Matthew 24:37 tells us, “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.” This passage comes from the Gospel of Matthew, and it is Jesus’ very words of the future. The passage of Matthew 24:37 comes from the Olivet Discourse that Jesus gave on the Mount of Olives.
Contained within the Olivet Discourse, Jesus talks about the destruction of the Temple, the future, and the End Times. The section of the Olivet Discourse that we will be focusing on is when Jesus says, “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man” (Matthew 24:37).
Meaning and Warning
When the Lord tells us this vital truth, he is referring to the time before His coming. No one will know at what time Jesus will come — only the Father knows.
When Jesus says that it will be the same as it was in the days of Noah before His coming, He is referring to the fact that the world will be just as wicked and evil as it was during the time of Noah.
It also refers to the truth that people will be living as though nothing major is about to happen — they will be getting married and celebrating as if the Lord isn’t about to return for His second coming.
This truth is shown in the following passages as Jesus tells us, “For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying, and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man” (Matthew 24:38-39).
As this passage tells us, the return of the Lord will be unexpected and take the world by surprise. Nobody can predict the day of the Lord’s return because it is unknowable. What we are given is the information that before the Lord’s coming, it will be similar to the days of Noah.
If we flash backward in time to the book of Genesis, we can see a glimpse of the person of Noah and the people surrounding Him. God tells Noah to build the ark because God was going to destroy the entire world.
He was going to destroy the world by sending a worldwide flood to drown out evil and violent people. During the days of Noah, there was no one who looked to God except for Noah. The people of the time were wicked and vile.
They had no respect for God and chose to indulge the sinful nature and worship false gods. Instead of looking to the Lord and living in repentance, they were wicked and were unashamed of their actions.
Since the world had grown to be wicked and evil, God told Noah to build an ark for him, his wife, his sons, and his sons’ wives. God also told Noah to take two of each animal on the ark in order to repopulate the world with animals.
Through Noah’s three sons and their wives, they were going to be able to repopulate the world since everyone in the world would have drowned in the flood.
God had to clean the world of the wicked and evil in order to have a fresh start. The only person God saw that truly did right and loved Him was Noah.
This is why God chose Noah and his family to go on the ark. Noah and his family would have been on the ark for a year or over a year. During this time, the wicked world has been destroyed, and God would start over with the human race, beginning with Noah and his family.
Even though Noah was a man who loved God, his whole family couldn’t say the same. Ham was wicked and disrespected his father, and it is thought that Ham and his wife carried on many wicked practices that were upheld in the world prior to the flood. Nonetheless, God placed a rainbow in the sky as a promise that He would never flood the earth again.
Going back to Jesus’ words and warning in Matthew 24:37, He warns us of how wicked the world will be before His second coming. Nobody will know His exact timing, yet we can know the world will progressively grow more wicked.
We have to understand the severity of Jesus’ words here because He is comparing the wickedness of the people before the flood as being the same wickedness that will be occurring before His second coming.
This wickedness and evilness that will occur before Jesus’ second coming will be as evil and wicked as the people who caused God to send a flood on the world to destroy it.
In the Days of Noah
As we can see, this is a severe statement for Jesus to make. The Lord is comparing the evil and wickedness of the future to the equivalent of the days of Noah.
We need to take this warning to heart and understand its meaning. As established, the meaning of “as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man” (Matthew 24:37) refers to the truth that the world will be just as wicked when Jesus returns for His Second Coming at it was during the days of Noah before the flood was sent upon the earth.
The warning given here by the Lord is that the world will progressively get more evil before the coming of the Lord.
This is an insightful warning because it helps warn us of future events. Depending on which eschatological interpretation you adhere to can play a factor surrounding Jesus’ words in Matthew 24:37.
From a premillennial, dispensational perspective, Jesus' Second Coming will happen right before the Battle of Armageddon. He will return and destroy His enemies. The Lord will reign victorious and take His place as the rightful King.
Since the Second Coming of the Lord will occur during the second half of the tribulation, known as the great tribulation, we can imagine how wicked the world will be at this time.
The Antichrist will be deceiving the nations, and the people of the earth will be following him. They will reject everything good, and they will oppose God in every way possible.
What Does This Mean?
When we consider these facts, we can see how wicked the world will be before Jesus’ Second Coming. Jesus gives us this warning in the Olivet Discourse to prepare us for what is ahead.
While believers will not be here when this extreme form of wickedness and evil will prevail, we will still know it is happening.
Believers would have been taken up to heaven and kept safe with the Father as the events of the tribulation play out. God spares believers the pain of the tribulation because they have accepted Him and love Him with their entire being.
The unbelievers with the mark of the beast will continue in unbelief and will carry on in their sinful nature throughout time within the tribulation. At the time of the Lord’s return, He will return with wrath, not mercy.
For further reading:
What Do We Know about the Second Coming of Jesus?
What Does the Bible Say about the Antichrist?
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