Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi
This has been brewing for a while now. I was so impacted by the word study I did on 'Desert' that I was itching to do another one. That was the first word study I'd done; would another one be as eye opening? I began to have a curiosity to see what the Bible says about hearts...the heart of man, the heart of God.
So I pulled out Ye Olde Exhaustive Concordance (well, maybe not so Ye Olde...it is based on the NIV and not King James) and looked up Heart/ Hearts.
Y'all. I may have bitten off more than I can chew; we may still be looking at this topic when The Last Trumpet sounds. That's just the first two pages, through Song of Songs. I've got another page of references from the prophets. I haven't started the New Testament yet. I confess, I wavered a bit, daunted by that list (we could potentially be in Psalms for WEEKS, maybe MONTHS...). But I took a deep breath, steeled my nerve, and decided to go for it.
As it turns out, there are only 6 references in Genesis, so it will be a good ease-in to what could prove to be a bigger challenge than I know, lol. But let's dive in just the same.
The first listing in the concordance is Genesis 6:5 - 6 (all references today will be from the NIV 84)
The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain.
The second listing references the first somewhat:
The LORD smelled the pleasing aroma [of the sacrifice Noah made after coming out of the ark] 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." - Gen. 8:21
Ok. Change of plan. The next reference is way, way down the road, and it and all the rest are in completely different contexts, and there is enough right there to think about, so we'll just look at these two today.
Yep. Gonna be doing this study for a looong time....
No matter. It's all about the journey anyway.
So...right off the bat, we have a mention of both the heart of man and the heart of God. In this case, the 'heart of man' is a generalization about the entire human race, not the heart of A man, but the state of the heart of every human.
Every inclination of the heart of a human being is evil. Now, this is the natural state of the human heart; knowing what I know, we will find verses that indicate this can be changed...by God. But left to oneself, without redemption and reformation, humans inevitably do what they want without regard to how that affects anyone else. Thievery, murder, rape, manipulation, lying, cheating, rebellion, and the like are all tactics humans employ to get what they want. Pleasure, possessions and power.
The entire human population of Noah's day had left the pursuit of God and replaced it with the pursuit of pleasure, possessions and power. And their entire society was wicked enough to grieve..to cause actual pain to...the heart of God.
Just between you, me, and the fencepost; I have a hypotheses that Noah and his family, who DID follow God, were actually in danger from the rest of the population, for the same reason Abel was murdered by Cain. The presence of righteousness is an affront to the spirit of one who has abandoned that path. I kinda suspect that if God had not intervened in some way, Noah and his family would have been annihilated.
Now, that's just my opinion, and certainly not specified in any scriptures that I have found. But it does make sense. There was a promise at stake...the promise that the offspring of Eve would crush the head of the serpent that deceived them. One attempt had already been made to thwart that bloodline, with the death of Abel, but Eve was not past the point of childbearing and Seth was born to keep the bloodline intact. BUT... if the enemy could somehow wipe out Seth's descendant Noah and his family...there was no one left to carry that promise. The entire population had abandoned God, save for Noah.
Or was it just coincidence that Noah's father, Lamech, died an unusually early death for that time period, 5 years before the flood, and his grandfather, Methuselah, died the year of the flood? Could one or both have been a martyr to the mob, whose 'every inclination of the thought of the heart' was evil?
Not making doctrine out of this, but it is interesting to consider. Because that would mean that God intervened because he HAD to. To preserve the promise. And it caused him great pain. His very heart was grieved by what mankind had become and what he had to do to keep the promised redemption possible.
But Noah, who HAD followed God in the midst of all the wickedness around him, worshiped after all the loss. And his worship blessed God. So God made himself a heart promise (he said in his heart) that he would never destroy the earth again in that manner. Even though he acknowledged that the heart of man tends towards wickedness, he promised himself that this would not happen again.
God has intervened in other ways down through history to protect the promise, which was fulfilled in Jesus.
He has kept his promise.
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