What Does Today's World Teach Us About God

Without God’s Intervening Grace, Everything Is Broken (1-4)

Here we see the ruins of a world gone mad, a society that has totally forsaken all fear of God and His wisdom.

“What God sees when He looks at the world is total beauty trumped by total depravity.” -Joel Beeke

The Corruption of Marriage (1-2)

There are a few different views here, and as I studied this passage I believe it’s relatively clear to me that this is a story of the sons of Seth marrying godless women. This is a mini-story of godly people throwing away their devotion to raising a godly lineage for the temporary attractiveness of the women.

This kind of thing is later seen in places where God forbids the people of God to marry unbelievers and most clearly in the story of Balaam who, after failing to curse Israel three times, sends these beautiful Midianite women to go to seduce the men into sexual immorality which results in the death of 24,000 of them.

As I read through here I had to think to myself, “Wow, this is extremely applicable for youth group”. And as I meditated on this, I thought of a few things to pass on,

Physical attraction is not the sole guide for deciding who you should marry. Don’t divorce beauty from godliness.

Build not only your marriages, but all of your relationships upon a love for God.

Where do you look for relationships? We must be careful to guard our hearts and be discerning on who we give it to.

This is a society here built upon lust. JUST LIKE OUR WORLD.

The Corruption of Mind (3, 5b)

What God is letting us know as He says, “for he is indeed flesh” is that it is pointless to fight with the flesh that are incapable of reasoning.

Moses emphatically presses the point of how bad things are as he record the Lord saying, “every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually”. This is what Paul presses ever harder in Romans 3 as he tells us that without salvation we are dead in sin, that we hate God. Guys, we live in a culture that drinks up sin like it’s water, and we are seeing a complete hatred for anything that is pure and wise in our world today. This is the insanity of sin and it isn’t just a few which leads us to the next point....

The Corruption of Mankind (1, 5-6)

*Don’t go too deep, you’ll really nail this point last*

Sin is a cancer consuming all aspects of fallen man.

Within God’s Heart, There Is A Hatred For Sin (5-7)

As we look at this passage, I want us to notice a few key words,

Genesis 6:5–7 (NKJV)

5 Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 6 And the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. 7 So the Lord said, “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.”

Here we see the Lord sees the sin, His reaction, and His response to it.

Now, I want to address this passage quickly, but carefully because if we read it long we might think that the Lord didn’t know how bad things would get and that perhaps that is why He’s so sorry. But that’s not the case here. What we are seeing is what is called anthropomorphism. God is allowing Himself to be described by human emotions so we can understand Him more. So what He is teaching us here is that first, He is so horrifically disgusted with the sinfulness of man that He is grieved to His very core as though they have wounded His heart with a deadly amount of sorrow.

What this teaches us is:

God is both just and gracious. Think of it like this: He has created us and we have rebelled against Him with so much hatred that the very depths of His heart is broken and even though He hates sin, He is so gracious that He gave the world 120 years to repent and they still rejected Him.

It also teaches us that seeing how grieved the heart of God is over sin, we should learn to hate our sin even more! Calvin says and I modernized it a little, “Unless we want to provoke God, and to put Him to grief, we should learn to hate our sin and to run from it. Seeing this fatherly goodness and tenderness in God, we should absolutely restrain any love for sin in us; since God, in order to powerfully pierce our hearts, He allows Himself to be clothed with our affections.”

What more beautiful way do we see this reality than in Philippians 2 where we see our precious Lord humiliating Himself on our behalf. What a precious Lord that He would share our temptations and yet never sin.

Without God’s Grace, This Would Be Us (8)

The reality is that without God’s grace, we would be the same as everyone else in this story. The story of Noah is a lesson on God’s hatred for sin and His gracious heart for His people. The question we ask as we look at Noah is, “Why was Noah righteous except for God’s preventative grace?”

Apart from Christ, nothing about me is good in God’s eyes.

Why did Noah find grace in the eyes of God? The answer is only because God wanted to show unearned grace to him! It wasn’t because Noah was holy apart from the grace of God. Here’s a quote that is helpful here:

“Holiness is not a merit by which we can attain communion with God, but a gift of Christ which enables us to cling to Him and follow Him.” -John Calvin

People don’t want to admit they need complete saving. we have little phrases we throw around like, “well, nobodies perfect.” and we try to get around the fact that we aren’t 100 percent bad (any amount of goodness we believe is within us, we in conclusion subtract from Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf.)

The story that we are going to be going through over the next few weeks show us the wrath of God toward sin and the amazing grace of God toward His people. As we read the stories of the Bible, we always think of ourselves as the righteous Noah’s, the Abels, the Davids taking down Goliath, but the truth is that without God’s grace, we aren’t Noah.. we are the people who’s hearts love evil continually.

Conclusion

So, as we read this story… we can walk away with a few principles:

The relationships I pursue matter.

Knowing the Lord’s heart toward sin, I should strive for godliness.

As I look at this crazy world, I must remember that without the grace of God, I am just a sinner.