Jesus warns his disciples of something that should give us pause as well.
so it will be in the days of the Son of Man;
they were eating and drinking,
marrying and giving in marriage up to the day
that Noah entered the ark
The problem Jesus saw in these earlier examples was that people were so involved in living life as usual that they failed to notice what God was doing. They ignored his attempt to rescue them.
Similarly, as it was in the days of Lot:
they were eating, drinking, buying,
selling, planting, building;
on the day when Lot left Sodom,
Lot survived Sodom, but even he himself could hardly be persuaded to go far from life as he knew it.
“No, my lords, please! Your servant has found favor in your eyes, and you have shown great kindness to me in sparing my life. But I can’t flee to the mountains; this disaster will overtake me, and I’ll die. Look, here is a town near enough to run to, and it is small. Let me flee to it—it is very small, isn’t it? Then my life will be spared.” (see Genesis 19:18-20).
Isn't this temptation still alive in our own time? We live our lives in such a way that our day to day becomes hypnotic. We lose track of the eternal horizon of life in the repetition of the daily grind. As a consequence we can't bring ourselves to care much about the rescue attempt God has provided us. The new ark of the Church isn't really a place we want to consider our home. We stop by periodically, but we prefer the wide open spaces of the world to the seeming cramped confines of God's house. So too do we prefer the secular city that is headed for destruction. If this were not so wouldn't we be urging others out of that city and into the Kingdom?
What are we to do to ensure that we aren't swept away in the coming judgment?
Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it,
but whoever loses it will save it.
I tell you, on that night there will be two people in one bed;
one will be taken, the other left.
Jesus wants to ensure that we aren't so attached to the things of this world as to be willing to die holding onto them. We can be in this world, in these secular cities, as long we still have the freedom of Spirit to follow God when and where he calls us.
Many deceivers have gone out into the world,
those who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh;
such is the deceitful one and the antichrist.
The world wants to lull us into forgetfulness of eternal things. The consequence of that is always that we hold unto temporal things and demand more from them than they can give. The way that we can be sure we are ready to meet Jesus, or any judgment that comes as we wait for him, is to make sure that we are free to love. His rescue plan for the world is always love. Love is the antidote to our doomed attempts at self-preservation on our own terms. It ensures that we can give our lives away and so find them eternally.
For this is love, that we walk according to his commandments;
this is the commandment, as you heard from the beginning,
in which you should walk.
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