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Some of the sages have noted that God's judgment comes in stages. The Great Flood was preceded by four successive generations of prophets that warned of the coming cataclysmic judgment: Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, and finally Noah.
It is fascinating to understand that Adam himself was alive when Noah's grandfather Methuselah was born, so the original message of teshuvah (repentance) was an echo that came from Eden itself; moreover, consider that Abraham personally knew of Noah (Abraham was 58 years old when Noah died), and undoubtedly Noah's son Shem told him of his grandfather Lamech, who had seen and spoken with Adam himself - the man who was directly created by God alone. Later, Abraham's son Isaac also came to know Shem, Noah's firstborn son, and the legacy of the "gospel of the garden" was thereby passed on...
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The first stage of judgment occurred when people disregarded the inherent dignity of others created in the image and likeness of God. This negation of the divine characteristics of people (i.e., the image of God) led to sexual promiscuity that became rampant upon the earth: "The sons of God saw the daughters of man that they were fair, and they took for themselves wives, whomsoever they chose" (one midrash claims that the Dor HaMabul, the generation of the flood, would regularly exchange marital partners). God then gave mankind 120 years to repent from his sexual corruption or be faced with apocalyptic destruction (Gen. 6:3). Despite Noah's 120 year public building project and the preaching of his grandfather Methuselah, God's patience finally ran out (1 Pet. 3:20). God then "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" (Gen. 6:5). Mankind refused to repent and turn to God....
There is a tragic progression at work here. The practice of "casual" acts of lawlessness eventually led to the acceptance and practice of sexual promiscuity. This, in turn, resulted in the loss of mankind's sanctity (kedushah), since this comes from man's ability to subordinate his instinctual/emotional desires to his intellectual/spiritual life.
Genuine sanctity refuses to exploit others as means to an end. Disregarding this truth cheapens and impairs the sense of self, causing disintegration of the spiritual life. As humanity became more and more fractured and stupefied, God's "like for like" judgment resulted in "giving them over" (paradidomi) to the lusts of their hearts (Rom. 1:26). (In our culture of unbridled pornographic expression and sexual immorality, we mirror such an antediluvian world view. Indeed, it is a mark of our age to be enamored with "degrading passions," with gender confusion and regularly practiced idolatry (i.e., fornication, adultery, homosexual relationships, and so on)).
The final verdict of this practiced "chamas" (lawlessness) was the bestowal of a "depraved mind" (αδοκιμον νουν), a condition of being unable to reason properly at all. Since truth is essentially grounded in a sense of value, and value is a function of conscience, a depraved mind is literally insane from a spiritual perspective... People who are devoid of conscience are unable to reason along the lines of ethical truth at all. This promotes a cultural collusion to suppress the truth, to silence the truth-tellers, to kill the prophets, and to gag advocates for justice. Lawlessness squelches the inward voice of right and wrong within the human heart.
Hebrew Lesson:
Genesis 6:5 Hebrew reading (click):
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Timeline Note: Noach lived for 350 years after the flood, and died when he was 950 years old (Gen. 9:28-29). Based on Gen. 11, Noach was 602 when Shem begat Arphaxad (Gen. 11:10), and Terach begat Abram 290 years later (Gen. 11:12-26), so Noah would have been 892 years old at the time Abraham was born. Since Noach lived to be 950, he would have lived for 58 years after Abraham was born. On the other hand, if Terach was 130 (not 70) years old (from Gen. 11:32 compared with Gen. 12:4), then Noah would have died two years before Abraham was born (Terach and Abraham's older brothers, however, would have been contemporaries of Noah). The problem is that Gen. 11:25 is equivocal, so we cannot know for certain because of the apparent discrepancy in the genealogies.
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