Lori resumed: “Twelve says: ‘So God looked upon the earth, and indeed it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth.’ And then thirteen: ‘And God said to Noah, “The end of all flesh has come before Me, for the earth is filled with violence through them; and behold, I will destroy them with the earth.”’”

“What do you think was wrong with business as usual in Noah’s time?” John asked.

After a long pause, Dave Busby said, “It’s as clear as the frown on your face. Those characters were living under a sentence of death because of the way they had been living!”

“Yeah, that’s right,” said Carl. “But they kept on doing their own thing as if nothing was wrong.” He paused, as the color drained from his face. “You know, guys, that really describes my own life in southern California—before the meteor hit.”

“You and lots of other people,” Dave offered. “We were all laughing and partying and doing our thing. I have to say I was there, too, Carl. I was dumping a big round ball through a hoop to entertain people, to keep their minds off the fact that the world was going to hell in a handbasket. But who’s thinking about basketball now?”

“That’s right,” said Carl. “And Charley here was a coach. What was wrong with that? It was the way he made a living. Not everybody can be a missionary, right?”

“Nothing was wrong with that,” John replied. “But that’s not the point. All of us must realize that crime and violence were the number-one concern of the American people in the last decade of the twentieth century. Gangs of fatherless teenagers killed one another without mercy, then turned their anger on the rest of the population. There were rapes, robberies, shootings, beatings, and bombings in massive numbers. Families were broken apart. Profanity, blasphemy, and the worst kinds of vulgarity became part of the everyday language and lifestyles of the people. And promiscuous sex was epidemic.

“On top of all that, the nation gave protected legal status to people who practiced aberrant sex acts. Over a period of twenty-seven years, the American government gave protective constitutional status to the butchering of forty million innocent unborn children. It was as if the highest court in the land repeatedly jabbed its collective finger into the eye of Almighty God—as if to defy Him, to challenge Him to do something about it.

“And while this was going on, the vast majority of people were occupied with their own lives, sports, and recreations. Lifestyles, they called it. They gorged themselves on food and drink, spent close to four hundred billion dollars each year on pleasure, and squandered the nation’s savings—then congratulated themselves on how good they were.