Interlocked Series – Lesson #05, Part 1
The Angelic Revolt and Mankind; The Global Flood
September 5, 2023
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org
Opening Prayer
“Our Father, we’re just so grateful we have You to lean on, that You are our strong tower, our fortress, our rock. our refuge, and that we live in a world where not only is there a spiritual dimension in terms of the angelic revolt, but that we are involved in a battle with our own sin natures.
“Father, we need to constantly be saturating our souls with Your Word, for it is Your Word under God the Holy Spirit that You have ordained to be the real source of strength and power for us in this church age. Father, we desperately need that.
“We are to take every thought captive for Christ, and that is almost a full-time job. And that means we have to constantly pursue our studies, pursue reading, pursue learning Your Word, memorizing Scripture, so that we can be used by You in ways that we cannot imagine. Father, we just thank You for those opportunities.
“Tonight, as we continue this study, help us to see how things fit together and how the foundation for the rest of the Scripture is laid in these opening chapters of Genesis. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”
Slides 1 and 2
We are going to be looking tonight at two things. We’re going to bring in the angelic revolt. and its effect on mankind, how that impacts how we relate to one another, developing that a little more from what I ended with last week. Then we’re going to look at the global flood.
This is Lesson 5 – Part 1, so you should download those notes and you should read those notes. If you aren’t aware of it at the end of the notes it tells you what you should be reading in Scripture to prepare for the next lesson. We’re looking at the angelic revolt and the global flood. This will take two or three lessons as we go forward.
Slide 3
There’s a lot covered there. When the Holy Spirit takes four chapters to cover an event, that means it’s important and we need to pay attention to the details. First, we will start off with all of our events. So everybody stand up. Y’all are getting tired sitting there, falling asleep. So let’s go through our timeline. One thing that has been added is the Tribulation. What is a good motion for the Tribulation?
Martin Davis put this together based on what I’d been doing and the first thing that came to our minds when we thought of the tribulation was seven years. Another idea is the number 666 on your forehead because that’s going to happen. So we could point to our forehead. Tonight, though, we’ll just do seven for the seven years of the Tribulation.
All right, creation, fall, flood, Tower of Babel, then you have the call of Abraham, and then you have the exodus. Then they, after they leave Egypt, they go to Mount Sinai where they get the law, and we used the ten for the Ten Commandments, and then there’s a conquest of the land, and then they establish the kingdom. And then you have, after there is the revolt and the split between the northern kingdom of Israel and southern kingdom of Judah, then both are taken out into exile, and then there is a partial return.
Then we get to the New Testament, and that begins with the birth of the promised and prophesied Messiah. You have the birth of the Messiah, and then He is crucified, and He’s buried, and then He rises from the dead, and then there’s the ascension to Heaven. Then He sends the Holy Spirit, and you have the establishment of the church, and we’re in the Church Age.
The Church Age ends when Jesus returns in the Rapture and we’re taken to Heaven, and that’s followed by the seven years of tribulation. Then Jesus returns to the earth, and then He establishes His Kingdom. After a thousand years, there will be a revolt and then the Great White Throne Judgment, and that brings us to the end of the timeline. You’ve just gone through the whole Bible, so you can sit down now.
Slide 4
We’ve gone through four lessons now, and what we’ve seen in lesson one was God’s Creation and the divine institutions. We came to understand the Creator-creature distinction and the creation of the three divine institutions. Responsible choice, number one; marriage, number two; and family, number three.
The second lesson focused on wrong views, the pagan views of Creation, and how pagan views always have either matter or gas or something like that that is impersonal and is eternal. It’s just there by chance. In the ancient world, they had the various gods, and usually one god got hacked up, And the body parts were used to create the material or physical universe. Today, the pagan worldview is based on evolution, that time plus chance equals complexity, which is absurd if you understand the laws of probability.
The third lesson looked at what happened to the world as a result of the Fall—what sin did to the world. Sin isn’t just something spiritual. Sin has a physical impact. If you’re getting over 50 or over 60 or over 70, you ought to be fully aware of that. We live in a corrupt world, and it’s affected not just the spiritual. A lot of people think sin is just a spiritual thing. No, sin has had an impact. We’ll develop this some more later on tonight, but sin has a physical impact. It affected human beings, it affected the physical universe, and it affects the divine institutions.
Lesson four looked at the three responses to the modern pagan worldview of evolution and saw how two of the views were compromises with the pagan worldview. These had really negative effects on our understanding of the Scripture.
Slide 5
In this lesson, we’re going to develop a little more. It’s not in the curriculum that the Kwoks put together, but we need to add some good information in teaching kids about the angelic revolt. Because we start seeing this more in Genesis 6, I felt like this was the appropriate place to develop it. You can’t just teach everything within the framework of the first couple of chapters of Genesis. So we’re going to see this as it develops with the sons of God.
Let’s talk about the creation and the angelic revolt. Now, we’ve already touched on this to some degree so it’s important to talk about this. There are two basic intelligent creatures that God has created. The first are the angels, and they are created before Genesis 1. They are present when God creates the earth. We know that from Job 38:4 and 7.
At this point, God has condescended to show up and have a one-sided conversation with Job in order to show Job just how limited his understanding is, how limited his knowledge is. God just began with a series of questions. This goes through Job chapters 38, 39, and 40. And it’s all designed to show Job that he can’t really understand any of these things that God has done.
God is pointing out that Job wouldn’t understand all that is happening to him even if He told Job. He didn’t have the capacity to handle all of that. In Job 38:4 you have a series of questions. We’ll skip verses 5 and 6 and go to verse 7 to continue the questions. God began saying, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”
When do you lay the foundations for something? If you’re going to build a house, when do you lay the foundation? That’s the first thing you do, and then everything fits together. So that is a metaphor because the earth doesn’t have the same kind of foundation that a house would have. But God is laying, creating those basic elements that make up our planet.
God is pointing out to Job that he wasn’t there when He, God, laid the foundations of the earth so what could his understanding be? God is referring to the fact that when He laid the foundation of the earth, the morning stars sang together. Now this just happens to be an aside for you. This actually means to sing. Sometimes in the Scripture, you have the angels saying something and it says they sang, but the original Greek or Hebrew says they said.
One example of that is in Luke 2, when the angels showed up to the shepherds out in shepherds’ field outside of Bethlehem and we sing every year “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”. No, they didn’t. The text says they said. They made a proclamation. They did not sing. But we give Charles Wesley a little poetic license there to say that.
All the morning stars sang together. So that’s a reference to angels, that there’s no division among the angels yet, they’re united, so there’s no fall yet among the angels. The Book of Job, which is probably written either at the same time that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, other people say maybe someone else wrote it.
Whenever it was, the events take place during the period of time when Abraham was older, probably Isaac is alive, but in that time frame. It’s probably the oldest book of the Bible. It’s identifying for us who the sons of God are. This is a phrase that’s used several times in chapters one and chapter two. And it tells us that these are the angels, the spirit beings.
Slide 6
The second thing we learn is that there was the greatest of these angels, who’s the most intelligent, the most capable, has the highest position over all of the angels, and is especially close to the throne of God. His name in the Hebrew was Helel Ben-Shachar, which means the bright and morning star. That was a reference to Venus.
In Latin, that was Lucifer. So that’s how we come to call this being Lucifer. But a good translation is shining star. He was bright. Remember in 1 Corinthians, we’re told that he appears as an angel of light. Well, that’s his basic nature. He doesn’t show up as the prince of darkness, all dark and with a pointy tail and fangs, and all of this other stuff he’s pictured as.
He looks like he’s just the greatest creature God ever created, and he was. It went to his head. He gave in to arrogance and self-absorption and wanted to be worshipped as God. He thought that even though he was a creature he could do everything that God did. That’s described in Isaiah 14:12–14 and Ezekiel 28:12–19.
Slide 7
His disobedience to God was the beginning of a revolution against the authority of God as the Creator of all of the angels. God gave all the angels a period of time to decide if they were going to be obedient and loyal to God, or if they were going to follow Lucifer (or Shining Star) in his revolt against God.
In Revelation 12:4 we’re told that his, and that refers to the previous verse which mentions the fiery red dragon who is Satan, his tail drew a third of the stars of Heaven. Again, there’s this metaphor of the stars that refers to the angels. A third of the angels that God had created, and there’s myriads of myriads, there’s an untold number, millions and millions of angels that God created, and a third of them joined Shining Star (or Lucifer) in his revolt. And that’s where that number is based.
Slide 8
Fourth thing that we see is that it is not specifically stated as such in Scripture, but there is the inference in several passages that Satan has challenged God’s verdict against Satan and the fallen angels. In Matthew 25:46 we are told that at the Judgment of the Sheep and the Goats, the judgment of the Gentiles who survived the Tribulation, that those who did not trust Christ as Savior are cast into the Lake of Fire, which was prepared for the devil and his angels.
The verb tense here is a perfect tense that indicates something that is completed action in the past. That means that at the time Jesus is speaking, He was saying that the Lake of Fire has already been created. It wasn’t created for human beings. It was created for Satan and his angels.
Those who will choose to follow Satan and his rebellion against God, whether it’s the fallen angels, also referred to as demons, whether it’s the fallen angels or unbelieving humanity, their destiny will be in the eternal Lake of Fire.
One question that is often thought is that if God has already created the Lake of Fire and the angels have already been judged by God, why aren’t they there? The Lake of Fire has been there for at least seven or eight thousand years. Why aren’t the fallen angels there? What has caused a delay in their punishment?
It is thought that Satan must have challenged the verdict like an appeal. Several people have developed this idea from the Scripture. One example is Donald Grey Barnhouse. He came up with the idea that there is some sort of trial going on based on the legal language used.
Also there was a Hebrew scholar by the name of Davidson who back in the mid-19th century had this idea. He believed that there must have been some sort of challenge to God to delay the execution of the punishment. It is often said that Satan must have challenged God’s justice and love. How can a just God and loving God send His creatures to eternity in the Lake of Fire?
God decided that He would give a demonstration to show why the punishment was so severe. Punishment should be somewhat comparable to the crime committed and should not be extreme. That’s the general idea here. It’s more complex, I believe, than what that simple sentence implies, because it begins this idea that sin is something, or disobedience to God is something, that is not very significant.
We think that way sometimes. I want you to think about this, and we’re going to develop this a little more as we go along. When Eve and then Adam sinned, they immediately felt the penalty of sin, which is spiritual separation from God. When God came looking for them, they ran and hid.
God began to spell out what was going to happen to the serpent. He tells the serpent that you’re going to be cursed more than—that’s a key phrase—more than the beasts of the field. That tells you that the beasts of the field, this judgment has already fallen on them. Something has happened to them.
Something has happened to the animals. Something happened to the plant world. Something happened to the planet itself. When Adam and Eve sinned, that changed. There was an instant change that occurred that just exploded and spread throughout the entire universe. Everything is affected by that sin. Sin corrupts things.
Part of what God is demonstrating is the sinfulness of sin. If you want to think about who did the most environmental damage, it wasn’t the human race. It wasn’t everybody since Adam and Eve, but it was what they decided. They did an incredible amount of damage that cannot be repaired by separating your paper from your plastic and making sure that everything goes to the right landfill. It cannot be changed by somehow cutting down on carbon CO2 production and keeping up with your carbon points and all of that. It can’t be fixed by any of the things that are often suggested and followed by the environmentalists.
Most of the time their solutions just make things worse. I remember, and I’m not the brightest bulb in the box, but I remember in the mid-70s when everybody decided we’re going to shift to plastic instead of paper, so we don’t cut down the rainforest. I was thinking, you can’t get rid of plastic. Plastic doesn’t break down. Paper breaks down and it’ll decompose, but this is crazy.
I was just up in New Jersey this last week, and I went to a Target, and they’ll sell you a bag for your stuff, a nice cloth bag for a buck and a half if you don’t come in with one. They don’t have any plastic or any paper to give anybody. We’ll see how that works. Since they make a little more money that way, it’s probably something that they’ll keep around for a while.
What we see is that the damage done by sin is more than just separation from God, alienation from the life of God, as Ephesians 4:18 puts it. It is much more than that.
Slide 9
What Satan is challenging is really every attribute of God. He’s saying that God’s just not worthy to be the Creator. He’s not worthy to be the sovereign. He’s not worthy to do any of these things. Satan is saying that God is really basically cruel and wicked.
God is going to perform a demonstration with the human race, and in human history that the consequences of disobeying an omniscient, omnipotent Creator, thinking that you know more than an omniscient, omnipotent Creator, has horrific consequences.
Basically, that’s what human history demonstrates, that the consequences of even an innocuous act, such as eating a piece of fruit, if that is in violation of the command of the Creator, then it is that breach of authority, the breakdown of authority that reverberates and has brought about all of this damage.
What it’s showing is the creature does not have the capabilities because he’s never infinite in his knowledge or his abilities. He’s always finite. His act of independence is destructive. Only the omniscient, omnipotent Creator God has the knowledge and power to truly be in charge of His creation.
Slide 10
The sixth point here is, because He’s omniscient, because God is omniscient, He knows what is absolutely righteous. Because He is flawless in His being, He is absolutely righteous, He can only do that which is consistent with His righteousness. Therefore, His justice, which is the application of His righteousness to His creatures, is the standard of perfection, the standard of perfect righteousness.
Only God can make those righteous calls. Man cannot do it. No creature can do that because they do not have the knowledge necessary.
Slide 11
The seventh point is because God is also perfect love, and He is a unity in His being, the love must work consistently with His righteousness and His justice. They’re not in conflict with each other. We have a view of love that if you love, you’re going to be permissive. If you love somebody, you’re going to be permissive. You’re going to let them get away with what they want to get away with, and there’s not going to be any consequences.
We see where that has gone in a couple of generations that are alive today. Their parents did not discipline them. So, under this seventh point, because God is also perfect love, He knows that the consequences of disobedience are so destructive to His creatures that it would be unloving if those who disobeyed Him were not also punished.
The consequences of disobedience are so harsh and so bad that the loving thing is to punish the offender. The problem you have with so many people who are permissive and who do not want to have the full force of the law ever leveled against anybody is because they’re more concerned about the criminal than they are the victim. They believe the criminal has to have all of these rights, and then they just ignore the horrible things that have happened to the victim. They put the focus on the wrong thing.
Slide 12
The eighth point is our conclusion that human history is to demonstrate the sinfulness of sin. The sinfulness of sin. We treat sin too lightly many times in our own life and in the lives of others. It’s just not that bad, we say.
In reality what we see as a result of Eve’s disobedience is that every star, every planet, every molecule, every atom in the universe became corrupted because of that choice of rebellion. It led to the greatest environmental disaster that could ever occur. Nothing people think about today can even come close to matching it.
Slide 13
Sin had more than just a spiritual effect. Even the earth itself now, Scripture says, it groans under the judgment of the curse of sin. This is what we see in Romans 8:18–22. And I put 18 in here because that’s the heading of the paragraph. Paul is really talking about the fact that we live in a world where there is suffering.
Many people have suffered a thousand times more than any of us in this room will ever experience. They live in areas that are war-torn. They are poor economically, and they’re having to face their homes being burned to the ground and then they’ll be arrested and they’ll be tortured and all manner of vile things will be done to them before they are finally killed and their soul is released to go to Heaven.
Paul says about all of the suffering that we endure, the sufferings of this present time, are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. That is a powerful verse to think about, especially if you’re going through great difficulty right now. Whatever the suffering may be, when we are face to face with the Lord, we’re going to forget all about the most vile suffering we ever faced on this earth, because the glory that will be ours in Heaven with the Lord is going to be so incredible that whatever we suffered is going to pale in insignificance.
Paul goes on to say in verse 19, explaining the previous verse, “The earnest expectation of the creation”. See, he almost personifies the creation, the physical creation here. He says the Creation itself is suffering so much that it awaits the revealing of the sons of God. That’s a reference to when we are revealed, when we return with the Lord Jesus Christ at the end of the Tribulation, when He returns to the earth in glory and establishes His Kingdom, because the curse will be partially rolled back at that time.
Paul goes on to say, “For the creation was subjected to futility.” Futility means it’s just a waste. It’s subject to futility not willingly, but because of God who subjected it in hope. There’s a recognition that as beautiful as God’s Creation can be, it’s still flawed. It reminds us that there’s a perfection that we don’t have today.
Look at all those thorns and thistles. Just go out to Big Bend sometime or go out to Arizona and fall into one of those saguaro cacti and you will recognize that things are not what they ought to be. Paul goes on to say in verse 21, “Because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption,” that the physical universe is under the bondage of corruption.
It’s remarkable that the universe didn’t just fly apart at the seams. Charlie Clough said once that God created the universe in such a way that He built in enough flexibility to handle the corruption that sin would bring. Instead of the universe flying apart at the seams, God built into it the flexibility to handle what would come and the Creation itself is in the bondage of corruption.
In verse 22 we read, “For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now.” That describes the horror of what happened to the physical universe because of sin. This is the worst environmental disaster that could ever take place. It affected not just this planet, but everything. This shows the issue of sin and the sinfulness of sin.
Remember, I’m answering the question that Satan might have raised. How can You judge Your creatures in this way? It’s because that little act of eating a piece of fruit reverberates through everything that God made.
Slide 14
From there we go to the fact that we are observed by these angels, by both the elect angels, or the holy angels, which are the ones that remain loyal to God, and the fallen angels, who are sometimes referred to as demons. These are the ones who followed Satan in his revolt against God.
We see this referenced in passages like Job 1 and 2. Job 1:6 says, “Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them.” We see here that all of the angels still come together in a convocation before the throne of God because the demons have not been sent off to the Lake of Fire yet. There is a pause in the execution of their judgment.
In Job 2:1 we read, “Again, there was a day when the sons of God—the angels—came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them to present himself before the Lord.” In Job 2:2, “And the Lord said to Satan, ‘From where do you come?’ Satan answered the Lord and said, ‘From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking back and forth on it’.”
Slide 15
That imagery is picked up again in 1 Peter 5:8. Job occurred probably around 2000, 1800–2000 BC and Peter writes some 2,000 years later and says, “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion.”
He’s still cruising for victims. He’s out there like a roaring lion looking for whom he can devour, looking for victims like Job. Notice that he could only do things to Job that God gave him permission for. Satan’s not an autonomous agent as much as he would like to be. He’s limited by God’s sovereignty.
Slide 16
Then we have the elect, or the holy angels. And one of the things we learn from them is that they rejoice over each person that is saved. This is indicated in Luke 15:7 and 15:10. Jesus says, “I say to you that likewise there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents—who changes his mind and accepts the gospel—than over 99 just persons—or moral people—who need no repentance.” Luke 15:10 says, “Likewise, I say to you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
Slide 17
1 Timothy 3:16 says that Christ was watched by the angels, I’m not going to read the whole verse, but just that one point.
Slide 18
In 1 Corinthians 4:9, we’re told that we are watched by the angels. They’re observing us. They’re observing our walk with the Lord.
Paul says that God has displayed us. In the context he’s talking about the apostles, but it applies to all believers. “God has displayed us last as men condemned to death. For we have been made a spectacle to the world, both to angels and to men.” So angels are watching us.
Slide 19
Ephesians 3:10 says, we are to display the wisdom of God because angels are watching us. That now the manifold wisdom of God might be made known by the church to who? To the principalities and powers in the heavenly places.
We are an object of learning to the angels. They’re getting an education about God and how He deals with us by watching us.
Slide 20
This is what 1 Timothy 5:21 and 1 Peter 1:12 talk about. 1 Timothy 5:21 gives a charge to Timothy, “I charge you before God and the Lord Jesus Christ and the elect angels.”
We are given our charge before the elect angels who are watching us, “That you observe these things without prejudice, doing nothing with partiality.”
Slide 21
In 1 Peter 1:12, it says “To them it was revealed that, not to themselves but to us, they were ministering the things which now have been reported to you through those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things—that is the gospel—which angels desire to look into.”
It’s like the human race is in a huge coliseum and the angels are packing the stands and they’re observing us to learn about God, to learn about grace, to learn about all of the things that they can’t learn otherwise, because God didn’t create them to rule in the earth but as servants.
Slide 22
That brings me to point 10. The human race chose to disobey God in the period between Genesis 3 and Genesis 5. The human race, exercising the first divine institution and their responsible choice, increasingly chose to disobey God and pursue their own sinful desires. This was also enhanced by the activity of fallen angels.
This brings us to our opening to the Flood passage and the Flood narrative. In Genesis 6:1, Moses writes, “Now it came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born to them that the sons of God …” Who are the sons of God? These are angels. When we see what they did, we realize they’re fallen angels.
The verse goes on to say, “That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose.” Jude tells us a little bit more that they left their first estate. So in some way they were able to exchange their body of light for a mortal body. That would enable them to then reproduce.
This was part of a strategy by Satan in order to destroy the purity of the human race. We have to remember and go back to Genesis 3:15, that God told the woman that the seed of the serpent would strike the Seed of the woman on the heel, but the Seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent. So that verse tells us in Genesis 3:15 that the promised Deliverer, the One who would come, had to be 100% human.
Satan picks up on that, and he’s going to try to infiltrate and destroy the gene pool, the human gene pool, to destroy the purity of the human race so that it will prevent God from fulfilling the promise of having a descendant who is 100% human.
We just finished on Thursday nights going through a series on Christology, and the bottom line there was that Jesus had to be fully God and fully man to be able to be the Mediator between God and man and to pay the penalty for sin. He couldn’t be part human and part God. He had to be 100% God and 100% man.
Slide 23
What happens here is these angels, these fallen angels, are entering into human history, taking on mortal bodies so that they can impregnate the daughters of men, human women, and then the results of their union were half human, half angel. And these became the Nephilim.
Some people think that the term Nephilim is a technical term for them. I don’t think so. It comes, etymologically, from a word for those who are fallen. Later on you have the word Nephilim applied to some of the Canaanites. If everybody except for Noah’s family are killed in the Flood, then you don’t have any descendants of these Nephilim surviving the Flood.
Now there are some people who try to make that happen, and they’re just not thinking very clearly, although they’re very bright people. There were giants. Is “giant” a term that necessarily means half angel or half man? No. It’s just a generic term for somebody who’s large. So the word Nephilim just referred to fallen ones. It doesn’t have a connotation of half angel, half man. So there were these Nephilim and I translated that as monsters because that’s what they were, fallen monsters
When they, the sons of God, came into the daughters of men they bore children to them Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. They were referred to in various myths and legends that people had.
We’re familiar with the Romans and the Greeks and you have people like Hercules whose father was Zeus and whose mother was a human. And so you had a number of people who populated their pantheons who were half god and half man and this is a reference to that. They were men of renown.
The New Living Translation translates it “In those days, and for some time after, there were giant Nephilites.” Allen Ross, who was my Hebrew professor at Dallas [Theological Seminary], translates it this way. I thought that was nice that he didn’t use Nephilim, because these terms get so caught up in a lot of these discussions. He’s trying to say that this was just the name for these giants. They … lived on the earth, for whenever the sons of God had intercourse with women, they gave birth to children who became the heroes and famous warriors of ancient times.” I think this gets the main point across and is fairly accurate.
This was going on in this time period that lasted roughly 2,000 years from the time of the Creation of the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Adam up to the time of the Flood—a little bit less than 2,000 years, depending on a couple of factors, which I’ll go into in a minute.
Slide 24
The Lord responds to this. He sees. He’s watching. He’s not going to let evil just go on forever and ever. He will bring punishment. One of the principles we’re going to see is grace before judgment. It’s a period of grace that God gives, extending it so that those who could turn to God in salvation would have that opportunity.
At some point God said that His spirit would not strive with man forever. The word translated “strive” is only used one time in ancient Hebrew and that’s in this verse. Do we know what it means? Not really. You have a translation in the King James Version, which you’re probably most familiar with, that says, “My spirit shall not strive with man forever.”
The translators of the King James Version just took a stab at it based on their theological framework. Since then we know a lot more and there are other languages in the Middle East like Arabic and Accadian and Aramaic that are very, very close to Hebrew. They’re closer even than, let’s say, Spanish is to Italian.
You can see the same root in Aramaic or in Arabic and in these other cognate or related languages. It always has the meaning of remaining with or abiding with somebody or staying with somebody. So what we see here is a statement, “My spirit shall not abide with man forever.” And I don’t think this is a reference to the Holy Spirit.
Some people believe that, but I don’t think so. “God is spirit and those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and truth.” That’s what Jesus says in John 4. So I think this is just a reference. God is speaking of Himself, God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He continued to stay in the Garden after He kicks Adam and Eve out. He surrounded the Garden with an army of cherubs. Cherubim is the plural. He didn’t put one there or two there. He surrounded it so no human being could get into the Garden.
There’s no revelation, is there? There’s no Scripture. So how did people find out, how did Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, have conversations with God? Where did they have those? They would go to the entrance of the Garden of Eden, which is where God’s abode was on the earth, and that’s how they would get communication with God.
Then what happened? The earth becomes so sinful and rebellious that God said, “Okay, I’m leaving. I’m out of here.” And that’s when He begins to delegate things. What does He do after the Flood? He delegates government to man. Wasn’t there government before the Flood? Yes there was. God living in the Garden of Eden and all mankind was in rebelliousness.
We’d all like to flesh that out a lot more, but remember, we have about 1,800 years between the creation of man in the Garden and the Flood. And it’s covered in three chapters. And then in chapter four we have Cain and Abel. Then we have a genealogy where people are living for about 900 years.
You have as many as nine generations living together at the same time. The Earth’s population is going to be somewhere around 4 or 5 billion people [around the time of the Flood]. Think of what that would be like. It would be like going back to Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure and all of the medieval saints and to the middle kingdoms in China. All of those people would still be alive.
Can you imagine how populated China would be if they had seven or eight generations all living at the same time and Mao Zedong didn’t come along and murder millions of them? I mean, we’d all be overrun so there was a huge population on the earth.
Slide 25
The Lord says He’s not going to put up with this evil anymore. “My spirit will not abide with man forever, yet his days shall be a hundred and twenty years.” Now, there’s some debate over the meaning of that. It’s possible that it means that that He’s going to reduce their lifespan so they don’t have as long to be as evil. It’s going to be reduced from about 900 down to about 120. That’s what a lot of people think but the traditional interpretation of this is that God’s going to give mankind 120 years before He wipes him out, grace before judgment.
In verse 5, then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth. It wasn’t that just some of man’s thoughts were evil, but every thought was. He didn’t just have some days when he had really evil thoughts, but every intent of his heart was only evil continually. That is an extreme statement.
I don’t want you to spend too much time picturing this, but the last time you saw the news and they were picturing one of these really perverse LGBTQ parades back in June, that was going on all over the world all the time. God is just saying, you know, I’m done with it. So He’s grieved in His heart. These are anthropopathisms. God knew exactly what was happening.
Slide 26
Here’s a timeline on the first 10 generations. Adam lived to be 930 years of age. Now, this red line here marks pretty close to the end of Adam’s life. And then Seth, his son, is 912 years. Enos is 905. Kenan 910, Mahalaleel 895, Jared 962. See, this marks pretty much the end of Adam’s life. All of these generations are living at the same time.
Enoch, there was an earlier Enoch in the Cain’s line, and then Methuselah, and Lamech is born just before Adam dies. You’ve got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 generations alive at the same time. People wonder what these people knew about God. How would they know about sin? How would they know about God’s grace?
That’s easy. Adam and Eve are still there telling them about it. They’re still alive. And then Noah is born, you know, sometime later. Methuselah dies just before the global Flood comes and Lamech dies just before him.
Enoch never died. He walked with God and was not, the Scripture says. How enigmatic is that? He was so close to God, God just let him walk with Him right into Heaven. I remember reading a Ripley’s Believe It or Not, when I was about 13 or 14. It said the oldest man in the Bible died before his father did. Think about it. Methuselah is the oldest man in the Bible, but he died before Enoch did, because Enoch still hasn’t died. He just walked right into Heaven.
Then the Flood occurs about 1,656 years after Creation. That’s the timeline and history is going to march on. What we’re going to see is that as a result of this, God is going to bring judgment upon the earth because of all that man has done.
Slide 27
We read in Genesis 6:5–6, the Lord observed the extent of human wickedness on the earth and saw that everything they thought or imagined was consistently and totally evil. It was incredibly bad, worse than anything you can imagine now.
Slide 28
Romans 2:14–15 refers back to this same time period, recognizing what those verses were saying is that those generations before Noah, when they were left to their own conscience, they just became more and more evil.
Romans 2:14, referring generally back to history says that “when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the law,” there’s a sense of right and wrong. “These, although not having the law …—which is what happened before the Flood—show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness.”
They had a conscience. Adam and Eve before the fall had a conscience. That’s where the standards, the values of right and wrong were defined by God and what God told them. After they sinned the people just defined what was right and what was wrong. They were just doing whatever seemed right in their own minds, like during the period of the judges later on, and also during the period under Manasseh, the king of Judah, who was so evil.
In Jeremiah 15:15–16 the indictment against that generation was that they just did whatever their heart thought was right. Same idea as what’s going on in Judges.
Slide 29
God’s going to bring a judgment. It’s a worldwide judgment. He’s going to reboot humanity—hit the restart button.
He is going to completely destroy everything on the face of the earth, every living creature that is above the oceans. The sea creatures were not killed. But every breathing animal on the surface of the earth and every human being except for a small number that are going to be rescued and preserved in Noah’s ark.
God, in His wisdom, designs it in such a way that all of the genetic material is going to be on the ark for human beings and for all of the families of animals. It’s the word “kind”, which we will see next week, is a word that probably has a broader meaning, much broader meaning than species, probably on the order of family.
In Genesis 7:21 we read, that all flesh died that moved on the earth. This included birds and cattle and beasts and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. What we’re going to see is a worldwide flood that drowns and buries all of these animals.
What do we see in these fossil beds? You know, tens of thousands of dead creatures who were packed in mud. That’s exactly what we see. And so Genesis 7:22 says, “All in whose nostril was the breath of the spirit of life, all that was on the dry land died”. So God destroyed all living things which were on the face of the earth, both man and cattle, creeping thing and bird of the air. They were destroyed from the earth.
Slide 30
Only Noah and those who were with him in the ark remained alive. Why is Noah so special? Genesis 6:8–9, “But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.” It’s God’s grace. We learn in Peter that Noah was a preacher of righteousness. He was a believer like Abraham. He had believed God and God had imputed righteousness to him.
Then we’re told this is the genealogy of Noah. Noah was a just man. He’s righteous because it was imputed to him. Noah walked with God. So there are five lessons we’re going to learn, and we’ll look at each of these next time. We’ll just summarize these to begin. There are five lessons coming out of the Flood.
Slide 31
Number one, God gives grace before judgment. He just doesn’t say He’s fed up with them and then brings judgment. We see this pattern all the way through Scripture. God extends grace to those He is going to judge, warning them and warning them and warning them until finally He is going to bring judgment. There was about a 120-year grace period. Enoch, a great grandfather to Noah, warned them.
Second, there’s a decision as to who to save and who to judge. Those who are saved are those in the ark, those who trusted God, those who believed God. Those who are outside the ark were judged and condemned.
Third, we see that there’s only one way of salvation, and that’s the ark. And there’s only one way to enter the ark, and that’s through the door that God provided. God always has only one way. It’s God’s way or the highway.
That’s the problem with Satan and then Adam and Eve. It’s called authority orientation. People who can’t listen and cannot respond to an authority who tells them what to do lack humility. If you lack humility, you’ll always have trouble in your life.
Fourth, the world changed. The global flood changed the whole world. Everything, the world that then was, Peter says, perished. You can’t find where the Garden of Eden was today. You can’t find where those four rivers were today. You can’t find anything that existed prior to the Flood.
I’m going to finish with this. We have these views of the Flood from children’s books that are just so inadequate. The Flood was horrific. It scared people. It was frightening. You think you would get scared if you were out of your house during Hurricane Harvey. What was happening during the time of the Flood was on a scale that we cannot imagine.
Here is a two-minute video that is based on an animation of what was taking place geologically with the plate tectonics at that time. It’s just fascinating to watch this and to imagine what it must have been like to be alive on land.
Noah's Flood and Catastrophic Plate Tectonics by Genesis Apologetics [this is the short version.]
The fountains of the deep open, and then the windows of heaven burst forth. The fountains of the deep burst forth, the windows of heaven open. This would have produced earthquakes that were probably a hundred times more violent than anything we would experience today. There were volcanoes everywhere. After that you would have enormous tsunamis.
This is only a two-minute video. I think there’s an hour-long video that’s been put together on this that you ought to watch. Show it to your kids. So often, the way you see Noah’s Ark portrayed, it’s minimized. And it’s just, you know, a little bitty boat. You have the giraffe with his head sticking out and the elephants looking out this way.
This minimalizes and trivializes this massive judgment that destroyed millions, maybe billions, of people on the face of the planet at that time. We’ll come back next time and get into more of the details of the Flood.
Closing Prayer
“Father, thank You for this opportunity to study these things, to be reminded that we are indeed in the midst of a spiritual warfare that is a warfare energized by Satan and his revolt against You. We know from Scripture that we play a role in that angelic revolt as witnesses for the prosecution, witnesses for You as to Your grace and Your goodness.
“Father, we pray that You would remind us of those things and also remind us that there is accountability in our lives. As the world just seems out of control, we know there will be a time when you will bring judgment. That judgment when it comes will be severe and will be horrific.
“We’re just thankful that we as members of the church will not live to see that, though it may get pretty bad before the Rapture occurs. Father, we pray that we might be strengthened by our study of Your Word, knowing its accuracy, and knowing its truthfulness. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”
