Fallen: Sons of God by Dr. Tim Chaffey

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And I think we're live streaming now too. Okay, let's go. So I'm Terry Kammerzell here on behalf of Creation Fellowship Santee.

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We love to learn about our creator God and believe the Bible, when read properly, rules out the possibility of millions or even billions, or especially billions of years.

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We used to meet for 10 years in person at the Creation and Earth History Museum in Santee, California.

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Then and online, our goal is to rally the remnant so we can defend our faith.

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You can see a list of our upcoming speakers by visiting tinyurl .com

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forward slash CF Santee, that's C like Creation, F like Fellowship, and the word

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Santee is spelled S -A -N -T -E -E. Tonight, we're happy to welcome Dr.

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Tim Chafee. Dr. Chafee is the content manager for the Attractions Division of Answers in Genesis, but he also has his own ministry called

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Midwest Apologetics. He's earned his Master of Theology degree from Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary after successfully defending his thesis on the

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Sons of God and the Nephilim. And that is the topic of one of his most recent books and also what he's going to be sharing with us tonight.

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So with that, I'll turn it over to you. All right. Well, good evening, or if you're watching this on delay, good morning or good afternoon, whatever it is.

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I'm happy to be with you today. So thank you for the introduction. And as you said,

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I work at Answers in Genesis as the content manager. And so I do want to give a disclaimer as a ministry. AIG does not take an official position on many of the things that we're going to talk about tonight.

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We have more of a non position position as far as that's our official view on this topic.

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But our speakers are allowed to talk about their own views as long as we give that little disclaimer that I just did. So with that out of the way, let me share my screen here and we'll pull up my

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PowerPoint so you can look at that rather than me. And there we go. Is that working?

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So let me jump in. Yes, it is. All right. Perfect. Well, it's great to be with you.

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And what I want to do in this presentation is I know I've got about 45 to 50 minutes to present on this and then do a little bit of time for questions afterwards.

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This is a nearly 500 page book. So I'm going to try to condense it down into that 45 minutes. So I'm going to move quickly.

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Hopefully you stay with me. And here we go. So the whole topic really comes from just a moment.

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My slide. There we go. From a few verses in the Bible, Genesis six verses one through four is the first time we see the word

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Nephilim. And that's not to be confused with the term sons of God. And what we're going to do in this presentation, we're going to spend the first half talking about the identity of the sons of God.

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And then the second half talking about the identity of the Nephilim. There are a lot of people who will conflate those two terms and they're not the same thing.

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They're not the same entities. So we'll talk about that as we go. So in Genesis six, it begins with, and it came to pass or came about when mankind began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born to them.

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But the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were beautiful, and they took wives took for themselves wives from any they chose.

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And Yahweh said, my spirit will not remain with man indefinitely in that he is flesh, his days will be 120 years.

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The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward, whenever the sons of God went into the daughters of men who bore to them children, they were the mighty men of antiquity, men of renown.

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And the other verse that has the word Nephilim in it, it appears twice is Numbers 1333. This is when the spies returned from spying out the promised land and they come back to get their report and they say they're also we saw the

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Nephilim, the sons of Anak are part of the Nephilim. And we became like grasshoppers in our own sight and so we became in their sight.

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And you might be wondering how on earth can somebody write nearly 500 pages on those five verses. That was my first thought as well.

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In fact, when I was working on my THM thesis, I was wondering how can I do 150 pages on this and quickly realized there is much more to it than I imagined at the start.

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So there's some key terms in that passage we need to look at. First of all, obviously the sons of God, as I mentioned, that's going to be our focus for the first half here that's the the

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Hebrew has been a hot Elohim. And then the daughters of men, which is the note Adam, Adam or Adam, the daughters of Adam basically the daughters of men, and then the

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Nephilim, and then the mighty men that you saw in verse four. That's the Hebrew word gibbering.

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So we'll talk about those as we go along here. So there are three primary views throughout church history about who the sons of God are or were.

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And the first one that was the most popular view in church history is called the

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Sethite view. That is that the sons of God are descendants of Seth, Adam's son

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Seth, and they're talking about in Genesis five, it takes you from Adam through Seth all the way down to Noah. So they'll say that the sons of God are in that lineage, and they married female descendants in the line of Cain, who are, you know,

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Cain's line is talked about at the end of chapter four. The royalty view says that they, the sons of God were either kings, tyrants, judges, people who were in authority, nobility who viewed themselves as divine.

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And so that then their offspring could be called sons of God if they're divine than their, their offspring with sons of God and their sin.

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According to this view is when it says they took wives of whoever they chose. Well, that means they were just going around taking women and adding them to their harems.

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And so the sin here primarily is polygamy. And then that's part of the judgment.

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The reason for the flood judgment has to do with that. The other view, the fallen angel view, and this is the oldest view as far as we know, and it's the one that I'm going to be defending tonight, is that the sons of God are heavenly beings.

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Sometimes people would say angel, you know, we call it the fallen angel view. They're rebellious heavenly beings who left heaven, and they, they had affairs or married women, and their offspring were the

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Nephilim, which is the word that means giants. Some people think that the fallen angels just possessed, so these demons are possessing men.

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And so that's kind of an offshoot of that view, but that's not really what the text says at all. There's no indication of that.

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So I don't hold that particular variant of this view, but that one's kind of, if you could say it's sort of trying to reach a middle ground, but it is not supported by the text.

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So there is apologetic value in this topic. Sometimes people say, why would you even bother studying this? Well, part of it is because I want to have a consistent hermeneutic all the way throughout

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Scripture. Just from Genesis 1 all the way to the end of Revelation, I think we can take

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God at his word. I don't think that we need to start to allegorize certain passages or come up with strange interpretations that don't really fit the context of the passage.

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I think we can have a consistent hermeneutic, and it also explains the severity of the judgment of the flood and the severity of the judgment during the conquest.

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And I think if we don't have the right view on this topic, sometimes we will miss what's going on in those two passages.

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And it demonstrates that mankind had a common history prior to Babel, as we'll see.

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So let's take a look real quickly at these three primary views of the identity of the sons of God.

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The first one, the Sethite view. As I mentioned before, you do get some of that discussion contextually.

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So chapter 4 and chapter 5 do discuss the descendants of Cain and Seth. And we do know that some of the

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Sethite men were godly. Enoch and Noah clearly were godly. And we know that some of the

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Cainites were ungodly, like Cain. And the last guy in his line named Lamech, the guy who was a polygamist, and then he murdered the young man, bragged about it.

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So he clearly was not a great guy. And as I mentioned before, it was a dominant view in church history, really, from about the 4th century up until about 100 years ago, it was the dominant view.

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But there are major problems with it, huge textual problems with it, because it's not supported by the text at all.

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If you take a look at this passage, you'll see that it says in verse 1, it came about when mankind began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born to them.

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Daughters were born to who? Well, to man who was multiplying on the face of the earth. In other words, this is a general term for mankind.

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And it's talking about the daughters of those men. Then verse 2, it says the sons of God saw the daughters of men.

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Well, who are the daughters of men there? They have to be the same as the ones in verse 1, which is daughters of men in general, not daughters of a certain line of man from, in this case, the

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Sethi view would say it's the descendants of Cain. But that's not at all what the text says.

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It's just telling us men in general. So they have to change the meaning of daughters of men from verse 1 to verse 2.

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Then if you look in verse 3, God says, my spirit will not remain in man indefinitely. So they go from verse 1, mankind is universal.

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Verse 2, it's particular, just this one group. Verse 3, you're back to man in general. Then in verse 4, when it talks about daughters of men again, you're back to mankind particular, just a certain group of them.

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And there's no hermeneutical warrant for changing who is being identified in each of these passages.

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But they do it because it fits their view. And yet you would never get that if you're just following the rules of grammar.

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But where does it ever tell us all the Sethites are godly? Where does it say that everyone in Noah's lineage, going back to Seth, where does it say all of them are godly?

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Where does it say all the Cainites are ungodly? The text never tells us those things. And so those ideas are assumed to be true.

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There are two people in Cain's line that have one of God's titles, the

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EL at the end of their name. I'm not saying that means they were godly, but there does seem to be an acknowledgement of God, at least in that line.

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Why would we automatically assume they're all ungodly? And why would we assume all the Sethites are godly when we read, because at the end, before the flood comes, there's a bunch of Sethites on the earth.

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There's a bunch of Cainites. And there's a bunch of other people too, because Adam and Eve had a lot of other sons and daughters.

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And so it's not just two lines. And it tells us that pretty much all of mankind was wicked.

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That would include Sethites as well. So why would we assume that this line stayed godly?

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And if they were so godly, why do they keep marrying ungodly women? Of course, that could happen occasionally.

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But would they continually do this, that they were godly men? And why such a harsh judgment for believer marrying unbeliever?

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This is something that's happened throughout history, and we don't see God sending a worldwide judgment for that.

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I'm not trying to make light of the idea of a believer marrying unbeliever, because we know that's not supposed to be done.

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But again, why such a harsh judgment? And why would the offspring be mighty men of old, men of renown?

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Why would they be giants? It doesn't make any sense when believer marries unbeliever. You don't produce giants.

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And it doesn't explain the existence of the Nephilim post -flood. Because if the

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Cainites are wiped out in the flood, which they were, because you just have the line of Seth going through, then where do these ones come from if they're the offspring of the descendants of Cain and Seth?

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So the text does not support the Sethite view at all. There's a reason why nobody held that view as far as we know until the 4th century in church history.

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Because it just was something that came along much later. The royalty view, let's take a look at that real quickly.

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This one was originally held by some Jewish rabbis at the end of the 1st century, early 2nd century

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A .D. And then it didn't really come into the church until about the 3rd century.

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And it's kind of been the third most popular. It's been gaining popularity a lot in the last 100 years.

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Among scholars, but really not among lay people. So the word Elohim, the

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B 'nei Ha 'Elohim, the sons of God, that word Elohim is translated as judges in a few places in some

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Bibles. There are about four places where some Bibles will have it that way. There are some kings from the ancient

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Near East who viewed themselves as divine. Pharaoh was supposed to be a god. And some other cultures viewed their kings that way.

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Although it's not as common as people will lead you to believe. But it was something that was there.

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So in that sense, their offspring could be men of renown or maybe sons of God. Nimrod, after the flood, was a king.

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And he's called a gibbereen, which is that mighty man that we saw in Genesis 6 .4.

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So there's some similarities there. And that's about it for the strengths of this view. So what about some of the weaknesses?

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Well, that term Elohim is better understood as a term identifying an inhabitant of the spiritual realm rather than human judges.

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In fact, whenever we see that term, it's referring to somebody, someone from that spiritual realm.

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Of course, about 90 % of the time that the term is used, it's referring to the one true God. And we'll look at other entities who are called that in just a moment.

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But you have in Exodus 22 that this is during the giving of the law when someone commits a trespass.

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And it says that the cause of both parties shall come before the judges. So that word is Elohim. And that's in the

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New King James where it uses that term for judges. But if you look at the

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ESV, it says both parties shall come before God, the one whom God condemns.

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And so the ESV translators believed it made more sense to view that as God. And I would agree because there's many other places in the law where people are supposed to come before Yahweh.

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They were to come before God. God was literally in their midst while he was giving them the law.

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And while they were moving about in the wilderness with the tabernacle, God was there. They could come before him. So you see that throughout.

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If we had more time, I would go into detail on each of these. But I mentioned that 90 % of the time it refers to the one true

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God. There are some instances where it's referring to members of what's called the Divine Council, which I'll talk briefly about in just a little bit.

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I don't have time to get into that in too much detail. It is used of angels. And I'll show you a verse later on that does that.

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It's also used of false gods or demons. And it's used of the spirit of Samuel that Saul and the medium at Endor call up the night before Saul is killed in battle.

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The spirit of Samuel is called an Elohim. So it always is referring to somebody from or someone from the spiritual realm.

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The idea of divine kingship. So another weakness of the royalty view is that whole idea of divine kingship is overstated.

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There were not that many kings in the ancient Near East who actually viewed themselves as divine. And many of them thought that many cultures believed the concept of kingship was divine, came down from heaven, but not that their kings themselves were divine.

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And this is the big one. So this is one of their main arguments, the idea that they took wives from whomever they chose.

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That sounds really bad in English. It sounds like they were forcing these women into marriage. But that's just the common

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Hebrew idiom throughout Genesis for marriage. So we have Abram took

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Sarah as wife. And later on after Sarah dies, he took Keturah as wife. Isaac took

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Rebekah as wife. And we know she was a willing bride because she had the opportunity.

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She was asked, hey, do you want to go with Abraham's servant or not? And she said she would go. Isaac didn't force her into marriage.

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So there's no idea of force when you see this phrase that's translated as took wives.

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And the whole idea, this whole view was not developed until the allegorical hermeneutic became popular among Jewish interpreters at the end of the first century

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A .D. And not until it became popular in the church in the third century A .D. And that's when this view took off in both of those places.

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So let's take a look at the fallen angel view, the view that I believe is the biblical one. When we see that term

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B 'nai Ha 'Elohim throughout the Old Testament, it always refers to angelic beings. There are places where we know for a fact it refers to that.

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Job 38 .7, when the morning stars sing together and all the sons of God shouted for joy.

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This is while God is creating things. And he's asking, Job, where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth, when

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I did this? And then he says this in verse 7. People weren't there. It obviously is not referring to human beings because people weren't made yet.

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Earlier in Job, in chapter 1, it says there was a day when the sons of God, the

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B 'nai Ha 'Elohim, came to present themselves before the Lord and Satan also came among them. Job 2 .1

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says almost the identical thing. So there's a time where these entities are presenting themselves before God and Satan comes along with them.

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And when God asks Satan where he has been, he's like, well, I'm from the earth. I've been doing this. Sounds like they're not actually technically on the earth at that point.

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It's something that's a setting in the spiritual realm. At least that's what it seems to be. In Deuteronomy 32 .8.

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So you have another instance of this word in some Bibles. So this one, I'll try to cover this quickly.

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And it says when it's talking about Babel, Moses, this is kind of his farewell speech. And he's telling the people to ask your fathers and they'll tell you.

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And he says when the Most High divided their inheritance to the nations, when he separated the sons of Adam. Again, this is at Babel.

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He set the boundaries of the people according to the number of. Now, in a lot of our Bibles, it will say according to the number of the sons of Israel, the

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B 'nai Yisrael. That is what is found in the Masoretic text. Now, then it goes on and says, but the

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Lord's portion is his people. Jacob is the place of his inheritance. So it's a little strange to say sons of Israel.

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But God's portion is his people. Jacob is the place of his inheritance. Contextually, that doesn't seem to fit very well.

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The Dead Sea Scrolls, we have found two fragments of Deuteronomy 32, 8.

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And one of them clearly says B 'nai Elohim. The other one says B 'nai El. And then the letter is rubbed out.

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We don't know why it was there. But there's enough room for it to be Elohim, just like the other one that we found.

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The Septuagint, the LXX, has always said the hui oifeu, the angels of God, is what they have there.

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So is it God? Is it sons of God or sons of Israel? Well, sons of God is the one that makes sense contextually.

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As I mentioned before, the context has to do with the division of the nations at Babel. Israel didn't exist at that time.

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And there were 70 people groups that scattered from Babel, as I'll show you, whereas Israel had 12 sons.

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So that doesn't fit. Contextually, it doesn't fit the rest of Scripture. But there's another word or another term that is identical to B 'nai

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Elohim, and that is the Aramaic term Bar Elohim. And that appears in the Book of Daniel.

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About half of Daniel is written in Aramaic, including Chapter 3. And so this is when

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Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are thrown into the fiery furnace. Nebuchadnezzar says, look,

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I see four men loose and walking about in the midst of the fire without harm. And the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods.

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Now, some of our Bibles will say the son of God. It's just the Aramaic term is Bar Elohim. It may very well have been the pre -incarnate

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Christ in there with them. I've got no theological problem with that. It's just I don't know how

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Nebuchadnezzar would know who that is. What he's saying is I see a divine being. And he calls it a

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Bar Elohim. And you look three verses later, he uses a different word. Look what he says. Blessed be the

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God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego who has sent his angel and delivered his servants who put their trust in him.

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So there the Bar Elohim is equated with an angel, which is the equivalent. Bar Elohim is the same as B 'nai

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Elohim. And then in the New Testament, we also have passages that speak of this event.

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In 2 Peter 2, it says, For God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them to hell.

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Or the Greek word there used is Tartarosos. And that's the only time that word is used in the

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New Testament. It's the place in Greek mythology where the Titans were locked away by Zeus. And it's their concept of hell.

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And it says, Committed them to pits of darkness reserved for judgment and did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a preacher of righteousness.

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With seven others when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly. So it puts the sin of angels in the context of Noah.

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In 1 Peter 3, 18, For Christ died also for our sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that he might bring us to God.

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Having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which he also went and made proclamation to the spirits now in prison, who once were disobedient when the patience of God was waiting in the days of Noah.

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So there are spirits who are now in prison who were disobedient in Noah's day. If you hold the fallen angel view of Genesis 6, this makes perfect sense.

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But if you hold to some other view, then you have to do some strange interpretation of this passage, including some people will say, well, it was talking about Christ preaching through Noah at that time.

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But that's not what this passage says. Then Jude 5 and 6,

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Jude says, Now I desire to remind you that the Lord, after saving a people out of the land of Egypt, subsequently destroyed those who did not believe and the angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandon their proper abode.

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He has kept an eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day. Again, you have New Testament passages that make perfect sense in light of the fallen angel view.

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But if that if you hold a different view, suddenly, these passages are very difficult to interpret.

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There are other strengths. It's by far the earliest view by all extant

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Jewish and Christian writers until the rise of the allegorical interpretation, as I mentioned before. It's the view in the

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Septuagint, the term b 'nei Elohim is translated as w 'yoy fey 'u, the sons of God.

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And or at times the sometimes just as angelos, so angels. And you have apocryphal books like First Enoch, which

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Jude quotes from. I'm not arguing that Enoch belongs in scripture, but Jude does quote from it.

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And he, that book is all about this. It's like any, it's an expansion of Genesis 6, 1 through 4 is essentially what

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First Enoch is. And Jude quotes it and knew his readers were aware of it.

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Book of Jubilees has this view, Genesis Apocryphon, 2 Baruch, Judas, which is in the

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Roman Catholic Bible. That's part of the Apocrypha that was added back in 1546.

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And then you also have the earliest Christian writers. I'm not going to go through each of these.

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They're all detailed in my book, along with a quotation, but just for the sake of time, I'm going to just put those up on the screen.

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It really wasn't until the 300s that people started to take a different view within the church. So let's take a look at some objections to this.

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The primary one is people will say, well, Jesus said angels can't do that. Matthew 22, 34,

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Well, Jesus spoke of the angels in heaven. He didn't say anything about the angels who left heaven, who left their proper abode is what

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Jude talks about. He may have been speaking of what ought to be true rather than what has happened. But he didn't say anything about the angels who left.

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He wasn't saying that what they can or can't do. He was just saying what they don't do.

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So he never said in this passage, angels are not capable of doing this. He said the angels in heaven don't do it.

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And people will say, well, aren't we sons of God? Because that term translated as B 'nai

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Elohim, that's translated as sons of God. And in the New Testament, aren't we called sons of God? Yes, but there's something kind of interesting when you look at it.

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Nearly every single time that term appears, it's in the future tense. It's something that we will be or something that positionally we are right now, but it's not going to be fully realized until the resurrection.

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As you'll see here in a little bit, Jesus said peacemakers shall be called sons of God. And Romans 8 talks about how the world is the creation is groaning and longing for the revealing of the sons of God.

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Romans 8, for as many as are led by the spirit of God, these are sons of God. And so these are the two right here that are not in future tense, but the rest of them are, for you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus.

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But look at what happens in Luke chapter 20. So this is the parallel passage to Matthew 22, the one that people will use to say

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Jesus said angels can't do this. Well, the same setup, and this is how Luke records it for us.

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Jesus answered and said to them, So when we are resurrected, when we receive our glorified body, then we are sons of God and we are equal to angels.

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Not saying that we become angels, and I'm not arguing that, but it's almost as if there's a subtle nod right here to that view that sons of God are angelic, or at least are spiritual beings that are controlled by the spirit, if you will.

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Another objection to this view, some people say that demons cannot materialize. And so how could they possibly perform this action?

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How could they marry women? How could they impregnate them? Hank Hanegraaff says, And he's just, what he's arguing is that demons could fake the resurrection, and then we have no reason to believe that Jesus actually rose.

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But demons can only go as far as God allows. If God says, no, you're not going to fake this, they can't do it.

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In fact, humans can only go as far as God allows. So God is in control, and if he's not going to permit them to fake a miracle, they're not going to be able to do it.

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And besides, Scripture tells us Jesus rose. We know that he did. In Luke 24, 39, sometimes people will point to that and say,

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Jesus said a spirit doesn't have flesh and bones, as you see that I have. And they're assuming that in this passage that Jesus is talking about, it has to be something like an angel, except that's not really what he's saying.

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Because that word pneuma, which is translated spirit, can be breath, wind, the

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Holy Spirit, angels, human spirit, ghosts. They need that to be angel, and then they apply that and say, see, angels can't take on human form, except for that argument proves too much because we know angels did take human form.

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And you have the passage in Genesis 18, where the two angels come with the

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Lord and they meet with Abraham and they eat and drink with him. And then they go on and they grab Lot and pull him out of the city of Sodom.

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Hebrews 13 tells us not to forget to entertain strangers for by doing so. Some have unwittingly entertained angels.

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So angels apparently can take human form. Did Satan materialize when he was tempting

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Jesus? It doesn't come right out and tell us that, but he takes him up to the top of the temple. It does seem as if that's what's going on there.

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And then the demonic plagues that are described in Revelation 9, sure seem like they're taking physical form, but we know that angels can do that.

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So some arguments just kind of prove too much because then they would, if true, it would make the Bible contradict itself.

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I think sometimes we underestimate our enemy. The Bible tells us in 2 Thessalonians 2, 9, and of course there's different views on eschatology and everything, but look what it says, the coming of the lawless one.

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Many people interpret that to be the Antichrist. It's according to the working of Satan with all power, signs, and lying wonders.

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So he's going to have the ability to do some pretty amazing, incredible things.

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Of course, they're going to be to deceive people, but still going to be capable of doing some pretty, what are going to appear to be miraculous things.

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Some people say if the angels did the sin, well, that's an unfair judgment. The flood is an unfair judgment on mankind, but the people were complicit as well.

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The Bible tells us that all flesh had corrupted its way. The Bible tells us that the thought of men's heart was evil continually, and the women who married these sons of God were complicit as well.

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They were wicked. So the whole world was wicked. God says that to Noah, I've seen that you alone are righteous before me in this generation.

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So it's not an unfair judgment on mankind. Mankind was wicked and deserved that judgment.

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Some people would say, well, it's impossible because angels can't create life. Well, that may be true, but we're not talking about creating life.

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We're talking about procreating, which is the same thing that human beings do. And I've got two kids.

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I can't create life, but I do have two kids. But what about Pharaoh's magicians?

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What happened there? When Aaron throws down his rod, it becomes a serpent. Then it tells us that Pharaoh's magicians did the same thing with their enchantments or through their dark arts.

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They threw down their rods and they became serpents. Now, I know some people try to reinterpret that and say, well, they had charmed these snakes to be really rigid.

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When they threw them on the floor, they started writhing. But that's not what the text says. In fact, they were able to turn the water into blood as well.

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So they were able to do some miraculous signs, but they couldn't do all of them. So I mentioned the divine counsel a little while ago, and I do need to move quickly through this because I want to get to the

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Nephilim. But in Psalm 82, this is where the phrase comes from. It tells us that God has taken his place in the divine counsel.

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This is from the ESV. In the midst of the gods, he holds judgment. So the first word there, elohim, has taken a stand in the council of El.

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In the midst of the elohim, he holds judgment. So you have elohim used a couple of times there.

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And obviously, one is in charge and he's in the midst of all the rest of them. So here's a question to think about.

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In our theological systems, we talk about being, as Christians, we're monotheistic, meaning we believe in one

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God who is triune, and so Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

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And that's true, depending on what we mean by gods, because the

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Bible mentions many other gods. But there's one all -powerful, eternal God.

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Also, you could talk about it being monolatry. Only one

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God may be worshipped. But ultimately, what it really is, there's one Yahweh and many elohim.

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And if that's hard for us to think about in English, just think of the term Lord, because we use that as a title for God as well.

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But we also know in England, there's the House of Commons, the House of Lords. So it's just a title of respect.

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So I'll show you real quickly here. There are other entities called gods in Scripture. Now, oftentimes we'll say, well, they're false gods.

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And yes, in the sense that they're not the one true creator, eternal God. But the

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Bible still calls them gods. And we can say lowercase g, that's fine. Angels are called that in Psalm 8 -5.

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Members of the Divine Council, which I just talked about in Psalm 82. Demons are called that in Deuteronomy 32 -17.

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And I think we'll look at each of these verses real quickly here. And the Spirit of Samuel. So in the beginning, God, Elohim, created the heavens and the earth.

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There we see that referring to the one true God. In Psalm 8 -5, here's referring to the angels. You have made them a little lower than the

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Elohim. And you crowned him with glory and honor. Now, some Bibles, like the

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New American Standard, will translate that verse as, You have made them a little lower than God. The problem with that is, in Hebrews, it quotes this passage, and it says,

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You have made them a little lower than the angels. So we have the New Testament divinely inspired commentary on Psalm 8.

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We know how that should be interpreted. Deuteronomy 32 -17, they sacrificed to demons, not to God.

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To God's, Elohim, they did not know. To new gods, new arrivals your fathers did not fear. So their demons are called

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Elohim. And in 1 Samuel 28, this is where it says, Do not be afraid.

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What did you see? So Saul said that to the witch or the medium at Endor. And the woman said to Saul, I saw a spirit, an

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Elohim, ascending out of the earth. Now, some people think this was demonic and it was impersonating Samuel, but the narrator calls him

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Samuel four times. And what he says came true. I happen to think that God did allow the spirit of Samuel to go back and pronounce judgment on Saul.

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I don't think we need to fight over that and split the church about it. But when the narrator tells us four times as to who it is,

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I think that's a pretty strong argument. I think the burden of proof would be on the other view to demonstrate that it's not

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Samuel. In the New Testament, we have the same idea. There are many so -called gods, whether in heaven or on earth, as there are many gods and many lords.

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Yet for us, there is one God, the father of whom are all things, and we for him and one Lord Jesus Christ through whom are all things and through whom we live.

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In 2 Corinthians 4, Paul says, But even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, whose minds the

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God of this age has blinded. Even in the New Testament, we have beings other than the one true

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God called God, or called lowercase g, gods. Real quickly then, for the divine counsel, if you're struggling with this image,

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I think one of the best places to look is in 1 Kings 22, when Micaiah the prophet goes to speak to Ahab and Jehoshaphat.

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Jehoshaphat, godly king, is going with Ahab, an ungodly king. They're about to go up to remote

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Gilead and try to win this town back. Jehoshaphat says, Are there not any prophets that you can call?

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He brings in a bunch of pagan prophets. He's like, Are there any prophets of Yahweh? He says, Yeah, there's one, but I hate him because he always says some bad things about me.

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Ahab, wake up. If the prophet of the one true God is saying bad things about you, maybe change your ways.

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But then they get Micaiah there, and here's what he says. Therefore, hear the word of the Lord. I saw the Lord sitting on his throne and all the hosts of heaven standing by, on his right hand and on his left.

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And the Lord said, Who will persuade Ahab to go up, that he may fall at remote Gilead? So one spoke in this manner, and another spoke in that manner.

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Then a spirit came forward and stood before the Lord and said, I will persuade him. The Lord said to him,

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In what way? So he said, I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And the Lord said,

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You shall persuade him and also prevail. Go out and do so. Who is that spirit that's right there in God's throne room that says,

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Hey, I'll go and I'll be a lying spirit. And what is going on in this passage? Well, it's something that happens in many other passages or very similar, like in Isaiah 6, when

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God says, Who will go for us? Whom shall I send? And you have the host of heaven around God. So this is this picture of God's throne room with all these angelic beings around.

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God is in charge. He is ruling over all of them. He does not need their advice, but he allows them to give input.

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He allows them to participate. Similar with us. He doesn't need us to do what he's accomplishing through us, but he chooses to use us.

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And a very similar thing going on in the spiritual realm. And here you have a spirit who is a lying spirit in the presence of God.

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And I know sometimes people say, Well, that must be Satan. Well, it doesn't tell us that. It appears to be one of these members of the divine council where God is asking for advice.

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Not that he needs it. And then he allows them to participate in what he's doing.

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And his will is still accomplished. He's the one who makes the call. He's the one who sends. He is the one in complete control and in charge.

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And where does this council take place? Well, look at Psalm 89. The heavens will praise your wonders, O Lord, your faithfulness.

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Also in the assembly of the holy ones. For who in the skies is comparable to the Lord? Who among the sons of the mighty is like the

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Lord? A God greatly feared in the council of the holy ones. And awesome above all those who are around you.

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O Lord, God of hosts, who is like you, O mighty Lord. So that's the picture we have in the

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Old Testament when it's talking about what the ESV translates as the divine council.

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And what's interesting is you have a similar concept, not exactly, but similar concept in some of the other religions in that region during that time period.

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So the Ugaritic people, a language that's very similar to Hebrew, their chief god

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El had 70 sons. The term is Ben -El. You can see it's similar to Bene Elohim or gods.

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And they were called the congregation of the stars. Again, very similar to the heavenly host or the assembly of the holy ones.

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In Canaan, they had Baal was the chief god and he held council over the gods. And when

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I mentioned before that there were 70 people that split off or 70 family groups that split off from Babel. There you can see the descendants of Japheth.

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There's 14 of them. Ham, there's 30 total that are mentioned in Genesis 10. And Shem, you've got 26.

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So when you add that together, you have 70 people groups from Babel. And remember in Deuteronomy 32, it talked about how

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God divided the nations according to the number of thee. And I argued that it was sons of God.

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So you would have 70 of them, which we'll see is fairly interesting here in a moment.

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But think about, I think, did I skip a, oh, here we go. Okay. Yeah, real quickly,

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I'll talk about this. So these other ancient religions, so you had the Ugaritic people, they believe that their gods met on a mountain.

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Think kind of like the Greek gods with Zeus on Mount Olympus. The El was believed to have met on Mount Hermon.

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And Baal was believed to have met on Mount Zaphon. Which is interesting when you look at Isaiah 14 passage.

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A lot of times people will say, you know, popular Christian theology is about Satan. But look what it says here.

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How you are fallen from heaven, O day star, son of dawn. How you are cut down to the ground, you who lay the nations low.

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You said in your heart, I will ascend to heaven above the stars of God. I will set my throne on high. I will sit on the

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Mount of Assembly in the far reaches of the north. And that might sound really weird until you realize that word north there, it's

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Zaphon. It's the word that the Canaanites believed that their gods met on that mountain. So this is a lesser

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Canaanite deity saying he's going to take charge. And of course this uses the judgment of the

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King of Babylon saying he's going to be brought low. So real quickly, and then we'll wrap up the

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Divine Council and we'll do a few things on the Nephilim. And then I'll have time for questions.

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I realize I'm running a little long here. I know you're doing okay on time, Tim. Okay, good. That's good to know.

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Yep, you're doing good on time. If you could just speak up a little bit, though, there are a couple of people, they got air conditioning running and they can hardly hear you.

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Oh, well, I turned off my air conditioning for this, but it's okay. I'll suffer. They don't have to. No, I'm kidding.

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I can speak up. I've got a loud mouth for a reason. Let me just take a break. That's funny.

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I didn't want to interrupt you, but I know that some people are struggling to hear you. This is so good.

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So I just want to make sure it gets out there. All right. Yeah, I will speak up here. So I mentioned 70 people groups leaving from Babel.

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Remember Deuteronomy 32, 8? According to the number of the sons of God or sons of Israel, depending on which one you think makes the most sense.

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But the Lord's portion is his people, Jacob, his allotted heritage. What's really happening at Babel is

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God is telling the people, look, you don't want me, so I'm going to put you under the authority of these rebellious entities.

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Good luck. Oh, and by the way, I'm going to take one man out of that, and I'm going to make a nation from him, and I'm still going to win, and I'm going to still accomplish my purpose.

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And you see that storyline moving throughout the Old Testament, and then you see a partial reversal of that when

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Pentecost comes. But I wish I had time to get into all that. But look at the similarities that you have elsewhere in Scripture.

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You know, so often things that are on earth are kind of copies of what you see or what is in heaven.

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So in Exodus 24, God tells Moses to come up to the

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Lord, you and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and the 70 of the elders of Israel. And so these are the 70 that were appointed, that were going to help

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Moses out. That's what his father -in -law suggested. So you have Moses leading the people. You have 70 who were helping him out.

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The great Sanhedrin, you had 70 members, plus the high priest who was the leader of that. And it seems that these things are copies of what was in the heavenly realm.

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But I mentioned before the similarities to the Genesis 1 through 11. If you think about the mythologies and the legends from around the globe, from these different people groups, we have creation accounts that are very similar in some ways, the creation of man from the dust of the ground or from the clay.

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You have fall accounts and dozens and dozens of accounts of man having something to do with a tree and or a serpent is why man dies or why man has become sinful and wicked.

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Flood accounts, hundreds of those all around the globe. Babel accounts, we've got about two dozen of those that we've identified so far.

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You have constellations identified in the eastern hemisphere as well as the western hemisphere, or what you might say the old world and the new world, where they both call it the great bear.

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Or you have in Australia the seven sisters, the Pleiades. They're the same as what the Greeks call the seven sisters. Some of these things that don't look like sisters or bears or anything like that, for whatever reason, they seem to have a similar origin.

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Maybe it all goes back to Babel. And you also have this same concept of the gods coming down and marrying women and producing demigods or giants.

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That's found all over as well. And yet, when you go to Genesis 12 and Abraham, there are no similarities in these other cultures.

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But Genesis 1 through 11, they seem to know a whole bunch of those details in distorted form.

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And it's because what the Bible tells us is true, is that up till Genesis 11, people had a shared history, and then they scattered and brought that with them.

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And, of course, distortions happen. All right, so who are the Nephilim? Well, the word does not mean fallen ones.

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You will find that online over and over and over again. You will not find it in lexicons.

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You will not find it in academic commentaries. People will try to make this noun, this plural noun, from the

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Hebrew verb nephal, which, incidentally, that word in Hebrew does mean to fall, so it sounds similar to our

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English word. But if you were to try to make that a participle, to use it as a noun, that word would become nephilim or nephulim.

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It does not become nephilim, because Hebrew undergoes predictable patterns in its morphology when you're going to do that.

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It does not become nephilim. There is an Aramaic noun, and that's the word nephil.

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That's a singular noun. When you make it plural, it becomes nephilim. In Aramaic, there's a masculine ending of i -n for the plural.

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When you make that a Hebrew word, it becomes i -m at the end. It becomes nephilim. And so it just means giants.

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That's what nephilim means. That's how they're described in Scripture. So the nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward.

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This next word is so key for understanding this passage. The Hebrew word is asher. And in most of our

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Bibles, it will say when. The nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward when the sons of God went into the daughters of men who bore children of them.

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So were they already on the earth when that happened, when the sons of God did this? Were they the result of that?

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We don't know. It's ambiguous. Who are the nephilim? If it's just when, we have no idea who they are.

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They're not even really connected to the passage at all. But our Hebrew grammars will tell us that this word asher, when it is used the way it's used in this passage, it should be translated as whenever.

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Now look at what happens when you read it that way. The nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward whenever the sons of God went into the daughters of men who bore to them children.

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Who were the nephilim? They were the offspring of those unions. It happened before the flood in those days and also afterward, after the flood.

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Now it tells you how the nephilim were on the earth before the flood. It tells you how they were on the earth after the flood. Moses is the guy who wrote this passage.

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He's the guy who wrote the passage in Numbers 13. And he knew about both the pre and post flood.

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So the passage is very clear when we understand how that word should be translated. It says they were the mighty men of antiquity, men of renown.

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So here's the post flood nephilim. There also we saw the nephilim. The sons of Anak are part of the nephilim.

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And we became grasshoppers in our own sight. And so we were in their sight. Obviously they were large. That's how they're being described here.

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So they're mighty men. They were large. They were giants. There are other giant groups. The Rephaim are giants.

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The Emim are giants. The Zuzim or Zamzumim are giants. The Amorites are giants. The Anakim are giants.

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And so here are passages talking about that. Genesis 14 has mentioned several of these.

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The Rephaim, the Zuzim, and the Emim, that battle that's taking place in Genesis 14, which that's one of those chapters in the

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Bible. I wish it was a lot longer because I'd really like to know how the army that had the giants with them was losing this battle. But we don't get a whole lot of detail.

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It just would be neat to have more information there. It tells us about King Og, if you remember him, in Deuteronomy 3.

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Only Og, king of Bashan, was left of the remnant of the Rephaim. And we know Og was a giant.

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It talks about how huge his bed was. And the Emim, in Deuteronomy 2, it says,

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Emim lived there, talking about Moab, people great, numerous, and tall as the Anakim. Like the

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Anakim, they were also regarded as Rephaim, but the Moabites called them Emim. So these are giant peoples as well.

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The Zamzumim or the Zuzim, Ammon is also regarded as the land of Rephaim.

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The Rephaim formerly lived in it, but the Ammonites called them Zamzumim, people great, as great, numerous, and as tall as the

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Anakim. But the Lord destroyed them before the Ammonites. So you have these other people groups in that land.

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The Amorites are not called giants until you get all the way to the book of Amos. And God says,

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Yet it was I who destroyed the Amorite before them, whose height was like the height of cedars, and he was strong as the oaks.

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Now, I think there's probably some hyperbole there. I don't know that they're really as tall as cedars and as strong as oaks, but they were tall.

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And Joshua fought numerous battles against them, and God even supernaturally intervened to make sure that they were going to be destroyed.

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And the day that Joshua had the long day to fight these Amorites, and God rained down hailstones and killed more of the people, more of the

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Amorites with the hailstones than the people did with the sword. So the

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Anakim are called giants as well. The Anakim are of the Nephilim, is what we read already.

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And look what it tells us at the end of Joshua 11. It says, or in verse 22, there were no

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Anakim left in the land of the sons of Israel, only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod some remained.

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So Joshua drove them out or killed them all, except for in those three places, all in the southwestern part of Israel.

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And who was from there? Oh yeah, Goliath was from Gath. And then Goliath's brothers or descendants, depending on the way that that word gets translated, were also from Gaza or from Gath, and David's mighty men wiped them out.

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So yes, Goliath was part of the Anakim. Yes, he was a Philistine nationally, but his lineage was the

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Anakim. So why were the Nephilim there?

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Well, I think, and I'm going to speculate here, because other than the fact that the Bible tells us that the sons of God saw the daughters of men were beautiful, that they were good, and that they desired them, that was one of the reasons.

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But I think there's something more sinister going on because when you, I'll lay this out for you, and just as we go here,

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Satan can only know what God has announced. He doesn't know the future unless God has already told us the future.

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So he's not equal to God in any way, shape, or form. And what we see is that he reacts to it.

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So he can only react to what God reveals ahead of time. And you see him trying to tempt

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Jesus, and of course Jesus not going for it. You see him possessing Judas, leading to the crucifixion.

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At the time, he probably thought that was a great idea. I think three days after the crucifixion, he realized that was a big mistake. But could it be that the

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Nephilim were a demonic attempt to thwart God's plan? For example,

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Genesis 3 .15, the seed of the woman is going to crush the head of the serpent. Well, what if he's able to eliminate the seed of the woman?

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Well, you have Cain killing Abel in the very next generation. Jesus said that Satan was a murderer from the beginning.

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We think that he inspired Cain to do that. And then in Genesis 6, it appears that he's corrupting this bloodline prior to the flood.

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So perhaps it's to keep this promise from Genesis 3 .15 from coming true.

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And then in Genesis 9, God tells people to be fruitful and multiply. We know what happens right away. They don't.

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They do multiply, but they don't scatter like they're supposed to. They start building a city on a tower, and God calls

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Abraham, and he promises him this land. And then he says, your descendants are going to go down to a land that's not their own.

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They're going to serve for 400 years, and then I'll bring them back here to this land. And when they come back, giants are dominating the land.

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And it seems as if Satan is using them to try to prevent God's promise from coming true. And what's really interesting is that's where Abraham was in the city of Hebron at that time.

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That's where he lived, by the Oaks of Mamre, or the Terebinth trees, depending on your translation.

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And when you read through Genesis, it says, Sarah died in Kirjath Arba.

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That is Hebron. Abraham buried his wife, buried Sarah, his wife in the cave of the field of Machpelah before Mamre.

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That is Hebron in the land of Canaan. And then Jacob lived there. And then Joseph, when he went to find his brothers, left the valley of Hebron.

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So why am I making a big deal about that? Well, that's where, even when they went down to Egypt and when

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Jacob died, they brought him back to Hebron to be buried there. When the spies return, or when the

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Israelites are about to go into the land and then the spies go into the land to check it out, and of course, their actions would result in 40 years of wandering.

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It says, they went up through the south and came to Hebron. Ahimon, Shishai, and Talmai, the descendants of Anak were there.

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So the narrator tells us Anakim are in Hebron. What else is it called?

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Kirjath Arba, or Kiryath Arba, the city of Arba. Every single time it mentions Arba in the

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Bible, it tells us Arba was the greatest of the Anakim. Or it tells us something else about Arba. Arba was the father of Anak.

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Arba was the father of Anak. So each time that term comes up, it tells us something else about him.

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And what's really interesting, when you plot all those out on the map, they are filling the southern end of Israel.

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They are filling the eastern edge of Israel, all the way along those places. It's almost as if Satan is saying, you're not coming back into this land.

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I know God promised, told Abraham they're going to, but you're not coming back here. And of course, that scared the people.

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They were afraid of going into the land and they wandered for 40 years. And yet God had just led them through the

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Red Sea. They should have trusted him. God can, if he can move the sea back, he can handle some giants.

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That's not a big deal. So, and of course we see Joshua driving them out and killing most of them, other than the ones we've talked about.

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So sometimes people say, well, why aren't they around today? Well, it could be that David's mighty men wiped them out.

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It could be that the angels who did that, who started all of that, are no longer able to because they're chained in, they're in chains of darkness until the judgment.

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So they're not around to do that. I'm going to speculate here a bit. It's possible that some have been trying to do that.

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I apologize if you have younger viewers here, this will be more like PG to PG -13.

53:56

I won't use bad terminology, but just the concept. In medieval time, you had the incubus, who was a demon that appeared as a male and would molest a woman who was sleeping.

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And then the succubus was a demon who appeared as female. They were also called sylvans and fauns. It's interesting.

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Augustine and Luther could not stand the fallen angel view. In fact, they both made really bizarre remarks about it.

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And yet look at what they say about this concept. Augustine wrote, there is too a very general rumor, which many have verified by their own experience or which trustworthy persons who have heard the experience of others corroborate that sylvans and fauns, who are commonly called incubi, had often made wicked assaults upon women and satisfied their lust upon them.

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And a certain devils called deuces by the Gauls are constantly attempting and affecting this impurity is so generally affirmed that we're impudent to deny it.

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He says, there's so many people who are saying this is true. We've got to believe that. But we can't believe that something like that is in Genesis 6.

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Luther said the same sort of thing. But as regards the demon, lectures, and trumpets, the incubi and succubi do not deny, may

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I believe that a demon may be either a lecture or a trumpet, for I've heard men cite their own experience. Is it possible that that's what was going on in the

55:10

Middle Ages? They were attempting to do that. I don't know. But we have a similar thing going on in our day where there are a lot of people who are claiming to be abducted by aliens, taken aboard these craft, and there always seems to be some form of sexual experimentation on them.

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Now, maybe it's just a demonic thing to frighten people, because that certainly would do it, and to keep them distracted, keep them from focusing on God.

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Maybe it's something that they're trying to duplicate what had happened in the past. I don't know, because we don't have scripture to tell us that on this one.

55:45

And it's interesting that many of these abductions are documented to have stopped when the person calls on Christ to help them.

55:52

So it does not seem like there are aliens coming from millions of light years away or anything like that to abduct people.

55:58

These are spiritual things. It's a deception that's going on. So here's another answer to that question, where the

56:09

Nephilim wouldn't be necessary. They wouldn't be necessary, because at that time, how do you win battles?

56:15

Well, whoever's bigger, stronger, more powerful, they usually win the battle. Obviously, if God is with the other side, they're going to win that battle.

56:22

But today, we don't need the strongest people to win a battle. If you've got a giant on your side, big deal.

56:27

We can knock him out with a cruise missile from 1 ,000 miles away. So what you need is the more intelligent people, not necessarily the bigger, stronger people.

56:35

So maybe they're completely unnecessary, or maybe it's just that the ones that could bring them about are no longer able to do that, because they're in chains of darkness.

56:46

So let's see. Those are the verses we talked about before. So I'm going to leave it at that. There is so much more that we can get into, but I think

56:54

I've probably given you, I've probably whet your appetite enough for some questions. So let me stop sharing my screen, and we can turn it over.

57:02

If that's the appropriate way to do it, we can. Perfect. It was perfect. OK, good. So this is

57:09

Robin. And I want to encourage people in the room, if you have questions, put them into the chat.

57:16

Terry will read them a little bit later. I'm going to go ahead and ask you a few questions, Tim. And I want to thank you for being considerate with the language, as we do have

57:27

Leilani's two girls listening. And when you said that, I was like, oh, no. So it worked out perfect.

57:36

I'm sorry, when I said what? PG and G rated.

57:42

Oh, yeah, yeah. OK, good. Because sometimes we do have kids in the room, and I know. But what you're saying is absolutely true.

57:51

Can you put the last part of your presentation up again, where you dropped off at?

57:59

Yeah, let me share screen again. Sorry about that. That's OK. I realize it's probably better to look at my presentation than me.

58:10

Oh, no, no. I just want you to put it up briefly, so I can take a look at it. There was a question

58:15

I had. OK. And then all of a sudden, it disappeared. OK.

58:22

Is that what we wanted there? The one before that. OK, let me make this full screen if I can.

58:28

Well. You don't have to. I can see it fine. Yeah. So the tartarosis, that's tartarus, right?

58:37

You can stop sharing now. I just made it a quick reminder. My question about that is, it's only mentioned there once.

58:47

Why do you think it's only mentioned there once? So it's a good question.

58:53

I think, well, let me, I'll try to give it a quick answer.

58:58

There are a lot of terms that I think we become very used to just lumping all together.

59:04

Like, when we talk about eternity, we say heaven or hell, right? But if we actually, if you want to be technical about it, heaven is the place where God is right now.

59:15

Where we're going to spend eternity is the new heaven, new earth, the new Jerusalem. We're going to have physical bodies in the new

59:20

Jerusalem. We're not going to be just spirits up in the current heaven, because there's going to be a new heaven, new earth.

59:28

So the Bible actually gives a lot more technical terminology to the, the good place, you know, the great place, but it does the same thing with the place where we don't want to go.

59:40

So a lot of times we'll say, you know, hell for all eternity. Well, technically it's the lake of fire. Hell is the word that gets translated from the

59:47

Greek word. Which is not. Probably is not how they would have thought of that at that time.

59:55

When, when Jesus first used that term, they would have thought of the valley of Hinnom and the bad stuff that that stood for and what was going on there.

01:00:03

But revelation clearly talks about the lake of fire. So I think Peter is using a term that the people in his culture understood that the

01:00:10

Greek speaking people understood. This is a place where these sinful angelic beings were, were held.

01:00:16

And yeah, the Greeks have a distorted view of that, but I think that's what's going on. So along with that, you said that.

01:00:27

The other gods. That's Zeus and that that's where he would send his people too.

01:00:35

So he was just saying that. In the Greek. So they would understand that. I don't know that much about grief.

01:00:41

Greek mythology. That's where Zeus. So. Zeus imprisoned.

01:00:47

The Titans in Tartarus, according to Greek mythology. Oh, okay. Interesting. And then you talked about.

01:00:55

A people group referring to the giants. With three different names.

01:01:00

Do you think they were the same giant groups? Or do you think. And with three different. The same group with three names or was it three separate gang groups?

01:01:09

And they just kind of lumped them all the different ones together. Yeah. Are you talking about like the MEM? Yes. I think those are different.

01:01:17

If you can say tribes. Different clans of giants. But they. So they're all

01:01:23

Nephilim in the sense that they're all giants, but they were different. Different clans.

01:01:28

They lived in different area. So they. Got different titles. Okay. All right.

01:01:34

Okay. And then the passage in Amos about the height of the giants. I've been following LA Marzulli since 2014 and all these other.

01:01:44

It's this topic. It's interesting. And. I think it was

01:01:50

Derek. Gilbert that said that possibly the giants could have been 30 feet tall.

01:01:57

And then they refer to something like the Bailback or the stones at Bailback. That they could have been transported by a 30 foot giant.

01:02:05

What is your take? Yeah, I don't think that they were that tall. And just to.

01:02:12

I actually, I think I'm a good example of this. So I'm six foot nine. Well, I'm probably six, eight now because I.

01:02:17

Older and I shrunk and I lost my hair, but. When I was in high school, I was six foot nine. And I used to.

01:02:24

I used to be six foot nine. Right now I'm about 230 pounds. So if OG were as tall as his bed was long, he would be 13 and a half feet tall, which is exactly twice my height.

01:02:36

Okay. So in order to have, if he were built according to my proportions, He doesn't become twice my weight.

01:02:44

He doesn't become 460. You have to multiply my weight by eight. And then you have to double the height, double the width, double the depth.

01:02:52

Right to support that kind of pie. Yes. And so then that means that person becomes over 1800 pounds.

01:02:59

Oh, my. A human skeleton could support, like, if he just stood there. The compressive strength of bone is pretty strong.

01:03:06

It could support that way. But as soon as he starts moving and. You know, Trying to twist or bend or anything like that, it's going to put so much stress on those bones.

01:03:15

It's very difficult to imagine. Yeah. I don't know if there's a difference between a human being even more than that. I know some people say, well, but they're part angel party.

01:03:22

The Bible says there. They're mighty men of old men of renown. It doesn't describe any of them as being taller than that.

01:03:31

Goliath is. Somewhere in the nine and a half foot range or so. And when we look at some of the other writings, like the

01:03:41

Egyptian records, there are some indications that they were eight and a half to nine feet tall.

01:03:49

There I don't. I really don't think that they're.

01:03:54

You know, 15, 20, 30, 50 feet high. Like I see a lot of things on the internet that it becomes almost impossibly large for a human.

01:04:07

Skeletal structure to. Right. Yeah. It's not just the skeleton. You also have to have the heart. That will pump. You know, that kind of.

01:04:12

Yeah. Yeah. From the feet all the way back up, you know, 15 feet back up into the air to get the back of the heart.

01:04:18

And we're just not built to do that. Like some of like giraffes are. Right. Yeah. So that, that makes sense.

01:04:26

I, like I said, I. I've just been following this topic. And, you know, it was so great having

01:04:31

Doug two weeks ago and. Really great hearing yours too, because yours brought a lot of.

01:04:37

Into it. What. What he didn't have. And he, what was with Hebron?

01:04:46

I don't understand. The importance of Hebron. Yeah. So when. God tells

01:04:52

Abram. Remember I said that Satan can only know what God. Says, you know, what he reveals.

01:04:59

Well, he revealed to Abram that his, that his descendants, the Israelites are going to go down into Egypt. They're going to go to a land.

01:05:05

That's not their own. And then I'm going to bring them back here after 400 years. And this land is going to be theirs.

01:05:11

Well, he was in Hebron when he said that. And then Isaac and Jacob and Joseph lived in Hebron.

01:05:18

So he's old. So that's what Satan appears to be guarding. He's trying.

01:05:23

It seems as if the Nephilim are trying to block the Israelites from getting back into Hebron because that's what

01:05:29

God said they would have. And when the spies come back, when the, when the spies go through the land.

01:05:34

That's where he, they mentioned three of them. They named three of the giants who are there in Hebron.

01:05:40

And then they're all along the Southern and Eastern border of the land of Israel. That's that's supposed to be given to the

01:05:46

Israelites. So it's, it's almost as if they were trying to prevent that promise from coming true. Okay.

01:05:51

That makes sense. And Hebron is full of Muslims today. It's a very, yeah, it's a very hostile area to go to.

01:06:01

Yeah. There's a very small Jewish population. And if you're. I can't go there unless I'm taken by a local guide.

01:06:08

When I'm over in Israel. Yeah. That's a couple of different people have said that very same thing.

01:06:14

Okay. Well, I could, I could talk about this all day. Can we have you remind people where we can reach you?

01:06:26

And then we're going to stop the recording and then Terry will ask everybody else's questions. We have a couple of questions that I was going to go ahead and ask first, if that, if you're okay.

01:06:39

Okay. And then, and then, yeah, we'll, and then we'll do our, our wrap up, but, but Jim would like to know, could, could the fallen angels have, so this goes back to our

01:06:50

PG version of the. Of the presentation, but she wants to know if they could have made it with human women in an attempt to become part of the human heritage and therefore be eligible for Jesus to be their kinsmen redeemer.

01:07:06

That's an interesting question. I, I don't know that they would have thought of that because I don't know that they even knew that part of the plan.

01:07:13

When you look in, in the new Testament, it talks about it. The rulers of this age, had they known, they would not have crucified the

01:07:20

Lord, the Lord of glory. That may be referring to the Jewish leaders at that time. And the Roman authorities that may be referring to the angelic powers.

01:07:28

They didn't really know the plan fully because obviously Satan inspires Judas to go through with it.

01:07:34

If they would have known. I don't know that they really fully understood that what was coming.

01:07:41

So I don't think that's what they're doing, but I I'm going to speculate a little bit here. I think that might be what the women were attempting to do, not necessarily gain salvation.

01:07:52

But if you look at originally, Adam and Eve are created to live forever. They sin and they and their descendants are living almost a thousand years, not quite that long.

01:08:01

And it could be that the women were thinking that, Hey, if we. Have children with the beings who don't die.

01:08:09

Maybe our children won't die. And if you look what happens as a result, that punishment is right there in that passage,

01:08:16

Genesis six, three, God says, my spirit will not remain in man or strive with man forever is indeed flesh.

01:08:21

And his day shall be 120 years. And what we see from that verse, Genesis six, three, Noah lives nine 50 and there's immediate drop, you know, 600, 400, all the way down to Moses who lives one 20.

01:08:32

And since Moses, nobody lives 120 years. So it's almost as if they were trying to cheat death in some way.

01:08:39

And God said, look, I let you live over 900 years. And you're this wicked. Now you get 120. And so it's another way to curb the wickedness of mankind.

01:08:49

That's interesting. Carolyn says the fallen angels who took human wives were banished to Tartarus prison.

01:08:58

Which was terrible, but what could explain more angels taking human wives later?

01:09:03

Are you familiar with what she's. Yeah, I think, I think there's an assumption in the question that that happened at the time of the flood.

01:09:11

So why would, if that happened at the time of the flood that they were bound, why would other angels make the same attempt?

01:09:18

I don't think that they were bound at the flood. I think that that's something that happened sometime around the crucifixion resurrection,

01:09:25

Pentecost sometime in that 50 day period. Based on, I don't have a whole lot of time to get into it, but based on something in Psalm 82, the judgment that's going to happen on those that he put in authority.

01:09:38

It seems to hint at. At the resurrection that that's when that's going to happen. That's when that judgment was going to take place.

01:09:44

And it could be what. When it talks about in Peter, where he says the, that Jesus went and made proclamation to the spirits in prison, it could be happening at that point.

01:09:55

That there he's proclaiming victory and that's when they're being. Sentenced essentially.

01:10:00

Oh, that they're being locked up at when he, after he was crucified and went.

01:10:08

Down to let them know that, you know, he was alive again. Right. Yeah. So I tend to think that's when it happened, not at the time of the flood.

01:10:15

I think the ones who were sinful before the flood of this are still the same ones sinning after the flood. Okay. That makes sense.

01:10:24

Rain would like to know what is the basis for thinking that angels can reproduce. Genesis six. Genesis six tells us that.

01:10:32

The, the, when we look at the text, The. Elsewhere in scripture clearly is referring to angelic beings.

01:10:41

I made that case. I go into more detail in the book. There's two. Places in the song or a very similar term.

01:10:48

Clearly refers to angelic beings. So. I don't need to know the.

01:10:56

The how they can do it other than. The text just tells us that they did.

01:11:03

One of the, so I have five chapters in my book all about the objections to the fallen angel of you.

01:11:08

We only covered like three, three or four of them. So I don't shy away from them in the book at all, but.

01:11:14

I'm going to try to say this carefully. Oftentimes we'll.

01:11:19

As creations will say that human beings are the only. Creatures made in the image of God. I would argue angels also are.

01:11:27

For a lot of reasons. If you think about what it means to be made in God's image. You know, we have authority. We have dominion.

01:11:33

We are relational beings. We can communicate with God. Ability to reason. Yeah. Ability to reason angels have all of those things.

01:11:40

They, they, everything that we can name in terms of what it means to be made in God's image, they have as well.

01:11:48

And I'm not going to go into more detail. I do in the book, but I think there are other reasons as well. So. We know that they can take on human form.

01:11:57

We know they can eat and drink. And grab somebody by the hand and pull them out of the city. We know that the people in Sodom.

01:12:04

We know that the people in Sodom wanted to do some very ungodly things to them. So. Based on the details we have in scripture, plus the text, just saying that that's what they did.

01:12:15

I have every reason to believe they can. At least certain ones. I'm not saying every. I think that's the other thing we need to keep in mind.

01:12:22

Not every angel is the same. So when you look at the. You know, we have angels. You have cherubim who apparently have four wings.

01:12:29

The seraphim have six wings. Isaiah six describes. We have messenger angels.

01:12:34

You have art. You know, Michael, the art. Archangel. The fighting angels. Yeah. So there just seemed to be a hierarchy or all sorts of different types of angels.

01:12:46

Maybe they have certain powers that other ones don't. They're just. The Bible doesn't give us a whole lot of detail, but it does tell us that there's a variety of angelic life.

01:12:55

And I think we're all going to be quite surprised when we are with the Lord and we see the variety there.

01:13:01

I know I can't wait. So intriguing. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, Terry, go ahead.

01:13:07

Yeah. We have a couple other questions, but I think that we'll save them for off camera. So, so.

01:13:14

I want to just. Leave with one comment comment. And then we'll wrap things up. Is that Jim W says.

01:13:20

Dealing with the unseen spiritual realm can be. Can be likened to staring at the sun.

01:13:25

I think that's a great point. One needs to be very careful and know what they're doing, or it can spiritually blind them to what is really the truth.

01:13:34

It's a great caution. It's one thing. I tell people on this topic too. Don't spend so much time focusing on what our enemy does.

01:13:43

Let's spend more time on what our great and mighty God has done, especially through the gospel, sending his son to take our place on that cross and then raising from the dead three days later.

01:13:52

And let's make sure we're sharing that. But people do have questions about this topic. And there are a lot of unbelievers who have questions about it.

01:13:59

It's an interesting way that you can introduce them to the gospel. But I think that's a great. Caution that we shouldn't be focused on.

01:14:06

The. Wicked spiritual realm too much. Definitely not dabbling in it.

01:14:13

So. Okay. So go ahead and remind everybody how they can find you. Support your ministry ministries and, and buy your book.

01:14:23

All right. Well, you mentioned, we mentioned earlier. I do work for answer in Genesis. So yeah, you can check out our encounter or creation museum .org.

01:14:29

I get to do the writing for the exhibits, those places, but my own ministry on the side of a few years ago, actually changed it to risen ministries.

01:14:36

That's a little easier to, to find it's risen men .com. And I do have a blog at my old website,

01:14:46

Midwest apologetic. You can find a lot of my resources there. A lot of my books like. Fallen right there.

01:14:52

Is available on that website is also available on Amazon. And. Not available at the arc or the museum, because as I said before, we don't take an official view.

01:15:02

On that topic. So. Okay. Thank you for that. And we are creation fellowship,

01:15:08

Santy. And you can email us at creation fellowship, Santy at gmail .com to get on our mailing list.

01:15:14

We promised not to spam you, but we will send you emails to all of our upcoming speakers. And in the month of July, we still have two more weeks and a couple of great speakers.

01:15:23

We have Dr. Randall price next week. And the week after we'll have Dr. Jason Lyles. So be looking forward and making plans to attend those.