[0:00] If you have your Bibles, turn to Genesis chapter 6. Genesis chapter 6. We've been blessed so much in music, we can just go home now. But we're not. It began with an innocent Adam and Eve.
[0:18] Then they wasn't innocent anymore. Sent it in. And then it hit the next generation with Cain and Abel.
[0:30] And it didn't stop there. It continues. Like a snowball rolling downhill, the impact of sin just kept getting larger.
[0:41] Destroying more lives. It led to future generations. Not only being born into a sinful atmosphere, but born into sin.
[0:52] With innate appetites that poisoned, that were poisoned with wrong motives. And misguided ventures. And the consequences of all of that were huge.
[1:05] The consequences of all of that are huge. The evil of the day is explained along with a significant development that makes matters that much worse.
[1:17] In Genesis chapter 6. Beginning in verse 1. And it says this. When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them.
[1:29] The sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives as they chose. Then the Lord said, My spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh.
[1:42] His days shall be 120 years. The Neaphalom were on the earth in those days. And also afterward, when the sons of God came into the daughters of man, and they bore children.
[1:55] These were the mighty men were of old, the men of renown. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth.
[2:09] And that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth.
[2:21] And it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, I'll blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land. Man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens.
[2:35] For I am sorry that I've made him. I don't want you to miss verse 5 in that passage.
[2:45] Because I believe it is the most significant of what I just read. When it says, It says, The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth. And that every intention of the thoughts of the heart was only evil continually.
[2:59] I believe it's significant when understanding what went wrong. However, I'm not going to avoid verses 1 through 4. It is further evidence of the persistent evil that was in the land.
[3:15] And it is hard to understand. And I'll be honest. It is hard to explain. However, I want to do justice to the word.
[3:26] And I believe it'd be an injustice not to grapple with this with you. And that's exactly what we'll do. Because the difficult passages are in verses 2 and verse 4.
[3:37] When it talks about the sons of God. So who are these sons of God? Well, there are two possibilities of who these sons of God are.
[3:49] One of them is that they are strong, mighty warriors from the line of Seth. We talked about Cain and Abel last week. But after Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve had another child named Seth.
[4:04] And this third son of Adam, some believe that these are people that came from Seth. Strong, mighty warriors. The term sons of God were often used for kings and warriors in that day.
[4:21] And so if that was the case, if that's what happened, what you have here is an unequally yoked kind of situation. Where you have godly people marrying ungodly people and bearing children with them.
[4:36] If that's what it meant, good godly men went after the women of the world and brought about an offspring that was even more rebellious against God. And their influence was paramount and played a significant role in the overall sinfulness of society.
[4:54] Therefore, they are spoken of in that way. God speaks against that often and it is destructively sinful to marry those that are not believers.
[5:06] The other possibility is this. That it was angelic beings that came down from heaven and married women. That is much harder to understand.
[5:19] It is much harder to explain. But it appears that it has some scriptural support to back it. For one, when the term sons of God are used in the Old Testament, it is referring to angels.
[5:35] We see that common in the book of Job. Right there at the beginning and all that negotiation of Job. We see him dealing with that and calling the angels in heaven the sons of God.
[5:47] There appears as well to be New Testament evidence that this is the case. That this really happened. Some have said that 2 Peter 2, verse 4 speaks of this. When it says, Now you look at me and say, Well, preacher, how do you know that's talking about Genesis 6?
[6:12] Because the very next verse mentions Noah in the context. So there's a possibility of that. Actually, Jude chapter 6, not chapter, there's only one chapter in Jude, if there's a chapter at all.
[6:25] Jude verse 6 seems to point to that as well when it says, Now, I'll just be honest with you, that's not easy to take in.
[6:46] Because Jesus said in Matthew 22, verse 30, that the angels in heaven are neither married nor are given in marriage. And what that means, frankly, is that the focus of heaven is not personal relationships.
[7:02] That's really what that's pointing to. Therefore, either this is a reference to mighty kings who God had blessed, who in the midst of their blessing were filled with pride, went after worldly women, and faced a disaster.
[7:16] And that's what I call the Solomon syndrome. Because that's exactly what happened to Solomon. Solomon had 700 wives. 300 concubines, because who can live with just 700 wives?
[7:31] And those thousand women that were in his house were from around the world. And they brought their gods in with them. And he was not only intoxicated with them, but he was intoxicated with their gods.
[7:45] And it says in 1 Kings 11, verse 4, that he turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not fully true to his Lord, his God.
[7:56] And it was because of the influence of all those people in his home. Now, that sort of thing is a recurring theme throughout history. Makes a lot of sense.
[8:10] Or, is this a reference to something that's not common? Apparently a one-time, supernatural, unmatched event when angels left their normal spiritual bodies to assume an abnormal physical form to cohabitate with human women.
[8:28] It is interesting when you look into this, because the book of Enoch is considered a well-respected historical work.
[8:39] It is a collaboration that was written over a few hundred years and put together, beginning in about 300 B.C. Enoch, which we'll talk about in a week or so, it was attributed to him, but he didn't really write it, because it was written thousands of years after Enoch lived.
[9:00] So I want to be clear about something. The book of Enoch is not inspired by God. It does contain error. It is not God-breathed.
[9:11] It is not authoritative, but it does really make this conversation interesting, because it was an often referred-to book when it was written. And Enoch says this, And it came to pass, when the children of men had multiplied, that in those days were born upon them beautiful and comely daughters.
[9:32] And the angels, the children of heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another, Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men, and beget us children.
[9:43] They were in all two hundred. They, like unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in unto them, and defile themselves with them, and they taught them charms and enchantments, and they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose heights were three thousand ales, and there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways.
[10:18] End of quote. Now, that describes the offspring as being hundreds of feet tall. That is interesting, but it is not inspired.
[10:31] I want to be clear about that. Have I said that already? However, Genesis chapter 6 verse 4 tell us that from this was produced the nephalom.
[10:43] The nephalom, that's actually a Hebrew participle, and if you look at the meaning of the word, the meaning of that word is literally the ones who have fallen, or the fallen ones.
[10:57] To me, that very well could be speaking of the products of falling angels, but it also could be talking about the angels that fell themselves. Neophalom also spoken of in Numbers chapter 13, when Moses sent the spies out into Canaan to check it out.
[11:16] You know the story. They were in the desert for 40 years, wandering around, lost like a bunch of Baptists that can't get along, and spent way too much time on a journey that shouldn't have taken, but not long at all, and spent that time in the desert, and in aims of getting to the promised land of Canaan, and when they got close, they sent spies over to check out the land, and when those spies came back, most of the spies, except for two, were scared to try to take the land that God had promised to them, because as Numbers 13.33 says, they responded, when they saw the people, we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.
[12:02] Therefore, the Neophalom is sometimes translated giant, because of that verse. So no doubt, the name shows that although mighty and well-respected, they did fall.
[12:16] They are the fallen ones. So what does all that mean? And which is correct? Well, I'm going to tell you this.
[12:29] Either way, it tells us that demonic power has too great an influence. That's what it says. Now, most say that the angels caused this.
[12:42] I don't believe we can be dogmatic about that. I could pick either point and argue with you about it if you want to argue, but I don't care to. But what is clear, and is a clear-cut point in this passage, and the point of this sermon is this.
[12:58] The cause of their soon-coming disaster was sin. That was the problem. A holy God was going to cleanse the earth.
[13:12] That wipes out the evil of the world, but the flood also changed the atmosphere. I believe a lot of our geological marvels that we look at in the world today are due to the flood.
[13:25] Personally, I believe the Grand Canyon gets its shape and form from the flood, and such is that. Not an authority on that. Just telling you my convictions. In addition to that, it changed the atmosphere in which we live.
[13:41] Humans would not live near as long as they had, and the evidence of that sin nature would become much more pronounced. Verse 3 says that we would not live near as long.
[13:55] We are weakened by it. Our lives are shortened by it. And I'm going to deal with some genealogies in the coming days, so I don't want to get too much into this, but the genealogy in Genesis chapter 11 shows lifespans much shorter after the flood than the genealogy in Genesis chapter 5 before the flood.
[14:16] And with every generation, it got shorter. And by Moses' day, the longest man could hope to live would be about 120 years versus Methuselah who lived 969 years before the flood.
[14:33] In other words, God saw what he had made and he grieved. What we see in verses 5 through 7 is the portrait of a father watching his children's mistakes.
[14:51] We also see here the real cause of disaster on the earth. And the real cause of disaster on the earth is sin. The real cause of disaster on the earth is a sinful society.
[15:05] And it is an ever-growing problem. And so let's look at that for just a few minutes from God's perspective.
[15:16] And I want you to notice what it says. First, I want you to notice what God sees. It says in verse 5, the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
[15:37] What God saw was the extensive and intensive nature of his creation's sin. Not only the depravity of their actions but also the state of their heart.
[15:51] It was to the core. And when the Old Testament refers to the heart, it's talking about the will of a man or a will of a woman. It's talking about the understanding. It's talking about them being changed, perverted of sorts.
[16:05] in the midst of how they think and what they do. In other words, when sin is there, it is life-saturating. And in reality, humanity has then ripped the clay out of the potter's hand and tried to form it itself.
[16:24] And God sees all of that. People were attempting to be self-made, self-led. It is a trait in the accounts of Genesis again and again.
[16:35] And being self-made and self-led is not only a trait in the accounts of Genesis, it's a trait in the account of any generation. You see it again and again.
[16:46] And sadly, the sinful hearts of humanity has erupted into sin and it's like a hot lava coming out of a volcano that has erupted and its impact is rolling down.
[17:00] It is influencing others. It is seducing others. It is condemning everyone that it touches, which is everyone. I wish I could say that the problems of Genesis chapter 6 with the wickedness of the world was taken care of with the flood, but the reality is the same is true today.
[17:24] You want to know why our world is so chaotic? The sin and the sinfulness of the world. You all draw it back to that.
[17:36] When sin is rampant in our lives, God sees it. And I want you to notice the sad contrast because we just looked at creation a few weeks ago and every day that God created something different.
[17:55] He ended the day saying, that's good. That's good. Now he looks at it and in Genesis chapter 6 verse 5 it says that he saw the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intention of their thoughts of his heart was only evil continually and the Lord regretted making man.
[18:27] It's clear. Also I want you to notice what he feels. What God feels and that's in verse 6. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth and it grieved him to his heart.
[18:40] We see in God's response his anger is mixed with anguish but we also see his love for us because God's heart was broken over our sin and that's not an old thing.
[19:02] God's heart is still broken over our sin. It is filled with grief. It is filled with affliction. It is filled with disappointment in humankind.
[19:16] His hand of judgment will not be restrained even though he loves the crown of his creation which is us. But like a truly loving parent God loved us enough to discipline and as a truly loving parent God was heartbroken over what he had to be done.
[19:34] It was to show his sovereignty and it was to show his holiness of God. And that word grieve there literally means that he repented.
[19:45] Now when we repent and when God repents that's something different. But the true meaning of repentance is to turn 180 degrees around.
[19:55] That's the true meaning of it. Repentance means to walk in one way and then decide one day to change and turn around and walk 180 degrees the other way. Not 360 degrees because if you do you'll keep going in the same direction.
[20:09] But 180 degrees and to change and God changed here radically. The heart that looked at his creation and said good now changed his action because God is too holy to let it go.
[20:30] That's what God feels. I also want you to notice what God says. It says in verse 7 Genesis chapter 6 verse 7 so the Lord said I will blot out man whom I've created from the face of the land man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens for I am sorry that I made them.
[20:55] God works through life even through nature to take care of the source of the problem. and as our sin not only affects ourselves and if you think your sin only affects yourself you're wrong.
[21:09] Their sin not only affected themselves but God's judgment upon them affected more than just them. And God's judgment upon your life will affect more than just you.
[21:22] So how can God do it? How can he take the creation that he made and flood it and destroy so many lives?
[21:36] Well I want you to think about it like a house fire. When a house is on fire only water can put that fire out. And that fire has to be put out regardless of what that water may do to that house.
[21:52] They continue to pump water into that house. And if it's your house it looks like they continue to pump water well beyond what they need to. But the reality is they want to put out every ember, every possibility of that fire coming back and starting again and being stronger.
[22:11] Like a mighty water hose God's discipline comes quenching the sin but also leaving his own mark. He will rebuild what has been destroyed.
[22:25] As a matter of fact 1 Peter chapter 3 verse 21 speaks of the flood as if it was like a baptism. Symbolically removing the evil and cleansing the earth.
[22:36] The flood was the way that the Lord cleansed the earth from the continual degradation of sin. It was a temporary fix. It was something that he would never do again.
[22:51] Peter uses baptism as an illustration of the cleansing of the flood. And baptism is normally used as an illustration of the cleansing that comes to the cross of Christ. And do you know why Christ went to the cross?
[23:06] He goes to the cross because of what he sees. He sees a lost humanity that has no hope outside of him. He goes to the cross for what he feels.
[23:21] And thank God he feels grace for the repentant. He's willing to extend grace to us. He goes to the cross for what he says.
[23:33] And Romans 10 13 says for everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved. No matter how wicked. No matter how sinful.
[23:47] No matter how dirty we are. God can cleanse us. And it is the heart of God to do what it takes to cleanse us if we'll just turn to him and surrender our lives to him.
[24:12] King David was caught in his sin. The sin became much greater than he intended. The ripple effects became much more than what he first thought when he first entertained the notion of sin.
[24:32] That usually happens. God and in Psalm 51 after he's been approached with his sin he approaches God and asks for forgiveness and he says this have mercy on me oh God according to your steadfast love according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.
[25:08] I am thankful that the same God that destroyed the earth as we knew it with a flood to remove sin is the same God that sent his son Jesus to the cross to die for us to shed his blood to remove sin from all of those who would repent and come to Christ.
[25:40] I'm thankful today that no matter who you are no matter where you come from or what you've done that the Lord Jesus Christ will receive you under himself if you'll just surrender your life to follow him.
[25:58] He hates sin it's destructive and God in his response will do what it takes to remove it.
[26:10] It's such a big deal to him that he brought the flood thousands of years ago and 2,000 years ago he allowed his son to die in our place so that our sins could be forgiven and it's because of that that I can stand here today in the midst of the sinful society in which we live and say our hope is only found in Christ Jesus and you can rest in him and he'll save your life.
[26:44] What can wash away my sin help me nothing but the blood of Jesus what can make me whole again nothing but the blood of Jesus oh precious is the flow that makes me white as snow no other fount I know nothing but the blood of Jesus with every head bowed and every eye closed I want you to know you can come to Christ as you are today he's not surprised at the sinfulness in your life he's not amazed by that he's seen it all and he'll take you as you are if you'll surrender your life to him if there's an unction in your being at all to come to Christ today I want you to know you didn't bring it about that's the
[27:57] Holy Spirit of God reaching out to you impelling you to come telling you to follow him if you've never given your heart and life to the Lord Jesus Christ I encourage you to come today surrender your life to follow him this very day I'll be happy to guide you in that process maybe you're here and you have done that but you've never acknowledged that through baptism baptism is the physical representation of what Christ has done in your heart and if you've never made your personal salvation public through baptism I encourage you to come to simply be obedient to his commission and his example to just simply follow him maybe you're here and God's drawing you to this church you know this is where God would have you to serve we'd be happy to talk to you about that to welcome you in as one of us maybe you're here and there's just stuff stuff you need to deal with you've been confronted with maybe through song maybe through sermon maybe through prayer stuff that you need to deal with lay down before the
[29:04] Lord I encourage you don't just sing through this hymn and go on out the door you settle things with God whether that's where you are whether it's at this altar or whether with a pastor praying for you either way you just obey God as he speaks to your heart and life Lord Jesus I love you I thank you Lord that you loved us enough to do something for us that we could never imagine I thank you Lord for Christ and I ask dear God that you'll help us each one to respond in obedience as you speak to our hearts and lives right now oh God move and work in our midst as only you can and it's only in Jesus name we pray amen stand moment by you you remember Mariah that you