Sons
of God; Nephilim; Demonic Attack
1 Peter 5:8 NASB “Be of sober {spirit,}…” This refers to
stability and objectivity in our thinking. “… be on the alert. Your adversary,
the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. [9]
But resist him, firm in {your} faith…” That is, in the body of doctrine. It is
in the body of doctrine that we learn and apply that provides a fortification
in our souls that protects us and defends us from the onslaughts of the devil…”
The imagery of the devil prowling around like a roaring lion is not
unique to the New Testament but it is also seen in the Old Testament, e.g. Job
chapter one. We are told several times in the first two chapters of Job that
Job was blameless. The Hebrew word means that he was a man of integrity and
this is the divine viewpoint analysis of his life—“that man was blameless,
upright, fearing God and turning away from evil,” verse 1. We are told this to
make sure that people understand that despite the claims of his so-called
friends in the next several chapters that what befell Job had nothing to do
with any behaviour of Job’s part. It was not that God was disciplining him but
that he was being disciplined in another sense, the sense of training. Then we
are told what is going on behind the scenes and we always have to remember that
Job didn’t know what we know. Job is not aware of what is happening in heaven
but for our edification the curtains are drawn back so that we can see into the
heavenly thrown room and understand the spiritual dynamics that lie behind the
world of empirical reality.
Job 1:6 NASB “Now there was a day when the sons of
God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among
them. [2] The LORD said to Satan, ‘From where do you come?’ Then Satan answered the LORD and said, ‘From
roaming about on the earth and walking around on it.’” Even as far back as 2021
BC Satan was cruising
the earth “like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” He came across Job
and decided he was going to make an issue out of Job because Job is the
wealthiest man of his generation and has been blessed by God in untold ways,
and he is a man of great strength and Satan is going to challenge his
integrity: “The only reason that Job worships you is because you have given him
all this. Take it away and see if he doesn’t curse you.” But that is another
story and this is to simply point out that there is a pattern that extends from
the garden of Eden to Satan’s ultimate destruction and confinement in the lake
of fire concerning who is consistently targeting the human race in order to
assault our spiritual lives and our relationship with God.
There are four things that seem to be the aim of Satan in attacking
believers, whether in the Old Testament or the New Testament. The first is that
his goal is to distract us from our spiritual life, our relationship with God,
to create some sort of breech in our life. There are things that happen such as
what happened to Job that people often react to, and unlike Job they curse God
and blame God for allowing these kinds of things to happen in their life. So
that creates a breech in their life and instead of having a rich life of
humility and obedience they give in to anger, bitterness and resentment, and
all sorts of mental attitude sins. This leads to the second aim that Satan has
which is to destroy our testimony regarding the grace of God. Every believer
from the Old Testament to the New Testament is to live a life that produces a
visible testimony to not only God and the angels but also to the human race,
and that as we walk with the Lord through life the ultimate goal should be to
glorify God in all that we do. Because we are building a body of evidence for
the grace of God in our family lives, in our businesses, and everything we do
in life relates to this and if Satan can get his foot in the door and destroy
that then that evidence that we provide in the scope of this angelic conflict
is destroyed and corrupted. The third goal of Satan is to attempt to destroy God’s
plan for the church in this present church age as the Lord Jesus Christ is
building His body. He seeks to distract us from evangelism, from spiritual
growth and spiritual life, all in relationship to what God is specifically
doing in this dispensation. Fourth, he wants to prevent us from reaching
spiritual maturity and having an impact on the world around us. It always
amazes us that people actually watch us. We don’t realise this but that is part
of our visible testimony and part of our impact on the world around us as we
grow to spiritual maturity. The decisions that we make in our sphere of
influence have an impact and if Satan can destroy that then he has gained a
tactical victory.
The focus at this point in our study is on how Satan has had direct
assaults in history. There are direct assaults and indirect assaults and
ultimately our protection comes from our mentality. Spiritual warfare doesn’t
take place between us and the demons, it takes place between our ears. It is a
battle for the mind. 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 NASB “For though we walk
in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh,
The second assault in history focuses on the events in Genesis chapter
six. In this angelic revolt against God there were a group of angels who had
fallen and who interfere with the human race in a bizarre sexual invasion that
is described in Genesis six. 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.” The idea from the Hebrew syntax is that this had been going on for some
time. It takes us back a little into the genealogy of Adam’s and Cain’s
descendants when this invasion began. [2] “that the sons of God saw that the
daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever
they chose.” What exactly this means has caused quite a bit of discussion
throughout the ages as to exactly what this means. The view that holds most
water is the view that deals with the terminology here in terms of how it is
used throughout Scripture. The terms “sons of God” is a Hebrew term, bene ha elohim. This is a technical term
found several times in the Old Testament and it always refers to angels, often
not just to the holy or elect angels but the angels as a whole, both fallen and
elect. But there is another term that is reserved for elect angels and there is
no example of it ever being used to describe a demon or fallen angel, so the
term “sons of God” clearly is used to refer to this class of angels that has
fallen. It may include all of the angels but its emphasis on the fact that it
is a term for their derivation, that they were created by God. In
extra-biblical literature there are similar expressions used for supernatural
beings or the assembly of these beings.
The question that is asked is how in the world is an immaterial spirit
being, an angel, going to have sexual intercourse with a human being. They will
often go to a passage like Matthew 22:13 where Jesus is asked by the Pharisees
a sort of set-up question about a woman being married to a man and he dies, she
marries again and he dies, etc., until she has had seven husbands, so whose
husband is she going to be in the resurrection? Jesus responds by saying that
in the resurrection they neither marry or are given in marriage but are like
angels in heaven. So the indication here is that angels don’t marry and
procreate and have baby angels. So people ask if angels don’t marry how then
can we say that is what is going on in chapter six refers to angels? First of all,
the term sons of God always refers to angels, so we have to find compelling
reasons why that would be different in Genesis chapter six. Our starting point
is that angels are immaterial beings. AS we go through the Scriptures we find
evidence of angels taking on human physical, material, human form where they
engage in normal biological activity and it doesn’t seem as if there is a
problem. There are passages like Genesis chapter eighteen where the two angels
accompanying the pre-incarnate Lord Jesus Christ come to visit Abraham. The
text says they are tired, they lie down and rest, they eat food, they drink,
and they have their feet washed. So there is obviously precedence in the text
for angels being able to transform their bodies into a physical, material body
that has physical properties and biological capabilities. So when the text says
that the sons of God took the daughters of men as their wives, we may not
understand all of the physiology and biology that took place but the text says
that is what took place. There was a biological attack on the human race to
destroy its purity.
Why would that happen? We go back to the first assault in Genesis
chapter three when Satan tempts the woman to eat of the fruit. She east first
and she gives it to Adam and Adam eats and then they have fallen. They try to
solve the problem on their own with garments of fig leaves and then God
addresses them as to what the consequences of this sin is going to be. In the
midst of that as He is addressing the serpent He makes first indication of the
gospel. He says: “Your seed will attack the seed of the woman; you will bruise
His heel but it (the seed of the woman) will crush your head (fatal wound).” So
this is an indication, a foreshadowing of how God is going to solve the problem
of sin that began in the garden. It is directly related to this very unusual
term “the seed of the woman.” Satan understands that it is through here
descendants that somehow God is going to rescue, deliver the human race and
provide this plan of salvation, so his assault plan is to destroy the seed of
the woman and prevent this from happening. In this assault in Genesis chapter
six there is this physical-sexual attack to destroy the purity of the human
race.
Passages that reinforce this, correlative passage that talk about sons
of God and use that in relation to angels: Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7. In the New
Testament, Jude 6, 7 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,
First of all he talks about the angels that did not keep their own
domain. In relation to this passage and passages in Peter’s epistles there are
people who come along and say this is referring to the original fall of the
demons when they followed Satan in his rebellion. The problem with that is that
if this is describing all of the angels that followed Satan then they would
have been confined and imprisoned as these passages indicate long before the
Lord Jesus Christ appeared on the earth, so where did those demons come from?
You can’t have it both ways. This can either refer to all of the demons, which
means that there cannot be any other demonic activity in history, or it must
refer to a sub-set of the fallen angels that got involved in some kind of mischief
for which they are punished severely until their ultimate judgment. They are
described as “angels who did not keep their domain.” This is the Greek word arche [a)rxh] which indicates
their sphere of influence, their power; it is a word which often indicates that
which is first in priority or to their initial position. So the first thing
that is said about them, they did not keep their domain, their initial place,
indicates they did not remain in the initial state which God had created them.
That wouldn’t be their initial state as a holy angel but their initial state as
a fallen angel.
Then we are told that they abandoned their proper abode. The word here
is oiketerion [o)ikhthrion] which has the
idea of a habitation or dwelling place. So what Jude begins with is that they
didn’t keep their initial state, whatever that was, as an angel. Then they
abandoned their initial dwelling place which would be heaven. The third thing
we learn is that they are kept in these bonds of darkness for the judgment. So
they are banned. We learn something else about them: that their sin, that which
caused them to be judged and bound in chains of darkness is that they committed
a sin which is compared to the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah—“just as Sodom and
Gomorrah and the cities around them [feminine plural], since they [the cities]
in the same way as these [masculine plural] indulged in gross immorality and
went after strange flesh…” So “these” has to refer back to the angels, it can’t
refer to the cities. It is saying that the sin imitated in kind the sin of
2 Peter 2:4, 5 NASB “For if God did not spare angels
when they sinned, but cast them into hell [Tartarus] and committed them to pits
of darkness, reserved for judgment;
1 Peter 3:18-20 NASB “For Christ also died for sins once for
all, {the} just for {the} unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been
put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit;
Genesis 6:4 NASB “The Nephilim 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.” This is what hangs around in residual racial memory in the
human race and becomes the foundation for these later distortions in mythology.
The truth that lies behind these myths is what is described in Genesis 6:4. So
we see that Satan attacked the seed of the woman. That is his focus, he is
trying to prevent the cross because it is at the cross when the Lord Jesus
Christ who is true humanity as well as genuine undiminished deity in hypostatic
union goes to the cross and dies for our sins. He must be a true human being to
die as our substitute, to be there in our place, the just substitute for the
unjust. That is the last great assault in the Old Testament and the next
assault that will come in history has to do with the time of Christ when the
seed of thew woman is in the flesh, incarnate.