Noah’s Ark is told as a children’s flannel-graph story, with cartoon animals, a cheerful Noah, and a stylized rainbow decorating baby’s rooms and storybook Bibles. However, the story of the flood provides a devastating description of God’s hatred and wrath expressed against pervasive, rampant human sin. The Babylon Bee has capitalized on this irony multiple times. As you read Genesis 6:5–22, in which God describes the reasons for the flood and commissions Noah to build an ark for his own salvation, several instances of wordplay reveal the nature of sin and the nature of God’s judgment on sin. This occurs along the lines of two themes: God’s grief over sin and sin’s corruption of creation.
God’s Grief over Sin
Early in our passage we see that God was “sorry” (Gen 6:6) that he made man on the earth because every “formation of intentions in his hard was evil continually every day” (Gen 6:5) or as the Christian Standard Bible renders it, “every inclination of the human mind was nothing but evil all the time.” Then in verse 7 God himself repeats his grief: “And Yahweh said, ‘I will wipe away man whom I created from upon the face of the ground, from man to beast, to crawling thing, and to the bird of the heavens, because I am sorry that I made them.’ ”
This term for “sorry” or “regret” or “relent” is the same word used in Numbers 23:19 (but in a different form), in which God is described as “not a man that he should lie, nor a son of man that he should repent.” So this odd word used here in Genesis 6 cannot mean that God has literally changed his mind or has repented over his creation; the difference of form makes this an expression of emotion on God’s part. God’s emotions may not be like ours, for they cannot change him or override his rational will, but this emotional grief of God over sin and evil expresses something real in his nature, a real grief over sin.
This is stressed by an intertextual wordplay in verse 6. The second half of verse 6 says that “It grieved him to his heart” (ESV) or, “He was grieved in His heart” (NASB), or “he was deeply grieved” (CSB). The word for grief is the same word used in the curse of the ground given because of Adam’s sin (Gen 3:17), when God said, “in pain (toil – NASB, painful labor – CSB) you shall eat of it all the days of your life” (ESV). The ESV probably captures the Hebrew meaning there best. The difference in verb form explains why it is “pain” in Genesis 3 and “grief” in Genesis 6, but the word root is the same. This suggests that when Moses and his original readers got to Genesis 6:6, they would recognize that Moses intended to show that the grief and pain caused by the curse for man because of his sin is analogously experience by God as man continues to sin. God hates sin as a contradiction of his holy nature. Therefore, it pierces him to the heart.
Understanding this pain of God over sin should motivate believers to live holy lives. Indeed, Genesis 6:5 didn’t mention particular outward expressions of sin, but rather the inward thoughts and intents of the human heart. If God is pained, similar to the pain we experience in the curse, over sinful thoughts, how much more should we seek to mortify indwelling sins in our own lives? How could we pain the God we love who saved us from our sins? How could we go on grieving our heavenly Father or our redeemer Jesus Christ, who gave himself up to death for our sake?
Sin’s Corruption of Creation
The other interesting wordplay to note in Genesis 6 involves the Hebrew word šaḥat. This word can mean “to destroy” or “to corrupt.” It also is occasionally translated in noun form in the Psalms as “the pit.” There are five interesting usages of šaḥat in Genesis 6 (I list translations of šaḥat in italics):
- “Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God” (v. 11)
- “God looked on the earth, and behold, it was corrupt” (v. 12)
- “for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth” (v. 12)
- “I am about to destroy them with the earth” (v. 13)
- “I am bringing the flood of water upon the earth, to destroy all flesh” (v. 17)
What we learn is pretty simple. As through sin, man corrupted the creation, with all flesh corrupting their way in rebellion against God, so too God’s judgment is an extension and completion of that corruption. Sin ruins creation. Sin destroys and undoes what God has done. Its punishment then continues that destruction to completion. Like in Romans 1:18–32, in which sin leads to the judgment of being given over to sin producing futility and irrationality, we see in Genesis 6 that sin undoes what God has made and must be punished with complete destruction, being “wiped away” or “blotted out” from before God (Gen 6:7; Gen 7:23).
As Christians we therefore need to take sin seriously. Sin’s destructive nature leads to more sin and more devastation. Little sins of the heart like pride, defensiveness, fear of man, envy, anger, or lust lead ultimately to death (James 1:15). The picture of God’s judgment of sin motivates us to fight it in fear of sin’s power and God’s wrath.
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