<p>2:5 <em>And did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah with seven others, a preacher of righteousness, when He brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly</em>- Given this apostasy of the sons of God and the unwillingness of the world to listen to Noah's preaching (2 Pet. 2:5) the size of the ecclesia must have declined, until it was only 9 strong. H.P. Mansfield claims that 'Methuselah' means 'When he dies, it shall come'- suggesting that he died a few days or weeks before the flood came. We can imagine the ecclesia falling away one by one until it was just that old brother Noah, his wife and his three faithful sons (no doubt he had other grandchildren and children whom he failed to influence). The small, declining size of the faithful in our last days and the total apathy to our preaching should not discourage us- as with all negative things, a positive message can be read into them in the light of Scripture. And the message here is that such things clearly indicate that we are in the last days. The only people to survive the temptations of these 'last days' before the flood were one family unit. As these events are so pregnant with latter day relevance, it may be that we are to perceive here a faint hint that strongly led family units are the way to survive the last days. Noah is described as &ldquo;the eighth&quot; (AV), perhaps alluding to the fact that of the eight people saved in the ark, he was &quot;the eighth&quot;; he put the others first.&nbsp;</p><p>Peter here mentions Noah and Lot together (:6). There are many connections between Peter&rsquo;s letters and the Gospels. I calculate that once every three verses, Peter is alluding to the Lord&rsquo;s words. And the figure is probably higher, seeing that we don&rsquo;t know all the words and actions of the Lord Jesus, and probably Peter is alluding to incidents and words which aren&rsquo;t recorded. Like Paul, Peter&rsquo;s mind was saturated with the Lord Jesus. This was the secret of his spirituality, this was why he could cope with the ministry to the Gentiles which he had so boldly started being taken away from him and given to Paul, this was why he didn&rsquo;t slump into a life of melancholy bitterness. &nbsp;Some of his allusions are conscious allusions (e.g. those to the transfiguration). Others seem almost unconscious- e.g. the way he cites both Noah and Lot (2 Pet. 2:5-8) as warnings for the last generation, when the Lord had likewise used both of them together (Lk. 17:26-32).</p>