DAY 1 GENESIS 6:1–8
Redemption is where God’s anger with sin and his grace toward the sinner embrace.
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t is so easy for us to minimize our sin. It’s so easy for us to be more concerned about or irritated by the sin of others than we are our own. It is so easy to argue for our own righteousness while being judgmental and condemning toward the sin of others. But if you minimize your sin, then you will no longer value, seek, or celebrate the forgiving, reconciling, transforming, and delivering grace of God. If you defend yourself in the face of conviction, you are defending yourself from the best gift that has ever or will ever be given: redeeming grace. One particular passage powerfully depicts the sinfulness of sin. These are the words of a Creator who is grieved by what sin has done to his world and to the people he made in his own image. 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.” (Gen. 6:5–7) What a devastating explanation of the horrible nature of sin: “Every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil contin- ually.” Since the heart is the control center of one’s personhood, for every intention of the heart to be constantly evil meant that the control of sin over people’s lives was both total and inescapable.
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