God is pleased with that offering. The Lord smelt a sweet savour.
If we absent ourselves from the house of worship, we say, in effect, we do not understand the importance of worship. We fail to praise and worship God in private devotions, we just rush into his presence and ask for our needs, and there is no worship, there is no thanksgiving, there is no dedication – we are showing that even as Christians we do not understand the ABC of worship. It is pleasure to God. A pleasure we can scarcely grasp or take in. In olden times, not today, it was illustrated by something that humans would find pleasurable to smell, indicating that God finds pleasure.
How was it that the flood was justified in the first place? It was justified because the heart of man and his imagination is continuously evil. Then surely judgment is still justified. Ah, but the reasoning is deeper than that. I will send a flood this once, to teach the world about judgment and that there is a final judgment coming. But I will not do it again, because, God seems to say, I would have to do it every five minutes; I would have to do it repeatedly. I will not do it again because the heart of man is continually evil. It was enough to do it once to warn the world for all time that there is judgment coming, but God’s purpose still remains to let history run its course and to fulfil all prophecy. There will not be another universal judgment until the very end, because man will never improve, and it is the purpose of God to call Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to send the prophets, to fulfil all history and to finally send his only begotten Son into the world. If God was to respond to human evil as it deserves, none of this could happen. So God tells us that he is going to exercise infinite restraint and patience and allow the world to continue in spite of sin. Noah and his sons and their wives are still fallen human beings and their descendants will be fallen human beings and the world will soon get back to the terrible state it was in before the flood, but God ‘endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory’ (Romans 9:22-23). So the passage is understandable.