Fear No Fear

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

“Yahweh smelled the pleasant aroma. Yahweh said in his heart, “I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake because the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth. I will never again strike every living thing, as I have done. While the earth remains, seed time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night will not cease.””
(Genesis 8:21-22)

The ‘pleasant aroma’ was NOT the burning of the flesh or the fat. It was the LOVE and the WORSHIP. It was the acknowledgement of God AS God and the Source of all they had and all they would need. It was the THANKSGIVING for saving them, being with them, and having His hand upon them.

God is not LIFTING the curse on the ground (Genesis 3:17), God is promising not to ADD anything to it. Essentially making sure we understand the Flood dealt with the breathing creatures and did not wash the world clean or renew it. The ONLY thing that removes the curse is the blood of Jesus (Galatians 3:13-14). The ONLY thing that gets us out of the curse into the BLESSING is Jesus (Colossians 1:13). In Jesus, the curse is no longer an issue or an impediment. We can have MORE THAN ENOUGH because God is our Source and HE is MORE THAN ENOUGH for us.

The whole world had become depraved. It was so bad there is only one time period that God ever mentions as being similar: the End Times (Matthew 24:37-39). God will not have to strike every living thing again because in the End, it will all come to a close. It will not need punishment to ensure continuance, but a judgment that is final and irrevocable. We will not see a destruction, but a renewal (Revelation 21).

God re-establishes the order of how this world works: seed time and harvest. Cycles. The planting, the nurturing, and the harvest. There is also a promise included. If we see days and nights occurring, if we see summer and winter occurring, and if we experience cold or if experience heat, then there is time to seed for a harvest and time to harvest what we planted. There is still time to do God’s work by gaining more workers (Matthew 9:38) and fulfilling our commission (Matthew 28:16-20).

The sage Sforno writes: ‘In His heart. He did not reveal this resolution to Noach and his sons until after they had accepted His commandments and He established His covenant with them.’

The sage Radak writes: ‘ויאמר ה’ אל לבו, He foresaw in His mind that He would not again have to wreak wholesale destruction on earth seeing that it would not happen again that the majority of the human species would be as depraved as those before the deluge. The report of what happened during the generation of the deluge was handed down from generation to generation and served as a warning against man again becoming as corrupt as at that time. G’d would not again punish the community at large on account of depraved individuals, but He would punish all the individuals who are wicked, as He demonstrated when He destroyed Sodom and its satellites.’

The sage Or HaChaim writes: ‘for the inclination of man’s heart is evil from its youth. This statement is best understood as similar to the Talmud Baba Kama 39. The Talmud discusses an incidence in which a bull trained to perform in an arena has gored someone. Such an animal is not subject to the death penalty as it only did what it was expected to do. The reason cited in that Mishnah is that the Torah uses the future tense יגח in Exodus 21,28 when providing the death penalty for oxen which gore a human being. Animals which have been trained to do just that are not culpable for doing what comes naturally. Similarly, man, equipped as he is with an evil instinct from birth, is not culpable until he has learned to distinguish right from wrong. This rule applies to minors not being subject to the judiciary process. They are, however, punishable by G’d for not having heeded His call. In that respect man is not like the bull we mentioned. Man’s advantage over the beasts is his knowledge of good and evil. He is charged with despising evil and choosing what is good. The fact that man was born with the יצר הרע only, acts like an extenuating circumstance protecting him against G’d’s anger.’