I have the book, and read about 1/4 of it so far. Good stuff.
I find it very odd that there are a lot of 'experts' that claim the "sons of Elohim" before the Flood are really the "sons of Seth".
I listened to a Johnny Mac sermon and he says they were demons or fallen angels. Johnny Mac does give you his honest opinion.
We were meeting together as elders, as we always do on Sunday night, and I was giving the men a little bit of an idea of what I’m going to be speaking about tonight. We had been talking abo
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Johnny Mac:
"We were meeting together as elders, as we always do on Sunday night, and I was giving the men a little bit of an idea of what I’m going to be speaking about tonight. We had been talking about migraine headaches, and I said the only thing worse than a migraine headache is having to spend two weeks in
Genesis 6:1 to 4. That would be a seriously painful experience. So I’m going to do my best to get through these four verses. Genesis chapter 6, verses 1 through 4.
You say, “It’s a very brief passage, you ought to be able to do that.” It is a brief passage, but it has caused no end of discussion. There are a number of interpretations of this particular passage, and people pile up under all varying interpretations. To try to sort through the voluminous journal articles, commentaries, and treatments of this passage is no small task. I confess that I started the sorting process before I ever went to seminary many, many years ago. I went through the sorting process, trying to determine the meaning of this passage when I was going through seminary and studying the book of Genesis.
Later on, in preaching through 1 Peter, 2 Peter, the book of Jude, and other portions of Scripture, which in some way connect with this. I cycled back through it later on, of course, in writing a study Bible and wrote comments on this sixth chapter. But with all of that background, it still took a rather extensive effort at reading a quite massive amount of literature to sort through all of the issues and come to what I think is an appropriate understanding of these four verses.
Let me read them to you. Genesis chapter 6. “Now it came about when men began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. Then the Lord said, ‘My spirit shall not strive with man forever because he also is flesh; nevertheless, his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.’ Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward when the sons of God came into the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.”
Now, there is a question, obviously, that immediately is addressed when you read that and that is: What does it mean? And at this particular point, that’s exactly the question that’s in your mind. It seems somewhat disjointed and somewhat oblique and obscure. But there’s even another more compelling question once we discern what it means and that is: So what? Now that we know what it means, why is it here? How does it inform us necessarily?
Now remember, we’re talking about a period of time in Genesis at this juncture before the flood. As we go through Genesis, we’ve gone through creation, we’ve gone through the fall, we’ve moved on into the development, the progress of human civilization in chapter 4 and chapter 5, and we’re about to get into the flood in which God destroys the entire world, except for eight people, and that’s only sixteen hundred and fifty-six years after creation. So we’ve got a period of sixteen hundred and fifty-six years, and the only record in existence of that period is here.
In fact, there are just only two chapters and a spilling into chapter 6, that’s all we have of that entire antediluvian or pre-flood society. And the question then is: Why, out of all of the things that must have gone on during that sixteen hundred and fifty-six years does God inspire Moses, the writer of the law, the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, as we call them, why does He inspire Moses to record this? What is the significance of this?
Now we want to remember that the book of Genesis is the book of what? Of beginnings, isn’t it? So this is the beginning of something that is very, very important. There are no trivial things here, there are no secondary things here. If you have to be very careful in selecting material because you’re making a brief treatment of a very, very important period of time, then you’re going to choose very selectively what is critical to understand, and I believe there is a very critical nature to this information.
So there are two issues to face. One is the issue of what does it mean, and the other is the issue of so what. Now that we know what it means, how does it play into our understanding in a way that is critical or important for us? And I confess to you that while I have read volumes on what it means, I cannot essentially find much of anything about why it is important and why it is here. So I’m going to do the best I can to tell you why I think it’s here and try to show you why I believe that is a good understanding of the text.
Now, as we approach this text, there is an identification that appears here in verse 2, the sons of God, and they are mentioned again in verse 4. The key identification in this entire passage is to find out who the sons of God are, and I’m going to give that away at the very beginning because there’s no point in hiding the fact. I am convinced that these are demons. These are demons. You can write that down in capital letters if you want, I’m not going to move off of that understanding, and I’ll show you why as we go.
Now, we who know the Bible are not surprised that demons should show up in human society, are we? We shouldn’t be surprised by that. The Bible is clear on the fact that, according to Revelation chapter 12, when Satan fell, he took with him a third of the holy angels, and they constitute a force of spirit beings who went from being holy before God to being evil and cast out of the presence of God by virtue of joining Satan in his rebellion. His rebellion is described in the fourteenth chapter of Isaiah and the twenty-eighth chapter of Ezekiel.
We dealt with all of that when we met the serpent in the garden back in chapter 3, so if you want that information, you can go back to that material. We’re not surprised that demons should show up in human society. That is not anything surprising to somebody who knows the Bible. We’re very much aware that we human beings are not the only intelligent personal creatures in the universe. We are the inhabitants of the material world.
Angels, both holy and fallen, are the inhabitants of the spiritual world, and the historical record of the Bible, starting in the book of Genesis with the first fallen angel, the first demon to appear (Satan in chapter 3) all the way to the end of the book of Revelation when all of those demons are cast into the lake of fire in chapter 20, makes it clear from Genesis to Revelation, in between, that demons play an important role in the efforts of Satan to thwart the purposes of God by being very involved in human life. So we understand that from the Scripture.
These supernatural creations of God were made to serve God and worship God. And they were present, by the way, when God made the universe. You can read Job 38, I won’t take the time to do that. In the first seven verses of Job 38, you have the angels of God surrounding God and praising God at the creation. So the angels were then created so that they could be at the creation of the material universe. Sometime very soon after that initial creation, there was a massive and devastating rebellion among the angels, and it resulted in a third of them being thrown out of heaven."
www.bbc.com
Regardless I'm sure some of the usual arrogant pseudo-"christian" cultists up in this toxic "biblical" disinformation honeypot thread - will no doubt as always either communally ignore or instead orgiastically pile on the typical fallacious "biblical" gish galloping fuckwittery.
