Question:
Will you please explain Genesis 6:3?
Answer:
The text reads: “And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.” This text is generally understood to express this: the time of that generation was limited to the period named in the text, and during that 120 years, God would, by the preaching of His servant and the sending forth of His Spirit, endeavor to bring men to repentance, before the Flood came upon the earth. The Lord never brings judgment upon men unwarned. (See Amos 3:7). It was not His desire that the antediluvian world should perish. Still, their wickedness had become so great that one or the other of two things was necessary— the truth of God would be lost to the earth, and sin would ultimately triumph, or the judgment of God must fall upon those who were wicked, and sweep them from the earth.
It is not the Lord’s plan that righteousness shall perish from the earth or that sin shall eternally triumph, and, therefore, He gave that generation the privilege of turning to Him. He sent out Noah, “a preacher of righteousness” (2 Peter 2:5), who preached the righteousness of Christ by faith (Hebrews 11:7), by the power of the Spirit of God (1 Peter 3:19, 20), for 120 years. At the end of that time, all upon the earth had either accepted or rejected the message of the Gospel. Those who rejected it identified themselves with sin and chose to perish. Those who accepted it were carried over the Flood by the ark or died in faith before the Flood. So it will be in the last days before Jesus Christ shall come again. God’s “Spirit shall not always strive with man,” for “as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of Man.” (See Luke 17:26, 27). The Lord has not now specified the time, but that day of judgment will as surely come as it did in the days of Noah.
