Genesis 6:5 Commentary and Bible Study

In a sense this has already been said, and so we understand this to mean that there was constantly increasing wickedness. We are now scanning forward over decades; things are growing worse, and in all probability we are well into the 120 years since the beginning of God’s statement and his reflection on the state of man. The heart is brought into it here, and how God hates sin. He sees what no one else sees: the thoughts of the heart and what goes on in the real person. He sees past the veneer of human respectability, and knows what we really think about him, about his standards and our fellow human beings. The mixing of the godly line with the ungodly through intermarriage has resulted in the corruption of the godly and not the reverse. The earth is now filled with violence, we are told later, and that is not surprising because what exists in the heart must come out, like water that cannot be retained by a dam. God looked into human hearts and he saw hatred, vengeance, spite, malice, and intention to murder. There was no let-up in this sequence of evil imaginings but it was the continuous pattern of human thought, and it was seen from the earliest age. One thought led to another and one though justified another worse thought. All this is said to show that what flows was not an overreaction on God’s part. He had said that he would wait 120 years before sending the flood, and he did in deed wait, but in spite of the preaching of Noah to his generation, they only continued to get worse.