BEFORE THE FLOOD happened, God said in Genesis 6:5-7:
And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every
imagination of the thoughts of His heart was ONLY evil CONTINUALLY.
And God was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at
His heart. [And God regretted that He had made man. GOD regretted that He had made man. GOD REGRETTED.]
And the LORD said, I will destroy man who I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; because I regret that I made them.
AFTER THE FLOOD, God said in Genesis 8:21: “for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth”.
Have you ever seen a before and after shot and wondered, "Why did they waste their money?"
Something was going on in the HEART of man. His heart was the same. Before the big cleanse and after the big cleanse, the heart was the same. Cleansing the world, did nothing to create a clean heart in man. In essence, God's descriptive of man's heart was the same before the flood and after the flood.
There was something so commanding in the heart of humanity, a flood that wiped out everything,
could not fix it. A flood that cleansed the earth and gave Noah and his family a brand-new world to start over, could not change the evil imaginations of the thoughts of the heart of people. The continual, nonstop, evil imagination of the thoughts of the heart had survived the flood. It was evident that the wickedness that had called for an earth cleanse was in “man”, in homosapien, not
in the elements of the grand nature that surrounded him. The earth didn’t need an earth cleanse. The people needed a new heart. Their brave new world was new. The heart is deceitful above all things. Who can know it?
Messed up heart in a pristine brand-new world – that is all God had. The grand production of the cleanse and the fresh clean slate of a beautiful world still hosted people with foul, dirty, messed up hearts. Didn’t the omniscient God know this? Perhaps the omniscient God needed us to see this. That even if God gives us a brand-new world and a clean slate, it was not enough. It could not change us. It could not rectify, fix nor change the heart.
In Ezekiel, the promise to His ever-straying people was a new heart.
Eze 36:26 A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh.
When the captives of Israel returned God promised to give them a heart know Him.
Jer 24:7 And I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the LORD: and they will be my people, and I will be their God: for they will return unto me with their whole heart.
*Note: The use of "man" refers to humanity in context; except for where "man" refers to a specific person/a subject of discussion.
