Genesis 6:6–7

The Spirit of God has chosen to tell us two grounds on which God brought the judgment of the flood on man. First, because of what he had done: "the wickedness of man was great in the earth." Further on we read that this took two forms, corruption and violence. Second, because of what he was: "every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually"; or, as the margin reads, "the purposes and desires of his heart" were such.

This is not God simply in His nature, but the God who concerns Himself with the ways of His creatures... He who loves to credit the least good thought or feeling saw nothing but evil all the day.

Much depends on grasping the meaning of the word "repent." In Scripture it does not usually mean remorse or sorrow, as so many think. It means a change or turnaround in the attitude of the mind... In any sense of regret or remorse about His personal actions, we are assured that God "is not a man that He should repent."

No doubt, as is so typical of these early revelations, grace shapes the words in a childlike way for the heart and conscience of man. The LORD felt deeply what man ought to have felt but did not.

God is infinitely great, and His holy nature is spotless and pure. So His grief must have been infinite. Yet He must have known in advance that this great grief would come to Him through the fall and corruption of mankind. Why then did God make man, and then let him stay on earth after causing Him such untold grief?

At the end of Genesis 2 God called everything, man included, "very good." Once man had been very good in God's eyes. Now he was nothing but grief to look at. The break was complete.

The gifts of God are without change of mind on His part. When it is not a gift or a calling of God, He may repent. So He repented of creation (Gen. 6:6), as we are told; and He destroyed it. That was not a gift; but simply an act, however immense. But in sovereign love He calls poor guilty men to Himself to make them His own. He gives eternal life, for instance, or forgiveness of our sins, or the place of a child. Such gifts are the gifts and calling of God, and they come without any change of mind.

All this delight was changed; God repented that He had made man on the earth. But in the Child of Bethlehem man is recovered and set up again. God delights in this man, and no such change of mind is possible. No other object in all His creation could awaken the same delight.

Verse 6 tells us how all this affected the Lord. Here for the first time Scripture gives God human feelings. Only in this way could we understand such a matter, and there is nothing out of place in it, since God made man in His own image and likeness. But God's thoughts and feelings must be far deeper and far higher than any man knows. How great His grief must have been! All was good at the start. Now all was so detestable that nothing could meet the case but the total destruction of mankind, apart from a few, and of the living creation God had entrusted to man.

The name Jehovah is needed where the point is not nature but relationship — the feelings and the position it brings.

But here we must make a distinction, or we will certainly go badly wrong. Scripture says here that the LORD repented of mankind, whom He had made on the earth. His work is a thing quite different from His purpose. Corruption spread all through it, and He had no duty to keep in existence what existed only to His dishonour. On the other hand, when a prophet cried out against a great city because of its wickedness, and its people repented at the preaching, God repented of the harm He had said He would do to them, and He did not do it… But here we are not told of the slightest effect.

God did repent of creation, in the state it had reached… But God's calling is His purpose. He has sworn in His holiness, and He will not repent.

Genesis 6:7: God says, "I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land." But according to this teaching, He had not created at all what He was going to destroy.

Yet animals, creeping things and birds fall under this awesome destruction too, for man's sin has involved the rest of the earthly creation. People may say that when they sin they have damaged only themselves. But man's sin always affects others too, even creatures that cannot reason.

The creation fell with the first man. But God's word says all its groaning waits for the triumph of the Second man, when the sons of God are revealed. What joy to know it!

How much interest the Lord God takes in the whole state of things in that day! Just as we all feel, His eye affects His heart. And then, just as we all do, He takes counsel with Himself… And after all this, just as we ourselves would do, He settles His mind and tells it to a friend. He passes it to the ear, the heart and the sympathies of another.

His faith accepted God's warning, and that warning moved him to fear. Fear moved him to act.