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Judgement is Coming, But Grace Got Here First

Genesis 6:1-8

Starting Over

Have you ever started something and then had to start over because something was messed up?  After Christmas, we bought this little basketball goal for the kids.  Assembling it took a lot longer than expected.  When I thought I was almost done, I raised the goal up only to realize that I’d put the board on backwards, so that the goal was facing the wrong direction.  I felt like a huge balloon deflating.  It’d taken so long and so much effort to get that far, so when I realized that I’d put it on wrong I wanted to throw it all away and go inside.

Whether it’s a research project, an email, a flower bed, an old car or an old computer, sometimes things get so bad that we need to start over.

Judging and Saving the World

In our text this morning, Genesis 6:1-8, we’re going to see that the good world that God created became so bad that he decided to start over.  These verses tell us why God decided to flood the earth.  God decided to destroy the world because the world was self-destructing.

But, amazingly, when God saw how bad things were, he made two decisions.  He decided to judge the world and save the world.  He decided to destroy the world and deliver the world.

Into this Dark World, Grace Has Come

Any optimism created by Lamech’s prophecy in 5:29 is dashed by chapter 6.  Instead of humanity being comforted by Noah, humanity is going to need to be saved by Noah.

The first seven verses of Genesis 6 tell us how bad things had become and what God decides to do about it.  Then verse 8 tells us that God was nonetheless initiating a plan to save the world.

The main point of this passage is that God responds to a world drowning in sin with judgment and grace.  Noah’s world was darkening, so judgment was decreed.  Our world is darkening, and judgment has been decreed (2 Pet. 3:5-7).  But into this dark world, grace has come.

More People Means More Sin

Verse 1 says that “mankind began to multiply on the face of the land.”  It’s not a coincidence that the next paragraph begins in verse 5 by saying that wickedness is spreading across the earth.  The multiplication of people results in the multiplication of evil.  Moses is pointing out that sin increased as mankind increased.

We see this today, as cities tend to be places where sin flourishes.  Of course, all people everywhere are sinners.  But in cities, there are larger numbers of people concentrated in a smaller area.  Because cities have more people, cities will inevitably have a greater concentration of sin and temptation.

For those who follow Jesus and live in cities like ours, this means that joining and participating in the life of a local church is all the more important.  The only way to survive in an ocean of corruption is to join other believers on an island of salt and light.  We call these islands “local churches.”  The question isn’t, “Do you go to church?,” but rather, “Are you vitally connected to a church?”  The church is a family, not an event, a worshipping community, not a content provider.

Living in cities can be a terrible temptation but also a wonderful opportunity.  There may be more Christians to fellowship with and more unbelievers to reach with the gospel.  May God give us wisdom and grace to live faithfully in the sea of people that is the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex.

Who Are the “Sons of God”?

In verse 2, we come to one of the most perplexing questions in the Bible.  Who are these “sons of God” who were marrying the “daughters of men”?  There are three main options.  They could be renowned kings and rulers.  They could be fallen angels that took a physical form and engaged in sexual activity with women.  Or they could be the descendants of Seth, or men from the godly line of Seth who intermarried with women from the ungodly line of Cain.

Either of the last two options seem best to me, but the option I lean toward is that the “sons of God” are the “godly sons” of Seth, the descendants of the line of promise who were marrying women from the cursed line of Cain.

The reasons why I lean this way are several.  It’s true that the phrase “sons of God” refers to angels elsewhere in the Old Testament (Job 1:6, 2:1, 38:7; Ps. 29:1; Dan. 3:25) , but it can also refer to human beings (Mt. 5:9; Lk. 20:36; Rom. 8:14, 19; Gal. 3:26).  Jesus seems to suggest that angels don’t have the ability to procreate (Mk. 12:25).  The phrase “they took as their wives” is a Hebrew idiom for legal marriage and doesn’t convey any sense of an unnatural relationship.  The text says that the “sons of God” found the “daughters of men…attractive,” implying a sexual attraction, which seems unlikely for angels.  God’s judgment is toward men, not angels (vv. 3, 6-7).  And the Nephilim in verse 4 aren’t the offspring of this union, as some have suggested.

I think these “godly sons” are the descendants of Seth.  Some in Seth’s line have already been portrayed as “godly men” (Enoch in 5:22, Lamech in 5:29, and those who called on the name of the Lord in 4:26).  Genesis 4 and 5 have set the stage for this interpretation.  Those two chapters contrast the two lines of descent, so that Genesis 6:1-8 is the conclusion of the story begun in chapters 4 and 5.  The story ends with the two lines intermarrying, resulting in an ever-increasing community of wickedness.

Christians Should Not Marry Non-Christians

Notice that Moses doesn’t explain who these guys are – he assumes his readers already know.  The point he’s making is that, though this wasn’t the only sin in the ancient world, it was a leading cause of the corruption that filled the earth.  Whether the “sons of God” are Sethites or demonic-human creatures, the point is that mankind is beyond self-help.

If the interpretation I lean to is correct, it says something about how damaging it is when the people of God marry the enemies of God.  Christians should not marry non-Christians.  2 Corinthians 6:14-15, “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.  For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness?  Or what fellowship has light with darkness?  What accord has Christ with (Satan)?  Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever?”

If you don’t share the most important thing together, then it’ll be hard to share anything else.  When you’re considering marrying someone, you need to become a fruit inspector.  You’re not looking for whether they go to church, but if they love the church, not whether they know about Jesus, but if they love Jesus, not whether they know some Bible, but if they’re hungry for the Bible, not if they know sin is bad, but if they want to kill it.

Folding other trusted friends into this process of discernment is crucial because we don’t see things objectively.  There’s safety in many counselors (Prov. 11:14).  This is the second most important decision you’ll make in your life.  Don’t make it alone.

God Won’t Stand By and Do Nothing

God’s reaction to the sons of God marrying the daughters of men starts to unfold in verse 3.

After the intermarriage of the sons of God with the daughters of men, God isn’t going to allow this state of affairs prevail.  So he limited man’s days to 120 years.

Even with this, we see mercy from God: man will have abundant time to repent.  Peter says, “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9).  But there is a line in the sand with God, he won’t abide with sinners who don’t repent forever.  Judgment will come for all who persist in their rebellion.

Who Were the Nephilim?

Verse 4 also presents us with an interpretive difficulty.  Who were the Nephilim?  Again, Moses doesn’t tell us because he assumes his original readers already knew.  And he doesn’t spend hardly any time on them either.  This verse is like a footnote supplying us with extra information that’s not pertinent to the main point of the narrative.

Moses is demythologizing these guys.  The existence of superhuman, or divine-human, beings on the earth was a widely held belief, so Moses refers to them but makes it clear that they’re not the offspring of angels and women.  They were already in the earth before them and after them.  They were probably giants who were on the earth before the flood and after it (see Num. 13:33).

Total Depravity

Verse 5 is one of the clearest statements in the Bible about human nature.  If the Bible were a man-made document, statements like this wouldn’t be in it because we prefer to cover up, not expose, our wickedness.

This verse supports the conclusion that the “sons of God” were in fact the Sethites.  It’s the “wickedness of man” that the Lord saw.  This wickedness included, but wasn’t limited to, the actions of the Sethites with the “daughters of man.”  Mankind’s moral deterioration had begun well before the intermarriage of the “sons of God” and the “daughters of men.”  In the garden, when Adam and Eve followed the serpent, a hard-wired propensity for evil was born in the human heart.

This verse tells us that the heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart.  As Jeremiah said, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (17:9) According to the Bible, mankind is devolving, not evolving.  There’s no day off for the evil human heart, “only evil continually.”  We’re masterminds of more and more sin.  This corruption in our hearts is like pouring cyanide into a glass of water.  It permeates everything.

This is total depravity.  Yes, we’re made in God’s image, but we’re also fallen in sin.  And our problem can’t be solved with politics or money or religion or good behavior.  Our problem is so much bigger than politics and bad behaviors.  We’re dying and need heart surgery.

God’s grace only makes sense in this context.  If we’re not wicked and evil, then what’s so amazing about grace?  Moses tells us about the human condition to magnify the grace of God, a grace that even Noah needs.  This verse connects to 8:21.  After the flood, God still says that the human heart evil.  Noah isn’t absolved from the sinfulness of humanity.  He needs what everyone else needs.

Our Sin Hurts God

Next we see what man’s sin did to God (v. 6).  The word for “grief” is the same Hebrew word used in 3:16 for the woman’s “pain” in childbearing and in 3:17 for the man’s “pain” in working the ground.  The sin of man pained God.

Yes, our sin hurts ourselves and others.  But when was the last time you thought about how God feels about your sin?

God Feels Emotions

This text inevitably brings up two questions: does God grieve like us, and does God change his mind like us?  Does God have emotions and does God change?  The short answer is, “Yes he has emotions and no he doesn’t change.”  God is both impassible and impassioned.

Scripture portrays God as able to feel emotions like joy (Zeph. 3:17), disgust (Lev. 20:23), jealousy (Ex. 20:5; Dt. 5:9), anger (Deut. 9:8), grief (Gen. 6:6; Eph. 4:30), and compassion (Mt. 9:36).  We don’t force God to feel one way or the other.  We can’t manipulate his emotions or wring something out of him that he doesn’t want to give.  But God is nonetheless responsive to his creatures.[1]

For more on how this was displayed in the life of Jesus, see Dane Ortlund’s Gentle and Lowly, especially the chapter on “The Emotional Life of Christ.”  Ortlund reminds us that Jesus was perfectly human and that emotions are part of what it means to be human and not a result of the fall.  Sin has tainted our emotions, but not Jesus’s.

Brothers and sisters, if you want to know what Jesus feels about you, just read about how he interacts with sinners in the Gospels and remember that he hasn’t changed.

God Does Not Change

This leads us to the second question, “Does God change his mind?”  Numbers 23:19, “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind.” In 1 Samuel 15, it says that the Lord regretted making Saul king (vv. 11, 35), but that he does regret like a man (v. 29).

God regrets, but not the way we do.  We say, “If I had that to do over again, I’d do it differently.”  That’s not how the Lord regrets.  He doesn’t wish he’d done anything differently.  But that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t grieve.  He doesn’t change like man, but he’s not a block of wood, or a stone wall who doesn’t engage and interact with people.  Yes, he’s eternal, outside of time, and yes he interacts with people in an authentic way.

The unchangeableness of God is the ground for our salvation.  Malachi 3:6 says, “For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.”  If God can and does change, we should worry that he may one day change his affections for us.

God does not change and God does feel emotions.  He’s not a stoic sovereign or a mechanical mover, moving chess pieces around in heaven.  He’s not immune to the sin and suffering of the world.  Remember what Jesus did when he approached Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and when his friend Lazarus died?  He wept (Lk. 19:41; Jn. 11:35).

We have to hold together in tension that God is immutable, that he never changes, and that he regretted.  We’re up against mystery here.  Our God transcends us.  We can’t get all our logic around him.  In Scripture, he accommodates himself to our finite capacities.

Judgement is Coming

Verse 7 tells us what God decides to do in light of the corruption on the earth.  He doesn’t say he’ll flood the earth until verse 17.  But this verse hints that the coming judgment will be like an uncreation.  Everything God made was good but now man is diseased with wickedness, so God decides to wipe the slate clean by destroying all of mankind as well as the animals.

Grace is Also Coming

Verse 7 says that judgement is coming on the earth, but verse 8 says that grace gets there first.  “Favor” can be translated as “grace.”  We may read on in verse 9 and suppose that Noah was favored by God because he was an awesome guy.  But remember that his heart is evil like everyone else’s.

The reason he was a righteous man who walked with God is because he was the object of God’s grace.  Grace is the only reason Noah gets on this boat.  The Lord sovereignly chooses to give him grace.  Noah is a trophy of God’s grace, a diamond of grace in a coal mine of corruption.  The Lord hadn’t given up on the human race; there was one who still “found favor” in his eyes.

A New and Better Noah

In these verses, we’ve seen that the world became so bad that God decided to start over.  When God saw how bad things were, he made two decisions: he decided to judge the world and to save the world.

He would judge the world through a flood.  He would save the world through a man.  God set his favor upon a righteous man who would save the world through a wooden vessel.

This story prepares us to meet another righteous man later in the Bible, a man who also passed through the waters of judgment and death on a wooden vessel only to emerge on the other side alive and victorious.  God appointed this man, this new and better Noah, to save his people and to remake the world.

Noah and the Resurrection

Does Genesis 6:1-8 teach us anything about the resurrection of Jesus?  Yes, it shows us that, though evil appears to be winning in the world, it will not have the last word.  In Noah’s day, the world was so bad that it seemed that all was lost.  But evil wouldn’t win the day.  God raised up a servant who would save his people.

In our day, it often appears that evil is winning.  But the resurrection of Jesus assures us that evil will not have the last word.  Jesus died and rose in order to crush Satan, save his people, and remake the world.  His resurrection initiated a movement that will culminate in the banishing of all evil from the world.

This is good news for sinners and sufferers!  The result of a world filled with Genesis 6:5 people is that we’ve all done evil things and had evil things done against us.  Progressives tend to flatten out everything into the woundedness category, while fundamentalists tend to flatten everything into the sinfulness category.  But the Bible says that our issues are a combination of sins and wounds and weaknesses.

We’re all villains and victims.  We’ve done evil and had evil done to us.  Our need is repentance and healing.  And the good news is that Jesus’ resurrection means that both are possible!  If Jesus overcame death, then he can help us repent.  If Jesus overcame death, then he can heal us.  If he’s still dead, our faith is empty and we’re still in our sins and we’re stuck with our pain.

But if he’s alive, if he made it through the flood of death, then he’s on the loose looking for and gathering together his lost and sinful and hurting people.  By his Spirit and through his word, he’s saving sinners and binding up the broken hearted.

Jesus’ resurrection means that evil will not win.  Weary friends, Jesus is alive and is coming soon.  Run to him today, confess your sin, be honest about where you’re at, receive his grace, trust his word, turn away from your sins and you also will come through the flood of death and arrive on the golden shores of a new world.

Judgement is coming, but grace got here first and it’s available for all who know they need it.

[1]Rob Lister, God is Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion (Wheaton: Crossway, 2013), 281.