This morning we return to our series of sermons in the book of Genesis. I invite you therefore to take your Bibles and turn with me to Genesis chapter six. In our last sermon from this book of Genesis, we preached on the, actually the last two sermons, we preached on verses one through four of Genesis six. Our text is gonna be taken from verses five and following. But because we've been a few weeks away from this series, I want to read beginning with verse one from Genesis chapter six. Now it came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were beautiful. And they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose. And the Lord said, my spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh, yet his days shall be 120 years. There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward when the sons of God came into the daughters of men and they bore children to them, those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. and especially pay attention to these verses here. Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and he was grieved in his heart. So the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Once again, let's pray for the blessing of God upon his word. Most gracious and blessed God, we do thank you that this awful story of sin does not end on the note of sin, but on the note of grace. And yet, O Lord, we do pray that you would help us to be honest with our own hearts, that we would see what you see. As you looked upon the hearts of men of old so long ago, the sight was awful. And we pray, Lord, that where we are hiding sin, where we are concealing it even from our own imaginations and thoughts, We pray that you would search us out, that you would try us, that you would help us to see what you see, and that you would drive us to the cross of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, in whom is forgiveness and grace. We pray all this in the name of our precious Savior, the Lord Jesus. Amen. J. Morris Jones was a congregational pastor from 1843 to 1905. He served in Lewisham, Wales, an area of England that is in the south of western portion of England, and in a sermon entitled, A Fair Scene Spoiled, he relates his impressions while he was visiting a certain spot. I know a beautiful valley in Wales, guarded by well-wooded hills. Spring came there first, and summer lingered longest, and the clear river loitered through the rich pastures and the laughing orchards, as if loathe to leave the enchanting scene. But the manufacturer came there. He built his chimneys, he lit his furnaces, out of which belched forth poisonous fumes day and night. Every tree is dead. No flower blooms there now. And the very grass has been eaten off the face of the earth. The beautiful river in which the pebbles once lay as the pure thoughts of a maiden's mind is now foul. And the valley scarred and bare looks like the entrance into Tophet itself. In this human nature of ours, in which faith and virtue and godliness and all sweet humanities might flourish, In miles of this London of ours is what bad air and the djinn palace and the careless indifference of a Christianity bent only on saving itself have made it. In spiritual terms, this is what Moses saw when God gave him a glimpse of the world before the universal flood. Genesis chapter one and verse 31, Moses tells us that after God had finished creating the world and everything in it, God saw everything that he had made. And indeed, it was very good. But the next time we read about something that God saw, this is what we read. And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth. and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. On the verses that we have just read, we are told that after seeing this ruinous spiritual scene, God determined to destroy what he had made. The book of Genesis makes it plain that it was the universal spread of sin that was the reason for the flood. Now the flood is a historical event. It actually happened. And because it was worldwide in scope, not surprisingly, many of the ancient nations and cultures had flawed narratives. They all go back to that which was the true story, the true narrative that the Bible gives us as to what actually happened. Many of these corrupt versions became part of the mythological lore of these various nations of that part of the world. And the reasons that they gave for the flood in these myths stand in stark contrast to that which is here in the Genesis account. Atrahasis is the name of the flood hero of Akkadian lore. In Atrahasis' epic, some 1,200 years after man's creation, his noise, that is the noise of mankind, And his commotion became so loud that it disturbed the sleep of the chief gods, especially Enhil. And to put a stop to this insufferable noise, Enhil sent a plague to eradicate boisterous humanity, only to have that plan thwarted. So the god Enhil determined to destroy humanity by means of a flood. But Enki thwarted Enhil's plan by informing his devotee Atrahasis which means extra wise, of a plot. He instructed him to build an ark and to ride out the flood, and so because of this, man's humanity was preserved. So you see, according to this myth, it's not the clamor of man's depravity that's the reason for the flood, but it's that there's too many people and this results in too much noise. And the Akkadian myth, it says nothing about the sin of mankind. Instead, it stresses the noise that was created by mankind, stressed Enhiel's auditory capacities. He had to stop his ears and he was tired of doing it. He couldn't get to sleep. And nothing is said about man being ground because he is a rebel and a sinner. And if we went to the famous, more famous story of ancient times, the Gilgamesh epic, it's much more elaborate. I'm not gonna go into the whole story. But there's some commonality to the Atrahasis story in that it describes the flood as something that the gods sent under the leadership of Enlil to eradicate humanity. And again, for the same reason, mankind is disturbing the sleep of the gods. He's too noisy. Now the contrast between these stories and the Genesis account could not be greater. In Genesis chapter six and verse five, the reason for the flood is laid exclusively at the feet of mankind on account of man's sin. And this verse, verse five, has a profound message for us and it did for the great reformer Martin Luther. It was a verse that in his great treatise, perhaps the greatest treatise that he ever wrote, The Bondage of the Will, which goes into the debate that he had with Erasmus of Rotterdam over free will. Erasmus had argued on behalf of man's free will, he did his natural free will in his sinful state, that it's perfectly free to choose and do the right thing. And he argued that even though men and women are sinners, there's a little bit of good in men. And if they just make use of this good, if they try it a little bit harder, God's gonna reward those efforts to do a little bit better, and he'll help them to do even better. And sooner or later, then he'll have some things that can be presentable, some issues of goodness that will commend them to God, that they might be saved. And Luther argued that man in his natural state, as a sinner, he can do nothing but sin. That's exactly what this text tells us. And if any of them do turn to Christ, this is entirely due to God's efficacious grace. Now some years later, after this treatise was written, Martin Luther wrote his eight-volume commentary on Genesis. And in this commentary, he reiterated this same position. Without the Holy Spirit, he wrote, and without grace, Man can do nothing but sin, and so goes endlessly from sin to sin. And then he went on to stress concerning the account that we have here in Genesis 6 concerning the sinful state of the world. He said, this knowledge of our sin is the beginning of our salvation, that we completely despair of ourselves and give to God alone the glory for our righteousness. My aim today, with any of you that are here that are outside of Christ, is to make you despair of yourself. I want to make you sad today. I want to make you broken over your sin. And I can't do it without God's grace and without the Holy Spirit and without his word. This is the aim, I do believe, of the passage that we have read. And just as the countryside ravages and pollutes, it was polluted by industry and what I read to you at the beginning. And just as the Welsh preacher, Morlis Jones, describes it, he put this out, no doubt, with the thought that that countryside would never be restored unless people could see how awful it was compared to what it once was. And God knows that we will never be driven to seek his salvation until we have an honest look at the nature of our own hearts and what we need when we need the grace of God. Our text this morning, verses five to eight, it divides itself into two unequal portions. In verses five to seven, we read of divine judgment, and then in verse eight, we read of divine grace. We begin on the note of divine judgment, and this is set forth in verses five through seven. And here Moses wants us to understand that our God does not govern the world amorally. The kind of judgment that he unleashed against the ancient world, it didn't happen because men were getting too noisy and it bothered God when he was trying to go to sleep. It didn't happen because the inhabitants of the world were just human. God was moved to act by the deliberate and inveterate defiance of mankind. The flood came because the sins of man had reached outrageous proportions, and because the hearts of men and women were constantly set on wickedness. Now before we look at each of these three verses, let me point out that the subject of each one of them is the Lord God. Notice how each of these three verses begins. Then the Lord saw. Verse five, and the Lord was sorry, verse six, so the Lord said, verse seven. And we try to stress this into three sub points that are under our first major heading. You can see them in the bulletin. We want to look first of all at what God saw. And then we want to look at what God felt. And then we want to look at what God determined. We're gonna spend the bulk of our time on what God saw, first of all. Let's look again at verse five. Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. After finishing God's creative work, what did he see? What he saw was very good. Nothing but good. What he now saw was evil. Nothing but evil. God had blessed the first pair, Adam and Eve. He had said, be fruitful and multiply. And humanity had indeed multiplied. But it had done so by filling the earth with violence and debauchery and evil. In the verse that we've just read, it contains a dreadful description of humanity and its rebellion against its maker. And in this description, there is not one redeeming feature. It's a description of what was back then, it's a description of what is now the case with fallen mankind. Now we're accustomed to judging things as we see them. It's important that we learn how God sees things. It's no marvel that that man doesn't have this view of himself. He doesn't see himself as being wicked like this. Men and women and children, they're prone to entertain rather positive views of themselves. We're supposed to be confident in ourselves. Believe in yourself, we are told. It's not easy for any of us to admit that God's assessment of things is more accurate than our assessment. Now there are many obstacles to be overcome in order to have a correct view of ourselves. And this is why Job prays, Lord, make me know my transgression and my sin. Job chapter 13. And it even takes more than the light of scripture and the light of our consciences to get an honest view of what God sees when he sees our hearts. And this is why, even as I preach to you today, I would hope that you would be praying, Lord, make me know my transgression and my sin. Our Savior has taught us that when the spirit of truth comes, he will convict the world of sin. Even the Bible, even our conscience doesn't break us. It's the spirit of God that must do that. He uses the word, but he's the one that does the work. And one of the chief aspects of our spiritual blindness is our ability, is I should say our inability to see the abomination of our own hearts. And therefore as we go over what God saw, Don't just shake your head and say, I just can't believe how bad people were back then. That's not the point of this whole text here that we're looking at. What God saw back then, it pertains not just to the world that was destroyed by the flood, but it pertains to the entirety of the human race as it is apart from God's grace. And we often think of this or that person as a, we call him a good person. He is a good neighbor. He mows his lawn. Doesn't leave it look like weeds all over the place. He's good. We speak of people like that. But we are only comparing one man with another man. But when God compares us with his holy law, and with Christ's perfect conformity to that law, apart from his work in us by his grace, he sees only evil and always evil. As painful as it might be for our eternal good, we need to see what God sees. What does God see? This is what he tells us here. Now in this verse, there are four noteworthy things that God sees, and you will notice them in your bulletins. We see here sin's proportions, sin's palace, sin's prevalence, and sin's Persistence. These four things in Genesis chapter six and verse five. First of all, sins, proportions. You know, pastor, you say, well, you know, you preachers, you make a lot of, you make a big deal out of sin. Is it really that big of a deal? God thinks so. He sees that it's proportions. These are great. And what is the first thing that we read in verse five? The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth. Now in our previous sermon, we noted two features of the wickedness that grew to enormous proportions in those days, violence and sexual perversion. Lomax boasting over his murders is just an example of the violence that began to cover the earth. And in verse 11, later on in this chapter, we read the earth was corrupt before God and the earth was filled with violence. They were killing one another, going to war against one another. We've also seen earlier that the debasement of marriage and sexuality, this goes hand in hand with the spread of violence. When men begin to think of women as objects available for their lustful use, they begin to abuse them in a violent manner. Richard Phillips writes this, with this evil cocktail of sexual debauchery and prideful violence, we may chart the demonization of the societal menu throughout history. This combination was seen in Baal worship of the pagan Canaanites. Rome in the time of Caligula and Nero was both horribly debauched and horrifically violent. Now do I need to acquaint you with the debauchery and the violence that is glutted every avenue of entertainment? I don't even want to put it in your minds. These things are so evil we don't speak of them. They're all over the movies and television shows and websites, the basest things. Now what is the underlying factor that defines the enormity of these sins and all of our sins in general? There's something even deeper than this violence and promiscuity that we've just spoken about or mentioned here in the early chapters of Genesis. There's something underlying it all. And whether it's in the case of sinners before the flood or whether it's the case of 21st century sinners, the enormity of our sin, it pertains above all, my dear friends, to the fact that it is rebellion against God. It's rebellion against a good God, a gracious God, the God, the loving God that made us and cares for us day by day. This is why Paul speaks of our sins as exceedingly sinful. What made him think of it as really being bad? It's when he saw that it was rebellion against God. He tells us in Romans chapter seven and verse 13 that it was through the commandment, it was through God's law that he saw his heart and he saw that it was exceedingly sinful. And this is the enormity of atheism. Because the atheist hates the idea of accountability to God, he just declares there is no God. And this is why Paul tells us in Romans 8, verse 7, that the carnal mind is enmity against God. He doesn't say it hates God, he says it is hatred of God. It's so filled, it's hatred, it's enmity against God. And this is what's behind our forgetfulness of God. This is why we deliberately ignore what God says. This is why God says to sinners, because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord, they would not admire counsel and despise my every rebuke. This is why God compares sinners with a death poisonous adder that stops her ear. And this defiance of God, this is what's behind the sinner's delight and scorning. It causes him to hate knowledge, to despise what God says in his word. It causes him to hate people that bring that bad news of his heart to him in sermons and the like. And this is why those of you that are still in your sins, you do not receive the things of the Spirit of God because they are foolishness to you. Because neither can they be learned, Paul says, because they are spiritually discerned. You need to be taught them by the Spirit. And so when God looked into the hearts of sinners, this is the Spirit that he saw. And notice that he saw this everywhere. Verse five doesn't say this is what God saw in the brothels. This is what God saw in the saloons. This is what God saw in other dens of iniquity. Verse five tells us he saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth. Everywhere it was this way. Psalm 14 in verses two and three, the Lord looks down from heaven upon the children of men to see if there are any that seek God. He's looking over the whole earth. They have all turned aside. They have together become corrupt. There is none who does good. No, not one. Much more could be said about sin's proportions, but I trust I've said enough to you that I hope you can see that it is no exaggeration when Moses wrote that God saw the wickedness of man was great in the earth. And when he wrote those words, he was not exaggerating. We've looked at sin's proportions, but there's something else that we see of what God saw. We see sin's palace. Where is its chief residence? Where is it most comfortable? Where is it fed by its choicest dainties? In the middle of verse five, we read that God saw that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil. Sin's palace is the heart of man. It's in the heart that all evil thoughts and plans are hatched. Of the Hebrew word that's translated thought or intent or imagination, it's a form of the word that's used in chapter two in verse seven and verse 19, to describe the formation. It's translated to what God formed man of the dust of the earth. And so here it speaks, this picture is of man forming these thoughts, like a potter forms the clay, just like God formed, fashioned the clay into a man. The picture in chapter two is God being a potter, a fashioning man. And now we're reading here of a man as a potter. And he's fashioning something too. He's fashioning his thoughts, he's fashioning his plans. And what God forms and fashions is beautiful. When he gets done with it, he says it's very good. But when man is fashioning in the workshop of his mind, it's repulsive, it's evil, what he fashions there. And this is why we read in Matthew chapter 15, beginning with verse 17, the words of our Savior. Do you not yet understand that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and is eliminated? But those things which proceed out of the mouth, they come from the heart, and they defile a man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. These are the things which defile a man. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man. So just like Moses, Jesus takes us to the internal factory in which every sin is formed. Your heart's a little bit of a factory. It's a place where things are fashioned, like a potter molds and fashions things. And we learn from Jesus, as well as from Moses, that our sins are not just due to our bad environment. They're not just our genetic inclinations, although genetically some of us are prone to one sin more than another. They're not the result of knee-jerk habits that just happen to develop. Instead, They come from the deep inner recesses of our hearts. Even from the first sinful thoughts that we entertain about something. And if we're to repent in such a way as to get to the very root of our sins, we have to go very deep. We have to get into our hearts. We've got to hold up our wretched thoughts in the presence of God's holiness. A particular sin. It always starts in the first wretched, unloving, resentful, suspicious, hateful thought about somebody. It starts there, that deep, dark thought in your mind. Or maybe that first lustful inclination to click some link on the internet. Or that first proud inclination to say something clever. It's hatched, first of all, in your mind. In 1720, the Scottish Presbyterian pastor Thomas Boston, he wrote one of the most searching books I've ever read, Human Nature in its Fourfold State. It's one of those books that's worth reading more than once. And in this treatise, he demonstrates the natural inclination of the human heart with a test, and the test is What's easy to think about for you, and what's hard for you to think about? And especially he's talking about the carnal mind. And he writes this, whatever difficulties it finds, that is the carnal mind, whatever difficulties it finds while occupied about things that are truly good, it acts with a deal of ease in evil. as being in that case in its own element. So he's saying you have a hard time thinking about something that's really good, but you get to the thing that you love, your sinful pleasure, all of a sudden you're in your element. The carnal mind drives heavily in the thoughts of good, but furiously in the thoughts of evil. While holiness is before it, fetters are on it. But once it has got over the hedge, it is like a bird got out of cage and becomes a free thinker Indeed. And Pastor Boston, he goes on to point out that when sinners are listening to sermons, their minds go after a thousand things that especially they have adulterous attachment to. And even while listening to sermons, their minds are like birds, he says. They flip from one tree to another. They think about everything else but the sermon. But while they can't concentrate, you see, on the things of God, their minds stick like glue to sinful things, sinful things and desires that have captivated their minds. This is why in 2 Peter 2, we read of those who have eyes full of adultery and that cannot cease from sin. This is why Jude 8 speaks of filthy dreamers. Now I am fully aware, and I want to put in this caution, I am fully aware that even godly Christians struggle with their thoughts and controlling their thoughts. I'm not saying that every struggle that a Christian has is a proof that you're one of these degenerate, carnal minds that Genesis chapter six describes. If this was an easy thing to control our thoughts, Paul would not have to write to his brothers in Philippi saying, finally, brethren, Whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there's any virtue, if there's anything praiseworthy, meditate on these things, Philippians 4 and verse 8. But while godly saints, they struggle to concentrate on those things, they still have indwelling sin, that's why they struggle, we all struggle. Even though you struggle, if you're a true Christian, When you are able to concentrate, you're in your element, you delight in those things. There's moments in which it's as if you soar into heaven as you hear something in the word of God or as you're singing a hymn. And my point here is to ask you to ask yourself, what is the basic tenor of your thoughts? The carnal mind, as it's described here in our text, it's a factory of evil. and mixed within its thoughts, there sometimes can be useful plans, there can be useful ideas. Some carnal people actually have some pretty good political instincts, for instance. Doesn't mean they're pious. They just happen to have some pretty good instincts along those lines about what works. And I want to ask you, though, what does God see? This passage is talking about what God saw when he looked into their hearts. When God examines your thought life, you can't deceive God, let me remind you. Here in our text, we're reading about what God sees when he looks into our hearts. And the idea that you could somehow hide your sinful attitudes from God, this is an absurd idea. You and I, we often misjudge other people. Because we only have access to their words and their looks. And their, maybe their deeds even. But God reads our thoughts, every one of them. And there's no secret place in which you can hide from the searcher of hearts. Now what would it be like if every sinful attitude, if every sinful thought could be read by everybody around you? They could see it all. What would that be like? What would the world around us look like if we could read everybody else's foul thoughts? If we could read all the evil that is in everybody's heart? What if there were no way for any sinner to conceal exactly what's going on inside? What would that be like? It would seem like a hell on earth, I say. It's God's mercy we can't read each other's thoughts. And would it not seem as though we were already in the boat of the damned if that's what we were surrounded by? But this is what God saw when he looked upon the hearts of fallen mankind before sending the flood. Now thank God there are still some effects that restrain sin in our country, the country of America. But the more that these restraints are removed, the more it is true that the thoughts and the intents of the heart of man More and more in society in which we live, those thoughts are evil. For a text that features sin's proportions and sin's palace, the thoughts of the heart. But now, more briefly, notice with me sin's prevalence. Notice in the words of verse five, these two words, only evil. Let those words sink in, only evil. What did God see when he inspected hearts? As he looked one by one on every heart, he saw that every intention of the thoughts of the heart was only evil. The factory of man's heart, it was ever busy churning out its plans, but evil tainted it all. Everything that was coming out of that factory was tainted with sin. Therefore, there was nothing truly good that God saw. Now before the fall, God saw everything that he made. Everything was perfectly good. Very good, he says. He stopped, he admired what he made. Nothing had disturbed it. It was perfect. Now he inspects his creatures again. And apart from Noah and the handful that were touched by God's grace and were saved on the ark, What did God see in the rest of humanity? What did he see in all the other hearts he inspected? He saw that everything was tainted with evil. Every other person was so evil, in fact, that God had to destroy them all. Had to start over. That's what he knew was best for the redemption of humanity. And yes, it is true that Some men are more evil than others. It's not everybody as bad as Hitler or some other awful person. And yet, lest we are tempted to tone down the language of our text, God doubles his statement here. We read, every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil. And if this is the case, Where is the man who has a heart apart from God's grace that's not only evil? Every heart, he says, is his way. Unless we think this is pretty extreme, that it shouldn't be said about people in general today, God says through the Apostle Paul in the New Testament, there is none righteous, no, not one. There is none who does good, no, not one. My dear unconverted friend, I call you my friend, and I love you. I say these things because I love you. You need to come to grips with this. Can you bear the thought, my friend, that the all-powerful God that gives you every breath that you breathe, who can take away that breath at any moment, that this is the God that says this about you? How can you remain comfortable in your sin knowing that this God before whom you will stand someday in judgment, he says this about you? What if your heart is never changed by grace? What will it be like to stand before that God who will then say to you, take him away? Take him away. There's no good there. He's only fit to be taken out to the refuse heap of eternity, to that place where the worm never dies and the fire is never quenched. The fourth thing that God saw is sin's persistence. And here I want you to notice one more word in verse five. It's the word continually. God saw that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And here we're informed that the condition that is being described here, it's a persistent, chronic one. It's not just a momentary lapse in judgment. As R. Kent Hughes writes, the depravity, it was not a temporary state. There were no relentings, no repentances, no hesitations. Lust was their medium, violence their method, and this was total inveterate depravity. The description that's given in this verse, it can be boiled down to these words. Only evil all of the time. Now, from our perspective, this seems like an overstatement. How does God say this? We'd be reluctant to say of your wife, maybe, or your next door neighbor, or your sister, your brother, you wouldn't want to say, well, this person's only evil all the time. We wouldn't say that about ourselves. We want to say, well, there's some nice things that I do and think about. We don't say that about ourselves. But let's remember something. This is what God says. This is what God saw. The God who carefully weighs every thought that we think, every word that we say. This is what he says when he reads our thoughts. In the work shed of the natural man, in his factory of the heart, while his thoughts are turning around and around, that the potter turning the wheel as he's fashioning that which is on his mind. His thoughts are always fashioning something, but never the right thing. Gardner Spring, in his masterful work, First Things, he sums this up, what is being said here of mankind. They sin as constantly as they think. Just in that brief statement, there's a world of truth there. They sin as constantly as they think. My dear friend, if your heart has not been changed by the new birth, take stock of your situation. If every imagination of your thoughts are evil continually, Your sins can be no more number than the grains of sand on the seashore. And if you remain in your sins, if you persist in refusing the only answer to this problem, the Lord Jesus Christ and what he did on the cross, on the last day your sins will be crushing. I urge you to stop everything you're doing, to stop your projects of your mind. Seek the Lord while he may be found. And if you will be truly converted, this is where it'll begin. It'll begin when you see as never before that outside of Christ, you were undone completely. We've looked at what God saw in verse five. We don't have time to go into detail about the next thing, what God felt. It says in verse six, and the Lord was sorry. that he had made man on the earth, and he was grieved in his heart. And we don't have time to go over also what God determined, which is in verse seven. So the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made him. But instead of going over some of those things, I want to conclude with their second major point. I want you to look with me at verse eight where we read, instead of divine judgment, we read of divine grace. We read in verse eight, but Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Now this is the first time in all the Bible that the word grace is used. Darkness was about to engulf the world as the very floodgates of heaven and of the deep would open up. As the skies would blacken, storm clouds of wrath. And in the midst of this darkness, there's this ray of hope. Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. And We mustn't think that he stood out from his evil generation because he was a better person. He tried harder. He had some discipline of his mind so he wouldn't think about those things like others. He maybe went to some kind of a counselor and that counselor taught him how to think better. It wasn't anything like that, my friends. It wasn't because he was commendably good. You might get this impression from Verse nine, it says that he was a righteous man, blameless in his generation, but that was the fruit of what God did to him. It wasn't the cause of this grace. He was born a sinner like everybody else. He didn't achieve this favor or grace. He found this favor, our text tells us. Grace was the free gift of God to him. And it was something that God used even as a means of grace to the world. The grace of God for Noah, it launches a new epoch in the book of Genesis. The whole history of mankind, it hinges on this fact that Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Let's remember that there was a promised seed, a savior that was gonna come. And as we read the genealogy of the Lord Jesus Christ in Luke chapter three, we read that Jesus is also, and it lists all the various ones, the son of Noah, the son of Lamech. God didn't allow unmitigated pollution of the human race to be the last word. He took one man, he gave grace, he gave favor to him, he changed his heart. And what the flood couldn't accomplish in terms of saving mankind, it saved a remnant that were on the ark. But it was only the cross that was gonna accomplish what had to be done. And it was this seed that was preserved so that eventually Jesus would come and he would die upon a cross. So he would pay for the sins of sinners that are the kind of sinners in thought, word, and deed that we've been talking about today. As the Puritan John Fable wrote, how deep is the pollution of sin? that nothing but the blood of Christ can cleanse it. All the tears of a penitent sinner, should he shed as many as there have fallen drops of rain since the creation, cannot wash away one sin. The everlasting burnings in hell cannot purify the flaming conscience from the least sin. It is only, my friends, the blood of Jesus Christ that cleanses our sin. It's the blood of Christ that can cleanse the kind of awful pollution that God sees when he looks upon our hearts. Ultimately, it was for the sake of Jesus that Noah found favor, that Christ might be born, that Christ might die, that we might be cleansed of our sins. In the fullness of time, as a result of what God did through Noah, ultimately there came the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. This is the one that I point you to. This is the one that can change your heart. And not only change your heart and your mind and your thoughts, but also bring forgiveness to you. And can take your place. standing in your place as your righteousness in the presence of a holy God that sees even the thoughts and the intents of the heart. I urge you to go to this Lord Jesus and to him alone, and it will be true with you that you will find grace in the eyes of the Lord. Let's pray. Father, we thank you and bless you that You've been honest with us. You've shown us what we don't like to see. We don't like to preach. We don't like to hear. But we know, oh Lord, that if we will be saved, we need to hear these things. We need to be driven in desperation to the Lord Jesus and to him alone. We pray that any sinner that is in this room today is still holding out, still clinging to their own plans and their unbelief and their own evil thoughts and desires and plans. Lord, our God, we pray that such ones would be brought to see their true state before you as you see them. And then more than this, even, that such ones will be brought to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and to his cross, to his shed blood. And may it be so that every one of us that are true believers, as we see even the remnants of this evil in our hearts still there, May this drive us likewise to our Savior, the Lord Jesus. May it be that we would, as we read in the scripture reading earlier during this hour, may we run the race with endurance, may we cast off every sin that besets us and hinders us from walking with you. May we do so in fear, but also knowing that you love us and that you are gracious to us through our Savior, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. We pray it all in his holy and blessed name.