by Coye Bouyer
LANSING, MI – Just as the world looks for and needs heroes, at times, God looks for one who is available to be made into a hero. Whether we are talking about something as fictional as the Avengers or DC Comics, or a real-life situation where a person runs into a burning building to rescue someone inside.
People often look for someone to give us the sense of security in a very insecure, and at times chaotic and traumatic world. But what happens when our search yields no one. The chaos, confusion, and sin in our communities has gotten so bad that everywhere we look, there seems to be no one standing up for righteousness?
THE LORD SAW…
God never acts arbitrarily. He does not run this world amorally as no one receives His divine judgment simply because they are human. But God is moved to anger by man’s deliberate violations of the code by which He designed His world to live.
In Genesis 6:5, we see what God saw. God saw the extensiveness and intensiveness of sin. Geographically, the problem of sin had infected the earth as the earth had become infested with the sinfulness of men.
This infection was not just centrally located, rather this infection had gotten so extensive it had spread throughout the entire world. Like cancer throughout the body or an infestation of cockroaches, rodents or ants, not only had sin entered the world, it was taking it over.
The situation is aggravated even further because such depravity controls not only man’s actions, but also his thoughts. For every scheme in man’s imagination was nothing but evil. For their minds had even become perverted and this kind of malaise “was only evil continually.”
THE LORD FELT…
Viewing the depravity man lives in, God is grieved, even to the point of experiencing pain in His heart. A peculiarly strong anthropopathic expression, which presents a truth that God, in consistency with His immutability, assumes a changed position in respect to changed man (Ps. 18:27).
He must assume the appearance of hating the sinner in the sin, even as he hates the sin in the sinner. Yet, even in God’s grief, somehow, He does not begin to hate man, as understood in the words, “and it grieved Him in His heart” (v. 6)
THE LORD DECIDED…
I will blot out man: blot out translates a verb meaning “wipe out, erase, do away with.” The LORD’s decision to eliminate the source of the problem; means He will “erase,” or “blot out one’s name out of a book” for just as God can erase sins (Psalms 51:3), He can erase sinners.
In translation, there are two parts to God blotting out the people: He will not only eliminate, He will also erase, remove them entirely from the world, “From the face of the ground.” Moreover, not only will people be erased, but so will all other living creatures, both beast and creeping things.
BUT THE LORD FOUND…
But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord: Most interpreters understand this as Noah won God’s favor which would have required some level of moral qualities that would have qualified Noah for the favor in which he had found. However, the Hebrew word for ‘favor,’ and one who finds it, usually insinuates the grace and mercy of God as opposed to the works or morality of a man.
And while many assume that Noah received God’s favor because of his personal righteousness, more than likely Noah was righteous as a result of receiving God’s favor. This does not mean God always finds someone; (Ezek. 22:30), however it was not without an intensive search throughout the entire earth.
For just as heroes are being made and heralded by the continual sin and rebellion of angels and men (6:4), God goes to work finding His own hero, for just as the world has her mighty men amongst regular men, the LORD takes regular men and makes them mighty.
CONCLUSION
Within Noah’s story we see the sad state of mankind physically, mentally and spiritually. We also see the heart of God as He is grieved, even hurt by the chaos and sin of His creation. And while God will destroy all the earth wiping away and even erasing just about everything, within this story is also the Redemptive and Restorative nature of a God who does not give up on His creation.
Rather, He has chosen to work in and within it by finding men and women whom He might find favor upon. Men and women who will respond faithfully and obediently to Him; men and women whom He will make into heroes of FAITH here on earth as they live like His kingdom down here in light of what we will all experience up there. Will YOU be one of them?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pastor Coye L. Bouyer is the founding pastor of Kingdom Life Church in Lansing, MI where he has served since March of 2010. Pastor Bouyer recently stepped into the Diversity Ambassador role for the BSCM and firmly believes that he was not only called to Preach the Gospel as part of the process of reconciliation of man to God, but also using any platform as a bridge of reconciliation of man to man, and even more so amongst the brethren. Pastor Bouyer and his lovely wife Keturah (Gen. 25:1) have been married four over 20 years and have four children; Sierra, Seth, Cayla and Coye II.