Lay down your sweet and weary head Night has fallen, you've come to journey's end From tent-toting patriarchs greeting promises from afar, to vagabonds and vagrants doomed to wander in a wasteland, God's people never sought final satisfaction in the journey. Traveling has stopped going. We seek the promised land, a city with foundations, whose designer and builder is God, aiding you on towards the destination. Welcome to Journey's End. You've come to Journey's End. Did you ever take a Greek mythology class? I never did, and I had absolutely no desire to. I've talked to many Christians that did take one though, and the usual answer I get when I ask what they thought was something like, it was anti-Christian fictional nonsense. Gods and demigods running around making a mess of the world, why waste my time with such primitive fantasy? This idea of fictional nonsense is what most of us think when we hear the term mythology. If mythology is any one thing, it is the made-up stories of primitive people. Why they made up those stories is anyone's guess, but that they are made up is the only obvious conclusion that rational, enlightened, modern people could come to. And yet, there is a strange thing here. During the next few weeks, we want to talk about the biblical flood. This story takes place in Genesis 6-9. Christians believe in a cataclysm that wiped nearly all living creatures from the face of the earth. The strangeness is that hundreds of other cultures, separated by oceans, cultures on every continent, on every island group on the planet, tell the same basic story. These stories are deeply mythological by everyone's definition. And yet Christians are quick to use these stories in their arsenal of arguments to show that the flood of the Bible really happened. Thus we have a bit of a contradiction. On one hand we say that mythology is silly make-believe. On the other, we use the same mythology to prove the validity of Scripture when it suits our purposes. You can't have it both ways. If you try to, you will make a mockery of the very faith you're trying to convince others to believe. In light of this, consider this quote by the late, great Francis Schaeffer, one of the most orthodox, conservative, well-known, insightful Christian apologists of the last century. Schaeffer said, quote, More and more we are finding that mythology in general, though greatly contorted, very often has some historic base. And the interesting thing is that one myth that one finds over and over in many parts of the world is that somewhere, a long time ago, supernatural beings had sexual intercourse with natural women and produced a special breed of people." In the Bible, the flood is precipitated by four very strange verses which tell a story as widely spread as the flood. It's the story of a group of beings called the sons of God who saw that the daughters of men were beautiful and so they decided to take wives for themselves. From this union came the people, came a group of people we've been talking about for the last couple of weeks, the Giants. Now in this show we want to explore who these sons of God might be in preparation for upcoming shows on the flood. Good afternoon, I'm Doug Van Dorn. I'm the pastor of the Reformed Baptist Church of Northern Colorado, and with me is Pastor Tony Jackson. He's pastor of Reformation Baptist Church. Tony, we have got another almost unbelievable topic on the table today, sort of like we have the last couple weeks. It's fairly contentious in some circles. It reminds me of something a friend posted on Facebook the other day, a joke. The past, the present, and the future walk into a bar. It was tense. Get it? It was tense. Okay, so this topic is contentious. Can you give us a little bit of an overview about why people might be up in arms over differences of opinion on how to interpret the sons of God? Over the past couple of weeks, we've been just to give a little background and then we'll jump into why this is so difficult and why it's so contentious even among Christians and why there are varying views on the subject. We've been talking about the war between the two seeds from Genesis chapter 3 and verse 15. We also have looked at Genesis chapter 6 verse 4 and how the sons of God mentioned in that text is what we believe a physical manifestation of the seed, not necessarily from Satan himself, but of Satan's spiritual offspring. There's a physical lineage that comes from the sons of God who are in Satan's army and doing his bidding and attempting to destroy the world, to eliminate the distinction between all kinds. But one of the things we haven't really looked at in detail is this idea of the sons of God and who they were and how that affects our thinking about our lives and the way that we live our lives and the spiritual reality that's going on all around us every day. And so that's what we want to jump into. But you asked the question, why is this so difficult for people to get along and to agree with this view that we've taken, what we have recognized or called the supernatural view. Well, first of all, the idea of mythology being fiction is probably one. You know, when you use the word myth, and you talk about trying to draw some historical reality from that myth, or some historical parallels even, then it's going to set off triggers in people's minds. Because when we think of myth, we just think of some stories that are made up, that are bizarre. So that's one thing, is the idea of myth. The second thing is it doesn't seem to fit anything in our experience. Many Christians believe there are demons. Many Christians believe that there are supernatural forces, that there are things that go on that we don't understand. But beyond that, it's really difficult to grasp the supernatural. It's hard to understand what's going on behind the veil, and because of that we don't want to talk about it. The other reason is I think we've not had much teaching or training in the church on the way that ancient people thought about these things. In other words, we haven't really looked at other Christians' worldview from other times other than our own. We live in the West. We live, as we've talked about, in a materialistic world that is driven by a materialistic worldview. And so it's difficult for us to think outside of the box. And so when we read things like this in scripture, it's sort of like we talked about before with the servant Gehazi having his eyes opened and seeing the spiritual things going on for the first time. In history, there have been many who have expressed not only disagreement with this view, but flat out contempt against this view. Doug, why don't you mention some of those historically that have come out very strongly against this view. So, a caveat here about who these people are. They're actually some of my absolute favorite writers, and I like a lot of what they have to say about a lot of things. I'm a Reformed Christian, and at least three of these guys would be considered kind of fathers of the Reformation. And we'll talk about one, especially here in a minute when we get to John Calvin, but Augustine was really the one who kind of started or popularized the more naturalistic interpretation of the sons of God. We'll talk about what his view was in a minute. But he said, here's his reason for getting rid of the other view, the supernatural view. He says, I could by no means believe that God's holy angels could have at that time so fallen. Martin Luther, who was really the fountain of the Reformation, said that anything could have been born from the union of a devil and a human being, I do not believe. And then he refers to it as the silly ideas of the Jews. So you can hear kind of a mocking tone in his voice there, can't you? Calvin, John Calvin, a great reformer, said he called it that ancient figment concerning the intercourse of angels with women that is abundantly refuted by its own absurdity. And he says it's surprising that learned people should formerly have been fascinated by ravings so gross and prodigious. Other older people call this view the view of mad fools or people uttering blasphemies, fanciful interpretations, and so on and so forth. In other words, they're not really dealing with the text. They're just making fun of anybody who might happen to have a different opinion, a supernatural view. In other words, what they seem to be saying is this is really hard for me to believe and therefore I'm not going to believe it. Exactly. I can't believe it because it just seems so unbelievable. It's kind of interesting that that's kind of the same take that atheists take when they start thinking about the Trinity or the humanity and deity of Christ and other kinds of things that are really difficult to believe but which are biblical. So we've touched on this before but let's just talk briefly about The two main views of Genesis 6 and the Sons of God, if you were to ask most Christians, where do you come down on this, they're normally going to take two primary views. What are those two views? Well, let me read the text again. We haven't read it for this show. This is from the ESV Genesis 6, 1-4. When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. Then the Lord said, My spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh, his days shall be a hundred and twenty years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came into the daughters of man and bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown." And we've looked at how some of those words are translated in the Greek as giants. So that's the text. The question is, who are these sons of God? And there's really, I guess, two main ways of taking who they are. And it can be broken down, subdivided into more. But the two main ways are basically, to help people on a radio show, listening in their car, a supernatural view and a natural view, or a more human view. So the supernatural view says that heavenly beings came down from heaven and bred with human women and produced a hybrid offspring called the Nephilim or the giants. Now this view was the universal interpretation of Judaism at the time of the writing of the New Testament and all the way through after the destruction of the temple in the 70 AD. And it was, as far as we know, the universal interpretation of the church with only one or two exceptions until almost the beginning of the 5th century with Chrysostom and Augustine. And that view is a natural view and it basically says that the sons of God or the sons of Seth and Seth would be the replacement for Abel when Cain killed Abel. So sons of God are sons of Seth, and the daughters of men are the daughters of Cain. And the idea is that basically Christians are marrying non-Christians. And somehow, it's not really explained, but this produces gigantic offspring. What they'll do is they'll usually take, I guess, the word Nephilim, and they'll say it just means fallen ones. It doesn't have anything to do with giants. So those are the two views historically. How should we come to understand a correct interpretation of this? I think that the first thing we need to do, Doug, is look at the actual term that's used in the Hebrew in Genesis chapter 6, and then look at all of the other uses of that, or at least several of them, throughout the Old Testament. and examine how this term is used. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that the Sons of God is a technical term in the Old Testament, and what I meant by that is not to explain something over our heads, but simply to say that when you have a phrase like this in Scripture, we have to look at how Scripture uses that phrase in context in order to understand what's going on in the text. And so that's what we need to do is just look at some passages that use this term, sons of God, and see how scripture works that out throughout, especially the Old Testament. Don't you think that would be a great place to start? Yeah, so I think we did this a couple weeks ago. We went to Job 38, and I like to go to this passage because it's absolutely clear who it's talking about. The verse is verse 7, Job 38, 7, kind of in the middle of a sentence. So God is talking to Job out of the whirlwind, and he's asking him questions about the very beginning of creation. And the reason why this is so important is because on day one of creation, there were no people around. They weren't created until day six, right? So when he's asking about the sons of God shouting for joy on day one, it can't possibly be referring to human beings because there were no human beings. Also, it refers to them as stars in the parallelism of the verse, and stars are very often used as another name, a synonym, for the sons of God and for heavenly beings in different places in the Bible, like the heavenly hosts and things like that. I think it would be important to mention, you know, we've touched on this in the last couple of shows, but this phrase, sons of God, is actually used three times in the book of Job. In Job chapter 1, remember when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord and Satan also came among them. That's in verse 6. And then in chapter 2, again there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves. The language that's being used here is really that of the courtroom. It is what I would consider to be courtroom language. To present themselves before the judge. The idea here seems to be that of some kind of a council. You might think of knights of the round table, you know, counseling together, meeting together to discuss the affairs of the day. Do you think that's a fair representation? Yeah, in fact, the Bible actually refers to this as the Divine Council, which is the same language that is used in neighboring cultures to Israel at the time. They call them the Council of El. And there were 70 of these beings. We'll get to that here in a little bit. But Psalm 82.1 refers to these beings as gods and calls it the divine council. And it says that God is taking his seat at the head of the council in the midst of these guys. And he's judging them for the things that they have done. I think it's also important to remember that the book of Job is a very ancient book. In fact, if you look at the chronology of the Bible, we think of the book of Genesis as being the beginning and the oldest book in terms of chronology, but Job is actually older, meaning that Job probably lived during the time of Abraham, about 400 years before Moses came along and wrote the book of Genesis. So this is a very, very old book, and so the idea of the sons of God here is a very ancient idea that goes way, way back in history, in the history of the Bible, in the history of God's people, understanding it this way. It's not something we're just making up. It's not something that we just read through and said, well, it looks like this is good evidence that these are actually angelic beings. In fact, there are several texts where the translators have translated the same term For example, in Psalm 29.1, the psalmist says, ascribe to the Lord, and the same word here is, O sons of God, but they translate it as, O heavenly beings, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. Now that's a really good insight there. It's a good window. Certainly there's some interpretation going on, but what's interesting is that consistently throughout the scripture, throughout the Old Testament, This term, Sons of God, is used not just in Genesis, not just in Job, but in Psalms as well, Deuteronomy, as we're going to look at in a few minutes, to refer to these angelic beings. And we're going to come to this in just a minute. And we'll have about, I suppose, five or six minutes to talk about something that really deserves a couple of hours. But I want to bring up the fact that the Sons of God actually have a lot of synonyms in the Bible that people have heard. But it probably never equated with what we're talking about here. And it's important to think about what is the son of God? If God is a king, what would be his son? Well, a prince would be his son. Or a ruler. It would be a prince. Right. And so Satan is actually called the prince of this world. I don't know if you've ever caught that before. Another term would be rulers. Other terms would be thrones, powers, lords, dominions, names, gods, principalities, stars. These are terms that you find all over the New Testament that are referring very often to invisible spiritual beings. And the idea is that Christ, in those texts, Christ has taken up his seat at the right hand of the Father, where he now is the name above every name. And he's the one who rules over the thrones and principalities of the air, and so on and so forth. So, sons of God is a term that's actually used, or it's an idea that's used throughout the scripture. OK, one of the terms that you mentioned there, Doug, was gods. Psalm 82.6 specifically says, I said you are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you. Nevertheless, like men, you shall die and fall like any prince. I think we need to touch on this for a few minutes. I don't think we're going to get to Deuteronomy 32 today. We can pick that up next week. But in this use of this term, gods, how can the Bible say that there are other gods? If as Christians we believe that there's only one God, we're monotheists. We believe there's only one Creator God who created the heavens and the earth and all that there is and sustains everything. So why does the Bible indicate that there are other gods? Do you want to deal with that? Yeah, it's a difficult question, but I think the easiest way to see it is that even in the way that you asked the question, you equivocated on the word God. Equivocation means that you're using a word in two different senses, maybe even in the same sentence, but you don't realize it. So on the one hand, we affirm that there's only one God, but on the other hand, you started to qualify who this God is by talking about his attributes. Yeah. You see what I'm saying? So, the Bible affirms that there are gods. It talks about them as real beings. One of the Psalms says that I praise you in the midst of the gods. Elohim, it's the same word that's used for God. And the very first commandment, you know, it talks about you should have no other gods before me. The very idea that God has a name, that He is the Most High God. Well, what's He most high over? He's most high over other beings. that would be called gods. So, because the Bible uses this idea that there are other gods, we need to think about God with a capital G, not by the name God. It's not the name or the word God, Elohim, that we know what God is like. It's by His names. He is Yahweh. He's the self-existent One. He is Elyon, God Most High. He is El Shaddai, God Almighty. He is Elroi, the God Who Sees. He's a God that's different from all the gods because He is the uncreated God. He's the omniscient God. He's the omnipotent God. He has attributes that other gods don't share. But because they can be called gods in the scripture, there has to be something that they have in common with him. So actually a lot of what we're talking about here today, I owe a great deal of debt to Dr. Michael Heisser, who has several websites and stuff that you can go and look this stuff up. He did his PhD at University of Wisconsin on the divine counsel. One of the things that he says and suggests is that when we look at the word God, G-O-D, that we need to think about it in terms of what all gods that are real have in common. And he suggests there's really only one thing that they all have in common, which is that they live in the spiritual plane of existence. In other words, they don't have physical bodies. So in the Bible, we don't have time to get into this today, but angels are called gods in Deuteronomy 32. Demons are called gods in the same chapter. Even Samuel's ghost is called a god by the Witch of Endor when she calls him up and she's shocked that he comes. Saul says, I want you to call up Samuel for me. And she sees this Elohim, this god who comes up from the grave. And Saul says, well, what does he look like? You know, so she describes him and he says, well, that's Samuel. And then Samuel ends up giving him a this curse and tells him when he's going to die and it ends up coming true. There's no hint in the text that it's not really Samuel, that it's some kind of a deceiving spirit or something. So Heisser suggests that the term God actually just refers to a place of existence. And I think that that's a good place to start when we're thinking about it. We're not saying that that God is on par with other gods. But we are saying that there are other beings that are real that the Bible calls gods. And there's just no way that you can get around that fact. It happens over and over and over. You know, as our time grows short today, Doug, I wanted to conclude with this verse that you alluded to earlier in Colossians chapter 2 and verse 15, where Paul tells us that God disarmed the rulers and authorities. He disarmed them. He put them down, and He put them to open shame by triumphing over them, and then it adds this, in Him, in Christ. Because of what Christ has done for us in redemption, we know that He's won the victory, and we have nothing to fear from any other so-called God, from any son of God, because Christ is the victor. That's a good way to end the show. I cannot believe that it's gone this fast. Next week we're going to pick up on Deuteronomy 32. So, we can't wait to be with you again next week. At www.ColoradoReformation.com you will find an increasing number of helpful tools. We have local churches in the southern and northern metro areas to assist you in understanding both the journey and the journey's end. Our worship services are Christ-centered and driven by the teachings of Scripture. This leads to our people seeking to emulate our Savior through kindness and humility. We are rooted in the historic creeds of Christianity and our traditions arose out of the Protestant Reformation. We invite you to head to our website www.ColoradoReformation.com for more information. That's www.ColoradoReformation.com. We look forward to being with you again next week. Into the