Back to the Beginning No.11 God's second thoughts

Lord, we come before your throne and present ourselves before the holy page of Scripture. We thank you for a word that is timeless, spoken in this case several, many generations ago, four thousand years at least, and yet a word which has meaning and relevance to us today, help us to think it through, nourish our hearts, gives a greater understanding of who you are and the resolution to the human problem which confronts us today as it has confronted every generation down the human story. So speak to us, bless all our friends wherever they're meeting, especially our church holiday conference over there in Ashburnham.

Bless the family service there. May it live in terms of knowing the life of your spirit and may your word be implanted on minds and work its way through into convictions and practice there as well as here for Jesus' sake. Amen.

Do sit down, nice to have you with us this morning. Let's go to Genesis and the sixth chapter. Picking up on where we were just a couple of weeks ago, when Tony Ford brought you a most illuminating address from the fifth chapter, focusing towards the end, though taking the whole breadth into consideration, on the person of Enoch.

Genesis and chapter six. When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful and they married any of them they chose. Then the Lord said, my spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal.

His days will be a hundred and twenty years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterwards, when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth and his heart was filled with pain. So the Lord said, I will wipe mankind whom I have created from the face of the earth, men and animals and creatures that move along the ground and birds of the air, for I am grieved that I have made them.

But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. Well, apparently it was one of the SS troops from the British Army, one of the crack regiment of soldiers who took out, to put it colloquially, a Serbian war criminal last week. If you were to review what's happened in Serbia and Bosnia over the last three years, you would think perhaps of that song that was in the top twenty in the 1950s, When Will They Ever Learn.

If you just turn the clock back from the Croatia and Serbian conflict some fifteen years or twenty years before and you dwell your concentration on Cambodia, you may recall that there was a war of horrific consequence, the effects of which are only just being measured today. Possibly one-third of all Cambodians were killed by their own countrymen, and part of the country of Cambodia is known as the killing fields. If you picked up The Guardian yesterday, the supplement was given over at least one of his essays to an insightful evaluation of Namibia.

Namibia is a country just north of South Africa and was dominated by the Afrikaner regime. A man there was evicted some fifteen years back, and he's just returned as a journalist. He has done a present evaluation of the circumstances in Namibia.

You know what? Surprise, surprise. He has said that basically nothing has changed. New leaders, they're not white-skinned, they're black-skinned.

But all the problems, all the issues for which he and his white idealistic companions, who were very much a tiny minority, those don't seem to have been realized. And he has discovered that whether a man is black or white, basic to all races is the incipient disease of greed, and to a large degree couldn't care less attitude. Now I'm painting with one brush on a large canvas, and the generalizations therefore are many, but there is no one within this congregation this morning who could argue that the picture I've indicated is nothing but at that general level accurate.

So we've got on Mars a little mobile, I was going to call it a car, reminds me more like a sort of sophisticated wheelbarrow, and it moves around. One stage, one inch per second, which they said was at least faster than the London traffic shifts at various parts in the day. I'm not too sure of how much it has cost to put that thing on Mars, but it's certainly in billions and not just in millions.

Now imagine that there was, which I don't think there is for a moment, life on Mars, and that a Martian, or if you don't like Mars, pick another planet and plonk someone there and bring them to Earth. That some intelligent being had the opportunity of visiting us and making a sort of evaluation as to how we intelligent beings on planet Earth are getting along. Imagine that he dropped down in North Korea at present, where the most horrific pictures are coming through of boys and girls in a state of semi-starvation.

And assuming that this being from outer space is not only intelligent but moral and has therefore an ethical criteria by which to judge us, he might be asking, why have you spent so much money putting a mechanised trolley on Mars when there is so much human need in Northern Korea? Now I've sustained the point by giving you these extended illustrations. One film recently released was called The Madness of King George III. It could have been followed with another, The Madness of the Adamic Family.

For quite frankly, as you look in many nooks and crannies in our world today, there is little other conclusion that you can come to but that there is within man a sort of schizophrenia. On the one hand, as I spelled out so many times in this study from Genesis, there is genius. And on the other, there is crass folly.

And the question that requires an answer is, why? Why can't he get his act together? What is fundamentally wrong with man? And that's the reason why I've been taking you back to the early chapters of the book of Genesis because here is spelt out the Bible's analysis of the human situation. You can look at it and laugh at it but one thing you will be left with, even if you in scorn, remove yourself from its arguments. Is this fundamental question that man is in a dilemma and why is he in the mess in which he finds himself? And my argument is that there is no other authority actually that gives you an insight and makes sense more than the first few chapters of Genesis and indeed the whole of the Bible.

When you get to Genesis 6, you've gone through a sort of seismic shift. What do I mean by that? Well, the opening two chapters are really so very wonderful, aren't they? I mean, they tell of a world fresh from the hand of God and everything is so very, very remarkable. Everything is so very wonderful.

Indeed, I would say that in the first two chapters you are confronted with the ecstasy of God. It's good, it's good, it's good, it's good, it's very good. But by the time you get to the sixth chapter and even before, you're confronted with the agony of God.

It's bad, it's bad, it's very bad. There is an inversion, you see. In the opening chapters, man, a reflection of God.

As you move towards the fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters, you see man and his rejection of God. Tyson bit off or took a bite of the ear of his boxing colleague, if that's the right term. And as a result, he brought disrepute to that so-called sport.

They said that the image of boxing has been threatened as a result of this brutal, senseless act. And it would be true to say that when man engaged in conflict with God, he too bit off more than he could chew. And as a result, the image that he had of God, for he was born to reflect something of the character of God, is utterly shattered.

So, the contrast. Good, good, good. Bad, bad, bad.

Man is told in Genesis 1 to go forth and to multiply and to fill the earth with his kind. But by the time you get to the fifth and sixth chapter, you discover that the earth is full of violence. What God did not want originally has now happened.

And somewhere between these contrasting chapters, the first two and these four that we're looking at, we are given an insight into the problem that man faced not only then but also faces now. The problem of his disengagement from God. The problem of him going his own way.

And you discover that though in the first chapter God determines to make the earth, in the sixth chapter there's an about turn. The seventh verse, I will wipe mankind whom I have created from the face of the earth, men, animals, creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air, for I am grieved that I have made them. You see what I mean? When I tell you you've got such an incredible contrast and you're only in the opening chapters of the Bible.

You're only there at the sixth chapter and things have become so different from the first two. You have to pinch yourself and ask, can this really be the case? How can things so quickly have gone so terribly, terribly wrong? Now, this sixth chapter does not present us with a very pretty sight at all. In fact, one might be tempted to bypass the opening verses.

They deal with something that seems to be very difficult depending on which commentators you look at, whether they're liberal or even evangelical but have taken a fanciful ride. You might find that there is presented here the possibility of some divine beings coming down on the earth and having sexual relationships with humankind and spawning some giants. Here is the stuff of which Jurassic Park and Hollywood films are made, the possibility of dragons and ogres and so forth.

Here you find, if you deal cavalierly with the narrative, the thought of God acting in a very impetuous way and with passion wanting the demise of everything, you come to these verses which speak in the second of the number of the daughters of men being exploited by the sons of God. And there are those who have suggested that one of the interpretations is that somehow angels can be attracted to women folk and speculation takes leave of senses when the reason suggested for the apostle Paul insisting that women cover their heads in the Corinthian church is because of the problems that angels have with women. And now in terms of ingenuity, it deserves a prize.

But in terms of an understanding of scripture, it causes you to shake your head and to wonder if reason has departed. So what do we have in these verses? For past them I will not. Let me show you by the way of just using the overhead for a moment or two.

Here are three couplets in which we can learn something about God and man. Man and his dealings, when man began to increase in number on the earth, what they did. And the second couplet or the second part of that first couplet, God and his feelings.

Then verse three, the Lord said, man and his dealings, God and his feelings. And then later on, mirroring in on the same thing but expressing it differently, here is man and his inclination. Every inclination of the thoughts of man's heart was only evil, verse five.

Here is God and his declaration, verse six. The Lord was grieved that he made man on the earth and his heart was filled with pain. And the third couplet, which again just mirrors the first two.

Here is man and his guilt, highlighted by God saying, I will wipe mankind whom I have created from the face of the earth, verse seven. And the second part of the third couplet, here is God in his grace but nor found favor in the eyes of the Lord. So let me unpack these verses with those three couplets in our minds.

Man and his dealings, the opening verses. When man began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them. The first thing you have to realize and something that you must keep in mind all the time is that God is in contact with the world.

Man was created so that God could have fellowship with man. But when that fellowship was breached, God does not retire to his ivory palace in the heavens and let man get on with it. Throughout the whole of the book of Genesis and on to the rest of scripture, you get the concept of God drawing near.

God's eyes are upon Noah. The eyes of God run to and fro. That's an anthropomorphic term.

That word means sometimes the biblical writers will use phraseology that speak of God as though he's a man. Not because he is, but because that's the only way that you can understand certain of his attributes. God is fully aware of what goes on today.

Serbia, Croatia, Namibia, North Korea. He knows how nations spend their monies. He knows how individuals look after their affairs.

Man is under surveillance. This is man and he's engaged in dealings. What is he doing? Well, there were emerging within the family of Adam those who were inclined to follow the Lord, and there were those who were disinclined.

That's the story of the Bible. Those who are elect, if you like, the church in the Old Testament and the New Testament, and those who are very cavalier in their spirituality. They couldn't really care a toss.

In the fifth chapter, you come across the line of Seth and also Cain, and you begin to realize that despite the problems there are in our emerging world, in the emerging story of humankind, there were those, last verse of chapter four, who began to call on the name of the Lord. Highlighted by Enoch who walks with God. Highlighted perhaps also by Lamech who seemed to be concerned about the things of the Lord.

How does the Bible generally describe people who are concerned to follow him? Now are we the sons of God? John's speaking to the church in his day. Here is Hosea speaking for God of Israel, and he talks about Israel as my son, Israel as my child. The term sons of God becomes a denominator in Scripture to indicate people.

They may be a mixed bunch. They may not all be genuine who desire to follow the Lord, the sons of God, the line of Seth. But there is also in the fifth chapter and anticipation in the fourth, the line of Cain, those who are deliberately going against the expressed will of the Lord.

They will develop, they will multiply, they will at times, and indeed for the larger part of human history, be in the majority. Tell me, what does the church do today? What is the church? It's not a building. The church is people.

What's the nature of the church? What's the function of the church? The church is salt. The church is light. If the church ceases to exist, society crumbles.

Society is always good when the church is healthy. At least society benefits. So when the sons of light behave as though they are sons of darkness, when there is intermingling between the sons of Seth and the sons and daughters of Cain, then there are great problems.

Later on as the Bible develops this doctrine, it will speak about the separation that there should be between those who are following the Lord and those who are not. Later on it will be refined in terms of marriage, and we will be told that the believer is not to marry the unbeliever. And here, much to the disapproval of God, you find that the line of Seth, the sons of God, are merging with the daughters of men.

And it seems as though that small community of those who really want to follow the Lord is narrowing itself down and down and here is God almost in an agony as he looks upon the scene. Michael Jackson went to Sheffield. Now if the kids were in, they would have appreciated that name straight away.

Most of you, 99% I give you for sanctification this morning, you haven't got a clue who he is. Jacko. Known throughout the world with some very grievous unanswered charges leveled at him.

He played to the biggest auditorium in my home city. They said it was brilliant. He and others, the Spice Girls and what have you, household words at least amongst the younger generation.

These are the people of renown. These are the people of fame. And in these opening days of history, there were the Nephilim, strong, sometimes considered to be, but perhaps not accurately translated from the original, as giants.

These were men, women, making an impact, but they were not following the line of Seth. They were not following the purposes of God. They were the heroes of old men of renown.

And God is displeased as he looks upon man and his dealings. So concerned to marry women of form and beauty than to preserve the purposes of God, making idols of those whose loss of the image of God is obvious. Man and his dealings, provoking God with feelings.

Feelings of what? Well, look at verse three. Then in the light of all that's happening, then the Lord said, my spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal. His days will be a hundred and twenty.

Here is an explanation. Here is an exclamation and an explanation. My spirit will not contend with man.

Exclamation. You see, there is a limit, if you please, to the patience of God. There are parameters, there are boundaries that he sets.

Later on, this verse is going to be unpacked. It's going to take the whole of Scripture to show what it really means to declare that God is a passionate being who has feelings. It's going to take the New Testament to unravel what it means about the work of the Spirit moving upon the hearts of men and women and how the Spirit can be resisted.

But here it is. Here is a summary statement of all that is to follow. My spirit will not contend with man forever.

Exclamation. For he is mortal. Explanation.

You see, the word mortal has the same connotation as corrupt. In fact, it carries that as a rider in the NIV as an optional translation. And that word corrupt in the authorized version is put across as flesh.

And here is the concept of the fleshliness of man becoming dominant. And here is God. And he's looked at man being controlled by his fleshly nature for so long, spurning his grace.

And so God says as he is confronted by man and his dealings, my spirit will not contend with man forever. For he is mortal. A failure to recognize the power of God, the messengers of God, to enthrone and make heroes of those who speak and whose example is harmful to society.

It was there then. It's there today. This is why you need to go back to the beginnings.

I have a heart of compassion for Michael Jackson, but he needs help. But he's proclaimed by the public as being such a great image, someone to follow. You know what I want, what I really, really want? The Spice Girls need our prayers.

But these are the heroes and the heroines, man and his dealings, God and his feelings. Let's move on. Man and his inclination.

The Lord saw how great the wickedness, how great man's wickedness was on the earth and had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his hearts were only evil all the time. It's a schoolboy question, isn't it? Knock, knock. What did Big Ben have to say to the Tower of Pisa? What did Big Ben have to say to the Tower of Pisa? The other way around.

What did the Tower of Pisa have to say to Big Ben? What did the Tower of Pisa have to say to Big Ben? Big Ben said, I've got the time if you've got the inclination. Well, I did say it was a schoolboy, Howard, didn't I? I mean, bless my soul. If the kids had been here, they'd have appreciated it.

The inclination. Worthing. What is Worthing famous for? What is Wimbledon famous for? Tennis.

Worthing. Bowls throughout the world known. Well, I doubt it, but that's according to the town hall publicity.

What is basic to bowls? Bias. You get your wood, you put it down the green, and there's a bias. And if you're skillful, you can get it near the jack, because in sending it out of your grasp, you make an allowance for the bias that is inbuilt.

Man has a bias. He has a bias and inclination towards sin. It's there in his mind.

This is what the Word of God says. The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The mind is the workshop.

It's the mind that fashions the character. Here is psychological truth. In the early chapters of Genesis, principles which stand the test for all time.

Modern psychology knows the power of the mind. Modern medicine knows the power of the mind. And man in his inclination is directed deliberately against all that God is for.

The old Puritans talked about total depravity, and they reckon that we're all totally depraved. They don't mean by that that there is no good that a man can do. What do they mean? What they mean is this, that as far as God's ideal purposes for man is concerned, he really hasn't got a clue.

He hasn't got a chance. Because of his inclination towards being biased, the heart is deceitful above all things, desperately wicked. The world has produced its Mother Teresa's, its Nelson Mandela's.

Mandela was talking to my good friend Fiona Castle just a few days ago down in Cape Town. Mandela said to Fiona and to Baroness Cox who was with her, is there anything you can do for Mobutu? Mobutu was the leader of Zaire. He milked the nation to the extent that in Swiss bank accounts is money that is equivalent to the national debt of Zaire.

And nobody wants Mobutu at all. And he's riddled with cancer. And Mandela says, he's a pitiful man, whatever he's done, is there nothing that can be done at least to help him because he is a human being? You see, there is a goodness.

But as far as our relationship towards the Lord is concerned, there is an overarching tend to do those things which are wrong towards evil at the larger level, at the individual level. You know it, I know it. The good that I would, I do not.

The evil that I would not, that I do. Man and his inclination. So it is followed frighteningly by God and his declaration.

The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth and his heart was filled with pain. It repented the Lord that he'd made man. That's what the authorised version says.

The idea of God changing his mind is very difficult, isn't it? You change your mind, don't you? Rona and I, we changed our mind when we were going to Ashburnham yesterday. She said one way, I said the other way. And the little interaction was a place called Battle.

The bruise on my forehead has got nothing to do with that. I was chopping wood earlier on in the week and a piece just flew up and mercifully missed my eye or else I would have been in trouble. Here is God changing his mind or seemingly so, wishing he'd never made man.

John Calvin says the repentance which is here ascribed to God does not properly belong to him but has reference to our understanding of him. What does Calvin mean? It's very difficult for the writers of the Bible to speak accurately about God's reaction. And so sometimes back again we're using that term, they use anthropomorphic language as though God was like us, he's not.

But he will react immediately to a circumstance and lay bare what his heart is even though in the long term he will still continue to do what he has determined. Listen to the easier language of an American theologian. In the case of God being sorry that he had made man it can be understood as God's present displeasure towards the sinfulness of man.

The language is not strong enough to require us to think that if God could start again and act differently he would in fact not create man. It implies that God's action of creation led to events that in the short term caused him sorrow but nonetheless in the long term would achieve his purpose. It's disturbing what he says, wipe out mankind.

It's difficult the concept of God changing his mind. Wipe out mankind, wipe out not only man but also the animals. John Calvin says why does God do this? Why the animals? They're innocent.

A constant theme in Calvin is the problem that he has with God's treatment of animals. Calvin goes on to say that the animals were built into the environment with man as being the apex of creation and therefore as a household might be despoiled because of the infamy of the householder so the animals will suffer for man. Calvin says that shows you the greatness of sin, how enormous it is, how awful it is, how terrible it is that man can bring such ruin to himself, such ruin to his environment, such ruin to the animal kingdom.

God says I'll wipe, I'll wipe man off the face of the earth. Which takes us lastly and quickly to man and his guilt. It repents me, he says it again.

I will wipe mankind whom I have created from the face of the earth, men and animals and creatures that move along for I am grieved that I have made them. Man and his guilt, the good that I would I do not. God saying of man this is not my workmanship, this is not that man who was formed in my image and who I adorn with such excellent gifts.

I do not deign now to acknowledge this degenerate and defiled creature as mine. I've known parents who've got to that state, mercifully they've changed their attitude but when the son and the daughter has brought so much hurt they wish that their boy had never been born, wish that they've been snuffed out in the womb and I can understand such feelings at time, that immediate gut level reaction to so many problems and so much hurt that an individual may have brought within a family and here is God saying of man, I do not deign to recognize him, his immediate reaction. But thank God for the grace that there is within our heavenly Father.

Man and his guilt, God responds to the sin of man, the heaped up sin of man and could almost wish in the short term that man had never been made and then there's grace. Noah finds grace in the eyes of God, that restoring, restraining grace that no one has known and throughout these chapters as I've shown you time and time again along with the guilt of man there is the grace of God. Why does God allow 120 years to be designated as a figure in the third verse when he says, my spirit will not contend with man forever for he is mortal, his days will be 120 years.

It's not a very good translation, it's not that man's days on average will be 120 years, some of these men later on in Genesis they live longer than that. What God is saying is there will be 120 years before he deals with man with a flood and so on and so forth. Why the lapse of 120 years? Because he's a God of grace.

He will give the opportunity for these men, for these women to repent as God singles out Noah here and we're told that Noah finds grace in the eyes of the Lord. It's all there you see, I wish I could impress upon you the necessity of studying these opening chapters of the book of Genesis, the whole of the theology that is to come is summarized in these verses. Where sin abounds, grace did much more abound, that's a maxim of God.

Here is sin at its foulest, sin at its most heinous and yet in God's grace even though he reacts immediately against the sin that's repugnant on the long-term view because of his grace and his promise to Adam and Eve, he'll do something about it. Such is the grace of our God, the mercies of our God, the compassions of our God. I was speaking just a few days ago at a conference in which I was asked to preach the gospel as though my audience were Islamic, that is at least to have some recognition of the theological understanding of God on the part of an Islamic community and how the gospel interacts and how the gospel I believe corrects.

And I took the person of Allah and when you read the Quran, very little grasp does it give you illustration that Allah is merciful despite what he said by the Muslim. But when you go through the Bible it's punctuated with the grace of God, all the depths of the riches of the mercy of God. New every morning, his compassions they're there.

He will not dilly-dally with sin and with the sinner but he will deal with them in such a fashion that instead of excusing their sin he'll bring their sin to book and deal with them in grace. God found Noah, God found you, God found me. Thank God that besides the dealings of mine you place the doings of God and his love is directed towards you and to me this morning.

Let's listen to these musicians playing so beautifully this morning. The song that will help us as we come around the Lord's table and we affirm afresh what we have been hearing from the Word of God as they play the refrain, my Jesus I love thee and some of the men here help me as we set up this communion.