Church: Reformed Baptist Church of Franconia | Text: Genesis 6 | Date: May 29, 2022 | Speaker: Fred Zaspel

All right, we are looking at Genesis 6 to 9 on the flood. We gave last week a brief overview of it, and we saw that the flood story, according to the way that Moses has constructed it, is first of all a story of grace. God remembered Noah; he remembered the promise that he had made to Noah. And that seems to be the point that Moses wants to emphasize. But of course, the story is also a story of divine judgment. And that’s what we’ll look at today.

That’s the way the passage is set up for us. You remember, we have these major divisions of the book: “These are the generations of,” “these are the generations of,” and now we’re at the “these are the generations of Noah.” And so we’re talking about the Noah event, which primarily now is the account of the flood. Chapter 6, verses 1 to 8, actually conclude the section that was begun in chapter 1, “These are the Book of the Generations of Adam.” We get to chapter 6 and verses 1 to 8; that actually concludes that section.

And you’ll notice in verse 9, “these are the generations of Noah.” So now here starts the Noah story, but chapter 6, verses 1 to 8, serves as sort of a transition passage between the two. It’s finishing up the generations of Adam. We come to Noah, but it sets the scene for us for when we come to the Noah account properly in chapter 6, verse 9.

The Advance Of Sin In Humanity

Verses 1 to 4—these verses are often just treated, like we will do today, in connection with what follows because I think it is intended to set us up for it. So verses 1 to 4: “When man began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them. The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were attractive and they took as their wives any as they chose. Then the Lord said, ‘My spirit shall not abide in…'” You know, I’m not sure why the ESV translates it this way, “my spirit shall not abide in man.” I think the better translation is what we have in the NIV, the NAS, the KJV: “My spirit shall not always strive with men” or “contend with men.” It’s an unusual word and I just haven’t checked. I’m sure they have good reasons for it, but I think the sense, though, is that of contending or striving. There are other explanations for this verb here; it means to protect man. “My spirit will not always protect man and now the judgment is coming.” Bottom line: the sense is, time is up.

“So my spirit shall not always strive with man forever, for he is flesh. His days shall be 120 years.” I think the point of that is 120 years, not as a lifespan, but 120 years before the judgment of the flood comes. So once again: “My spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is flesh. His days shall be 120 years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterwards, when the sons of God came into the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. These were mighty men who were of old, men of renown.”

Notice, by the way, in verse 2—well, verses 1 and 2—”when men began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were attractive. They took as their wives any that they chose.” So you have this: they saw, it was good, and they took. And it seems to be an echo of what we saw in Genesis chapter 3. Continuing, and the point is the continuing growing of evil in humanity.

All right, we come to verse 2 then, and we have the “sons of God,” or the “sons of the gods,” or however we should translate it. And there has been endless discussion on this: who are the sons of God that are spoken of here? There have been a number of different interpretations that have been offered.

One is—and this is the ancient interpretation—that they were angels who had come, they’d cohabited with women and bore children. Another interpretation is that they were royalty, heroes, big shots kind of thing, kings, that kind of thing is what we’ll see that in a second, a dynasty of tyrants. And then others like Calvin and Luther take this as the sons of God to be the sons of Seth. And so we’re tracing the line of Seth as opposed to the line of Cain.

And I think at least superficially—and I think it’s just superficially—but it’s superficially that makes sense in the flow of the narrative of Genesis. The Sethites then are taking the daughters of Cain, and so you see the continuing disintegration of humanity in terms of morals. So you have the godly line intermingling with the ungodly line of Cain. That was the view of Calvin and Luther. I don’t think that holds. It’s introduced for us in verse 1 with man and the daughters of man. That’s just humanity. A female offspring of man, the daughters of man. That’s all it is, I think. And I think it’s arbitrary to make the sons of God mean the Sethites and the daughters born to them are the Cainites. I just don’t think that works very well. I think verses 1 and 2, he’s just talking about the growth of humanity.

Now the angel interpretation: the sons of God, I’m sure you’re familiar with this. This is the ancient interpretation. In fact, the most ancient view is that these are angels who have come, and there’s some good precedent for that, generally at least. “Sons of God,” in that expression in Job, clearly refers to angels. That also, it seems, informs—this passage seems to inform—two New Testament passages that speak of angels.

And I’ll just read them for you; we won’t take time to go, but 1 Peter 3:18-20: “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water.” And then Jude verse 6: “The angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day.” So that seems to be a reference back to Genesis chapter 6. So there’s some connection with angels, and I think that’s right, although I’m going to want to qualify it in a minute.

The problem with this angel interpretation—and I think in some sense it’s insurmountable—is that, one, two things. One, the flood is a judgment on humanity, not on angels. They’re being kept under judgment for later, but this judgment is because of the evil of humanity. And more importantly, I think, the whole idea of angels procreating with humanity I just think doesn’t fit. It seems to contradict what Jesus said about angels. There’s no marrying or giving marriage, but we’re like the angels. I just, I think that’s insurmountable.

The third view is that these are some kind of royalty, a dynasty of tyrants of some kind. The “sons of God” language is used to describe that. So they’re nobles, they’re aristocrats, people with authority and power, and they’re abusing that power. It might have been some kind of idea of divine kings claiming deity for themselves, someone in the line of Cain claiming deity.

And it says they produced Nephilim. Now, in the New International Version, they didn’t bother translating Nephilim. That’s the Hebrew term. I’m not sure what it means. So they just gave you Nephilim. If you have a New International Version, that’s what you see there: Nephilim. The question is, what are Nephilim? It really hasn’t helped at all. It’s translated sometimes “giants.” I think the idea is that of heroes, mighty men, maybe even thugs—men who took wives as they chose, any wife that they want. We find examples of that in Genesis 12, where Pharaoh, in the time of Abraham, takes whatever wife he wants. We even see something of that with David, 2 Samuel 11, with Bathsheba. Take what you want.

I think that’s the idea, at least generally. And I think that’s this royal tyrant’s view of who the sons of God are. I think it’s a reasonable interpretation. And then you add to that the 1st Peter and the Jude reference, where it’s connected with angels. I don’t think we can say that these are angels cohabiting with humanity, but what we have is this dynasty of tyrants who are demon-possessed, and so the involvement of the angels in that regard. So I think what we have here then is a description of these ruthless human rulers who are demon-possessed.

Verses 1 and 2 then, we have a brief snapshot of the violence and the oppression that characterized the day. In a way, it’s difficult to see how it’s any different from today. But God said he wouldn’t do that again, so we are still here. But verses one and two, the violence, the oppression that characterized that day. Verse three, God won’t let this continue for long. They’ve got 120 years and that’ll be it. That’s 1 Peter chapter three, verse 20: “They formerly did not obey when God’s patience waited in the day of Noah.”

And then verse four, the Nephilim are these mighty men who were of old, the men of renown. Again, sometimes translated giants. There’s a reference to that in Numbers chapter 13 later. We have Nephilim, and these are mighty men. And you remember, “we seem like grasshoppers in their sight.” So maybe they were actual giants, large size men. Or it’s just a reference to—the root probably means something to be wonderful, to be mighty, to be strong. So it’s great men, strong men of some kind, men of renown. That’s the way they’re described here.

So we have whatever they are. And I made a comment to somebody afterwards last week asking about who are the sons of God. I made the comment that nobody knows. A lot of people think they know. I thought I knew for a long time. And I took the angel view. I just can’t get over the fact that the idea of angels cohabiting with humanity just doesn’t fit reasonably at all. And so I think the idea of demon-possessed leaders is really the best interpretation here. So you have powerful leaders or thugs of some kind, the stuff of which legends are made. And you have echoes of this in some of the ancient Near Eastern literature, the Gilgamesh epic and things like that, and other ancient myths talking about these great leaders of the time who were powerful and abused their authority. And I think this is probably the root of some of that.

All right. If you wanted a long study on the sons of God and angels, you’re not getting it. That’s what you get. That’s all you get. So verses 1 to 4, in brief here, we have humanity advancing and advancing with regard to evil and oppression and violence. Don’t get allergies. We’re terrible. So we have the advance of sin in humanity. That’s a developing theme in Genesis before here and now after this as well. The sin in humanity is intense, it is universal, and now it has brought divine judgment.

Gerhardus Vos has an interesting statement here that I think is helpful just to put this in perspective. He says, “Had God permitted grace freely to flow out into the world and to gather great strength within a short period, then the true nature and consequences of sin would have been very imperfectly disclosed. Man would have ascribed to his own relative goodness what was in reality a product of the grace of God. Hence, before the work of redemption is further carried out, the downward tendency of sin is clearly illustrated in order that subsequently, in the light of this downgrade movement, the true divine cause of the upward course of redemption might be appreciated.” Well, that’s an old-fashioned way of saying, if God had worked in grace too soon, we wouldn’t have appreciated it.

God’s Indictment On Humanity

Well, we come then to verses 5 to 8, which finishes the setup then for the flood account. Verse 5: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I’m sorry that I have made them.’ But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.”

Now we should take a few minutes with verse five. This is God’s indictment on humanity. Look at the particulars of this again: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” And there are a lot of particulars we have in that. There’s a contrast I think we’re intended to see here, and that is with chapter 1, where God said he saw that it was good, he saw that it was good, he saw that it was good. It’s the end of the chapter, “it was very good,” and now we have the wickedness of man very great in every kind of way.

In verses 11 to 13, which we took a look at last time briefly, we have the evil activities of humanity, and that is the corruption filled the earth, and they’re filled with violence. We saw that in verses 11 to 13. But verse 5 is not speaking specifically about the evil actions of humanity. Verse 5 addresses the evil of man himself. “God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.”

So look at the specifics here. Let’s pick this apart. The specifics of God’s indictment on humanity. John Murray characterized it this way, and I think it’s helpful. Number one, notice the intensity of it: “The wickedness of man was great in the earth.” There’s an intense evil. Two, there’s the inwardness of it: “The intentions of the thoughts of his heart.” So the idea is that of the most rudimentary movements of the mind even were evil, not just the actions. Then there’s the totality of it, third: “Every intention of the thoughts of his heart.” And then there’s the constancy of it: “It was only evil all the time.” And then there’s the exclusiveness of it, he says: “It was only evil.”

It’s quite an indictment. The wickedness of man is great—that’s the intensity of it. It’s inward; it has to do even with the thoughts of his heart. It is every intention. It is constant all the time. And it’s only evil; nothing good about it. That’s God’s characterization of humanity. Now this is what we mean by simply total depravity: that Adam’s sin has brought a moral and a spiritual ruin to his descendants and the entire race has been corrupt. And every faculty of our being affected by it.

So again, we have the contrast with Genesis chapter one: everything was good and it was very good. God characterized his creation as perfect, serving its order, doing what it was intended to do. It’s a perfect picture, man and wife living together as they should in God’s created order. And God looks at it and he was pleased with his work and he says, “It’s very good.” Genesis 3, we have the fall, the great rebellion. Genesis 4, we have Cain’s false worship. We have his hatred of his brother and his murder of his brother. Genesis 5, we have that repeated refrain that judgment has come into the world, and “he died,” and “he lived so many years, and he died,” and “he died,” and “the next guy died,” and “the next guy died,” and that’s the story of humanity.

And now we come to chapter 6, verses 1 to 4, and we have moral anarchy of some kind. Sons of God taking whom they will, daughters of men, exercising their rough authority over others who are less advantaged. And now chapter 6, verses 5 to 7—then we have, for verse five, we have the indictment on humanity itself. This is not just evil activity, but it reflects what man has become. And so verses five to seven give us then the reason for the flood stated precisely:

“The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth. Every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I’m sorry that I have made them.’ But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.”

Now in verses 11 to 13 that I mentioned earlier, we have it again. The indictment continued: “The earth was corrupt in God’s sight. The earth was filled with violence. God saw the earth and behold, it was corrupt for all flesh had corrupted their ways on the earth. And God said to Noah, ‘I’ve determined to make an end of all flesh for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth.'” So we have this—actually there’s a wordplay in the Hebrew going on here—with “corrupted” and “violence” and “destroyed.” They’re corrupt and God’s going to destroy them.

The Lord Regretted That He Had Made Man

So the flood story then, according to this setup, is a story of judgment. Humanity has progressed in its sin, its evil has become intense and it’s become exclusive and it’s become expressed in all kinds of ways and God says, “That’s it, I’ll wipe them all out.” Noah found favor, and his family will be saved. We’ll see that in the coming weeks. But God is going to destroy humanity. And it’s just an awful, awful passage when you read through it. We have this brief account of the destruction of humanity, and it is in such short shrift that you can read through it too quickly and not catch the enormity of the awfulness of God’s judgment that has fallen. Can you imagine? Here’s Noah and his three sons, his wife, their wives, and that’s it. All of humanity destroyed and they alone are left. And I’m sure they, as I mentioned last week, they had a sense of divine wrath and judgment that we don’t adequately appreciate. And so in chapters six to eight now, we have this total devastation of the earth and all of mankind destroyed.

2 Peter chapter two and verse five comments on it. Given the sinfulness of the world, they refused to hear Noah, who was a preacher of righteousness. Peter says, God “did not spare the ancient world, but… brought a flood on the world of the ungodly.” Now, chapter six, verses six and seven, we have a theological issue that we have to talk about. If you have not puzzled over this kind of language in the Bible, you’re probably the only one here who hasn’t. Verses six and seven: “The Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth.” I think in the King James that’s translated, “it repented, the Lord repented that he had made man.” This is an improvement on that. The word “repent” has connotations of evil that has been done, wrong has been committed, and this does not have that. We still have a problem to deal with, but “the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, ‘I will blot out man whom I’ve created from the face of the land, man and animal, creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.'”

So God is sorry. God regrets. How do we explain that? We have that several times in the Bible, in the Old Testament in particular—God saying he regrets what he has done and he’s going to take a different course of action. So is God confessing to a great cosmic mistake? “I wish I hadn’t done this.”

And I think the way to understand this is to start, when we come across language like this, start with some anchor points that we have theologically, some statements in scripture that give us some frame of reference in how we can understand that. And the first anchor point is God’s omniscience—that God is omnipotent, he’s sovereign, he’s immutable, he’s self-existent, he’s transcendent. All that the Bible tells us about who God is and all of his perfections bring us to think, “Okay, this statement, ‘the Lord regretted that he made man on the earth,’ has got to be qualified somehow.” Because the teaching about God’s omniscience and his perfections is so clear everywhere else in the Bible, we have to find somehow else to understand this.

God is not contingent. He’s not dependent on his humanity, on the humanity that he created. He’s not dependent on what they do. He’s not contingent. In fact, why don’t you turn to this one: Isaiah chapter 40, verses 13 and 14. I think this has tremendous implications for this area of theology. Isaiah 40, verses 13 and 14. I’ll wait till you get it because I want you to see it. Isaiah 40 verse 13: “Who has measured the spirit of the Lord or what man has shown him counsel? Whom did he consult? Who made him understand? Who taught him the paths of justice and taught him knowledge and showed him the way of understanding?” You see what he’s saying here about God? Isaiah is saying God never learned anything from anyone. Who taught him? Whoever told him, “No, this is what you should do”? Where did he gain understanding from outside of himself? Well, it never happened. He’s the eternally omniscient God. To put it in philosophical terms, the ground of God’s knowledge is himself, not anything outside of him. The ground of his knowledge is himself.

This is the problem we have with Arminians who like to say that God looked ahead and saw who would believe, and on that basis he chose to save them. That has God learning from the outside. That’s a big theological problem. And Isaiah is telling us here is that never happened with God. He never looked at his creations and, “Oh, well then I’m going to…” It just never happened. So if Isaiah tells us this, unless we have an explicit contradiction, we’ve got to find some way to qualify what we read in these passages that speak of God regretting.

If you’re in Isaiah, look at Isaiah 48 in verse eight. There it says that God is the one who declares the end from the beginning. He tells you what’s going to happen at the end from the very start of it all. This is the omniscient God whose knowledge is grounded in himself and is grounded in his own decrees. That’s how he knows it’s going to happen.

All right, so the first thing we have to do in coming across passages like this is look at some anchor points that we have—theological anchor points to help us understand what’s being said. Second thing we have to do, and this is just as important, and this is part of the process, is recognize the limitations of human language. There is an area of doctrine in theology proper called the incomprehensibility of God. Great big word: the incomprehensibility of God. And all that means is, although we can understand God in the way that he has revealed himself, we can never comprehend him fully. He’s beyond us. If we could comprehend him fully, we would be God. We are finite, he’s infinite, he’s incomprehensible in that sense. Not in the sense that you can’t understand him at all, but that you can’t understand him fully.

Now if that’s the case, if God is who he is, if he’s the infinite creator beyond us, and we’re the finite creation, then any language describing God, by the nature of it, has to be analogical. God is portrayed as a husband. God is portrayed as a king. But in human language, kings and husbands have all kinds of limitations and qualifications. With God, it’s not there. The point is, if he’s king, he’s ruler of all, and that’s it. Husband—it talks of his affection and his protection of his people, and so on. But there’s an analogy that’s made, but it doesn’t walk on all fours. Calvin talked about this at some length in his Institutes of Christian Religion, and he gave the analogy of baby talk. Well, let me update it a little. Could Einstein explain his theory of relativity to a three-year-old? Well, I suppose on one level, he could. Boy, it’s going to have to be adapted down. It’s going to have to be qualified in some very important ways. And it’s the same way in talking about God. Our language is analogical.

We should understand that there are going to be some limitations in this analogy in the way that we talk about God, whether we talk about him as father or king or husband. With regard to God, we have to exclude any notions and connotations that are restrictive with humanity. They don’t apply to God. Same with God’s love, God’s wrath. With our wrath, it’s triggered by something that’s outside of us, our love. We “fall in love.” God loves, but he doesn’t fall in love. He’s not contingent on his creation. He doesn’t say, “Oh, I just can’t help myself. I love those people so much. I just can’t help falling in love with you.” That never happened to God. He’s not contingent. And so even when we use words like “God loves” and “God is wrathful,” all of this is analogical language that doesn’t walk on all fours as it does with respect to us. It doesn’t carry the same connotations. And there’s always some element of mystery; we have to recognize that when we come to this language as well.

And then third, and I think this helps most, once we have that in the background, we can turn to some other passages—the third step, turn to some other passages where this language is used and see what we can learn from that. And I want you to look at 1 Samuel 15. This is the passage I always want to go to in this discussion. 1 Samuel 15—this is the passage where Saul is rejected. Samuel is speaking of Saul’s sin and his rebellion; he won’t follow God, and so he’s out. He won’t be king, his sons won’t be king, his dynasty ends with the first king. Instead, we’re going to have David, and that’s the flow of 1 Samuel here. After this, we have the anointing of David, and we have the David and Goliath incident, and we have the troubles then of David becoming king with Saul running after him and all of that.

But 1 Samuel 15—this is where Saul, King Saul is out. In verse 10: “The word of the Lord came to Samuel, ‘I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned his back from following me and has not performed my commandments.'” So there it is, the language again: “I regret that I’ve made Saul king.” Verse 35, at the end of the chapter you’ll see the same: “The Lord regretted that he made Saul king over Israel.” But now in between, look at verse 29. Second part of the verse: “He who is the glory of Israel will not lie or have regret because he’s not a man that he should have regret.”

So right in the middle of this, we have the statement qualifying the other two. So we can use this language with respect to God, but understand we’re talking about God here. He’s not a man. He doesn’t have the same limitations that we have. Don’t misunderstand; don’t think that God is actually changing his mind. God doesn’t do that. And that’s what verse 29 is telling us. So here we have the language of regretting used again, but specifically qualified for us to say, “Okay, wait, you’re talking about God here and you have to recognize there’s an analogical use of it and it doesn’t have the same connotations.”

I think also helpful in this is Jeremiah chapter 18, verses 7 to 10, and there the prophet says with regard to any prophecy that God has made, if he’s prophesied evil on a nation because of their sin, and if they repent, God will rescind the judgment that he said he would bring. If God has promised to bless a nation, and they commit evil, he’ll rescind the good that he promised to them. So repentance is the key. So all of this is looked at from our standpoint. From God’s standpoint, it’s still Plan A, and Plan A never stopped going. God isn’t surprised by the nation’s repentance, and so he’s not surprised by not giving the judgment that he’d prophesied. He saw it all along. But from our standpoint, this is how we are to read it.

John 6 verses 5 and 6 might provide a perspective here as well. So Jesus, lifting up his eyes then, seeing the large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread?” This is the feeding of the 5,000. “Where are we to buy bread so that these people may eat?” Now was Jesus wondering then, how in the world are we going to feed these people? John tells us, “He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he would do.” I think that’s the bottom line of all of this, is this: the language of God relenting or regretting is adapted to our perspective and can’t be understood in absolute terms. God is eternally omniscient. Plan A is still in place. He knows from the beginning what the end will be, what all outcomes will be, and everything in between. And if it were not that, how else could you trust God? You might love him and you might like him, but how could you trust him if some eventuality might arise that he didn’t know about it? “Oh no, I didn’t know that was going to happen, I regret it. Now we’re going to have to try plan B.” The whole plan of redemption, the whole plan of history—everything falls apart if you take it in that kind of a sense.

Well then the next question then is why? Why even use this language of God regretting? And I think the answer simply is to draw attention to the sinfulness of humanity that Moses is emphasizing in this passage. This is the occasion of divine judgment. Humanity has become sinful and God who remains the same and God who is relentless in his judgment of evil is going to judge evil. And this is the explanation for the flood.

Now on one level, this judgment of the flood is just one of many judgments of God that we read of in the scriptures and through history. We have Sodom and Gomorrah. We have the judgment of Pharaoh’s armies. We have the judgment of the Canaanites. Judgments coming on Babylon and other nations and the prophets speaking of it. And on one level, this is just one of many judgments in the Bible and in history. But on another level, this judgment is so devastating and so pervasive that it becomes a paradigm of the final judgment. And this language is picked up in the prophets as reflecting and echoing the final judgment to come when God will come like a flood and bring judgment on rebels.

We have it in Isaiah chapter 8, the Assyrian army sweeping over Israel like a flood. That’s the flood language that’s being used. But again, in Isaiah 28, the Lord will come against Israel like overflowing waters. Isaiah 30, the Lord will come against the nations and against Assyria like a flood. Jeremiah 47, it’s the Lord against the Philistines. And other places as well, in the New Testament as well. So all of this flood language and this terrible devastation of this flood, awful as it was in itself, becomes something of a model that points forward to what will happen in the end times when God comes in judgment against the wicked. And then the judgment will fall and there’ll be no escape.

My dad told me once, this would have been back in the, probably the 50s or the 60s, he was preaching on the subject of Noah’s Ark. And he took as his text, at least one point of emphasis in the sermon was Genesis 7, verse 16, where it says, Noah entered the Ark and “God shut him in.” And the implication is now, no one else could get in. Noah, his wife, his three sons, their wives—they’re in there and God shut them in. No one else can get in. And you gotta fill in the white spaces a little, but it’s not hard to imagine that when the rain started falling, people are, “Oh my goodness, that Noah was right.” And you can imagine some come clamoring at the door. “Let me in, let me in!” Can’t get in. God shut him in.

And like my dad could do, he is much more eloquent in these kinds of things than I could ever be. But he’s waxing eloquent on this idea of “God shut him in” and the others are shut out. There’s a man in the congregation stood up and said, “I don’t want to be shut out. How can I be saved?” And God was at work, and he came to Christ. But we have that here, and that’s part of the message here. This is a story of divine judgment, and the judgment will come, and one day there’ll be no escape. We’ll have more to say about the doctrine of judgment, actually, in the morning message as well, in connection with the doctrine of justification. But that’s one of the primary lessons now that we learned from the Genesis flood. Next time we’ll talk about the flood as a story of rescue as well. Yeah, Joe. Just going back to Genesis 6:5, yeah.