• The “Slave” Who Lived to See the “Sign”
    God’s Kingdom of a Thousand Years Has Approached

    •  4. So social conditions among mankind during Jesus’ parousia were to be like the days of whom, and which particular days?

      4 According to this prophecy, the social conditions among men and women on earth during this invisible parousia of the Lord Jesus Christ should be like those in the days of Noah before the planetary deluge. Evidently by the time reference, “the days of Noah,” Jesus meant “those days before the flood” when Noah was preparing the ark that God had instructed him to build. Otherwise, there would have been nothing special for the antediluvian people to take note of to indicate that a deluge was scheduled for their generation. This preparing of the ark would locate the particular “days of Noah” within the last hundred years of his life before the deluge, for the deluge started in Noah’s six hundredth year, and so we read: “Noah got to be five hundred years old. After that Noah became father to Shem, Ham and Japheth.”​—Genesis 5:32; 7:11.

       5. (a) The “days of Noah” for building the ark are also shown to be limited by what fact? (b) The comparison made with the “days of Noah” proves what about the meaning of parousia?

      5 Another limit on the time would be that Noah was told that he must take into the ark his own wife and his three sons and his “sons’ wives” with him. (Genesis 6:18) This would indicate that Noah’s three sons were married before the work on the ark began. So the time before the deluge during which the people could note that something unusual was going on may have been reduced to around fifty years before the global catastrophe. At any rate, the “days” allowed to the people for taking serious note were a considerable time. Inasmuch as “so the presence [parousia] of the Son of man will be,” this proves that the invisible parousia of Christ is an extended period of time and does not mark merely the time of the start of the “great tribulation” at a certain hour of a specific day. In harmony with that view of the parousia, Jesus’ parallel statement, in Luke 17:26, says: “Moreover, just as it occurred in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of man.” But just as the days of Noah’s building the ark led up to the entry of him and his immediate family into that tremendous structure, so the invisible parousia runs for a period of time and comes to a climax in a global “great tribulation.”