The Word Was God: Genesis 8 – Never Again

I’ve made it a goal to sit down at least once a week, read one chapter of the Bible, and pull out as much as I can from it, to see what God has taught me and to find out what he’s going to teach me next.

Today, I’m reading chapter 8 of Genesis.

Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: “Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” –Genesis 8:20-22 NIV84

When the Flood was over, God promised never to curse the Earth again, that as long as our world exists, everything will run in the natural order that he set into motion in the days of creation.

But he also pointed out that the inclination of every man’s heart, since childhood, is evil.

This makes sense. When we are born, we cry for everything, which is natural, because we cannot speak, but once we start to grow up and learn right and wrong, we still tend to cry when we don’t get what we want. We exhibit selfishness to an insane degree as children.

And we never grow out of it. Selfishness breeds pride, lust, greed, all number of sins.

But God knew that not only would he never take these drastic measures again, but also that he wouldn’t need to.

We look at the world today as Christians and think, “How much worse could it get?”

But remember, before the flood, the ONLY righteous man was Noah. Today, Christianity is the world’s largest worldview. In fact, Christians make up nearly a third of the entire planet.

With the Flood, God set into motion a return to faith. There were still many discouraging times ahead, but God knew His people would persevere.

In Genesis 8, we find God’s wrath abate and his mercy shine as he allows humanity to continue on to thrive again and we find that, even though we are inclined toward evil since our childhood, we are all a part of Noah’s family, descendants of the one remaining righteous man.