The fairness of the flood
In Genesis 6:6, we’re told that God regretted that he made man on the earth. This is a difficult thing for us to understand, and I don’t know if we can fully. God, of course, knew this would happen. Yet God, in a sense, wished it had not. This is trying to explain to us in words we understand how serious God feels about sin.
To use a different word from v6, all of this grieved God. We must not think of God like some machine. God is a person. God feels pain and emotion. Our sin hurts God. God is desperately sad and upset and frustrated at people’s sin.
I don’t think we consider this enough. When we do something wrong or selfishly, we consider what impact this might have on other people. We know that our selfishness and sin can hurt and offend others; we’ve all had to apologise for things before. And it changes and damages us, we probably know that. But it also hurts God. God made us to honour and glorify him, and so often we do not. We do the opposite. We do what we want and ignore God. And that hurts and grieves God.
What does God do about this? Well, if it was us, we would lose our temper. Yet God’s response is measured and fair. He will wipe out everything that exists. People, animals, birds. All of it. There is an idiom here in v7, the phrase translated “blot out”. It means to erase or remove something by washing. To wash it away, to clean it. In ancient writing, if you made a spelling mistake, you would use water to remove the ink and start again. That’s what God is going to do.
God is always fair and just, which should make us notice something here. God thinks that a fair penalty for the sin in the world is to wipe everything out. To destroy it all. This is not God over-reacting or being unreasonable; this is fair. Sin is that bad. Selfishness is that bad. It’s consistent through the Bible. The wages of sin is death, as the apostle Paul wrote. Sin leads not only to death but eternal death, to hell. Sin is far worse than we often think.
This should also lead us to another conclusion. Jesus died for the sin of all who believe. The son of God, God himself, needed to die to pay the price of sin. That is a massive cost. More than we could know. And God says that this cost was necessary. That is how bad sin is.
Why am I stressing this point? Because if you are anything like me, you can downplay your sin. You can be tempted to think that giving in doesn’t really matter. You can fail to be bothered by greed, feeling good about buying another investment property or putting another large amount into super rather than being generous. After all, doesn’t everyone do this? You can think that losing your temper at your wife or husband or children is fine because they deserved it. All of these things show us not taking sin as seriously as we should. The flood was the appropriate penalty for sin. The cross was the required payment for sin. We must not think it a light thing. We must resist it. We must be quick to confess, to apologise, to run to God.
If the flood is a fair payment for sin, sin is far worse than we tend to think it is.