Scripture
6 The Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him in his heart. 7 The Lord said, “I will destroy man whom I have created from the surface of the ground—man, along with animals, creeping things, and birds of the sky—for I am sorry that I have made them.”
Audio Commentary
Abstract
Genesis 6:6-7 shows the Lord sorry that He had made man, grieved in His heart. The commentary insists the point is not whether God erred in creating us. The point is how the verse reveals His love. God did not watch the collapse with indifference. He watched with a father’s pain over a rebellious child. His grief is holy displeasure against sin, never a loss of control. His regret signals no change in the unchanging God. It signals a change in our relationship to Him. The same God is met as Savior or as Judge, according to our own obedience. God repents of the creative act, but never of the gifts and callings given for redemption. Redemption was His plan before creation. So the fall was folded into that plan, like a needle before a vaccine. The word behind “destroy” means to wipe clean. Yet even in judgment He calls them “man whom I have created.” He never disowns the ones it grieves Him to blot out.
Brief Observations
- Grief that reveals love — The point is not whether God erred in creating man. It is how His sorrow reveals His love.
- Holy displeasure, not lost control — God’s grief is no human passion. It is holy displeasure against sin, without any loss of control.
- The offense of betrayal — Creation was furnished for humanity, His noblest work. That it became an inventor of evil inverts God’s own character.
- Love God, hate sin — Because God loves us and hates sin, we should grieve our sin too. The cross is both His love and our reason to mourn.
- Regret without change — God’s regret implies no change in the unchanging God. It marks a change in our standing before Him.
- Repents of creation, not the callings — God repents of making man, but never of the gifts He gives for redemption. Redemption was His plan before creation.
- Repentance must transform — God’s answer to sin was to destroy it, and so is ours. Claimed repentance that keeps sinning only mocks Him.
- To blot out — The word for “destroy” means to wipe clean. Yet God still calls them “man whom I have created.”
- Even the creatures — The Flood took the animals too. Guiltless themselves, they shared a penalty man’s rebellion brought.
Full Commentary
This passage shows us God’s resentment of man’s wickedness. Many people read this passage and get caught up in whether God made a mistake creating humanity. How could God be sorry or regretful of anything if it’s impossible for him to do wrong? The more important point of this passage is how it reveals God’s love for us.
God didn’t watch humanity’s collapse into moral depravity with eyes of indifference. Scripture says it grieved Him in His heart. He observed it with the kind of pain a father feels witnessing the mistakes and stubbornness of a disobedient child. It would have been a combination of anger and grief. This kind of pain is so poignant that you just wish it would go away — and so sometimes that can feel like wishing you were childless. In God’s case, it made Him sorry He had ever made man to begin with.
I want to point out that we must be careful when attributing human emotions to God. Most of the time human emotions, especially negative emotions, are inextricably bound up in human insufficiency. God Himself is perfect and there is nothing insufficient about Him. So we need to do our best to put ourselves inside what was actually going on here.
The entire planet was created and furnished by God for the habitation of man. Human beings are noble among God’s creations. We are unique in our creative powers as well as our intellectual capacity. With the creation of humanity, the table was set for goodness the likes of which nothing in the world could match. Instead human beings became inventors of evil, persistent in their sins, with corrupted hearts the likes of which no one had ever seen. This outcome being such an inversion of God’s own character is the cause of the offense.
God’s grief is not a form of passion or uneasiness. It’s not the same loss of control that we feel when we grieve. He was not unsettled by human beings. His eternal mind goes beyond vulnerability to such problems. When we observe God’s emotions here they would look more like holy displeasure against sin and sinners. Sin is an offense to God’s holiness. Sinners are an offense to God’s justice. But there is never a loss of control.
We know by scripture that God crushes iniquity. God also describes Himself as wearied by our sins. The evil abominations of man breaks God’s heart. The psalmist says God grieves with wayward generations for many long years. Really what we’re watching is the offense of betrayal. God had been so gracious and so kind to humanity that their belligerent departure from Him and subsequent embrace of evil was an abuse of His providence. He wished He had not created man in the same way you might regret being kind to someone only for them to betray you and punish your kindness.
God loves us, and that’s one major theme of this passage. The other major theme is that God hates sin. If we love God and God hates sin, this means we should also hate sin. If sin is an affront to God’s heart it should also be an affront to our own hearts. The crucifixion of Jesus Christ is the ultimate expression of God’s love for us, and it’s simultaneously the ultimate reason we have to be humbled and grieved by our own sins. When we see how our loving God was pierced for our transgressions we should mourn the pain we have caused.
So when we contemplate God’s regret we must understand this doesn’t imply any change in God’s mind. The eternal mind is of one mind and nothing can move Him. There is no variance in the sovereign will of God. Instead what this expresses is a change in humanity’s relationship to God. Before Adam and Eve fell from grace, scripture says God rested and was refreshed after creating humanity. He made them upright and faithful, created in God’s own image. Their relationship with God was one such that God was pleased with the work of His hands.
After their descent into evil, humanity’s relationship with God had to change. This is the shift which resulted in God’s displeasure. God was never pleased with evil and He never will be. And here’s the most important point: the perspective you have on God is shaped by your own obedience.
An unrepentant sinner experiences a very different side of God than a faithful follower. Does this mean God changes? No it does not. God is immutable meaning He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. But the quality of your experience changes in response to your defiance or your obedience. This is why the same Jesus can be either your Savior or your Judge.
Key to understanding this is realizing the truth that redemption was part of God’s plan even before creation. I would go so far as to say the creative act was always in service to the redemptive act. A careful theologian will notice God repents of creating man, but He never repents of the gifts and callings He bestows upon men in service to redemption. For millennia men have been abusing God’s gifts to do works of evil. These are the very same gifts God gave them for the purpose of the Gospel. So the inversion of the creative act reveals God’s repentance, while the inversion of the redemptive act does not.
An easier way to understand this is to run a thought experiment. You take your child to the doctor’s office for a vaccination. For this experiment just assume the vaccination is a safe and effective protection against a deadly disease. All your child understands is that he’s about to be jabbed with a needle. Your child has a limited view of the story. It doesn’t matter that you yourself know the end from the beginning and the pre-planned reason your child is going to be jabbed with a needle — you still feel pain and regret that you have to do this.
The pain and regret you feel does nothing to stop you from jabbing your child, because jabbing your child was never the purpose of the story. The purpose was to protect him from disease. In the same way, God was sorry that He created humanity only to watch them suffer under the weight of their own sins. But humanity’s creation and the subsequent fall was always God’s will — because redemption was always God’s will.
The creation and the fall were necessary for redemption in the same way the needle’s jab was necessary for vaccination. The pain and grief God feels while we suffer does no more to change the arc of His sovereign design than it would to change your decision to protect your child from disease. I believe that’s the right way of thinking about God’s repentance.
God’s solution to man’s sin was destruction. As Christians we should feel the same way about our own sin. We should want to destroy it by the power of the Holy Spirit. This is called the mortification of sin. Part of repentance should be our efforts at restitution for what we did wrong. We should want to make amends like Zacchaeus did as part of his repentance. Mortification of sin and restitution for sin’s damage are far less common than a sinner’s supposed repentance. Here’s the problem with that: if we claim repentance and profess to be sorry for our sin, then continue to indulge in it, we mock God. Actual repentance leads to transformation — and transformation of the mind expresses itself in transformed actions.
When God resolves to destroy man in verse seven, the Hebrew word used means to wipe out, blot out, or erase. It carries the connotation of wiping something dirty off of something which should be clean. God uses similar language when He’s judging Jerusalem for Manasseh’s wickedness, saying He will wipe it as a man wipes a dish. This language communicates permanent removal.
It also communicates that unrepentant sinners impart uncleanness to those around them. The impact of their sins spreads a kind of spiritual filthiness. The dirtiness of the sinner is wiped clean by the judgments of God, and the sinner himself is blotted out by name. This permanent removal refers to the Lamb’s book of life and how those not found in the book face judgment and the lake of fire. The Old Testament presents a type of this removal with the Torah requiring the unclean to be cut off from the sanctuary of the Lord.
Notice how God refers to humanity as belonging to Him even when He’s about to destroy them in wrathful judgment. God doesn’t relinquish ownership of having created you simply because you go astray. This is one of the key reasons we can say it breaks God’s heart to destroy sinners. It also tells us the distinction of having been created by God does not excuse our disobedience. God is our Creator. If we obey Him He is also our Savior. If we fail to call Him Ruler then the same God who is our Creator will also be our Destroyer.
You might even say God’s authority as our Creator is what certifies His authority as our Destroyer. In this way our destruction is a consequence of scoffing at our own creation. If we hate our Creator or discount Him, should we really expect our created lives to continue? We forfeit our lives when we fail to use them for what God designed. I’m speaking generally here: regardless of calling everyone of us is created with the purpose of glorifying God. Glorifying God is the highest purpose of our lives, from which our various callings are subordinate and specified expressions of this.
Noah’s Flood would also claim the lives of countless animals and wild beasts. It wasn’t just collateral damage. The earth and all of its creatures were made for man and so were subject to the penalty of man’s corruption. The creation suffers because of man’s sin, and it groans under the weight of their rebellion against God. Today the creation longs for redemption and the revealing of God’s children. The animals themselves did not sin — such creatures are not capable of sin because they have no standing in the divine moral law. They were destroyed because man used them to serve his own lusts and his own idolatry, rather than using them for their intended purpose which was to serve and honor God.
The cataclysmic flood was not a judgment executed on God’s whimsy. Man strove with God in vain for many long years before the resolution was destruction. The antediluvian people faced the justice of God only because they were unwilling to be reformed by the grace of God.