Fear No Fear

(All scripture from the World English Bible, ebible.org, all rights reserved)

“Yahweh saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of man’s heart was continually only evil. Yahweh was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him in his heart. Yahweh 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.”“
(Genesis 6:5-7)

Sin is the result of ideology, not simply our physical appetites. It’s a mind-body-soul issue. Before Jesus, people had no way to defeat the demonic. No way to cleanse themselves. They couldn’t even cover themselves before the Law was given. God was personally talking to Adam and at least some of his descendants. There were men in the line of Seth that walked with God. God wasn’t absent here. But people were choosing to mix. Godly people chose to connect themselves with ungodly people. And since sin is easier than choosing not to sin – honestly impossible outside of Jesus (John 15:5) – people were choosing to embrace ungodly thinking, ungodly actions, and dreaming up ungodly desires. They totally gave into their carnal (sinful) selves. It spread like cancer, consumed almost all in its path, and there was no way for them to be free of it (but truly, no one desired to BE free).

I think the sage Chizkuni sums it up nicely. He writes: ‘כי רבה רעת האדם, “for man’s wickedness had become very great;” it is futile to ask that seeing that G-d has foreknowledge of all that man will do, creating him had been an exercise in futility to start with; why had G-d bothered? The answer is that everything is under the control of heaven except man’s decision to live in awe of the Creator or to defy Him. Seeing that G-d had decided to create a creature equipped with free will, He had simultaneously abrogated His right to interfere as long as man’s use of his freedom did not threaten to undo His universe. The reader is reminded of Deuteronomy 10,12, where Moses tells the people that G-d “asks” the people to revere Him; he did not say that G-d had “commanded” the people to revere Him. He also quoted G-d as expressing the wish that the people could maintain their moral high, as expressed after the revelation at Mount Sinai. In other words, He Himself had restricted His freedom in matters of religious belief of His creature. (Deuteronomy 5,26) “May they always be of such mind, to revere Me, etc.”A third verse spelling out the choice before all of us is found in Deut.30,14: “see I have given before you this day, life and goodness, or death and evil.”’

God says He REGRETS creating humanity. But how can a God who sees the end from the beginning truly regret anything? Our behaviour, our choice to sin and embrace sinful thinking, sinful desires, and sinful actions broke God’s heart. He was invested in us. He was involved in us. He was right there in the trenches with us and we spit on Him. We turned away. On purpose. That grieved Him so much, He regretted making us. Jesus is God, and as such Jesus was feeling these feelings of sorrow as well. Jesus knew TRUE sorrow (Isaiah 53:3).

The sage Or HaChaim writes: ‘We can therefore say that at the time G’d created man He totally excluded from His conscious mind all and any sins that man would ever commit. He did so for two reasons. 1) G’d is good and does not dwell on evil. This reason does not suffice, however, because G’d needs to know what will happen and what will be the ultimate outcome of what happens now. 2) G’d excludes such future events from His consciousness so that the wicked cannot claim they had been programmed by G’d due to His omniscience, and that therefore they are not culpable for their evil deeds. The wicked believe in what we call “self-fulfilling prophecies,” and they consider G’d’s foreknowledge as belonging to that category. This concept is part of the verse (1,31): “G’d looked at all He had done and here it was very good.” G’d “saw” i.e. foresaw, only what was good, i.e. the deeds of the righteous. Of course you will ask: “if so how could G’d punish someone for a deed that He had not seen?” The Torah tells us that at at this point in time G’d chose to look at the deeds of the wicked; what He saw caused Him to regret that He had for so long ignored these deeds in order that His knowledge would not become a self-fulfilling prophecy.’

Sin is a cancer. It HAS to be cut out. It HAS to be removed. The plan was for Jesus (slain before the world was founded – Revelation 13:8) to come and save us. But if God didn’t destroy these wicked people, there would be no virgin for Jesus to come through. As we can see from the behaviour of one of Noah’s sons later, evil NEVER stops trying to get us. There would have been no one willing to accept Jesus, nurture Jesus, and raise Him up in God’s ways if something wasn’t done. God could have killed EVERYONE and started again, but instead He preserved a remnant. Noah preached and tried to get them to repent for the entire time he was building the ark (or presumably the whole time – 2 Peter 2:5), but NO ONE repented. No one was even sorry – until it was too late. It was out of MERCY that God brought such great judgment. But it was mercy to the whole of humanity throughout all of history, not necessarily mercy to those involved in the judgment.

The sage Chizkuni writes: ‘כי נחמתי כי עשיתי, this is how G-d referred to sinful man; but when man was loyal and G-d fearing, He boasted with their loyalty, lauding them for their steadfastness and refusal to regret having accepted the Torah; (compare Numbers 23,21, לא איש אל ויכזב ובן אדם כי יתנחם, “I am not disappointed in this people. It does not cause Me any regrets.” (loosely translated by this Editor) We find in that verse another allusion that change in attitude always first occurs in G-d’s creature, never in G-d, so that what appears as G-d changing course is really only His reaction to man’s perversity.’

For those wondering why God included air-breathing animals and birds in this judgment (though clearly not all of them – we’ll get there in a bit), the sage Steinsaltz writes: ‘The Lord said: I will obliterate man whom I have created from the face of the earth; from man to animal, to crawling creatures, to birds of the heavens; for I regret that I made them. Man is not simply the pinnacle of creation, but the very purpose of it. Only man can direct the many objects and creatures of the world to their collective purpose. Consequently, in his absence, all of creation loses its reason for being. The Sages teach a parable to illustrate this idea: A man fashioned a wedding canopy for his son and prepared many types of food for the wedding feast. Sometime later, before the wedding, his son died. The father then dismantled the canopy, saying: I fashioned all this only for my son. Now that he is dead, why do I need a wedding canopy? Similarly, the Holy One, blessed be He, said: I created all the animals only for man. Now that man sins, why do I need these creatures?’