Saturday, February 05, 2011

Same cause, opposite response

Haven't looked up an commentaries yet, but does anyone here have a helpful understanding of what's going on in God's head when he says that:
20 Then Noah built an altar to the LORD and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. 21 The LORD smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though[a] every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.

22 “As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will never cease.”


I mean, isn't that why he decided to send the flood in the first place?

Particularly interesting to me is how the pleasing aroma of the sacrifice enters into it.