Genesis
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.
Genesis
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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