Many Christians around the world celebrate Epiphany on January 6th or the Sunday following – which would be today. It is also known as the Three Kings Day to honor the three Magi who traveled from the East to bring gifts to the baby Jesus. For Eastern Orthodox Christians it is called Theophany and also celebrated as the Blessing of the Waters to honor the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan and the wedding at Cana when Jesus turned water into wine. In Bulgaria and other European countries a crucifix is blessed by the priest and then thrown into the nearest body of water where swimmers dive in to find it. The person who retrieves it is freed from evil spirits and will be healthy through the year. In every case – whether it is called Epiphany or Theophany it is the annual recognition of God’s surprising appearance to mankind – in Bethlehem to kings, in Cana to wedding guests or at the Jordan to people coming to hear John preach about repentance.

So, it is fitting that today we are looking at the story of the great flood of water and the fatal revelation the people in the time of Noah experienced. It was not the blessing of the waters – just the opposite. It was God’s thought of returning his creation – with a few exceptions – to the chaos of the waters across which his Spirit moved at Creation. He could no longer look on what he had created and call it good.

When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them,  the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the Lord said, “My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.”

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.  So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.

What must the wickedness been like to make God regret his own act? What had happened to make him think about destroying not only man but everything from the face of the earth? How could sin have been so rampant that it had not only infected mankind but made the earth and all the creatures in it evil as well?

It is a chilling picture of the power of evil, isn’t it? “Every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.” We have talked before about what the world will be like without the salt and light of the Church in the horrible days of the end of the world. As it was in the time of Noah so it will be at the end. Every inclination of the the hearts of men and women will be toward evil.

That is the description of Noah’s time. It was a time of violence and self-deceit. People were not overcome by evil spirits. They had chosen to believe in lies and violence. They had embraced corruption and becoming senseless. I used to think it was a time of drunken carousing and debauchery but it was not. Wine was not present until Noah first created it after the Flood. This was a special kind of cold violence and sober wickedness. It was not a product of inebriation but was clear-eyed, whole hearted and calculating.

It was the kind of deception and violence we see in Psalm 12:8. “When what is vile is honored among men then the wicked strut about freely.”

Proverbs 4 describes such men perfectly, “Mischief and wickedness are more important to them than sleep. They cannot rest nor be content unless they have corrupted or hurt others. Wickedness and violence are their bread and wine.”

It is the conscious evil of Psalm 36: “With the wicked there is no fear of God before his eyes. For in his own eyes he flatters himself too much to detect or hate his sin. The words of his mouth are wicked and deceitful; even on his bed he plots evil; he commits himself to a sinful course and does not reject what is wrong.”

It is more than a pattern of bad choices. It is a giving over to wickedness. Psalm 14: “The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on the sons of men to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. All have turned aside, they have together become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one.”

In his novel, The House of the Dead, Dostoevsky wrote:

“Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate … the return of the human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible.”

The people in Noah’s world had become desensitized to their unrestrained tyranny. They had become as stupid as beasts. They had become the creatures about which Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes:

But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE. At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.

But here is what might be a description of Noah and his righteousness. Again, Solzhenitsyn:

And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! Let THAT (lies and violence) enter the world, let it even reign in the world – but not with my help. ONE WORD OF TRUTH SHALL OUTWEIGH THE WHOLE WORLD.

The apostle Peter tells us that Noah was a preacher of righteousness. We have no sermon to read but in the course of the 120 years it took to build the ark the work itself and the witness of one life of truth was a sermon. In Hebrews 11:7 we read, “By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by which he condemned the world, and became the heir of righteousness which is by faith.” Just as Paul says about Abraham in Romans 4: “Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations..Without wavering in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead..yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had the power to do what he had promised.”

Abraham, like Noah, did not preach sermons but his faith, his hope, his belief that God was able to do what he had promised was the mark of righteousness. No doubt Noah’s world did not understand faith or hope for they had exchanged the truth of God for a lie. I believe until the moment the rain began to fall and the springs beneath the earth opened up the people did not believe – and that was their condemnation. They had become blind, deaf, senseless and stupid. Their wickedness had become normal for them. Every inclination of their hearts was only evil. There was not a shred of inclination toward good. Jesus says, “For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage.” I am sure in those final moments people were complaining they had no warning and that God was unfair and cruel. Many might have felt betrayed thinking God was on their side. For hundreds of years they had gradually deadened themselves to the decay of their own wills and conscience and it was likely a total surprise – an epiphany of sorts – when they realized their fate.

Like all those who choose their own destruction as C.S. Lewis writes:

The forces which had begun, perhaps years ago, to eat away his humanity had now completed their work. The intoxicated will which had been slowly poisoning the intelligence and the affections had now at last poisoned itself and the whole psychic organism had fallen to pieces.  Only a ghost was left – an everlasting unrest, a crumbling, a ruin, an odor of decay.”

And in another place he writes: “A damned soul is nearly nothing: it is shrunk, shut up in itself. Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First, they will not, in the end, they cannot open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food or their eyes to see…There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy”

From the first days of the Church there have been competing beliefs about the second coming and end times. Yes, there were and are false teachers but most of the confusion has resulted from jumping to conclusions about certain signs, overly excited imaginations or just different readings of Scripture. Why else would we have pre/post/a millennial interpretations? Why else would we have an end times industry pumping out books and movies?

From the outset there have been two major perspectives on the role of the Church in the world as we await the second coming of Christ.

There is the conquering Church– the Church triumphant. There are those pursuing dominion in the world and, in truth, they can relieve the world of some of the effects of the sin that is in the very nature of the world. We can combat and sometimes win over slavery, disease, poverty, injustice, and crime.

Then there is the restraining Church. This is our holding out against the flood of evil through our constant struggle to restrain a force that desires overtaking us. We’ve all seen pictures of communities being flooded by the Mississippi. Everyone is engaged in filling and piling sandbags to hold back the water. The river keeps rising while the people keep stacking to contain the flood until the waters recede or the town is destroyed. No one sits by and watches.

We need both churches in this world. The church that alters the effects of a fallen world and the church that fills and stacks sandbags against the flood to restrain it. Neither is adequate on its own.

The restraint of evil is not a one front war. It is billions of fronts where every life is a point of defense against the power of lawlessness. Every person, family and church is a front against a power that never sleeps and is relentless in its desire to break in and steal. What you do to resist evil affects me and my resistance affects you. Every time you tell the truth when you could have lied; every time you forgive instead of remaining angry; every time you pray or act with integrity you are restraining the power of hopelessness and lawlessness. No good act is neutral. It is one more sandbag stacked against the flood. This is the “secret power of goodness” about which Paul writes.

There will be in the future a time of no law, restraint, truth, hope, and pleasure. Only complete delusion – like the time of Noah. The disguise of evil will be removed and the mask peeled off. Evil that has been invisibly boiling below and ever present in the world will be revealed. That is the meaning of the word “apocalypse” – it is a revealing of what has been hidden but already at work. It is not an invasion from the outside but what has always been present but restrained by the Church. It is just the opposite of an epiphany – a revealing of God in the world. It will be a release of the springs of destruction flooding from beneath and a torrential rain of condemnation from above.

The Church will not be here for that. Just as Noah was taken out before the flood and Lot taken out of Sodom before destruction, the Church will not go through these times. Instead, all goodness will depart. It will be a world without the Church and as ineffective as the Church often appears to be there is no way to imagine what it will be like to live in a world with absolutely no goodness of any kind and no remorse, guilt, shame or pity. A friend of mine once said in joking, “The stench on the inside of the church would be unbearable were it not for the destructive flood surrounding it.”

Yes, we are in a war that is constant. Bob Woodward described it in his book Bush At War: “The enemy is relentless, hidden, patient and hates us. The war will not be spectacular large battles but thousands of invisible actions.”  We are in a war of restraint against deception, delusion and anarchy – and the greatest weapons are truth, righteousness and prayer. Our continuing responsibility is to fight the battle on the front closest to where we live and fight for each other whenever delusion and deceit break through. Evil does not overwhelm. It works to make us prefer the lie and break the heart of God. Evil breaks the door down only as a last resort. It much prefers to be invited when people willingly exchange the truth of God for a lie and rush to join the mob of fools.

So, Paul’s constant admonition to the Church is not to focus on fear or evil but pay attention to our responsibility to restrain evil and take care of each other.

Every single good deed and good word is a sandbag. We have hope and eternal encouragement. Do not fear. Hold to the truth. Fill sandbags.