And Then God Looked at Man

AND THEN GOD LOOKED AT MAN

Part two of four

Where We Left Off

In part one I walked verses one to four and stopped there on purpose.

I showed you three parties named before anything happened, and a fourth already in the earth. I showed you where my King James says sons of God and sorted those places into piles. I showed you the word for man changing between verse three and verse four, and I told you what I hear in that and told you it was mine.

I am not going to walk that ground again. If you have not read part one, read it first, because I am building on it. Here is where we stopped.

And here is the very next verse.

He Looked, and He Named Man

Read who He names. The wickedness of MAN.

On my reading, something else had crossed into that world, something that had left the place that belonged to it. And when God turns and looks, He looks at man, and He says man. Man did not stop being man because another order came near him.

The Word Under Wickedness

Now here is something my King James does not show you, and I want you to have it.

The verse says wickedness of man, and then it says only evil continually. WICKEDNESS and EVIL. Two different English words.

The lexicons give them the same number. It is the same Hebrew word, twice, in one verse.

So He saw the thing, and He saw it again inside the man. Wickedness on the earth, and the same word in the thoughts of his heart.

That is what the number gives me. What I make of it is that the outside and the inside were the same thing, and I am telling you that is my reading.

The Days

Now go back and pick up something from verse three.

His DAYS shall be an hundred and twenty years.

And in verse five, the King James says his heart was only evil CONTINUALLY. Two different English words again. Days, and continually.

The lexicons give those the same number too. It is the same word. DAYS, both times. So read the two together.

God put a number on man's days. And when verse five describes what filled man's days, the same word is underneath CONTINUALLY.

And here is what I take from that. Both of those belong to man. The limit was put on him, and the evil was in him. Not on another order, and not in another order. On him and in him.

One thing I will not do is tell you what the hundred and twenty years means. Some read it as the length of a life and some read it as the time left before the flood. Moses does not stop and say, and I am not going to settle it for you.

What Happened to the Other Side

Because somebody will ask. If God named man, did nothing happen to the others?

Genesis does not tell me what happened specifically to the sons of God. After verse four, it does not name them again.

But two men in the New Testament do, and I want to show you what they say, and then I want to be careful about what I do with it.

Read what Jude holds them to. Their first estate. Their own habitation.

He does not say they sinned in general. He says they left what was theirs.

And Peter names them by what they are, not by what they did. The angels that sinned.

Now here is my fence, and I am putting it up before I build anything on it.

Neither Jude nor Peter says these are the sons of God in Genesis 6. Neither one names the chapter I am reading. That I bring them here is my joining, the same as the Job one in part one.

If you do not make that joining, the rest of what I say in this study will not hold for you, and I would rather tell you now than let you find it out at the end.

It Runs Both Ways

Taking my joining, here is what I see.

The angels do not escape by pointing at men. Jude does not say they were provoked. He says they left their own habitation. Peter does not say they were dragged. He says they sinned.

And man does not escape by pointing at them either. God looked at the earth and He said the wickedness of MAN.

So both answer. And here is what I make of the two accounts, taking my joining, because neither Genesis nor Jude stops and states this for me. God calls man MAN when He judges what is in him.

Jude calls the others ANGELS when he tells what they left and what judgment followed. I read that as each being held to what he was.

And neither one gets to hand his account to the other.

I Learned This Raising a Child

My daughter did a thing she had been told not to do, and when I put it to her she said, my friends did it too.

I told her, your friends do not concern me. What concerns me is what I told you.

That was not me being hard. She was the child I was answerable for in that conversation.

Another parent's child could not undo what I had required of my own.

And that is how I read Genesis 6:5. When God comes to look, He looks at the one He made, and He deals with him according to what He put on him.

The Heart

Here is what I have come to hold, and it is mine. God's judgment does not confuse identities.

He does not lose track of who He made, or what He required of them, or what boundary He set around each order.

A thing can cross a line it was never given, and the crossing does not erase what either side was.

And I take that personally, because I am on one side of it. I was made in His image, and I will answer as what He made me. Not as what somebody else did near me.