They worshipped the Creation instead of the Creator

Before we can understand the strange story of the sons of God and the Nephilim in Genesis 6, we need to learn how the Bible speaks to the ancient world around it. Pagan cultures told stories of gods, divine-human unions, and mighty heroes from the distant past—but Genesis tells the story differently. In this episode, we explore how the Bible confronts the pagan world not by saying, “None of this is real,” but by exposing an exchange of truth for a lie: creatures worshiped instead of the Creator, rebels followed instead of the King, and a world of violence remembered as an age of heroes.

Transcript

Jon 0:39

Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Two Trees Podcast. I'm John Dylan, and I'm here with Rosemary Moller.

Rose 0:46

Hello.

Jon 0:47

And Martin Listener.

Rose 0:49

Hey all.

Jon 0:49

It is the Fourth of July here in America, and we are excited because there is boundless amounts of hot dogs. Hot dogs, hamburgers, dead animals on grills. So if you're a vegetarian, this is not your scene.

Rose 1:05

Actually, there's potato salad, and believe it or not.

Jon 1:08

No one puts potato salad on a grill.

Martin 1:10

Pretty sure it's the 4th of July everywhere. Yeah, but for us, it's a holiday.

Jon 1:15

Other places are like, man, they really like that day.

Martin 1:18

Yeah, it just means a little bit different to us.

Jon 1:20

Yeah, it's our Independence Day. Really, what it is for most people is the celebration of summer family, getting all the peoples together.

Martin 1:28

Fireworks.

Jon 1:28

Fireworks, patriotism, rah-rago team, and the World Cup is ongoing, and we are not as terrible as we thought we were going to be. Which is very true.

Rose 1:38

Is that what you were listening to last night? No.

Jon 1:41

No, I was listening to the Guardians play Chicago. Something because we are in the running for first place in our division.

Rose 1:50

For what?

Jon 1:50

Baseball is professional.

Rose 1:52

Not everybody was into soccer right now.

Jon 1:54

Well, they are, but baseball is awesome.

Rose 1:57

Also a thing.

Jon 1:58

It is a thing. Martin, tell me about my sponsor, our sponsor for the day.

Martin 2:02

Oh, of course, today's sponsor for this episode is Thomas's store and lock. Thomas. Thomas's store and lock. Your stuff is safe with us, no doubt. No doubt.

Jon 2:14

I do think it's kind of sad. Thomas gets a bad rap because he has these great lines in the Gospels, but we really only promote the doubting part of his story.

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Yeah.

Jon 2:24

He has this part where they're going down to Jerusalem and everyone's like, that's a really terrible idea. We will die. And Thomas, Thomas has this moment where he's like, you know, then I'm gonna go and die with him. That's that's heroic. It seems like a like a brave heart moment kind of a thing.

Martin 2:40

Yeah, definitely.

Jon 2:41

Not not very doubtful. No, that's very confident.

Rose 2:45

So I um went back into our archives for reviews, which is always fun, but I decided to go with one that somebody I think messaged us this one. And John put it on our group chat, and it's very encouraging. So I'm gonna read this. So not a review, just a message, but we love it anyway. Two Therese Podcast is one of my favorite podcasts. I like the topics, questions, discussions, and banter I recommend and send to my friends. And there's a thumbs up. So I honestly am sorry, I'm not sure who this is, but they are out of Pennsylvania.

Jon 3:15

Very cool. No, I honestly that's the way our podcast grows. We don't do any kind of advertising. Uh, if you like it, share it with somebody, leave us a review. But it really is just us in Martin's garage chatting on microphones, talking about Jesus-y stuff. And in particular, this season, we're looking at trying to help a modern reader understand an ancient book. And it it does get kind of frustrating as a pastor sometimes when there's all this background stuff that you know that would help people understand their Bible. And it isn't that they don't care about it, they just haven't been exposed to it. They're not aware that there are Easter eggs in the yard, and so they don't go look for them. Um, and so really what we're trying to do is we're not saying, like, hey, we're gonna help you do Bible study because we figured it out. Instead, this is just three friends sitting around a table talking about stuff that we're thinking about, and we want to draw you into that conversation. Uh, Rose has the homeschool powers. Martin is the chief of our village council, and I I work at Stillwater, so I love the Bible, and so do they, and so that's what we're doing. But we are about to make the jump into probably the most controversial chapter as far as like Internetville.

Martin 4:39

I could tell that you were like trying to stall there. It seemed like you're really totally stalling. I want to get into this, but let me tell you all about who we are and what we do, that way we have less time to do that.

Jon 4:49

Yeah, that's okay. I'm not stalling, but there's a lot of stuff. Because really, what I'm what I'm hoping to do in this episode is to overcome a pretty big obstacle that people have when they when they look at the the book of Genesis, chapter six, is because the the main topic that's being talked about in Genesis six is so different from the way that the modern American or Western Christian approaches their Bible, you have a massive cultural disconnect. And people are a little rattled by the fact that there could be anything in their Bible that they don't already know everything about. I mean, a lot of people have read this book a lot, and how many sermons have they sat through? And some of the stuff that we're going to talk about is weird. And I think, you know, if you're going to make a big claim, you you need to take your time and slow walk through it because it's not like we have, you know, any time limits. We can do this as long as we want for as long as people care to listen. Yeah, we're on to a new chip. We've been fighting with the board, and so we are babying it, trying to make it work.

Martin 5:56

It actually says 88 hours.

Rose 5:58

Oh man.

Jon 5:59

Well, that makes me wonder.

Martin 6:00

This could be a marathon episode.

Jon 6:02

I don't like that at all. Anyway. So, really, what I'd like to do is talk about how it is that I approach the book of Genesis, because there's a lot of different schools of thought out there. If I'm doing Bible study with people at my church, what they're going to see from me is going to follow a set of ideas that kind of go like this. First of all, I believe whatever the Bible says. Like that is a non-negotiable. And our first commitment has to be to the biblical text. So if you read a really cool internet article, or you've got some fringe theory, or some rabbit trail that you've got some assumptions, and all those things are fine, but they never take the place of the actual text themselves. The problem is that we can get so excited about some new idea that's popped into our mind that we try to make the Bible do what we want it to do instead of allowing our minds to be shaped by the direction that the Bible is running. And so I let the text describe the world in its own terms. I don't get upset if it doesn't use the word that I want or the idea that I want or emphasize the part that I want, or even leave me with lots of questions afterwards. That doesn't mean the text failed. It means that it was supposed to inspire those kind of questions and thoughts, and the author felt it was fine to leave it that way. And so we should not explain away things that seem strange simply because it doesn't fit our modern assumptions. This is going to be a big deal in Genesis 6, because you have the sons of God see the daughters of mankind and they have children. Everything about that to a modern reader is going to sound like paganism. Are you telling me that this story that the Greeks were telling and the Babylonians were telling, and all of the peoples all over the place, that this is in the Bible? I reject that. So let's find a less crazy or less uncomfortable solution. But when you go back and you read early Jewish writings about this, or even early church fathers, nobody before Augustine was putting forth that I know of the idea that this is the godly line of Seth. And what do you do with the giants that are there? It's just uncomfortable. And there is a movement inside of the church that wants to strip away anything that feels overtly supernatural. We're fine with the big things, like, okay, God creates the world, which I don't know why you would be okay with that and not other miracles, because that's a doozy. We're fine with Jesus turning water into wine, we're fine with those kind of things. But when you then move into the realm of are there other beings in the world besides God and humans, this nebulous idea of angels and demons, we have lumped all that under science fiction. And many Christians don't know what to do with it. And so by looking at the Bible on its own terms, I think the Bible will teach you what to do with it, how to put this into your own worldview. So we're not replacing and we're not overruling the text. The Bible is telling a story in Genesis that emphasizes not how old is the earth. It's not a story about whether or not Darwin is wrong. It's not a story about where to dig to find ancient treasure. It's not a map, it's not any of those things. What it is is it's a theological book describing God as king and that his creation has rebelled against him. That's the story. That's the big thing we're trying to drop things into. And so when we look at creation, the Bible tells us that creation exists in two parts. Jump in at any point that you need clarification here, guys. There's two parts to it. There's the physical creation, and God places humanity to be his imager in the physical creation. It's our job to rule and to have dominion over the physical world, not under our own power, but as representatives of the divine king. And then there's the supernatural world. And there seems to be uh persons, personalities, different maybe even species, a being that exist in the spiritual world, and that at the beginning, all of this was existing in harmony under the banner of the kingdom of heaven, if you want to think of it that way.

Martin 10:34

It's interesting to me the spiritual side of it, which seems to be the one that people struggle with, one because they experience the physical world every single day of their lives, but the idea that they'll believe a certain extent of a spiritual world. So, like I always think of like a little old lady that has the thing on her uh right above where she's driving, has it on a rearview mirror, and it says, like, I drive faster than my guardian angel, you know, something like that. But along the lines of that, like this little old lady believes that there is an angel specifically designed for her, I know angel means messenger, but you understand the idea that it's specifically designed for her, and that's great because it's a feel-good thing, but there is a spiritual being that is looking after this physical creation. But then if you say something along the lines of what we're gonna get into at Genesis 6, well, that's way out of line. Like that is completely irrational behavior. And it just surprises me that it seems like almost everybody believes in some form of supernatural reality, but everybody is at a different level on that spectrum of how far they think it really exists.

Jon 11:37

That's right. And even most people's approach to something like a guardian angel doesn't normally come directly out of scripture, it comes through people's cultural river that we're swimming in today. There's a category for this. Are you muting me?

Martin 11:51

No, I'm muted myself. I it's hard for me to hear my own thing, but I can hear you guys just fine. So if I seem like I'm screaming, just tell me to tone it down a second.

Jon 11:59

Okay. Uh and see yeah, so again, we're fighting with the board, we're trying to give you guys a good product, and we're working on it. But uh, it's because there is a modern um world that it that has been greatly influenced by the Bible and by biblical themes. Uh, the way angels look, for instance. A beautiful woman with swan wings and this glowing halo over their head.

Rose 12:20

Is this that particular picture where the children are crossing a bridge and she's like floating along behind them?

Jon 12:25

Uh I haven't seen that one.

Rose 12:27

Oh my goodness, where have you been for the last 40 years, John?

Jon 12:29

Apparently not up on my angel art.

Rose 12:31

Yeah, I guess not.

Jon 12:32

Yeah, but but even people who are like all and out pagans will talk a lot about angels. Like it's it's part of the culture. And so in when you look at the world that the Bible came out of, it's not coming out of pop culture today. It's coming out of a very ancient world. And so what we need to do is to recognize there's a couple disadvantages that I may have moving into this text. First of all, the pre-flood world feels very strange to us because it is separated by thousands and thousands of years, and really the world has culturally collapsed a couple times since then. We're also separated from it culturally. There's a lot of things that they would have taken for granted that I just don't have a category for. We talked a little bit about the idea of cities, like an ancient person living in Ur, where Abraham is from, they viewed cities as the physical earthly estate of the gods. It wasn't really about lots of people live here, it was a religious institution first and foremost. But even in cuneiform, if you write the name of a city, the first thing you do is you put the little star symbol, which means God, and then another symbol, which means place, and then the name of the city. So the name of the city is God place, whichever I'm not just God, but like whatever God you're talking about. And so that's how they viewed where they lived. I don't think that way about Cleveland or about Chicago or about any cities. They're wonderful places, but we don't have a religious concept of a territorial spirit that's attached to this at all.

SPEAKER_00 14:09

Right.

Jon 14:10

The pagan world did. And so when the Bible is making statements to a people like Israel who are living in the pagan world, it's dealing with these topics. It is pushing back against them in some places, it's reinterpreting uh what I consider to be demonic propaganda in other places. But really, you're looking at a thing that's very far away. Also, the flood itself is a massive cultural barrier. I don't really know how people acted before the flood, I know what they acted like afterwards because I can get archaeology and things like that involved. But I'm making some pretty big assumptions about things before the flood. And so this is why you don't go past what the text says. You can make assumptions and and chase rabbit trails, but our opinions never come to the boiling point that is scripture itself.

Martin 15:04

But I think it is important to do that kind of stuff to chase down rabbit trails because it brings you together with other people. I think that's the main reason that you would go into things. That's why you're listening to this podcast, because we're trying to have a community of people getting back into reading the Bible. But that's always been our idea is that eventually if you listen to us and hear something you like, go confirm it with what the text says. If you listen to us and hear something you don't like, confirm that we're wrong by looking at what the text says.

Jon 15:32

That's what we're trying to do is to to help people in their Bible study. And and I think that's definitely true. The Bible doesn't say, hey, you're not allowed to be interested in any of this. Like the whole point is that it is mysterious. It should draw you deeper into it. But the West has a habit of saying, I was drawn into this and I did about 10, 20 minutes of internet study, and now I'm an expert in X, Y, or Z. Or worse, I watched a YouTube video and I'm now fully uh an expert in this field. There needs to be a category that is just us discussing the ideas, where we're not throwing each other away as heretics and dividing and just running away, that we're allowed to love the text and have thoughts and wondering, and just the mystery of it draws us deeper as we try to find out answers. But we never substitute those things for things like Jesus is God. The Lord came to earth and physically died on the cross for your sins and is coming again. Those are doctrines that's different from opinion. And there's a there's a lot of um problems floating around out there where people mistake the one for the other. The other big divide that often gets overlooked, if we're going to understand this ancient world, is Babel itself. Because the Bible is a Hebrew book, it is necessarily written after the events of the Tower of Babel. And so you have a breaking of the languages. You have this event that's taken place, the nations are scattered. Deuteronomy 32 talks about how the nations are um scattered according to the number of the sons of God, and human cultures developed in different ways of remembering and talking about their ancient past. Those cultures all went through those events. They all are descendants of Noah and his kids, right? They get all those events, they have been talking to supernatural beings, they have these stories, but now the language is gone, and they begin telling the stories in their own ways. They begin reaching out again, and it's almost this restart of human history. But instead of going back to the Lord, they seem to reach into the darkness and say, Hey, won't you come and lead us further into what we want?

Martin 18:01

Yeah, I I think that's the most important part. Uh, been listening to some stuff online and they they talk about how the reason that Genesis 6 gets to the point that it is is the disloyalty to God, not so much the actions of what the people were doing. When you go to Sunday school, you hear about how the evil was continual in man's heart. The idea that they were just like robbing banks every day or stealing or whatever. But it's this idea of like if I'm loyal to this other being, it gives me what I want instead of what God has deemed as the way that it should be. And that that to me is what has stuck out the most in every time I've heard or listened to a anything about Genesis 6 is the the loyalty factor that goes into it. And we'll probably touch on that in a little bit. I obviously have not read the outline. So if I'm spoiling something, no. But it's it's just very important to me that again we talk about it in a situation of like it's not as important understanding all the rabbit trails, but it is important to get the ideas and the motifs behind it because that's what helps you live your life, that's what helps you get back to the way that God wants it instead of falling into the same trap that these people did.

Jon 19:09

Right, and that's what's really great about the Bible is even though these stories are describing events that happened way before the Tower of Babel or, you know, before the flood and all these things, that's that's awesome. But the book itself was not written then. There may have been stories and things floating around that were gathered together, but the act of inspiration where God gives us the book of Genesis occurs after these events. It comes out of the children of Abraham, it comes out of this world. And so when it is talking about these things, it isn't unaccessible because the way that it's brought to us is specifically brought to us through a man and a culture that existed in our times. And so we can say, okay, he uses the word city. What did that mean to someone living in the Earth read, like Abraham? We're looking at somebody's talking about the sons of God. What did that mean to people who were living in this time period? What was the story that was floating around then that Genesis is interacting with? And so, yes, we have the old events themselves, the actual historical event. But the book of Genesis is a miraculous event that God has preserved and given to us, and it was originally written in an ancient culture.

Martin 20:31

And so when you're trying to bridge the gap back to the culture, we know the culture that we're bridging to, not all the way back to the actual event, but to the time when it was written.

Jon 20:40

So the assumption that I'm making is that God did a good job, that he's using the right words in the right ways, and that he knew what he was doing. I'm not allowed to then be like, oh, but God, why did you care about the Ur Three period when you could have been talking to me? And we have this self-obsessed complex that involves all of Scripture being about revealing something now to me, that there's hidden something or other in there. And we never actually get around to saying, Well, what did they think they were talking about? And then all of a sudden you find out, well, they thought they were talking about that, but it would take another 5,000 years before humanity really figured out the text. I think that's dumb. I think God succeeded right away, and that it is our job to follow that text backwards.

Martin 21:28

In fact, if you if you just think about that for just a moment, like if something is revealed to you, some kind of, I don't know, hidden knowledge, like it says in Enoch, perhaps you're on the wrong side of this story, because the people that got that stuff revealed to them in this story Yeah, it was kind of bad. Kind of are on the bottom of the water, not on the top.

Jon 21:46

Yeah, and there's there's also the fact so Genesis 6 starts, and it doesn't give you a ton of detail. You just kind of get the sons of God saw the daughters of man, behold, they were fair, children are born to them, and they are weird. Like they're this huge Nephilim giant. Type children. And so, first of all, if this is the Sons of Seth, when a good boy marries a bad girl, they do not have monstrous children that are huge and out there rule. Like that's not a sign that you're going to have some sort of supernatural, monstrous child. You're just going to have a normal kid. You may raise him in a good or bad way, but it doesn't actually fit with what the text seems to be implying. Secondly, wouldn't it have been nice for like if this was written in my generation today? Like I'm trying to talk to you guys, and I'm not able to just jump into this text because it requires background discussion. The author of Genesis doesn't do that because he didn't think it was needed. Everyone already stood understood what the question was. And so you've got all these ancient cultures. You've got, you know, even Sumeria isn't one culture. There's the Akkadians in the north, you've got the Gutians, you've got the Canaanites, you've got all these different people who are living in this area, and that's not including like the Hittites, the Jebusites, all of the ites that are floating around out there. And they're all talking about the fact that the world was created by a supernatural being. They're all talking about the fact that there was a great flood. They're all talking about the fact that when the great flood came, human civilization, which was awesome, by the way, like better than anything we've got now, is washed away. And that in that time and afterwards, there are children of the gods, beings who are not normal. They are some sort of new creation, and they are worshipped by these people. They are made the kings, divine and human unions who offs who produce mighty kings and heroes. So when I then read this story in Genesis, it kind of sounds like that. And that makes people really uncomfortable. Why is the Bible sounding like something similar to the pagan world? Well, similarities between Genesis and the pagan stories shouldn't cause you trouble. The real question is not do the stories resemble one another? The better question is how does the Bible interpret the ancient world differently? Because if you read the text, you do not come to the same conclusion that the kings of Ur or Eruch are coming to. You get uh the exact opposite. These are not good guys, these are not ancient heroes, these are rebels against the Most High, and God judged them and will continue to judge them.

Martin 24:41

But you know what? Just having that understanding really helped me a lot when I was doing my podcast, Not Your Average Sunday School Stories. The one that we did was Noah's Ark. It was like the second one we did, and it was you and Dwayne Wilson. And when Dwayne started going off about all this stuff, I just like paused for about 10 seconds and I didn't even know what question to ask the next time. That was only a few years ago, but it's so helpful to me knowing that like these other stories, like the Greek mythology and all of these stories that talk about this are kind of on the same wavelength as what the Bible is saying. And it's it's so important to me because it it doesn't separate my life from the Bible. It it really makes it so that like the culture and everybody's natural inclination to have this understanding is actually a possibility in God's creation. And for me personally, that was a struggle because my life has always been my church life and then my outside life. And knowing that those two things actually do overlap and I don't have to separate every aspect of my life into am I going to be a good church boy church going boy, or am I gonna be somebody that lives in the world and has enjoyment in the world? And in fact, both of those things can coexist. And to me, that's what it meant personally when I learned about this idea that all of these like crazy stories that you hear in mythology and whatever, maybe there is a little bit to that. Opened up doors for all other aspects of my life where it's like maybe I don't need to just shun everything like that. I can enjoy the beauty of creation and understand that God's world is much bigger than what my little box ever had him in.

Jon 26:19

Yeah, so there's an assumption that floats around. Honestly, it it's a very logical assumption. It comes from our love of science and the enlightenment, and it's the assumption that everything yesterday needs to have been happening the same way as today. And so then if you're looking at like how plants grow, that makes a ton of sense. You're always going to find the sun rises in the east, it sets in the west, you're finding that the or the sun, the stars, all these things are working this way. And we drag that assumption then into the way that supernatural beings work. They're free creatures, they can do what they like, how they like, when they like. And the rules that are in place today are the results of those past events. We are going to find that the angels who do uh this horrible rebellion in Genesis 6 are judged. They are placed in chains of darkness. The Bible talks about this. And so when I'm looking at the history of the world, it doesn't all work the same way. For instance, there have been three generations in the history of the world that the Bible records for us that had a ministry of miracles. You find in Moses' day, things were not going like normal. As a matter of fact, it freaked Pharaoh out so much that he let go of his entire slave labor force. This is not normal. We got to get rid of this. There's miraculous things happening. Moses is throwing sticks into ponds and it becomes sweet water. God physically is moving around in the wilderness. Then you find there's another guy called Elijah. Elijah's a prophet, but there's no book of Elijah. He seems to have a different kind of ministry than someone like Jonah or Nahum or Habakkuk, and there's miraculous things happening on the regular that catches people off guard. God didn't just throw down fire onto Mount Carmel all the time. That's why it was weird, and everyone sat up and took notice. The third generation where this happens is Jesus and the apostles. You're noticing, man, this is this is wild. This isn't normal. And so you don't get to look at this and say, well, everything has to work exactly the same way tomorrow as it did today.

SPEAKER_00 28:29

Right.

Jon 28:29

God is capable of doing things any way that he likes. And ancient uh supernatural beings, they also are part of this story. The Bible doesn't always name them because it's stripping them of honor.

Martin 28:45

But I think that goes along with what I was just saying, and also the way that people experience life today, the idea of like there's a fearfulness to, you know, step out into your faith by i if it's just talking to somebody that needs to hear the gospel, or if it's do I take this mission, do I take this job, whatever? The idea that taking your past experiences and extrapolating them forward to have an idea of what's going to happen, look at the weather. You can't forecast the weather tomorrow because it was sunny yesterday. It could rain tomorrow. The same idea. God might not have blessed you in the way that was necessary yesterday, but maybe he's waiting for you to take that step and then the blessings will just flow.

Jon 29:22

Rose, you're writing things down furiously.

Rose 29:24

What are you writing? I I'm taking notes. Oh. That's all.

Jon 29:28

That's never happened before.

Martin 29:30

In the podcast world, we'll never get to know what they are.

Rose 29:33

So, yeah, I know. I'm gonna eat it after I finish writing them. That way nobody can ever. This receipt, the back of this receipt is gonna taste disgusting. Um, this is a very confusing chapter for me. I've shelved it, and now I have to think about it. So I'm just taking some notes.

Jon 29:48

Well, and that's good. It's uh and I'm not claiming to have cracked the code. I'm just saying there is some cultural stuff we can we can pull out of this. Let's push on with that. So the the the pagan world, right? They preserved stories about their gods. They preserved stories about the flood, stories about these children of the divine beings, and they remembered them as heroes. But remembering something is not the same as understanding it correctly. Like they're remembering, hey, these things happened, and so they must have been heroes. Genesis doesn't just say the pagan world is stupid, all of this is fake, none of that happened. Instead, what it says is you misunderstood what happened. Those powers did try to move upon the earth, and God stopped it. There was an attempt to destroy the world that God had set into motion the way that God intended it to be, and God only permitted that evil to exist so long, and then he put it in check.

Rose 30:48

I think that one of the reasons that I shelved this for quite a while now is because it seems as though this, and maybe this is just the influence of being around you and Jacob, and that this is such a pivotal four verses here at the beginning of Genesis six, that it's almost like w if you can correct the code, it you almost like change a lens, like click it sideways, and the rest of the Bible opens up differently. And if you don't do that, then you're not going to see the rest of the Bible differently. And one sec. And so if you have the internet and lots of access to all the words and the meanings of the words and the things of the words and the words, words, words, then you are going to do a lot better switching that lens. But not everybody through history has had the benefit of such deep study. So what do you do with that?

Jon 31:42

Well, again, it's not a dividing issue. You can read this text and say, Man, I think this is the godly line of Seth, having children. And everything goes bad. Apparently, there are some freakish human beings floating around out there. But in the end, the story is exactly the same. God judges the world, and it's brought back to what God intended it to be. You've got the man on the mountain in a garden. That's where Noah ends up. Then you have these things later, like Goliath, the giants. You've got in Daniel, the sons of God, you've got uh, you know, the prince of Persia, all these things. And you just have to say, well, I don't know where any of this came from. This must be new information. And you just run with it. So long as you accept what the Bible says, you're gonna end up in the same place. It's not a matter of cracking the code as much as it is, are you shoving your culture back onto theirs? Or do you just read it and believe what it says? Because if you've read Genesis 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, and then it says the sons of God saw the daughters of men, behold, they were fair, they have children and they're giants, you're not assuming that this is the children of Seth or the children of Cain. You're assuming this is a supernatural being, because that's the emphasis of the plain reading of the text, in my opinion. In order to get the, well, angels don't get married, you have to go all the way to the gospels and pull that backwards. And you have to take all kinds of assumptions because when you read Genesis, you're gonna find angels are doing physical things on the regular. God put a cherubim at the gate of the Garden of Eden, and if you got too close, he whacked you with a whirling sword. There's a couple angels who show up with God to visit Abraham, and they sit down and they eat. These are physical things. And so there seems to be there, this is not a divide over it issue. To me, this is a there's more here than you think there is issue. It's kind of like eating a pomegranate. You're like, you can you can make a valiant attempt at eating a pomegranate, but there's always more seeds in that thing. Like you're never gonna get to the point where you got them all, at least I never have.

Martin 33:49

But I also think that's the idea of like, how many people in this world, and I always think of some remote, you know, people that live on an island and have never seen civilization outside of this, have do they understand Genesis 6 the same way that John understands Genesis 6? Do they probably not know what Genesis 6 is? But you know, the Bible talks about the the natural revelation of God's creation can do to somebody. So there have been so many people that have lived and died and are now in eternity with heaven that have not cracked the code of Genesis six. And this really I struggled with this quite a bit because I feel this way, and I know that even some people in my family have made comments of like, How have I been in the Bible so much and I just haven't got it, or I've missed it? Or like there's so many things where it's like, dang, my entire life it almost feels wasted because I haven't been able to in interpret the Bible in the way that is necessary.

Jon 34:41

I hope nobody thinks it was wasted. Like this to me, like I have this assumption all the time. There is more in here than I'm seeing.

Martin 34:49

But I think that's kind of the point that you're getting at is like there is this thought of like, dang, now I'm hearing this, and it is opening up the rest of the Bible in ways that I've never thought of it before. And it is opening my eyes and my ears and all this stuff. And so it there is this assumption when you hear this and when you learn it for the first time, you're like, man, was I just like dumb, or did I not know what was going on? But even if you don't come to that revelation in your life and you don't understand the Bible to its full extent, or even as full as you have it now today compared to last year, that doesn't separate you from God. That doesn't allow what Jesus did to not be applicable to your life. And so I don't want anybody to think out there like, well, geez, I'll never get it as much as these guys have. How am I going to be able to X, Y, and Z because God is bigger than us sitting at the table?

Rose 35:36

Well, no one's gonna think that about me because I just said I shelved this whole thing for about a year and a half. So don't be me. It reminds me a little bit of Chesterton when we were reading Orthodoxy, where he's like, I set out on this, you know, voyage of discovery, and then I discovered the thing, and then it turns out everybody else already knew that, you know. And I I wonder if there's just different personalities and mindsets and and humans that God uses to show the same truth through different paths. Which makes sense.

Jon 36:05

And this is the thing. So people who run in my circles, like we like the weird parts of the Bible. Genesis 6 is gonna come up a lot. Like if you're into paranormal stuff, like this this passage comes up all the time. It is not the main part of the Bible, it just isn't. The main part of the Bible is God, the King, dealing with his rebellious creation, and it's Jesus. That's the whole thing. This part is interesting to me because it's so odd, it just doesn't fit, and it touches all the aspects of ancient cultures that I do get really excited about and interested in. Like we have all over our area here, we have these earthworks, these Native American earthworks, and I think they're fascinating. I want to know why you built this, why what what's the story behind it? And when I go there with friends, they're always like, Yeah, it's a pile of dirt, John. It wouldn't be that hard to make. And the point isn't how hard was it to make, the point of it is the story that's behind it. I want to know that. And so, like Genesis 6 gives me a bump into that. It's like, oh, it's actually this part I'm interested in has now moved into the spotlight for a moment. It's gonna fade back away, but here it is, it's stripped away. And so then I'm looking at this, and it sounds so much like the pagan story, it just comes to the exact opposite conclusion that the pagan world was coming to.

Martin 37:24

And so, John, before you go any further, I gotta ask this question do you think this was the closest that the darkness got? Genesis six to winning.

Jon 37:33

To winning, sure. I don't know, man. It'd be hard to imagine them getting much closer.

Martin 37:37

Well, they you always think the crucifixion.

Jon 37:40

I think if you had asked them at what point did they think they were closest, it would have been the crucifixion. Uh the but kind of what Genesis six seems to indicate is I mean, you can do whatever you want, guys. I can win with half of a half of a half of a second on the board. You're gonna wipe out all the animals? No, I'll just bring them all to put them on this arc. It's not a problem. Like, I'm able, like, at no point are you a legitimate threat to overcoming my will.

Martin 38:06

But that's the part that always gets to me is like, was the darkness intending to do this to overthrow God's rule? I think the answer is yes. Like that that was their whole point. Satan's whole point is to be the most high. And so if they got to a point where God's like, I'm gonna have to take out everything, seems to me like they were pretty darn close, like eight people away from winning.

Jon 38:26

Yeah, or at least the people, you know, they seem to be loyal servants of what's going on.

SPEAKER_00 38:30

Yeah.

Jon 38:31

And so when the Bible looks at this, it doesn't say, hey, all that's imaginary, none of that's real. It says you have exchanged the truth for a lie. You have misunderstood the world you live in, you have worshipped creatures instead of the creator, and you are listening to rebels instead of the king. Now, there is a verse in the book of Romans, right? So I just got done hollering at people about this, but I'm gonna show you how it fits together. And so if we go to the New Testament, we're gonna find that this actually is not just a thing that exists in Genesis, but the idea flows from Genesis forwards. It doesn't flow from the New Testament backwards. It starts in Genesis and it rolls forwards. And in the book of Genesis or Romans, chapter one, verses 18 through 25, Paul is building this beautiful argument to a church that he's never visited before, a church that is in the heart of the political world, and one of the most pagan cities in all of the world. This is incredibly steeped in paganism, and this is what Paul says to the church in Romans.

Rose 39:40

Marian, can you read that? My Bible's not loading.

Martin 39:42

I have it pulled up. John didn't put it in the outline, but I got it.

Jon 39:46

I didn't spoon feed it.

Martin 39:47

Romans 1, starting and 18. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

Jon 40:49

So here is Paul's discussion of humanity's mental state. It says, You guys are looking at creation, and you know there's a creator. Humanity knows this, it's revealed in creation itself. We call this general revelation. But humanity is actively suppressing the call of God. You know to do good, you will not do it, to you it is sin. There isn't a culture out there that I know of who glorifies cowardness or things like that. There is this law that's written we know to do good, we just won't do it. It's because we are desiring to establish good and evil for ourselves. There's a law for you, but it's different for me. So humanity is suppressing to the point that we exchanged authority. We began to create idols, and this is a um a dig against idolatry, to the point that they're worshiping the creation instead of the creator. So Paul's point is not that humanity knows nothing about God. His point is that they exchanged what was true for what was false. There has been a human flip-flopping of the story. And that's just generous. Like that's not including were there also supernatural beings who were peddling uh a false version of this story themselves. The Bible talks about doctrines of demons, that they actually are interfering with humanity and wanting to change the way we view things.

Martin 42:19

But this this Paul passage, I think to me, kind of puts a little bit more explanation into the the women part of it. I don't want to say just like the woman's role, but humanity's role in it, because the sons of God come down and take for themselves wives and they have children. And it was kind of my general recollection that the human the humans really didn't have much say in that, if you were. But as Paul is talking about it also, it seems like there is an exchange for this, that there is a willfulness of the humans to partake in the action of reproducing and stuff like that.

Jon 42:54

So, and and this is one of those moments where the text doesn't tell you. What it does do is it emphasizes this see and take motif that begins with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They see and they take. All through the Bible you're going to see this see and take. Here, the sons of God, the Bene Hal Elohim, see and take. And so the emphasis here is on this is a repeated pattern that's starting back in Genesis. Now, practically speaking, and this is not doctrine, this is the rabbit trail stuff. Ancient peoples were trading with each other for goods, for power, for stuff. We know this. It seems that they also did this with these divine beings. If you will give me X, Y, or Z, we will give you devotion, we will build for you, we will give you our daughters. This concept isn't just that the sons of God came down and just like had a bunch of girlfriends. It's the idea that they came down and set themselves up as deities, that they were receiving worship and honor from the others who were.

Martin 44:00

But the willingness for the humans to partake in that is very important, I think, to the story. They understand that like this wasn't something that humanity was forced into. And I think Paul says it very clearly in this Romans passage that like they knew the way to do it. They know who is on the throne, and they willingly throw that away for something that they deem better.

Jon 44:21

Yep. And I think that you can trace this all the way back to Cain's city personally. But again, the text doesn't say that. That's me just wondering what was it like? How did that go on? And we don't know. But what we do know is that something very, very strange happened, and it was remembered by everybody. Even after the flood, the kings of these cities are claiming to be the descendants of this uh this style of leadership. That I'm not just a human. Gilgamesh is two-thirds God and one-third man, and he builds the walls of Uruk, this unstoppable city. You're looking at the world and saying, man, why are you telling this story? Did you all have a meeting and just come together and be like, you know, it would be sweet, is if we all told this story. And the guys over in America, and then down in Africa, and up in Scandinavia, everyone adopts this story. Or they're remembering something that really happened. And that's what I think is occurring. So the ancient world is telling these stories. Divine beings came to human women, extraordinary children were born, and those children become mighty figures in the ancient world. That's what the Babylonian texts say. It's also what the book of Genesis says. Except the Babylonian texts say these were heroes, and the Babylonian, or the Bible says these are evil. The thoughts of their heart was only evil continually. So Genesis tells us that the ancient world has the story backwards. These are not gods worthy of worship. These are rebels against the king. Their actions were not gifts to humanity, they were violations of God's good order. The world that they helped create was not a golden age of heroes, it was a world filled with violence and corruption. And so Genesis 6 becomes a countermeasure to the main propaganda of the demonic world. It's saying, you thought because all the people died and no one remembered what happened that you could change this. Here is God speaking into the story. The nations look backwards and they saw an age of gods and heroes. Genesis looks backwards and it says, it was an age of rebellion, and God is the victor. The nations celebrated these giants as mighty men. Genesis places them as part of what's wrong with the world and the violence that's spread everywhere. The nations worship them as gods. Genesis identifies them as rebels, supernatural beings pretending to be greater than they actually are. And so to help you understand this, now that we've talked about it, let's read Genesis 6, 1 through 8.

Rose 47:15

When man began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive, and they took as their wives any they chose. Then the Lord said, My spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh, his days shall be a hundred and twenty years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart were only evil continually, and the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them. But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.

Jon 48:15

Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. This is the emphasis. All those other things are true. Yeah. Things got real nasty. The world was falling apart. The divide between the spiritual world and the physical world had broken down, not in an Eden way, but in a Babylon way. But the story that you're about to read is there to show you that Jesus is the God of gods, the Lord of Lords, mighty and awesome.