Genesis 6:5-6
The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.
As a child, I did not understand her words, “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” My little legs might sting from the switch necessarily and justifiably applied as punishment, but the tears welled in her eyes. The wrong was mine whether disobedience, sass, defiance, or lying. Her discipline was fair. The punishment was just and necessary.
Little boys are not entitled to immunity from truth or right behavior. Neither do little boys understand — at least I didn’t — the love of a mother who grieves unrighteousness in her child to such a degree that it truly hurts her more than it hurt her son.
My mother’s parenting would likely be regarded as child abuse today. Corporal punishment is anathema to a permissive age, but I gratefully say my childhood experience with discipline was never excessive, never unjust, and never unloving. And certainly I never recall my mother ever saying she would wish I had never been born.
That my mother never regretted giving me birth cannot be credited to any lack of provocation by me. I often gave her reason enough, increasingly so when I might have outgrown a spanking but not her tears. To wish I’d never been born – I don’t believe she ever thought it. And even if she had, I know she never would have conceived saying it even if it were so.
Child psychologists today would probably condemn such a statement as the very height of verbal child abuse. We are horrified to think any parent would be so cruel to say to their child they wished him never to have been born.
And yet, God said it. “The Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth.”
When you think of it, divine regret is something quite unnerving. I don’t like to see God second-guess Himself or need to think twice. It puts me in delicate territory. It confronts me not only with the thought of what it would mean if God just took his ball and bat and went home but also with the unpleasant disclosure that maybe I’m just not so all-fire wonderful after all or worth wanting any more.
As a little kid, when I played fast and loose with my mother’s rules, I admit I never reckoned on her leaving and not coming back. She tended to my “backside.” I never weighed what it would mean if she showed me hers—for a last time going out the door, regretting I’d ever been born. Would that not have been child abuse?
Scripture says, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” There were no redeeming qualities in any whom God had made and loved. The sin in man is total and terrible, a perfect storm of rage and rot.
God wasn't going on rumor or unconfirmed reports. He looked. God saw. He saw with absolute transparency the thorough hatefulness and abhorrence in man. Even the very worst epithets are too good for what God sees in our sinfulness. When God uses words like “every inclination,” and “only evil,” and “continually,” in the space of one breath, you gotta know it’s bad/bad; I mean really, really, really bad—and shockingly so.
God’s regret at having made man is understandable. For us to have received all the care God can give, His every good only and continually, and then to trash it utterly, grieved our Lord to the very marrow of his bones. It broke his heart.
Far from a regret in which one angrily turns their back and resolves to “chuck it,” to pitch the whole rebellious, undeserving brood aside forever, God weeps and grieves.
I don’t suppose I’ll ever fully appreciate what it means that my offenses and the penalties I deserve have hurt Him far more, infinitely more, than they have me. My mother expressed a hint of it as she reproved me for my wrong. No amount of punishment or chastisement could make me whole. I might do my little “gig” against the sting of a switch, but what is that to the comprehensive nature of my sin?
It is the tears, broken heart, and anguish of our Heavenly Father which reveal the source of my restoration, a love so deep and so acute that He would turn over His own Son into that death I had earned. “Every evil” – “only evil” – and infinite sorrow were assigned to him.
And here’s the wonder. God never regretted it! He has never, and will never, regret the price of Calvary. The Father is not sorry He gave His Son, for in so doing, He won me back again.
