Table of Contents
Of the many attributes of God, one that is often overlooked is His patience and long-suffering. God doesn’t act rashly or hastily. When God acts, it is on His timeline and then only when the time is right. The human world is a world of much suffering and pain due to the evil of sin corrupting the soul. Although always an affront to a holy God, for the time being, this horrible malady is tolerated for its ability to draw us toward the God who saves, restores and redeems. But, there will be a time, as has been proven in the past, when God says, “Enough is Enough!”
Much time has passed since Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the wonderful and perfect Garden of Eden. They were evicted from that blessed homeland and sent into the world to multiply and replenish it with what has become the largest family imaginable: the Family of Adam. The name “Adam” literally means “Man” and is also related to the term “ground”, “dust” or “earth”.
Genesis chapter 3 explains why this family has issues. You’ll recall that the fall brought more consequences than just a change in scenery. The fall also welcomed sin and death into the very soul of man, tempting and torturing every human with selfish lusts and base desires. For a deeper study into the corruption of our souls, read the chapter “What Went Wrong?”
Genesis chapter 4 recounts Cain’s murder of his brother Abel and the additional curse Cain received to live a separate, nomadic life as a fugitive. To take the next step in understanding the frightening slavery that Satan can exert upon a sin-conquered soul, read the chapter “Listen to God’s Advice.”
God could have justly required Cain’s blood as payment for the spilled blood of his brother Abel, but instead, in mercy, God forced Cain to live separate from the relatively unspoiled line of Adam’s other children. In Cain’s separation, he founded a city where he could rule and be provided for by the family he sired. Apparently, Cain’s genetic makeup yielded descendants that were larger, stronger and more war-like in their nature and technology than the clan of Adam who descended from Seth.
As an example of the character of the Cain’s clan, the great, great, great, great grandson of Cain was Lamech. The Bible tells us in Genesis 4:23-24 that Lamech was a violent murderer like Cain, who boasted to his two wives in a poem about killing a young man who struck him. Lamech can be heard mocking God, challenging Him to apply the Curse of Cain sevenfold if He dares.
Genesis 5 describes key descendants of Adam and Eve through their son Seth. People are living to the incredible age of almost 1000 years. Adam and Eve were able to spend time visiting their descendants born eight generations after their creation. Chapter 5 goes into great detail about how old the father was when a son was sired and how old they were when they died. The clan of Cain isn’t so well documented.
As an example of the character of the clan of Adam, Adam’s great, great, great, great, great grandson was Enoch (like Cain’s first son) and his character was one of nearness to God as demonstrated by the testimony of Genesis 5:24:
24 Enoch walked with God; and he was not, for God took him.
Genesis 5:24
Thus the clan of Adam, made peaceful by the generations of training from godly fathers raising faithful sons to live in the corrupt world respecting the God of Mercy, is contrasted against the clan of Cain who are warlike, brutal, giants, taking multiple wives and boasting of their wicked exploits.
Genesis chapter 6 is a turning point in the history of man. If there ever was a wild, wild, wild West, it would have been those early days of creation. Mankind’s evil bent was constrained only by the knowledge of God passed down through the Creation Story, the mercy God extended after Adam and Eve’s Fall, the advice from God regarding sin’s evil consequences and the restrained wrath of God leveled against Cain, the first murderer and minion of Satan.
By the time we reach Genesis chapter 6, approximately 1500 years have transpired. Eden’s perfection, purity and peace have long been forgotten and so also have all the tools God gave humanity to constrain sin.
God’s Reset
Let’s walk briefly through the first few verses of chapter 6 and see just how bad things were getting “out West”.
Verses 1 & 2 — The Intermingling of the Line of Cain and Seth
1 Now when men began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they took as wives whomever they chose.
Genesis 6:1-2
Debates have raged for centuries regarding what the “sons of God” could mean. Essentially the options are:
- “Sons of God” are beings not born of a woman, but are demons -or-
- “Sons of God” are just human beings of spectacular size and strength (and perhaps demonically controlled)
Allow me to be brief about this question for now and just note that the language appears to suggest that because of something about their nature, these sons of God faced no resistance when they selected female partners. The passage from Chapter 4 referenced above even indicates they may have been taking more than just one wife for themselves as well– clearly a behavior that went against God’s intentions. Their selections were based on outward appearances of “beauty”– a very common trait of corrupted souls. Personally, I feel if there had been another humanoid form of life on earth with a demonic character, I’m pretty sure the Bible would have been more explicit about it. In the very least, these humans, able to sire offspring with women, could be people so controlled by sin that they have become possessed of demons and have lost all human will.
Also, be aware that “daughters of men” could just as easily have been translated “daughters of Adam”.
I personally prefer the idea that these “Sons of God” were just powerful, ruthless men, bred for their size and strength who followed in the brutish character of their ancestor Cain. God separated Cain’s clan from Seth’s clan, but the earth’s population has been increasing and it is likely much harder now to stay separated.
Verse 3 — God Establishes a “Deadline”
3 So the LORD said, “My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days shall be 120 years.”
Genesis 6:3
The LORD has been monitoring the situation on earth. As the moral decay grew more and more dire, God reached a threshold of patience. Thus He informs us of His next steps. Some have suggested that God is tired of man living so long, or perhaps the corruption of their lives had reached this stage because of man’s long lifespan. If you skip ahead and look at longevity before and after the flood of Noah, indeed men don’t live nearly as long in the future, so this suggestion has some merit. A shorter lifespan may indeed be an additional force to constrain the overflow of sin in human society. However, the New Testament author Peter points out that it took 120 years for Noah to build the ark, so it is also likely that God set a divine timer ticking down the years until a total destruction will come upon the earth as a judgment against the out-of-control lives of men.
This verse also fills in yet another gap in our understanding of God’s plan for redemption. God’s Spirit is contending with man. God wants instead to love man and to do this he must offer a clear path for man to regain immortality. As an illustration to a new generation of man, this total, world-wide flood will be an example of the dire consequences of losing control. When sin becomes rampant over the earth and perversions exploit the innocent, this cataclysm will be a lesson to remain restrained by whatever means possible. For those aware of the battle against sin, this lesson also contains a lifeboat!
Verse 4 — Further Comments on Clan Intermarriage
4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and afterward as well, when the sons of God had relations with the daughters of men. And they bore them children who became the mighty men of old, men of renown.
Genesis 6:4
Ouch! Another tricky verse. Translators struggle with the option to either leave the Hebrew word “Nephilim” untranslated or substitute a best-case meaning. Other rare, Hebrew Old Testament contexts don’t help in clarifying this term. Had they translated this Hebrew word, they would have substituted a term like “giants”. When the Greek language became the language of most of the civilized world through Alexander the Great, Hebrew scholars translated their Hebrew manuscripts into Greek, using the Greek word “giants” to translate “Nephilim” in this and other passages.
Are these “Nephilim” or “Giants” again a reference to supernatural beings? Or is this merely another reference to men bred for their size and strength? Commentators through the ages have argued on both sides of this question. Whatever the case, they seemed to be alive both before and after the flood. Were they the very same race or breed before and after the flood? Hard to say, but I doubt it. It may be that the same general term was applied to men of extreme size and strength. Goliath, described in 1 Samuel 17, was a giant by all comparisons of normal human size but was clearly not a supernatural being. Likewise, Anak was also described as one of the Nephilim by the spies sent into Canaan, but perhaps this was a false report meant to frighten the Israelite into disobeying God.
Even today, a hormonal disorder, aptly called “gigantism” after the Greek word γίγας, gígas, “giant” or “giantism”, sometimes causes people to grow to very large sizes. Apparently some areas of the ancient word were more prone than others to this malady where clans or families of giants were common.
My “middle of the road” opinion doesn’t count for much, but I prefer the interpretation where these Nephilim or “sons of God (or Gods)” were “Giants”, bred for strength and warfare, fearsome in battle and the product of a moral character that lived in direct opposition to the character of God, their Creator and Judge. One commentator pointed out that the lineage of Cain, separated from the lineage of Seth, could perhaps explain this distinction between the sons of God and the sons of Adam. Whereas the culture and society of Cain was brutish, war-minded and violently ambitious, the culture and society of Seth was perhaps more graceful and genteel, producing women of beauty and charm. At this point in history, the descendants of Cain had absorbed the descendants of Seth, corrupting the better graces of the line of Seth to the point where the world was about to be overrun with humans that acted more in accord with beasts than the character of God.
Thus we come to that brink where man is so steeped in sin, so completely out of control, so corrupted past the point of reformation or revival that redemption is impossible. God knew this day was coming. It was part of His plan, but as we’ll see it wasn’t an easy judgment to carry out.
Verse 5 — God Sees Man’s Utter Lostness
5 Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great upon the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was altogether evil all the time.
Genesis 6:5
Verse 5 tells us that man’s wickedness was open and visible to God. Man’s wickedness was great the Bible says. This is “great” in the sense of “countless”, “abundant” and ultimately “too many”. Similarly, wickedness in this context is merely another form of evil. In fact the Hebrew word for wickedness is related to the same word for evil God used when describing the banned fruit, growing on the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. The Hebrew word for evil is used all over the Old Testament to describe hundreds of various behaviors all of which are contrary to God’s perfectly Good character. Man was behaving in an evil way and it was too much for God.
Behind that evil or wicked behavior was an intent or inclination to do evil. I like the King James translation where is says “imagination”. The Hebrew word is a picture-word describing the process a potter might use to take unformed clay and create a design from it. Man was designing and forming evil right in his mind, or imagining evil, crafting evil to maximize its effect against God.
God gave men the ability to imagine in order to simulate future consequences. When properly informed with God’s truth, the imagination is a tool for good, but without the science of consequences the imagination is useless. When misinformed, the imagination becomes yet another shackle to lock evil into the soul.
In addition to the evil imaginations formed in man’s mind, the accounting or reckoning that goes on in man’s heart, those deep personal thoughts, was likewise also evil. When God explains that Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him as righteousness, that accounting process is the same process man was using to devise evil. Man’s knowledge and conscience was so twisted and his judgment and attitudes so perverted, nothing was left upstairs to stop evil imaginations from becoming evil behavior.
Verse 5 ends with the words “all the time”, or continually. This is a great translations of the Hebrew picture of “all day”.
As a summary of Verse 5, we might say in the process of monitoring the level of man’s evil, God saw that evil had reached the limit where God knew someday he would need to take action, because man was forming plans for evil in his heart, unbridled by any knowledge or moral restraints, all day long.
Verse 6 — God Shares His Feelings
And the LORD regretted that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.
Genesis 6:6
Verse 6, and the verse that follows, sometimes cause readers a bit of trouble. At face value, these verses appear to describe our perfect God using terms that would typically only be used to describe the emotions of an imperfect man. But that is just the point. God clearly experiences feelings, moral reactions to the evil situations set in motion when creation was just a design in God’s heart.
In order to express Himself to us, God shares with us his feelings so we can understand the depth of anguish He was suffering when the limit of evil was reached. We need God’s feelings described to us in human terms. Thus we hear God’s aching heart as he expresses “regret” or “sorrow” that He made man. The action He was forced to take to right the wrong that Adam and Eve released into the world grieved His heart.
Remember Genesis chapter 1 ends with “God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good.“
In Chapter 2 we learn that there was a planned vulnerability in God’s perfect creation — man could chose to disobey God, eat from the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil and bring suffering and death upon God’s perfection.
And of course in Chapter 3, as God had also accounted for in His plan, Adam and Eve fell. Obviously God didn’t make Adam and Eve sin, but God planned the history of mankind knowing in advance that they would. So the rise of evil, having corrupted His most loved and cherished creation, is a very painful and disappointing experience that caused God real suffering. Elsewhere we’ll focus on how this also was Satan’s plan as well: in a battle against God, inflicting pain and suffering toward God satisfies Satan.
Imagine, knowing that someday, as a calculated and fore-ordained part of the redemption of mankind, God would have to destroy that mankind, created in His own image, over-flowing with evil, off the face of the earth. This is something that would make you or I dread getting up in the morning. In fact if it were you or I facing this decision, wouldn’t we let that thought cross our minds that perhaps it would have been better to have not created mankind in the first place, just to avoid this day?
Verse 7 — God’s Plan and His Feelings About It
So the LORD said, “I will blot out man, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—every man and beast and crawling creature and bird of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them.”
Genesis 6:7
Verse 7 explains the necessary action God plans to take: “I will blot out man, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—every man and beast and crawling creature and bird of the air.”
God is resigned, reluctantly, to the necessity of destroying evil by killing the beloved people it has infected.
I can’t honestly understand fully why God had to also blot out the animals, but if you skip ahead to chapter 9 where God tweaks the order of civilization with a modified covenant through Noah, you’ll see that animals which were not meant for food prior to the flood, are now approved and perhaps even necessary for food. With this change, animals which once were not afraid of man, are now very afraid of man. Just guessing, but when God brought all the animals into the ark, He brought those animals which were predisposed with this natural fear. Sea creatures that weren’t part of the ark experience also exhibit this fear of man for what that’s worth.
Destroying the world through a global, world-wide flood was necessary on several levels.
- God needed to start mankind and man’s civilization over with new ground rules. We don’t have time for that here, but Genesis 9 describes a new covenant with Noah, especially regarding the evil of murder– murderers are commanded to be put to death. This one new rule would prove effective in constraining corrupted souls that wander out of control.
- The pre-flood world was a world with a warmer climate everywhere, likely far more fertile and able to grow a greater abundance of just about everything. The post-flood world is a far more challenging world, making survival a key focus for all people. When survival is guaranteed, idle time allows the forces of sin to spoil the natural discipline of survival.
- Several times in Scripture, God uses the flood as proof that He means business and has the power to pass judgment on evil with world-wide ramifications. This is a huge deterrent to evil becoming widespread again.
- And not only is the act of destroying evil from the earth a physical reality, it becomes a picture of Jesus Christ– our Ark to save us from a second world-wide destruction of evil that God also dreads, just like the first time. Only the next judgment will come with fire, not a flood.
QUESTION: Satan has filled the academic and scientific community with lies about the worldwide flood. If the flood was really true as the Bible says, and God is serious about sin, then men living lives that insult the character of God should be worried. Through what ways has the world disarmed this powerful motivation to fear a righteous God?
A world-wide flood, like the one accurately described in Genesis 6 and 7, is doubted today– but this doubt should come as no surprise. In order for evil to again flourish, all threats of judgment must be countered with lies. However, it is very hard to hide Noah’s Flood– there is evidence on nearly every square mile of the whole planet of violent floods of water, killing every kind of land and sea animal, a host of land and sea plants, burying them in rapidly deposited layers of sediment and fossilizing their remains for us to observe today.
It is not hard to understand then why God again repeats the anguish he feels using the phrase “I am grieved that I have made them” to conclude verse 7.
Verse 8 — Grace
8 Noah, however, found favor in the eyes of the LORD.
Genesis 6:8
We won’t expound on the rest of chapter 6 and chapter 7 here, but as you might remember, God’s favor rests on Noah, a righteous and blameless man, and a stark contrast to the rest of mankind. God saves Noah and his family, instructing Noah to build a huge boat, large enough to preserve himself and the other members of his family, along with select representatives of the major kinds of animals, for a year above the deadly waters of the flood. Noah’s obedience and tireless labor were both a testimony to the wicked, out of control people of that day and to God’s power to save when one’s faith firmly rests in God.
Wrapping Up
God’s judgment against the unbridled overflow of evil through the flood of Noah was real. Our generation needs to take heed of this lesson of history, recorded for everyone who is unmoved by the wrath of God being stored up against sin and Satan. God will be forced to action once more as the level of evil on the earth someday reaches another deeply regrettable limit.
And just as in the days of Noah, God’s grace and mercy are equally in action today. This time the ark to save men from the coming judgment is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ took all the suffering and wrath that God’s consistent and righteous standard required upon Himself. Satan will be soundly defeated as well when the greatest of all painful blows brings death itself to God. But God’s life is life far beyond death. His Life is not a mortal life, but an eternal life.
Now that all the debts have been paid through Jesus Christ, now that the insult that Adam and Eve leveled against a holy God has been resolved, now that the relationship between a righteous Creator and an unrighteous Creation has been restored, God can unveil the best part of His plan– those who trust and obey Jesus Christ, committing the plan for their life into following Jesus as their guide, will also take part in the new eternal life, given by God’s resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ.
John the Baptist was sent ahead of Jesus to announce the new Ark of Salvation, and the price of a ticket to climb on board, in Matthew chapter 4 verses 7 through 12.
7 But when John saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his place of baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? 8 Produce fruit worthy of repentance. 9 And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. 10 The ax lies ready at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.
11 I baptize you with water for repentance, but after me will come One more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. 12 His winnowing fork is in His hand to clear His threshing floor and to gather His wheat into the barn; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”
Matthew 4:7-12
When pressed for a time when this second judgment would come, Jesus referred His listeners back to this tragic story, saying
36 No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. 37 As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man. 38 For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark. 39 And they were oblivious, until the flood came and swept them all away. So will it be at the coming of the Son of Man.
Matthew 24:36-39