Gen 6:1–8 — The Deepening Corruption of Mankind

The title of today’s sermon is “The Deepening Corruption of Mankind.” This is a very difficult passage. This is a passage that has caused a lot of discussion and controversy in the church. The language itself in Hebrew is vague. There are numerous Hebrew words and phrases that are uncertain and occur only once in the Hebrew Bible. And so it is very tempting for people to begin to speculate and to go off into all kinds of bizarre ideas to try to understand what is being said here in this text.

And so I would like to simply remind you of Paul’s warning that he gives in the pastoral epistles. On several occasions, the apostle Paul says, beware of myths and endless genealogies which do not promote godliness, but only promote division and speculation. And so you need to be careful and reserved and cautious as we approach this text. It is even possible, we do not know for sure, but it is possible that this may have been one of the myths that Paul was referring to, not this passage, but the speculations that arose from this passage. And so we need to be careful and godly and sober in our handling of God’s word.

Three Interpretations

There are a number of different interpretations of this passage, but there are three main views, three main approaches to it. I am going to go through each of those and defend what I think is the best view. But I am not going to say that it is absolutely the correct view. I think no one can say that for sure, but I will give my best attempt at doing that.

The Supernatural View

The first main view of this passage is called the supernatural view. The supernatural view is that this text could be interpreted as saying that the angels sinned by descending to earth, having intercourse with human females, and giving birth to the giants, to the Nephilim. The reason why some people think that the Nephilim here are giants is because later on in the Bible, in Numbers 13:33, this word Nephilim occurs again, and there it is in the context of the people of Israel about to go into the land, and the spies came back, some of them with a negative report, saying, we look like grasshoppers in the eyes of the inhabitants of the land. And it mentions the Nephilim in that context. And so some people have said, well, because of that passage later in Numbers, the Nephilim here must be the same. That is, they must be giants.

This view, this supernatural view of this passage is the oldest view. It goes back to early Jewish interpretation several hundred years before Christ. There is a Jewish writing called First Enoch that contains some of these Jewish interpretive speculations where it goes into great detail about who these angels were and what they did and how they came to earth and they taught forbidden knowledge like sorcery to mankind. And that this was what led to the corruption of mankind that triggered the flood.

This Jewish interpretation, which is kind of mythological and speculative, really getting into angelology and demonology, angels and demons, much more than the Old Testament itself goes into. But they say that when the giants died, the giants were the offspring of the angels who sinned with human females. That when the giants died that their spirits went forth from their bodies and that is the origin of demons, the evil spirits that go around and corrupt the earth and corrupt mankind with idolatry.

As I said, this is the oldest view, and it does have a certain degree of credibility to it because it is so ancient. But as you can see, these view goes beyond what the text explicitly says—tying in the Nephilim here with the Nephilim in the Book of Numbers, which is much later after the flood. That is speculative. It also goes beyond the text to say that these angels literally had intercourse with women. That is a little bizarre. So all of these things are expansions upon the text. You can see where they got it from. You can see that there is perhaps something in the text that might lead to those ideas, but they are filling in with greater detail than the text itself actually says.

The primary problem with the supernatural view is that angels, by their very nature, are incorporeal. That means that they do not have bodies. Angels are spirits. And so this idea of angels somehow having intercourse with women, sounds a little bit odd, does it not? It actually sounds like pagan mythology. If you remember from your study of the Greek and Roman myths, the gods like Zeus would come down and have intercourse with women, and then the offspring were these heroes like Hercules, these almost semi-divine beings that were human, but partly divine, and so they had all this tremendous power.

The supernatural interpretation has this fundamental problem with it, which is that it violates a fundamental teaching of scripture that angels are incorporeal. Furthermore, Jesus himself confirms this, that angels are incorporeal, when he says in Matthew 22:30, that the angels neither marry nor are given in marriage. So how could we have angels here marrying women and producing offspring? This objection to the supernatural view was raised by many of the church fathers, such as Chrysostom and Augustine. Their critique became standard in church history.

The Sethite View

And so the second major view was developed to respond to the supernatural view and to provide an answer to this bizarre theory of angelic intercourse. It is called the Sethite view. The Sethite view is that the sons of God in our text are not referring to angels or divine beings, but rather is simply another term for the people of God who are part of the Sethite line.

Remember in the previous chapter, in Genesis chapter five, it describes the line of Seth. Adam gave birth to Seth, and then Seth gave birth to Enoch and so on, and all of these men here, this genealogy is describing the godly line as distinct from the line of Cain in chapter four, who are apostate and are full of violence and sin, but the godly line of the Sethites in Genesis chapter five that includes great godly men like Enoch. Who walked with God and he was taken directly into heaven, or a godly man like Lamech, who believed in the promise of the offspring to come back in Genesis 3:15.

And so when he gave birth to his son Noah, he said, this is the one who is going to bring us relief from the curse that God has placed upon mankind. And so the Sethite view is that the sons of God are the later descendants of the godly Sethite line who intermarried with the women from the Cainite line. And so this is talking about the sin of those that were supposed to be the godly covenant community, but who are beginning to lose their covenant distinctiveness and we are beginning to mix with the ungodly line. So when it says there that the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive and they took as wives any that they chose, it is saying that some of the later descendants of the godly Sethite line began to lose their fervor and their commitment to God and they began to intermarry with men or with women from the Cainite line.

In support of this view is the fact that this language there, where it says they saw that the daughters of men were attractive and they took as their wives, this language of seeing the beauty and then taking a wife, this is very common language. It is ordinary human language. It is found throughout the Bible, throughout the Old Testament, to refer to ordinary human marriage. It does not have anything to do with some kind of angelic intercourse. It is just an ordinary term. Somebody sees a beautiful woman and takes her as his wife. That is just a common, ordinary thing.

The problem with what the Sethites did was that they took from among the Cainite line. They took any whom they chose, rather than making sure that they were following the distinctive covenant pattern that God desired for them.

This view, the Sethite view, is great because it avoids this bizarre idea of angelic intercourse. And it answers the question of how can angels who are incorporeal, how can they engage in this bizarre concept? And it also fits in neatly with the previous context in chapter five, which describes the line of Seth, which is the godly line.

This has been the mainstream view for most of church history. As I mentioned, Augustine, also the reformers, universally held to this view. This is the standard view. However, this Sethite view, although it is very attractive because it avoids the bizarre idea of the supernatural view, and although it does seem to fit the context because of the description of the godly line of Seth in chapter five just before, Although it has these attractive features to it, and although it is the mainstream view of church history, it does have some difficulties to it. It has some problems as well.

The number one difficulty of the Sethite view is that this title, the Sons of God, consistently is used in the Old Testament to refer to angels. It is found three times in the Book of Job, Remember that, remember in the book of Job at the very beginning where it says that there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord and Satan also was among them? That is Job chapter one, verse six. So it is clearly talking about some kind of supernatural divine being. The sons of God are angels.

It is found three times, this phrase, the sons of God, is found three times in the book of Job. It is found three times in the Psalms. And it is also found in the Pentateuch. There are the two verses here in our text, but then also later on in Deuteronomy 32 verse eight. It also occurs there. So in all of these cases, this term, the sons of God, is referring to supernatural beings.

In addition, we have the fact that in the New Testament, we have a couple of very brief references to this idea of the angels who sinned. That is in 2 Peter 2, verse four, and Jude, verse six, and possibly another parallel in 1 Peter 3, 19 and 20. And they are very brief. These New Testament references are very cryptic. It is not really clear if they are even referring to this passage here. But it does talk about the angels who sinned. And so it makes you wonder, maybe there is some truth to the supernatural view.

In fact, the one in 1 Peter 3, 19-20 ties it to the flood. It says, this happened in the days of Noah. So that provides another indicator that maybe there is something to the supernatural view. Although the New Testament does not go into all the mythological aspects and the details of angelic intercourse and giants and all that, it just simply mentions very briefly the angels that sinned. And the one in Jude, in Jude 6, it even says that the angels did not keep their own domain, but left their proper dwelling. What is their proper dwelling? Heaven.

Going all the way back to the very beginning of the Bible, the Bible has a two-layer cosmology in which the world is composed of two parts, heaven and earth. Heaven is the invisible realm where God and the angels live, and the earth is the visible world that we see around us. And so the Bible has a two-layer cosmology. There is heaven, where the angels are, and there is the earth. And so Jude 6 seems to be saying that the sin that the angels committed was they left their proper domain, heaven, and they came down to earth, and they transgressed this boundary between heaven and earth, and they sinned in some way.

That brings us then back, so now we are kind of going back to the supernatural view. But what do we do with this weird, bizarre idea of angelic intercourse?

The Divine Kingship View

So there is a third view, and this is the view that I think is the best. I am not saying that it is absolutely true. I could be wrong. But this is a view that many scholars hold to today. This view is called the divine kingship view. Divine kingship. In the ancient Near East, many of the kings, many of the pagan kings, the Babylonians and so on, the Sumerians, they claimed to be gods. They claimed to be divine. They even called themselves son of God on certain occasions. And so the divine kingship view is that without endorsing their claim, the Bible is referring to these kings according to their claim as sons of God.

And so this view, this third view, the divine kingship view, is that these kings who are claiming divine power to represent God on earth, they are exalting themselves beyond their due bounds. And they are sinning. And one of the ways in which they sin, one of the ways they express their aspirations to God-like power is by taking wives, as it says there, any that they chose.

The problem is that not they took wives, taking a wife is not a sin, but they took wives as many as they wanted, any that they chose. One theory is that this refers to the common ancient practice of kings gathering a large group of women to themselves and expressing their authority and their power by gathering harems to themselves.

Another interpretation might be the right of the first night, where an oppressive tyrant would claim that when a man and a woman are getting married in his domain that he has the right of the first night with that woman. And that is a way of expressing his dominance upon society. And it is a very oppressive, tyrannical thing to do. In the movie Braveheart, that is one of the things that happens and it sparks a rebellion.

So this theory then, this third theory, is that the sons of God are kings who are becoming tyrannical and oppressive and who are trying to aspire to God-like power and authority, claiming to be God or the sons of God. And one of the ways they express that is in their gathering of women to themselves according to force and might and oppressively treating the world around them.

The offspring of these unions is not some bizarre idea of giants, but simply what the text says. The text itself explains to us what the Nephilim are. It does not say that they are giants. It says that they are “the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.” So it is simply referring to the fact that these great kings, these oriental potentates who are claiming divine authority are having these lots of women and they are giving birth to princes who become mighty warriors and mighty men who also are going around and oppressing people and continuing to extend this violent oppressive authority upon mankind.

So this view, this third view, is helpful because it also ties in with the context. Notice that in chapter six, verse one, we have a major shift from chapter five. The Sethite view is appealing to chapter five, the previous chapter, to say that we are still talking about the Sethites, now they are just being called the sons of God. But chapter six, verse one, I think, is shifting the perspective. Chapter 5 was indeed about the godly Sethite line. But now in chapter 6 verse 1 there is a shift in perspective where the lens is widening out into a panoramic view of all humanity. It says, when man began to multiply on the face of the land. So now we are not just talking about the godly Sethite remnant. We are talking about mankind. When mankind began to multiply. There is a population explosion happening here on the earth. And daughters were born to them, ordinary daughters, not Cainite, not Sethite, just daughters were born to them.

The context helps us to see that this is the setup for what is coming next. We are about to get into the whole story of Noah and the flood. And so what the text is giving us here is an explanation for how mankind is deepening its corruption and rebellion against God. And how we see this particularly in the population explosion of the human race. And whenever that happens, whenever a population explosion happens, what naturally occurs in those situations? You have an elite that begin to rise to the top. To exercise power in the civil realm over that population. And that is what we are being given here is a description of these elites who are not believers, they are not from the godly line, they are the sons of God, they claim to be divine, and they are concentrating power among themselves.

Some scholars who hold to the third view, and I would count myself among them, also incorporate an aspect of the supernatural view into this third view. These tyrants were controlled by fallen angels. We could even say, as one scholar says, Bruce Waltke in his commentary on Genesis, that they were demon-possessed. This then answers the question of how it is that angels that are incorporeal could have intercourse with women. It avoids that question. It solves that question by saying that the way that they did it was by using these mortal men. They are mere men, but they are tyrants. They are kings that are claiming outlandish authority and oppressive power. The angels, the fallen angels used those mortal men. And controlled them. And so this then avoids the outlandish, grotesque implications of the full supernatural view. And it also deals with that issue of the giants—on this view, the text makes no reference to giants, but merely about these mighty men who were the offspring of these unions.

This makes perfect sense. And actually, it ties back to Genesis chapter four, does it not? Genesis 5 was like a parenthesis talking about what happened to the godly line, to the line of Seth all the way down to Noah. But now in chapter 6, we are going back to mankind as a whole. Notice the similarities between the description of these tyrants and these abusive kings Notice the similarity between them in our text, in chapter six, and the story of Lamech in chapter four. Remember, there is two different Lamechs in our passage. There is the godly Lamech who is the father of Noah, that is in chapter five, verse 28 and following. But there is another Lamech who is the descendant of Cain. And this is in chapter four. The Cainite Lamech is very different from the godly Lamech in chapter five. The Cainite Lamech, he is engaging in a similar type of behavior that we see with our kings here in chapter six.

Number one, he is abusing marriage. He took to himself two wives. That is Genesis 4:19. Number two, he is engaging in violence. He says, I have killed a man for wounding me and a boy for striking me. That is pretty unfair. To kill someone just because of a slight wound. And then also in chapter four, that was chapter four verse 23, but also in chapter four verse 24, the ungodly Lamech, he claims vengeance for himself far greater than what God had decreed for Cain. Remember God had said to Cain that if anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. But this ungodly Lamech, he escalates that, he takes it to the nth degree and he says, for me, if Cain’s revenge is sevenfold, mine is seventy-sevenfold.

And you can see that is a very oppressive, tyrannical, abuse of authority, completely out of the order of what God had intended. In fact, he is almost making himself divine because he is claiming a greater degree of vengeance for himself than what God had decreed. So he is taking, he has these kind of divine aspirations just like we see with the sons of God in our text in chapter six.

I would argue then that the divine kingship view is very good because it meshes so well with the context, not going back to chapter five, but back to chapter four, and seeing how the spirit of Lamech, the ungodly Lamech, is now being escalated and expanded into a societal corruption of society as a whole.

The Response of God

And what is God’s response to this? God’s response is, He is not going to let this continue. In chapter 6 verse 3, He claims to be divine. He has these divine heirs trying to assert to himself this divine prerogative and authority. But he is just flesh and his days shall be 120 years.

There is two different interpretations of that statement about the 120 years. It could be referring to a reduction of man’s lifespan where man now will live ordinarily to about 120 years. Or it could be referring to a time frame that God is saying, man has 120 years to go until the flood. And that interpretation also makes sense because of the fact that we know that Noah was 500 years old when he had Shem. That is in Genesis 5, verse 32. But then he was 600 years old when the flood came. That is in Genesis 7. Verse six, so about 100 years from Shem until the flood.

And so it makes sense that there would be this time span of about 100 years, 120 years, until God blots man out from the face of the earth. The point is that God is saying, enough. He is not going to let mankind get so corrupt that he is claiming to himself divine power and authority, multiplying wives, engaging in all kinds of violence. He is going to bring an end to the situation, and that is what the flood represents.

Both views are very widely held, not only in commentaries, but also in church history. The lifespan reduction view versus the 120 years until the flood, both views are legitimate. The point is that God is saying he is not going to let this continue.

The Depth of Human Corruption

And then we read in verse five, that 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. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, I will blot out man, whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.

The key point here is to see that the depth of human corruption is such that it is not just a matter of these sinful rulers. It has gotten to the point where all of mankind is utterly corrupt. Every intention of his heart, every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. It does mention this interesting statement here where it says twice that the Lord regretted and then in verse, that is in verse six, and then in verse seven, he repeats it again at the very end, I am sorry that I have made them.

We have to, of course, understand that language is not to be taken literally as if God is a finite creature like us who regrets things that he has done. The Bible clearly teaches that God is not a man that he should change his mind or have regret, Numbers 23, 19. So the Bible’s very clear that God does not engage in regret because God is immutable and God does not change his mind.

This is rather language to describe God in human terms in order to express the fact that God has now made a decision to judge the world. He is now going to unmake what he had made. This is similar to the language where God remembers. God remembered his promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and he sent Moses to deliver the people Does God remember because he forgot? And he is like, oh yeah, I made that promise. No, this is describing God using human language, not because God is human like us, but in order to say, now God is going to fulfill what he had promised. God remembers his covenant means that God is fulfilling his covenant.

So also here, when it says God regrets that he made man, does not mean that he is literally saying, “I did not see this coming.” No, he knows it was going to happen, but it is showing his decision to act and to judge the world.

Noah Finds Favor

But the wonderful last line of our text gives us a ray of hope. In the midst of this bleak situation, it says, but Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. And as we will see when we get into the next sections here, talking about Noah and the ark and the flood and so on, Noah is clearly being described here as a second Adam. He is the one who is going to bring about the salvation and restoration of his people.

Remember back in chapter five, verse 29, when Lamech had his son Noah, he said, out of the ground that the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands. And in saying that, Lamech was echoing the promise of Genesis 3:15 that had been passed down from father to son through the godly Sethite line. And so when our text then says, but Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord, we are seeing that God has not forgotten his promise to send the offspring of the woman who will redeem his people.

Of course, in doing so, Noah is only a type, only a picture of Christ. But he is clearly here in our text, representing this idea of the one righteous man. Everyone else is wicked. There is no one righteous, no, not one. The whole world is full of violence, sexual sin, immorality, wickedness. The whole world is apostate. But there is one righteous one, and God is going to save the world through him.

The Pattern of Final Crisis and Deliverance

This passage teaches us a number of important things. Number one, it teaches us that the sin of Adam and Eve back in Genesis 3 may have seemed like a small, private little sin, but Genesis 6 is showing us, and not just Genesis 6, but also Genesis 4 with the sin of Cain and killing his brother Abel, but Genesis 4 and Genesis 6 is showing us that little seed of sin has now grown and become like this massive impact upon all of society. There is a massive societal impact of the sin of Adam and Eve.

Secondly, just as in the garden, there are spiritual forces at work. Spiritual forces of evil in leading to the corruption of mankind.

Thirdly, the satanic corruption of the human race manifests itself particularly in the tyranny of civil rulers. That is one of the key things that our passage is saying. If we hold to that third view, that the divine kingship view is the correct view, then it is telling us that one of the ways in which we see the satanic corruption of mankind is not only in ordinary sin among mankind, not only in one-on-one violence like Cain killing his brother Abel, but specifically in this form of the tyranny of civil rulers who are claiming divine authority and oppressively mistreating those around them.

Fourthly, this passage then creates an eschatological template. It gives us a pattern, a paradigm that we are going to find repeated throughout the Bible until the very end. Jesus himself said that. He said, “Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man.” He also says that there will be a great tribulation such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, and no, and never shall be. So this passage provides us with an eschatological template of how mankind is going to get worse and worse, and it is going to be expressed particularly in the oppression of the tyranny of civil rulers claiming divine, godlike authority that does not belong to them.

We see this, for example, in the book of Revelation. The book of Revelation describes for us what it is going to be like before Christ returns. And one of the things it describes is, in Revelation chapter 13, that there is going to be a beast who is going to rise out of the sea with ten horns and seven heads. And he is going to have worldwide authority, granted to him by Satan himself. And the whole world will worship the beast. And those that refuse to do so, that is God’s remnant, God’s people, they will be persecuted for not doing so. And this beast is going to have God-like claims. He is going to have a mouth that utters blasphemies against God. Paul will say in 2 Thessalonians 2 that the Antichrist, the man of lawlessness, will claim to be God and exalt himself above all that is called God. And so we have an eschatological template of how things are going to get worse and worse until it finally reaches this outbreak of absolute satanic rebellion against God.

But then Christ will come at the end. And so we have, just as we have in our text, but, but Noah. So we also have the wonderful truth that through the righteous offspring, God will deliver his people, judge the rebellious world, and establish his kingdom forever. What a glorious hope we have. A difficult passage, lots of questions, temptations towards weird speculations, but if we step back and think about what Jesus himself says, “Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man,” the this text provides us with clear teaching on this eschatological template of how the Lord is going to vindicate his people, save them from their enemies, and bring about a glorious consummation of his kingdom in the new creation.