Unexpected Grace (Genesis 6:1-8)

If I had a nickel for every time I heard or read the phrase this is one of the most debated passages in Genesis, Old Testament, or Bible, I would have enough nickels to pay off the water tower.

If you have questions please let me know, I am certain you will and I have already planned two Sunday nights to talk about things that come up in this ext, but I would still value your questions, just text them to me!

Let’s Pray and dive in

Pray

Sin in the World

Genesis 6:1–4 ESV

When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.

Every since Adam and Eve ate the fruit, we see sin continues spreading.

Cain murdered Abel.

Cain’s descendants were not what we call good people by anyone standard.

Abel’s descendants have their high points, but even then death reigns and sin is spreading more and more.

So we come to this passage and we see it is still under the Tol Dot the generation of Adam.

Mankind has obeyed God in that they have been fruitful and multiplied, however sin has multiplied quicker.

What we see here is a picture of humanity living out in depravity.

It is extremely grotesque and terrible what is happening.

There is a lot of debate on who the sons of God refers to.

Do to the highly debated nature of this text I will not be able to fully walk through some of the things that come up in this text.

So my commitment is the next time I teach on Sunday Night I will walk through the sons of God and Nephilim fully, because it is pretty interesting.

For the sake of time, as best as I can understand right now the sons of God is referring to demon possessed men from the line of Cain, or those who are lost.

It’s terrible in how these men took wives they looked at which ones they wanted to the took them.

Most like they took as many as they saw fit.

The fathers of these men encouraged them to do this.

The fathers of the women sent their daughters to this.

Sex was king, and these demonic men tried to fill that lustful thirst with more and more women.

Women are treated as objects to be used not as co-image bearers meant to subdue the Earth.

Demonic activity in the bible is almost always seen in cultures and places that try to have sexual liberation.

Look at any empire, any nation, and what you will find is before they fall sexuality flawed and skewed.

We see the Nephilim are present.

We are not told much about them in all of the bible which has lead to speculation.

In Numbers they are called giants, and they are before sons of God had children with Daughters of man so they represent some type of status or were seen as an authoritative position.

These men were the men of renown of old.

We have to keep in mind Moses is writing then as they are wondering in the Desert.

When the spies go into the Promised land all but Joshua come back afraid and not wanting to go because of these giants these Nephilim.

So one of the things that God through Moses writing this is saying, you think these Nephilim are unbeatable, but I wiped them out in the flood once, and I will defeat them again.

They are not opposing gods, who stand a threat against God, they are men fallen and broken and perverted and will be judged and destroyed.

These mighty mythical warriors do not stand a change against the Lord. He is de-mythologizing them.

The Lord demonstrates grace by saying the world will not flood for 120 more years, God gives an opportunity for people to repent and turn to him.

But we know the story.

fast forwards and we see...

God’s Disappointment

Genesis 6:5–7 ESV

The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.”

Sin’s consequences and ripples spread into deeper and more unintended and un-thought about areas.

This is a hard passage because it seems to contradict what is said elsewhere in the bible.

It also paints an extremely bleak picture of man.

Unfortunately, in the American church circle, especially in the bible belt like where we are at, Sin doesn’t sell.

You want to become a popular author or have a following , especially in ministry spheres (women's, kids, and youth) then you teach, preach, write books, do videos, or social media posts about how valuable someone is and how God saved you because you have value.

So every struggle, every temptation, every misstep, break your nail and it’s Satan himself attacking you because you are that valuable in of yourself.

We will walk through this because we do the stamp of the image of God upon us, there is something about humanity that requires dignity and value, but ultimately what happens is those message are from the Devil.

Here is subtly and all dressed up what is being taught in those things… You deserve a God who caters to you because you are valuable God has no choice.

Satan is not omnipotent, he is not omniscient, he is not omnipresent, He is NOT all powerful, He is NOT all knowing, He is NOT everywhere.

He is limited, and fighting a limitless God, so his strategy is to control the message, and then use his limited power to influence as much as he can.

This is what he did it the garden with Eve, He didn’t eat the fruit, but he tempted Eve into it.

This is what he attempted with Jesus during his temptation and life.

In all all honesty he is probably not in Ira.

But the messaging that we buy into it I am god, lowercase g.

We never see it this way, because it is not that blatant and obvious, but if you boil down those messages, the temptation it is always, every sin, every struggle, every temptation comes down to us serving the false god of self.

I want this so I will… lie, cheat, steal, cover up, hate, envy, on and on and on.

I don’t want to be embarrassed so I will, blame, hide, fight , argue, cut out “negative people”, because ultimately it’s not about bringing God glory, its about bringing me happiness and comfort.

I need me time, because I deserve to papered.

Sin isn’t that bad, think about all the “good” things that you do.

It’s ok to let your guard down every now and then.

What we see here in Genesis, is still true.

wickedness of man was great in the earth.

every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

Heart for us means to center of emotion, but to the Hebrews it meant the center of their being. So this is where thoughts originate, emotions, feeling, ideas, this is the core of who they are, their identity, their personality.

And it’s only evil continually.

No t-shirts with that verse are being sold.

Hobby Lobby doesn’t have that sign to hang above the mantle.

Your grandma isn’t cross stitching that on a pillow,

That’s not anyone's life verse.

Do you see what sin does.

When God created everything in Genesis 1, God looked and said this is good.

And now 6 chapters later God looks and says this is wicked and evil.

Why?

It’s because of Man’s sinful heart.

whatever the sinful heart touches it corrupts.

It’s like a dirty glass that has clean water poured into it.

All the sudden that water in contaminated.

This is effects of sin.

Everything is spoiled.

What we do is sinful because we operate out of a sinful heart.

Now God in his grace and limited us.

We are not as sinful as we possibly could be, there is common grace present.

But everything that we do, all of who we are is sinful.

This is why those self help, empowerment messages work.

We long for relief from what we know to be true even if we cannot give it a name.

We cry for justice, and when justice comes through a jury, it leaves many longing for something more.

It leaves many thinking that’s not justice.

So remake the world into the images we long for it to be, only to find out that whatever we remake the world into is still not what the world was created to be.

It still lacks the power, so we are left hopeless, tired, and living in a state of evil.

It was so bad before the flood that Moses tells us that God regretted that the had made man.

This passage has been a difficult one to understand, the word regretted elsewhere is translated repented.

I want to delve deeper into the unchangeable of God, however I will save it for a Sunday night.

I’ll leave the understanding of it as this, God NEVER changes.

It’s common sense for believers, if God changes does he change for the better or worse?

If it’s for the better, then he was not perfect, if it is for the worse then he becomes imperfect.

We can also look to the bible that talked about Jesus being the same yesterday today and forever in Hebrews and many other places.

This idea of God regretting or having His mind changed is not isolated to just this passage:

It’s littered throughout the Old Testament.

Moses pleads with God to change His mind about the Israelites.

Hezekiah get 15 years added to his life.

Jonah gets upset because God promised destruction on Nineveh, but instead relents.

The most closely related one to this passage in Genesis is when God says he regretted making Saul king over Isreal.

The bible also says

Numbers 23:19 ESV

God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?

So does God regret it or not?

Is the bible telling a lie?

It is an apparent contradiction, but it is not an actual contradiction.

We are finite human beings, created in the image of God, but there is a massive void between God and us.

We cannot know everything about God.

The bible teaches us what we need to know about God, not everything about God.

No book could ever contain that.

There is not enough paper in universe, nor ink to be able write that book.

We must also acknowledge that God made us in His image, he did not make little gods.

We are not able to fully understand God.

We cannot fully understand one aspect of God.

We could spend and eternity learning what it means that God is Love and never comb the depth of that.

We must humble come and say God is helping us by relating to us in way that we can somewhat comprehend.

For example, God saw.

That phrase has been repeated throughout Genesis up to this point.

God saw creation, God Saw Adam and Eve, God saw wickedness.

What know from the bible is God is Spirit… so God does not have physical eyes.

It’s a anthropomorphism, if you want to big cool word.

It means God takes things that we can understand and uses those things to teach us about Him.

It’s a small picture that merely scraps the surface, but it gets us in the right direction and its what we need to know.

So we can approach this passage and say with confidence, I am not sure how this plays out with other passages like Number 23:19.

But I trust God in the midst of this tension.

That is not to say that we should just shrug and move on.

We should wrestle in this tension, it helps us to know our place and to know our God.

God does not change, yet God is personal and at least appears to be interacting with a fallen and terrible creation.

It also pieces together the implication of the fall that we might have skipped.

Even when we think about sin and the fall we typically thing about how much harder it made life for us.

Death reigns.

Pain reigns.

It’s a struggle.

It’s a battle.

There are temptations around every corner.

We fail over and over and over again.

We tend to see the faults in others more “clearly” than we see the faults in our selves.

Our emotions are misleading.

Our experiences are faulty.

Our traditions are stale.

Our ideas fall flat.

It’s all pretty rough for us, but think about God and his reaction here.

It grieves Him to his heart.

God experiences emotions different than us.

We are ruled by emotions.

If I get angry it effects everything about me.

If I am excited about something it spills over into the rest of my life.

We are very much controlled by what we feel.

God often uses emotions for his glory and our good, but we often use emotions to justify running from God or making God in our image.

I wouldn’t feel this way if it was wrong, so God must me wrong instead.

God is not moved by His emotions like we are. He is not controlled by them or anything else.

Yet he still experiences them.

I look at this passage often what gets lost because there is a lot of theological depth here but the plain meaning is simple and profound.

Look at this passage and see darkness that is and has enveloped over humanity.

And then look to how God is portrayed in this passage by his own hand, and see a God who knows what it best for mankind, yet watches them do the worst things.

I see God who knows that Jesus is going to bear the wrath for these sins too.

And it grieves God to the point that God knows I am going to execute judgement in the form of a global flood.

It’s setting the stage for the story of Noah that we know, but warning the Story of Noah that has been told and is popular with us, and is the great kids story of old, painted nurseries, bath toys, is also one of the 4 greatest acts of judgement by God in the bible.

I hope what you see in this sermon is bleak.

We are 90% good and just need 10% of Jesus get us over the top.

We dead.

depraved.

And just in case you think well that was before the flood, now that we are on this side of redemption we are that bad… that was just them.

Look around.

Paul quotes Isaiah in Romans 3 when he says...

Romans 3:9–18 ESV

What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, as it is written: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.” “Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive.” “The venom of asps is under their lips.” “Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.” “Their feet are swift to shed blood; in their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they have not known.” “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

Ephesians 2:1–3 ESV

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

We may think we are better, but that friends is a lie too, what are we to do?

Noah’s Favor

Genesis 6:8 ESV

But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.

Jesus came to save the sinners.

Don’t let modern ideologies that use the same words, the same languages pacify and keep you comfortable in sin.

If your version or understand of who God is never requires you to repent, then brothers and sisters you are worshiping yourself not the God of the Bible.

This bleakness, this darkness, this finding out selves to be filthy rags is good news because those are who Jesus comes to save.

What we see here is Noah found God’s favor or grace.

We will learn in the coming verses that Noah was righteous, but why was he righteous?

What is something he did?

Was it something he said?

Was there something of value within Noah that God sought to keep?

NO!

Noah was saved by Grace through Faith in God, but like we are saved by grace through Faith in Jesus (God)

This is good news!

If we think that we are saved because God find something of value that he does not already have an infinite value of then we spend all of our life trying to be something of value for God when God doesn't look and think I need you.

That’s making God in my image.

If in my depraved mind I can think God saved me because God needed me then God is somehow dependent on me, who is God?

No, God doesn’t need me.

Praise the Lord!

Brothers and Sister its not about getting yourself put together and coming to Christ, its about God coming to us in our mess.

We will fail, and there is grace and forgiveness to be had.

People will offend us, and there is grace and forgiveness to be had.

It all comes through Christ, who takes our wrath, I don’t want to undermine sin, God grieved it, and God bore it for believers.

On the cross taking the punishment so that God’s grace and God’s justice are on full display.

God doesn’t look at the continually sinning all the time and pretend to not see it or change the rules to accept it.

God dies for it. and enables us to live for Him.

Is that you?

Can you back in the amazing grace that is found in Christ alone or are you working on trying to maintain or gain something that you never can?

We are saved by Grace through Faith in Christ alone, this is not your own doing it is a gift of God so that no man may boast.

Brothers and sisters humble go before God in repentance, it doesn't matter if it’s the first time or the one millionth time, Jesus came to saved sinners like you and me.

The healthy don’t need a doctor, only the sick.

the rested don’t need rest, only the tired and worn out.

Conclusion

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