40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 40 Minutes In The Old Testament: Episode 11

Episode Date: March 31, 2015

Angel Sex?

you are listening to a podcast produced and distributed by christholdfast.com please visit christholdfast.com for additional resources this is 40 minutes in the old testament We are back for another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. And we are on episode 11. I get confused. Having the multiple podcasts, I get the numbers mixed up. I think it's 11. I'm pretty sure it's 11.

But we are not in the 11th chapter of Genesis because we're not that fast. So I am with Brandon. Well, we're halfway there. Hello, everybody. And with Chad Bird, who will tell us exactly where we are. Yeah, hey, everybody. We are not quite to Chapter 11. We will get there, I promise you.

If you've been listening, you know that we're on Chapter 5, and we will finish Chapter 5 tonight. I do promise you that. Get into Chapter 6. Yeah, I'm making promises. I have to stand by this now. Okay. I'm on the air making a promise

that we will cover the rest of chapter 5 but you didn't expect me to bring out all these rabbit trails I'm going to today you got some surprises for us I'm just kidding Brandon takes that as a personal challenge he's like oh we will huh

we could probably spend a good 40 minutes on let's see what do we have 4 verses left so we'll see how that goes if I can get to verse 1 of chapter 6 then I will have fulfilled my promise. Okay. So what are we looking at then? Yeah, if you were listening last time, we were talking about genealogies.

Chapter 5 of Genesis is mostly a genealogy that covers 10 generations from Adam all the way to Noah. And quite a bit of last time we focused upon one rather odd character in the genealogy by the name of Enoch. Talked about how Enoch was unique because he didn't die. That's a pretty unique thing. He's one of a couple of people in the Old Testament, the other being Elijah, who left this life without experiencing death.

Talked a little bit about how in each of the, what you might think of the stages of the world, I believe Luther is the one that talks about that, that God has left us a witness that this life is not all there is. That, in fact, he has created us for the life to come. In the pre-flood world, we have Enoch that he takes to be with himself, doesn't experience death. In the post-flood world, we have the witness of Elijah, who is also taken up before he experiences death. And then, of course, in the resurrection of our Lord, we have that third witness that God has another life in store for us beyond this one. So God has left us with multiple witnesses that, in fact, mortality is not the end, the grave is not the end,

that he has destined us, created us for a life that never ends, a life that is with him. And we got a little bit into the story of Noah as it begins, but we're going to go back there. And those are those final verses of chapter 5 that we're going to talk about. But I needed to mention what we covered last time, because it really does set us up here for seeing these closing verses of chapter 5. because you kind of have to think about what's going on in the minds of people at this particular time. Back in chapter 3 when we had the fall into sin, we also had this promise that God was going to send a seed who would crush the head of the serpent and whose heel would be injected with venom at the same time. And the belief in this promised seed, which is the Messiah, was a firm faith, a firm belief, because we have Eve already believing that her firstborn, Cain, was the Messiah.

And as we're going to see in just a moment, also the father of Noah, Lamech, believed the same thing. Now, if you think about what's happening at this time, you can see how there would have been an even more heightened expectation of the coming of the promised seed. Because, first of all, Enoch has been taken up. So you have this miraculous assumption into heaven of a living man. Now, if that wouldn't have rattled the early world, I don't know what would have. So they can see that God is at work, that God has a life beyond this life that he has prepared for us.

And you have this growing expectation that God is about to do something extraordinary. And what also sets the stage for this is that you have the death of the first man. So Adam finally dies after hundreds of years. And the first recorded birth after the death of Adam is a baby named Noah. So you have Enoch taken up into heaven, you have Adam dying, and then this first recorded birth of Noah. And I suspect that is why his father gets so excited, because he's seeing that God is at work. There is a belief that God is going to send this promised seed. Adam has just died, and so this father, Lamech, thinks that at the birth of his son,

that this is, in fact, finally the seed that God has sent in order to bring rest and comfort and relief to the world once more. It's because of what Lamech himself says. I'm looking here in chapter 5 of Genesis, and looking at verse 29 and following. So, Adam died. It's been a few years, and Lamech has a son. It says that he lived 182 years, and he became the father of a son, verse 29. Now, he called his name Noah, saying, this one shall give us rest from our work and from the toil of our hands arising from the ground which the Lord has cursed. Now, as you heard that, I hope that you heard some words that

connected you directly back to Genesis chapter 3. You heard about the toil of our hands and the ground which the Lord has cursed. Of course, all of this comes from Genesis chapter 3, because Adam is promised that he is going to work from the sweat of his brow, and he's going to have to labor for his food because of the ground which the Lord has cursed on account of the sin of man. So Lamech sees Noah, and he names his son Noah because that name itself is as the root of rest. And so he names his son based upon the vocation that he believes the son is going to fulfill. So he is the promised rest. That's what Lamech believes. and he believes that this baby is going to grow up to be the one that the Lord has promised.

So, of course he's wrong. He's not the promised seed. But the important thing, I think, to recognize is that once more we see that the Old Testament believers had this true faith and the true promise of God to send this seed who would accomplish salvation for them. That they understood Genesis 3.15 to be God's sure and certain promise to provide redemption for them.

So much so that every child that came along, they had to be wondering, well, is this going to be the seed? Eve thought it, and Lamech thought it about his son as well. They're both wrong. They both make what Luther calls a pious mistake. But the very fact that they believed it is testimony to their faith in this promise. Now, I will also say that it's interesting that, of course, Noah is much closer to the fulfillment of this promise than Cain was. Cain was the murderer, and Noah is the one through whom God actually provides salvation for humanity, at least salvation in the sense of saving them from the destruction of the flood.

And it's also very interesting that Noah is in many ways what you might call a second Adam. And we'll get into this in more detail in just a minute when we get into chapter 6. But I will say this as a preface to that. Very often in the Old Testament, you have what I like to refer to as type and antitype. Now, we're used to hearing that terminology in connection with Old Testament, New Testament. For instance, that the first Adam is a type of the second Adam, Christ, or that you have a high type of Christ, our high priest, or that the crossing of the Red Sea is a type of baptism, as Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians, all of which is true. You do have this analogy between the two, this type-antitype. But the truth is, and this is what I find fascinating, the truth is that this particular way of reading the Old Testament originates within the Old Testament itself.

now what i mean by that is that already in the old testament you have earlier figures or earlier events prefiguring later events that occur within the old testament itself so it's not like you have to wait until the new testament before you finally have this corresponding event happening that is the fulfillment let me give an example uh well first of all let's start here we'll start with This is an example of Adam and Noah. So Noah is in many ways like a second Adam. He is the head of a new humanity after the flood. He is the father of three sons, just like Adam was the father of three sons.

He is in the ark in this perfect community with the animals, just like Adam was in the Garden of Eden. And there's some other parallels we'll get to in a minute. Let me give you another example. The crossing of the Red Sea is a type that finds its corresponding antitype in the crossing of the Jordan River under Joshua. Both are crossings of bodies of water in which the people of God pass through on dry land. In fact, another one that has to do with Moses is that Gideon, Gideon, the call of Gideon, is in many ways a parallel to the call of Moses.

So my point in bringing this out is that when you're reading the Old Testament, you're going to be seeing cases where God is repeating himself. He is providing this ongoing revelation of his acts among humanity in a somewhat predictable fashion So that he shows us what he's going to do ahead of time by demonstration of what he's done in the past. So the way that I like to describe it is this, that Israel walked into the future facing backward. Israel walked into the future facing backward. That is to say, they knew what was coming based upon what had already been. and you see this throughout the scriptures in fact that's why if you turn to revelation

you have so much of the language of genesis that's found in revelation especially if you look at the last chapter of revelation it's full of genesis genesis kinds of imagery and language and promises why because already in the beginning god is revealing the end it's like uh you read the last chapter of the bible and you're already seeing what the first chapter of the Bible is about, or you read the first chapter of the Bible and you're already seeing what the last chapter of the Bible is about. God is always squeezing eschatology into the beginning. So he's pushing forward the end times into the beginning times, so that Genesis is all about revelation, and revelation is all about Genesis. The end is packed into the

beginning and the beginning is a revelation of what is to what is to come to come at the end i don't want to get too uh uh you know detailed about it but i think it's important to bring out because we're talking about how you read the old testament and you when you read the old testament you're not simply reading history you're not simply reading what has been you're also reading what will be because in the way that god acts with israel the way they act here with with noah and the way he acted with Adam and Eve, all of these are windows into the future. They are windows into the way that God will continue to act throughout history with his people. So there are no surprises.

God is consistent in his dealings with humanity. And we see this in the case of Noah, how he is like a second Adam. So I'm trying to think if there's anything else I wanted to bring out about Chapter 5. I promised that we'd finish it, but I think we're pretty much at the end. See, I can keep my promise. How about that? We're 15 minutes into the broadcast, and I've already finished Chapter 5. Not bad.

You got any rabbit trails that we're going to be going down? I think when you talk about types and antitypes, one thing that's that's important to remember um every time you see like something foreshadowing christ or uh it's always or redemption you know the sacrificial system whatever it is that the fulfillment the reality is always greater than the shadow and so it's that just you know uh in 3d it's that is that just just expanded upon and and and bigger and greater and And so the redemption of eight, you know, the salvation of eight people through the Ark, all of a sudden this, you know, and Christ being a type of the Ark,

and we'll get into all that, but just since we're talking about types and shadows and that kind of thing, that then encompasses all of mankind. You know, the sacrificial system, which was where they made atonement for the sins of Israel, it all of a sudden extends to all people everywhere. um and so like all every time these things are realized in their reality um they expand and become and become greater and so you have these small little little things that are stuck in there that we are that as people who know the outcome and and know what what the fulfillment of these things is it's always oh that that that small thing that that smaller thing right there

is pointing you to this this humongous reality you know i'm making all kinds of hand gestures right now that you can't see yeah but they're very helpful they're real i i think if you really had to summarize the message of hebrews that's it the message of hebrews is not that there was something necessarily inherently wrong with the old testament uh but rather that it was insufficient That was the problem. So the sacrifices were insufficient or imperfect. The tabernacle or the temple was imperfect. The priesthood was imperfect.

God set it up that way. God never intended it for it to be permanent. Instead, all of this was a preparation for what he had to come. So all of these prefigurations or shadows or types or whatever you want to call them, all of these were constructed to be insufficient because their very insufficiency was prophetic. That is to say, they were made to be incomplete in order that they might point forward to that which would be the completion.

So you had sinful high priest, and their sinfulness was prophetic of the fact that we needed a sinless high priest. An earthly tabernacle was prophetic of the fact that we needed a heavenly tabernacle. The animal sacrifices were prophetic of the fact that we needed a perfect human sacrifice. So, yeah, all of these parts of the Old Testament, which are shadows or prefigurements or types, they point forward to something that's going to be greater. And the flood, as we get into that today as well as next week, is a great example of that forward-pointing history that we find in the Old Testament. Well, I've got no rabbit trails. I failed in my personal challenge.

So I won't hold you back from getting into that. All right. Well, very good. Very good. Well, let's jump into chapter six then. And if you're following along, you're familiar with the fact that this is really then the beginning of really three chapters that are all about Noah and the floods. So we're not going to spend tons of time talking about all the details here. What we're going to do is concentrate on some of the main themes that you see in the story of the flood and the ark and how God is using this whole story to teach us, to catechize us, if you will, to draw us into a deeper understanding of the faith. Because there's like a whole theology packed into the story of the flood. So, let's start chapter 6

Before we really get to the flood, there is something of, I guess you might call it a segue Between the genealogy of chapter 5 and the flood As it begins to unfold in verse 5 and following, or verse 8 and following There's lots of really good stuff to talk about in these opening verses and there's probably some questions here that you may have that I may or may not have the answer to. It starts out here with a very interesting section of Genesis. It talks about how as humanity began to expand,

as man began to multiply on the face of the land, that daughters were born to them. And verse 2 tells us that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful And they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose And then verse 3 goes on to say that the Lord speaks and says My spirit shall not strive with man forever Because he also is flesh Nevertheless his days shall be 120 years

So we'll stop there for a minute. There's a couple of main interpretations of what's going on here, especially with regard to the identification of the sons of God and the daughters of men. One of those is both modern as well as ancient, this way of understanding it. And I will say as a preface that I don't buy into it. I'm sure some do. But this interpretation understands the sons of God to be the angels. These are rebellious angels who look down upon the daughters of men, and they had intercourse with them.

So they understand these sons of God as angels who came down to earth, and they had some sort of sexual relationship with females. And because of this, God was angry, and because of this, God said that he was going to limit the lifespan of humans to 120 years. One of the reasons I have an issue with that particular interpretation is because I think it opens up more questions than we could possibly ever answer. There's never any case recorded in the scriptures where this is even a possibility of angels to have any kind of sex, any kind of intercourse with humans. Now, granted, there are cases in the scriptures where the sons of God are the angels, like the beginning of Job. But my particular reading of these verses is the same thing that's followed by Luther and many other interpreters. And that is that these two categories that we have here, the sons of God and the daughters of men, are basically the categories of those who were followers of God and those who were not. What Luther calls the true church and the false church.

So the sons of God would have been the believers, at least those who were part of what he calls the true church, church of God. But one of the ways in which they rebelled against God was by marrying those who were not of the true church, what he would call the church of Cain or the false church. So you have these sons of God, these members of the true church, who, as part of their rebelliousness against God, took wives for themselves who were antithetical to God. and because of this demonstration of their disobedience or their rebellion against God that because of this God set a time limit in which he said at the end of this

he was going to send a punishment upon the earth so he was not setting the age limit for people instead this 120 years is actually the time from when he spoke these words until he sent the flood to destroy humanity. So this 120 years was, if you will, a time for repentance, a time for him to graciously forgive those who had led these lives of rebellion and unbelief against him.

So I want to get into that more in just a minute, but I want to see if you guys have any reaction, action if you've if you've had some discussions about these verses or have any insights that that i might not have no that's that's my interpretation as well um i think that i one of the problems i think with with the other interpretation is that you know if angels or well first of all you know we know that there's verses that say that that will be like the angels in the sense that we won't be male or female um this this kind of brings up some questions on how exactly this uh this you know this sexual relationship took place if that's the case one of the other problems is that even if that were the case that god then says well that's it

i'm punishing man and shortening his lifespan to 120 which is a weird punishment so the angels come and do this terrible thing and then he punishes mankind for it just the punishment doesn't really seem to make sense um all right you're just not you know i don't know how um unless people got like really attractive after they hit 120 maybe that's how it worked back then but like i don't know how how limiting people to living 120 years like solve it solves your the daughters of men a really hot problem uh just doesn't doesn't seem like a really good uh good implementing that's not a good that's not a good uh punishment strategy like i know how i'll fix this no no no no 130 year old hottie is going to be roaming the earth anymore yeah i've often thought that

Noah is kind of the patron saint of the long-suffering pastor, and I've often thought of him in comparison or rather contrast with Jonah. You know, here you have Jonah who does not want to preach to these people. In fact, he wants him to burn in hell. He'd be very happy if God rained down fire and brimstone upon these enemies that he's sent to preach to. And yet finally, after everything he goes through, he begins to preach, and I really can't imagine him preaching that zealously, compassionately, really going for the conversions. And people were falling all over themselves repenting as Jonah preaches. He goes to the city and all of a sudden the whole city is putting sackcloth and ashes on. They're even putting sackcloth and ashes

on their cows. I mean, this is a whole city that can't repent enough. And then you have noah who preaches for 120 years and he's a herald of righteousness he wants people to turn to the lord and believe in him and join them on the ark and yet after over a century of preaching the only people that are still with him are his family yeah it's noah remind for some reason i maybe there's something here i don't know i always um i always think of john the baptist When I think about Noah, John the Baptist is out there, and he's saying, repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. This is Noah saying, hey, repent, the wrath of God is coming, which is a little bit different of a message, but there's water involved in both, and the flood is a type of baptism. And so you have John, and people are coming out in droves, just repenting in droves, but not so with Noah.

Nobody's coming for Noah. No one does. He doesn't get a John the Baptist-like response. Yeah, it really is a great example of the fact that we have no control over the Word of God, that it's God's Word. He does the speaking, He does the calling to repentance, He does the giving of faith, He does the converting, He does the forgiving. We simply speak His Word, and His Word does what it does. And sometimes that doing produces people repenting in droves, and sometimes that Word produces people who are just eight in number. it really is a humbling lesson

but it's also really exhilarating because it means that the Word of God is that living and active thing that is not something that we can control it's not something we can predict it's not something that we have any kind of way of manipulating we are given it to speak and it does what God wants it to do

so that the numbers are not indicative of whether God's Word is being spoken or not. If the Word is being spoken, then God is going to be doing what God does, and we should rest assured in that. It's like the sower in the parable of the sower of the seed. He just goes out and sows the seed. He's throwing it here and there. There's a hymn by Martin Fransman that says that as the sower sows, Some falls on rocks and some on shallow soil, and the birds are eating some of it.

But in this hymn, Frantzman has the sower saying, what of that and what of that? It's not his concern. He just simply sows the seed. That's what Noah was doing. He was sowing the seed. That's what Jonah did. That's what John the Baptist did. That's what preachers still do today.

They're just out there kind of throwing the seed all over the place. Some of it takes root. Some of it doesn't. Yeah. Jesus was a terrible farmer. And we're called to be terrible farmers as well. It's the indiscriminately and generously just throws seed all over the place, throwing it on roads and bushes, and that's not what you're –

a good farmer knows, like, you don't just throw it everywhere. You put it in a place that you know is going to grow, but that's not what Jesus does, and that's not what we're called to do. Ridiculous generosity when it comes to the seed, and you just throw it everywhere. And it shows you, too, like not to despise sort of the small church. I mean, at one point in history, we know that the church was eight people in the entire planet. And so, yeah, so that you despise not the small congregation on the ark. Yeah, nor do you assume that just because a church has, you know, is bursting at the seams with people that what's happening is there in accordance with the word of God.

Right. Yeah, you know, what determines whether a church is doing the right thing is whether the church is speaking the words of God. And if it is, and it's huge, fantastic. If it is and it's small, well, fantastic. That means that God is at work among his saints, his saints who are there. I think the problem we often have is that we're looking for the right kind of people to believe. You know, we think that there's some kind of right people out there, and they are the ones that we need to find in order to speak the gospel to. So we like to be good farmers.

We plow these very straight rows and only in soil that we're sure is going to be fertile. And that's exactly where we plant the seed. But that's not the way that God works. God sows his seed on Nineveh, of all places. I mean, Nineveh was like a farmer going to a Walmart and throwing seed on the parking lot. It's ridiculous. There's nothing that's going to grow there. you wouldn't see a farmer out there

walking around with a bag of seed throwing it in a Walmart park it's laughable that's what Jonah did he threw seed on the parking lot there at Nineveh and the next morning the whole thing is just this fertile field full of

repentant hearts and believing people so it's a humbling lesson to us that God is the one who does, God is the one who does the work and thank God when there are lots of people believing and continue to thank God when there's even a small group such as these eight people with Noah on the ark.

I just had one comment about the sons of God and daughters of man. I've got a dog in this race here. I've got family members who at least previously believed this, and I saw them get wrapped up in it, And I've seen friends get wrapped up in this other interpretation that these were fallen angels. So I guess I'll begin with this. One of the interpretive keys that I follow or use when I'm looking at Scripture is, does it point me to Christ? Or does it point me to myself instead as the solution?

Or, in this case, with this passage and that alternative interpretation, is it leading me down a trail that is dragging me away from Christ? Is it pointing me towards something else, something sensational, something that, yeah, my flesh gets excited about, like, oh, this is kind of cool, you know, what if they were fallen angels, you know? And then the other problem with this, besides it not pointing to Christ, is the only way that I, in my personal opinion, as I've studied this and looked into it some as I had personal concerns about it for personal reasons, was that the only way that we've arrived at that interpretation is through extra-biblical material, such as the books of Enoch. um not canonical not inspired definitely not inerrant and we're going to use those to shed light on the on the inspired word of god i don't think that's quite how that is supposed to work necessarily um but the the problem that i've seen with this is people get so distracted and they go down this trail and you can look up the nephilim or the sons of god in the Nephilim on YouTube or something, and you will see hours upon hours upon hours of media

where people are just talking about this, and they've got all kinds of insight into this, and it's all rubbish. It's all just a huge waste of time. Where is Christ in this? This is a huge rabbit trail that people get sucked down. It's a vortex that they get sucked into, and all that time, paying attention to something else rather than letting the story progress as we're going to see here over the coming weeks, it continues to point us to Christ. We can do that. We can keep walking this path that God has set out before us, or we can get stuck on this one verse. And I'm of the personal opinion that Satan loves to get us hung up on one verse and distract us with one verse in scripture. He will use a passage of scripture and twist it to get us hung up so that

we stop looking to Christ. He loves for us to read the Bible if he can distract us from what the Bible is really about. Yeah, he'll use scripture to do that if we're not careful there. And that's one of the problems that I've got with that other interpretation that these were fallen angels. I think that that's a distraction that Satan has set out for us to get trapped in and drawn away from Christ. And, yeah, this is just a footnote in the story along the way to Christ. And it's something that can help us see Christ better if we don't get distracted by some odd, strange interpretation. yeah it's that's it's sensationalism which we're very bent towards uh because all of a sudden you're like angel sex what all right that's that's crazy like i need to investigate this uh yeah but if

it's just like yeah so some guys were hooking up with some girls and they weren't believers you're like oh i've seen that a million times nothing special nothing unique about that uh that's everyday kind of deal yeah uh but yeah if it's if it's if it's angel if it's angel sex here's something and you goes what that's that's like um you know it's like you had ufo sighting or something you know i gotta i gotta get involved in that i gotta like investigate that's uh that's i think uh what brandon has done in uh in talking about this and and uh The way that Satan can use this to distract people, to pull people away from Christ, is a great reminder of the reason we're doing this to begin with. The reason we're talking about 40 minutes in the Old Testament is because that is so often what happens.

It can be this kind of sensationalism, it can be moralism, it can be all kinds of isms in which the Old Testament is misused, abused in such a way that people miss the whole point. that the whole Old Testament is there to point us toward its fulfillment in Christ. And if we're doing something with the Old Testament that doesn't lead us there, that in fact leads us the opposite direction, then what we're doing is not in accord with the purpose of the Word of God to begin with. So Christ points us to what we are to do with the Scriptures when he talks with the Emmaus disciples, that all of these bear witness of him. So that's what we're all about as well.

We're pointing people in that direction and along the way pointing them away from other directions that they shouldn't be going. And I think that's just about it for tonight. 42 minutes in the Old Testament. I think it's going to be somewhere around there. Make sure you tune in next week for episode 12 Angel sex episode

That's how you get hits On the thing That'll pull some people in That'll draw them in So alright Well thanks for joining us again And we will be Examining the flood I assume next week

Which I am excited about I've got Chad's going to have a hard time getting a word in edgewise Maybe next week So thanks for joining us and we'll see you guys next week.