Under consideration is John McArthur’s sermons on Genesis 6:1-4 which is titled, Demonic Invasion (my full review of which you can find here). I would say that his overall sermon, as in application of the text, is good and useful however, he jumps to various conclusions due to presuppositions and so ends up asserting various points.
DEMON POSSESSED MEN
Having claimed that the sons of God are angels which are fallen and are thus demons, John MacArthur then claimed that angels/demons are spirits and so he ends up with the view that, in reality, the sons of God are demon possessed men.
He asks “The question then comes, how can this be? How can an immaterial spiritual being, a fallen angel, a demon marry a woman?” within the context of procreating offspring and his answer is, “Only one way, folks. They have to take the body of a man.” He then asks “Why would men want to do this? Why would a man want to become the house of a demon? Why would he want to have demonic involvement in his family? Why would he want to have children that would be exposed to this demon power, this demon wickedness? Why?” and his answer is that “here is man, he’s under the curse” of death as per Genesis 3 “and along comes the enemy and says, ‘Hey, we can beat that. In fact, not only will he give you life eternal, but we will make you like God.’ So people embraced the demon lies. They embraced the demon religions.”
He notes that Genesis 6 states, “‘My Spirit shall not strive with man.’ Please notice this. He doesn’t say My Spirit won’t strive with demons because He realizes that the demons don’t have any access unless it’s granted by man. The issue is people here…And that tells me that the demonic invasion is not ultimately the fault of demons, it is the fault of man. God has a judgment plan for demons…He doesn’t say I’m going to destroy demons, He says I’m going to destroy man….Judgment of angels is not the subject of Genesis. Man is the subject of Genesis. The judgment of angels, we’ll get that later in the Bible. Man is the subject of Genesis. This is the record of the history of man and this is the judgment of man who has opened himself to demons just like Adam opened himself to Satan and Eve.”
There are some good points here but the fact is that the text is correlating the actions of the sons of God and their offspring to the reason for the flood. And perhaps because angels look like human males their offspring are referred to as “men”: much like Barack Obama is referred to as the USA’s first “black” president even though he is half “black” and half “white.”
NEPHILIM EX MACHINA Well, I state Nephilim ex machina because based on his view that the sons of God are demon possessed human men then their offspring are 100% human and the Nephilim just are. He envisages addressing the sons of God thusly, “you may think you’re demons coming in and filling you and taking your demon power into your sexual actions are going to produce some godlike children…some kind of wonder child” but “you are only flesh…You’re just mortal, you’re not half man and half angel, you’re just depraved flesh.”
He then comes to “verse 4, ‘And there were Nephilim on the earth in those days.’ Nephilim is just a term that means great men, men of stature, men of power, men of influence” but this is not the case. He states, “It’s just a generic word for that kind of person” so they why is it not used throughout the Bible? Rather, great men, men of stature, men of power, men of influence is that which the text has as “mighty men which were of old, men of renown” the key word for which is gibbor (H1368). MacArthur does touch upon the traditional etymological meaning of Nephilim (when assumed to derive from Hebrew rather than Aramaic), “the term actually means falling ones, the kind of people that fall on you and crush you, powerful, fierce warrior-type people.”
He further notes that the term Nephilim only elsewhere appears “when the spies went in to Canaan in Numbers 13 and they came out and said there are giants in there…And the reason they used Nephilim there to describe them is because they knew the word from Genesis. Not a race of people, it’s not a race of people that shows up again later in Canaan because they would have been all drowned anyway, cause only Noah and his family survived.” I agree that they pick up on it from the events recorded in Genesis 6, of course, and also agree that it’s not a race of people that shows up again later as that was stated within a bad/evil report by spies whom God condemns—see Did Caleb and the spies see Nephilim giants in the land.
John MacArthur notes that as per Genesis 6 the Nephilim “were on the earth in those days” and further asserts, “somebody might think they were the product of these unions and that angels, demons and men got together and produced some monsters. No.” and he then asserts that “There were powerful men on the earth and when the sons of God, verse, went into the daughters of men and bore children…All you have is men, men, men. There were already some powerful men and out of those unions there came some more powerful men” yet, if “There were already some powerful men” then why are they not called Nephilim but sons of God and why are their powerful men offspring called Nephilim and not sons of God or sons of the sons of God?
His bottom line is, “The point being that those unions didn’t produce anything different than already existed” which he is very emphatic about, “they were men, men, men, men…They’re just of the flesh, man, man, man….men, men, men, men…All you are is flesh, flesh, flesh, men, men, men.” I emphasize with part of why he claims that the “didn’t produce anything different than already existed” since the grammar (at least in English) is a bit tricky at this point. After all, “There were giants [Nephilim] in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children” seems to imply that the Nephilim were already there—ex machina. And yet, I wonder if a more straightforward reading might not be, “when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children, there were giants [Nephilim] in the earth in those days; and also after that.”
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