Angelic Conflict: “Sons of God: Apostates, Autocrats, or Angels.” Jude 6, 7

What we see in Jude 6 & 7 as well as 1 & 2 Peter passages is a reference to some dramatic conflict among the angelic hosts that resulted in a large segment of the fallen angels being assigned to a place in Sheol where they were imprisoned in chains of deep darkness. This is stated by Peter and Jude, and this is not the final, ultimate judgment, it is a holding cell for their future judgment before they are assigned to the lake of fire.

Jude 1:6 ^NASB “And angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day.” At the end of Jude 7 there is a reference to Sodom and Gomorrah undergoing the punishment of eternal fire. Ninety-nine per cent of people immediately jump to saying that the eternal fire there is the lake of fire. That is a question that has to be decided but it must be pointed out that the noun “fire” is modified by a genitive adjective—“eternal fire of eternity”—and this is the same kind of thing we have here with reference to “eternal bonds.” It is not eternal forever and ever and ever because there comes a time when they will be set free from these bonds to stand before God at the final judgment, and then they are sent to the lake of fire. So “eternal” doesn’t always means eternal. Sometimes it means a long time; sometimes eternal has to do with their origin—“bonds of eternity,” meaning these come from God as the eternal one. And it can also means for a time period within a certain age. So we have to evaluate the context and some other things before we immediately leap to the conclusion of eternal, everlasting, never-ending judgments.

This passage talks about angels. Angels are the subject of the verse. They did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode. The proper noun is angels and it is in the plural, and this is important for understanding the next verse. It is a masculine plural noun. When we get to the next verse there is a comparison made between the sin of angels and the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah. The topic shifts from the first example of judgment to the second example. The first example was Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities. Jude 1:7 ^NASB “just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them …” “Cities” is also a plural noun, a feminine plural noun, so just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around “them”—feminine plural noun referring to the cities—there has to be agreement in gender and number between the pronoun and its referent. “ … since they in the same way as these …” This particular pronoun shifts gender to a masculine plural. Well the only masculine plural noun preceding this that is could refer back to would be the plural noun “angels.” So what this is saying is that Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them “indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh” in the same way as these angels. It is specifically stating that the area of sin among these angels was one of sexual sin and sexual immorality. “… are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire.” Jude is bringing them forth as an example of those undergoing the punishment of eternal fire. We will have to come back and take a look at what that describes, but we don’t think it describes eternity in the lake of fire; they are not there yet. For one thing, it is talking about present tense. It is talking about present time punishment, the time Jude is writing, or it could be a punishment that has occurred already in the past. So that would indicate the fire and brimstone that God sent down. Its source then would be from God, from the eternal one; that God sent down on Sodom and Gomorrah, and that is probably the best interpretation because it fits the pattern of all these judgments or pattern of punishment in time for the sins, not a future punishment.

We have seen that in 2 Peter 2:4, 5 there is an indication of a major sin among the angels for which they are cast into Sheol/Hades, committed to the pits of darkness, reserved for judgment. So it is saying the same thing as the Jude passage: they are held for future judgment. And this occurred prior to the world wide flood of Noah’s day.

It is very important to understand how Satan is constantly trying to invade human history to block God’s plan of redemption and God’s promise of fulfilling His promises to the Jewish people. We see one major assault that took place in the garden of Eden. A second major attack takes place in Genesis 6 and then series of attacks that take place during the Tribulation period.

Genesis 6:1 ^NASB “Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them.” If we look at the context, what we have in chapter 5 is a genealogy. These genealogies are important and significant because they take us through the lineage of the Messiah. God promised to Eve that her seed would defeat the seed of the serpent and so this follows and traces the lineage of the seed of Adam through two lines. There is the line of Cain and the line that goes through Seth.

Genesis 6:2 ^NASB “that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men …” So it makes a distinction between daughters that were born to men and sons of God. It is important to understand this distinction. It is talking about the daughters, about a group of females, and then the sons of God are treated as the males. The sons of God saw that “the daughters of men were beautiful.” So this is clearly talking about one group of women and one group who are male, a group of males who “took wives for themselves, whomever they chose.” It is a one-way pattern. It is always males in the first group, sons of God, taking women from the daughters of men.

The key issue, as has been pointed out, is the phrase “sons of God” which in the Hebrew is beni ha Elohim. This is a technical term which always refers to angels. But there are three basic interpretations that are set forth for understanding this episode, and so we have to evaluate these and evaluate these terms to make sure we are properly handling Scripture.

The first view is that these are apostates. This view looks at “the sons of God” as referring to those in one group. Usually it says that these are the descendants of Seth, all believers, and the problem is that they are intermarrying with unbelievers. We understand from passages in the New Testament that it is wrong for believers and unbelievers to intermarry, not because it creates a crisis in the human race but because you have two people with different perspectives of reality living together. It is always a recipe for disaster. They can get along if they are both operating in carnality, and if they both live their life in rebellion against God they can probably have a fairly happy marriage. But it is not going to be a God-honoring marriage and it is ultimately going to be self-destructive because God is not part of the marriage. But that is not the issue that is going on here; the evidence doesn’t support that. What we see in this view is that the sons of God is said to stand for descendants the Seth line and the daughters of men to descendants in the Cain line. This is the view that the daughters of men are spiritual apostates.

This view tends to use phrases we see in some passages such as “Israel my son,” or “my firstborn,” or “sons of Yahweh” in Deuteronomy 14:1, “children of God” in Deuteronomy 32:5, and many others to try to argue that this use of beni ha Elohim can refer to human beings as well. However, in each of those phrases it is a very different phraseology than the one that we have in Genesis chapter six.

One of the problems with this Cain line versus Seth line view is that it makes it a one-way problem. It is just an intermarriage between believers and unbelievers, but it is an intermarriage between male believers and female apostates. The apostates come just from one genealogical line, Cain’s line, and the sons of God would be male believers in the line of Seth. One of the problems with this is the failure to appreciate the size of the population during this time. There was a world wide population that had grown through about ten generations or more and they lived to be 800 to 900 years of age, with several generations living together at the same time. Adam only dies about 400 years before the flood. There were a lot of people on the earth. It did not take long for the population to expand. It is very conservative to postulate four children per family. On the basis of those figures Dr Henry Morris worked out the world population at the time of the Noahic flood to be approximately three and a half billion. To say that this entire number of people was divided into two classes and that the line from Seth was all believers and the line from Cain were not believers is ridiculous to assume, especially when the picture presented here is that the people upon the earth were becoming more and more reprobate and spiritual rebels. So not everybody in the Seth line would become believers or be positive to God. So it is a very simplistic view that doesn’t seem to fit some of the facts.

A second problem is that the context of the passage suggests that only eight people survived. They were the only believers on the planet. Just prior to this Methuselah died, within a year of the beginning of the flood. So there were other believers on the earth during this 100 years between God’s calling of Noah and the completion of the ark the flood, but they were of a much older generation and they were dying out during that hundred-year period. By the time the flood began the only believers left on the earth were Noah and his family. Again that shows that even from the descendants of Seth most were apostate by the time of three quarters of the way from Adam to the flood.

Third, in that context the daughters is made to refer to the descendants of Cain but contextually daughters are never mentioned in that line, though there were daughters. There were a couple of wives mentioned but daughters are only mentioned in the Seth line, and in the Seth line they are mentioned nine times. Genesis 5:22 ^NASB “Then Enoch walked with God three hundred years after he became the father of Methuselah, and he had {other} sons and daughters.” Genesis 5:4 “Then the days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were eight hundred years, and he had {other} sons and daughters.” There is a focus on daughters only in the Seth line. It doesn’t make sense that all of a sudden daughters of men would be a reference to the daughters in the Cain line when there has never been an emphasis on daughters in the Cain line within the text itself.

Fourth, the term “sonship” outside of Genesis relates to the privileged position of Israel as a theocratic covenant nation. The idea of making sons of God mean one thing here and something else somewhere else doesn’t work. Unless you take the term “sons of God” as a class of created beings as it it used in other places in the Old Testament. It really doesn’t work. The major problem, though, is that beni ha Elohim or beni Elohim always refers to angels, fallen or elect. The reason is that angels are created directly by God, whereas human beings are called the sons of Adam because we are all generated through procreation. In that sense each angel is a son of God and angels are always presented as male. They don’t have sexual identity as human beings do, they were not created male and female, but they are always presented in Scripture with masculine nouns and whenever they transform themselves into a mortal body it is a masculine body.

The second option is really a minor view but one that is often stated in commentaries. This is that sons of God really refers to dynastic rulers or tyrants, and so they were referred to as “sons of Elohim” in the same way that a couple of passages in the Psalms refer to human leaders and ariostocrats as elohim (lower case) gods. This view states that these tyrants forced young, beautiful maidens to marry them and they developed huge harems.

This has its own problems. First, there is no documentation that the terms “sons of God,” beni ha Elohim, anywhere in the Old Testament anywhere is used to refer to dynastic rulers or tyrants. Second, in the alleged support for this view the judge they refer to where the judges are referred to in the Psalms as elohim, the judge is called that because he is a representative God. But in Genesis 6 the “sons of God” is a reprobate doing some evil, someone who is opposed to God.

There are two problems that neither of these two interpretations address. The first is, why is it necessary to wipe out the entire human race except for eight people? They just don’t explain that. Secondly, both view ignore the evidence from the epistles of Peter and Jude. They can’t correlate that.

Then we come to the third view, the view that the term “sons of God” always the technical term for angels. There was a group of fallen angels who left their original place in heaven, managed to transform their angelic immaterial into human bodies, with mortal human function and who seduced young women and married them to produce a genetically corrupt offspring. This view goes further and says that the purpose for this was to try to destroy the ability of God to fulfill His promise to Eve that the seed of the woman would defeat the seed of Satan.

So Satan attacks the seed. This isn’t the only way he attacks the seed. There were times in during the Old Testament after the Davidic covenant when Satan sought to completely wipe out and destroy the house of David. And at one point it got down to where there was only one survivor, and that was Josiah. He was hidden in the temple until he grew to maturity. So there is more than one way that Satan tried to wipe out the seed lineage. Today this is why Satan is engaged in anti-Semitism and the destruction of the Jewish people. He knows that God has not yet fulfilled the promise to restore them to the land and to bring in all of the promises related to the kingdom. If Satan can destroy all of the Jewish people then God can’t fulfill His promise and Satan thinks that he can win that way. That is the only way left to him.

So in this view Satan is trying to corrupt the seed, destroy the purity of human DNA to block God’s plan for the cross.

One objection that often comes up from people is that the Bible says that angels don’t marry and are not given in marriage—Matthew 22:30 ^NASB “For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.” This does not address sexuality at all; it only addresses marriage. We can draw an inference that in heaven because there is not marriage there will not be a sexual role for human beings—like the angels. But that does not mean that angels couldn’t take on some human form with a means of human procreation.

Example of angels taking on mortal function: In Genesis chapter eighteen God comes to Abraham with two angels who later on go on to warn Lot in Sodom, Genesis 19:1 ^NASB “Now the two angels came to Sodom in the evening as Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom ...” Genesis18:2 ^NASB “When he [Abraham] lifted up his eyes and looked, behold, three men were standing opposite him; and when he saw {them,} he ran from the tent door to meet them and bowed himself to the earth.” There is no indication here that he understands they are supernatural beings, so they appear to be human. He brings them water, etc. They are eating; they have these normal human, mortal bodily capabilities. They have a meal, they rest, things that relate to the normal function of the human body. So we can extrapolate from that that they could do other things as well.

It has been suggested that on the basis of logic, because this kind of thing never happened again with the angels—never invaded the human race—that God restricted that ability and did not allow that again after Genesis 6. That is not stated in the text anywhere, it is a logical inference and a valid one. But we do have some very clear lines of evidence to follow in the Scripture. First of all, the term beni ha Elohim or beni Elohim is always used of angels and never of anybody else. We also know that there are some variants to this term and some of these show up in other passages. There is the phrase beni elim, which refers to the angels, and also given to the Lord—“Oh you mighty ones.” Psalm 89:6 ^NASB “For who in the skies is comparable to the LORD? Who among the sons of the mighty [beni elim] is like the LORD.”

It is interesting that in extra-biblical literature in surrounding cultures there are cognate expressions similar to beni Elohim or sons of God used to speak of supernatural beings, used to speak of the gods, used for a congregation or assembly of these gods. This shows that there was a sort of distortion of this term that still was reflected in the pagan culture surrounding Israel.

Some people try to also argue that if angels are meant here why isn’t the normal term for angels, malak, used? The answer is that malak is used exclusively in Scripture to refer to the holy or elect angels. These (in Genesis 6) are not holy or elect angels and so the writer uses a term that can describe either the holy angels or fallen angels. The malak are the ones who carry out the mandates of God. As we have also seen there are many places where the term “sons of” are used in the Scripture. Usually it is not literally translated but the significance is. There are places where people are referred to as the “sons of Belial,” they are destructive, they are liars and so they are like Belial, so they are called sons of Belial. They are not real descendants of Belial but they manifest his attributes and characteristics. Someone is called a murderer, but in the Hebrew he is a son of a murderer because he manifests the characteristics of a murderer. In 1 Kings 20:25 we see the terms “sons of the prophets.” This is talking about a man who is a prophet. So he partakes of the characteristics of prophets.

This terminology is also used in Canaanite mythology for the counsel of the gods. Sometimes we see something similar in the Hebrew language because the Canaanites spoke a form related to Hebrew and so we see some parallels. Psalm 89:5 ^NASB “The heavens will praise Your wonders, O LORD; Your faithfulness also in the assembly of the holy ones [angels]… [7] A God greatly feared in the council of the holy ones, And awesome above all those who are around Him?” It is talking about this group that surrounds God in His throne room, a very similar picture to what we see in Revelation 4:2, 4 of the four and twenty elders and the four living beings who surround God.

Another objection that come sup is that the word Nephilim which is used in Genesis 6 is used also in the post-flood environment of Numbers. Genesis 6:4 ^NASB “The Nephilim [KJV, giants] were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore {children} to them. Those were the mighty men who {were} of old, men of renown.” We are not sure of Nephilim’s etymology. It is not a technical term; it was just a vocabulary word which meant that these were mighty men, and it could apply to any group of individuals. It could be just a word for saying there were monsters on the earth, these superhuman monstrosities on the planet.

Remember who is writing this. Moses lived around 14-1500 BC. The flood occurred about 2800 BC. Moses is writing after the flood and is using vocabulary after the flood to refer to something that occurred before the flood. There is something that happens in history and that is when people are travelling from one location to another they name their cities after cities they were familiar with where they came from. So they have vocabulary that changes its meaning. And what we see here most likely is a situation where at the time of Moses there is this vocabulary word “monsters” for these oddities that are beyond description and it is just a generic term. It is not a term that inherently means a half-breed between angels and human beings. That is the only way this can be explained because in Numbers 13:33 when the spies went into the land they saw the giants, the descendants of Anak came from the giants. The NASB transliterates the word to nephalim. Well if you start off by saying nephilim means something that there is no documentation for and say that is means a half-breed angel and human then you have a problem. It is very clear that the nephalim talked about in Numbers 13 are human beings, but the nephalim of Genesis 6 would be the product of this angelic sons of God union with the daughters of men.

In Jude 7 what we see is that the sin of the angels is clearly related to the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah, sexual immorality, and the punishment that occurred there is the same kind of punishment that occurred for Sodom and Gomorrah. In Genesis 19 the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is clearly described as a destruction of fire and brimstone that comes from heaven. Genesis 19:24 ^NASB “Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven.” It is likely that there is an idiom here that the fire of eternity or fire from eternity is what is mentioned at the end of Jude 7, suffering the justice—dike [dikh], not vengeance—of eternal fire or the fire from eternity, which is the same as saying the fire from the heavens. That is the context where all of these judgments that are illustrated are judgments in time for disobedience to God.

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