10. The Roots of the Kingdom: The Pathology of Sin
Genesis 6:1-7
In the Journal of Nuclear Medicine, Dr. Johannes Schwartz, and a team of Canadian and German researchers recently published the results of an experiment they conducted over a 7 year period among Parkinson’s sufferers. It reveals that they have developed a technique that enables scientists to monitor the progression of Parkinson’s disease. The study shows that as the disease progresses dopamine transporters in the brain are affected proportionately. Measuring the loss of dopamine transporters becomes what Dr. Schwartz calls “a biomarker of disease progression.”
In other words by measuring this effect in the brain scientists can tell what stage of development the disease is at with much greater accuracy. The reason that is important is that it will enable doctors to understand the disease with great precision as it develops in someone’s brain and tailor treatment specifically for their case.
Says, Schwartz, “It gives us quantifiable data that can then be used to devise a general treatment methodology and to assess an individual patient's status and tailor treatment to his or her specific needs."
Now this evening we are looking at the opening section of Genesis 6, as we continue our study of the book of Genesis. And in many ways what we have here in this chapter is something like Dr. Schwartz’s discovery. It is a marker, an index, a measuring mechanism, that is designed to chart the progress of the universal disease scripture calls sin, and show us its consequences. Genesis 6 is a description of the pathology of sin in the human race.
But just as with Dr. Schwartz’s technique, this is a chapter designed to aid the treatment of the condition. Genesis 6 is a warning passage that is there to let us see the reality and pervasive power of sin and its consequences so that we might flee to God for the precise and specific treatment he has provided in Jesus Christ.
And I want us to look at this fascinating chapter with that basic purpose in mind. There are some difficult passages in this chapter dealing with the identity of ‘the sons of God’ and the identity of people called the ‘Nephilim’ for example, but as we discuss those together lets keep in mind what this section of the chapter is designed to do. It is trying to show us what sin does and what God does in response to sin. And it is trying to make us flee to God in Christ for the antidote.
And I simply want us to look at those two things together this evening; first, what sin does. To continue the medical metaphor, what is the pathology of sin in the human race? And then secondly, what God does in response; how does he react to sins spreading presence here?
First of all then let’s look at the pathology of Sin. What sin does.
And here we need to note first of all the two characteristic sins of the Genesis 6 generation.
First of all in verses 1-3we read of the intermarriage of “the sons of God” with “the daughters of men”.
And before we spend a few moments wrestling with what that means exactly we should recognise that there is a basic theme that has been repeating again and again from the very beginning, a Satanic strategy, or to resort once more to our medical metaphor, this disease has a pattern that all its several mutations follow.
It attacks the family. It undermines marriage. It distorts, and it perverts and it debases the basic building blocks of the Kingdom of God. God has designed his covenant people, as we saw last week, to function in a family-centred structure. At the heart of that family structure are the covenant bonds of marriage, which mirror the covenant bonds of God’s loving union with us in his covenant of grace. Marriage has always been fundamental to the programme of God for the fulfilment of his covenant purpose in the world.
In the beginning he commissioned Adam and Eve to ‘be fruitful and multiply’, ‘fill the earth and subdue it’. ‘Rule over the creatures’. Make it your own. Extend Eden’s borders. Build the covenant kingdom. But sin came. Eve listened to the Serpent’s insinuations. The fall occurred, and marriage came under direct assault. Adam relinquished his role as head of the home, and submitted to Eve’s temptation to sin, ‘just one bite, husband...’ And when they are caught red-handed, Adam blames Eve. Eve passes the buck and blames the Serpent. And God himself indicates in the words of the curse that their sin’s consequences condemn them to marital strife and tension, “your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you”, i.e. you will want to dominate him, and he will frustrate your plans.
Then in Genesis 4 we see the same thing. Lamech cannot content himself with just one wife, and remember that he chooses them, if their names are any indication, for their physical attributes, not because they are ‘a helper suitable for him’. And now here in Chapter 6 we are seeing another mutation in the pathology of sin, another variation in the life cycle of this spiritual disease. Marriage remains under attack.
But how so? Who are these Sons of God and daughters of men? What exactly is going on here?
Well there are three major interpretations of this passage held by equally credible evangelical scholars, and I want to look at them briefly for a moment.
I. The first view argues that the Sons of God here are angels, or more specifically fallen angels, or demons. This view builds on the fact that the only other time the precise phrase “sons of God” is used in the Old Testament is in Job (1:6; 2:1; 38:7) and in Daniel (3:25). In both cases the phrase refers to Angels. Also this view appeals to Jude 6 which speaks of “the angels who did not keep to their positions of authority, but abandoned their own home..” and they see this passage as a reference to Genesis 6 and the sin of the angels intermarrying with the daughters of men.
Now in response it should be said that so far Genesis has nowhere made mention of angels in the text. The ‘sons of God’ are not really introduced to us here, their identity is simply assumed, as part of the existing narrative, as though they already had appeared in these opening chapters. And secondly we should recognise that while the exact phrase “sons of God” appears in the OT with reference only to angels, nevertheless the idea appears throughout the Old Testament in connection with God’s people, Israel, (Exodus 4:22, 23; Deut. 14:1; 32:5-6; Psalm 73:15; 82:6; Hosea 1:10; Malachi 1:6). Finally, Jesus himself expressly tells us that at the resurrection, people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven (Matt. 22:30). Angels don’t marry the daughters of men, they are in heaven, they don’t have bodies of flesh and blood, they certainly don’t have children.
II. The second interpretation comes from Meredith G Kline, a reformed OT scholar who has noted that in ancient near eastern texts Kings and princes, the royal line, were given the title and regarded as being ‘gods’. Kline argues that what we have in this text is the beginnings of royal polygamy. It is the sin of Lamech carried to the ‘nth’ degree.
But against this interpretation is the fact that it is almost completely original to Kline, and it depends entirely on sources outside of scripture for its authority. Furthermore, there is no sense that polygamy was the problem here. It was not that the sons of God had multiple wives that was so offensive to God, (though that would doubtless have been the case if it were so). It was who they married that angered God! Not how many but which wives, is the issue in this passage.
III. Then there’s the third interpretation which sees the Sons of God as a title for the Sethites. The daughters of men are the daughters of the line of Cain. The sin in view here is the intermarriage of the godly line of covenant promise with the line of unbelieving Cain. It is, to use Paul’s language, believers unequally yoked with unbelievers, that forms the grounds for the wrath of God on that generation.
And that view does seem to make best sense of the text, especially when we recall chapter 4:26 where we saw that the phrase ‘men began to call on the name of the Lord’ can also mean ‘men began to call themselves by the name of the Lord’. There were those in this ancient culture who were adopted into the covenant community, who had taken the Name of God as their name, who were ‘sons of God’ and bore his name.
Throughout this section of Genesis we have been confronted with two groups: the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman; Cain and Abel; Cainites and Sethites. And so it makes sense that we have the same two groups represented once again here the Sons of God and daughters of men.
Fundamentally then what was going on was the intemarriage of the covenant people of God, with ungodly daughters from the City of Cain.
How the mighty have fallen! Remember this is the same generation we looked at last week! These three chapters, Genesis 4,5 and 6, all overlap in the history they relate. Cainites, in their city of men, and Sethites, with their devotion to the Lord, are both here. The godly line that produced Enoch who went to be with the Lord, and the Sethite Lamech who yearned for the deliverance of God’s Messiah, the ones known as having been named with the name of the Lord, who call on the name of the lord, are here, openly eying up Cainite women.
These beauties were sophisticated citizens of the Cainite civilisation and the Sons of God, we are told, married any of them they chose, verse 2. It seems that the world was eager for the godly to join them in their ways, happy that Cainites and Sethites were finally coming together, that a little compromise had finally been realised. After all who can stand in the way of the heart? If these young folk want to marry surely that is a good thing? Maybe some of the Sethites will win the Cainite women to the Lord!
But then the Lord said, “My spirit will not strive or better, my spirit will not remain with man forever” I cant stand this. I won’t abide it any longer. I will not allow those who name my name to drag my honour through the mud of their own lusts. I will not remain with men forever.
God abominates it, he hates it when men and women wilfully choose to join themselves to those who reject his rule and refuse his grace. Citizens of the heavenly city, members of the covenant people, sons and daughters of Seth, have no business marrying citizens of the city of man, the seed of the serpent.
“Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? What agreement between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God.” 2 Cor. 6:14-16
It is hard to be single and committed to life God’s way when you are alone and made for partnership, love and sexual intimacy. We are made to be with a partner of the opposite sex, and when there are not that many Christian men or women of godly character around the temptation to sin is great and I don’t want to minimize that at all. The pressure is real and it is often very painful to be faithful in this area. It costs to keep covenant with God. It might mean being alone and single when love and intimacy beckons.
And frankly, the kind of pressure that is sometimes exerted by older believers on single Christians to ‘find someone and settle down’, all that match making, and those not so subtle hints that ‘its about time that you got a man or found a wife’, those comments actually end up serving the Enemie’s ends, by making the difficult task of obedience all the more painful for those without partners holding out for the right man or right woman in God’s time.
All of that is true, and we must pray and support and stand alongside believing brothers and sisters who remain single. But that said, the temptation to bend the commands of God, to rationalise it away, to justify disobedience and pretend that we are evangelising, to kid ourselves that we are not really straying from the will of God, by going out with, by getting serious over, by getting engaged to, by marrying, an unbeliever, remains a temptation we must resist at all costs.
And sin does not stop at the undermining of the covenant line in Genesis 6. Verse 11 tells us that the earth was corrupt and full of violence. Probably the Nephilim mentioned in verse 4 were leaders of the violence that came to dominate the world. The NIV leaves the name untranslated because it’s notoriously difficult to know exactly what is meant. But probably something along the lines of ‘mighty man’, or ‘man of valour’ is meant. These are great ones. They were as the text says, the ‘heroes of old, men of renown’. They were warriors, powerful fighters, who some suggest led a wave of terror and violence in the ancient pre flood world. We don’t know, but violence was everywhere.
The twin obsessions of Lamech, of Cain’s citizens, have become the dominant obsessions of society in general, whether Sethite or Cainite. Violence and lust, death and adultery, the end of marriage and the end of society, describes the culture before the flood.
Sin spreads and it distorts and it labours all the time to cause the people of God to apostatise, to compromise and to fall away.
And I think one of the lessons to be learned here is that we must be on our guard, we must be aware that sin has a universal tendency to mutate and develop and spread, and as it does, all the while it seeks your spiritual death. It labours to destroy our witness. It is working to render the people of God and the people of the world into one amorphous and indistinct whole. It wants to reduce God covenant people to a group differing in no respect from the world whatsoever. It wants to leave us without clear values, without moral absolutes, without God. Satan has a strategy. And we need to be aware of that, and ensure that we are clothed with God’s provision for such an onslaught. We need to live out Ephesians 6:10-18, clothing ourselves in the whole armour of God so that we can take our stand against the devil’s schemes.
The compromise and violence, the worldliness that marked the Genesis 6 generation was not a disease that is unique to the ungodly only. This was the same generation as Enoch and Lamech and Noah. This was s generation of great giants of godliness and moral purity. The church of the Sethites was remarkable for its godliness, and remarkable for its utter compromise. It came upon the holy ones as well as the pagans, Sethites as well as Cainites. Your pedigree, your privileges, your covenant membership are no guarantees against apostasy! Be on your guard your enemy the devil prowls around as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.
So sin is a deadly spreading disease that targets the people of God and seeks to utterly compromise their lives and testimonies and bring them under judgement.
And it is to that judgement we must now turn in verses 3-8.
And notice that there are patterns that are being repeated here, a repetition of themes Specifically there are two cycles of judgement in these verses and I want to look briefly at the lessons they can teach us.
The first judgement cycle is there in verses 2-3 and breaks down like this:
The sons of God saw the daughters of men vs. 2, and sinned by taking them as their wives, and in verse 3a God responds to their sin by withdrawing his spirit. Then, verse 3b, God judges, and his judgement relates to death. God says, “Man is mortal”, or alternatively “man is morally corrupted, his days will be a hundred and twenty years”. Now that time reference could relate to the lifespan of the race being deliberately capped at 120 years old, although several of the patriarchs lived longer. Or it could relate to the time remaining to that generation until the coming flood judgement fell. Either way God’s words here are words of judgement that indicate that death remains the wages of sin.
Now look at verses 5-7 and see that same structure repeated in the second judgement cycle, beginning at verse 5, with a direct echo of verse 2. Just as the sons of God saw and sinned, so now God saw their sin, and, verse 6, God responds, this time by expressing the grief and pain lying behind the withdrawal of his Spirit in verse 3. Then in verse 7 God judges, and again his judgement relates to death. God says, “I will wipe mankind whom I have created from the face of the earth…for I am grieved that I made them”.
Clearly the first cycle in verse 2-3 is there to anticipate and prepare us for the second larger cycle in verses 5-7. The themes repeat in both but their force and emphasis grows. Now, we have already noted how the cycle of sin has been repeated repeated in these early chapter: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Cain’s city and Lamech, and now the Sons of God and the daughters of men. And we saw that there is a growing seriousness and perversity to each new cycle of sin in each new generation. Well, now it would appear that these two cycles dealing with God’s response mirror that pattern. The more severe the sin the more severe the judgement, as sin grows so too does the anger of God.
And there are different themes that get repeated in these two cycles of wrath.
The first theme is that all of life is to be lived ‘Coram Deo’, before the face of God. God saw. God saw the sons of God seeing the daughters of Men! He saw them cross the line. He saw them sin, and break his covenant. There is no escaping the relentless gaze of God. As the Risen Christ says in the seven letters to the churches of Revelation “I know your deeds”.
Do you exist as though your every action, and every thought, was transparent to God? Do you strive to think and speak and act conscious of the fact that you are ‘Coram Deo’, before the face of God, all the time?
It is an awesome thing to realise that this idea of God seeing all things is set in Genesis 6 against the backdrop of wrath and judgement. It is God’s perfect, encyclopaedic knowledge of your habits and actions and thoughts, that will provide all the evidence he needs to condemn you to a lost eternity when Judgment comes, unless… unless through faith in Jesus Christ, like Noah in verse 8, you find favour in the sight of the LORD.
God can view you two ways. He can look at you as you are, in your sin and fallenness and guilt. Or he can look at you through the lens of Jesus Christ and no longer see you sin because it has been hidden by Christ’s perfect law keeping, no longer see you covenant breaking because it is hidden under Christ’s perfect obedience. It is faith in Jesus Christ that hides you from God’s un-mediated gaze.
Who are you in God’s sight? Are you seen in all your sin, one of a generation facing the wrath of God? Or are you looked upon with favour in the eyes of God, because you keep covenant with the Lord by faith in Jesus Christ the seed of the woman?
The second theme is that God can withdraw his spirit-presence from his covenant people. verse 2, “My Spirit will not contend or beter remain with man forever for he is mortal, or corrupted.” My Spirit will not remain with these people who are utterly corrupted.
It is possible to be named with the name of God, to be called a ‘son of God’, to be called ‘Christian’, and not be saved in the end! It is possible, as the writer to the Hebrews puts it in Hebrews 6:4-6, “to have been enlightened, to have tasted the heavenly gift, to have shared in the Holy Spirit, to have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age”, it is possible to have all these things, to be called a Son of God, and fall away, and turn back, and have the Spirit withdrawn, and have God destroy you in the flood of his wrath.
External membership in the covenant people is not enough, the general influences of the presence of God by his Spirit among his church is not enough.
Unless your being a son of God outwardly, by virtue of your covenant membership in the people of God, corresponds to being a son of God inwardly, unless you are a son of God by faith in God the son, you cannot hope for salvation.
Let the call of 2 Peter 1:10 teach how we should respond to this text: “Therefore my brothers, be all the more eager to make your calling and election sure. For if you do these things you will never fall, and you will receive a rich welcome into the eternal Kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.”
Or again, let Paul teach us what to do in Philippians 2:12, “Therefore my dear friends, as you have always obeyed – not only in my presence but now much more in my absence- continue to work out your salvation with far and trembling for it is God who works in you to will and to do according to his good purpose.”
These sons of God did not persevere to the end. They did not work out their salvation. They did not make their calling and election sure. Will you? Are you a son of God by external covenant privilege only or are you a son of God by faith in the Son of God out Lord Jesus Christ? There is no other antidote to the wrath of God than this. There is no other way of security for time and eternity than this. Trust in Christ the Son yourself from the heart and you will keep covenant with him and like Noah in verse 8, in the face of wholesale defection and compromise, you will find favour in the eyes of the Lord.
Sin mutates and grows and develops and aims at our destruction. God’s wrath burns as he sees it all. He may withdraw his spirit, he may wipe the earth clean of us, sons of God or not, covenant members or not. But if we are found clinging to the promised seed of the woman, the Lord Jesus by faith alone, if we are sons of God by trusting in God the Son, then like Noah we will survive the deluge when it comes.
Amen