Apparently if you run the numbers, the ark was built with a lot of extra room.

Until the doors closed, anyone and everyone was encouraged to board but ultimately only Noah and his family did.

It’s a very interesting idea because 2 Peter 2:5 explicitly calls Noah “a preacher of righteousness” and what’s the point of preaching unless there was extra room on the ark?

God tried everything to save the diseased, rotting tree of humanity until he was forced to lop it off, before it was so completely dead that the stump couldn’t send out a new shoot.

The behavior of Noah’s kids’ after the flood, after having eyewitness proof, strongly suggests that they were covered by Noah’s faith and had he died, the tree of humanity might have been rotten to the root and there would have been no more hope. God held open the window for repentance as long as He possibly could.

Noah’s grandfather was Methuselah, and theologians have interpreted his name as a prophecy, because it can be translated to mean: “After me comes the flood.” And I tend to believe that translation because it is quite consistent with the character of God throughout all of scripture. Methuselah’s name as a prophecy means his life was a ticking time bomb. Yet he was the longest living man. Truly God was reluctant to send the flood. The text makes it clear that the action grieved him–Atsab–even as he knew it was absolutely necessary.

It grieved him that after all of His warnings, after waiting as long as He could, after all of Noah’s preaching, no one took the escape route. Not even one.

Like a doctor extremely reluctant to lop off a gangrenous leg, God waited until the last possible moment and even a few moments beyond, holding out hope that maybe, just maybe one more might want on the ark.

It grieved God deeply that no one else ran into His open arms. No one even tried to go up the gangplank he’d left wide open. Only the animals came, and they were pulled within by an instinct God pulled upon. Mankind had been blessed with free will, and they all used it to reject God.

They refused to be saved.

When the windows of heaven finally opened, the window of opportunity closed.

We can be stunned at their foolishness, but a similar offer is now before humanity, once again.

The window given to the world before the flood is long since closed, but ours is still open.

“God will invade.” C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity: “But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realize what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks on to the stage the play is over. God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else – something it never entered your head to conceive – comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? … It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing… Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last forever. We must take it or leave it.”

Genesis 6:6 – ו וינחם יהוה כי עשה את האדם בארץ ויתעצב אל לבו