destruction the less it
thinks of it 86.

* How the time of the flood is to be compared with the time God
gives man to repent 87.

II. THE JUDGMENT AND LAMENTATION OF GOD OVER THE FIRST WORLD; NOAH AND
HIS PREACHING.

A. GOD'S JUDGMENT AND LAMENTATION OVER THE OLD WORLD.

V. 3. _Jehovah said, "My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for
that he also is flesh: yet shall his days be a hundred and twenty
years."_

41. Moses here begins by describing Noah as the highest pontiff and
priest, or, as Peter calls him, a preacher of righteousness. This text
has been mangled in various ways, for the natural man cannot
understand spiritual things. When, therefore, the interpreters, with
unwashed feet and hands, rushed into the Holy Scriptures, taking with
them a human bias and method, as they themselves acknowledge, they
could not but fall into diverse and erroneous views. It has almost
come to pass, that the more sublime and spiritual the utterances of
Scripture, the more shamefully they have been distorted. This passage
in particular they have managed so shamelessly that you would not know
what to believe, if you followed the interpreters.

42. The Jews are the first to crucify Moses here, for this is their
exposition: My Spirit, that is my indignation and wrath, shall not
always abide upon man. I will not be angry with men, but spare them,
for they are flesh. That means, being spurred by sin, they incline to
sin. This meaning Jerome also adopts, who is of the opinion that here
only the sin of lust is spoken of, to which we are all prone by
nature. But his first error is that he interprets Spirit as wrath. It
is the Holy Spirit Moses here speaks of, as the contrast shows. "For
man," he says, "is flesh." The meaning is, therefore, that the flesh
is not only prone to sin, but also hostile toward God.

43. Then the matter itself serves as refutation, for could anything
more absurd have been devised? They see with their eyes the wrath of
God swallowing the whole human race through the flood, and yet they
expound that God does not wish to be influenced toward the human race
by anger but by mercy, and this after a hundred and twenty years, the
very time of the flood.

44. Rabbi Solomon expounds it thus: The Spirit which is in God shall
no more strive and wrangle. As if God in his majesty would have
disputed and wrangled about what should be done with man, whether to
destroy or to spare him, f