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Text Comments
v.2 These first two verses present us with one of the great interpretive issues
in the Book of Genesis. In our tradition, most commentators have taken "sons of
God" to refer to the descendants of Seth, the godly line introduced in chapt. 5 and
"daughters of men" in v. 2 to refer to the descendants of Cain, the line of
unbelief and wickedness which was given, at least in its beginnings, at the end of chapter
4. This, in fact, as you may remember, is the way I have taken this text on a number of
occasions. The collapse of the human race into a rebellion so deep and so intractable that
God determined to wipe out virtually the entirety of humanity thus resulted from the
intermarriage of believers with unbelievers and the spiritual corruption of the believing
line that resulted from it. The passage, thus interpreted, is then the first of many
passages in the Bible warning of the inevitable and terrible consequences of spiritual
intermarriage. When Christians marry non-Christians they do not lift the unbeliever up to
faith --as the believer always imagines will be the case-- , but instead find themselves
pulled down into unbelief, and if not themselves, their children.
Contrarily, many others and some of our own authorities have taken "sons of
God" to refer to angels, as may be suggested in such NT texts as 1 Pet. 3:19-20; 2
Pet. 2:4-6 and Jude 6. It has often been pointed out that it is exegetically harsh to
assume that "daughters of men" in v. 2 should refer only to the descendants of
Cain -- "men" would normally refer to human beings in general, and all the more
as it seems to have exactly this reference in v. 1 -- and, further, it is noted that the
exact phrase "sons of God" in the Bible -- though, to be sure, there are few
instances -- normally refers to angels. Again, it is not inconceivable, however that
"sons of God" should refer to the children of God in a spiritual sense, as a
very similar phase does, for example, in Deut. 14:1. Israel is often referred to as the
son of God, and so forth.
The words themselves of Gen. 6:1-2 seem to favor the "angel" interpretation,
but it certainly creates difficulties of its own: angels assuming bodies and living in the
world; angels -- or, better, demons -- not simply seducing human women, but actually
marrying them and, so the text certainly suggests, living with them in the world as
husbands and fathers -- in other words, not merely angels assuming human bodies for
momentary appearances, but "actual angelic incarnation" [Delitzsch on Gen, p.
225]; angels choosing these human women according to their physical attraction, which
seems, at first glance, a somewhat strange consideration for a spiritual being, etc. What
is more, of course, the text does not raise any of these questions though it would seem,
in the entire context of the books of Moses, an utterly unprecedented event for angels to
marry human beings, full of all manner of issues that are addressed nowhere in the
Pentateuch or anywhere else in the Bible.
Prof. Jack Collins, with whom I have had the pleasure of discussing these questions in
some detail, recognizes all of these problems, but is persuaded that the statements
themselves should be taken to refer to angels marrying men, no matter the problems created
by such an interpretation. This week he faxed me the studies he felt most persuasive on
both sides of the issue. I confess myself uncertain and doubtful that I will ever be
confident of one interpretation or the other.
However, I want to say that, with respect to the effect these marriages produced and
the ethical teaching based upon these verses, the particular choice of interpretation is
inconsequential. For the Lord clearly does not mean that the pious and believing women
were ravished by these angels or by these unbelieving men. I cannot think that, whatever
these words mean, we are to see them as suggesting that demons or men kidnapped pious
women against their will and so corrupted the faithful line, by no fault of the faithful
themselves. Verse 3 does not permit such an interpretation, for it plainly indicates that
the events described in v. 2 are justly punished in the punishment that will fall
exclusively on mankind, at least so far as the text indicates. Clearly, the entire
point is that the human beings involved are culpable parties to this intermarriage of
faith and unbelief and so responsible for the corruption of the pure line of living faith
in the world and the doom that came upon the world as a result of the disappearance of
faith in God among men.
In other words, it is clear that the fathers consented to the marriages of their
daughters to unbelieving men, whether or not they were also angels and whether or not the
fathers knew it. And the daughters themselves consented. They are blamed for it and
punished for it, clearly, and the mixture of the pure line with evil is regarded as the
cause of evil progressing to the point that such a ferocious judgment as the flood was
required.
Young people beware. If you marry an unbeliever; if you are cavalier in your
decision to marry one who seems only mildly committed to Christ and to the life of faith
in Him, you may, I say, you may survive yourself in the true faith of
Christ, but, apart from an act of supreme mercy that both Scripture and observation teach
us God rarely extends to his children, you will have damned your children. This is the
lesson of these three verses and many others like them in the Bible.
v.3 "contend with man" probably better, as in the NIV margin
"remain with man." God will withdraw.
120 Years. A judgment apparently only gradually executed, as some after the flood,
Abraham, for example, lived longer. After the flood the recorded ages of men steadily
decline.
v.4 The "Nephilim." The KJV rendered the word "giants" as a
result of its one other use in the Bible, Num. 13:33 where the Israelites spies said of
the Nephilim who lived in Canaan in those years that they were so tall they felt like
grasshoppers in comparison. The NIV rightly confesses the obscurity and uncertainty of the
word by simply transliterating it. "Heroes" or "Mighty Men" suggests
warriors of great power. It is not necessarily to be understood that these were somehow a
special result of the union described in v. 2 and, in any case, we are reminded that such
people were born and lived after the flood as well.
These past few weeks I have been reading off and on a biography of George MacDonald,
the English novelist whose writings were of such great influence on C.S. Lewis. I know
that many of you have read and read MacDonald and that many of our children have had read
to them MacDonald novels such as Sir Gibbie, At the Back of the Northwind, Princess
and the Goblin, or The Princess and Curdie. My wife is a great admirer of
MacDonald's fiction and I know that others of you are as well.
He was a man who wrote self-consciously as a Christian. Indeed, he was a
congregationalist minister, though he served pastorates only briefly before embarking
full-time on a literary career. But he saw his fiction as a way of proclaiming what he
thought to be a Christian view of the world, of human personality, of redemption, of God
and of the future. Much of this is very fine and the attraction of his books still today
is in no small part due to how well he enunciated and adorned Christian themes in his
work.
However, I confess to being deeply offended by the biography, not only for what it
reveals of MacDonald's own thinking, but as well for the complete lack of critical
response on the part of the author of the biography, a teacher of English at a well-known
evangelical Christian college. Perhaps I should be well used to the fact that clear
thinking about the faith is as little likely to be found in Christian college English
departments as virtually anywhere else. But this biography is a particularly egregious
example of sentimental and shallow thinking about the Christian faith. This biographer
fawns over MacDonald's most dangerous and sacrilegious of mistakes.
That mistake was one made widely, as a matter of fact, in Victorian Britain. The book
seems to suggest that somehow it was MacDonald's genius that led him virtually alone to
universalist views of salvation, to the idea that in the afterlife the love of God would
finally conquer all resistance and that all would be embraced in the salvation of the
Lord, and that led him to reject the doctrine of sovereign grace and divine election -- so
much as to say on one occasion that "he did not want God to love him if he didn't
love everybody," [p. 6] and so on. As a matter of fact, of course, everyone was
embracing these ideas in Victorian Britain, they were the new orthodoxy of the day and
ever larger measures of scorn were being heaped on that rapidly shrinking minority,
faithful to the Bible, who could not bring themselves to embrace a God of love from whose
character justice and wrath had been removed.
What is almost worse about this account of MacDonald's theological pilgrimage is that
the author, whose analysis of his subject constantly collapses into hero-worship, blithely
accepts as true MacDonald's negative construction of historic Christianity and its
advocates. All Scottish Calvinists were apparently dour, lifeless, legalists who had no
true knowledge of or communion with the person of Jesus himself, no real experience of his
love or of the liberation of his grace, no sense of the thrill of knowing God for himself.
But the Scotland of MacDonald's youth and young manhood, was the Scotland of the
awakening in the late 1830s, of the Disruption, of Thomas Chalmers, William Burns, Robert
Murray McCheyne, the Bonars, the vast company of pious, cheerful, Christ-adoring folk who
filled faithful churches to listen to as bright a galaxy of evangelical preachers as has
ever graced a single nation's pulpits: Robert Candlish, Alexander Moody Stuart, and the
young Alexander Whyte. All of these men differed mightily with MacDonald on the true
teaching of Holy Scripture and, particularly, on the reality and seriousness of divine
wrath and the prospect of hell, but they knew the love of God better than George MacDonald
knew it, I daresay.
You read those terribly solemn sermons on hell and divine wrath that McCheyne preached
near the end of his life and you will come away thinking that what MacDonald understood of
the love of God was more mere sentimentality than the earth-shaking and heart-melting
mercy of a stooping God that the Scottish Presbyterians knew it to be.
Indeed, it is perfectly obvious to an honest observer that the demise of real belief in
the mainline Scottish churches occurred precisely as a result of the ascendancy and the
popularity of views of the love of God that George MacDonald helped to make famous. The
spiritual indifference of his homeland today is, by a bitter irony, the truest legacy of
his views -- not, of course, that they were his alone; they were the views of many in his
day, and not, of course, that he intended any such result. No doubt he did not. But
indifference to God and his salvation have always followed closely behind doubts as to
God's justice and his wrath against sinners.
Now, I say all of that simply to prepare you to face the obvious, unmistakable and
terrible emphasis of these early verses of Genesis chapter 6. God, as the Scripture says,
is angry with the wicked. Sin, as the Scripture says, is the abominable thing which he
hates. He will, as the Scripture says, "punish those who do not know God and who
do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus."
The belief that divine wrath against sin and sinners is a mere temporary expedient,
that it threatens no one with eternal woe, that, at the last, all shall be joyfully
immersed in the divine love, that God couldn't be God and leave anyone out of heaven --
face it brethren, this is what we all want to believe! I do; you do! But it is
sentimentalism, because that is what sentimentality is: the believing to be true what one wants
to be true. We are all guilty of this sentimentality. Every poll ever taken of human
opinion shows this up: we all think better of ourselves than others do, we all blame
others for our own mistakes and faults, we all assume that we will not reap the harvest of
our own personal foolishness however quick we are to warn others of the consequences of
theirs. But all of this wishful thinking evaporates in the face of the living God whose
"righteousness is like the mighty mountains, and his justice like the great
deep."
God, the living God, once destroyed the world and everyone in the world -- the entire
population of this planet -- save but four couples -- Noah and his wife, his three sons
and their wives. And he did this as punishment for their sin, as the vindication of his
justice in the face of man's wickedness.
All the way through the rest of the Bible, the judgment of the flood, is used as a
grand illustration of what God will always, finally do to the wicked -- ferocious,
terrifying, unrelenting as that judgment was in the days of Noah, so it will and must be
at the end of the world.
It is no proof of a man's kindness or wideness of spirit that he cannot believe in the
wrath of God and the eternal punishment of sinners, it is merely proof that he will not
believe either what God has so often and so solemnly and so emphatically said in his Word
or accept the evidence of his own eyes, as he looks out on a world chock-full of every
kind of intimation and foretaste of the catastrophe that awaits those without Christ and
without forgiveness in the world to come.
As the whole world in our day repudiates the judgments of the Lord, as evangelical
Christians in ever greater numbers doubt the reality of divine wrath against sinners in
the world to come, it is essential --for our souls' sakes, for our children's sake, and
for the world's sake-- that we not be beguiled, that we remain firmly committed to this
fundamental article of our faith: behold the goodness and the severity of God!
And we must for three reasons.
I. First, it is true.
If we believe the Bible we are shut up to this doctrine, hard as it may be to accept.
For it teaches us not only the reality of divine justice and wrath, but reveals to us a
gospel that at every point presupposes that reality and shows us a Savior whose life and
work were without point unless there was a real divine wrath, a real and terrible
punishment that we had to be saved from. And, what is more, we are shut up to the fact
that no one spoke more openly or emphatically or more often about the wrath of God upon
sinners, the judgment of the wicked, than did our Savior himself.
George MacDonald used to claim, as many did in those days, that if people would just
concentrate on the Gospels and the spirit of Jesus instead of the letters of Paul, they
would know that God is love and that God could not condemn and judge sinners as historic
Christianity had always claimed he does and will. But, MacDonald, like all others who have
gone that way, had then to ignore a great deal of what Jesus said and did, because no one
spoke with greater force about the Bridegroom shutting the door forever against those who
arrived late to the feast or without the proper clothing than did Jesus. It was he, the
Lord of glory, the man of sorrows, who spoke of the worm that dies not, the fire that does
not go out, the wailing and gnashing of teeth, and eternal death. What is more, what Jesus
never taught, nor any of his apostles or prophets, is what MacDonald and his like claimed
must be true. It seems obvious that if, as these men claim, the God of Scripture, if he is
a God of love, must eventually embrace all creatures in that love, the Scripture would
have said so. But it does not. It says that the God of love is also the God of wrath and
that his way with sinful men is a demonstration both of his infinite grace and his
infinite justice.
And it is my sacred duty as a minister of Christ and as your minister to tell you that
the Word of the Lord endures forever, that it cannot be broken, and that there is not a
more dangerous step that any human being can ever take than to dismiss that Word of truth
to believe instead what one merely wishes to be true.
II. Second, we must believe the doctrine of divine wrath and judgment because that
doctrine is just.
I do not say that minds and hearts as thoroughly accustomed to and accepting of sin as
ours see its justice perfectly, all the more in such a day and time as ours. But, then,
you see, we live in a world, in a spiritual universe that makes the right and true
evaluation of divine justice perhaps the most difficult thing any human being ever
attempts. We find it difficult to punish anyone for anything, at least to punish for
justice's sake and not for revenge; our society finds it difficult to blame anyone for
anything; we find it very difficult to accept that such a statement as is made here in
Gen. 6:2 could possibly be true of us or many other human beings. We judge ourselves, not
by God's standards of purity and righteous, but by our own; we judge ourselves, in other
words, by ourselves and the one who does that, the Scripture says, is not wise.
But God destroyed the world with a flood because human beings were evil and his
justice required their judgment. Notice v. 6: God's heart was filled with pain at the sin
of man. Evil does that to God, all manner of evil, including the mountains of it that
produce neither pain nor even notice in our minds and hearts.
Did you notice that God's assessment of human evil, reported there in v. 5,
concentrated on the thoughts and inclinations of the heart. That is just what we
ignore and minimize. We consider evil almost totally in terms of outward acts -- which are
evil enough in every human life, and all the more if we consider sins of omissions, acts
that should have been but were not: love, forgiveness, mercy, kindness, worship, and the
like. But, what does God see when he surveys our hearts as he does every minute of every
day of every week of every month of every year of our lives. Is it reverence and love and
purity and devotion and faithfulness and goodness and mercy and justice and honesty and
humility and self-forgetfulness that he finds there? Or are our hearts -- which are
what God primarily judges because they are our truest selves -- as the Puritan John Owen
put it, standing sinks of abominations? Was William Law only more honest than we about his
own heart when he said that he would rather be hanged by the neck until dead and his body
thrown into a swamp than that anyone should be allowed to see what was in his heart -- and
yet God sees that all the time, and sees the true inclinations of our hearts better than
we do. He knows what our hearts would do, if they could, if they had full
opportunity to express themselves. No; divine wrath and judgment is just. And a
universe without it would be unjust. We will see this with a terrible clarity one day,
even if we cannot see it now!
III. And, third, we must believe in divine wrath and judgment because
otherwise we cannot
rightly honor or estimate God's true love.
"Grace," "Saved by grace," these are familiar terms for Christians.
So familiar, indeed, that if the truth be told they mean little and stir us little.
"Unmerited favor" is what grace means and we know that very well. Too well! But
what, of course, is meant by this is that you too and I had hearts that by nature were
like those described in v. 5; we too deserved to drown in the flood of waters, in terror
gasping for air until we could hold ourselves above the flood no longer; and, once dead,
to face a holy God again with nothing but our sins and our rebellion to show him. We
deserved Sodom's fate and we deserve the fate of those who came late to the feast and had
the door shut forever in their faces. Our lives too, our hearts, our thoughts, our
inclinations, by themselves are also nothing but pain in God's heart. We should have been
wiped off the face of the earth, both in this world and the next.
All around us are folk who face exactly that fate, as blithely unaware of that fact as
were those in Noah's day before the flood waters filled the earth. In the great day
to come, just as it was in the days before the flood, Jesus said, "people were eating
and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and
they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and carried them all away.
that is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man." [Matt. 24:38-39]
And there, but for the grace of God, go you and you and you. And if now you struggle to
keep in your soul any true sense of the terror and the wonder and the marvel of that, a
day is soon coming when many around you, many you know, will be calling on the rocks to
fall upon them and, I tell you, then, if you are in Christ, when you see the
gates of the eternal city opening before you, then you will know what the love of God
and the mercy of Christ really mean and what they did for you. How right of God to
punish the wicked -- you will see it then -- and how unspeakably merciful of the Lord
Jesus to take that just punishment upon himself in your place.
Never, Never, for us, brothers and sisters, the temptation to diminish the justice and
wrath of God in hopes of exalting his love. Those who succumb to that temptation
accomplish the reverse. They make the love of the Redeemer less not more, because they
lessen the price he had to pay, lessen the terrible fate from which he delivered those he
loves.
I will make the heavens tremble; and the earth will shake from its place at the wrath
of the Lord Almighty, in the day of his burning anger.
And what will you think, then, my friends, of the love of Christ?
Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from
God's wrath through him!
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