6:6
¶ And it repented the LORD that he had
made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. 7 And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I
have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping
thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.
What
does the idiomatic expression, it
repented the Lord, mean?
Judges
2:18 And when the LORD raised them up
judges, then the LORD was with the judge, and delivered them out of the hand of
their enemies all the days of the judge: for it repented the LORD because of their groanings by reason of them
that oppressed them and vexed them.
Something
is presented to God that, by His very nature, He will not ignore, even though
He knew, by virtue of His omniscience, that it would happen. The wickedness of
mankind grieved God at His heart and
demanded a certain path which He had prepared in His foreknowledge. Because the
expression, it repented the Lord, like
most idiomatic expressions, has a meaning that goes beyond simply the
definitions of the individual words strung together it requires us to use our
reasoning ability, something we do not like to do when someone is willing to
spoonfeed us their own careless reading.
By
the context the creation of mankind repented
the Lord because it grieved Him at
His heart and His purpose is to erase the life He created, not just man,
because it repented Him.
The
word repent clearly in other contexts
in the Bible means to turn from something or to change one’s mind about
something. Here, as part of this expression it means more than that. By viewing
this context we see that the Lord was grieved by mankind’s wickedness as the
definition of how the Lord was repented by something. The Lord did not repent or change His mind or turn from
something He planned. Something repented Him
with the Lord being the object of the phrase and not the subject, as mankind’s
wickedness caused Him to grieve. We all understand this. We have known
something sickening was coming in our minds but still were sickened by it when
it came to pass and we required ourselves to go to the next action. I know my
child is going to fall down but he must learn. Still, it anguishes me when it
happens. I know I must grow old and weak, if I am to live, but it is not an
easy thing to experience. Man has disappointed God, but He knew He would. It
doesn’t make the experience any more comfortable. From before the foundation of
the world God knew He would come to live in a body and be tortured and murdered
on the cross at Calvary but that foreknowledge didn’t make it any more
pleasant.
Ephesians
1:4 According as he hath chosen us in
him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without
blame before him in love:
Luke
22:44 And being in an agony he prayed
more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down
to the ground.
We
must understand that God is not a disinterested bystander to our affairs. He
dearly loves His creation and loved all mankind, even the most wicked, at the
cross of Calvary. What we do affects Him profoundly. If it were not so He would
not have let us so much as touch Him.
Man’s
wickedness disgusted God and, in His disgust and grief, man and the animal
life, which God had created and which mankind’s sin had corrupted, must be
eliminated. The next word, though, one of the most important words in the
Bible, has great implications for God coming to earth in the form of a man to
deliver us from eternal loss and suffering. That word that follows is But……
6:8 ¶
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.
6:11
¶ 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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