A story I clipped from the New York Times business section not too long ago was about the cult success of the book, “Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets,” which first came out in hardback right around 9/11 and became a “word-of-mouth sensation on Wall Street.”

In what the Times writer calls his “Cliff Notes translation” of the book, he says author Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s central belief is “that many of things that happen to us—career success, or decisions that turn out well, or gains in the stock market—that we attribute to our own skill or hard work, are really a result of plain dumb luck.

“And secondly, he believes that the kind of rare events that really change the world—be they wars or disasters, inventions or serendipitous discoveries, bubbles or crashes—are things we don’t see coming, and aren’t prepared for.”

I think about how Noah spent 120 years building the ark, all the while warning the people who were ridiculing him, “God's told me He's going to wipe everybody out and this boat's the only place you're going to find any safety and refuge from His wrath."

As we know, only eight people believed Noah, and they were his own family. The rest of the populace, which numbered into the millions prior to the Flood, went about eating, drinking, marrying, giving in marriage, etc., not paying any heed to Noah’s warning.

The story of Noah and the ark, as we learn from Jesus Christ in Luke 17, is an illustration of the upcoming situation for Israel during the tribulation.

“The ark is a picture of the ‘little flock’ of Believers who will call Israel into the ‘ark’ of safety,” explains my pastor, Richard Jordan (Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill.) in a study I have on tape. “The wrath's coming, and the people who heed the warning and heed the call, get in and are delivered. The ones who don't are taken in judgment.”

A lot of people aren’t aware of this, but the pre-Flood society was a tremendously advanced one, both technologically and culturally.

“One of the things you know in a culture is, if you’re able to support musicians to entertain you, well, then that's leisure time, and you’ll find mention of the arts and all that back in Genesis 4,” says Jordan. “They had a tremendously advanced culture. They didn’t have some of the technologies that we have evidently, but you get to thinking, anybody who can build the pyramids and do a lot of the things they did back then, they understood geometry, architectural issues, suspension and so forth. They didn't use electricity or the combustible engine to power things as we do, but they had a lot of other things. They had a tremendously advanced technological era.”

As Oklahoma radio and TV preacher Les Feldick explains the literal explosion of knowledge and technology before the Flood in one of his audio studies on his website, “You go back to secular history and the evolutionists, and they maintain that the human race didn’t know anything of metals until way, way, down the line, (but) here we are at the very dawn of human history and, according to Biblical account, they were already mining the ore so that they could put brass together, and their iron, and now we see they’re manufacturing with it. They are beginning to produce things made with these metals.

What needs to be remembered, says Feldick, is that Adam, created as a perfect human being and living past 900 years of age, had to have produced some incredibly brilliant children.

“Adam had a mind that would probably blow ours, and his children were not that much below him,” says Feldick. “And on top of that tremendous intelligence, look at all the years they had to use it. What if Einstein, who died if I can remember correctly at the age of 90 or 91, could have lived to the age of 900? Can you imagine what that mind would have produced? Or an Edison, or any of these great men who have been responsible for so much of our technology, what if they could have lived ten times longer than they did? Can you see what would have happened? And that’s what you’ve got here before the Flood. You’ve got people with tremendous intelligence, but they had 900 years of time to use it.

“So I stick by my guns that there was tremendous technology on the scene by the time we come to the Flood. But always remember, where were most of the people spiritually? Out there in utter darkness. Without God it’s a Satanic-inspired civilization…Remember that Satan will promote anything, even a beautiful city park, or work of art. Satan will promote anything as long as it will keep men’s eyes and hearts from God, so never forget that.”

.

When Jesus Christ says, “They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all,” He’s saying they were just going about life. They were just going about the ordinary vocations of life, wrapped up in what they were doing, and not paying any attention.