I

Originally, God created a humanity that in His eyes was very good and close to Him, but they were destroyed by flood after rebelling against Him. Did it hurt God that such a humanity just instantly vanished like that? Of course it hurt! The destruction of the world at that time was not what God wanted. We might be able to imagine a small part of the pitiful sight of the earth after the destruction of the world, but we cannot come close to imagining what the scene was like at the time in God's eyes. We can say that, whether it is the people of now or then, nobody is able to imagine or appreciate what God was feeling when He saw that scene, that image of the world following its destruction by flood.

II

God was forced to do this by man's rebelliousness, but the pain suffered by God's heart from this destruction of the world by flood is a reality no one can fathom or appreciate. That's why God made a covenant with mankind, through which He aimed to tell people to remember that God once did something like this, and to swear to them that God would never destroy the world in such a way again. In this covenant we see God's heart—we see that God's heart was in pain when He destroyed this humanity; His heart was weeping and bleeding. Even though God hated this world and this humanity, when He destroyed the human beings He created with His own hands, His heart was hurting, struggling to let go, feeling reluctant, and finding it hard to bear.

from The Word, Vol. 2. On Knowing God. God's Work, God's Disposition, and God Himself I