Luke 17:26

And as it came to pass in the days of Noah, even so shall it also be in the days of the Son of man. They ate, they drank, they married, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all. Likewise, even as it came to pass in the days of Lot; they ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; but in the day that Lot went out from Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all.

Significantly, these were cataclysmic physical disasters. The Dead Sea today lies on the site of the cities of the plain which were destroyed by the cataclysm mentioned here. The ravages of the flood were genuine, worldwide, and attested not merely in the word of God, but by the legends of fabled Atlantis and many others. Moreover, there is hardly a hill on earth that does not show signs of once having been beneath the sea.

The fact that Jesus selected these two great physical phenomena from the Old Testament, making them comparable to the Second Advent, is a clear word that the Second Advent will also be such a physical thing; a cataclysm of unbelievable and unprecedented destruction; and that in the midst of the Great Disaster, the Son of man will appear to redeem the faithful from the earth, who shall be caught up with the "Lord in the air" (see 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18). Men either believe this or they don't; and this writer, striving to read the word of the Lord aright, BELIEVES it, with no pretensions whatever of being able to EXPLAIN it.

We shall not detail all of the incidents relative to Noah and Lot; those Old Testament narratives should be well known to every Christian; and the lesson here is not what happened to those generations, but what is going to happen to all the world and the generation that abides when the Lord shall come.