Genesis 6

1. And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters 2 were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and 3 they took them wives of all that they chose. And the LORD said, My Spirit shall not strive with man for ever, for that he also is flesh: yet shall his days be an hundred and twenty years. 4 The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them: the same were the mighty men 5 which were of old, the men of renown. And the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him 7 at his heart. And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the ground; both man, and beast, and creeping thing, and fowl of the air; for it repenteth 8 me that I have made them. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD. 9 These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, and perfect in his genera-

10 tions : Noah walked with God. And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. And 11 the earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw the 12 earth, and, behold, it was corrupt ; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. 13 And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me ; for the earth is filled 14 with violence through them ; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Make thee an ark of gopher wood ; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without 15 with pitch. And this is how thou shalt make it : the length of the ark three hundred cubits, 16 the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. A light shalt thou make to the ark, and to a cubit shalt thou finish it upward ; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in 17 the side thereof ; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it. And I, behold, I do bring the flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breadth of life, 18 from under heaven ; every thing that is in the earth shall die. But I will establish my cove- nant with thee ; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy 19 sons’ wives with thee. And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou 20 bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee ; they shall be male and female. Of the fowl after their kind, and of the cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the ground after 21 its kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive. And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and gather it to thee ; and it shall be for food for thee, and for 22 them. Thus did Noah ; according to all that God commanded him, so did he.

Having traced the line of descent from Adam through Seth, the seed of God, to Noah, the author proceeds to describe the general spread and growth of moral evil in the race of man, and the determination of the Lord to wipe it away from the face of the earth. M.

Constantly, as the well-spring of life flowed on, the stream of human depravity swelled into a deeper and broader flood. There were things in God’s earlier procedure that were naturally fitted to check its working, and repress its growth—especially the forbearance and kindness with which He treated the first race of transgressors—the wonderful longevity granted to them—the space left for repentance even to the greatest sinners, while still sufficient means were employed to convince them of their guilt and danger—all seeming to betoken the solicitude of a father yearning over his offspring, and restraining for a season the curse that now rested on their condition, if so be they might be won to His love and service. But it was the evil, not the good, in man’s nature, which took advantage of this treatment of God, to ripen into strength and fruitfulness. And, ere long, the very goodness of God found it needful to interpose, and relieve the earth of the violence and corruption which had come to usurp possession of the world. So that, looking simply to the broad facts of history, the doctrine of human guilt and depravity stands forth with a prominence and intensity which could leave no doubt concerning it upon thoughtful minds. P. F.

Sixteen centuries—almost as long as from the advent of Christ to this present time—are despatched, in sacred history, in the briefest possible mention. What was the meaning of that immense chasm and void in the life of our race ? The world was full of people ; but it was full of sin. May not this be the import of that historic lesson—to furnish, for all time, one undeniable proof that, left to himself, apostate man had no power or prospect of recovery ? Knowledge of promised relief was limited : all which existed was in the form of tradition, and this growing fainter and fainter, like a dying echo ; providential restraints were few ; so to speak, God seems to have withdrawn himself from the race that sought to be independent of him, that the world might know, for all time, that ruined mind never restores itself ; that the planet which breaks away from the attraction of the sun finds no power within itself by which it is brought back, but its centrifugal force is multiplied with terrific speed, driving it further and further, faster and faster, into the blackness of darkness. Left to itself, the race of man increased in wickedness with such gigantic strides, that the earth and the skies sickened at the spectacle, and the waters of the great deep swept them away. The termination of that first long stage of human history was the Deluge. W. Adams.

2. Sons of God.** In the view of some Fathers of the Church, the Reformers, and in more modern times Dettinger, Hengstenberg, Keil, and others, the expression “sons of God” refers to men, to the pious race descended from Seth, as the name “sons of God” is used in Deut. 14 : 1 ; 32 : 5 ; Hos. 2 : 1 ; Ps. 73 : 15. On this view, the passage refers to the marriage of Seth’s descendants with Cainitic women, by which means the corruption of Cain’s race spread among the Sethites. Not only is the connection in which the whole story stands to what precedes, but also ver. 3, in which an erring of man, not of the higher spirits, is spoken of, in favor of the latter view; but so also is the expression “they took wives,” which is confessedly used in the Old Testament only in speaking of formal marriage. O.—The family of Seth, on account of its adherence to the true religion, were styled “the sons of God;” the descendants of Cain and the other branches of the family who united with him in his impiety, “the sons of men,” denoting that they were a carnal, irreligious race. R. Hall.

We are not probably justified in saying that there were but two races descended from Adam, the race of Cain and the race of Seth. Adam may have had many sons; but the history of the Cainites is preserved because both of their impiety and of their ingenuity; that of the Sethites, because at least in one line of that race piety and true religion flourished, and of them came the family of Noah which was preserved in the ark. There appears to have been a growing corruption of mankind, more rapid, no doubt, in the family of Cain than in any other race, but still spreading far and wide. The line of the Sethites, traced in ch. 5, alone appears to have kept itself pure, the little Church of God, in the midst of gathering darkness of the world around. This little Church may well have been called “the children of God,” a term by no means limited in Scripture to the holy angels. They alone were the salt of the earth; and if that salt should lose its savor, all would become worthless and vile. When therefore some of these “sons of God” went out from their own little home circle, to make mixed marriages with the general heathenized races round them, the elements of corruption were brought from the world into the Church. E. H. B.

1. 2. When man began to multiply, the separate families of Cain and Seth would come into contact. The daughters of the stirring Cainites, distinguished by the graces of nature, the embellishments of art, and the charms of music and song, even though destitute of the loftier qualities of likemindedness with God, would attract attention and prompt to unholy alliances. The godly took them wives of the ungodly as well as the godly families, without any discrimination. “Whom they chose,” not for the godliness of their lives, but for the goodliness of their looks. M.

“The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair;” just as Eve saw the tree that it was pleasant to the eye. Here was the last turning-point of importance of the family probation. Social man was about to repeat the act of individual man, and to take the forbidden fruit. “And they took them wives of all which they chose.” The sensual triumphed over the rational and the moral. The sons of God, in their social capacity, apostatized from God. Their self-will came into direct collision with his authority. The family had fallen from its high object of constituting the Church of God. If the time should come when the relations of family to family, and of one community of families to another, shall be employed only to answer sensual, unjust, and impious purposes, every principle of moral government will warrant and call for Divine interference. From the moment when “the sons of God took them wives of all which they chose,” the higher design of the conjugal state was defeated; it was prostituted to sensual purposes; and the doom of the family constitution itself, as a distinct economy, was sealed. Hence, the reason assigned by God for terminating the probationary contest with man is (v. 3), “for that he also is flesh.” In other words, his own professed worshippers, by joining the sensual for sensual ends had merged the last hope of recovery in profligacy. And being thus perverted into an evil to the individual, the family became also an organization of social oppression and wrong. Brute force bore down law and right. Families banded together for the perpetration of more extensive wrong. Men became renowned in proportion to their deeds of rapine and bloodshed. And “the earth was filled with violence through them” (v. 11). J. H.—If there had not been so deep a deluge of sin there had been none of the waters. From whence then was this superfluity of iniquity? Whence, but from the unequal yoke with infidels. These marriages did not beget men so much as wickedness; from hence religious husbands both lost their piety and gained a rebellious and godless generation. Bp. H.

3. “Jehovah said, My Spirit shall not always strive with man (the Adam); for that they are but flesh, and their days shall be an hundred and twenty years.” In the somewhat obscure brevity of this speech, it is difficult to determine the force of each word; but the general sense seems to be: “I will take away from man the life I at first gave him, since he has corrupted himself to mere flesh, and I will limit his time on earth to one hundred and twenty years.” That the period thus defined was a space for repentance, seems clear from the context. P. S.

The verb (translated “strive”) is currently used of judicial transactions—searching out, convincing, convicting; and seems to have a striking analogy in that leading word given us by Christ; “When he is come, he shall reprove the world”—enforce conviction upon the world—as to sin and righteousness. God may right-eously say—may must in honor to himself say—My Spirit shall not plead my cause in man for ever. He is utterly gone over to the flesh, and nothing remains but that he must perish. One hundred and twenty years of merciful respite for patient warning and exhaustive trial must suffice:—then, if no penitence appear, judgment must fall, and that without remedy! Thus God places on record the moral causes and antecedents of this fearful visitation, that its moral lessons may go down to distant ages for their admonition to the end of time. H. C.

—From this passage we learn that the Lord by his Spirit strives with man up to a certain point. In this little negative sentence streams out the bright light of God’s free and tender mercy to the apostate race of man. He sends his Spirit to irradiate the darkened mind, to expostulate with the conscience, to prompt and strengthen holy resolve, and to bring back the heart, the confidence, the affection to God. But it is a solemn thought that there is a certain point beyond which he will not go, for sufficient reasons known fully to himself, partly to us. First, he will not touch the free agency of his rational creatures. He can put no force on the volitions of men. An involuntary or compulsory faith, hope, love, obedience, is a contradiction in terms; and anything that could bear the name can have no moral validity whatsoever. Secondly, after giving ample warning, instruction, and invitation, he will, as a just judgment on the unbelieving and the impenitent, withdraw his Spirit and let them alone. M

From the method God took in this judgment, first withdrawing his Spirit and then introducing the flood, it appears that God’s taking away his Spirit from any soul is the certain forerunner of the ruin and destruction of that soul. From the expression, “the Spirit’s striving with man,” which always implies resistance from the party striven with, it appears that there is in man’s heart a natural enmity and opposition to the motions of God’s holy Spirit. And from the definitive sentence that God here passes, that his Spirit should not always strive with man, it appears that there is a set and punctual time, after which the convincing operations of God’s Spirit upon the heart of man in order to his conversion will cease and forever leave him. South.

Awhile he will strive, he will awaken, he will convince, he will call to remembrance former sins, former judgments, the breach of former vows and promises, the misspending of former days. He will also present persuasive arguments, encouraging promises, dreadful judgments, the shortness of time to repent in; and that there is hope if he come. He will show him the certainty of death and of the judgment to come, yea, thus he will strive with the sinner. But, behold, here is laboring and striving on both sides. The Spirit convinces, the man turns a deaf ear to God; the Spirit saith, Receive my instruction and live, but the man pulls away his shoulder; the Spirit shows him whither he is going, but the man closeth his eyes against it; the Spirit offers violence, the man strives and resists: he “does despite unto the Spirit of grace.” The Spirit parleyeth a second time and urgeth reasons of a new nature, but the sinner answereth, No; I have loved strangers, and after them will I go. At this, God comes out of his holy place, and is terrible; now he sweareth in his wrath they shall never enter into his rest (Ezek. 34 : 13). I exercised toward you my patience, yet you have not turned unto me, saith the Lord. I smote you in your person, in your relations, in your estate, yet you have not returned unto me, saith the Lord. “Cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground?” Banyan.

Such a dispensation upon the part of God, as the withdrawal from a man of his Holy Spirit, is never the result of a dark and mysterious sovereignty. Sovereignty is an attribute of grace. The salvation of every sinner is an act of sovereignty; but the infliction of evil falls within the province of justice, and its reasons are always taken from the character and doings of its subject. Hence, when you read in the Bible of the suspension or withdrawal of divine influences from a man, you always find it represented in connection with some previous wrong conduct on his part, and as a punishment of that conduct. Spiritual abandonment is the judicial result of spiritual resistance. The Spirit of God ceases to strive because he is driven from the human bosom. E. M.

There is no more wondrous subject than the patience of God! Think of the lapse of ages, during which that patience has lasted! Think of the multitudes who have been the subjects of it! Think of the sins which have all that time been trying and wearying that patience—their number—their heinousness—their aggravation! The world’s history is a consecutive history of iniquity, a lengthened provocation of the Almighty’s forbearance. The Church, like a feeble ark, tossed on a mighty ocean of unbelief; and yet the world, with its cumberers, still spired! The cry of its sinful millions at this moment entering ’the ears of the God of Sabbath,’ and yet, for all this, his hand of mercy is stretched out still! An.

There is no more affecting view of our human life than that which presents it to us as a scene of the perpetual working of Divine compassion, seeking by every possible agency and avenue to enter in and rouse us from apathy, to break the sinful sleep, to open our eyes on the beauty of holiness in the face of Christ, to unseal our ears that they may hear the voices of a higher world than this, and to draw us into the blessedness of reconciliation and communion with our Lord. The air we breathe is all quick with these gracious ministries. Till we find it out we discern only the surface, we comprehend nothing of the glory, of the common life we are living. It is but a tread-mill march, or a mere scramble of appetites, or a whirl of vulgar intoxications, or a mocking dance of illusions. Strong words are used by Holy Scripture to declare the earnest reality of this Divine solicitation, so much more merciful to us than we are to ourselves. The Spirit strives with man. He pleads, He presses, He teaches, He watches, He pursues, He cries, He wrestles, He agonizes, He maketh intercession with groanings that cannot be uttered. What kind of a nature must it be that can stay indifferent to a Love like that? F. D. H.

What mean those oft-formed resolutions to which kindled fears give birth, and what those oft-repeated vows originating in intelligent conviction, if they are not the evidence of some mighty though mysterious agency at work upon the mind? Lo! we carry within us the proofs that the Spirit of God strives with man. Truth, a thousand times heard before without awakening emotion, now rousing us to thought; claims, a thousand times before presented and at best but listlessly received, now securing a prompt and intelligent response from conscience; feeling, quick, deep, permanent, perhaps excited under the demonstrations of the gospel; these as facts defining our own circumstances and testified to by our own consciousness, are the evidences of our subjection to the influences of the Holy Ghost. E. M.

What has God done to induce men to do their duty? He has created men; he preserves them in existence; he inhabits their consciences and all their faculties; he enswathes them with manifestations of his Power and Goodness in the natural world; he instructs them by the course of history, general and personal; he places above them Heaven, beneath them Hell, and before them the Cross. Could God do more to induce man to repent and not overpower his freedom of will? Who can say that God, without overpowering or impairing man’s freedom, could do more than he has done to persuade man to do his duty?

The seven knocks from the Divine Hand, on man’s door, are Nature, History, Conscience, Heaven, Hell, Christ, the Holy Spirit; and in all God! In the individual life, in national life, in the life of the world as a whole, God knocks for admission to the human heart with these seven blows. With every birthday, with every hour of sickness, with every bereavement, with every illumination of the soul by the solemnity of solitude, by ten thousand voices from Nature and from history, and from the depths of conscience, God expresses his desire to enter the human soul.

The Scriptural teaching as to the knocking of God at man’s door shows: 1. That some act of man’s free will must go before God’s entrance into the soul. Man is to open the door. 2. That man has natural power to do this and a corresponding responsibility. 3. That God’s knocking invites, inspires, persuades and enables man to do this act, but that God does not himself force open the door. 4. That God’s entrance and man’s opening the door are practically simultaneous—the two sides of one indivisible transaction—regeneration and repentance. 5. That God enters and sups with man, and he with God. On condition of the opening of the door, friendship with God follows. 6. That if any man will open the door God will enter. 7. That God stands at all doors knocking. 8. That if any man does not open the door of his soul to God, the fault is that of the man only. 9. That there is a difference between the general and special operations of the Divine Spirit—general while knocking, special after entering. 10. That the duty of immediate opening of the door lies upon all. 11. That every refusal to open adds to man’s guilt and peril, and that there must be on the part of the unyielding soul a refusal for every knock, and that the knocking is incessant, and that so the guilt and peril of evil choices mount swiftly to vast magnitudes.

Just so the Scriptural teaching concerning man’s knocking at God’s door shows: 1. That it is an act of man’s free will to knock at God’s door. 2. That man’s want and power and God’s promise inspire the desire on man’s part to knock at God’s door. 3. That man’s knocking and God’s opening are practically simultaneous—two sides of one indivisible transaction—Repentance and Regeneration. 4. That the law of from less to more prevails here, so that, after the general influences of the Spirit are rightly obeyed, the special influences follow. 5. That if any man will knock God will open. 6. That God invites all men to knock. 7. That if any man does not knock, it is wholly his own fault. 8. That the duty of immediate knocking lies upon all. 9. That every refusal adds to the soul’s guilt and peril. There is distinct Scriptural teaching that a time arrives when the gate of opportunity is shut, and the soul knocks at a closed door. J Cook.

His days shall be an hundred and twenty years. “In the days that were before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark.” Judgment was not executed precipitately. One hundred and twenty years intervened between the prediction and its accomplishment. Full scope was thus given for the circulation of the intelligence throughout the then habitable world—full time for the awful tidings to visit every dwelling. E. M. G.—A hundred and twenty years was less than the eighth of the average duration of antediluvian life: and, in respect of warning, was not more to that generation than nine years would be to us. It was, therefore, an interval just long enough for effective warning, without being so long as to allow any man that lived, to deem that he might neglect that warning without danger. Noah himself seems to have been the instrument of making this warning known, and of preaching repentance, since Peter calls him “a preacher of righteousness.” But the construction of the ark was in itself a warning the most impressive. It evinced the sincerity of Noah’s conviction, that the judgment he declared really impended over mankind; and as its vast proportions slowly rose, the rumor of this immense and strange undertaking must have spread far and wide, with the report of the reasons which the builder gave for its construction. Thus “the long-suffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing.” Kit.

This passage should be viewed in connection with 1 Pet. 3 : 18-20, from which we learn that it was no other than the Spirit of Christ that through the instrumentality of the pious patriarch preached to the disobedient spirits of the old world. Bush.—The spirits are the souls of those now in prison, who once enjoyed a space for repentance on earth. The connection leaves us no room to doubt with respect to those intended by this description. They were the sinners destroyed by the flood. To these, Christ had once preached. *How? Did he preach to them personally? The immediate antecedent here is the Spirit, meaning either the Holy Spirit, the third person in the Trinity, or the divine nature of Christ. “For Christ also hath once suffered for our sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit, by which,” that is, the Spirit, “he went and preached unto the spirits in prison.” By the Spirit, Christ preached to the inhabitants of the old world. We are accordingly assured, that the Bible is the word of Christ, and that the prophets received their messages from his “Spirit that was in them” (Col. 3 : 16 ; 1 Pet. 1 : 11). Noah is called “a preacher of righteousness” in 2 Pet. 2 : 5, and it was the Spirit of Christ which inspired Noah, and spoke, as it were, by the mouth of that holy man. There is plainly allusion here to Gen. 6 : 3, “And the Lord said, My Spirit shall not always strive with man;” it had striven by the warnings given him; but these warnings shall cease, “for that he also is flesh; yet his days,” the term of his probation yet remaining, “shall be an hundred and twenty years.”

When did Christ preach to the antediluvian sinners? Before the flood. This is evident, not only from the foregoing, but from the following connection: “Which sometime” (formerly) “were disobedient, when once the long-suffering of God waited in the days of Noah” (it is not said waited till after Christ’s death, which must have been the case, if Christ after his death went and preached to them), but “in the days of Noah, while the ark was preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls, were saved by water.” All the calls of Noah, every stroke upon the ark, were so many calls of Christ to a rebellious and perishing world (Matt. 10 : 40 ; Luke 10 : 16 ; John 13 : 20). It is the constant representation of the Bible, that the deluge came, when, and not before, God’s long-suffering toward that generation had come to a close (Gen. 7 : 1 ; Matt. 24 : 37-39 ; 2 Pet. 2 : 5). “Elsner,” as quoted by Macknight, “on this passage, hath produced examples from the Scriptures, and from Demosthenes, to show that the phrase, he went and preached, is a pleonasm for he preached.” Among the examples from Scripture, the clearest and most direct is Eph. 2 : 15-17. “Having abolished, etc., he came and preached peace to you who were afar off, and to them who were nigh.” For it is certain, that our Lord after his resurrection did not go personally to the Gentiles to preach peace to them. He preached to them by his apostles only. But if Christ is said by Paul to go and do what he did by his apostles, he may with equal propriety be said by Peter to go and do what he did by his prophet Noah.

There is nothing then in the words of Peter to sustain the doctrine of a new probation after death. The persons of whom he spoke were antediluvian sinners, who, at the time he wrote, were spirits in the prison of despair. These had been faithfully warned by the preaching of Noah, before they were carried away by the flood. The argument then from this passage, in favor of a second probation to those who die in ignorance, is wholly out of place; since the antediluvians were not ignorant, but enjoyed many advantages under the preaching of Noah, whose frequent and solemn warnings they utterly disregarded and despised. Divine patience could bear with them no longer. Their wickedness is declared to have been total, and peculiarly aggravated (Gen. 6:5-7). Even if Christ be supposed to have preached to them, after their descent into hades, there is not the smallest evidence or intimation, that any of them obeyed his voice during their second term of probation, and were liberated from their prison. If the passage prove anything to the purpose for which it is alleged, it proves more than was intended, namely, that a new probation has been granted to some of the most hardened sinners, and consequently it is possible at least that all mankind will sooner or later attain salvation. The argument is legitimate for Universalists; but overstrained and self-destructive when applied to the defence of any other creed. J. Woodbridge.

4. Giants in those days. Almost every record of antiquity hands down the tradition of a family or race of giants. Nor does their existence appear to be any more enigmatical than the amazing strength, magnitude, and duration of many of the structures of the ancients—the pyramids, for example, and the hundred gated Thebes. Geology points us to past worlds of gigantic ferns, tree-grasses, and lofty mosses; and to reptiles tall and bulky as the elephant, rhinoceros, or hippopotamus. “There were animal-giants in those days;” and why not human giants in later days? The size of the body oscillates between certain extreme limits. During the early period of man’s history, the extreme development of his bulk and strength took place to a much greater extent than at present; though the instances of gigantic stature which still occur are more frequent than is commonly supposed. It is erroneously inferred by many that these antediluvian giants sprang from the union spoken of in the context between the sons of God and the daughters of men. Whereas the statement seems constructed expressly to guard against such an inference: “In those days were the (well-known) Nephilim in the earth. Also after that the sons of God,” etc. Two periods are spoken of. Giants existed prior to the period of the unions in question, and continued to exist afterward. J. H.

On the whole, it seems that the antediluvian world had reached a desperate pitch of wickedness, the climax of which was attained by the fusion of the two races. The marked features of this wickedness were lust and brutal outrage. P. S.—The flood came, not because the race of Cain were corrupt and wicked, but because the generation of the righteous had fallen into disobedience, lust, and tyranny. When the members of the true Church degenerate, the judgments of God are close at hand. Luther.

It is happily clear that God is moved by what we would call moral considerations, and not by arbitrary impulse, in his government of mankind. The man who does an action simply to please himself is said to act arbitrarily; the action is not founded upon argument or reason, and is therefore arbitrary. 5. In this case God gives his reasons, and discloses every step in the process of his pathetic and mournful argument. “God saw that the wickedness of man was great upon the earth.” That is the basis of action. God’s purpose in creating man had been frustrated; its frustration involved the ruin of man, as if by a suicidal act. God, therefore, seeing that ruin must come, acted judicially, as in the first instance he had acted creatively. J. P.—“God saw the thoughts of men that they were only evil continually.” They were not cherishing their foul conceptions, pursuing their mad calculations, unwatched, uncared for. There was an eye looking down into their most inward secrets, penetrating the intents of their hearts. And that was the eye of One who desired to make them right within; who had determined that His earth should be purged of its corruptions,—should fulfil all the ends of His creation. And why could He not make it fulfil them, by a fiat of His omnipotence? Because He had made man in His own image; because He had given him a will; because He could only restore and regenerate him by restoring and regenerating his will. Hence we have to read all the Bible through, of floods, famines, pestilences, earthquakes, anarchy, tyranny. It is throughout, the history of an actual government, - throughout, the history of an actual education; a government of voluntary creatures to teach them subjection; - an education of voluntary creatures to make them free. And He who carries on this government and education, is seen, the more He makes Himself known to us, to be not a hard despot, but a loving Ruler; with that heart and sympathy in perfection which He requires in His creatures. If this be so, do you wonder that it is said, “It repeated God that He had made man, and it grieved Him at His heart”? Maurice.

Every man might have exhibited the modified excellence of a Seth, an Enoch, or a Noah. Each patriarchal family might have displayed its own distinctive phase of excellence; while it yet stood in harmonious relation with the great whole. Every succeeding year, from the first man to the flood, might have added a new page to the volume of Divine manifestation transcribed from the character of man. There was no necessitating reason why the day that poured down the deluge on a world already drenched with evil, did not see it flooded with heavenly light in approbation of its spiritual proficiency. But by what long travail in sin had man reached his fearful climax! Every sinful man that had lived had tried the patience of God “in his own way,” in a manner different from all the rest. Every godless family had varied the great experiment on his long-suffering. What lessons, warnings, and significant intimations each man of many centuries had unconsciously sown broadcast as he walked through life; and what vital seeds, numerous as the spores shed in autumn, had others unconsciously scattered in his path - to be all trodden into the general mire! What myriads of children had come age after age, bringing with them traces of their Divine origin and mission - to be all wrought up into the great organization of evil! What an amount of resistance man must have offered to Divine remonstrances and restraints, in order to break through them all! What miseries he had been content to endure in his prolonged hostility against God! J. H.

6. It repeated the Lord.** All the language of this portion of Scripture is suited to the infant condition of the world. Hence human sentiments are even more than in the later books of Scripture attributed to the Almighty. No sound criticism would see any appearance of myth in this. E. H. B. - When the holy Scriptures speak of God, they ascribe hands, and eyes, and feet, to Him - not that He has any of these members, according to the literal signification; but the meaning is, that He has a power to execute all those acts, to the effecting of which these parts in us are instrumental: that is, He can converse with men, as well as if He had a tongue or mouth; can discern all that we do or say, as perfectly as if He had eyes and ears; and can reach us as well as if He had hands or feet. In like manner, the Scripture frequently represents Him as affected with such passions as we perceive in ourselves; namely, as angry and pleased, loving and hating, repenting and grieving; and yet upon reflection we cannot suppose that any of these passions can literally affect the Divine nature: therefore the meaning is that He will as certainly punish the wicked as if He were inflamed with the passion of anger against them; as infallibly reward the good, as we will those for whom we have a particular affection: and that, when He finds any alteration in His creatures, either for the better or the worse, He will as surely change His dispensations toward them as if He really repented or changed His mind. It is by way of analogy and comparison, therefore, that the nature and passions of men are ascribed to God: so that when He is said to repent or grieve, the meaning must be, not that He perceived anything that He was ignorant of before to give Him any uneasiness (for “known unto God are all His works from the beginning”); but only that He altered His conduct with regard to men as they varied in their behavior toward Him, just as we are wont to do when we are moved by any of these passions and changes of affection. Stackhouse. - A truly comprehensive study of God, and of the real conditions under which he must be revealed, makes it more than doubtful whether we have gained a more accurate, or even a more spiritual conception of God, by discarding what is called the anthropopathic imagery of the Old Testament, - representing God as feeling emotions, joy, grief, pity, like ourselves. The straining after literal accuracy dilutes the vigorous conception. Our God sometimes seems further off than the Jewish Jehovah was, and what we gain to exactness, in our attempts to eliminate these material configurations of Deity, is worse than lost to trust, in the dissipating of the personality. F. D. H.

“Repentance with man,” says an old divine, “is the changing of the will; repentance with God the willing of a change.” In this case the very same principles which would lead him to reward and bless the obedient, would lead him also to punish the perverse and rebellious. The words before us express, with an energy and impressiveness which probably nothing purely literal could have conveyed, the exceeding sinfulness and provoking nature of sin. Bush.—It does not bespeak any change in God’s mind; for he is in one mind, and who can turn him? But it bespeaks a change of his way; when God had made man upright, he rested and was refreshed (Ex. 31:17), and his way toward him was such as showed he was pleased with the work of his own hands; but now that man was apostatized, he could not do otherwise than show himself displeased: so that the change was in man, not in God. God repented that he had made man; but we never find him repenting that he redeemed man, though that was a work of much greater expense. H.—As a man, when he repents, changes his course of procedure, so God, when he changes his procedure, is said to repent, seeing that such change would be in man the result of repentance. Yet there is here a change, not as in man, of the will or purpose—but of the work of procedure only. Repentance in man is the changing of his will as well as of his work; repentance in God is the change of the work only, and not of the will, which in Him is incapable of change. Seeing that there is no mistake in his councils, no disappointment of his purposes, no frustration of his expectations—God can never change his will, though he may will to change his work. The cause is, in all these cases, put, by metonymy, for the effect. It would seem that all these expressions, whereby God is presented to the mind as invested with human parts and passions, involve a sort of looking forward to that period in which they would all become proper and appropriate, by our being permitted to view God in Christ, who has carried the real experiences of our nature into the very heavens, where he sits, not as one who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but as one who has been tempted like as we are, yet remained without sin. Had God been, in the Old Testament, set before our mind wholly in the abstract qualities of his being—there would have been a lack of unity in the mode in which he is presented to the apprehension of the heart (we say not of the mind) under the two dispensations. But the Lord, knowing from the beginning the aspect in which he would be eventually presented to the church in Christ, permitted beforehand these humanized indications of himself, that there might be under both dispensations an entire oneness of feeling in regard to him. Kit.

7. The alternation of epochs of tolerance and destruction is in accordance with the workings of God’s providence here and now. For though the characteristic of that providence as we see it is merciful forbearance, yet we are not left without many a premonition of the mighty final “day of the Lord.” For long years or centuries a nation or an institution goes on slowly departing from truth, forgetting the principles on which it rests, or the purposes for which it exists. Patiently God pleads with the evildoers, lavishes gifts and warnings upon them. He holds back the inevitable avenging as long as restoration is yet possible—and His eye and heart see it to be possible long after men conclude that the corruption is hopeless. But at last comes a period when He says, “I have long still holden my peace, and refrained Myself; now will I destroy.” A. Maclaren.

8. Noah found grace. Now for the first time grace itself finds a tongue to express its name. Grace has its fountain in the divine breast. The stream has been flowing forth to Adam, Eve, Abel, Enoch, and others unknown to fame. By the time it reaches Noah it has found a name, by which it is recognized among men to this day. This completes the circle of saving doctrine in regard to God that comes down from the antediluvian times. He intimates that the seed of the woman, an individual pre-eminently so called, will bruise the serpent’s head. He clothes our first parents with coats of skin—an earnest and an emblem of the better, the moral clothing of the soul. He regards Abel and his offering. He accepts him that in faith does well. He translates Enoch, who walked with him. His Spirit has been striving with antediluvian man. Here are the Spirit of God and the seed of the woman. Here are clothing, regarding, accepting, translating. Here, then, is salvation provided and applied, begun, continued, and completed. And last, though not least, grace comes out to view, the eternal fountain of the whole. On the part of man, also, we have repenting, believing, confessing, offering, calling on the name of the Lord, and walking with God.

9. The close of the preceding document introduces the opening topic of this one. The same rule applies to all that have gone before. The generations of the skies and the land (ch. 2:4) are introduced by the finishing of the skies and the land (2:1); the generations of man in the line of Seth (5:1), by the birth of Seth (4:25); and now the generations of Noah, by the notice that Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. The narrative here also, as usual, reverts to a point of time before the stage of affairs described in the close of the preceding passage. Yet there is nothing here that seems to indicate a new author. The previous paragraph is historical, and closely connected with the end of the fourth chapter; and it suitably prepares for the proceedings of Noah, under the divine direction, on the eve of the deluge. We have now a recapitulation of the agent and the occasion, and then the divine commission and its execution. Noah is here characterized by two new and important epithets,—just and perfect. To be just is to be right in point of law, and thereby entitled to all the blessings of the acquitted and justified. The perfect is the tested in holiness. M.—He was perfect, not with a sinless perfection, but a perfection of sincerity; and it is well for us, that by virtue of the covenant of grace, upon the score of Christ’s righteousness, sincerity is accepted as our Gospel perfection. He walked with God, as Enoch had done before him; he was not only honest, but devout; he walked, that is, he acted with God, as one always under his eye; he lived a life of communion with God; it was his constant care to conform himself to the will of God, to please him, and to approve himself to him. God looks down upon those with an eye of favor, who sincerely look up to him with an eye of faith. But that which crowns his character is, that thus he was and thus he did in his generation, in that corrupt, degenerate age in which his lot was cast. It is easy to be religious when religion is in fashion; but it is an evidence of strong faith and resolution, to swim against a stream to heaven, and to appear for God when no one else appears for him: so Noah did, and it is upon record to his immortal honor. H.

That there was during this period a growing apprehension of the Divine purpose in redemption among the obedient, appears plain from what is told us of Enoch and of Noah, that they “walked with God,” or in his ways; and of the preaching and translation of Enoch, and the preaching of Noah. The statement in Heb. 11: that “these all died in faith, and were persuaded of the promises and embraced them,” can only mean that they had such knowledge of God’s purpose in redemption so far as then revealed us to be workers together with him in faith. Andrews.

11,12. Three times the sacred text repeats it, that the earth was corrupt, adding that it was full of violence, just as if the watchful eye of the Lord, who “looked upon the earth,” had been searching and trying the children of men, and was lingering in pity over it, before judgment was allowed to descend. A. E.

Our most veritable, though saddest, impressions of man’s greatness, we derive from the magnificent ruin he displays. In that ruin we distinguish fallen powers, that lie as broken pillars on the ground; temples of beauty, whose scarred and shattered walls still indicate their ancient, original glory; summits covered with broken stones, where the palaces of high thought and great aspiration stood, and righteous courage went up to maintain the citadel of the mind,—all a ruin now, “archangel ruined.” And exactly this is the legitimate impression of the scripture representations of man, as apostate from duty and God. Thoughtfully regarded, all exaggerations and contending theories apart, it is as if they were showing us the original dignity of man, from the magnificence of the ruin in which he lies. How sublime a creature must that be, call him either man or demon, who is able to confront the Almighty and tear himself away from his throne. And, as if to forbid our taking his deep misery and shame as tokens of contempt, imagining that a creature so humiliated is inherently weak and low, the first men are shown us living out a thousand years of lustful energy, and braving the Almighty in strong defiance to the last. “The earth also is corrupt before God, and the earth is filled with violence.” We look, as it were, upon a race of Titans, broken loose from order, and making war upon God and each other; beholding, in their outward force, a type of that original majesty which pertains to the moral nature of a being endowed with a self-determining liberty, capable of choices against God, and thus of a character in evil that shall be his own. They fill the earth, even up to the sky, with wrath and the demoniacal tumult of their wrongs, till God can suffer them no longer, sending forth his flood to sweep them from the earth. Bushnell.

13. Miraculous interpositions were necessary in order to prevent the termination of all progress; and they were to be expected, as parts of a plan from which the Deity has never departed. The world itself originated in miracle; and contains in its bosom the memorials of having been, at distant intervals, the theatre of successive creations. Man himself, originated in miracle, is preconfigured for the recognition of the supernatural as truly as he is for the belief of the natural. Hence, when it occurred, as in the translation of Enoch, it brought nothing new into human belief; the doctrine was there before. When an inspired communication was made, the Divine Being was but continuing the employment of a method for the impartation of religious knowledge, to which man had owed, at first, the elements of even material knowledge— the Parent was but once more speaking to his children on affairs of great urgency; and hence the revelation did but corroborate the pre-existing fears of the wicked and the hopes of the righteous. The seasons selected for such interpositions, too, would be such as to invite, or to excite, the expectation of them; and, when they did occur, so adapted would they be to the exigencies of the time, as to stop nothing natural, and to set nothing unnatural in motion; their tendency being only to impair the force of the evils which threatened to destroy all human progress, and to give to that progress continuity and impulse.

“All observation and experience are against a miracle,” says the sceptic. “Nature is uniform in her operations. The laws of the human mind compel my disbelief.” The error lies in confounding that inner circle called the course of nature, with that larger outer circle—the course of providence, which preceded nature and encompassed it; which originated it, employs it, and, at distant intervals, adds to it, or modifies it, at pleasure. That no similar event has taken place may be true. But is that sufficient to prove that nothing like it ever will or can occur? Experience is, in this sense, against everything till it occurs. The existence of man himself was contrary to all that had previously taken place on the earth. If the proposition that nothing will take place but what has taken place is to be admitted, it must be because it is a principle of the Divine Being; and if it be such at present, it must ever have been such; and if it has ever been such, even before creation began, no creation could ever have taken place. There was no precedent for the creation of a world, any more than there is now said for its destruction. Thus, the objection becomes an intellectual absurdity. J. H.

14. Make an Ark.** It was an enormous undertaking, demanding all the cutting instruments and metallic implements already invented. Observe the material, as congruous to the region as was the shittim or acacia wood of the tabernacle to the region of Sinai. The “gopher” wood of the ark is admitted to be pitch-wood, therefore light and comparatively easy of working. Lexicographers, from the similarity of the consonant elements, incline to suggest specifically the cypress. Now the cypress abounds throughout Asia Minor. It grows to the height of one hundred and twenty feet. Nothing could be more suitable. The pine also abounds in these regions. The cypress or the pine would have furnished the pitch for the caulking; or if we suppose the pitch to be bitubitu-men, we are reminded of the extensive petroleum works now carried on at Buku on the Caspian, and of the bitumen springs still flowing at Is on the Euphrates. And the olive tree of which the dove brought a fresh-plucked leaf, grows also in Armenia, and is found on the south side of Mount Ararat at its foot. S. C. B.

15. Of the shape of the ark nothing is said; but its dimensions are given. It was to be 300 cubits in length, 50 in breadth, and 30 in height. Taking 21 inches for the cubit, the ark would be 525 feet in length, 87 feet 6 inches in breadth, and 52 feet 6 inches in height. Two objects only were aimed at in its construction: the one that it should have ample stowage, and the other that it should be able to keep steady upon the water. P. S.—The ARK was neither intended nor suited for nastical purposes. It was not meant for navigation, but for carrying freight, for which it was much more suited than if it had been constructed according to the principles of shipbuilding. K.

16. The interpretation of Gesenius seems evidently the true, viz. that the unusual word translated “window” (the word in ch. 8:6 is quite another word) means really a set of windows, a window course, a system of lighting. E. H. B.—Noah was to make, i.e., to provide for giving, light to the ark. This might be done by a series of windows or by leaving a vertical space on each side, on the ridge of the roof, and covering this on the top. Aft.

Though there were many rooms in the ark, THERE WAS ONLY ONE DOOR. It is said, “And the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof.” And so, there is only one door into the ark of our salvation, and that is Christ. “He that cometh not in by the door, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.” Sparyron.

17. How impressively did the Divine prediction of the flood proclaim the calm, certain, and majestic movements of justice! The world probably then, as now, derided the idea of its destruction; scientifically demonstrated, in its way, the physical impossibility of a general deluge; proved historically that such an event never had taken place; and congratulated itself on the superior notions which it entertained of the Divine benevolence—notions which rendered it politely horrified at the bare mention of such a catastrophe. But on went the note of preparation, in the building of the Ark, without pause or relaxation. And many a sinner would see in the coming crisis, a prediction, by fact, of the last judgment. And the “preacher of righteousness” would solemnly point to it as an instalment of the great doom predicted by Enoch (Jude 14, 15). J. H.

18. God here makes Noah the man of his covenant, another Hebrew periphrasis of a friend. But with thee will I establish my covenant. The covenant of pre-widener; that the course of nature shall be continued to the end of time, notwithstanding the interruption which the flood would give to it; this promise was immediately made to Noah and his sons (ch. 9 : 8, etc.). They were as trustees for all this part of the creation, and a great honor was thereby put upon him and his. The covenant of grace; that God would be to him a God, and that out of his seed God would take to himself a people. When God makes a covenant, he establishes it, he makes it sure, he makes it good; his are everlasting covenants. The covenant of grace has in it the recompense of singular services, and the fountain and foundation of all distinguishing favors; we need desire no more, either to make up our losses for God, or to make up a happiness for us in God, than to have his covenant established with us. H.

We find the key to this great transaction in this saying, With thee will I establish my covenant, etc., in the saying of the apostle (Heb. 11 : 4): “By faith Noah being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark for the saving of his house; by which he condemned the world, and became the heir of righteousness which is by faith.” The whole transaction is thus at once lifted above the sphere of the natural. It is no mere record of how a great natural disaster once befell the earth after 1600 years of the reign of man upon it, through some upheaving of the Caspian or other seas. It is the account of how, at the close of the first cycle of the Adam race the corruption became so enormous that judgment ceased to linger and damnation ceased to slumber. It was a transaction that has had no parallel, nor will have until another judgment by fire shall fall upon the earth and the heavens shall melt with fervent heat. Noah, as the end of that cycle, becomes also the Adam—the second ancestor of the human race. Hence, as with Adam, God entered into a covenant of life for himself personally and the race, as represented in him; so now, when about to visit judgment upon man in this his second fall and wind up that first cycle and old order of things, he declares to him whom he has chosen as the germ for the new race, “With thee will I establish my covenant,” as before with Adam. This covenant idea is not only the scripture form, but the sublimest form of setting forth the relations bebetween God the Saviour and man the sinner. The very aim and end of the representation is, to distinguish this revealed religion from mere natural religion. The very fact that God has endowed man with moral, rational and religious faculties, at once puts him above the plane of nature, to be operated upon by mere natural laws as the other creatures and works of God. And, accordingly, the Creator is represented as entering into covenant with him—that is, revealing himself as the Infinite Personality binding Himself with the finite supernatural being. Thus man is put above the sphere of mere natural law and natural right, as deducted from the universal nature of things. While, indeed, by reason of his physical nature, still bound like the animal and other creatures of God, yet God gives him more than a natural right by making him the subject of special promises to which the Author of nature binds Himself. The very term “covenant” (co-veniens) signifies in Scripture a coming together of the divine and the human spirit. It involves, therefore, a higher class of ideas than those of nature and natural things. In nature the ideas are of forces, gravities, attractions, affinities, appetites, instincts, etc. In grace the ideas are of covenant parties, promises, agreements, oaths, conditions, fulfilments, perfectness, penalties, rewards, etc. The tendency of the ethics and theology of our times to base the relations of God and man upon the “nature of things,” and to determine the place of man by philosophy, obscures all the higher glory of positive law covenant, promise, and the dignity of the human soul as capable, through faith, of standing in forensic and current relations with God. This modern tendency is rather to trace man’s relations to the universe than to God the sovereign of the universe. Hence the saying to Noah here, with thee I will establish my covenant (literally make my covenant stand), implies that the covenant with Adam had been impaired; it had fallen down as a covenant with the race and had need now to be raised up. Hence as Tayler Lewis, by whom these thoughts have been suggested, very properly says: “There is no religion without this idea of a personal covenant with a personal God, and therefore all such views as those of Comte, Mill and Spencer are for all moral and religious purposes wholly atheistical. They acknowledge no personality in God; they cannot use the personal pronoun in speaking of him or to him. It may be said in truth that all religion is a covenant, even when religion appears in its most perverted form. It has some appearance of being in the very etymology of the Latin word. Cicero makes it form ’re lego,’ but a better derivation would be from ‘religio,’ to bind, bind back—religio is a positive bond (higher than nature) between straying, fallen man and his Maker” S. R.

The building of the ark commenced when Noah was four hundred and eighty years old; that is, before any of his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, had been born,—in fact, just twenty years before the birth of Shem. Thus the great faith of Noah appeared not only in building an ark in the midst of a scoffing and unbelieving generation, and that against all human probability of its ever being needed, and one hundred and twenty years before it was actually required, but in providing room for “his sons” and his “sons’ wives,” while as yet he himself was childless! A. E.

19. The distinction between clean and unclean animals—of the former of which seven of every sort, and of the latter one pair, were to be selected—had even before the flood grown up among men as the offspring of custom, and the closer observation of nature, and had also received the divine sanction. Only the former sort were permitted to be sacrificed to the Lord, and (after or perhaps even before the flood) used as food by man, and hence a greater number of them, seven pairs (the sacred number of the covenant), were to be taken into the ark. Noah was to transfer from the old to the new world, not his mere life, but the pure worship of God, of which sacrifices formed a part. C. G. B.

20. Only the animals necessary to man, or peculiar to the region covered by the deluge, required to be included in the ark. It seems likely that wild animals in general were not included. It is obvious, therefore, that we cannot calculate the number of animals preserved in the ark, or compare the space they would require with its recorded dimensions. We may rest assured that there was accommodation for all that needed to be there. M.

22. Thus did Noah. He prepared the ark; and during one hundred and twenty years preached righteousness to that sinful generation (2 Pet. 2:5). And this we are informed (1 Pet. 3:18, 19, etc.) he did by the Spirit of Christ: for it was only through him, that the doctrine of repentance could ever be successfully preached. The people in Noah’s time are represented as shut up in prison, arrested and condemned by God’s justice, but graciously allowed the space of one hundred and twenty years to repent in. A. C.—Doubtless Noah continued his “preaching of righteousness,” especially as occasions arose from the scoffing curiosity of those who watched his work; but that work preached louder still. And so “the long-suffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was preparing.” But it waited in vain. The unheeded warning, as is usual, only plunged men into greater carelessness. They went on, “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark; and knew not till the flood came and took them all away.” P. S.

Methinks I see those monstrous sons of Lamech coming to Noah, and asking him what he means by that strange work; whether he means to sail upon the dry land. To whom when he reports God’s purpose and his, they go away laughing at his idleness, and tell one another, in sport, that too much holiness hath made him mad: yet cannot they all flout Noah out of his faith; he preaches, and builds, and finishes. Doubtless more hands went to this work than his; many a one wrought upon the ark, which yet was not saved in the ark. Our outward works cannot save us without our faith; we may help to save others and perish ourselves, what a wonder of mercy is this I here see! One poor family called out of a world, and as it were eight grains of corn fanned from a whole barnful of chaff. Bp. H.

He “built an ark to the saving of his house.” Here was faith, first, in God’s warning—the flood will certainly come; here was faith too in God’s promise, or rather in God’s command implying a promise—“If I build the ark he has commanded, it will save me when the flood comes.” And when a sinner flies for refuge to the Lord Jesus Christ, his appointed Saviour, it is faith that leads him to Christ, and it is exactly thus his faith works. He has been taught at last that God really means something when he threatens destruction to sinful men, and, at the same time, that he may trust his mercy for salvation when, in obedience to his command, he seeks salvation in his Son. “There is the danger,” says God, “and there is the deliverance;” the sinner through grace believes him, and he is seen fleeing from the danger to the great deliverance. C. Bradley.