Wonder of the Word Daily, Day 3

Judgment and Mercy (Genesis 6-11)

Transcript

Frenetic News-Type Music, in compatible key as theme.

News Announcer: Conflict continued [fade out] across the peninsula today as the two sides . . .

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: When you look at all the headlines in our world today, it’s easy to assume that the world has never been in this bad of condition . . .

News Announcer 2: Thousands were affected by flooding. [fade out] Rainfall is predicted to continue. It’s been unseasonably . . .

Nancy: . . . that things are worse now than they’ve ever been before.

News Announcer 3: The refugee camps have swelled by two thousand [fade out] in the last week as people flee conflict in the worst-hit regions . . .

Nancy: It’s also easy to believe that the corruption that’s in our world, the corruption, the dysfunction, the brokenness, that it will go on unchecked forever, that nothing’s ever going to change that.

[Slight music change]

Well today we’re going to see that neither of those beliefs—no matter how much they seem true—neither of those is true.

Dannah Gresh: Welcome to the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. It’s January 6, 2027, day 3 of “The Wonder of the Word.” Thanks for joining us!

This year, we’re studying the entire Bible with Nancy. We’re about to explore a couple of well-known Bible stories. But even if you’ve heard these stories before, I think they’re going to come alive as you hear them today. You’ll be thankful for God’s grace even as he deals with human sin. Here’s Nancy.

Nancy: In Genesis chapters 1 and 2, we looked at the creation, what God made was good. It was beautiful; it was blessed. But then we came to chapter 3, and we saw the fall into sin. We saw how the Fall affected individuals, Adam and Eve, how it created alienation and blame and isolation and guilt and shame between those two individuals.

Then we came to chapters 4 and 5 in the last session, and we saw that sin is infectious, it's contagious. It infects families, not just individuals, but people within family and community relationships.

Today we will look at chapters 6–11 of the book of Genesis. We're going to see the continued spread, the festering, the spread of wickedness and how it infests and corrupts an entire society.

Now in these chapters we're going to see two important events in the history of the world. One is the flood; the other is the Tower of Babel. I want you to see them in the context of the spreading—like a sea of sin that is spreading throughout the culture. So turn if you would in your Bible to Genesis chapter 6.

Oh Lord, would You open our eyes as we open our Bibles, open our ears, open our hearts, help us to receive the hard things, and the wonderful things, in your Word. Help us to see glimpses of grace, even as we look at this very tragic and painful set of circumstances in the history of our world. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.

Genesis 6:1, “When mankind began to multiply on the earth . . .” Now, let's just stop there for a moment. Life expectancy before the flood was much longer than it is today. There were those who lived more than nine hundred years. I mean, it’s like at five hundred they were teenagers or middle aged. It was something that we can't even imagine today. So the population as a result grew rapidly.

Some scholars estimate that there may have been as many as a billion people on the earth at the time of the flood. Because people were living a long time and they were having children, the population was expanding rapidly—and with an increase in population came an increase in sin, widespread, increasing wickedness. The descendants of Cain, the first son of Adam and Eve, we talked about him in the last session, his descendants became increasingly godless and pagan.

First, they were just good people doing good things, but they were doing it without God. But then they became reprobate, wicked, corrupt. And we see in these chapters the extent, the pervasiveness of man's sinfulness.

Look at verse 5, in chapter 6 of Genesis. “The LORD saw.” The LORD sees; He knows. He's not blindfolded. He's not absent from this. He sees what's going on. He saw it then, and He sees it now.

“The LORD saw that human wickedness was widespread on the earth and that every inclination of the human mind was nothing but evil all the time.”

That's a pretty despairing sentence. That's a pretty rough estimate of what's going on, but it's true. Verse 11:

“Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight, and the earth was filled with wickedness . . . every creature had corrupted its way on the earth.” (vv. 11–12)

What had started as the exception, eating one piece of fruit from one tree; Cain killing Abel, that was serious, but it wasn't like everybody doing that. Now that becomes widespread, that becomes the norm. It becomes accepted. It becomes just the fabric of society, the way things are. Sin had taken its course, and people and culture had become exceedingly wicked.

And couldn't we say that describes the day in which we live?

I came across this rendition of Psalm 13, a part of Psalm 13 from an old psalter where the psalms are put to verse. Listen to what it says:

Help Lord, because the godly have quite vanished,
And faithful folk we can no longer see. . . .
For here the wicked strut about quite freely,
And praise is given to all that is impure.
(Psalm 13:1–2, 7–8, Sing Psalms)

You see, in the first few chapters, we had praise being given to what was pure and good and blessed and right. But now we have praise being given to what is wicked, and scorn being given to what is good. We laugh at what is evil and lament and grieve what is good and beautiful. It's all topsy-turvy, all backwards and inside out. Satan has switched the price tags on sin and unrighteousness and caused us to think that what is sinful is valuable and what is righteous and holy is cheap and worthless. “Help, Lord! Help, Lord!” So we see in verse 6 of chapter 6, God's grief over the sin of mankind.

“[For] the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and he was deeply grieved.”

I think it's important for us to remember that God is personally and deeply affected by sin, not just the big horrendous sin—terrorist acts and massive acts of crime and destruction and war that are going on in our world—but God is deeply grieved over all sin. That includes my sin and your sin. It causes God to be deeply grieved.

When He sees the earth covered in sin, this earth that He created to be good and beautiful and a holy place for Him to live with His people, now God had been thrown out of the earth. He could no longer live with His people. He had been banished from people's thinking because they no longer wanted Him, they no longer wanted to have anything to do with Him. God was grieved by all of this, so what does He do? He purposes to cleanse the earth of wickedness and start all over again.

Here's where we see a glimpse of grace. If you're noting those in your Bible, you might just use the initials GG, glimpse of grace. You'll see them all through Scripture. But here's one in Genesis 6, verse 8. “Noah, however, found favor . . .” Your translation may say, “Noah found grace . . .” Noah found favor, He found grace, He found kindness with the Lord. Some of your translations say He found grace “in the eyes of the Lord.”

The Lord who saw the wickedness of the earth, saw the corruption that was overcoming this planet, He also saw in His eyes one man who found grace. This is the first reference in Scripture to that word, “grace,” sometimes translated “favor.” Many times in the Old Testament it is translated “favor.” It’s the same word.

It's a word we need to come to know and love, because without it, we and this corrupt world are absolutely helpless and hopeless. There's no hope to be delivered from our sin apart from finding grace in the eyes of the Lord, in the midst of this very dark and dire and desperate situation. God showed grace to Noah.

If you are a child of God, you have been delivered from the wrath of God, from the judgment of God. It is because God has shown you grace and favor. You have found grace in His eyes. And what we see in this passage and many others through the Scripture is that in His mercy, no matter how bad things get, God always preserves, let's call it a remnant, a line, sometimes a very thin line of faithful believers, those who receive God's grace and are recipients of His grace.

When corruption became so widespread in this world, if there had not been a remnant, the whole human race, every last human being would have perished in the flood. “What's the problem with that?” you say. “Couldn't God just start over again?” The promise that God had said to the serpent, said to the woman—see there will be a descendant of this woman who will be the Redeemer who will crush the serpent, who will crush and destroy Satan. If the whole earth had perished in the flood, that would have ended the line leading up to Christ, the Messiah.

So what does God do? Again, He's not sitting up in heaven, “How am I gonna figure this out? I don't know what I'm going to do about this one. Boy, these people got me stumped. They are sure bad; I don't know what to do.” No, God never has a thought like that. God knew from all eternity past what He would do.

And what He did was to show grace, to show favor to one man and his family. Of all the people on the face of the earth, perhaps a billion of them, it was a very thin line, a remnant through whom the line of Christ could come. Verse 9 tells us:

“Noah was a righteous man, blameless among his contemporaries. Noah walked with God.”

You talk about swimming upstream against your culture. I mean, when you read some of those verses that every inclination of the human mind was evil all the time, the earth was corrupt, every creature had corrupted his way; everything about Noah stood in contrast to the day in which He lived. He was different. He stood out. He stood alone.

And don't you know, that means He had a lonely life. He was a remnant; He was a minority. There were almost no others on the whole face of the earth who had faith to believe God. So God let Noah know what He was planning to do. Verse 13 of Genesis 6:

“Then God said to Noah, “I've decided to put an end to every creature, for the earth is filled with wickedness because of them; therefore, I'm going to destroy them along with the earth.”

But in the midst of that judgment foretold, God makes provision for rescue from judgment. So in verse 14 He says to Noah:

“Make yourself an ark of gopher wood. Make rooms in the ark, and cover it with pitch inside and outside. This is how you are to make it: . . . [then God gives a description] 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high.”

If you're like me, those numbers don't mean a lot to you. The length is a football field and a half. The width is a six-lane highway. The height is something like a four-story building. It’s a huge seaworthy boat, an ark, to provide rescue from judgment. Then God says in verse 17 to Noah:

“I am bringing a flood—floodwaters on the earth to destroy every creature under heaven with the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. But [these are words that should bring joy to the heart of every child of God] I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark with your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives.” (vv. 17–18)

So Noah obeys God. He follows the instructions for the one hundred twenty years he's building that ark. And then God invites Noah and his family into the ark. Once they're in, God shuts them in so they are secure. They cannot be touched by the floodwaters of God's judgment.

You see, Noah and his family were saved from judgment that the whole earth deserved and all the rest of the earth experienced. How are they saved from judgment? By grace through faith, because they believed God's word. It's God's grace that saves us from the wrath to come as we put our trust in Him. Christ is our ark, our safe place, our place of safety, our refuge from the wrath of God. Even as those floodwaters beat up on Him there at the cross, we are safe in Him from God's judgment.

So while Noah and his family, eight who entered into the ark, were safe from the floodwaters, we see that there was judgment on all those who refused to come into the ark and be saved. Chapter 7 of Genesis, verse 11:

“In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened. And rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights. . . . Every creature perished . . . as well as all mankind. . . . He wiped out every living thing that was on the face of the earth. . . . Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark.” (vv. 11–12, 21, 23)

Now, this is the kind of passage in the Bible that makes some people not like God very much. This judgment, every creature . . . They don't hear the part about those who were saved and everyone having the opportunity to be saved. They just hear about this wholesale judgment of the earth. First, they don't believe it. But then if they do believe it, they say, “This is so cruel, so unfair, I could never believe in that kind of a God.”

Well, we're not going to answer all those questions today. But let me just say, if you and I had any idea how holy God is, if those who dislike God in His ways and His judgment, if they had any idea how holy God is, and how sinful humanity is, and how longsuffering and patient God is, and the gracious provision God has made for mankind to be rescued from His judgment and His wrath; every creature in heaven and on earth, including us, we would bow before Him in worship and wonder and profound gratitude, amazed that God would show mercy to anyone.

We’d realize that His judgments on the earth are absolutely right and fair and true, as we hear sung in the book of Revelation in the final judgment.

A number of years ago, I had the chance to go to a place called Sight & Sound in Branson, Missouri. They do some amazing live musical shows of different biblical accounts. I went with some friends to the one that's on the life of Noah. It told the story of Noah and how people mocked him for years when He was preaching about righteousness. They didn't believe God; He did believe God. You just get the whole story.

Then there's an intermission. When you come back from the intermission and the lights come up, you find that the seats of the auditorium are now in the ark. I mean, we're talking all sides around us. We're seeing above and around the different stories and levels of the ark with the animals in them and then you start to hear the rain on the outside of the ark.

The patter of the rain becomes a torrential downpour. You can hear as the water starts to rise, the people outside the ark screaming out in desperation as they are about to perish. I can remember sitting there that day just overcome with the sense of what it meant to be in the ark. I just kept saying to myself, “I'm safe in the ark. I'm safe in the ark. I'm safe in the ark.”

And we see that Christ is our safety; He is our place of refuge. If it weren't for Him, you and I would be outside the ark in the place where the storms of life and the storms of God's wrath and the storms of God's judgment will accumulate one day and destroy all of the earth in a great final judgment. But to be in Christ is to be safe.

It hit me that day with a force I've not forgotten. It was a deeply emotional thing to me just to realize what it means to be preserved, saved to find grace in the eyes of the Lord, and to be saved from His judgment.

The flood is a warning to every generation that God takes sin seriously, that there's a final judgment. There's coming one day the wrath of God that will destroy all of this earth. The flood reveals God's deadly anger over sin and God's right to rule over His creation.

It's also a reminder that even in judgment, God shows mercy. He's longsuffering until a final judgment. That day is coming. But at the moment, God is delaying the final judgment, giving you and others who have never believed in Him an opportunity to come into the ark through faith in Christ and to be saved through His grace. He gives an opportunity to repent of your sin, to come to Christ and say, “I believe there is no life apart from You. Apart from what You have done for me in dying for my sins, I have no basis to be able to come in and be saved from Your judgment.”

If you're already in Christ, in the ark of His salvation by grace through faith, rejoice! Don't lose the wonder of the fact that you are safe, that you will never experience the wrath and the judgment of God. Maybe you've known Jesus for so long that you've just become ho-hum about it, and you've lost a sense that I had that day sitting at the Sight & Sound production and a little bit of what it means to be saved from the wrath of God.

Well, in Genesis 8 and 9 the flood finally recedes. The water stops, and the rain stops, and the waters recede. God extends promises. Noah and his family come out of the ark, and God makes a new covenant with them. He says that never again will He destroy the earth with a flood. Then He puts a sign in the sky, the rainbow, the sign of His covenant-keeping faithfulness. Then He gives to Noah and his family the same mandate that He gave years earlier to Adam and Eve. You see it in Genesis 9, verse 7:

“Be fruitful and multiply; spread out over the earth [remember those words spread out over the earth] and multiply on it.”

This is God's plan for the glory of the LORD to cover the earth. Here we have a new cleansed earth. And God says to these who have found grace in His sight, “Now I want you to multiply and spread out and spread my glory to all the earth.”

But then we get to Genesis chapter 11, approximately one hundred years after the flood. Noah's descendants are no longer carrying out the mandate given to Noah. Look at verse 1 of chapter 11:

“The whole earth had the same language and vocabulary. As people migrated from the east, they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there.” (vv. 1–2)

What had God told them to do? Spread out over the earth. What did they do? They found a piece of land they liked and they settled there. That's the first danger sign, warning sign. Then verse 3:

“They said to each other, “Come, let's make oven-fired bricks.” (They use brick for stone and asphalt for mortar.) And they said, “Come, let's build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky. Let's make a name for ourselves; otherwise, we will be scattered throughout the earth.” (vv. 1–4)

This is an act of rebellion. God had said, “Spread out over the earth.” And they said, “No, we want to settle. We don't want to be scattered throughout the earth.”

It's a rebellion that is fueled by pride. They're seeking fame, self-glory, independence from God, wanting to compete with Him, do it their way versus God's way. Then look at verse 5, Genesis 11:

“Then the LORD came down to look over the city and the tower that the humans were building. The LORD said, “If they had begun to do this as one people all having the same language, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let's go down there and confuse their language so that they will not understand one another's speech.” So from there the LORD scattered them [But God told them to spread out. They said, “We want to settle. We don't want to scatter.” So what did God do? He scattered them] throughout the earth, and they stopped building the city. Therefore it is called [in the CSB that I'm reading this Christian Standard Bible translation, it is called] Babylon.” (vv. 5–9)

Now that city in most of your Bibles, if you're not using the CSB, they mostly say Babel. This is one and the same city. That's important because Babylon figures prominently in the Scripture narrative all the way to the very end of the New Testament. Babylon is the city of man without the presence of God. It is man doing his best to be God. The city was called Babylon (the city they had tried to build) or Babel.

“For there the LORD confused the language of the whole earth [of Babel, they couldn't understand each other] and from there the LORD scattered them throughout the earth.” (v. 9)

So this was an act of judgment. They were united in this day in their attempt to deify man, elevate man, and humanize God bring God down. They were united in their attempt to exalt and get glory for themselves, rather than to give glory to the Most High God. And in this moment, God showed the whole world who was in charge. He foiled their efforts to establish a one world government. He forced them to scatter. They became a diversity of languages and nations and smaller broken up communities.

But that's not the end of the story. You see, this judgment was not final. God did not forsake the nations that scattered, the nations that came out of the scattered people, and the different language groups. We have in our studio a map of the world with the nations of the world in different colors. This happened out of Babel.

But God did not forsake these scattered people with their different tribes and tongues and languages and nations. He did not forget or forsake them. Approximately two hundred fifty years after God scattered them throughout the earth, God would call up another man, a man who would honor Him and would start a new line that would bring blessing to the nations of the world.

And approximately twenty-two hundred years after Babel, on the day of Pentecost, we have what in a sense is Babel reversed. Because on that day in the founding of the Church, God brought together men from various nations and languages of the world. He gave them the ability to understand the word that was preached as if they were hearing it in one language, actually hearing it in their own language. They could all understand. And those nations, those peoples, those languages, heard the gospel of Christ proclaimed on that Pentecost day. They were brought together in one new, unified body called the Church.

The Church was devoted to exalting Christ, making Him known throughout all the earth to the languages and peoples of the world, not for the glory of man, but for the glory and praise of God.

Dannah: Have you thought about the fact that when the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost, it was a reversal of what happened at the tower of Babel? Isn’t that an amazing thought?

That’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, helping us see glimpses of God’s grace, even in the dark chapters of history. She’ll be right back to pray.

If the Lord used that teaching from Nancy in your life, I hope you’ll hear more by visiting ReviveOurHearts.com. Nancy taught through a whole series on Noah and the Flood. You’ll find it at ReviveOurHearts.com.

That’s also where you can find our current series, The Wonder of the Word. It’s a year-long study of the whole Bible, available in [add specific language.] For more information, visit ReviveOurHearts.com.

Do you ever feel like you’re too flawed and weak for God to use you? On our next episode, Nancy will show us some very flawed people who were used by God in powerful ways. Please be back with us for Revive Our Hearts.

Now, here’s Nancy to pray.

Nancy: Oh Lord, thank You that out of the rubble, out of man's sinfulness and the messes we make, that You were always hovering, moving, acting, fulfilling your purposes, redeeming, renewing, making all things new.

Thank You for the glimpses of grace we see even in this widespread flood that covered the world, in the disintegration in the tragedy that took place at the Tower of Babel. Thank You that You are in the business of undoing the works of men and asserting Yourself and Your glory and Your works in the earth. Thank You that we get to be a part of it because we have found grace in Your eyes. We are safe from Your judgment, safe from Your wrath, and all the wrath to come because we are in Christ. We pray in His name, amen.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

All Scripture is taken from the CSB unless otherwise noted.