Nephilim and the Grief of God: The First Grace in the Bible (Genesis 6)

By Genesis 6 the world God called good has gone rotten.

The numbers had been climbing since the garden, people multiplying across the earth, and something darker multiplied with them. The chapter opens on strange, disputed ground, the "sons of God" taking wives, the Nephilim in the earth, "the mighty men of old, men of renown" (Genesis 6:4). Readers have argued for centuries over who exactly those figures were. What the passage will not let you miss is where it lands: "the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great upon the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was altogether evil all the time" (Genesis 6:5).

Then comes a line unlike anything before it in Genesis. "And the LORD regretted that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart" (Genesis 6:6). God grieved. The word is heavy and personal, the grief you feel over someone you love. The God who spoke light into being looked at what people had done with the gift of being alive, and it wounded Him.

What does it mean that God 'regretted' making man?

The word for God's regret is the same root Lamech reached for one chapter earlier, when he named his son Noah and prayed the boy would "comfort us in the labor and toil of our hands" (Genesis 5:29). One root holds a father's hope for comfort and a Father's grief over ruin. God feels the full weight of what love has to do next: "I will blot out man, whom I have created, from the face of the earth" (Genesis 6:7).

And then the sentence the whole rescue turns on. "Noah, however, found favor in the eyes of the LORD" (Genesis 6:8).

Why does 'Noah found favor' matter so much?

Because that is the first time the Bible says the word we would come to call grace, and it comes before Noah does a thing to earn it. The very next verse begins his story. Favor first, then a life of walking with God. Generations later Jesus pointed straight back to these days, "Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the Son of Man" (Luke 17:26), and the New Testament built everything on that one small word: "For it is by grace you have been saved through faith" (Ephesians 2:8). One man found favor and a whole household came through the flood. One Man was favor itself, and everyone who belongs to Him comes through the judgment in Him.

The Doxa Deeper Dive today stays with the Hebrew: the word for God's grief, the inclination of the heart the LORD names, and the small word 'favor' that the rest of the Bible never stops using. Read it here.

Go looking for God in this passage and you find Him grieved over a broken world, and you find Him setting His favor on one man before that man had done a thing to deserve it. That is still how He comes. Where has God shown you favor you know you did not earn? Write it down, and read it back the next time you are tempted to think He has given up on the world, or on you.