A Sad Situation

If you noticed, I haven’t done a podcast for 5 days which is unusual since I’ve been recording and uploading videos every day since October of 2023. At the time I didn’t make it public why I stopped, but now I can. You see I was selected to be a juror in a local criminal trial and as part of the instructions we were told not to discuss it until a verdict was reached. As I prayed about it I came to the conclusion that I didn’t want anything I posted publicly to be a cause for a mistrial. Now some of you may think I could have avoided doing that, but trust me when I tell you I took this duty very seriously and after it was all said and done I think it was the right decision. Now that the trial is over I can talk about the sad details of the trial because it is a microcosm of life in our world today. It was a murder trial and a young mother of 4 children lost her life in a shooting back in 2024. The bodycam footage was heartbreaking. The children screaming and crying as their mother lay on the floor bleeding was hard to digest. And that was only the start of the evidence given to us. If you want more details you’ll have to talk to me in person, but the whole trial made me think of a prophetic statement spoken by Jesus to His disciples:

But as the days of Noah were, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be. (Matt 24:37, NKJV)

Violence Was Common

This senseless loss of life and the violence surrounding it served to remind me and anyone paying attention that we are indeed living in days like those Noah lived in. Another verse highlights this:

And the earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. (Gen 6:11-12, ASV)

Filled with violence is a pretty bad state of affairs. But how violent was that? And how did the world get to that point? The human heart is deceitful in all it’s ways we’re told in Jeremiah 17:9:

The heart is the most deceitful thing there is and desperately wicked. No one can really know how bad it is! (TLB)

Over time a hardened heart will overflow into actions as a commentary from gotquestions.org explains:

In Luke 6:45, Jesus says that people can be judged by what they say and do because these things reveal what is really inside the person: “A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” If you want to know what is on the inside of a person, you simply watch his actions; listen to what comes out of his mouth on a regular basis. This is not being judgmental; this is being realistic.

In this murder trial we saw a person who didn’t see anything wrong with shooting into a home knowing there were little children sleeping with their mom. In the days of Noah life was cheap just as it is now. While we know that the ways violence was carried out was different than today, it really is more basic than the methods. It goes to what happens when God is not in the equation. God instructs us to treat each other as children of God and special. And mankind was created to be above all of creation. Take that specialness out of the picture and we are no more than animals with higher intelligence but no morals. While one can criticize the theory of evolution on many fronts, one of the most critical is that we not only took a long time to become as civilized as we are now, we are also getting progressively better. Nothing could be farther from the truth both before the flood and now. How can we look at the current state of affairs and even remotely think we are more civilized now? We simply can’t.

Saturated With Violence

As we noted in Genesis 6:11 people were very violent. Interestingly the Hebrew idea behind “violence” is hamas, meaning violence, cruelty, injustice, oppression, robbery, bloodshed, and moral wrong. So the days of Noah were not merely people being “kind of bad.” It was a world where corruption had become normal, violence filled society, and human imagination was bent continually toward evil. Genesis 6 gives several details:

  • Violence had become widespread.
    The earth was “filled with violence,” meaning violence was not isolated. It had spread through culture, homes, communities, and systems.
  • Corruption was both moral and social.
    Genesis says, “all flesh had corrupted their way.” That points to a breakdown of God’s order: sexuality, justice, worship, family, truth, and human dignity.
  • Evil was continual, not occasional.
    Genesis 6:5 says “every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” That is a terrifying phrase. It means evil has moved from action, to imagination, to identity, to culture.
  • People were carrying on normal life while judgment was approaching.
    Jesus said people in Noah’s day were “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage” until the flood came. The point is not that eating or marriage were evil, but that ordinary life continued while people were spiritually blind to the condition of the world.
  • Violence and spiritual blindness existed together.
    That may be the most sobering part. Noah’s world was violent, corrupt, and wicked, yet many people were still living as if everything was normal.

The contrast to today is uncomfortable. We live in a time where violence is not just physical, but also ideological, technological, political, and spiritual. ACLED or Armed Conflict Location & Event Data recorded over 204,000 conflict events from December 2024 to November 2025, resulting in over 240,000 deaths globally. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), a United Nations refugee reported that by the end of 2024, 123.2 million people were forcibly displaced because of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations, or public disorder. Today, we see wars, terrorism, cartels, mass shootings, riots, political violence, persecution, trafficking, and the normalization of brutality through media and technology. In Sudan, a drone strike on a crowded market killed 28 people, amid a war that has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions.

Hardened To It

There is also a moral parallel. In Noah’s day, violence flowed out of corrupted hearts. Today, much of the world seems increasingly desensitized to death, rage, lawlessness, sexual confusion, corruption, and hatred. But the biblical warning is not merely, “The world is violent.” The deeper warning is: people can become so used to corruption that they no longer recognize it as corruption. That is the connection Jesus made in Matthew 24. The days of Noah were marked by violence, corruption, and spiritual carelessness. The people were busy, entertained, marrying, eating, drinking, building lives, and ignoring God’s warning. Then judgment came suddenly.

So the contrast is this:

  • In Noah’s day, violence filled the earth. Today, violence fills our headlines, screens, cities, nations, and sometimes even our entertainment.
  • In Noah’s day, corruption became normal. Today, many things God calls evil are rebranded as freedom, progress, justice, or self-expression.
  • In Noah’s day, people were distracted by normal life. Today, people are flooded with noise, outrage, entertainment, and endless information, yet often remain spiritually asleep.

The whole eating, drinking, and marrying sounds innocuous on the surface and some people look at that as just normal activities for any generation. The point Jesus was making was that evil and violence became normal and commonplace to us so much so that we lived our lives not even thinking about the depravity and cheapening of life all around us.

The Bottom Line

We are living in the End Times. And if we are not diligent, we will succumb to the spirit of the age even though we attend church. It is no longer enough to just attend. We must fight to stay holy. The good news is that it can be done. So we need to be like Noah and learn to be pure:

3 It is God’s will that you should be sanctified…that each of you should learn to control your own body in a way that is holy and honorable… (1 Thess 4:3-4, NIV)

God will help you learn to live right. He loves you and will instruct the Holy Spirit to help you live differently than the world around you. But you must choose to accept His help. And, the hopeful part is that Noah was not called to panic. He was called to walk with God. Genesis 6:9 says Noah was “a just man” and “walked with God.” That is the message for today: not fear, not obsession, not date-setting, but discernment, repentance, faithfulness, and warning others while there is still time.