Advanced Level, Block 1—Result of Fall
Week 8
God’s Repentance of Making Man
Point to Emphasize: We must avoid things in the evil society around us that could damage us for God.
Reference Reading: Genesis 6:5-7; Life-study of Genesis, msg. 29
Memory Verse: …He will be a vessel unto honor,…useful to the master, prepared unto every good work. (2 Timothy 2:21b)
Story Sample
After God created man, He said, “Very good” (Genesis 1:31). In God’s eyes, man was very good. Then, in Genesis 6, many hundreds of years later, God took another look at mankind and saw that man had become wicked and corrupt to the uttermost. Genesis 6:5 says, “And Jehovah 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.” What a change from Genesis 1! Originally, man was on such a high level; noble, even perfect, and now man declined to a low level and had become so wicked and corrupt. Man had no morality in their living.
Verse 6 says that God repented that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him in His heart. To repent is to have a deep regret. God regretted that the man He created was so corrupt. There was no hope. This grieved God. To grieve is even more than to feel bad—Grieving hurts to the very center of our being. God was full of sorrow.
What was it about their living that caused God to regret making man? Well, man followed Cain in leaving God and man became evil. As we read in Genesis 6:5, man was doing evil things and was thinking evil thoughts constantly. Evil, wickedness and violence filled society. So, God needed to make this right. The only way to make things right was to clear up this evil on the earth.
Sadly, the world we live in now is very similar to the world they were living in thousands of years ago. There is such wickedness on the earth today. For example, firstly, God created a man and a woman (male and female) and He established it this way. Marriage was between a man and a woman. This is God’s way. Anything different that you see in society, in books or in television programs, is part of the evil age. These different and erroneous things grieve God. Since God created us male and female, boy or girl, we just accept it. To say that someone can “change their gender” is to deny God and is part of this evil age.
One more example in this evil age is the pressure on children to have boyfriends and girlfriends. This damages us. When I was your age, some of my girl classmates were already talking about the boys they liked, about kissing and holding hands. My friends would put pressure on me to be like them. However, I decided to wait. I was not going to get myself involved in that kind of talk and participate in those kinds of things as a child! I decided I would wait until graduating from college before thinking about who to marry. I enjoyed my teenage years baking, cooking, playing guitar with the young people, among a lot of other healthy activities. It wasn’t until I was 24 years old that I felt I was ready to get married. Oh, it was the perfect timing! Some of my classmates had many boyfriends, and ended up getting married too early. They ended up having complicated lives. I am happy I avoided all of these complications and waited for the right time to get married. [Storyteller, insert your example of avoiding things from society that could damage you, for a 10-11 year old.]
Finally, another evil in this society is the pressure to smoke, vape, take drugs, and drink. All of these things will damage our bodies that were created by God. These things can even damage our bodies permanently. It can damage you physically and psychologically for your whole life. There are some things we’ve done that we can’t erase. Some of these may damage our bodies and shorten our lives. We need to make sure that we don’t give in to this pressure. We need to avoid any of these things. We can make the decision to avoid all these things so we can be useful to God.