Genesis Chapter 6 Part 2

Transcript

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And welcome back. In our last lesson, we set with the most debated four verses in all of Genesis. If you haven't listened to that one, I highly recommend you go back and listen to Genesis chapter 6, part one. We talked about the sons of God, the daughters of men, the Nephilim, and the collapse of the last boundary between the holy line and the line of Cain. And we made the case that this was not a supernatural invasion, but it was a moral implosion. God's people choosing for themselves whomever they choose, without discernment, without covenant, without consideration, without God. And now in the next verses, we see, we see the result. In Genesis chapter 6, verses 5 through 12, it contains a stunning passage. And perhaps it's more stunning than the creation account, the fall, the proto-evangelium. Because in these eight verses, God does something that he has never done before in this particular text. The text says that he grieves. The God who spoke the universe into existence, the God who walked in the garden, the God who came looking for Abraham, the God who warned Cain before the murder, the God who preserved the line through Seth, that God, that creator, is grieved. And in the middle of that grief, in the darkest moment of the pre-flood world, one sentence changes everything when we read, but Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Now let's read the text here. Let's start in Genesis chapter 6, verse 5. Said, Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. The Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and he was grieved in his heart. That's a powerful verse. The Lord said, I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things, to birds in the sky, for I am sorry that I have made them. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. These are the records of the generation of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his time, and Noah walked with God. Noah became the father of three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God, and the earth was filled with violence. God looked on the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth. In these verses, we see the most comprehensive diagnosis of human sin. The most profound portrait of divine emotion in the Old Testament and the first use of the word grace. We've seen grace happen, but this is the first use of the word grace. And then we see one righteous man standing in the middle of total corruption. So let's start with verse five and let's break this down piece by piece because this is so important. Verse five is one of the most comprehensive statements of human sinfulness in the entire Bible. It says every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. You have to break that down word by word. Every intent, not most intentions, not the majority of one person's desires, every single part of them, of the thoughts, not just the actions, not just the words, the thoughts, the interior life, the place no one else can see of his heart. In Hebrew thought, the heart was the center of the entire person, their intellect, their will, their emotion, their motivation, not just their feelings. And when you read the word heart here in this verse, it means the entire inner self. So their hearts were only evil, not mixed, not partially good, only evil, not in moments of weakness, not occasionally. It was evil without interruption, without pause, continually is what the verse says. And this is depravity described at its absolute worst. Not the inclination towards sin that the fall introduced, but the complete domination of sin over every faculty of every person. We talked in our Genesis chapter three lesson about original sin, the doctrine that the fall bent human nature toward self rather than God. Genesis chapter six, verse five, is that doctrine taken to its logical end. What happens when sin is never corrected? When no restraint remains, when the spirit stops striving to please God. The Hebrew word translated, intent here, is one of the most important words of all of Hebrew anthropology. It's a word Yetzer, and I might be mispronouncing that, but Y-E-T-Z-E-R, and it comes from a root meaning to form or fashion. The same root word is used in Genesis chapter 2, verse 7, when God formed man from the dust. So the Yetzer is the formative impulse of the inner person. It's a deep inclination, the basic orientation of the will. In later Jewish theology, the rabbis developed the concept of two impulses in every single human. There was the good inclination and there was the evil inclination. Before the flood, though, what we read is every person, every person was only evil continually. The good inclination had been entirely overwhelmed. The formative impulse of the heart was corrupt at its root. This is why the flood is not disproportionate, not a disproportionate response. God is not destroying people who were mostly good but occasionally slipped up and did evil. He is responding to a civilization whose interior architecture had become entirely inverted. Augustine wrote this. He said, When the will abandons what is above itself and turns to whatever is lower, it becomes evil. Not because that to which it turns is evil, but because the turning itself is perverse. And when a civilization turns entirely and collectively, the result is what Genesis chapter 6 describes. The Mesopotamian flood narratives also describe a reason that the gods of their culture sent the flood. But the reasons they give are remarkably different than Genesis. And the hotrahopas, uh, Hatrahasis, I always struggle with that word, epic, the oldest known flood narrative, the gods send the flood because humanity has become too noisy. Think about that, too noisy. The gods cannot sleep because of all the noise that the humans are making. And so they send a series of plagues, then a drought, and then finally the flood. And they're not sending them to punish moral evil, but they're sending them to reduce the population so that they can get some peace and quiet. In the Gilgamesh epic, the reason for the flood is not stated clearly at all. There's no moral justification, it's just on a divine whim. And then you contrast that with Genesis, and it couldn't be more complete. In Genesis, the flood is not about noise, and it's not about divine convenience. It's about a moral response to a moral corruption described with extraordinary precision. The God of Genesis does not send the flood because humanity annoys him. The God of the Bible is not like the gods described in these ancient writings. The God of the Bible acts justly and with precision. And now we come to the verse that stops that stops every careful reader cult. It says, The Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and he was grieved in his heart. This is one of the most extraordinary statements in the entire Old Testament. And it requires us to think very carefully. Two things are being said here. First, the Lord was sorry. The Hebrew word is the same root as the name of Noah, meaning comfort, to be moved with compassion, to grieve, to repent. And it is the word used when a person changes their emotional. I want you to catch that, their emotional posture in response to what they are experiencing. And I'll explain that in just a little bit more in just a minute. The second thing we read is that he was grieved in his heart. The Hebrew word for grieved here carries the sense of a deep pain, distress that cuts to your core, the ache that someone has who has been wounded by what they love. It's the same word used in Genesis chapter 3, verse 16 and 17, for the pain of childbirth and the toil of the ground. And now it describes the interior state of God as he looks at the world that he makes. It means God hurts. And this raises an enormous theological question that the church has wrestled with for 2,000 years. And that question is: does God really change his mind? Skeptics sometimes use this verse as an argument against God. They would say, if God is all-knowing, then he knew what would happen. So how can he be sorry? Did he not know this was coming? Is he not in control? And within the church, theologians have debated what it means to read that God grieved or that God repented. Let me give you a careful, orthodox answer from the context of the scripture of the ancient languages. The Bible teaches two truths simultaneously that must be held in tension. The first is this God is immutable. God is a mutable. He does not change his essential nature, his purpose, or his character. And the second is that God is genuinely relational. That means that he responds to what happens in history with real emotional engagement. Let me give you an example. In 1 Samuel chapter 15, verse 29, we read the glory of Israel will not lie or change his mind. Will not lie or change his mind. Yet 1 Samuel 15, verse 11, just a few verses earlier, says, I regret that I have made Saul king. So both statements are in the same chapter. How do we hold them together? The answer is that God's regret or grief is not a change of his eternal purpose or foreknowledge, it is a genuine expression of his relational response to what is happening. God knew before the foundation of the world what the pre-flood world would become. His plan of redemption through Noah and ultimately through Christ was not a backup plan. But his grief over what humanity has done in itself is also real. And this is not a contradiction. This is the language of a God who is both sovereign and personal, both above history, yet genuinely engaged in it. When Scripture says God repented or grieved, it isn't describing a change of God's mind. It's describing what the reality of human sin actually deserves, which is a response of grief from a God who genuinely loves what he has made. Because he loves you, he is grieved by your sin. Augustine wrote this about it. He said, God's repentance is not the repentance of a man who was error. This is it is settled. It is the settled, sorrowful response of a creator whose creatures have destroyed themselves, expressed in human language, so that we can feel the weight of what we have done. Now, I want to stay here for just a few more minutes because I think most people would rush right past this verse and just dive right into the flood. And in doing so, they miss something that reshapes how we should understand everything. Read it again. God grieves. God grieves. I want you to hold on to that. Not because the plan has gone wrong, not because he was surprised, but because he genuinely loves his creation. And what he loves is being destroyed. This is not the God of Aristotle, the unmoved mover, the cold first calls who set the universe in motion and feels nothing. This is not the gods of Mesopotamia who are only interested in themselves and indifferent to human suffering. This is the God who grieves. And here is a staggering implication. If God can grieve over the corruption of humanity, then that means every sin that you or I have ever committed has grieved him or cost him something. Not because sin limits God's power, but because sin wounds the relationship that he treasures. The same God who grieves in Genesis chapter 6 is the God who will weep at Lazarus' tomb in John chapter 11, the God who will grieve over Jerusalem in Luke chapter 13. The God who on the cross will absorb the full weight of what grieves him onto himself. So Genesis chapter 6, verse 6 is not a theological problem to solve, it's a window into the heart of God. And what we see there is not cold justice, it's a wounded love. Origen in the third century wrote that scripture uses emotional language about God, not because God is literally subject to human passions, but because the reality of God's response to sin is so deep that only the language of grief and sorrow can begin to communicate how God feels. Irenaeus in the second century saw the grief of God as proof that creation matters to him. He wrote, A God who cannot grieve is a God who cannot love. The grief of Genesis chapter 6, verse 6 is proof that the love of Genesis chapter 1 was real. There's a man by the name of John of Damascus, one of the great synthesizers of Eastern theology in the 8th century. And this is what he wrote. He said, when we say God repents, we mean that his actions toward humanity change, not that his nature or foreknowledge changes. The change is in what he does in response to what man has done, not in what he is. Hold on to that for a little while. Now, let's move on to the next verse. Verse 7 ends with declaring his intention to blot out humanity. That's a devastating sentence. And then in verse 8 we read, but Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Focus on that one word for just a minute, but that's such an important word in scripture. It really creates a different way we look at things. That word, but is the hinge of the entire flood narrative. It's the reason that eight people survive. It's the reason that humanity continues. That word, but is the reason there's a line leading to Abraham and David and ultimately to Jesus. But Noah found grace. I need you to see how much theological freight is carried in those four words. The Hebrew word translated grace here, it's the first time that that word appears in the entire Bible. Everything before this in Genesis, the image of God, the provision in the garden, the garments of skin, the protection of Cain, the line of Seth, all of it has been grace and action without the word actually being used. And now, in the darkest moment of the darkest chapter in Genesis, grace gets its name. The word means, where we read the word grace, it means favor, unmerited, unearned acceptance, a gracious disposition, a bending toward the undeserving. In the ancient world, the idea of grace, or the word grace, was used to describe the favor of a king toward their subjects. And the king had every right to destroy and chose instead to spare their subjects, not because the subject earned it, but because the king was gracious. And here in Genesis chapter 6, the king of the universe is about to destroy everything, and he graciously disposed toward one man. Noah found grace. Notice it, Noah didn't earn grace. Noah didn't deserve grace. Noah found grace, which means he received it and he was the object of it. This is the first announcement of the word that will define the entire New Testament. Ephesians chapter 2, verse 8. For by grace you have been saved through faith. Grace first appears not in a moment of human triumph, but in a moment of universal judgment, not when humanity is at its best, but when humanity is at its absolute worst. Now, the text does not leave us wondering what made Noah different. Verse 9 gives us three descriptions. It says Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his time, and Noah walked with God. Three descriptions, and each one is important. First, he was righteous. The Hebrew word used through the Old Testament means a person who lives in a right relationship with God and with others. It does not mean sinless, it means aligned, living in accordance with God's character and covenant. Next, we see the word blameless, the Hebrew word meaning complete, whole, without defect. This doesn't mean perfect in the absolute sense. No fallen human being has ever been that. But it's a person having integrity, being the same person in private that they are in public, consistent and undivided. And the last thing we read is that he walked with God. This is the same phrase used in Enoch chapter 5, verses 24. Now, only two people in all of Genesis describe or describe with that exact language. Noah walked with God. It is the in the most corrupt world in human history, when every intent of the heart around him was only evil continually, when the Sethite line had largely collapsed into the culture of the world and intermarried with Cain's line, Noah still walked with God. And this is still one of the most important statements in all of Genesis. It is possible to walk with God when the world around you is not walking with God. It has always been possible because we read that Enoch did it and Noah did it, and the call has not changed. And so here's a question that careful readers of the text have always asked. Did Noah find grace because he was righteous, or was he righteous because he found grace? And this is not a trivial question. The order in the text is verse 8, Noah found grace. In verse 9, Noah was righteous, blameless, and walked with God. And so, according to the verse, grace comes first. Righteousness is described after. This is the consistent pattern of the entire Bible. Grace is always the foundation. Righteousness is always the fruit. God did not survey the pre-flood world looking for a righteous person that he could save. Now we see that later in some text. But he extended grace to Noah, and Noah's righteousness was the evidence that the grace uh of the grace that he had taken hold of. Well, the rest of that verse that I mentioned earlier, Ephesians chapter 2, starting in verse 8 through 10, really references Genesis. It says, For by grace you have been saved through faith, and it's not of your own doing, it is the gift of God, not the result of works, so that no one can boast. For we as it are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works. So grace first, and then works come after we receive Jesus, after we receive grace, walking with God, resulting in righteousness and blamelessness. Now, we never see the reverse of that. Now many people. Have pointed to Genesis chapter 6, verse 8, as one of the clearest Old Testament expressions of the doctrine of grace by grace alone. By grace alone was not a New Testament invention, it was the operating principle from the very beginning. Now, we've talked about this a lot when we read certain words. When you get to the record of generations, it's the new starting of a new idea. So verse 9 opens a new record. And the record here are the generations of Noah. And it says, immediately after this, we're introducing Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. And the text gives the final devastating description of the world that they were born into. It says, now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God, and the earth was filled with violence. The two words dominate the summary that we're given. First, the word corrupt. The Hebrew word there means to destroy, to ruin, to uh corrupt beyond repair. It was a word that was often used for the spoiling of food or the rotting of a vessel or the moral destruction of a person. The earth had been so thoroughly ruined that the word used as the same word for the uh for the word destruction itself. That's important. This is what's going on in the world at the time. And the next word is violence. The Hebrew word is one of the strongest words in the Hebrew language for violent wrongdoing, and it includes physical violence, bloodshed, murder, assault, social violence, oppression, injustice, exploitation, moral violence, the violation of every boundary that God has established. Now, this word appears throughout the Old Testament prophets, particularly in the passages condemning the oppression of the poor, the crushing of the vulnerable, and the perversion of justice. In Genesis chapter 6, we see that the earth is filled with it, not scattered here and there, not occasional, but filled with it. And the phrase in the sight of God is doing really important work here. That means the pre-flood world had clearly built impressive things. Again, you go back to what we read in chapter four. Cain's line of developed cities and music and metalwork and agriculture, powerful men, men of renown, populated the earth. And from a human perspective, this may have looked like a flourishing civilization, culture, achievement, and progress. But in the sight of God, it was corrupt. And this is one of the most important distinctions in all of Genesis. What looks like civilization from the outside can be corruption in the eyes of God. Power without justice becomes violence. Achievement without righteousness becomes vanity. Culture without God is what verse 11 describes. God looked on the earth, he saw what humanity had made, and it was corrupt. The phrase there echoes Genesis chapter 1. God looked on the earth and he saw that it was good. Now God looked on the earth and he saw that it was corrupt. This contrast is intentional and it's devastating. What God declared very good in chapter 1, humanity is made corrupt by chapter 6. Then we get to the final phrase of verse 12, which is precise and important. When it says this, all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth. All flesh, not most, but all, and they corrupted their way. The word way here is one of the great words of the Old Testament. It refers to the path a person walks, their direction, their manner of life, their moral trajectory. God had made a way, laid it out in creation, written it on the conscience of men, whispered it through the Holy Spirit, and all flesh had corrupted that way. This is just not an external behavior. It is the corruption of the inner compass. The very capacity to find the right way had been destroyed, which is exactly why the flood cannot be described as excessive. When the way itself is corrupted, when the compass no longer points north, there is no path back without outside intervention. There must be a rescue, and God is about to intervene. So let's consider what this passage says to us today. This is the question that skeptics most often raise about the flood. How can a good God drown the entire world? Is that not the act of a monster? And it's a serious question that I believe deserves a serious answer. And I'll answer it like this. First, Genesis chapter 6, verse 5 gives us the diagnosis. This is not a world of mostly good people with a few bad eggs. This is not a culture with some people who made poor choices along the way. This is a civilization where every intent of every heart was only evil continually. Second, God gave 120 years of warning. Peter tells us that Noah was a preacher of righteousness in 2 Peter 2, verse 5. So for 120 years, while the ark was being built, Noah warned. No one listened. The third thing is this the flood preserved the seed of redemption. Without Noah, without the preservation of one righteous family, the promise of Genesis chapter 3, verse 15 would have had no human lineage to run through. And so the flood was not the end of God's plan. The flood was God's protection of his plan. The fourth thing is this there is the grief of God. This is not the action of a cold, calculating deity pulling the lever of destruction. This is a God who grieved, who is pained, who takes no pleasure in what he must do. Ezekiel chapter 33, verse 11 says this As I live, declares the Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that the wicked turn from his way and live. The God of Genesis 6 is not delighting in this destruction. He is grieving over it, while being unwilling to allow total corruption to continue unchecked forever. Chesterson once wrote, The wrath of God is the love of God face with what destroys what he loves. And so Genesis chapter 6, verse 6, and Genesis chapter 6, verse 7 are the same sentence. The grief and the judgment are not opposites. They are the same response from a God who loves too deeply to be indifferent. Now, our culture flatly rejects the idea that human beings are fundamentally broken. The secular narrative says people are basically good. It says, given the right environment, the right education, and the right systems put in place, humanity will flourish. But Genesis chapter 6, verse 5 refuses that narrative. And history refuses it too. The modern times, we have the most educated, technologically advanced people in human history. And humans have produced over the last couple of hundred years the Holocaust, the killing fields, Hiroshima, and more. Not because those societies lacked intelligence or culture, but because the formative impulse of the human heart without God, without restraint, always tends toward destruction. Jeremiah chapter 17, verse 9 says, The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick. Who can understand it? Genesis chapter 6, verse 5 is the most honest sentence about human nature ever written. And the gospel is the only answer to it. It's not better systems, it's not more education, it's not more programs, it's not even a new heart. It's what God does inside of you, changing everything about you from the inside, changing your compass. Ezekiel chapter 36, verse 26 says, I will give you a new heart. Remember, that means total self, not just heart, your total self, and put on a new spirit within you, and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And so the flood cleaned the earth, but it could not clean the heart, the total self, the total man. Only the gospel can do that. And the early church fathers consistently saw Noah as a type of Christ, a figure who foreshadows and points forward to Jesus. And the parallels are remarkable. In John chapter 1, verse 14, uh, we read that that Christ is the embodiment of grace itself. And then Noah found grace in the eyes of God. Noah was a righteous and blameless man in a corrupt world. And in Hebrews chapter 4, verse 15, Christ was the only true righteous and blameless human being to ever walk the earth. Noah walked with God. We read in the new in the New Testament in John chapter 5, verse 19, that Christ did nothing of his own initiative, but only what the Father showed him to do. Noah was the means by which God preserved humanity through judgment. Christ is the means by which God saves humanity from judgment. Eight souls were saved through the water. 1 Peter 3, verse 20 really has the idea of the prefiguring baptism and salvation. Irenaeus in the second century wrote that Noah's Ark was a type of the church, the place of safety in the midst of judgment, where those who entered found salvation from the waters of destruction. And Christ is the greater Noah, the one through whom not ate, but countless millions are brought safely through the judgment they deserve. Think about it. You and I are here because God preserved Noah. That also means we're all brothers and sisters, by the way. Tertullian in the late second century connected the waters of the flood directly to the waters of baptism. He wrote that just as the Spirit of God moved over the waters in Genesis chapter 1, and just as the flood waters bore Noah's ark to safety, so the waters of baptism, overshadowed by the Spirit, carry the believer through judgment into a new life. And so you have the flood and the ark, judgment and salvation, Noah finding grace, and then the grace that would one day be made flesh in Bethlehem. Now, I want to close the New Testament section of this lesson with something that I think is one of the most profound connections in all of Scripture. In Genesis chapter 6, verse 6 says, God was grieved in his heart. Again, that word grieved in Hebrew means to be wounded, pained, or to suffer anguish. Now, turn to your Bibles or mark this down and read it later. But it's Isaiah chapter 53, verse 10, and one of the suffering servant passages. This is what it says, Isaiah 53, 10. But the Lord was pleased to crush him, putting him to grief, he would render himself as a guilt offering. That word grief in Isaiah 53 is the same family of words. The God who was grieved by what humanity has done to itself in Genesis chapter 6 became grieved in a different way on the cross. In Genesis chapter 6, God grieves over humanity's sin and determines to judge it. In Isaiah chapter 53, God grieves over his son bearing humanity's sin and determines to save humanity through him. The grief of Genesis chapter 6 is answered ultimately at the cross, not by the removal of sin, not by the destruction of sinners, but by the bearing of the grief itself by God in the body of his son. The flood was God removing sin by removing sinners. The cross was God removing sin by absorbing it in himself. Genesis chapter 6 is necessary to understand the cross because you cannot understand why the cross was necessary until you understand what every intent of the thought and thoughts and the heart looked like without God. Now, let me wrap this lesson up for today. This has been a little bit longer one than usual. Here's the word I want to leave you with. The pre-flood world was not shocked by the diagnosis of Genesis chapter 6, verse 5. They weren't sitting around saying, you know, we know something is terribly wrong with us. We read that they were eating and drinking and marrying and building cities and singing songs, murdering every evil continually. They looked fine from the outside to themselves, but every intent of their hearts was only evil. And the most dangerous spiritual condition is not obvious depravity. The most dangerous spiritual position for you and I is a comfortable, culturally successful, self-satisfied corruption that doesn't even know it's corrupt. And the only answer in Genesis chapter six and in every generation since is what Noah had: grace that was found, not earned, received, not achieved, walking with God in a world that was not of God, that didn't recognize God. Now, our next lesson will be our final lesson in chapter six. And there we're gonna see that God speaks to build an ark. And Noah does the most extraordinary thing of any human being in the pre-flood world that could possibly be done. He obeyed. And thus Noah did according to all that God had commanded him. Now again, I hope that you've enjoyed this lesson. If you enjoy these lessons, please be sure to share them with your friends, to follow the show either on Facebook or YouTube. I put some little clips on Instagram and TikTok and things like that. If you're on YouTube, please hit that subscribe button. 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