Wickedness
“The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”
Definition
Wickedness is human corruption considered under two aspects together: a settled disposition of the heart and the sinful acts of life that flow from it. Genesis 6:5 names both at once, reporting that “the wickedness of man was great in the earth” and that “every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually,” a text one classic exposition reads as distinguishing “the wickedness of their lives” from “the wickedness of their hearts,” with the corrupt heart as “the source of all.”1 Wickedness is sin regarded as settled character rather than as a single act.
Confessional Witness
Neither the 1689 London Baptist Confession nor its Reformed confessional siblings give “wickedness” a chapter of its own; the confession’s own vocabulary for it falls under chapter 6, “Of the Fall of Man, of Sin, and of the Punishment Thereof.” There it states that fallen human nature is left “utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil,” and that “from this original corruption… do proceed all actual transgressions” (Rom. 8:7; Col. 1:21; James 1:14-15; Matt. 15:19).2 The clause states in confessional terms the same order Genesis 6:5 supplies and Boston draws out from it: a corrupted disposition, “wholly inclined to all evil,” from which particular sinful acts, the “actual transgressions,” proceed.
Biblical Basis
Genesis 6:5 is the flood narrative’s own explanation for God’s judgment: “the wickedness of man was great in the earth,” his heart’s “every intention… only evil continually.” The Psalms apply the same vocabulary to describe corruption as universal rather than confined to one generation: “They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is none who does good… They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one” (Ps. 14:1-3). First Samuel preserves an old proverb naming wickedness as itself the source of further wickedness, “Out of the wicked comes wickedness” (1 Sam. 24:13), a saying David invokes precisely to explain why he will not act on it against Saul. Ezekiel treats wickedness as reversible rather than fixed: “when the wicked turns from his wickedness and does what is just and right, he shall live by it” (Ezek. 33:19).
Related Doctrines
References
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Thomas Boston, Human Nature in Its Fourfold State (Printed for the booksellers, 1787), 32-33: “First, Corruption of life, wickedness, great wickedness. I understand this of the wickedness of their lives; for it is plainly distinguished from the wickedness of their hearts… Secondly, Corruption of nature. Every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. All their wicked practices are here traced to the fountain and spring-head; a corrupt heart was the source of all.” ↩
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The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 6, “Of the Fall of Man, of Sin, and of the Punishment Thereof,” para. 4. ↩