Daily Devotional Details

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The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. Genesis 6:5 (NIV)

For some years now, secular education has been teaching our children and young people the postmodern myth that there is no such thing as good or evil—everything is relative.

But sometimes we see the face of evil—things that are too awful for a social or cultural explanation. People reared in relativism then begin searching for words, language, and categories to describe what happened. And, ultimately, what they find themselves saying is: “This is evil.”

Once you admit that there is evil, and that it is in human beings, you have to ask how it got there. The book of Genesis tells us the story of sin’s origin and of its development. After Adam and Eve were expelled from God’s garden, sin grew.

The first family soon fractured. Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel. Cain became angry with Abel and murdered his own brother. It was an early sign of the devastation and destruction that sin would bring to the human family.

Then in Genesis 6:5 we have an extraordinary statement of how sin multiplied and intensified as the human family grew: “The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.” Evil became pervasive in society, and for this reason God sent the flood.

How in the world did that happen? How did we get from one sin in Adam to a world where every thought in the hearts of men was only evil all the time?

Can you think of an area in your own life (or in the world around you) where you have observed the growth or multiplication of sin?