The Days of Noah: Understanding the "Sons of God" & Coming Judgment

Welcome to Through the Bible with Les Feldick, a 30-minute walk through the Scriptures, teaching in-depth Bible truths that change people's lives. Now, here's your host, Les Feldick. Good evening. It's good to have everybody back again tonight, and we'll just pick right up where we left off our last class, if you'll turn with me then to Genesis chapter 6, and for those of you joining us on television, we would ask you, if possible, to take your Bible, take a pencil and a notepad, and follow right along with us and be part and parcel of our class time. Now, for you in the class, of course, by the time our first 30 minutes have gone, you're going to have some questions, and we're going to answer them. But for those of you on television, if we leave you with a question, feel free to call our 800 number, and we'll try to answer your questions to the best of our ability. All right, now, at last week, as we were discussing chapter 5, we noticed that we came to the man called Seth. And if you want to just go back for a moment of review, verse 5, all the days that Adam lived were 930 years, and he died, but of course before Adam died, Seth came on the scene as a replacement for Abel, who had been murdered earlier by Cain. And then we come to verse 6, and we pick up the genealogy of this man Seth, the replacement for Abel, or the beginning of what we would call the spiritual line. Now, remember that we pointed out earlier that all through Scripture, the process is first the natural, or the unbelieving end of it, and then the spiritual, or the believer. Cain, the unbeliever, followed by Abel, the spiritual man, Abel replaced by Seth. And then as we come on up through the Scriptures, you've got first Esau, and then Jacob, first King Saul, and then King David. And as we approach the end time, we'll have first the appearance of the Antichrist, and then the appearance of the real Christ. So this follows them all the way through Scripture. So Cain, of course, was the beginning of the natural, or the non-spiritual aspect of the human race. But now Seth comes on the scene to become the head of the spiritual line, and we pick it up, as I said, in verse 6 then, where Seth lived 105 years, and he begat Enos, and so on down the line. We aren't going to take all these names. But finally we get closer and closer to the flood, and I think in our closing remarks last time we were together then, we talked about Enoch, who walked with God. Enoch was translated, did not see death, and I think that probably he is a perfect picture in type of the outcalling then of the church or the believers before the coming judgment of the tribulation. Enoch was translated shortly before the flood, as the judgment of that day came on the scene. Then as you come through the genealogy, of course, you next run across Methuselah, the man who lived the longest of anyone in biblical history, 969 years, as against Adams, 939. And then after Methuselah, we have Lamech in verse 28, and then finally we get down to Noah, and Noah, of course, is going to bring us to the flood of chapter 6. But before we go to chapter 6, I'd like to put these two lines on the board. First, the natural posterity of Cain, and even though Cain was out from the presence of God, he turned his back on God, yet he was not without a motivating power. Remember I pointed out that when Cain pushed God out of his life, the very power of Satan enters in. You can't create a vacuum. There is no such thing as having absolutely no spiritual influence. If we push God out, Satan's going to come in. And remember I pointed out that just because we speak of Satan as being evil, and he is that which represents wickedness, Satan doesn't always do awful things. Satan is very well qualified to promote good things, beautiful things, things that even we as believers enjoy day by day. When Paul says he can transform himself into an angel of light, he is the master counterfeiter, and I like to use that word. He is a counterfeit of God at every opportunity. If he can make a sham, or if he can make something look like an original, I said look like, he'll do it. I always like to be reminded, or remind my classes, I read some time ago that when the United States government brings in young people to work in the Treasury Department, especially to work on counterfeit, they don't sit down and show them a lot of counterfeit bills, but for six months all those people study are legitimate American currencies. That's all they study. And the idea, of course, is that if they know meticulously how the original looks, when they see something that's a counterfeit, they'll recognize it immediately. And this is what I beg people to do with the Scripture. Be so profound in your knowledge of the Scripture that when the cults come along, when people come to your door with something less than the truth, that you'll recognize it immediately as a counterfeit. Because, see, the master counterfeiter is so capable of making it look like the original. And Satan, of course, is the master. He is the master counterfeiter. So as he comes in then to the experience of Cain, we come down, as we saw the last time we were together, that this becomes a tremendous civilization with technology. And that technology, I use the word explodes. And the reason for it, of course, is that Adam was a perfect person. Adam and Eve were both perfect. They had tremendous intelligence. I don't think we can even use a percentage of what Adam and Eve and those early members of the human race were capable of doing. Always remember that. Adam was created perfect. Now, as these people began then to multiply, they didn't become cave dwellers. They didn't become savages. That's man on his way down. I've had that question come up so many times over the years, especially from college-age young people. Well, what about the caveman? Where'd he come in? Well, he is not man on his way in his ascendancy. Now that's what evolution likes to show us. You see, the man gradually crawled up until finally he reached where we are today. But it's not biblical. We know that Adam and Eve started as perfect human beings, and they had a tremendous civilization that just erupted from their offspring. And then as years and centuries and, yes, millennia go by, what happened to the human race? They degenerated. And so in that process of degeneration, sure, we've had cave people. I mean, there's enough evidence of that. But always remember, it's man on his way down, not man on his way up. So the kinetic civilization, the natural aspect, begins to explode in technology as well as in population. So it's very easy to comprehend that by the time we get to Genesis chapter 6, or by the time we get down to the time of the flood, now remember this is probably about 1600 years after Adam, that is, after Adam's creation, that in those 1600 years now, it's very easy to believe that there were probably 4 billion people on the earth, about equal to the population that the earth had at the, oh, about the turn of the 70s. I think we reached about 4 billion people, somewheres in the early 70s. And now in just the last 15 years or 20 years, we've come all the way up to 6 billion, and the latest figures I've read is that we will probably approach something like 8 billion people by the end of this century, by the year 2000. And then, if the thing were to keep going, that would double again by about the year 2020 or 2025. And it's just like that old story, you remember when the king offered a job to somebody at a penny a day, but he would double it every day of his life? And a penny a day doesn't seem like much. Two cents a day doesn't seem like much. But as you well know, when you keep doubling, it isn't very long until it becomes explosive. So it's the way it is with population. It was here, and we're seeing the same thing in our own time. All right, now then, over against the civilization of Cain, who went out from the presence of God, precipitated a society and an economy that was tremendous, but it was without God. It was motivated by the powers of Satan, but remember, that doesn't mean it was all bad. Now over here, we have the line of Seth, and again we come down through the genealogy, and as we've already mentioned, until we finally get down to Noah. And Noah has his three sons, Ham, Shem, and Japheth, but we'll cover them later. Now I think we've got the setting, so that we can come into chapter 6. We're about 1600 years after the creation of Adam, which puts us about, what, 3,400 B.C.? 2,400 B.C., I'm sorry. 2,400 B.C. Verse 1 of chapter 6, And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and I've already alluded to that. You're going to have a doubling, and every time it doubles, it's just going to be that much shorter period of time until it will double again. So men were beginning to multiply, and daughters were born unto them. Then verse 2. Now these are points of controversy amongst the best of theologians and Bible scholars, and I don't claim to have a corner on it, but I prefer to agree with the consensus of opinion that the sons of God here are simply the godly line of Seth. We've got the ungodly line of Cain, and they have been going on in their materialism and in their technology, but over against that, probably quite well separated, was this godly line of Seth, who have not become too involved with this, what today we would call this worldly community. And they have maintained a relationship with Jehovah God, and in fact it says in there, Then began men to call upon the name of Jehovah. And so as this godly line of Seth comes down through the centuries of years, building up to the flood, as the sons of men here then, let's look at it, the sons of God rather, saw the daughters of men, that they were fair and they took them wise of all which they chose. Now there is that, like I said, there is that controversy where some feel that the sons of God here were angelic beings who took on sexuality and actually cohabited then with human women, and that offspring became then the giants of verse 4. Now there's a lot of good men that adhere to this, and I mean good men. But there are also as many or more, and this is the one that I will stay with, who feel that the sons of God here were the godly line of Seth. They had kept themselves pretty much from the ungodly line of Cain, and their children had intermarried within this family, and had totally kept themselves separated from the line of Cain, until as you come down through the years of time, and I think we've seen it even in this, the church age, up until about 1900, the Christian community was pretty well separated from the world. Christian people had their testimony, and the world knew it. But since about 1900, we've seen the same thing happen, where more and more the Christian community has just overlapped with and has joined with the world, where the world has come into the church, and the church goes out into the world. And consequently I'm one of those, I just can't get too enthused about so-called Christian rock, because in my line of thinking, that's just another amalgamation of the church and the world, the world coming into the church. And so I think what we can see here then, in verse 2, is that the godly people in that line of Seth finally came to the place where they lost that separated character, and they began to intermarry with the line of Cain. Now we know from genetics, in any kind of genetics, that when you begin to cross bloodlines that have been relatively pure on both sides of the fence for a long time, in animals or in plants, and it also comes into the human element, that when you have a long line of bloodlines totally separated from this bloodline, and you begin to cross, and the word we use for that today, of course, is hybrid, and what do you get? You get a species that is stronger, more viral. They're just, everything is expanded, size, energy. And I think that's all that we can see here, is that after hundreds of years, the line of Seth began to intermarry with the line of Cain. And as a result, those children were probably 6, 8, 10 inches taller than their forefathers. They had greater physical stamina, and so the world called them what? Giants. Now all I have to say, if you think that we're not living in much the same kind of a situation today with our increase in nutrition and technology, look at our pro football players. Look at our pro athletes. Now approaching 7 feet tall and 350 pounds, I've had one or two of these pro football guys in our class, and I mean it's just unbelievable, the size of these guys. Well, we call them giants. So I don't think you have to look at this verse 4 and think, oh, you know, they must have had men 10, 11 feet tall. Not at all. I think probably the average size of men at the time of Adam was probably 5 '7", 5'8", but then all of a sudden they began to get people well over 6 feet, and maybe even as much as 7, and so the Scripture refers to them in verse 4 as giants. All right, but before we go on any further, let's come back up to verse 3, where now the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he is also flesh. In other words, God hasn't lost sight of the fact that man is still man. He may have accomplished a lot of things in his technology over here on the kinetic side. They may have even accomplished an increase in the size of their offspring when they began to intermarry, but they're still men. And now look what God says. Yet his days shall be a hundred and twenty years. Now here's another portion of Scripture I think that has been maligned and has been taken out of context, and I think all it refers to is that from the point of time here that God says, Now, I'm not always going to put up with this. I'm going to give man 120 years, and then judgment's going to fall. The New Testament refers to Noah as that preacher of righteousness, and from that I think we can take that from the time that God commissions Noah to build an ark until the flood would come is 120 years. That's a long time in our way of thinking, but you want to remember people lived 900 years back here. And so Noah has 120 years to build the ark, but every blow that goes into the building of that ark, every piece of energy that went into it was also a sermon to the surrounding people of a coming judgment. Now I think we're finding ourselves in much the same situation today. We're right on the threshold of another tremendous judgment of God, which the Bible calls the tribulation. But oh, look what God is doing to get people's attention. I've been amazed these last few months at the awful increase in interest in prophecy. We were listening to a gentleman Sunday down at McAllister, enjoyed him tremendously, and he alluded to the fact that a real good friend of his, and I'm assuming that it must have been Dr. John Wolvard, he didn't name him, but I'm assuming it was, who had written a book back in the early 1970s, and it had only sold a few hundred thousand copies, and it was a book, of course, on prophecy. Well, after the invasion of Kuwait, I think it was Zondervan who published it, they retitled the book, put it back again into publication, and they named it, if I'm not mistaken, I read it a few weeks ago, Armageddon Oil in the Middle East, or something like that, by John Wolvard, and I'm sure some of you have read it. But since they have now come out with a new printing, they have sold, I don't know how many, Beverly, remember? Huh? Okay, they had sold a million copies, just in these last few months. I read in one of the news magazines, either Inside or Time, or the two I happen to subscribe to, and they were giving a full-page article, the same thing, that Christian bookstores have just been deluged with requests for Hal Lindsay's book, Late Great Planet Earth, and some of the other books on prophecy. Well, I think it's as it should be, because suddenly, at least the Western world is realizing that we who have been teaching prophecy for the last many, many years, and have literally been screaming at people, the center of everything is going to be Israel, the center of all end-time events is going to be the Middle East. And now when they suddenly realize, yes, this is where it's all at, then they remember. In fact, I had a young man call me just the other day that I'd taught in Sunday school years and years ago. Taught these same things then. And now he's a practicing professional man, and he said, Les, he said, I just was suddenly remembering. These are the things that you tried to put into our heads when we were kids. And he said, I had to give you a call. He said, Is this what you were talking about? Oh, it's the beginning of it. Now certainly this war that just ended was not Armageddon, not by any stretch of the imagination, but oh, it's showing the world that the Bible knows what it's talking about when it speaks about all these end-time things as culminating there in the Middle East. So anyway, before judgment would fall, God is going to warn that generation of people for 120 years, while Noah's building the ark, of a coming judgment. But for the most part, I'm afraid people just didn't listen, and probably for the most part, most won't listen today. So anyway, then we go to verse 4 again. So there were giants in the earth as a result of this intermarriage. And also after that, when the sons of God came into the daughters of men, they bared children to them. The same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. Well, I don't think there's anything special to pick out of that, except that this generation of people that came out of the intermarriage now of these two lines, became better at everything. They were probably more ambitious, they were more energetic, and they just simply capitalized on everything that they possibly could. Then we get into verse 5. Now along with this tremendous increase in technology, and I'll be bringing that out more in detail in our next program, but along with this tremendous increase in technology, look what also comes. And again, we're seeing it in our own time. We've got tremendous technology. We've got tremendous intellect. But what has happened to our moral fiber? It's rotting away right before our very eyes. Murder is on the increase. Crime is on the increase. Immorality is on the increase. Drug use, drunkenness, everything is increasing in spite of our tremendous level of standard of living. All right, look at it here. Verse 5, "...And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every," what? "...imagination," those people couldn't think a thought, "...but that it had to be evil in one sort of another. And so to every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil," not just now and then, but what? "...continually." If they woke up in the middle of the night, the only thing they could think was something evil that they could perpetuate when they got up in the morning. I've always been amused that our dirty stories, I haven't heard one now in years and years and years, but I was just like anybody else. I heard my share when I was in sports and service and what have you. And I used to wonder, who thinks this stuff up? Then I read one time, you know where most of it comes from? From our prisons. From our prisons, where you've got that mentality of just thinking evil continually. Not all of them, but most of them. And that's all they got to think about. And so they can just spew this stuff out. See? Well, it was the same way back here. This society of people couldn't think good thoughts. It just constantly enveloped their thinking to come up with something evil, come up with something wicked, come up with something less than honorable. All right, now, how did that affect God? Well, verse 6, and here's a word that a lot of people have come and asked me about. You mean God had to repent? No, that isn't what it means here. It says, "...and it repented the Lord, that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart." Now, God didn't repent of the fact that He made man, but when God saw what man was doing, He had an act of sorrow. Oh, He was sorry to see what His created beings had now come to. In fact, I've often had to think of this. Adam lived within just a few hundred years of the demise of that human race, and so he must have seen the beginning of all this. How do you suppose the man must have felt? I can't help but wonder. What must Adam have thought when he realized that he had precipitated all of this rebellion against the Creator? The Bible says nothing about it, but I'm sure he must have had some thoughts on the matter. Well, for just a moment now then, let's go on down to verse 7. So when God was sorry that He had brought mankind into the picture, He said, "...I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth." Both man and beast, creeping things, the fowls of the air, everything that He had created had now been affected by this terrible degeneration of the human race to the place where God couldn't just destroy man. He had to take everything with Him, except, of course, the things that were living in the sea. So God says again, "...for it repenteth," or it makes me sorry that I have made them. Don't you often look as you read your newspapers, and you watch television, and you watch some of the stuff that comes into our living room? Do you ever stop and ask yourself, what must God think of this? I'm sure you do. And aren't you amazed that God puts up with it? He doesn't have to. He's sovereign. But there's coming a day when He's going to say, I've had enough, even as He did back here. It finally got to the place where as man looked upon that human race, maybe some four billion or more, I think probably more rather than less, and steeped in wickedness, how could God help but say, I've had enough? Well, we'll have to stop there for this time, but we'll pick it up here again when we come together. Thank you for watching Through the Bible with Les Feldick. Through the Bible is a partner-supported ministry. If this program has been a help to your study of the scriptures, and you'd like to see others enjoy the teaching, your support would be greatly appreciated. Write to us at Les Feldick Ministries, Route 1, Box 760, Kenta, Oklahoma, 74552, or call 1-800-369-7856. Remember, all programs are available in printed form, audio cassette, and videotape. Be sure to tune in next time to Through the Bible with Les Feldick.