Clough Genesis Lesson 22
Survival of the Messianic Line – Genesis 5:24-6:8
Before we go any further in Genesis some people have handed in some feedback cards. One question that we get about once every four months is: will infants be raptured with the Church suggested by Enoch’s rapturing here in Genesis 5? Will infants be raptured with the Church? At leas the infants who are in the families of believers and we know this from 1 Corinthians 7, that passage about the children are sanctified by the parents, that’s the implication of that passage.
If angels exist and do not have a soul but spirit only, and in eternity past they made a choice for God or Satan, where was their volition if volition is supposed to be located in the soul of man? Well, the reason, obviously is the angelic beings are made differently than men and obviously their volition isn’t in their souls because they don’t have one.
The spirits don’t eat; well then how about angels who appear before Abraham and announce the birth of Isaac, they ate with Abraham. But they did so through materialized bodies which we’ll talk about today in Genesis 6.
In Genesis 5 we ended last time with a section dealing with a tremendous rise of the antediluvian society; particularly we got up to the time of Enoch. Now in the antediluvian era, we have to review this again, we have to do with a civilization that is utterly omitted in present day studies of history. Today, when you and I study history we are always led to believe that there has basically only been one civilization, and man dropped out of the trees and gave up the bananas and finally slowly evolved upward. But the Bible view of history is that we have four epics or four great civilizations, and the first one, which man knows little about today is the one we’ve been studying in these chapters of Genesis. I make mention of this and pause and review to make you aware of the fact that it’s not just Genesis one that’s the problem; so many people think well I have to do is somehow get around the days in Genesis 1. Well, that’s a very, very over simplistic idea of Genesis. The problem is that everything in Genesis 1-11 is a problem; everything in Genesis 1-11 is wholly out of line with what is the common view of history today.
So it’s not just the days in Genesis, it’s a whole set of things and they have to be solved or just omitted as a set, as a unit together. And one of these is this whole idea that there was this antediluvian civilization existing before the days of the flood. This civilization did not begin, as the usual mythology has it, that man gave up his tail and became a nomad and then after this he finally discovered that by dropping seeds in the ground he could have agriculture and you have the cradle of civilization arise and so on. Now what is being talked about in that sequence from Old Stone to New Stone to Bronze III, Bronze II, Bronze I, Iron I, Iron II, all that is the recovery of the human race in the second civilization after the flood. That did follow that pattern for reasons we’ll get into when we get into Genesis 9, 10 and 11. But the antediluvian civilization was an entirely different geography, the continents looked different, apparently, then than they do now; the earth’s surface was largely unconsolidated material, you have a hydrology that was different on the planet, you have more of an artesian well effect, possibly you had a different atmospheric design, the precipitation processes and so on. So this civilization was a very strange one by our present day standards. Then you have the third civilization which will exist after Christ comes back for a thousand years, the millennial kingdom; and then finally the fourth civilization, the eternal state, mentioned in Revelation 21-22 of the Bible.
So this is the way the Bible views history; not a unilinear progress but four epics, marked off from each other by severe universe shaking catastrophes. And in this early antediluvian society we’ve already seen certain things about it. We’ve seen, for one thing, that it had a surprisingly high technology. More about that next week; a surprisingly high technology, that is, metallurgy occurred within seven generations of creation; we have a period, therefore, that has to do with at least mining; at least an elementary chemical knowledge to not only refine iron but to deal with the bronze situation, to deal possibly with aluminum, so we can infer technology existed. The design of musical instruments, mathematics, the problem of harmonics, all these were there in this antediluvian society if you’re going to read honestly the text of Scripture and stop trying to ram it, cram it and jam it into some preconceived evolutionary mold.
That being so, we have a high technology but we have at the same time a low spirituality. Ethically the antediluvian society left lots to be desired. We also found out last time using geometric ratios that it’s very easy within 1,656 years to generate close to one billion people without having anything more than about 1.5 to 2% population growth curve, the reason for this being that you have such high longevity. People forget that when they work with the population figures. If you’re going to take the Bible as a straightforward figure and people are averaging 930 years you don’t have death subtracting from the total number of people in the geometric ratio. So obviously it’s blowing up rapidly. And anybody can do this, all it takes is a hand calculator and a little math, so it’s not in debate, it’s just there, that’s fact; 2 + 2 = 4 and it’s possible to have 700,000,000 very easily in the antediluvian society.
So that’s how much we’ve seen about the thing and we’ve said that Genesis is made up of various books that report these events. For example, we’ve been working with Book 3; Book 3 begins in Genesis 5:1 and continues through Genesis 6:8. We know these are books because as you can see in Genesis 6:9 it starts out with a famous title, “These are the generations of Noah.” If you look back at Genesis 5:1 what does it say? “This is the generations of Adam.” And periodically throughout Genesis you have these markers. Who wrote the books? The Bible doesn’t say; apparently Moses is the final editor but they may have gone all the way back to Adam writing the first two, perhaps Noah book three and so on.
The theme of the particular book we are in, from Genesis 5:1-6:8 is the theme of the survival of the Messianic line. The Messianic line starts out with Seth and terminates with Noah for that book, and the names of these men are important because they show you the thinking of the parents in that time. “Seth” is the word to appoint, that God has sovereignly appointed certain things in history to come to pass; this is the plan of salvation. Then we find the word “Noah” as we will see today means rest and the Messianic line has indeed survived for the 1,656 years it has survived all sorts of things and including one very bazaar thing that is happening here in Genesis 6.
Back to Enoch in Genesis 5:24. Enoch was the first man in history to go into the presence of God without going through the process of physical death. We don’t know why Enoch was selected; all the Bible says that in face he was selected. Now I suggest that one reason he may have been selected was that he faced, very valiantly, overwhelming odds in his day. The only other man we know of like Enoch in biblical history is Elijah, and Elijah too faced overwhelming apostasy in his culture and he had to face it largely without the support of his contemporaries. So both these men were in similar situations; if it was that that led God to rapture them we don’t know, but nevertheless we know that “Enoch walked with God and he was not, for God took him.” And verse 24 is the first verse that we’ve seen that doesn’t end with “and he died.” There’s a monotonous refrain in Genesis 5, so and so lived so many hundred years and he died; so and so lived so many hundred years and he died; so and so lived so many hundred years and he died, over and over and over again. Why? To show the curse of God.
And this introduces us now to the picture. Enoch was struggling with this and all the Old Testament saints before the flood were struggling with this and that’s the problem of evil. Now on the non-Christian basis evil is looked at radically differently than it is looked at from a biblical basis. Evil, for the non-Christian and the person that doesn’t follow the Bible’s train of thought, evil is inherent to existence and you can’t get rid of it. There just is no way of getting rid of evil from the system and so therefore evil, we say, is permanent for the non-Christian. But for the Christian evil is a late addition, so you have history going on and the time line, and sometime after creation we have the addition of evil and evil goes on for a time. Evil is not a necessary part of existence; it starts with the fall of man and will one day end.
Now the question is, if evil is to end, how is it to end, and this is a great question of all time because we can go through a little logic here and say that evil has to be judged; God will judge it to get rid of it. The problem is that all men are evil, so if you’re going to get rid of evil by judging, and all men are evil, then it follows that you have to get rid of all men to get rid of evil. So there obviously has to be something else that happens, there has to be some way in which the faithful seed of men can be preserved in history and the evil part subtracted from their being. And the question is, how is this evil part subtracted away from man to let man continue to exist and survive God’s awful judgment against evil. That is the question of eschatology or the question of the end of all things: how will all things end. The flood becomes the first picture in the Bible of the end times. The flood has served a vital function in giving us a concrete picture for our imaginations so we can work with it, and with our minds, and think how this is going to be like when the world comes to an end.
Now to show you the vital interest that the New Testament has in the flood, let’s look at some passages. Matthew 24:37, this is to show once again as I have repeatedly during this Genesis series, this is to show you that the New Testament surely interprets the Old Testament literally. There’s no debate about this, it just does it. Now on our side today we have pussyfoot evangelicals who feel intellectually embarrassed by the things in early Genesis and so their way of ooching around the problem is to reinterpret Genesis in a radical way, saying that this is just kind of a sanctified mythology that’s going on here and so on and so on. Yet inconsistently they also hold that Jesus is the final authority. But if Jesus has interpreted the mythologies literally and we say we believe in Jesus then it must follow that we also have to believe in Jesus’ interpretation of the mythology.
Or, like these pussyfoot evangelicals we have some hidden standard behind our back that we use as a sorting device, so given all the data we have about Christ I say this is true about Christ, this isn’t true about Christ, this is true about Christ and so I study my Bible with a razor blade, cutting out that which is true, saving that which is false and putting that which is false in the garbage can. Now that’s a fine little game to play but if you’re going to play that kind of little game then at least announce the rules; announce by what magical means you have been able to devise truth from error in the midst of Scripture. Tell us what your hidden compass is that guides you infallibly to the true passages in the text, and tells you with red warning lights that X passage is false while Y passage is true; at least be honest and above board and come to us with these criteria so we can discuss where you get your criteria from.
But we take the criteria original to the first century that the whole Testament is inspired and in Matthew 24:37-38 you find Jesus singling out the flood as the one example from history of the coming holocaust in the universe. Not any event but this event! “But,” says Jesus, “As the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. [38] For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, [39] And knew now until the flood came, and took them all away, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.” Obviously Jesus sees a striking parallel between the flood and His return.
Let’s go to another New Testament passage, Heb 11, again just to show you this is spread out, that you’re not going to get around it by fudging a little here and a little there. I’ve always said that if you want to do that be honest and just chuck the whole Bible in the ash can; I have a lot more respect for people that just chuck the whole thing than people that want to try this fiddling around sorting out pieces from other pieces. Hebrews 11:7. Here is the hall of fame of the great believers of the Bible who exercised faith in an unusual way. “By faith, Noah, being warned of God of things not yet as seen,” in other words, what Noah has access to is a promise that God is going to judge the world, by a flood, which Noah has never seen. Now here again Noah goes back in his thinking, he must have had to have gone back in his thinking, to what Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden. And here is the problem: Do I finally, when all is said and done in my life, do I proceed using experience as a final criteria; do I proceed using reason as a final criteria, or do I proceed using the Word of God as the final criteria; but somewhere along the line I’ve got to choose my gauge. Either I go the empiricist route, I go the rationalist route, or I go the route of the Scriptural thinkers that the Word of God is authoritative.
In Adam and Eve’s case, when faced with the proposition, eat of this, there was no way to rationally test the hypothesis, no way to experiment with it without violating the Word, so therefore Adam and Eve were compelled to accept the Word of God on its implicit authority. And the same way with Noah here; Noah couldn’t take a time machine, advance forward in history and say let’s see, is it true or isn’t it that the geophysical processes are capable of producing a flood like that is prophesied; there’s no empirical check on the prophecy, nor is there any rational check on the prophecy. So therefore there’s only one thing Noah could do, the same thing you can do and I can do, and that is trust the Scriptures, and in so doing trusting the God of the Scriptures.
So, “By faith, Noah, being warned of God of things untestable [not seen as yet],” and unreasonable we could say, “moved with fear,” the idea there is respect for God’s authority, “prepared an ark to the saving of his house, by which he condemned the world, becoming heir of the righteousness which is by faith.” So Noah is logged in the Scriptures as one of the great believers of all time.
Now you can say still that doesn’t prove a
literal interpretation. Fine, let’s turn
to 1 Peter
Turn to 2 Peter 2:5, once again Peter shows us how in the first century people interpreted the flood narrative. “And He spared not the old world, but saved Noah, the eighth person,” notice eight again, a detail out of this supposed mythology, “the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly.” So obviously these New Testament authors are trying to tells us something in loud unmistakably clear language that this thing is literal, it’s not a mythological event. All right, if that’s what they’re saying let’s go back and survey the ground and see what we can come up with; back to Genesis 5.
Enoch is taken; Enoch was a great preacher according to Jude, we studied last week, we even have part of one of his sermons. Enoch preached, he warned the people about the return of Christ. They didn’t listen, so God took him. And in his place He left Methuselah. Methuselah is the man that many of you have heard about, this is the man that lived longer than any other recorded person in human history, Genesis 5:;27, 969 years, which is enough to blow the actuary of any insurance company and the man’s name means something about the day in which he lived, like all these men’s names. Let’s take his name apart a moment; “methu” is man, “selah” noun form would be something thrown or something sent and we would say therefore a weapon would be the most logical guess, he’s a man of weapons, or the man of the spear, which suggests that in addition to the high technology of antediluvian society by the time of Methuselah we had the development of a weapons technology, and along with the art and the music we have the rise of weaponry, which is interesting in the light of some people who think that to be a Christian you have to be a pacifist. Methuselah lived 969 years, quite plausibly he lived simply because he was a man of weaponry and could defend himself, but however he lived for a long time; nevertheless it infers that it was something to do with weapons.
Incidentally, this coupled with Genesis 6:5 ought to warn anyone who takes this text seriously about how deeply imbedded sin is in any society, and the fallacy, therefore, of thinking that world peace will come through armaments limitation and so on; war has always been with us, will always be with us in the future, until the swords are beaten into plow shears at the return of Christ. War is a corollary to the reign of sin in the world. It doesn’t mean we don’t try for peace; it does mean, however, we don’t approach it with glassy eyes.
So we have Methuselah, then, as one of the longest living antediluvian patriarchs who begets a son called Lamech. Lamech is the father of Noah, Methuselah being the grandfather of Noah. And you will note that the Holy Spirit stops the genealogy in Genesis 5:28 and gives us a note of history. “And Lamech lived an hundred and eighty and two years, and begot a son. [29] And he called his name Noah,” now at this point we have in the sequence of events… Adam has passed off the scene. If we correlate the antediluvian ages and remember the overlap factor that Genesis is talking about, namely that one generation did not die off before the next generation came on the scene, we have Noah dying in the year 930 after creation, and if you look at the list of the dates of when the patriarchs were born you can very easily see that all of them were born before Adam died except one; Noah. Noah never personally saw Adam but he was the only man in the list who didn’t see him; Adam conceivably is a very old man; Adam conceivably had no real vital influence on history in his day but nevertheless he was able to pass transmission on down through Enoch to Methuselah, and that’s how we got the early portions of the Bible. So then we have Noah being born in the year 1056 after creation.
So Noah was the first millennia man, that
is one millennia of human history had come and gone before Noah came on the
scene and when he did, very significantly his father called him Noah. Verse 29 tells us why the name. “And he called human spirit name Noah,
saying, This same shall comfort us concerning our and toil of our hands,
because of the ground which the LORD God has cursed.” So Noah was named because of a mental
framework of the antediluvian order that rebelled at the curse of God, not in a
bad sense, it was just the tired society, a society that had developed
technology, had developed cities, developed population, developed a weapons
technology, and it was tired. So it’s a
testimony that even back in the antediluvian period when life was a lot easier
than it is now, physically speaking, man was a tired man. Sin ground him down, and though he lived
physically far longer than you will ever live, and though he lived with a body
far stronger than your body will ever be, nevertheless, he was ground down in
his mental attitude. He just simply was
tired, and that’s the story of verse 29.
“He called his name Noah,” saying this one shall give us rest. The Hebrew word “rest” looks like this, nuach, and when it is in the form of a
noun it’s simply noach, so you change
this thing to noach, an “o” and get a
{?} “ch.” So we could read verse 29, “He
called has name Noah, saying he shall nuach
us concerning our work and toil of our hands because of the ground which
Jehovah has cursed.” Notice that the
curse here is being interpreted as earth-wide, not just limited to some few
square feet in a flower box in
In Genesis 5:30, “And Lamech lived after he begot Noah five hundred ninety and five years, and begot sons and daughters.” Those sons and daughters, in verse 30, all died as non-Christian in the flood. This is one of those crosses that Noah had to bear; he had to know that all of his brothers and all of his sisters were rebellious against God’s Word, and when the flood came, and as the traditions tell us it was not just simple water, it was scalding water that erupted out of a tectonically active earth; these people were largely scalded to death in the waters of the flood. When this happened who was being toasted outside of the ark? His own brothers and sisters. His father died before the flood happened. Well, these are some of the things that Noah had to bear.
The other interesting thing about Noah is that he may have had other sons and daughters unmentioned in the Scripture because if one looks at the dates recorded for the birth of these children it’s significantly different than the date of all the other patriarchs. Notice that all of these men had the sons who would be the Messianic seed within the first 200 years of his 900 year life. All, that is, except Noah. Noah doesn’t have the Messianic seed line until he’s 500 years old. Why? The Bible doesn’t tell us why, it just reports it, presumably he may have had children earlier. [32, “And Noah was five hundred years old; and Noah begot Shem, Ham, and Japheth.”]
So this is the background for Genesis 6:1 and probably one of the most bizarre passages in all of the Bible. And critics have had a heyday with this thing, interpreting it in all sorts of weird ways and then ridiculing the various interpretations. As you can see, the first four verses speak of something strange happening between two groups of people. One group of people is called “the sons of God,” and the other group of people are called “the daughters of men.” Over this 1900 years of discussion and Bible scholarship there have been three interpretations made of this text. The first interpretation, the oldest one, dating back before the time of Christ, all the way back into the Jewish Talmud and so on, is the idea that the sons of God are angels and that what is recorded here is the marriage of angelic beings with human females. A second interpretation that began around the time of Chrysostum and Augustine is that this is the godly line, so the sons of God are the believers, and they’re intermarrying with non-Christian or non-believers; that’s the Sethite interpretation. Then a little known but strongly Jewish interpretation is that the sons of God are princes of some sort, kings; we’ll see that though it’s unpopular there is a degree of truth that may be in this third interpretation.
But first we have to say the major contenders for our allegiance are these first two, either one or the other. And how we’re going to decide is to look at the two groups and identify what it is that makes them different: the sons of God versus the daughters of man. Now the question is, what is the difference? If the difference is only moral and there’s no metaphysical difference, if it’s only a moral difference then the second interpretation is vindicated, namely that the sons of God are the godly line; daughters of men are the unbelievers. But if we can show that the difference isn’t just moral, the difference is metaphysical, it’s built in the way are, it’s a constitutional difference, then the first interpretation is vindicated, that the sons of God, in one of the most bizarre eras in all of the history of mankind, had sexual intercourse with human females. And we have to say that if the Bible reports that and we can’t explain it, our lack of an explanation is not sufficient reason to throw out the interpretation.
Let’s look first at Genesis 6:1 and see if we can define our terms carefully. Remember, by the time we get to verse 2, to prove that this difference is only moral what have we got to show? We’ve got to show that the daughters of man, or the daughters of men, that this “men” refer only to unbelievers, not to all men. The problem with that interpretation isn’t found in verse 1. When you start into the passage the first use of the term defines itself. “And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, daughters were born unto them.”
Now forget all the problems that come out of it, just look at the text. It says “when men began to multiply,” it doesn’t have any pejorative judgment about whether these were good men, bad men, godly men, ungodly men, line of Seth, line of Cain, nothing is mentioned that way; all that is mentioned is that when “the man,” and this is the way it looks in the Hebrew, “the man” or ha adam, and when you have the h-a before a Hebrew noun, “ha,” that is the article, “the,” definite article. When it’s used in this kind of a situation it’s called a generic use of the article which refers to a class and so it’s saying “the class of man,” or mankind. The Bible doesn’t call mankind kind of like you and I do, it just simply says “the adam,” not atom, a-d-a-m. We are all called “the adam.” So it says when the adam, “when mankind began to multiply on the face of the earth, daughters were born to them.” Now the antecedent of the pronoun “them” can’t be anything in verse 1 except mankind. So we have to interpret the last part of verse 1, “the daughters were born unto them,” or unto mankind.
So far not one distinction has been made in verse one about godly versus ungodly people. There’s not any ethical distinction being made here, just all mankind, “when mankind began to multiply.” Well, when did mankind begin to multiply on the face of the earth? Again, here’s Adam, here’s Noah. Well, when mankind began to really get going it probably was in the seventh generation as recorded in Genesis 4 with Lamech, somewhere, in other words, hundreds of years before the flood, whenever this bizarre thing is it started then, back when the human race got of significant numbers.
Now do we have a hint about what the significant numbers caused? What’s this business… why is it tied to “when men began to multiply?” Why doesn’t it say “in the days of Cain?” Or, “in the days of Enoch?” Or, “in the days of Lamech,” that would be the usual linguistic way of referring to the thing; why is it we have this population explosion brought into the scene in verse 1. Well obviously because the Holy Spirit is saying hey, whatever this bizarre thing is it’s linked somehow to population increases.
Well, can we think in our minds what would be most associated with population increases? Well the thing that most comes to mind from Genesis 4 is that as the human race populates you’ve got a progressive division of labor, you have specialization. Now you don’t have a jack of all trades and master of none, now you have… say somebody comes over here and says okay, you run the supermarket, you’re good at marketing and sales, I’ll be a farmer, I’ll raise the food sold in the supermarket. So you have division of labor developed. I mention this because it has bearing on the overall interpretation here. So we suspect that verse 1, this speaking of population explosion, is trying to say that the human race had needs about that time.
Now Genesis 6:2, “The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were beautiful; and they took them wives of all whom they chose.” Now who are “the sons of God?” Well, this word, “the sons of God” looks like this in the Hebrew. Think again, before we do that, of what we’ve already said about “the man,” “daughters of the man,” ha adam, daughters of the class of mankind. All right, now the Hebrew is quite clear on this and everybody reads it this way apart from evangelicals that get all upset with the results of it. You can go to your liberal scholar and he’ll read it this way, I’m not devising and inventing a new interpretation, it’s just the liberal after he gets through saying it he says well isn’t that a sweet little story, kiss it goodbye. But nevertheless, he reads it this way.
And it’s structured as this: the Hebrew beni which is the word “sons of,” plural, plural ending, beni ha Elohim, beni of the class of the gods, and you have the generic article on the noun. So obviously to any unprejudiced reader what the Hebrew is trying to tell us in an unambiguous way is that you’ve got two classes of beings: mankind over here and the gods over here. And you’ve got the daughters of the mankind, or human daughters, and you have the divine sons of the sons of the gods over here.
Now what are “the sons of the gods?” I thought, you would say to yourself, that the Bible is monotheistic. Do we have polytheism creeping into the text? No, not quite, fortunately for us this term occurs in three other places and all we need do is open our Bibles, go to those three other places where beni ha Elohim is used and lo and behold we arrive at a good interpretation.
Turn to Job 1; this is a strange text also. Few men in history have ever had the opportunity of watching what I call the heavenly counsel meet. Now what this heavenly counsel is, is a counsel that apparently runs history at this point in time, eventually replaced by the Church, but right now history is run by the heavenly counsel. It also meets, incidentally, in the book of Revelation and John the apostle sees it. We don’t say that it’s just the way Hal Lindsay’s movie is and all the rockets and MIG-15s but the heavenly counsel does exist in history and occasionally God allows man to peer in on the meetings. The heavenly counsel… this is completely… it blows your mind because in the west we’re used to thinking of history mechanically working, as though history is one from state one to state two by a series of principles or series or rules or natural laws but when you peer behind the scenes, and we will someday get that chance to do this, when you peer behind the scenes you’re going to discover not principles have run history, including geophysical phenomena but beings have run history. And the heavenly counsel is a meeting of the beings that run history and they are called the gods.
Job 1:6, “Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them.” So obviously in this passage the gods are angels, angelic beings, both good and evil, that are united in this heavenly counsel… both good and evil, sort of like the U.N. here, they meet together and they run the world. But they run it under the permission of the sovereign God; God allows this to go on.
In Job 2:1 you get another instance of beni ha Elohim, and again it’s not talking about godly people, let’s just look at the text. It says “there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them to present himself before the LORD.” And incidentally you get an idea here of how some things in history go on, verses 2, 3, 4 and 5. Satan has to get permission from God to bring pestilence onto Job, and he has to go through the chain of command to do this. It’s nice to know, isn’t it, at least that evil, even the worst forms of evil, have a law above them. So evil is under control. Well anyway, this heavenly counsel is made up of angels on positive volition which we call in Scripture the elect angels and the demons, the angels that are on negative volition toward God and have decided to rebel.
One further passage where beni ha Elohim occurs, Job 38, during
creation. And during creation there was
no evil yet inside the heavenly counsel, so they had unanimous votes at that
time on how to do thing; there’s no spirit of dissent. In Job 38:7, during creation, “When the
morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy,” “all the sons of God,” you see this
unanimity in the heavenly counsel; everybody is together. Incidentally, that’s also a passage that shows
you that music antedates the creation of man.
What we call music is something that the angels once sang and probably
still do. In fact, in the story of
Christmas the shepherds went out in their field and they beheld the heavenly
counsel saying, “Glory to God in the highest,” the angels were singing. So the angels down through history have been
the great musicians also. All right, so
the heavenly counsel is called beni ha
Elohim.
On the way back to Genesis we’re going to stop at one more passage where a particular prophet of ancient Israel got a change to listen to a discussion going on in this heavenly counsel, a very, very rare moment; it’s never repeated until the book of Revelation and why God doesn’t open up the heavenly counsel to human observation I have no idea, I just observe that this is the case.
1 Kings 22:19, Micaiah is trying to explain a prophecy to the politicians of his time, and so he says, “Here thou, therefore, the word of the LORD: I saw the LORD sitting on His throne, and all the host of heaven standing by Him on His right hand and on His left,” using the right and left here, presumably he’s got the elect angels on the right and the demon powers on his left. Verse 20, “And the LORD said, Who,” this is a question of what are we going to do about history angelic counsel; “And the LORD said, Who shall persuade Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?” So the problem is bringing divine institutions on a political leader in history, how are we going to do it? God talks it over with the heavenly counsel. “And one said on this manner, and another said on that manner.” So there’s a discussion about to engineer history, wouldn’t it be neat to get in on some of these deals. Verse 21, “And there came forth a spirit, and he stood before the LORD, and said, I will persuade him. [22] And the LORD said how are you going to do that? And he said, I will go forth, and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And the LORD said, You shall persuade him, and prevail also; go forth, and do it. [23] Therefore, the LORD has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these prophets.”
Now notice two things about this passage: number one, all proceeds from the sovereignty of God correct but two, it proceeds by means of these intermediate good and evil spirits, they are the links between the sovereignty of God and what we call historical event. And notice too that the means of the links used, that is the means the angelic beings use, take subsidiary place to the angels themselves. I mention this because I’m going to bring it up in a moment here in Genesis 6. Notice in verse 21, though the angelic being, a fallen angel presumably here, that’s going to act as a lying spirit, this lying spirit is going to use physical bodies to do his dirty work. But the physical bodies aren’t the issue in verses 21-22; what is the issue in verses 21-22 is the fact that simply the lying spirit is going to do his thing, if he happens to use men fine, if he doesn’t fine, but he’s going to do his thing. Now let’s come back to Genesis 6 and see if we can have a little more insight with these angels and what they’re doing with all the girls. The first time probably some of you girls have ever been told to watch out for angels.
In Genesis 6:2, “The sons of God saw the
daughters of men,” and all during this period of time, for some 700 years maybe
or 600 years before the flood, this kind of thing was going on. The question we raise, is there some way we
can pull this together in some sort of coherent picture and I say there
is. We know that the angels in Genesis
Another thing that’s interesting is that we know in Genesis 4, what did God do to protect Cain? He said to Cain I’ll leave My sign and that says nobody will exercise vengeance against you. So it’s not civil government, human beings doing it, it’s God doing it. The third element I point to is Jewish tradition and true, it’s not inspired, but Jewish tradition says that when the division of labor occurred man’s high technology was mediated to him through angelic helpers, that the angelic beings originally taught man math and some of the basic things. And this is remembered in the world’s myths as various gods and goddesses would give man the gift of this, the gift of that and the gift of something else. Read it in mythology.
So if that were the case, and since we know that there is minus divine institution four going on before the flood, there is no civil government function operating then, I would suggest to you that God ruled history during this period in a direct way through angelic ministers, who at times showed up on the earth, and that there was a mixing of angelic beings with the human race prior to the flood. And while this mixing took place from time to time there was a little hanky-panky going on and that’s what’s being described here in verse 2: when “the sons of God,” who are acting as princes, who are acting as helpers to the human race, acting as the agents of swinging and moving history, looked around, they looked down at man and they said hey, you know what, there’s something neat that God did with Adam that He didn’t do with us, He made females for those guys, because angels are always pictured in the Bible as masculine.
So females were a very interesting phenomenon to them. Angels then started chasing. And that’s what the whole point in verse 2 is, and obviously some sort of social anarchy prevails, we knew that from Genesis 4, “and they took wives of all whom they chose,” in other words, they said you, you, you, you’re mine, and the rest of them come along and said you, you, you, you’re mine, get over here. And the girls would have to do it, that was just the way it was, no ERA in those days.
Genesis 6:3, and so “the LORD said,” as a result of this hanky-panky that was going on, He said “My Spirit shall not always…” and the word isn’t “strive,” the Hebrew word is diyn or judge and it’s used for government, political government. “My Spirit will not always politically govern among man,” and I would suggest, merely a suggestion, I would suggest that that’s how the angels are getting into the position they’re getting into in verse 2, that God ruled in place of divine institution four with these angelic ministers, and what He’s saying is, the system isn’t working and so it’s not always going to work and I’m terminating it. And then He says this, which I say further confirms the interpretation, “for he is also flesh,” He’s talking about mankind, “he is also flesh,” now when you and I use the word “also” what do we mean? Also besides something else; well what is man besides being flesh? Spirit. So what he’s saying is that man has been spiritually polluted and is in a very dangerous situation, but one thing, I have made man also of flesh and so I’m going to destroy him physically and that’s going to end it. So man is also flesh, he is now susceptible to death as a mortal being, his life “shall be one hundred and twenty years.” That’s the announcement of the flood; it came in the 620th year of Noah.
Now Genesis 6:4 is a synopsis statement, it’s a summary statement of the conditions of verses 2-3; verse 4 is not an added action. In the Hebrew it starts out with a noun which signifies it’s a nominal clause and it’s a parenthesis. So if you really wanted to you could put a parenthesis around verse 4; it’s a descriptive clause describing conditions contemporaneous with the actions of verses 2-3. What does verse 4 say?
It says, “There were nephilim in the earth in those days. We’ll get back to what that means in a moment; “There were nephilim in the earth in those days; and also after that, “when the sons of God,” and in the Hebrew the force is this way, “whenever,” so we’d read it… forget that little note, “and also after that,” that’s a note well get to it but to see the simple sentence structure read it this way: “There were giants in the earth in those days; whenever the sons of God would come in to the daughters of men, and bore children to them—[dash] these ones were the mighty men which were of old, men of fame.”
Now who are these “men of fame?” The “men of fame” are the men remembered in the myths of the world. Think of the great heroic gods, Achilles and some of the others that you read about in mythology. What is always true about their father and their mother? In most cases you will find that these gods peculiarly are born of a human mother with a god for a father. Now where’d that get started in history? I say it’s a memory among men’s collective unconscious of what’s going on here in Genesis. These myths are suppressions deep in the psyche of man of his past historical experience, and so man remembers that somehow at one time or another in history there were these fantastic heroes, capable of almost super human things that they were able to do and they all bragged that they were the result of a god and a human mother.
Now let’s see if this interpretation is wholly out of line by checking three passages in the New Testament. Turn back to those Peter passages, in 1 Peter 3:19 it talks about three days in the life of the Lord Jesus Christ. Those of you who have come out of liturgical churches, if you have recited The Apostle’s Creed do you remember, I believe in this, I believe in that, Jesus Christ was crucified under Pontius Pilate, He died, and He descended into hell and He rose again the third day; do you remember, He descended into hell. Did you ever wonder where that came from? There’s only one passage in the Bible The Apostle’s Creed comes from and it’s right here, verse 19. Here’s what’s called in theology the harrowing of hell. What did Jesus do from the time He died until the time He rose from the dead? He was raising hell! “By whom also He went and He preached unto the spirits in prison.” The word “preached” here is different from the usual word to preach the gospel and that’s a tip. The word “preach” here is a word that means to proclaim or announce, and the idea is, literally, “He proclaimed” and it doesn’t tell us what, “He proclaimed unto the spirits who were in prison.” Well now what’s He proclaiming? We’ll get to that in a moment. Who are the spirits? Well, verse 20 says they are the spirits “who were disobedient, when” during the flood, just prior to it, “in the days of Noah.” Well, who were these disobedient spirits in the days of Noah? The spirits you just read about, the beni ha Elohim of Genesis 6:2-3.
Well you could say that’s just one passage. All right, turn to 2 Peter 2:4-5, it must have been fascinating for Peter, he talks about them. “If God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment, [5] And spared not the old word, but saved Noah, the eighth person….” Verse 4 and 5 flow quickly together. And by the way, the word for “hell” in verse 4 is a word that is again familiar to those of you have studied some Greek mythology; this one, Tartarus, the lowest part of hell, they were chained in the lowest parts of hell. Why were they chained? Because of something they did that was associated with the days of Noah.
One further reference; turn to the little
book of Jude. Jude 6, “And the angels
who kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, He hath
reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great
day, [7] Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them in like manner,
giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set
forth for an example,” notice that verse 6 and 7 are unitized and brought
together. What is the sin of
Now, can we pull it together and say… can we infer somehow what happened when
Christ went down to see those spirits?
And I think we can. Look back at
the big picture and what’s happened here.
Here’s the antediluvian society from Adam to Noah. What promise had God given Eve? That out from the daughters of men would come
Christ, the virgin born {?}. Now if you’ll
turn and look at the language of Genesis 6:4 you see one of Christ’s title’s
there. The women are all human, the
angels like them; the angels, presumably, in some way, had sex and probably…
there’s two ways that have been suggested, they materialized bodies and we know
that they can do this because in Hebrews 13:2 it talks about the fact that
Christians have entertained angels unawares, and entertain means to invite them
into the house and feed them a meal. And
he’s talking about the gift of hospitality in the church. Now I ask you, if angels can’t materialize
bodies, how in heaven’s name can they knock on your door, walk in your room,
sit down at your table and eat food and you don’t even know they are angels.
Well, if one of these {?}{?}{?}{?}{?} [can’t understand, says same word several
times] and comes on down the aisle and it’s floating you’re going to know they’re
an angel. Well obviously they don’t show
their presence that way; they show up with a suit of clothes on and they have
normal human bodies and you can’t tell because Hebrews 13:2 says they entertain
angels unawares. So there’s proof that angels can show up in
materialized bodies. They eat. Well, if they can eat and consume bread why
can’t they engage in sexual intercourse?
The males only need a short time and so they don’t have to materialize
for a long time, that’s why it takes the male side of the situation.
Two, another suggestion has been made recently by Dr. Henry Morris and he would suggest the idea based on what I showed you in 1 Kings 22, namely that they were able to do this by some special form of demon possession, where they’d get hold of male bodies, and did something with the soul and just utilized the human male body in these divine marriages. But whatever the means, they were able to do this.
Now in Genesis 6:4 the conclusion is that the nephilim, who are the products of these marriages between angels and people, these nephilim, called giants, because later on the same word is used in Numbers 13 for giants, these giants that were the result were called “mighty men” and the word “mighty men” is gibbor, and that’s the word in Isaiah for Christ. “And His name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father,” the word “Mighty God” is El gibbor. And so obviously what you’ve got is the antichrist. These nephilim were a conspiracy on the part of Satan to simulate the virgin birth of Christ; they were an infiltration and a tampering with the womb of humanity to bring forth Christs, not The Christ, but they represent some sort of conspiratorial counterfeit to destroying the human race and preempting the virgin birth of the Lord Jesus Christ, an extremely bizarre and extremely dangerous situation happened in those days.
Now I said earlier that as we studied the
lead-up to the flood we want to understand something else. There are parallels between the flood and the
generation before it and the return of Christ and the generation before
it. Now we know the rise of technology,
population explosion and so on. I would
suggest in Genesis 6:4 we have an added parallel to our own generation. In our own generation one of the most
startling scientific advances that has been made are the advances in genetic
engineering, tampering with the vital nucleus of reproduction. My own alma mater in
Genesis 6:5-7 summarize the rest of the conditions in society; not only was there genetic engineering of an angelic nature going on, “God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Verse 5, a statement of the sin nature, incidentally, found centuries before Paul. [6] “And it repented the LORD that He had made man, [on the earth, and it grieved Him at his heart],” notice how God is grieved, He doesn’t just sit with folded arms in sort of a Leonardo De Vince pose, with total and perfect peace. The God of the Bible is enraged at what’s going on in history; it strikes Him, and so in verse 7 God says, “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth;” now he lists them, “man, the beasts, the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repents Me that I have made them.”
Now those three are precisely those listed in Genesis 1:26 under “subdue the earth.” Man was to subdue the earth and part of the subduing of the earth was beasts, and creeping things, and the fowls of the air. And God says I will damn man and damn everything in his kingdom. Another question of interest: I wonder if the angelic beings weren’t in league with the beasts and the fowls of the air, perhaps, in whatever was going on in verses 2, 3 and 4.
The last verse of book three of Genesis closes out with the introduction of grace. [8, “But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.”] This is the first time in the Bible’s history that the word g-r-a-c-e shows up. Here is the first occurrence of grace; very important and forever afterwards for those of you who use the word grace a lot, you remember one thing: grace can never be appreciated unless you first set it inside a prior damnation. It means nothing to talk about God’s grace if you don’t first talk about God’s judgment, and there’s the situation, after I see the wrath of God, only then do I appreciate grace. Three’s too much cheap grace talk going on in Christian circles. You can’t appreciate grace until after you face the wrath of God and that’s the point here. God damns this whole world with its high technology, its genetic manipulation and all the rest that’s going on. He’s going to damn it from one end of the world to the other. And the only hope is those who find grace.
Therefore we are going to conclude by
singing of the victory of grace….