“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 regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the LORD said, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.’ But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.”
Genesis 6:5–8 (ESV)
The Question from Class
Just before the flood, Moses writes a sentence that stops a careful reader. The LORD “regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” (Genesis 6:6). The King James Version has “it repented the LORD,” and The Lutheran Study Bible, which prints an earlier edition of the ESV, has “the LORD was sorry.” Every one of these sounds as though God had made a mistake, or as though the wickedness of the world had caught him unprepared. Neither can be true. A God who errs is not wise, and a God who is surprised does not know all things.
The question is old, and it is a good one. Martin Luther stopped at this verse in his lectures on Genesis and asked it in nearly the same words: “If God foresees everything, why does the text say that he now first sees? If God is wise, how can regret for having created anything befall him?” The answer begins with the two Hebrew verbs in the verse and with what the rest of Scripture does with them.
Two Hebrew Words
The first verb is nacham (נחם). When God is its subject in the form used here, it names sorrow that follows an action. Andrew Steinmann, in the Concordia Commentary on 1 Samuel, gives its sense as “regret” or “be sorry.” Reed Lessing, in the Concordia Commentary on Isaiah 56–66, observes that the Old Testament generally keeps this form of the word for the LORD and uses a different verb, shuv, “to turn,” for the repentance of sinners. The word is therefore no confession of fault. Sinners turn from their evil. God has no evil from which he might turn.
The second verb is atsav (עצב), “to be deeply grieved.” Luther pointed out that it is the word for the pain of childbirth in Genesis 3:16. The pain that sin brought into the world in chapter 3 is, in chapter 6, said of God himself. Lessing notes in his commentary on Amos that this is the only verse in the Old Testament where the two verbs stand together, and that it is the first place in Scripture that speaks of the suffering of the LORD. The verse describes a wound. It does not describe an error. The Lutheran Study Bible says it in five words: “Man’s sin is God’s sorrow.”
One Chapter That Settles the Matter
Scripture answers the question itself in 1 Samuel 15, where this verb appears four times. In verse 11 the LORD says, “I regret that I have made Saul king.” In verse 29 Samuel tells Saul that “the Glory of Israel will not lie or have regret, for he is not a man, that he should have regret.” Verse 35 then repeats that the LORD regretted making Saul king. The writer saw no contradiction, and there is none. God does grieve over Saul. God does not regret as a man regrets, who learns too late what he did not know and wishes that he had chosen otherwise. Steinmann points out that the omniscient God already knew that Saul would reject him, just as Jesus already knew, when he chose his apostles, that Judas would betray him (John 6:64, 71), and still tried to turn him back (Matthew 26:21–25).
The Old Testament applies this verb to God in three ways, and they do not conflict.
| What the Verb Says of God | Where | What It Teaches |
|---|---|---|
| The LORD grieves over what sinners have done with his gift. | Genesis 6:6–7; 1 Samuel 15:11, 35 | His sorrow is real, and his judgment is not cold. He knew beforehand what man would do. |
| The LORD relents from a judgment that he has threatened. | Exodus 32:14; Jeremiah 18:7–10; Joel 2:13; Amos 7:3, 6; Jonah 3:10; 4:2 | Sinners turn, and he spares them. The change is in them. Mercy was the purpose of the warning. |
| The LORD does not change his mind. | Numbers 23:19; 1 Samuel 15:29; Psalm 110:4. See also Malachi 3:6 and James 1:17. | His promises and his oath stand. Lessing counts thirty-five passages that use this verb of the LORD; seven of them say that he will not relent. |
Genesis 6:6 belongs in the first row. It does not say that God reversed a decision, as he did when Nineveh turned at the preaching of Jonah. It says that he grieved. Augustine, writing on 1 Samuel 15, gave a rule that holds for every row: “Where we do read in Scripture that God repents, this means that human affairs themselves change, while the divine foreknowledge of them remains unchanged” (City of God 17.7). Man had changed since the day when God called his work very good. God had not.
He Saw Everything from Eternity
Luther, the Church Fathers, and the Formula of Concord on Genesis 6:6
Did God See It Coming?
Yes. Luther answers his own question plainly: “The meaning, therefore, is not that God did not see these things from eternity; he saw everything from eternity.” He continues, “From eternity, therefore, God is firm and constant in his purpose. He sees and knows everything.” The Formula of Concord confesses the same. God “foresees and foreknows everything that is or will be,” whether it is good or bad (Solid Declaration XI 4). The Formula then draws the line that matters for Genesis 6. God foresees evil, but “not in such a manner as though it were God’s gracious will that it should happen,” and he fixes “a limit and measure” to it: “how far it should go, and how long it should last, when and how He will hinder and punish it” (Solid Declaration XI 6). The flood is such a limit. God foresaw the wickedness of that generation, did not will it, bore with it, and ended it at the time that he had set.
The ancient church read the verse in the same way. Augustine wrote that “God cannot ‘repent,’ as human beings repent, of what He has done, since in regard to everything His judgment is as fixed as His foreknowledge is clear” (City of God 15.25). Ephrem the Syrian, a deacon and hymn writer of the fourth century, gave the plainest proof that man was no mistake: “If there had been any blemish in the works of God, He would have created a new world and would not have preserved in the ark anything that had caused remorse to Him.” God did not begin again with something else. He kept the man and the woman whom he had made, and he carried them through the water.
| The Thought | Why the Text Does Not Allow It |
|---|---|
| “God made a mistake.” | He kept what he had made and carried it through the flood in the ark. The fault lay in the heart of man (Genesis 6:5). The work of God was “very good” (Genesis 1:31). |
| “God did not see it coming.” | “He saw everything from eternity” (Luther). God foreknows all things, the evil with the good (Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration XI 4). |
| “God changed his mind about us.” | The Glory of Israel “is not a man, that he should have regret” (1 Samuel 15:29). Two verses after the grief, Noah finds favor (Genesis 6:8). |
| “God felt nothing.” | “It grieved him to his heart” (Genesis 6:6). The LORD does not judge with indifference. “Man’s sin is God’s sorrow” (The Lutheran Study Bible). |
Why Scripture Speaks This Way
God speaks to us in our own language. Luther said that “God himself condescends to the low plane of our understanding” so that we may know him in some way. John Chrysostom, preaching on this verse in the fourth century, told his hearers to let the thought of God regretting perish. In his words, “Sacred Scripture recounts it to us in human fashion so as to teach us that the excess of their sins aroused the loving God to such anger.” The human words are not empty. They tell us truly that God is not indifferent to sin, and they tell us so in words that we can feel. When God speaks in this way again after the flood (Genesis 8:21), Luther comments: “This must not, of course, be understood as implying that God could possibly change his mind; it is written only for our consolation.”
Luther accepted that explanation and then offered one that he thought simpler. The grief of Genesis 6:6 was heard and felt on earth. Noah, his father Lamech, and his grandfather Methuselah had the Word of God in that generation, and the Holy Spirit moved them to grief over a world that would not listen. “The Holy Spirit is said to grieve when Noah grieves,” Luther wrote, and he pointed to Ephesians 4:30, where Paul warns Christians not to grieve the Holy Spirit. The Lutheran Study Bible sets that same verse in the margin beside Genesis 6:6. Wherever the Word of God is preached and refused, this sorrow is still heard.
Where God Wants to Be Found
Luther would not let his students stare into the hidden mind of God. “It is better and safer,” he told them, “to stand at the manger of Christ, the man.” Nobody can look into eternity and read the heart of God there. Anybody can look at Jesus. In him, Luther said, we see “the spirit and the will of his Father, who does not hate sinners but desires to have compassion upon them through his Son.” That gracious will “has been determined, from eternity, and revealed and published in Christ.”
Genesis already points there. The paragraph ends, “But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD” (6:8), and The Lutheran Study Bible notes that this favor is “found and not won.” The God who was grieved to his heart had prepared the rescue before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4; 1 Peter 1:20), and he carried his promise through the flood in one family. In Jesus that grief has a human heart. Luther set him beside Noah: “Christ, foreseeing the destruction of Jerusalem within a few years by reason of its sins, is most violently moved and pained in his soul” (see Luke 19:41–44). He saw it coming, and he wept. He then went into that city to bear the judgment of the world himself. At the flood the grief of God ended in the death of sinners. At the cross it ended in the death of his Son for sinners, and Peter teaches that Baptism now saves us as the ark saved Noah (1 Peter 3:20–21).
Genesis 6:6 · “Man’s Sin Is God’s Sorrow”