8
¶ But Noah found grace in the eyes of
the LORD. 9 These are the generations of
Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with
God. 10 And Noah begat three sons, Shem,
Ham, and Japheth.
11 ¶
The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with
violence. 12 And God looked upon the
earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon
the earth.
One person, among all of those untold thousands or
even millions, found grace, favor, in the eyes of the God. That was Noah. He
would believe and he would obey so God chose him for the task at hand. Noah,
apparently from reading verse 9, did not have any of the taint of the fallen sons of God in his lineage, as he was perfect in his generations. This would
not necessarily be true of his wife, whomever she was, so genetic corruption
would come through his sons; Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
The earth is corrupt and filled with violence and this
corruption affected all created life. We can only imagine what the offspring of
the fallen sons of God and human
women looked like and, based on myths and stories, we can perhaps assume that this
corruption didn’t end with giant men, great heroes of myth. Mythologies also
contain hybrid animals called “chimera” and human-animal hybrids that may have,
and this is pure speculation, originated in this corruption. We are only now
starting to come to the point where knowledge has increased allowing us to
consider forming these creatures in our own scientific laboratories.
This also may be the reason why there is in a few
verses, long before the Law given to Moses was put in force listing clean and
unclean animals, a distinction between clean and unclean animals. The Bible
doesn’t give much detail here, perhaps because we are not to focus on this, but
it is interesting to speculate when one considers the talk in the scientific
community about what man is able and will be able to accomplish. We are living
in a world of men that parallels quite often the pre-Flood world of Noah.
A capacity for violence, even extreme violence, is one
of the primary characteristics of mankind. In the last 4,000 years there have
been very, very few without war. But in the last century, from the time that
World War One, the Great War, began in 1914 and until Germany paid the last of
its forced reparations in 2010 from that war mankind has slaughtered a 100
million of his own kind and made homeless refugees of tens of million more. We
have the technological capacity to wipe out civilization as we know it. Would
not God’s judgment then on this world as laid out in Revelation be perfectly
justified considering how much we are like the pre-Flood world?
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