on doing things that advance his kingdom. And the promise of Jesus, that he will be with us as we do, hasn’t changed.

How about putting an “A” for “ark” on your hand today, and do something to make a difference for the Kingdom.

EXAMINER.COM

London (CNN) – A Dutchman has built a replica of Noah’s Ark to biblical proportions, following a dream his homeland would be flooded.

Johan Huibers, a wealthy businessman, used the ancient measurement of the cubit — the length of a man’s arm from elbow to fingertips — to build the vessel to the dimensions specified in the book of Genesis.

The finished craft — which has just been opened to the public on the Merwede River in the Dutch town of Dordrecht — is 300 cubits long (about 450 feet or 137 meters), 50 cubits wide (about 70 feet or 21 meters), and 30 cubits high (about 45 feet or 14 meters).

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Huibers has filled his ark, which will operate as a “Bible museum,” with life-sized plastic animals and an aviary of live birds to give visitors more to interact with.

“We want to tell people about God,” Huibers told AFP. “We wanted to build something that can help explain the Bible in real terms.”

It is not Huibers’ first ark. He completed his first, a half-scale replica of Noah’s Ark, in 2004, and used it to take tourists on canal trips, before beginning work on a full-scale version in 2008.

The origin of the project stems from a dream Huibers said he had in 1992, in which the low-lying Netherlands was flooded by the North Sea.

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“The next day I bought a book about Noah’s Ark. That night while sitting on the couch with my kids, I looked at it and said: ‘It’s what we’re going to do,’” he told AFP. “I have always been a dreamer.”

He resolved to build the ark, to inspire children with the biblical story of how Noah and the inhabitants of his Ark survived the flood that, according to Old Testament, washed the world clean of sin.

Despite his best efforts, it was impossible to adhere entirely to the biblical description of the Ark. Genesis describes Noah’s boat as made of “gopher wood,” but experts disagree over what this is.

Instead, Huibers and his team built the boat by welding together the metal hulls of 25 barges into a single frame, which was then covered with Scandinavian pine. Weighing about 3,000 tons, the boat contains sleeping quarters, a theater, restaurant and conference facilities to seat 1,500 people.

Huibers initially wanted to sail his ark to London for the Olympics to share his message with sports fans. But he was forced to abandon his plan to sail across the North Sea after authorities raised safety issues.

(CNN.com)