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Were the Sons of God in Genesis 6 Fallen Angels_ Who Were the Nephilim_ · Bible stories

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  Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Bible Stories. You may notice there
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  Speaker 1: are no ads on this video because YouTube has demonetized
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  Speaker 1: our channel. To support us, you can scan the first
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  Speaker 1: QR code to join the Bible Stories podcast app, where
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  Speaker 1: you can listen offline and access exclusive episodes. Or, if
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  Speaker 1: you simply want to give, you can scan the second
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  Speaker 1: QR code to donate directly. Thank you for helping us
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  Speaker 1: keep these Bible Stories going. The most likely answer to
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  Speaker 1: the first question is yes. The sons of God in
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  Speaker 1: Genesis chapter 6 were almost certainly heavenly beings who rebelled
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  Speaker 1: against God. Two writers in the New Testament say those
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  Speaker 1: same beings are in chains at this moment, waiting for judgment.
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  Speaker 1: The second question is where nearly everyone goes wrong. Ask
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  Speaker 1: a Christian who the Nephilim were, and the answer comes
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  Speaker 1: back fast. They were the giant children born to those
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  Speaker 1: angels and human women. That answer is so familiar, it
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  Speaker 1: sounds like something you read in the Bible. You did
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  Speaker 1: not read it in the Bible. Genesis mentions the Nephilim
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  Speaker 1: in one sentence. In that sentence, it places them on
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  Speaker 1: the earth first, before it says a single word about
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  Speaker 1: the marriages. It never calls them anyone's children. It never
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  Speaker 1: says how tall they were. A few ordinary words in
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  Speaker 1: the middle of that line do all the damage, and
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  Speaker 1: almost every reader slides over them in half a second.
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  Speaker 1: Once you see those words, the story you were given
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  Speaker 1: cannot be put back together. This is the passage where
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  Speaker 1: a great many believers stop reading Genesis. Four verses arrive
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  Speaker 1: out of nowhere, full of things nobody explains, and it
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  Speaker 1: feels safer to close the book than to get it wrong.
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  Speaker 1: If that has been you, the strangeness you felt was real.
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  Speaker 1: It is in the text, and it is not a
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  Speaker 1: failure in you, which is why it is worth walking
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  Speaker 1: straight into. Start with where these four verses sit. Genesis
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  Speaker 1: chapter 5 is a long list of names. Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel,
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  Speaker 1: and on down the line, each man living and fathering
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  Speaker 1: sons and dying. It reads like a family record because
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  Speaker 1: that is what it is. The chapter closes on Noah
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  Speaker 1: and his three sons, and you expect the flood to
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  Speaker 1: arrive next. Instead, the text stops and tells you something
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  Speaker 1: else entirely. When human beings began to increase in number
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  Speaker 1: on the earth and daughters were born to them, the
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  Speaker 1: sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful,
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  Speaker 1: and they married any of them they chose. Genesis chapter
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  Speaker 1: 6 verses 1 and 2 Then, without pausing to explain
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  Speaker 1: who these sons of God are, the passage records a
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  Speaker 1: word from the Lord limiting the days of humanity to
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  Speaker 1: a hundred and twenty years. Then it mentions the Nephilim.
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  Speaker 1: Then it moves straight into the verdict that brings the flood.
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  Speaker 1: Four verses. That is all. No introduction, no definition, no argument.
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  Speaker 1: The writer clearly assumed his first readers already knew what
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  Speaker 1: he meant, the way you would not stop to explain
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  Speaker 1: who the pharaoh was in a story about Egypt. What
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  Speaker 1: was obvious to them has become the most argued passage
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  Speaker 1: in the book of Genesis. That word about a hundred
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  Speaker 1: and twenty years deserves a moment of its own, because
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  Speaker 1: almost every reader steps over it on the way to
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  Speaker 1: the interesting part. People usually take it as a new
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  Speaker 1: limit on human life, as though God were shortening the
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  Speaker 1: human span from centuries down to 120 years. That reading
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  Speaker 1: has an obvious problem. After the flood, Abraham lives to 175.
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  Speaker 1: Isaac lives to 180. Jacob is 130 when he stands
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  Speaker 1: in front of Pharaoh and calls his own years few.
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  Speaker 1: If God had just capped human life at 120, nobody
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  Speaker 1: told them. The other reading fits better. God is starting
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  Speaker 1: a clock. 120 years is the time remaining before the
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  Speaker 1: water comes, and it is announced right here in the
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  Speaker 1: middle of the passage about the sons of God, because
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  Speaker 1: this is the moment that set the clock running. which
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  Speaker 1: means the flood came at the end of more than
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  Speaker 1: a century of patience, while an old man cut timber
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  Speaker 1: in front of a watching world that had every day
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  Speaker 1: of those years to change its mind. Notice something else
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  Speaker 1: about the placement. Genesis has been telling a story of
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  Speaker 1: steady collapse, a garden, then a rebellion, a field, then
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  Speaker 1: a murder. A man named Lamech boasting to his wives
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  Speaker 1: that he has killed a young man for wounding him.
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  Speaker 1: Each step the trouble spreads wider and reaches higher. And then,
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  Speaker 1: at the top of that climb, comes this. Something crosses
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  Speaker 1: a line that was never meant to be crossed, and
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  Speaker 1: the very next thing God says is that he will
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  Speaker 1: wipe the earth clean. Whatever these verses describe, Genesis treats
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  Speaker 1: it as the last event before the water. That alone
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  Speaker 1: should make us read them slowly. The Hebrew behind sons
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  Speaker 1: of God is a set expression. It is not a
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  Speaker 1: loose description that could stretch to cover anybody godly. It
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  Speaker 1: is a specific pair of words, and we can check
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  Speaker 1: where else it appears. It appears in the book of Job.
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  Speaker 1: In the opening chapter, on a certain day, the sons
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  Speaker 1: of God come to present themselves before the Lord, and
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  Speaker 1: the accuser comes among them. That is, a scene in
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  Speaker 1: the throne room of God. No one reads it as
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  Speaker 1: a gathering of pious farmers. The same expression appears again,
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  Speaker 1: a chapter later, in exactly the same setting. Then it
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  Speaker 1: appears one more time in Job, near the end, when
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  Speaker 1: God finally answers the man out of the storm. God
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  Speaker 1: asks Job where he was when the foundations of the
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  Speaker 1: earth were laid. When the morning stars sang together and
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  Speaker 1: all the sons of God shouted for joy. Job chapter
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  Speaker 1: 38 verse 7 Look at when that happened, before the
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  Speaker 1: earth was finished, before there were any human beings at
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  Speaker 1: all to be godly or ungodly. Whoever these sons of
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  Speaker 1: God are, they were already alive and already singing while
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  Speaker 1: the world was being built. There is no reading of
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  Speaker 1: that line that allows for descendants of Seth. Seth had
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  Speaker 1: not been imagined yet. So the expression, in every place
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  Speaker 1: we contest it, refers to beings who belong to God's
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  Speaker 1: own realm. Created, powerful, present at the beginning, and gathered
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  Speaker 1: before his throne. There is one more piece of evidence,
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  Speaker 1: and it comes from long before the argument started. About
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  Speaker 1: two centuries before Christ, Jewish scholars translated their scriptures into Greek.
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  Speaker 1: When those translators arrived at Genesis chapter 6, some of
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  Speaker 1: the copies that have come down to us do not
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  Speaker 1: say sons of God at all. They say angels of God.
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  Speaker 1: That is how Jewish readers who spoke the language and
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  Speaker 1: lived nearer to the text than we ever will understood
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  Speaker 1: the sentence, and they said so in their translation. Now
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  Speaker 1: let me give the other reading its full weight, because
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  Speaker 1: it is held by careful believers who love Scripture, and
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  Speaker 1: it deserves more than a dismissal. The most common alternative
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  Speaker 1: is called the Sethite view. On this reading, the sons
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  Speaker 1: of God are Seth's family line. The people, Genesis chapter 4,
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  Speaker 1: says began calling on the name of the Lord, and
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  Speaker 1: the daughters of men come from the line of Cain.
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  Speaker 1: On this reading, the sin is intermarriage. The faithful line
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  Speaker 1: joined itself to the faithless line, the difference between them dissolved,
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  Speaker 1: and within a few generations, there was nothing left on
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  Speaker 1: the earth worth saving. That reading has real strengths. It
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  Speaker 1: keeps the story human, which fits the chapters on either
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  Speaker 1: side of it. Genesis chapter 4 and Genesis chapter 5
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  Speaker 1: are two family trees running side by side, one from
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  Speaker 1: Cain and one from Seth, and it is natural to
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  Speaker 1: think chapter 6 finally brings them together. It also explains
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  Speaker 1: why the punishment falls on people, and it protects a
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  Speaker 1: boundary that the rest of the Bible seems to assume
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  Speaker 1: that heavenly beings and human beings belong to different orders
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  Speaker 1: of creation. there is a second alternative worth naming. Some
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  Speaker 1: read the sons of God as rulers and kings. In
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  Speaker 1: the ancient world, kings routinely claimed to be sons of
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  Speaker 1: a god. A tyrant taking whatever women he wanted, gathering
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  Speaker 1: harems by force, and fathering a warrior class would fit
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  Speaker 1: the phrase they married any of them they chose, and
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  Speaker 1: would fit the violence that fills the earth a few
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  Speaker 1: verses later. Both readings are sober, both avoid the strangeness,
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  Speaker 1: and both run into the same wall. The wall is this.
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  Speaker 1: Genesis chapter 5 never calls Seth's line the sons of God.
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  Speaker 1: It calls them what it calls everybody else, men who
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  Speaker 1: lived and fathered sons. and died. And the phrase daughters
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  Speaker 1: of men in chapter 6 is simply daughters of humanity.
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  Speaker 1: If sons of God meant Sethites, then Sethite men would
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  Speaker 1: also be sons of humanity, since that is exactly what
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  Speaker 1: chapter 5 has just spent 30 verses proving about them.
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  Speaker 1: The sentence would be saying that humans married humans. That
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  Speaker 1: is not a scandal. That is Tuesday. There is a
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  Speaker 1: further problem. Whatever this union was, the text says something
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  Speaker 1: came out of it that people talked about for generations afterward.
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  Speaker 1: Ordinary marriages between two ordinary families do not produce a legend.
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  Speaker 1: Something in this passage is being reported as unusual, and
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  Speaker 1: the ordinary readings remove the very thing the passage is reporting.
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  Speaker 1: Here is where the question stops being a matter of
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  Speaker 1: Hebrew grammar and becomes something the New Testament settles. Two
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  Speaker 1: letters near the end of the Bible reach back to
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  Speaker 1: this moment. They were written to Christians who were frightened,
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  Speaker 1: surrounded by false teachers, and wondering whether God still judged
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  Speaker 1: anything at all. Both writers answer the same way. They
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  Speaker 1: pull out examples from the past to prove that God
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  Speaker 1: has never once failed to act. Peter writes it like this,
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  Speaker 1: For if God did not spare angels when they sinned,
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  Speaker 1: but cast them into hell, and committed them to chains
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  Speaker 1: of gloomy darkness, to be kept until the judgment. 2
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  Speaker 1: Peter 2.4 And what is the very next example he
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  Speaker 1: reaches for? Noah. The flood. The eight people carried through
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  Speaker 1: the water. Peter puts the sinning angels and the flood
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  Speaker 1: side by side in a single breath, in that order
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  Speaker 1: as though every reader would know they belonged together. Jude
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  Speaker 1: does something similar, and he adds a detail that decides
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  Speaker 1: the matter. and the angels who did not stay within
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  Speaker 1: their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling,
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  Speaker 1: he has kept in eternal chains, under gloomy darkness, until
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  Speaker 1: the judgment of the great day. Jude, verse 6. Read
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  Speaker 1: what Jude says the sin was. Not pride, not rebellion
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  Speaker 1: in the abstract. They left their proper dwelling, they abandoned
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  Speaker 1: the place assigned to them, and went somewhere they had
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  Speaker 1: no right to go. And in the very next sentence,
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  Speaker 1: Jude sets beside them the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah,
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  Speaker 1: which he describes as having gone after strange flesh. He
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  Speaker 1: places those two events together, deliberately, as two examples of
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  Speaker 1: the same kind of transgression, a crossing of the boundary
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  Speaker 1: God set between one order of being and another. Now
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  Speaker 1: ask the obvious question. If Jude and Peter are not
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  Speaker 1: pointing to Genesis chapter 6, where in the Old Testament
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  Speaker 1: are they pointing? There is no other story. The Old
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  Speaker 1: Testament nowhere narrates a rebellion of angels in heaven. It
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  Speaker 1: never tells us when Satan fell or how. If you
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  Speaker 1: take Genesis chapter 6 out of the picture, these two
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  Speaker 1: apostles are appealing to an event their readers had no
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  Speaker 1: way of finding in their own scriptures, which would make
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  Speaker 1: the argument useless to the very people it was meant
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  Speaker 1: to comfort. So the answer to the first half of
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  Speaker 1: our title is yes, and it is not a guess.
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  Speaker 1: The phrase belongs to heaven everywhere else it appears in
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  Speaker 1: the Hebrew Bible. The oldest Jewish translators read it that way,
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  Speaker 1: and two New Testament writers addressing suffering churches treat the
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  Speaker 1: angels who sinned and the days of Noah as one
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  Speaker 1: connected event. There is one objection that stops many people,
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  Speaker 1: and it should be answered plainly because it comes from
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  Speaker 1: the mouth of the Lord himself. The Sadducees came to
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  Speaker 1: Jesus with a trap about a woman who had been
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  Speaker 1: married to seven brothers, wanting to know whose wife she
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  Speaker 1: would be in the resurrection. Jesus answered them,' At the resurrection,
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  Speaker 1: people will neither marry nor be given in marriage. They
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  Speaker 1: will be like the angels in heaven.' Matthew 22, verse 30.
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  Speaker 1: People hear that and conclude the case is closed. Angels
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  Speaker 1: cannot marry, so the sons of God cannot be angels.
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  Speaker 1: But look carefully at the three words at the end
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  Speaker 1: of the sentence, the angels in heaven. Jesus is describing
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  Speaker 1: what angels are like in the place where they belong,
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  Speaker 1: in the presence of God, doing what they were made
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  Speaker 1: to do. He is answering a question about the resurrection,
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  Speaker 1: not writing a policy on what a rebel spirit is
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  Speaker 1: capable of after it has abandoned its post. And that
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  Speaker 1: is precisely what Jude said happened. They left their proper dwelling.
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  Speaker 1: Jesus describes angels in heaven. Jude describes angels who refuse
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  Speaker 1: to stay there. Those two sentences are not in conflict.
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  Speaker 1: They are describing two different situations. And the second one
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  Speaker 1: is the whole point. We should also be honest about
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  Speaker 1: what Scripture does not say. It never explains how such
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  Speaker 1: a thing was possible. It never describes the process. Every
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  Speaker 1: attempt to fill that gap is imagination, and the Bible
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  Speaker 1: leaves the gap open on purpose. What it tells us
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  Speaker 1: is that a line was crossed and that God dealt
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  Speaker 1: with it with chains and with water. Now, for the
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  Speaker 1: second half of the title, and here the ground shifts
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  Speaker 1: under our feet, because almost everything popularly believed about the
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  Speaker 1: Nephilim comes from outside the Bible. Here is the entire verse.
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  Speaker 1: This is the whole biblical foundation of a topic that
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  Speaker 1: has generated thousands of videos, hundreds of books, and an
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  Speaker 1: entire subculture. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days,
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  Speaker 1: and also afterward, when the sons of God came into
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  Speaker 1: the daughters of man, and they bore children to them.
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  Speaker 1: These were the mighty men who were of old, the
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  Speaker 1: men of renown. Genesis chapter 6 verse 4 Now watch
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  Speaker 1: the order of the words, because the order is everything.
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  Speaker 1: The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, already there.
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  Speaker 1: The sentence introduces them as something that was present, the
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  Speaker 1: way you would mention that there were lions in the
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  Speaker 1: region during the years a story took place. Then it says,
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  Speaker 1: and also afterward. Then, only after establishing both of those things,
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  Speaker 1: it says, when the sons of God came in to
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  Speaker 1: the daughters of man. The verse does not say the
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  Speaker 1: Nephilim were born from that union. It says the Nephilim
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  Speaker 1: were around during the period when the union happened, and
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  Speaker 1: also around afterward. That is a description of the setting,
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  Speaker 1: not a birth announcement. Then the verse names what the
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  Speaker 1: union did produce. These were the mighty men who were
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  Speaker 1: of old, the men of renown. That is a different phrase,
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  Speaker 1: and in Hebrew it is a different word. The children
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  Speaker 1: are called Giberim, which means warriors, champions, mighty men. The
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  Speaker 1: verse gives the offspring their own name, and that name
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  Speaker 1: is not Nephilim. This is the clause I promised you
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  Speaker 1: at the start, in those days, and also afterward. Five
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  Speaker 1: words in English, and they rearrange the whole subject. Once
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  Speaker 1: you see them, you cannot build the standard story anymore,
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  Speaker 1: because the standard story requires the Nephilim to be the children,
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  Speaker 1: and the verse has already placed them on the earth
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  Speaker 1: before the children arrive. I want to be careful here.
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  Speaker 1: This is a difficult sentence, and faithful readers have taken
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  Speaker 1: it more than one way. But the plain order of
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  Speaker 1: the words is what it is, and the plain order
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  Speaker 1: does not give us hybrid offspring called Nephilim. It gives
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  Speaker 1: us mighty men born to human mothers in a period
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  Speaker 1: when something the Bible refuses to explain had already gone wrong.
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  Speaker 1: Stay on that word, gibberim, because it opens a door
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  Speaker 1: most people walk past. Four chapters later, Genesis introduces a
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  Speaker 1: man named Nimrod, and it says he was the first
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  Speaker 1: on earth to become a mighty man. Same word. Nimrod
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  Speaker 1: builds cities, he is called a mighty hunter, and his
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  Speaker 1: kingdom begins in Babel. Then look at what happens at
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  Speaker 1: Babel itself. The people gather on a plain and say
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  Speaker 1: to one another that they will build a tower with
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  Speaker 1: its top in the heavens, and then they give their reason.
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  Speaker 1: Let us make a name for ourselves. Genesis chapter 11
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  Speaker 1: verse 4 Now go back to Genesis chapter 6 and
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  Speaker 1: read the last three words again. The men of renown.
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  Speaker 1: In Hebrew, that phrase is men of the name. The
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  Speaker 1: same word for name sits in both verses. So Genesis
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  Speaker 1: tells us that in the generation before the flood, there
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  Speaker 1: were men of the name. And then after the flood,
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  Speaker 1: there is a mighty man who founds Babel. And then,
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  Speaker 1: at Babel, humanity says out loud what the whole pattern
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  Speaker 1: has been about. We will make a name for ourselves.
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  Speaker 1: We will build something that reaches into heaven. We will
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  Speaker 1: not be scattered and forgotten. That is what Genesis is tracking,
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  Speaker 1: not monsters. The human hunger to become greater than what
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  Speaker 1: God made us, to climb up into a realm that
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  Speaker 1: is not ours, to have our names spoken forever. The
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  Speaker 1: sons of God came down to where they did not belong.
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  Speaker 1: Then the sons of men tried to build their way
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  Speaker 1: up to where they did not belong. The book of
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  Speaker 1: Genesis puts those two events a few chapters apart, and
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  Speaker 1: it uses the same vocabulary for both. You already know
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  Speaker 1: this hunger. You have watched people spend a whole life
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  Speaker 1: chasing a name, and you have felt the pull of
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  Speaker 1: it yourself in smaller forms, on days when being ordinary
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  Speaker 1: felt like a punishment. Genesis says that hunger is old,
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  Speaker 1: older than the flood, and that it has never yet
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  Speaker 1: built anything that lasted. There is exactly one other verse
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  Speaker 1: in the entire Bible that uses the word Nephilim. One.
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  Speaker 1: And most people who quote it have never read the
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  Speaker 1: verse just before it. Moses sends twelve men into Canaan
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  Speaker 1: to look at the land God has promised. They are
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  Speaker 1: gone forty days. Ten of them come back terrified, and
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  Speaker 1: Scripture tells us plainly what kind of report they brought.
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  Speaker 1: It calls it a bad report about the land. That
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  Speaker 1: is the Bible's own label on the paragraph before the
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  Speaker 1: famous line. Then comes the line itself. And there we
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  Speaker 1: saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come from
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  Speaker 1: the Nephilim, and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and
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  Speaker 1: so we seemed to them. Numbers chapter 13 verse 33.
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  Speaker 1: That is the only other occurrence of the word in Scripture.
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  Speaker 1: It is spoken by frightened men inside a report that
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  Speaker 1: God's own text has already classified as false, and it
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  Speaker 1: is contradicted on the spot by Caleb, who stands up
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  Speaker 1: and says, the people are well able to take the land. Later,
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  Speaker 1: God tells Moses that these ten men died of a
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  Speaker 1: plague because of the report they spread. So the single
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  Speaker 1: verse used to prove that the Nephilim survived the flood
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  Speaker 1: is a sentence God rejected. And look at what the
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  Speaker 1: frightened men actually said. We seem to ourselves like grasshoppers,
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: and so we seem to them. They report the size
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: of their enemies, and then, without noticing, they report the
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: size of themselves in their own eyes. Nobody surveyed the Anakim.
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: Nobody asked them what they thought. The spies simply assumed
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: that anyone that large must see them as insects, because
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: that is how they had already learned to see themselves.
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: Two verses. That is the complete biblical record of the Nephilim.
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: One sentence in Genesis that describes where they were rather
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: than who they were, and one sentence in Numbers spoken
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: by men whose fear was so loud it drowned out
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: the promise of God. If Scripture wanted to tell us
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: that giants roamed the earth after the flood, it had
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: every chance, and it had the vocabulary. The Old Testament
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: speaks often about unusually large and frightening peoples. It calls
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: them Anakim. It calls them Rephaim. In Deuteronomy, it mentions
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: the Emim and the Zamzumim, tall peoples who lived in
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: the land before Israel arrived. When David's men later kill
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: four enormous Philistine warriors, Scripture says they were descended from
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: Rapha in Gath, and there is one hard measurement in
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: the whole subject. Og, king of Bashan, is described in
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: Deuteronomy as the last of the Rephaim, and the text
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: tells us that his bed was made of iron and
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: was nine cubits long and four cubits wide. That is
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: somewhere around 13 feet long. It is a strange, specific,
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: almost bureaucratic detail, the kind of thing you record because
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: you saw it and it impressed you. Now here is
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: what matters. In all of those passages, across several books
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: and several centuries, the Bible never once reaches back and
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: connects any of these peoples to Genesis chapter 6. Not
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: for Og, not for the Anakim, not for Goliath, who
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: is described as a champion from Gath, and whose family
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: line is traced to Rafa, never to the sons of God.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: Scripture had a category for tall enemies, and it used
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: a different set of words for them every single time.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: That silence is not an accident. The writers of the
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: Old Testament were not shy about the supernatural. They wrote
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: about a talking donkey, a floating axe head, and fire
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: falling on a soaked altar. If they had believed that
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: the giants of Canaan were the surviving children of fallen angels,
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: they had no reason to hide it and every reason
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: to say it. They never do. So where did the
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: familiar picture come from? The angels, the watchers, the giants
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: who grew to the height of mountains and devoured everything
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: on the earth. It came from a book called First Enoch,
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: written in the centuries between the Old and New Testaments
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: by authors we cannot name, who used the name of
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: Enoch because Genesis had said something tantalizing about him and
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: then said nothing more. That book takes the four verses
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: we have been reading and expands them into a full
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: epic with named angels, catalogs of forbidden knowledge, and giants
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: of enormous size. It was widely read. Copies of it
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls, which tells us
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: it mattered to at least one Jewish community. It is
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: still counted as scripture by the Ethiopian church, and it
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: is unmistakably the source of nearly every detail people now
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: assume they read in Genesis. Jude does quote a line
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: from it, and that fact troubles some believers. It should not.
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: Paul stood on Mars Hill in Athens and quoted Greek
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: poets to make a point about God, and no one
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: has ever concluded that Greek poetry is inspired scripture. A
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: writer can borrow a true sentence from a book without
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: endorsing the book. The sentence Jude borrowed describes the Lord
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: arriving in judgment surrounded by thousands upon thousands of his
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: holy ones. That sentence is true. It does not make
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: the rest of the volume true. The honest position is this. First,
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: Enoch is a window into how some Jewish people thought
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: during a period the Bible mostly passes over in silence.
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: It is worth knowing about. It is not the word
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: of God. And when its picture of Genesis chapter 6
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: and the actual text of Genesis chapter 6 disagree, the
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: text wins. Here is the turn that changes the whole passage,
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: and it is sitting one verse past everything we have
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: been examining. After the sons of God, after the Nephilim,
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: after the mighty men of renown, God speaks, and when
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: he names what has gone wrong with the world, he
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: does not name angels. The Lord saw that the wickedness
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: of man was great in the earth, and that every
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: Genesis chapter 6 verse 5 the wickedness of man, the
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: thoughts of the human heart. That is the verdict, and
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: the flood follows from it. This is the part the
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: monster stories always lose. There is a version of this
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: passage that is genuinely appealing to us, in which the
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: world went bad because something from outside came down and
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: corrupted it, and human beings are essentially victims of an invasion.
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: Genesis will not let us have that version. Whatever happened
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: in verses 1 through 4, when God explains why the
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: waters are coming, He points at the human heart and
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: nothing else. That is harder. It is also the only
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: honest starting place, because a problem that came from outside
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: would be solved by a rescue, and a problem that
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: lives inside the heart requires something far deeper than rescue.
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: It requires a new heart. Every promise God makes from
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: that point forward in Scripture is moving toward that one thing.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: And in the middle of that verdict, one sentence stands apart.
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: Genesis chapter 6 verse 8. Not because Noah was a
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: mighty man, not because he had a name. The chapter
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: has just finished listing the men who had names, and
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: none of them are in the ark. The man God
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: carries through the water is the one nobody was talking about.
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: There is a final peace, and it is the reason
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: this whole subject belongs in a Christian's Bible at all,
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: rather than in a collection of curiosities. Peter tells us
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: in his first letter that Christ, after his death, and
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: in the power of the Spirit, went and made proclamation
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: to the spirits in prison, who disobeyed long ago in
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: the days of Noah, while the ark was being built. Peace.
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: Peter then compares the eight people saved through the water
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: to baptism and to the salvation that comes through the
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: resurrection of Jesus Christ. Consider what that means. The beings
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: who crossed the line before the flood, who have been
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: held in chains since the earth was young, do not
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: spend eternity forgotten in the dark with no news reaching them.
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: News reached them. And the news came as an announcement
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: rather than an offer. The one they rebelled against had come,
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: had died, and had risen, and everything they had attempted
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: had failed permanently. That is where the story of Genesis
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: chapter 6 finally arrives. It begins with heaven coming down
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: to take what it wanted, and it ends with heaven
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: coming down to give everything away. The sons of God
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: abandoned their proper dwelling in order to seize. The Son
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: of God left his proper dwelling in order to be seized.
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: He came into the exact realm where he did not
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: have to come, and he came empty-handed, and he came
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: to be crucified. There is only one descent in the
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: Bible that saved anybody, and he is the one who says,
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: Come to me, all you who are weary. So let
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: me put the answers plainly one more time, because you
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: came here for answers, and you should leave with them.
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: Were the sons of God fallen angels? Almost certainly yes.
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: The phrase means heavenly beings everywhere else it occurs in
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: the Hebrew Bible. The oldest Jewish translators read it that way.
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: Peter and Jude both point back to it when they
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: need proof that God judges rebellion. Something crossed a boundary
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: in the days before the flood, and Scripture says God
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: still has those beings in chains. Who were the Nephilim?
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: We are told far less than we would like. They
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: were on the earth in those days, and also afterward.
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: The children of that union are called mighty men, men
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: of renown, and their name lived on. The word Nephilim
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: appears twice in the whole Bible, once in Genesis, and
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: once in the mouths of ten frightened men, whose report
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: God rejected. Everything beyond that comes from books that are
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: not Scripture, and you are free to set those books down. Now,
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: hear the thing this passage is really for. Some of
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: you are tired in a way that sleep does not touch.
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: Some of you are older now, and the body that
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: used to carry you has become something you negotiate with
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: every morning. Some of you have not had a real
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: conversation in longer than you would admit to anyone, and
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: some of you have been reading the Bible for forty
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: years and still feel like you are standing outside a door,
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: hoping nobody notices you do not understand. Genesis chapter 6
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: is not written to frighten you. It is written to
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: tell you that God saw a world where the strong
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: took whatever they wanted, where men built names for themselves
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: out of other people, where the human heart had turned
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: in on itself so completely that heaven had to intervene.
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: And in that entire generation, his eye fell on one
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: ordinary man that no one was talking about, and he
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: made a way through. The spies in numbers looked at
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: the land and said, we seem to ourselves like grasshoppers.
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: That was their real problem. The giants had not measured them.
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: They had measured themselves in fear and then assumed everyone
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: else agreed. You are not a grasshopper. You are not overlooked.
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: The God who kept the record of what happened before
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: the flood, who has held those chains for thousands of
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: years without forgetting, has not lost track of you in
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: your chair, in your kitchen, in your hospital room. He
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: knows your name, and he never asked you to make
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: one for yourself. That is what these four difficult verses
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: are guarding, not a secret about monsters, a God who sees,
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: who remembers, and who comes down. If this video helped
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: you grow deeper in God's Word, I want to personally
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: invite you to be part of what we are building here.
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: Every video on this channel takes many hours of study
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: and careful research to make sure we bring you content
• 34:19
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• 34:23
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• 34:26
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• 34:29
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• 34:33
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• 34:38
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• 34:43
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• 34:46
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• 34:50
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• 34:53
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• 34:58
  Speaker 1: you for being here, and may God bless you richly.