Up to this point in this series, I’ve presented the Biblical position that fallen angels abandoned their proper domain (Jude 1:6) in order to enter into unlawful sexual relations with human women and produce the hybrid Nephilim giants (Genesis 6:1-4). This incursion took place during the period of history leading up to the Great Flood and it was a tactical effort to comprehensively corrupt the human genome.
The ultimate goal of the fallen angels (the “sons of God” or b’nai Elohim) was to prevent the advent of Jesus Christ and the destruction of Satan which were first prophesied in Genesis 3:15. God sent the Great Flood to destroy this Nephilim invasion, to reboot humanity as He’d originally created it, and to preserve the conditions necessary for the Messiah’s arrival.
But in accordance with the ongoing hostility between the “seeds” of the serpent and the woman which was also foretold in Genesis 3:15, the giants returned after the Great Flood (Gen. 6:4), and the Bible tells us how this happened. The giants are precisely traced through the lineage of Ham, one of Noah’s sons. Since Noah and his wife were genetically-untainted, and since Shem – another of Noah’s sons – also remained unpolluted to continue the Messianic lineage, the logical conclusion is Ham’s wife carried a latent Nephilim gene.
There are various assaults against the truth of those three paragraphs, but all this opposition faces a serious problem – the Bible backs it up! To put that another way, the Bible does not support the notion that sin overwhelmed God’s tolerances, that one faction of humanity was somehow lifted above mankind’s baseline depravity (Romans 5:12), that another portion of the human race was uniquely depraved, or that God was different then than He is now. Every one of these ideas rests somewhere between passive ignorance and active apostasy, and given the clenched teeth and flushed visage of many who refuse to accept the Scriptures at face value, it’s often the latter.
Moving forward here, my primary assumption is Satan is doing all he can to assert himself and to stave off his own inevitable destruction. These have been his motives since earliest times. If we can accept this basic premise, then everything else falls into place.
Satan’s first attack followed God’s first prophecy concerning Jesus Christ. Satan’s initial target was the genome of the human race since Jesus Christ was prophesied to come through the “seed” (Hebrew: “zera”) of a woman. If he could poison humanity completely, then he could prove God wrong, prevent the Messiah’s arrival, and position himself to be worshipped as “God.”
That last objective was Satan’s original desire before his own fall (Isaiah 14:14), and it remained his obsession after the arrival of Jesus Christ (Matt. 4:1-11). It will continue to be Satan’s goal as the present chapter of human history winds down (Revelation 13:4), and he won’t stop trying to defeat God even at the threshold of the “new heaven and new earth” (Revelation 20:7-10).
Satan’s strategy became more focused when God issued another prophecy which also concerns the Messiah, and to see this we have to leap from Genesis 3:15 to Genesis 12:1-3. It’s in this latter passage that we find God sovereignly electing Abram and giving him the unconditional terms of the Abrahamic Covenant. It is within these terms that we find the promise of Abraham’s descendants through which “….all peoples on earth will be blessed.”
God further affirms this unconditional promise in Genesis 15:1-6. Here, Abram is not only reassured that the Messianic lineage would continue through him, but a few verses later in Genesis 15:18-21, God lists some of Ham’s Nephilim descendants which Abraham’s offspring would be forced to overcome in order to gain the land that God would give them.
These passages may seem as vague as clues on a cryptic treasure map, but Satan got the message loud and clear. Now he knew something he hadn’t known before: the Messiah would not only come through the human race, but He would come specifically through the lineage of Abraham. The target was smaller. Now Satan could use a rifle instead of a shotgun.
The fallen angels’ agenda shifted at this point from one that was focused broadly on the human race to one that was focused on part of it: the Jews. The corrupt angelic “zera” zeroed in on God’s chosen people, and in a tactical sense, the battle was concentrated in the land of Canaan and the surrounding territories. If Satan could disrupt the terms and ramifications of the Abrahamic Covenant, maybe he could prevent God’s greater plan from achieving success.
This is the reason why the Israelites faced the Nephilim in Numbers 13:31-33. These were “….the giants, the sons of Anak” whose genealogies could be traced directly back to Ham. It’s why the Israelites faced the gigantic King Og of Bashan (Num. 21:10-35; Deut. 3:11) when after being so afraid of their Nephilim adversaries in the Promised Land, God sent the Israelites back into the desert to wander in the wilderness once more.
It’s why Moses – when forty years later the Israelites stood once more on the borders of the Promised Land and prepared to enter it – rallied the nation of Israel and reminded them that they would face giants (Deut. 7:1-2). Moses listed seven Nephilim nations which he called “….larger and stronger than you,” and he commanded the Israelites to “….completely destroy them,” and to “….show them no mercy.” It’s no coincidence that God had mentioned six of those seven nations when He had reassured Abram of His covenant way back in Genesis 15:1-6.
The enmity between the Nephilim and Abraham’s descendants continued well past Canaan’s conquest. David killed Goliath (1 Sam. 17) who had ridiculed the God of the armies of Israel (1 Sam. 17:45). David and his men also killed four more giants who were related to Goliath in subsequent battles (2 Sam. 21:15-22).
The whole premise that Satan positioned his Nephilim troops in the Promised Land to resist the entry of the Israelites and the fulfillment of the Abrahamic Covenant explains why God ordered Joshua to “….wipe out all the inhabitants” that were there (Josh. 9:24). It’s why God directed Saul to attack and kill the Amalekites and to put to death “….every man, woman, child and infant” (1 Sam. 15:2-3). The Amalekites were a subset of the “descendants of Anak” (Num. 13:22-23), and God’s orders got down to the nitty-gritty. In the instructions Moses gave to the nation of Israel and which Joshua and Saul received, God was scrubbing the earth to rid it of the sordid stain of the fallen angelic “zera.”
I admire R.C. Sproul JR for his exceptional ability to exposit many portions and themes of God’s Word, but it’s at this juncture I need to take issue with him. R.C. Sproul JR, like other teachers, scholars, and pastors, does not want to accept that the Bible says what it means and means what it says concerning the Nephilim and God’s instructions to the Israelites.
R.C. Sproul JR states in a Nov. 2013 article, “Why Did God Command the Children of Israel to Kill Every Man, Woman, and Child in the Promised Land?” that “….God wanted the land cleared of all temptations to His people to turn from Him, His worship and His law.” He further adds that the reason “….God commanded them all to be put to death is because they were all, every man, woman and child of them, sinners. And the wages of sin is death.”
OK, true – but only partially so, and in partial truth lurks the feats of full deception. R.C. Sproul’s approach is to provide carefully-constructed language that sounds right on the surface but stops shy of submitting to the bigger divine picture.
Sure, God didn’t want the Israelites tempted, and sure, the Canaanites were sinners, but that hardly explains this genocidal command by God any more than similar hermeneutical gymnastics justify the Great Flood. R.C. Sproul JR confesses in an article he wrote called “The Sons of God,” and concerning the pivotal Genesis 6:1-4 account, “I do not believe this text necessarily teaches the idea of sexual relations between angels and human beings.” He goes on to support the arguments of the “sons of Seth” theory, a boilerplate heresy I addressed in Part 3 of this series.
OK, there you have it. To quote myself from Part 3 of this article series, R.C. Sproul JR “….spiritualized the text so he could disregard the plain truth that was staring him in the face.” And he’s not the only one! R.C. Sproul JR is one example of many highly-regarded teachers and scholars who have found the full counsel of the Scriptures to be an affront to their personal tastes and agenda.
The reality is Satan’s actions and intentions in this “sons of God” storyline are not hard to see. Knowing the Messiah would come through the human race, Satan first assaulted all of mankind. When he learned that prophecy would be fulfilled in the lineage of the Jews, he went after God’s chosen people. His methods along the way stayed true to the original Genesis 3:15 prophecy that his “seed” – his “zera”- would be at enmity with whatever human “zera” Jesus Christ would come from, and so Satan went from a broad brush approach to a more specific one as he gained more information along the way.
Today, the Jews are reviled and resented. It’s an evil prejudice which is a first cousin to the physical “battle of the seeds.” It’s been that way for centuries, but I personally feel there is a strong surge in anti-Jewish sentiments in our time as God permits Satan to work furiously on his own plans behind the scenes. That ancient enmity which was first prophesied in Genesis 3:15 remains alive and well.
Hints of a new battle between the “zera” of the serpent and the “zera” of the woman are already brewing, and it’ll all be out in the open once more as the other battles before it have been. Jesus predicted this when He said it will be “….like the days of Noah” (Matt. 24:37, Luke 17:26), and among other assessments, that battle then was global and visible.
“As it was in the days of Noah,” the fallen angels’ forthcoming agenda will not ultimately succeed, but in the next installment of this series, I will discuss the things we need to learn from the past to understand how the future will play out.
