Genesis Chapter Eight, Part 5

8:21 [though] the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth
In a later revelation the prophet Jeremiah writes, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” Jeremiah 17:9. The answer being: “only God,” Jeremiah 17:10; 1st Samuel 16:7. This is a hard fact to swallow, since we desperately wish to believe that mankind is essentially good by nature, and outside perturbation is responsible for our lawless behavior. Given proper moral, economical and agricultural circumstances man can rise above outside contamination, master himself, and grow into the moral and self-determined creature he truly is within.

This is a lie of evolution and psychology, wrapped in pretty wording that is disconnected from daily reality. Even Freud, a pillar of modern psychology, disputed man’s inward goodness. Man’s penchant is toward evil; why else must we train our children to be obedient, polite, selfless, useful, responsible, etc? Do we have to train them to be self-centered, quick-tempered, selfish, hasty, lazy, rebellious, etc? 5000 years of recorded history have revealed a tapestry of failure on man’s part to perfect himself; without God, as He revealed Himself through Jesus Christ, it is hopeless. Andrew Murray once noted that you don’t have to create laws in order to compel a creature to do something that it does naturally. In other words, the existence of laws forbidding this and prohibiting that testify that we haven’t the moral power to obey in our nature. We want our way, and Heaven help those who intervene, James 4:1-4.

8:22 While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.
Here God promised that while this present earth remained, the seasons and cycles of day and night would remain fixed. Yet this testimony by God foreshadowed the great reality that one day this present earth would indeed be destroyed. Peter writes, “But the heavens and the earth which are now preserved by the same word, are reserved for fire until the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men…but the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat; both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up,” 2nd Peter 3:7, 10. Perhaps when a believer’s works are tried at Christ’s judgment seat and burned, it is because they are not done in Christ, but done with an earthly ambition in mind. Since the earth is perishing, so too will all such works.

When John saw the new heaven and new earth there was no more night there, Revelation 21:1; 22:5. Isaiah records the same thing: “For behold, I create a new heavens and a new earth; and the former shall not be remembered or come to mind,” Isaiah 65:17. The old covenant will be dissolved because the old earth will have passed away; there is no night, implying that there are no more seasons, and no more tracking of time: time itself will expire and give way to eternity, where everything is the ceaseless present. The old earth is unfit to endure eternity since it is dying; so too man must be reborn by the Spirit of God, or they are likewise unfit to enter and inhabit eternal dwellings. “Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does corruption inherit incorruption,” 1st Corinthians 15:50. Paul explains the need of the new birth in detail in verses 51-54. This earth is passing away, and the lust of it, 1st John 2:17. But God supplied victory for His saints in Jesus Christ. Know that if you have put on Christ, you have put on immortality; you will not see death, John 8:51.