Genesis 6:5

God. To be consistent, the KJV should read “Lord” instead of “God,” as in the Hebrew the word Yahweh, Jehovah, is used. Apparently, KJV translators were influenced by the LXX, which reads, the “Lord God.”

The wickedness of man was great. Human language could hardly provide a more forceful picture of human depravity. There was no more good left in man; he was “rotten to the core.” His “every imagination” was evil. The word “imagination,” from yeser, means “device” or “formation,” and is derived from the verb “to fashion,” “to form,” yasar. Therefore “imagination” refers to evil thoughts as the product of an evil heart. Christ said, “Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts,” and observed that they in turn produce “murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies” (Matt. 15:19). The heart was popularly considered the center of the higher powers of the mind — the conscience and the will. A contaminated “heart” sooner or later infects the entire life.

Continually. Literally “every day” or “all day long.” This brings the sorry description of antediluvian wickedness to a climax. If this is not total depravity, how could human language express it? Here we find evil supreme in the heart, in the “imaginations,” or thoughts, and in the actions. With very few exceptions, there was nothing but evil, not temporarily but always, not in the case of merely a few individuals but in society as a whole. This came about because men were “willingly ignorant” of God’s word (2 Peter 3:5).