God Regretted Making Us

on war, systemic violence, and Genesis 6

I’ve been thinking lately about this verse in Genesis:

“The LORD regretted that he had made humankind on the earth, and his heart was deeply grieved.” (Gen. 6:6)

I keep returning to it because I wonder whether God might feel the same grief now, looking at the world we’ve made.

I hesitate to focus on Trump here, because our problems are bigger than any one person. I’m no fan, obviously, but I worry about how much attention we give him as an individual, as though he alone explains our political moment. In doing so, we often forget that he is a product of the system that created him. This is why, when I critique this administration, I always return to the larger framework of empire—a system that has shaped and dominated our reality long before Trump ever appeared on the scene. I don’t claim to do this flawlessly, of course; I’m human, and my emotions inevitably color the work I produce.

Perhaps this is why I was struck by a line in a TIME article released today:

“Since returning to office, Trump has authorized attacks on eight nations, three of which have never before been directly targeted by U.S. forces. No modern American leader has ordered assaults against as many countries in such a short span of time.”

Photo by Lisa van Vliet on Unsplash

And it made me think again of Genesis.

Last week, a girls’ school in Iran was bombed, killing more than one hundred students. This comes on the heels of the release of the Epstein files, revealing again the countless children who suffered unimaginable trauma because of Epstein, his cronies, and the network that protects them. And then there is Gaza. Since October 2023, roughly 20,000 children have been killed, not counting the generations who have lived and suffered under occupation.

If there were ever a moment for God to regret making humankind, it feels like that moment would be right now.

Of course, the early chapters of Genesis are ancient epics. But Genesis 6:6—God’s regret—has always been a kind of theological puzzle, especially in evangelical spaces. A great deal of breath (and ink) has been spent trying to explain it away. Trust me. My own seminary career began at a Southern Baptist seminary, where debates like these consume an astonishing amount of intellectual and emotional energy.

But the text itself is surprisingly straightforward. Genesis tells us why God grieved. By verses 11–13, the diagnosis is clear: the earth had become corrupt and was “filled with violence.” That detail feels important right now, when the messages we hear from those in power insist that war is necessary, righteous, even good. We are told strength means striking first. That security requires domination.

But Genesis does not say God was grieved because humans were weak, nor does it say God regretted creating people because they failed to be powerful. No, God was grieved because the creation that once was very good had turned violent.

The Hebrew word used here (cḥāmās) carries a sense broader than individual wrongdoing: It points toward brutality, oppression, and injustice embedded in the fabric of society itself. In other words, the problem wasn’t just that people were doing bad things or behaving badly. The problem was that the whole structure had become corrupt. And that matters, because empire is simply violence organized.

Empire depends on it at every scale. Sometimes violence is spectacular—bombs falling from the sky, cities reduced to rubble. But more often it is quieter: humiliation, dispossession, the slow grinding down of dignity and safety. Violence becomes routine, embedded in law and habit alike.

Empire also requires an enemy. Without one, it cannot justify the enormous machinery it has built to sustain itself. People become collateral damage—casualties in the pursuit of power. Peace, in this logic, is not the absence of violence but its byproduct: order imposed once the sword has cleared the field. Only then is devastation rebranded as stability.

History offers no shortage of examples. 70 years ago, the CIA helped orchestrate a coup that removed Iran’s democratically elected prime minister and installed a ruler friendly to Western oil interests. But as the story goes, he repressed his people, and that is how the story has continued to unfold because this is what empire (the U.S.) has always done: put people in vulnerable positions, then convince them that only it can save them from that vulnerability.

It’s always about self-interest.

And when power gathers in the hands of the few—
when the strong secure themselves at the expense of the vulnerable—
when human beings become instruments of profit, expansion, or control—

the earth fills with cḥāmās.

Genesis 6 imagines a world ordered against God’s intention for shared flourishing. This tells me that God’s grief isn’t sentimental. Instead, it is a sorrow of a Creator watching image-bearers construct systems that devour one another.

Perhaps, then, what comes next—the flood narrative—is less a matter of divine punishment and more a matter of divine resistance. A refusal to allow violence to become the permanent heartbeat of creation. And what strikes me most is how early this moment appears in the story. We are only six chapters in. Six chapters removed from a garden where the whole project began with the intent of human flourishing.

And yet, for a faith whose story begins with God grieving a violent world, many of us grew up learning to celebrate battle.

Evangelicals have been singing “I’m in the Lord’s Army” since childhood. Western evangelical theology doesn’t just borrow the language of warfare—it is deeply shaped by it. The imagination itself is militarized. And that imagination spills into everything, shaping not only what we believe about God but how we understand the world. In this framework, everything is a battle and there is always an enemy. You must always be armed—spiritually, ideologically, sometimes literally—ready to fight.

Violence has long been baptized in holy language. From conquest narratives we were taught never to question to apocalyptic fantasies soaked in divine bloodshed, war has been woven into the story and called good. When that imagination goes unexamined, it forms people who come to see bloodshed as not only inevitable, but righteous—sanctioned by God.

This is the only way the slaughter of innocent children can be justified: by sanctifying it, by lifting it out of flesh and bone and placing it safely in abstraction. Western theology often survives by living in theory, at a distance from bodies. Because to confront the literal, breathing, bleeding reality of what this kind of faith authorizes would undo us. It would destabilize the systems we’ve built and the God we’ve made in their image.

But perhaps that unraveling is exactly what faith requires of us. Not to defend power or sanctify violence, but to have the courage to imagine life beyond it—and more importantly, to engage in the stubborn work of refusing it.

If Genesis teaches us anything, it is that God’s grief isn’t passive. It is a bold protest against a world where bloodshed has become normal, inevitable, justified. And if that grief tells the truth about the world, then it also calls something new out of us.

Because if the problem is a world structured by domination, the answer cannot be more domination. It must be something else entirely. If empire insists peace must come through the machinery of war, I will keep defiantly seeking it elsewhere: in mutual aid, in solidarity, in the stubborn conviction that safety cannot be built on graves. Peace must mean interrupting the cycle. Refusing the scripts we have been handed.

So we keep showing up to our civic duties. Loudly. Disruptively. We refuse silence when silence is the price of belonging. And we keep loving one another so fiercely, so stubbornly, that our care becomes its own form of resistance—until we become the very thing empire fears most: a people who fervently believe—and live, as if another world is possible.

And when the words fail us, as they often do—we borrow them from one another.

So here I offer you this benediction from my latest book, Liturgies for Resisting Empire, from the chapter on peace:

“May we be filled with a strength that rises not from the clash of arms but from quiet courage. Let us hold the weight of love like an offering, knowing that true power lies in the gentle persistence to heal, to soften, to mend what’s been broken. In the tender pursuit of peace, we find the resilience to endure, to breathe, to be.

Amen.”