Can you imagine the conflict and pressure people must have felt in the days of Noah, right before
the Great Flood? For some, it was probably a subtle nagging to repent and listen to what Noah was preaching. For others, it was an agonizing terror, knowing that he was right, but stubbornly refusing to get right with God. You know they could
feel the Lord's dealings with them.
Peter describes it in I Peter 3:20...
the
patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah, during the
construction
of the ark, in which a few, that is,
eight persons, were brought safely through
the water.
"
8" The number of righteous who went aboard before the world was destroyed the first time. The days prior probably felt like it does today - an intense pressure to make a final decision, one way or the other. "How is it going to be? Are you getting on the Ark, or continuing your life "business as usual"?"
The visible world regularly reflects what is happening in the spiritual realm. (That subject is an entire book's worth of teaching.) So, it is no accident that at this moment, in the halls of the U.S. government, our leaders are being pressured from every side to make a choice on legislation that could impact our nation like nothing else in history. Some congressmen are being tempted with "deals" to violate their values. Others report being threatened. "Threats and temptations"...sounds like being a Christian.
Yet all they need to do is look to our nation's beginning when our founding fathers realized that God had called us to be a free and independent nation. They wrote in the last line of the Declaration of Independence,
"And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection
of divine Providence, (God) we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our
Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.
That translates, "We will do what is right, relying on God, out of sacred honor, pledging to each other everything we own, even our lives!"
Today, this is the question each of us must answer. Will we do what we know is right, the honorable thing, committing everything we are and own to serving the Lord? Or will we go about business as usual? We all feel the pressure, and it's beginning to rain.
