Audio  As we were preparing for the birth of our first child, I remember the overwhelming assumption that many people made. Since we are Christians, we would certainly decorate our child’s room with the theme of Noah’s Ark. That seemed to be a popular option judging from the options presented in the local stores. It was a genuinely honest question that I asked to one person who made such an assumption, “Why would we do that?” And the person responded that it would be cute, what with all the animals and such, and after all, it was in the Bible. I replied, “Well, wouldn’t that be kind of like decorating with a theme of Sodom and Gomorrah, or Armageddon?” I think many people have in their mind’s eye this vision of the story of Noah’s ark being a cute little cartoony story. In fact, the story of Noah’s ark is a story of cataclysmic judgment. It is anything but cute. When we attempt to make it a cute story, we minimize the severity of this judgment and overlook the sinfulness of humanity that brought it about. If we were to envision it accurately, we would see it as a horror story. And yet, in the midst of the horror story there would be a sweet story line of divine love and redemption. That is how the Bible sets forth the account, and how we must understand it. As we make our way through this passage, we will discover the conditions which made the flood a necessary act of divine judgment. We will also discover the characteristics of a man who was shown gracious favor by the Lord. And we will also see how God acts to rescue and redeem the objects of His grace in the midst of His judgment. I. The Conditions of a Culture Destined for Judgment In our exploration of the essential texts of Scripture, we have looked at creation, and we have seen corruption as sin entered into the human experience. Because of sin, Adam and Eve immediately faced the consequences of shame, fear, guilt, pain, conflict, frustration, and death. One generation removed, the human race experienced its first murder as Cain slew Abel (4:8). It was not long before the family unit began to deteriorate with Lamech taking two wives (4:19).[1]Like his ancestor Cain, Lamech was a coldblooded murderer who boasted of his evil deeds (4:23-24). Genesis 5 records for us the wages of sin working itself out over successive generations of humanity with the repeated refrain “and he died … and he died … and he died.” The first four verses of Genesis 6 are notoriously difficult to interpret, and there has been no shortage of creative (and sometimes bizarre) attempts to explain them. I have dealt with those issues in depth in a document I wrote concerning the infamous “Spirits in Prison” passage from 1 Peter 3, and that document can be found on our church website. Suffice to say here that, whatever those verses mean, the conditions of human existence on the earth had been progressively degrading since Adam and Eve disobeyed the Lord in the Garden of Eden. There was creation. There was corruption. And now comes catastrophe.   Genesis 6:5 begins, “Then the Lord saw ….” The last reference we have to God “seeing” something occurred in 1:31 where, “God saw all that He had made, and behold it was very good.” But now, with successive generations of humanity having come and gone and with the sinfulness of man and the effects of sin having been compounded exponentially in the world, the Lord sees an entirely different state of affairs in the world. No longer is it “very good.” Now, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth.” The corruption of the human race had reached a tipping point, and divine judgment could no longer be withheld. Notice how the text describes the expression of this corruption. There is a repetition of words like “wickedness,” “evil,” and “violence.” The Hebrew word hamas underlies our English word “violence” here. The word is defined by one scholar as “the cold-blooded and unscrupulous infringement of the personal right of others, motivate