Cruelty -- that's a very good thing to carefully consider(!).
My sense is that
few people,
and I think even few in churches, have been able to comprehend/accept what the text says was happening just before the Flood -- a situation so extreme the mind doesn't want to encompass it.
We tend to want to discount it, just not see it. Or if someone does see it, maybe the mind self-protectively forgets....
Like if we don't look, it will go away.
Maybe many people read it and then their mind refuses to allow the words to be what they are saying.
But the wording is about a shocking situation.
Verses 5 through 11, with more than one surprise (including destroying a pet favorite theory of many that God foresees all things, disproven here in my opinion). Have a look, if you like:
5 The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.
[I think many people can't quite grasp, or maybe it's they can't quite accept, that wording: that the culture of the peoples had descended to the point where they had
only evil thoughts, and
all of the time. A fantastically extreme level of evil that we'd grope to try to find any parallel for....
...maybe one would think of the guards herding people into the gas chambers at
Auschwitz, but...well,
worse. They had not
any love or compassion anywhere at all, not even occasional. Not even sometimes. Zero love, zero kindness. Only rape and murder and brutality,
constant, everywhere, all the time.]
6 The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.
[Here in my view the idea God foresees all things is disproven. In my opinion.]
7 So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” ...
11 Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence.
[Only violence, everywhere, all the time, and filling all places and probably even all hours of the day.]
Ok, see why this seems hard for many to grasp? They don't want to acknowledge -- or maybe it's just strong reluctance to think about... -- that humans can do something like Auschwitz, or worse....
When things are this bad,
living that way is cruelty, already.