FigLeafe

From across this grey land...

(Dead but dreaming)

Notes on the Nephilim: The Giants of Old  - Part 5

BACK AT THE RANCH

A study like this involves so many technical details that it is easy to find oneself wondering about the point of it all and asking whether the outcome really matters. In one sense, the natural interpretation is quite valid and its point well taken. But I am convinced that to view Genesis 6 in this way is actually to lose something important.

Earlier we pointed out that one thing in favor of the natural interpretation is that it seems to fit in well with the general theme of chapters 4 and 5, namely, the contrast between the godly and the ungodly lines. But this is not the only contrast we have seen in the opening section of Genesis. What of the serpent? What of Satan? What of his desire to subvert the race and draw men and women after himself against God? If Genesis 6 does not refer to demonic activity, Satan apparently fades out of the picture entirely after chapter 3. But if Genesis 6 refers to a further attempt by Satan to pervert the race, then we have a reminder of his continuing hostility not only to God but to ourselves as well.

Satan was in the garden when the promise of a deliverer was given. He heard God say, "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel" (Gen. 3:15). Like Eve, he too must have thought that Cain, the woman's offspring, was the deliverer and must therefore have plotted to turn him into a murderer. He succeeded! He corrupted Cain by getting him to murder Abel, thereby eliminating one of Eve's children and rendering the other unfit to be the Savior. Yet Satan failed! For, as he was soon to learn, God simply continued on His unruffled way to develop the godly line through which the deliverer would eventually be born. What was Satan to do now? At this point he conceived the plan of corrupting the entire race by the intermarriage of demons and human beings. The Savior could not be born of a demon-possessed mother. So if Satan could succeed in infecting the entire race, the deliverer could not come. In narrating this incident, Genesis 6 is saying, in effect, "Meanwhile, back at the ranch the villain is still hatching his plots."

Satan is still doing it today. Because he is a being who learns by experience, he is a much wiser and more dangerous devil today than he was in the time before the Flood. A person who knows this and who knows that we struggle "not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world a against the spiritual forces of evil in heavenly realms" (Eph. 6:12), will fear Satan and draw near to Jesus, who has defeated him.

Again, there is this practical application. Without detracting in the slightest from the fact that the Flood was a real judgment of God on the ungodliness men and women and consequently warning of an even greater judgment come, we can also see that it was at the same time an act of the marvelous grace of God. For in preserving the race intact uncontaminated by Satan's attempts demonic perversion, God actually provided for our salvation through keeping open the way for the Redeemer to come. If Satan had succeeded, Jesus could n have been born and the race as whole--including Adam and Seth a Enoch and all the rest--would have been lost. But by destroying the contaminated race and saving uncontaminated Noah and his immediate uncontaminated family and by binding the demons who participated in this great sin in Hades until the final judgment God made the salvation to be achieved by Christ both sure and possible.
 

References:

1. Augustine, The City of God, Book 15, p. 303.
2. F. Schaeffer, Genesis in Space and Time, p. 126.
3. C . F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament, Vol. 1,
4. The Pentateuch by James Martin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, n.d.), p. 128.
5. R. H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, Vol. 2, Pseudepigrapha (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1913), p. 163.
6. Cf. Bo Reicke, The Epistles of James, Peter and Jude (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964, pp 109-11.
7. Paul's discussion of the nature of our resurrection bodies in 1 Corinthians has bearing on this interpretation, for he used the word heteros, meaning something that is entirely different, in comparing the glory of "heavenly bodies" and the glory of "earthly bodies" (1 Cor. 15:40). One verse earlier he spoke of the differences between the flesh of men, animals, and birds. But there he used the word meaning different but nevertheless of the same kind.