Gen 6:6 God's Grief

Gen 6:6   And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. (ESV)

I thought I was going to get to Noah today but this verse caught my eye. What a deeply sad verse this is, but how incredibly revealing. I sometimes wonder why God created the world knowing it would fall into such depravity and evil with all the pain and suffering that that would entail. When I see or hear about evil and suffering even on a small scale I can be overwhelmed by it. Imagine what it would be like to see all of it all of the time, not just the actions of sin, but the evil inclinations of people's hearts. Not just the visible effects of sin on others but the devastating invisible wreckage on their soul. Think how we grieve over loved ones. The more we love someone the deeper our grief at their loss. Well, God's love is infinitely stronger and deeper than ours for this broken world so how intense his grief must have been as it despised and rejected him. Love would one day triumph but only after an even greater grief.

There is a scene in Mel Gibson's "The Passion of Christ" where the camera hangs above the cross.  It looks down giving us a kind of God's eye view on the last minutes of Jesus' life. A single drop of water, a tear, falls in slow motion impacting the ground with a crown shaped splash. What pain and grief must have been in the Father's heart that day. God created a world destined to fall knowing it would crush him. He stepped into that world to embrace the full force of its suffering and evil so that you and I could be saved for his glory.