Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Did Angels Have Sex With Women? | Questions You're Asking | Genesis 6.1-4

Episode Date: August 24, 2020

You might have read through Genesis, but have you ever noticed https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis+6&version=ESV (Genesis 6.1-4)? Did it confuse you? It's a strange passage. Learn what it means from https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/patrick-miller/ (Pastor Patrick Miller) as he continues our series on https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcast-series/questions-youre-asking/ (Questions You're Asking). Interested in more content like this? Listen to https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/keith-simon/ (Pastor Keith Simon's) answer to https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/has-my-sexual-sin-made-me-unsavable-questions-youre-asking-matthew-21-31/ (Has My Sexual Sin Made Me Unsavable? ) Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO and @TenMinuteBibleTalks.  Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcast-series/questions-youre-asking/ (https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcast-series/questions-youre-asking/) Support this podcast

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. Right now, we are answering questions you're asking. A lot of these are coming from our Facebook page. So follow 10-minute Bible Talks on Facebook, vote on your favorite questions, or you can just give your own, and you might hear it right here on the podcast. Real quick, before we hop in, I want to invite you to two online classes, Keith and I will be teaching. teaching this fall. If you sign up, you can join us live or you can receive the videos after the fact.

Let me tell you what we're offering. First, who would Jesus vote for? Over three weeks, we're going to answer some hot topic type questions and reflect on what faithfulness to Jesus looks like in a polarized political season. Second, we're going to be doing a women's Bible study called Skilled at Life. Although I think we should have called it life skills and I think about it. It's a four-week journey through Proverbs tackling topics like French, finances, communication, and parenting. I hope that you will sign up for one or both of these classes because I really think you're going to get a lot out of it. I know right now doing Bible studies in person is hard, it's hard to find. So rather than saying I have to do it online,

why not say I get to do this? This is a great opportunity to grow in your faith. I love it when someone starts following Jesus. They open up the Bible for the first time and start where any same person starts at the very beginning. The first two, the first two, Two chapters are these beautiful stories about the goodness of creation. The third and fourth show the dark depths to which humans fall. And after that, things get weird. A whole chapter of fathers who begat sons, that's chapter five, and these guys end up living for hundreds of years, weird.

And then just when you think you can come up for air and find something great, you hit chapter six, and you read this. When human beings began to spread an increase on the earth and daughters were born to them, The sons of God saw the daughters of humans were very beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. And then the Lord said, my spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal. Their days will be 120 years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterwards, when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them.

They, the Nephilim, were the heroes of old, men of renown. Okay, what is happening? Now, I remember talking to someone, and they said, look, I read through Genesis. I don't even remember reading this, so I must have just fast-forwarded through it and tried to pretend I didn't see anything. I just want to start by asking a question. Did the sons of God, whoever that is, they appear to be some sort of spiritual beings like angels, did these figures actually have sex with women resulting in superhuman offspring called the Nephilim? That's what I just read. That's what you just heard, so we've got to talk about what is happening here. Well, Jews and Christians

alike have considered several options throughout the centuries. One of these options, and what a lot of people believe, is that the sons of God are actually the human descendants of Adam's son, Seth. Now, Seth stands out because he is one who walks with God and obeys God, and his entire family line is supposed to do the same. Now, the daughters of humans, who the sons of God slept with, these are the descendants of Cain, and they are a line. with Kane's family and the humans who are rebelling against God. And so the problem that Genesis 6 is actually describing in this view is that there is a line of faithful people intermarrying with a line of faithless people. Now, the first problem with this view is that the Hebrew, it actually

doesn't read the daughters of humans. It reads the daughters of Adam. Technically, women came both from Seth and Kane's line. So technically, all women, all daughters, that they are all the daughters of Adam. The second problem is that elsewhere in the Bible, this phrase, the sons of God, it actually refers to something. It refers to spiritual beings who are a part of God's special counsel, his divine counsel. Now, you need to know this. In Hebrew, the phrase sons of, plural, sons of, it doesn't refer to literal children. If you were the sons of someone, it signified that you were part of a group. So, for example, in First and Second Kings, we meet these characters called the Sons of the Prophet. Now, these men, they're not literally biological sons of the prophet

Elijah or Elisha. They are merely part of a group of people who followed Elijah and Elisha, and so colloquially, they are called the Sons of the Prophet. Likewise, the sons of God, they are a group of spiritual beings tasked by God to help him run the world. Now, of course, the problem is not that they are literal sons of God. The problem in this story is that they appear to be rebelling against God. And this fits with things that we read elsewhere in the Bible. Check out Psalm 82. God has taken his place in the divine counsel. In the midst of the gods, he holds judgment. And this is what he's saying to all of these gods. He's holding court. He's saying, how long, you gods, will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Give justice to the

weak and the fatherless. Maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy, deliver them from the hand of the wicked. They, these gods in the divine counsel, they have neither knowledge nor understanding. They walk about in darkness. All the foundations of the earth are shaken. I said, you are gods, sons of the most high all of you. And so here you see the same idea, the sons of God, these spiritual beings who are followers of God, that's what sons of means, all of you, nevertheless, you, these spiritual beings like men, you shall die. And and fall like any prince. O rise, O God, judge the earth, for you shall inherit all the nations.

Man, there is so much to say about the Psalm. It's one that you don't get quoted much in church. But let's just start with the obvious. It is depicting God like a king, and he's this king in charge of a vast, expansive kingdom. And he's entrusted the governance of that kingdom in its various lands, its various fiefdoms. He's entrusted the governance of those lands to spiritual beings. who are called the sons of God, his followers, his divine counsel in verse one. Now the sad part is that

these spiritual legates of God have fallen short of their calling. They haven't brought justice. They haven't heard the needs of the needy. They haven't rescued the oppressed from the wicked. They aren't doing the job that God wants them to do. Instead, they've turned to darkness. They've redefined good and evil for themselves. But that so-called knowledge, this new knowledge that they've created, the psalmist says, is not understanding at all. And so as a result, these spiritual beings, they're going to be held accountable by God for their injustice, for their misdeeds. Now, some of this feels like a bizarre perspective you've never heard of before. I am sorry it's about to get worse. Because all of this maps onto Deuteronomy 32, which talks about a time when

God apportioned the idolatrous nations to these idolatrous spiritual beings. You might call it a match made in hell. The people who didn't want to worship the one true God are united with these beings who don't want to trust and live for the one true God either. Deuteronomy 32, 7 to 8. Remember the days of old. Consider years of many generations. Ask your father and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you when the Most High gave the nations their inheritance. So what does God give to these nations who have rebelled against him? When he divided mankind, it's talking about Babel, divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. So now we're getting the bigger picture. God once ruled the world by means of a divine counsel,

but those spiritual beings at some point rebelled against God just like humanity did, and God gave them to each other. But as Deuteronomy goes on, God says that he also chose an inheritance for himself. It's not just the sons of God who get the inheritance of these rebellious nations. He gets an inheritance. And that inheritance is Israel. And somehow through Israel, God is committed to overturning the problem of spiritual evil infecting the world. Deuteronomy 319. But the Lord's portion is his people.

Israel is God's chosen inheritance. We need to ask a question. When did these spiritual beings actually rebel against God? Maybe you've heard a story about some sort of angelic rebellion in heaven, which was led by Satan before humanity fell. That idea was popularized, at least in the English-speaking world, by John Milton in his 1600s classic Paradise Lost. And that idea has for sure taken root in America. The only problem is, it's not in the Bible. The Bible actually does include the fall of these spiritual beings, the fall of the sons of God.

We see the first fall when one being, in the form of a serpent, sinfully tempts Adam and Eve. That's the first fall. But much more explicitly, we see a second fall of many more beings, and that happens in Genesis 6, when we see the sons of God redefined good and evil and start having sex with women, which God did not intend. We don't know how this worked, and I can pretend to understand it, we don't know how it happened. We just know that it did, and we know that it was such a profound problem because it ends up leading to the flood. But as Genesis 6 makes clear, these beings, and they're half human, half-angelic progeny, which are called the Nephilim, these beings, they actually end up outlasting the flood. The Nephilim, which are the children of the sons of God with women,

they are these superhuman figures. And they're actually called a number of things in the Bible. Most people don't realize this. They're called the Sons of Anok in Numbers 1333, and the Refaim and Deuteronomy 311. There's other names as well. But if we trace the story of the sons of God and their Nephilim offspring throughout the entire Bible, we begin to realize something. One of Israel's missions is to eradicate the evil presence of the Nephilim. For example, Joshua, we know the story of him conquering the promised land, and that can be a really difficult story for some of us to swallow when we read about the destruction.

But one thing we have to understand, Joshua only destroyed cities which were inhabited by, guess who, the Nephilim. Likewise, when we meet David, he becomes famous by doing what? destroying a Nephilim giant called Goliath. In other words, part of Israel's calling is to deal with the problem of spiritual evil. Fast forward to Jesus, and what's he doing? He's casting out powers of spiritual evil. He's reclaiming God's inheritance from the powers of evil. It's worth pointing out, even that at the time of Jesus, many people thought of demons, not just as the fallen sons of God, but also as the disembodied demonic souls of the Nephling. So when Jesus defeats the demons,

David casting down Goliath. Okay, well, what's all this mean for us? Spiritual evil is real. C.S. Lewis points out in his novel screw tape letters that the greatest strategy of demonic power is convincing us that demonic power isn't real. But just like Israel, we are called to fight through Jesus' power against spiritual evil in our lives and in our world. Paul writes this, for we, Christians, followers of Jesus, do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against rulers and against the authorities and against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Now, I don't think this means that Jesus is calling us to have power encounters where we are casting out demons. But it does mean

that we need to understand that a war is underway. It's not just over individuals, it's on a global level. Our calling is to be faithful to Jesus in the present, to be lights in the darkness, to resist temptations of the evil one. Pray against those powers. Overturn them where you can with actions of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. But we can't ever forget this reality. They are real.

So today I would encourage you to pray and to ask for Jesus' protection and power. Ask for the power to obey the gospel, resist evil, and participate in the coming of His kingdom even in the midst of this present darkness. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating.

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