Genesis 6:5-22 – 5/7/2026
The Lord saw that the wickedness of humans was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humans on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.
Genesis 6:5-6 (NRSVue)
What a strange thing Genesis says of God at the opening of the Noah narrative. God was sorry that They made humans. God regretted making us. It grieved God to see how evil humans were, how much harm and violence we inflicted on each other, and so God regretted even making human beings at all. Because of this regret, God decides to undo God’s act of creation by destroying the living things of creation with the very waters of chaos out of which he had brought dry land, making life on earth possible.
It is my experience that most Christians and most theologians do not take God’s regret in the Noah story seriously. What it means for God to have regrets, for God to be sorry for something God deliberately chose to do, seems to contradict some of the traits God is thought to possess necessarily by God’s very nature. In traditional understandings of theism, God is thought to be all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good. God can do anything God wants, and everything God wants is for the good, for the best.
Such a God cannot regret. So if we take seriously the Genesis story’s claim God brought about a world flood because God was sorry They had made humans and wanted to undo the act of creation, then we are going to have to adjust our conception of God away from the picture presented by the idea that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good.
Before tackling what God’s regret signals about who God is, it is important to note the radical nature of the flood that God brings about. In the account of creation in Genesis 1, God is seen separating dry land from the waters of primordial chaos. By flooding the entire world, God is bringing back the waters of chaos, returning the earth God created to its pre-created state. The flood is not simply God’s judgment against the earth but God’s desire to undo earth’s very creation. Such a complete reversal of the creative act signals that this is not simply a winnowing, this is a wholesale starting over. It is the difference between smashing a large sandcastle with a fist versus dumping bucket after bucket of water over the same sandcastle, washing it completely away without a trace. To un-create something in this way parallels God’s sorrow at having made it all in the first place.
Here we have a God powerful enough to bring order to chaos and then return that order to chaos once again, but it is not a God who orchestrates events or chooses particular, pre-ordained outcomes. This is a God whose will and plan can be thwarted. This is a God who can be taken by surprise and who can make mistakes, a very different picture from the detached, placid God, as God seemingly must be if God’s knowledge and power is so great that God could bring about any outcome God wanted. The God of the Noah narrative is powerful but has weakness, sees outcomes but not all of them, and is good but makes mistakes, a far cry from the Greatest Possible Being conceived of by some theologians.
From our limited perspective, we cannot know with any degree of certainty if God exists. We certainly cannot whether God knows all and plans all for the best or whether God regrets and smashes what They made. What we have in the Noah narrative in Genesis is a tradition grappling with evil and how that evil is compatible with the idea of a single, unified creator God. Floods destroy, plagues kill, famines starve, and these things happen seemingly without purpose or reason. These catastrophes that harm and destroy human flourishing appear from our limited perspective to be capricious. How could a loving God allow them? How could a perfect God have created such a fucked-up world?
One solution is to bite the bullet and say that God planned all this out, that each and every thing that unfolds is God’s plan and will. God created a world God knew would be full of suffering, evil, misery, and strife. Such a God, while mighty in power and perfect in knowing the precise detail of the unfolding of all creation, is terrible in action, creating and destroying with an unrestrained violence that could cause us to doubt that divinity’s intentions toward us. The author of Genesis has a different way of understanding God. This God who regrets is a God who is in the thick of uncertainty and weakness like we are. This is still a powerful God to be sure, but it is a God who has weakness and is capable of being thwarted and taken by embarrassing surprise.
As Lutherans we believe that God is human in the second person of the Trinity, God the Son, Jesus Christ. As such, whatever can be truly said of Jesus as a human person, can be said of God the Son as a divine person. When we take seriously God as truly human, the picture of God from the Genesis tradition of Noah starts to make more sense. If God is truly human, then God will be surprised, God will be frustrated, and God will do things They regret. If these things were not true of God, it would make no sense to say that God is truly human. When we look at the flood narrative through this lens, we see less a God exercising angry judgment, and instead we see a God who feels terrible for making a world with so much evil and suffering. “That’s not what I meant to do” God tells us through this tradition. “I wanted something better; I’m going to try again, better this time.” In saving Noah, God invites human beings to try again this time with Them. Noah then is not the one decent man in a world of wickedness; Noah is the acknowledgment of a weak and sorrowful creator that even though God’s creation went terribly wrong when it came to humans, there was something there still good, still worthwhile. Even though God was sorry and filled with regret, God was not going to give up…, on us.
So we remain, in the thick of it, in a world with things that are good and worth saving and things that never should have been. When we look closely at the suffering of the world, the suffering of innocents, we acknowledge that God regrets these things, that God desires they never would have been. Noah’s story then is a story of hope, a story of trying again and of overcoming regret. God may be in some ways transcendent and other, but God is not detached and placid. God makes mistakes. God wishes things had turned out differently. And yet, hope remains, life continues. Creation may be continually returning to the chaos from which it arose, but God chooses to keep trying despite the failures.
Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary.
Dionysus on a Bike 
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