Sunday School | David - Genesis 6 Nephilim

Introduction

This morning is gonna be very strange in two different ways. Okay? So if you're new, this is your first time here, my apologies because it's about to be an unusual morning. Okay? There's gonna be two reasons it's gonna be weird. One is because of our subject matter, and then second is because we're gonna do this Wizard of Oz style, meaning I'm gonna only be down front for about five minutes, and then I'm gonna go behind the curtain. And I'm gonna speak to you from up there in the booth because what I want to show you in the scriptures just needs to be visually seen and it's too complicated to, like, have somebody else bouncing around in the Bible. So I need to be controlling the laptop and so you'll just listen to my voice and look at the words on the screen. And I'm very sorry you don't get to look at me, which I know is what you'd rather be doing, but it's just not gonna be an option this morning.

Do you guys know the name William Hurst? What is he famous for? Newspapers. Newspapers? He made his money in newspapers. Yep. And then do you guys know what the Hearst Castle is? Have you heard of this? So he built this, it's called the Hearst Castle. He built this ridiculous, lavish, kind of, you know, very unusual home for himself. And it's famous because it's huge and it's sprawling and it's the kind of thing you're never done. You're always adding rooms and doing stuff. And one of the things that he did in his castle, or so is the story at least, is that he wanted a private zoo.

So on this, you know, lavish extravagant place, he contracted with some big game hunter to go to Africa and to capture him a lion and bring it back. And he envisioned when he did this that there would just be this amazing, majestic, terrifying lion, the king of the jungle, living on his property. But instead, what he finds that he has is this mopey, listless, disappointing lion in a cage. And so he calls his big game hunter and says, you sold me a bum lion. I wanted like a, you know, I wanted a better lion than the one that you got me.

He said, well, let me come take a look. And so the game hunter comes and he examines the enclosure and sees the environment in which this lion is living. And he says, well, I see your problem here. There's no problem with the lion. The problem is that you have your lion in a cage right next to these monkeys and all day long, these monkeys are just throwing garbage at him and mocking him and teasing him. He said, want your lion to be a lion? Let him out of his cage and put him in there with the monkeys. Okay? And then you'll get what you're looking for.

The Cage of the Scriptures

I tell you that story because I think that sometimes we've tended to take the scriptures and put them in a cage, that we've made the word of God far more boring than it is by domesticating all the weird stuff and making it be, like, banal and simple and we just explain away all the weirdness. So what we're left with is a tame lion, a domesticated lion that is safer. And there's, you know, I understand the advantages to doing that. And there are plenty of things in the scriptures that to a modern mind, and I am thoroughly sorry if that just made your microphone thing weird. Sorry.

That to a modern mind like mine, there are some things that we're like, ah, that's so odd. I don't know what to do with that. But so this morning, we're gonna open the cage a little bit. Okay? And then it will be very strange from that moment on.

So we last week, we talked about that David, some of David's mighty men or some of his primary military commanders. You guys remember at the very end of the chapter we looked at, there's all these stories about them killing giants, and they killed all these guys, the Rafa, and we talked about the Anakites. And I gave you, I just kind of opened the door on the Nephilim, and I kind of dropped just a couple of hints about that, and then I decided to move on. But I'm going to go back to that.

Bob Blacksmith just came up to me and said, you're not gonna teach on the Nephilim, are you? And the answer is yes, we are. And it's super weird. I'll explain it. I want you to see the text on screen and we're going to go on a little bit of a tour down into super crazy land. What's that? Pseudopigraphy. Pseudopigraphy. We're gonna jump into the pseudopigraphy. It's just gonna be a freak show. Okay? So it's gonna be a freak show at lots of different levels. If you're new here, it's not normally this strange around here. Okay? But it's gonna be today. So, Genesis chapter six, make your way to that and it'll be on screen and lots of other weird, weird, weird things besides. Okay? So Genesis six.

Genesis 6 and the Nephilim

Alright. So what I happen to own like, the greatest Bible software in the world and loads and loads of stuff. And so we're gonna do this because I want you to see it live, and we're gonna we'll just talk through it. You can still hear me okay. Right? It's good.

And then if you, we I love to do this interactively, and even though you can't see me, I can see you and your bald spots. And so you guys can still ask questions. And Scott, are you down? Scott? Okay. Scheuer is somewhere around. Did you do you have a handheld? Can't even, I can't even find Scott. Where's Scott? I do. He's somewhere. Okay. Well, where are you? You're hidden underneath me? Okay. So if you guys have questions, Scott, maybe go to the front so that people can see you and you can see them. And then if folks wanna interact, just wave at Scott and then maybe speak in the mic because that way it'll be easier for me to hear you and we'll see where you go. Okay? Alright. So let's begin.

The Passage from Genesis 6

So in Genesis 6, this is a very early chapter in the scriptures, there's this odd little moment. It says this:

When men began to increase in number on the earth, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them that they chose.
— Genesis 6:1-2

Then the Lord said, my spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years.

Let's start with that. So something happened when there's these two different groups of persons who intermarry, and there are different ideas of what this might mean. We have these two who are the two populations we're seeing here? Yeah.

Sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose.
— Genesis 6:2

Now that could mean a number of things, and I have always been a proponent of the simplest, least creepy and weird, most normal understanding of this, and that would be that what he's basically saying is the sons of God and the daughters of men. This is something like when Christians marry non-Christians.

What makes that a plausible explanation is that very quickly in the book of Genesis, you get a sense of two different groups of people. You've got Cain and Abel. Right? Cain is kind of the bad guy, the rebellious one, the disobedient one, and then Abel is the innocent sufferer. And then we replace Cain with Seth. And as things go on, you very quickly get the sense of like there's the good guys and the bad guys.

Some have suggested, including myself, that all that's going on here is that the sons of God saw the daughters of men. This is just Christians marrying non-Christians, faithful people marrying unfaithful people, and that certainly is a thing that's been happening for a very long time. Okay? So far so good?

Second thing that happens in this passage is that God decides we're gonna have a short term on this. It's a hundred and twenty years. Some people think that means that the limits of the human lifespan are gonna be a hundred and twenty years, nobody's gonna live longer than that. Others think that what it means is that a hundred and twenty years from now, from the moment this was said, is when the flood would come. And in fact, what does come immediately after this is the flood.

Then it says this, the Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them.

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them.
— Genesis 6:4

Now you'll notice, if you guys are good scientists, this is correlation, not cause. It does not say that the Nephilim were the children, they the offspring of the sons of God and the daughters of men, simply that they lived at the same time. Although it kind of seems to plant into your mind that they were the offspring, right?

So whoever the sons of God are, having children with the daughters of men, that was either at the same time as the Nephilim or the Nephilim were that offspring. You get kind of like some of the interpretive range of possibilities there? Okay.

And then what happens after this is in verse five, the Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become and every inclination of thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The Lord was grieved he made man on the earth, and then he floods the world and kills literally everyone. Right? It's a massive thing. We'll come back to the implications of that shortly. Okay.

So first, questions about that as the range of Genesis 6? Good enough for now? Okay. The simple, the easy, the safest interpretation is that it's like faithful people intermarrying with unfaithful people and maybe the Nephilim are their kids, maybe they're not, but we don't know.

But there is another possibility about what this means right here that's much, much weirder. And that is this, you guys. Every other time that the Old Testament uses the term sons of God, do you know what they're talking about? What is it, Michael? Angels or demons. Literally, every other instance, what they're talking about, the sons of God, are angelic beings, nonhuman spiritual creatures.

And that what this would be saying is that angels that themselves sin and thus become demons interbred with human beings, that demonic creatures that we would not have necessarily had any reason to think had the ability to, number one, have sex or, two, have sperm that were compatible with human eggs, nevertheless impregnated and fathered children such that there were some sort of a hybrid human-demonic creature on the earth, which perhaps are called or what these Nephilim are.

Do you understand why we prefer the option that this is Christians marrying non-Christians? Okay. And so over the years, as people would kind of like suggest to me that that's probably what it means, I would always just kind of nod and smile at them because they were obviously lunatics. However, I think that's what it means, which is exceptionally strange, very, very uncomfortable.

But I want to show you why that lunacy actually has a surprising amount of biblical credibility to it. Okay? And in order to make that case, what we need to do is go to a very neglected book in the New Testament, namely the book of Jude.

The Book of Jude and Its Connection

So if you flip over with me to Jude, and Jude's gonna be at the very close, right before Revelation, very near the end of your Bible. Jude is an odd little book. It's short. It's one chapter. And so if you say Jude 3, you don't mean Jude chapter 3, you mean Jude verse 3. And Jude comments on this. Jude is, I would say, probably the strangest book in the New Testament for a number of reasons, some of which we will touch on now. And I'll show you what Jude has to say about this, and we're gonna have to follow some of his reasoning and logic. Alright? This is honestly where Jude, I believe, constrains the possibilities of Genesis 6 in a way that are a little uncomfortable to me. But nevertheless, we want to surrender to the scriptures and whatever it says. Okay.

So Jude 1, servant of Jesus Christ, da da da, and he's gonna say this. We're gonna skip down. He says, dear friends, though I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, he had something he meant to write, a note he planned to communicate. I felt I had to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints.

He was planning on writing letter A, and instead he wrote letter B, and what we have is letter B. And the reason he wrote letter B is because he's concerned about something. And here's what he's concerned about: certain men whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you.

We'll come back to what that phrase means, but he's essentially saying there was something, very, very old prediction, a very, very old prophecy that is coming to pass. Okay? I'll leave that there. These certain men whose condemnations written about long ago have slipped in among you.

This is very, if you've been in our second Timothy series, this is what we've been talking about, right? The false teachers are coming. They're coming over the walls. The liars are among us. He characterizes them, excuse me, as godless men who changed the grace of our God and who are licensed for immorality, denied Jesus, all these.

What he's gonna say, he's gonna give this bit of a history of Israel, some of the high points or maybe more honestly the low points. And he's gonna say in verse six, he makes this kind of oblique reference to angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their own home and who have been subsequently kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great day.

So he is saying there's this thing that his audience should be familiar with in which angels were supposed to stay in location A, but they left it to go into location B. They abandoned their own homes, were subsequently judged and imprisoned for what they did that was wrong. You got that so far? It doesn't say much about much, and there could be some at this point, we could have speculation about which angels he is talking about.

In fact, if you were just reading Jude and we hadn't already been to Genesis 6 at all, that wasn't on your mind, what would you think he meant? I'm peering over the wall to look at you guys here. What do you what would you think he was talking about? Anybody have a stab in the dark?

Angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their own home. Some have surmised that perhaps that's talking about the fall of Satan. Some perhaps could look at that as Genesis 3 when Satan comes into the garden. Maybe he wasn't supposed to be there. There's been a variety of ideas put forward, but there's a little more data that we've gotta catch.

Okay? Watch what happens. He continues in the next verse. So there's these angels who did this thing, whatever that was, it's kind of vague. In verse seven, he says, in a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion.

Now, when he says that, this is, you gotta follow the logic here. It's not too many steps, but it is a one step lump jump. When he says in a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah was sexually immoral, that has a necessary implication for verse six. It necessarily means that verse six was also an example of sexual immorality. Does this make sense?

So I can't say, you know, if you're if you, it's you gotta be sitting at a table for me to say, come sit at this other table. There's gotta be another table in order for there to be another table. And so when Jude says in a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah gave itself up to sexual immorality, he is necessarily casting a sexual immorality cloak over verse six.

So whatever the heck was going on in verse six with these angels who didn't keep their position of authority but abandoned their own home and were subsequently judged, what they were doing necessarily was sexual in nature. You with me so far? And so, again, confirmation to the fact that that's even possible, which I don't think any of us would have ever surmised. Okay?

If you read and study Jude, then you would know, that he is throughout his book, throughout this letter, he is drawing on some other sources, but he has a favorite source that he alludes to over and over and over again. Does anybody know what Jude loves to quote and draw statements and ideas and language from? Does anybody know? Or does anybody know who he's drawing from? Did you say Moses?

So he's okay. That's good. So he's going to allude to a book that we, or he's gonna say something that shows up in another book known as the assumption of Moses. We're not gonna go down that particular strange avenue today, but he does draw from him, from that, from this thing called the assumption of Moses. You see it most explicitly down here in verse where are we at? I thought I highlighted this. Right here, verse 14. You hear that? Okay. When he says, Enoch, the seventh from Adam, he's referring to a human being, Enoch. What is Enoch famous for, you guys? Right? You said never dying. Is that what you're saying? He was just walked with God and was no more. Right? So Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about these men. And then he makes this statement.

See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones to judge everyone and to convict all the ungodly of all the ungodly acts they've done in the ungodly way and of all the harsh words and ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.
— Jude 14-15

That statement right there that he calls prophecy, this is technical language for divinely inspired. This statement does not exist in the Old Testament. There's no place that you're gonna find that. Enoch is described in the book of Genesis. We don't have him speaking any words at all, much less these words. But he is saying that Enoch, the man, and that's important, bear this in mind, he's describing a person. Enoch, the seventh from Adam, said this, and he says, see, the Lord has come among thousands and thousands of his holy ones to judge everyone, to convict all the ungodly, about their ungodly acts if done in an ungodly way, da da da, all that.

Now, we don't have Enoch's original speech. It's not recorded in the Scriptures. This is not biblical data, and yet, he gives it the title. He gives it the inscription that it is prophecy. Now, so let me try to help you be comfortable with something. I believe that there are 66 books in the Bible, 39 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New, and that every word is the inspired word of God. However, I don't think that a hundred percent of everything God has ever said is captured in the scriptures.

Right? Jesus had conversations with his disciples that were not recorded. Presumably, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit had conversations with one another that they didn't write down. Right? So we believe that the scriptures, the 66 books are everything that he wanted captured for us, that we would know it in every age among every people group. Right? This is his word.

We have a, I believe, what we would call a closed canon. Right? But it doesn't mean that it's the only things he ever said. Jesus said other things that were not recorded, and John makes this explicit. He says, listen, I ran out of paper. I don't have time to write down everything that Jesus ever said or do. So there's more that he said and did that didn't make it into the canon, and this prophecy from Enoch perhaps is one of them.

The Pseudepigrapha and First Enoch

So, let me give you a little bit of a jump. It doesn't necessarily follow from that that Jude is quoting the book of First Enoch. They might both be quoting a common source. Right? So it could be that Enoch said these words and then they were recorded in First Enoch and Jude also had that common source and isn't quoting from what we think of as the pseudepigrapha, but he's just quoting from some other unknown source that captured that accurately.

Or it could be he's quoting from First Enoch. What makes that uncomfortable is that there are things in First Enoch that nobody likes, that we really don't like, that are very, very odd, very, very strange, and that he is conferring on whatever his source is, whether it's First Enoch or some other unknown source, he's conferring enormous dignity upon it, not only by quoting it here but he repeatedly draws language from that shows up in First Enoch.

So if I go over here, if you watch this, look at what he does here. He's describing these false teachers and he uses all these illustrations for them. He says that they are, among other things, wandering stars. Well, First Enoch talks about how the good stars do not change their orbit, right? They rise in order, they rise and set in order. He talks about how that these men are clouds without rain blown along by the wind. Well, First Enoch in that same passage talks about the water and the clouds and the dew and the rain that come. The clouds are supposed to give rain, but these guys don't.

First Enoch is gonna talk about the trees that cover themselves with green leaves and bear fruit, and he describes these people as being like autumn trees without fruit and uprooted, twice dead. First Enoch is gonna talk about the sea and the rivers are like fixed and uniform and unchanging, but these people are like the wild waves of the sea foaming up their shame. Right? Over and over again throughout Jude, he is drawing language that exists in First Enoch and, as we speculate, may also exist in some unnamed source that is perhaps some kind of a subset of what we find in First Enoch.

Alright? Now, here's why all that's important. Jude is unmistakably drawing on Enoch, maybe as contained in First Enoch, but he's certainly drawing on a source that we find there. And First Enoch writes extensively and explicitly about these angels. So take a look. We're gonna go back.

First Enoch and the Angels

This is Genesis 6 and this is First Enoch over here. Again, the stuff on the right is not Bible, but the stuff on the right is the source that Jude is drawing from when he does write Bible. You with me so far? Here's what First Enoch says, and it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied, that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of heaven, saw and lusted after them and said to one another, 'Come, let us choose wives from among the children of men and beget us children.'

Then we get a whole bunch of proper names, which we can skip. Chapter 7, and all the others together with them took unto themselves wives and each chose for himself one, and they began to go unto them and to defile themselves with them. They became pregnant. They bore great giants whose heights was 3,000 elves. They consumed all the acquisitions of men. The giants turned against them and devoured mankind. They began to sin against birds and beasts and reptiles and fish. It's just evil, wretched, terrible, bad things happen.

Enoch is explicitly resolving the potential ambiguity. This is not merely non-Christians marrying Christians. This is demons and human women. That's what First Enoch is saying. It seems very, very reasonable that Jude thinks that is true, and when he writes Scripture, he is enshrining into his understanding that these angels did not keep their position of authority in terms of sexual immorality because he is drawing from what Enoch has said, which limits our options here.

The Broader Implication and the Strategy of Satan

A couple more stops and then we're gonna watch a quick video. What it seems that this means—and what's actually really stunning to me about this, and it gives maybe some insight into the work of Satan in the world—is that earlier than Genesis 6, way back here.

Let me just go like this. Way back in Genesis 3, God said—hang on. Where did he talk to the snake? When he talks to the snake, he says, because you've done this, you are cursed above all livestock and all wild animals. You'll crawl in your belly. You'll eat dust all the days of your life. And I'll put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers.

That is the word seed right there. Your offspring, your seed. And he, singular male offspring, will crush the head of the snake, and you will strike his heel. We call this the proto-euangelion. It's the first mention, really, of the atoning work of Christ in which he will defeat the snake.

And it seems as though Satan, knowing that his defeat—or at least his opposition—would be coming through a human male child born of a woman, enacted a counterstrategy. What do you think that counterstrategy would be?

Say it again. Say it, Judy. Basically, I'm proposing. Yes. You can't have a full moon. That's right.

Okay. What Judy's saying is basically what—what we might be seeing here is that Satan, understanding that his opposition and the one who would seek to defeat him is gonna be born of a woman, what he's going to do is pollute the wombs of all humanity. He's gonna so pollute the gene pool with these demonic half-breed creatures that the plan cannot proceed.

And I know that sounds super odd, but here's what's interesting about that. Did you ever wonder what on earth happened that was so catastrophic that God literally kills every living person on the earth and starts again? That it could be that what we're seeing played out in Genesis 6 and clarified in Jude is that Satan's strategy to pollute the human race, to cause the race to be so corrupted that he had to wipe the whole thing out and start over. And it seems exactly what happens.

And which is why not only here back in Genesis 6 is God's strategy after these Nephilim come—if they are the offspring, when God saw how great the wickedness on the earth had become, that every inclination of the thoughts of a human was only evil; this race of people that are just wretched and wicked. He wipes them all out. And then every other time you find God giving instructions to the people of Israel, kill them all, kill them all. They are descendants of the Nephilim. They are descendants of the Anakites. They are these Rafa people. And that might explain—and I'm not 100% certain on any of this—but it does seem this is the direction that this thing points.

Okay? That there's something here that God is seeking to do—to push back this wickedness that is infiltrated, not only in that age but then you get this really terrifying statement where it says, the Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward. That's really strange because everyone who is a descendant of the Nephilim necessarily should have been killed in the flood. And yet, there are some that either survived the flood—which I don't think is the case because the Bible is pretty clear that every living thing that has breath in its nostrils dies—but perhaps there is a subsequent invasion, and we have more of this half-breed offspring.

That seems to be the most uncaged, and you might say unhinged, take on this. Okay? But I want to give you one reason to think that I might not be a complete lunatic, and that is this. Many of you, I think, admire, as I do, the guys of the Bible Project. And they did a whole series on spiritual beings. And not only did they do series on it, but they did a podcast. It was kind of a longer form. And they give about ten minutes to talking about this. And so we're gonna play this. And this is just purely a self-injection of credibility. That's all I'm doing right now. Okay? So here we go.

[Video clip about spiritual beings, angels, and the Genesis 6 story, discussing how angels can take on physical form, and the biblical imagination of spiritual beings, and how Jude references the apocryphal book of Enoch.]

Conclusion

So strange things. And I just bring it out here because when we—one thing that has helped me to make sense of the, there's so many things about this— but I think we tend to be really uncomfortable when God's like, wipe them all out. Right? That is a major question that gets raised. But you guys, every time he issues the command to wipe them all out, this is who he's talking about. This is who he's wiping out, these evil people that are perhaps part of Satan's strategy to destroy the possibility of the Messiah coming. I think that's what's going on there.

So I would have let you go and talk about this on the drive home, and you're welcome to call me or email me if you want to push back or just do whatever you like about that. But that is what I alluded to very, very briefly last week. Next week, it'll be more normal again, so I'm very sorry if you brought a friend this week. Alright. See you.