Dennis Tuuri

verse one and read through verse 8 of chapter 6. So, please stand for the reading of the sermon text, Genesis 5, beginning at verse one. This is the book of the genealogy of Adam. In the day that God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. He created them male and female and blessed them and called them mankind or Adam in the day they were created. And Adam lived 130 years and begat a son in his own likeness after his image and named him Seth.

After he begat Seth, the days of Adam were 800 years and he had sons and daughters. So all the days that Adam lived were 930 years and he died. Seth lived 105 years and begot Enosh. After he begot Enosh, Seth lived 87 years and had sons and daughters. So all the days of Seth were 912 years and he died. Enosh lived 90 years and begat Cainan. After he begot Cainan, Enosh lived 815 years and had sons and daughters.

So all the days of Enosh were 95 years and he died. Cainan lived 70 years and begot Mahalalel. After he begot Mahalalel, Cainan lived 840 years and had sons and daughters. So all the days of Cainan were 910 years and he died. Mahalalel lived 65 years and begot Jared. After he begot Jared, Mahalalel lived 830 years and had sons and daughters. So all the days of Mahalalel were 895 years and he died. Jared lived 162 years and begot Enoch.

After he begot Enoch, Jared lived 800 years and had sons and daughters. All the days of Jared were 962 years and he died. Enoch lived 65 years and begot Methuselah. After he begat Methuselah, Enoch walked with God 300 years and had sons and daughters. So all the days of Enoch were 365 years. And Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him. Methuselah lived 187 years and begat Lamech. After he begot Lamech, Methuselah lived 782 years and had sons and daughters.

So all the days of Methuselah were 969 years and he died. Lamech lived 182 years and had a son. And he called his name Noah, saying, “This one will comfort us concerning our work and the toil of our hands because of the ground which the Lord has cursed.” After he begat Noah, Lamech lived 595 years and had sons and daughters. So all the days of Lamech were 777 years, and he died. And Noah was 500 years old, and Noah begat Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

Now it came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were beautiful, and they took wives to themselves of all whom they chose. And the Lord said, “My spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh. Yet his days shall be 120 years. There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came into the daughters of men, and they bore children to them.

These were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and he was grieved in his heart. So the Lord said, “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this portion of your scriptures and ask that your Holy Spirit would illumine the text for understanding that we might rejoice in it, be convicted by it, and take hope in it. We ask this through the mighty and powerful name of the Lord Jesus Christ, our blessed savior forever. Amen.

Maybe you should have sung “Who’s on the Lord’s Side” this morning. That would have been a good song.

We chose songs today that reflect the Reformation—of course reflect the lineage that we have continuity with those saints in heaven who died in the Lord both in the old and new covenants, particularly those who were martyred for the Lord, many of whom came out of the Reformation. We sang the profession of our faith according to the Luther paraphrase of the Nicene Creed, noting the importance of Luther to the Reformation. We’ll sing a song whose words were penned by John Calvin. In terms of the offertory we sang a psalm from the Genevan Psalter just now that was produced at Geneva at the time of Calvin. And we’ll close with Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress” sung to his original tune instead of the one that is maybe a bit more familiar. We celebrate the Reformation in this church every year.

We remember it. We teach our children history and we also call our children to act in terms of that Reformation and ourselves as well. We affect a small reformation of our own. When we take a day that is set aside to at best frivolity and typically no thought of God and at worst the sort of things we see out in the driveway this morning—broken pumpkins, mischief of various kinds. Increasingly the city of Portland seances with witches now broadcast on the evening news shows as a good and pleasant thing for our city to have practicing witches in it that are helping people with their love life, etc., etc.

We also—I saw a newscast this week about the neat deal that was going on at the South American dance of the dead where women dance with skeletons. This is what marks our day. We live in a day of distinguishment. That distinction is becoming more and more the mark of the day. When we were children, most of us—the older people here—Halloween was not a wicked thing really. I never went out and thought of myself as worshiping demons when I went trick-or-treating or took my younger children years ago.

But it certainly was not a day in which we thought at all about the history of the church and the need for the reformation of all of our lives based upon God’s word. So it was kind of a neutral period of time in many ways. But God doesn’t allow that to go on very long. Neutrality and pluralism is kind of the segue point to a new orthodoxy. And we see many people in our culture moving to a new orthodoxy of New Age spiritism or other sorts of anti-Christian activities.

And they are markedly anti-Christian. The gubernatorial race in Massachusetts this year—I think it was the governor’s race I read about in World magazine—talks about this controversy. You know, they have a lot of practicing witches in Salem now. And a year or two back some Christians protested their presence. They then called upon the governor at that time to tell the Christians that they were going to get thrown in jail if they didn’t stop violating the civil rights of these witches. That now has become an item in the gubernatorial race. The incumbent was challenged on this—that he was brought in, threats of the attorney general to threaten Christians who were persecuting witches supposedly. And now Wicca, the witches association that most of the witches in Salem belong to, are now actively opposing the gubernatorial candidate who favored the Christians.

So there’s a bit of a distinction going on in our culture. And which side are you going to be on? Who’s on the Lord’s side? Well, we’re going to read today about who was on the Lord’s side. We’ve talked about this a lot. We see it portrayed for us here, the line of Seth, the Sethite genealogy, as opposed to the line of Cain that we read about and talked about last week. We’ll find, however, at the end of the text that this section of scripture, and it is a section, makes it not quite so easy to distinguish who is on the Lord’s side and has some tremendous lessons for us in terms of our own families and the centrality of marriage.

Marriage is at the center point of what goes on here and we’ll see that. Notice first of all that this section of scripture is clearly delineated as a section. We stopped at verse 8 of chapter 6 because verse 9 takes up then the generations of Noah with language that comes from Genesis 5:1. So Genesis 5:1-6:8 forms a definite section that God wants us to consider at one point in time. And this is a section that has as its end, very importantly, apostasy due to intermarriage.

So marriage is a very important truth for us. Marriage is a worldview builder. One way or the other it is either a Christian worldview builder or it’s tearing down the Christian worldview slowly but surely and replacing it with a different worldview, because there is no neutrality. God will move it one way or the other.

Now if you think about marriage in its inception, wives are given to assist men in their vocation and their occupation, their calling from God. And so to the degree that marriage becomes a blur or a lack of distinction between worldviews or a movement away from a Christian worldview, the support that comes from the family will definitely find its way into the workplace as well, or lack of support in terms of a worldview. So marriage is quite an important institution, and we’ve spent quite a bit of time on it these last few months and we’ll spend more time on it.

One other thing before we get started: this is a narrative account, and which we’ve been dealing with in Genesis 2, 3, and 4. These narrative accounts don’t tell us what to believe explicitly. They expect us to draw from the narrative account conclusions about what we believe and then, based upon those conclusions, about what we should do. It shows the agenda of different people and then wants us to develop a credenda—agenda, belief system, set of things to do—based upon the narrative.

So that’s what I try to do here: take the narrative, draw out illustrations from the narrative, or truths rather, and then tell us, help us to formulate a list or agenda in what we’re to do. So that’s the nature of narrative accounts and that’s what we’ll do here as well. You have hopefully both the outline as well as the chronology given to us in Genesis 5. Let me mention that history entitled “From Adam to the Flood” is page 14 of a work by James B. Jordan entitled “Chronological and Kendrical Observations on the Commentary on the Pentateuch.”

So he takes the first five books of the Bible and does a chronology study. Jordan’s been working on a huge book on the chronology of the scriptures for years and of course this list with its chronology is central to that. And this list will be important for us to consider in just a moment. So be sure you have it. That chronology is important.

Okay. So what we’re going to do first of all is look at the Sethite chronology or genealogy and note some observations about it.

Now what we have here is a set of 10 patriarchs that are listed for us prior to the flood. There’s 10 generations from Adam to Noah and that’s what’s listed for us in Genesis 5. There is a prelude, as it were, a prologue to the actual genealogies in the opening verse. However, the actual genealogy actually begins properly speaking in verse 3, but verses 1, 2, and 3 are kind of a prologue. “This is the book of the genealogy of Adam”—introductory statement. And then “in the day that God created man, he made them in the likeness of God. He created them male and female and blessed them and called them mankind in the day they were created.”

And there’s a structure there that draws us back to Genesis 2:4. In Genesis 2:4, we read of the creation of the heaven and the earth when they were created: “On the day the Lord God made earth and heaven.” So it starts with heaven, goes to earth, talks about the day God created the earth and the heavens. So it goes in and it comes out. And this prologue given to us does the same thing. “In the day that God created man, okay, so the day that God creates man, he makes him in the likeness of God, he created them male and female and he blesses them and calls them Adam or man in the day they were created.” So he starts with creating Adam, ends at the creating Adam. In the middle is the fact that he created them male and female. So it draws us back to the earlier accounts in Genesis.

Okay. So hence the observations on the text. Then I’ll start to draw, begin with this prologue. The prologue casts God in the role of the father who names his son. God names mankind, names Adam. That’s the role of the father. He makes his son and he names him.

And this prologue is the naming of the son who then carries on the image in the family of the patriarch. Now in the book of Luke when our savior’s genealogy is drawn back and back and back, goes all the way back to Adam, and Adam is identified as the son of God. So proving that Jesus is the son of God—one of the proofs relies upon the genealogy of Christ being traced back to Adam and Adam being then identified very explicitly as the son of God.

So this opening prologue is important for establishing the lineage of the patriarch. The great patriarch here is not Adam ultimately. It’s God who is the father of Adam. And Adam then is said to bear a son in his own image and likeness. In other words, carrying on the image and likeness of God the father. So the father is preeminent in this prologue, which is quite important as we get to later sections of this particular section of scripture.

God is cast in the role of the father.

Secondly, note here in passing—we could spend a lot of time on this. Hopefully you’ll do thinking about it and have in your family. It takes man and woman together to express full humanity. In our Sunday school class we’ve talked about the covenantal nature of the Trinity and that the image-bearing aspect of man is carried on in community. “Male and female created he them,” stated earlier in Genesis, now repeated again. The full humanity of mankind must be found in male and female together. Okay? Community. So men are made to exist in the context of community, and male and female together express the full humanity.

C. The ungodly line is irrelevant to the history of redemption in spite of technological advances. Now remember in chapter 4 we read about the line of Cain who killed Abel and it culminates in the seventh generation—remember Lamech, the first polygamist and the man of horrific violence who’s going to kill a kid if the kid so much as harms him in any way. Okay, so the culmination of the ungodly in chapter 4.

Here all of humanity is recapitulated, isn’t it? We kind of go back to the beginning of Genesis and say, “Where did mankind come from?” Well, he comes from God and he comes from Adam and he comes from Seth who was the appointed replacement to Abel. And we read nothing of Cain or the ungodly Lamech or Cain’s children after him, the ungodly Enoch that they builded the city upon.

Now, remember, the Cain line got to a lot of stuff first. They developed animal husbandry, metallurgy, musical theory and practice. They developed all this stuff. And yet when God comes around to writing the history of redemption, they are essentially irrelevant to that history. They’re not even mentioned here in passing when the full history is recapitulated beginning at God, Adam, and then his lineage.

Oh, this is quite important for us because it tells us that in the midst of a time and culture when witches are starting to abound again and New Age spiritism is happening and there’s opponents to the church, there’s this growing distinction—no longer pluralism, no longer “we’re okay and the Christians are okay,” but increasingly “we’re okay and the Christians aren’t.” They’re the only group that aren’t okay.

It’s easy to get a little unsettled about this kind of thing. But see, remember folks, that it’s we who carry on history. We’re the ones who determine history, the church of God. At the end of the day, God says the only ones worth writing about are the ones who don’t develop as their first and foremost stuff metallurgy, animal husbandry, music—as good as all that stuff is—but the line of Seth that developed institutional worship. Men begin to call on the name of the Lord at the end of chapter 4.

Men who come together in corporate worship with their families to call on the name of God. Those are the ones who are delineated in chapter 5 when human history is recapitulated. And those are the ones who will find preeminent prominence and preeminence as the history of the world is recapitulated from time to time. The important ones to remember out of the Reformation wasn’t the pope and all the wicked guys on his side or the other folks, the pagans, etc. It was Calvin and Luther and Knox and Bucer. They’re the ones you line up to talk about what humanity did in the 1500s and the 1600s because they’re the true humanity in the Lord Jesus Christ. What an encouragement to us that God says we determine history and history is written on the basis of the godly line.

Fourth point: Individuals are known and remembered by God. Unity and diversity. The group of humanity is being described, but they’re being described in terms of individual names and exacting details about when children were born and when people were born and died. Their thing. You’re important, right? You fill in your name—you’re important to God. God knows when you were born. God knows when you’re going to die. He knows your life story. And you are important to him.

You know, you sometimes get the impression that the unity of mankind will eat up all diversity. That isn’t true. We sometimes get the idea that in heaven we’ll be part of this great mass who aren’t really differentiated, but we’re all just sort of standing there. And it frightens us. And it should frighten us because it isn’t true. It is true we’ll be part of the corporate mass that worship God. But there is unity and diversity as well—even of course in the Godhead. And so also in terms of us in eternity.

And here your life now has significance. God looks, God sees the ways of men. God records names. It’s important that our children recognize: here is a true heritage. Our history comes from these men. And this is the same lineage that Calvin, Luther, Bahnsen, Knox, and others, Swingli, etc. found their lineage in this lineage. And we will be the same sorts of men. Our children should recognize that individually they are important to God. They are named and known in these Bliss-appointed.

Seth leads to rest. Seth means appointed one. Remember we talked about “put enmity between the two seeds.” He’s a picture of the liturgical warfare of the seed of God against the seed of the serpent. He’s appointed, and that history leads to culmination in this microcosm. Look at it: to Noah, whose name means rest. So the progression of history takes place in place of these men who see themselves as children of God, and those children of God, their lineage leads to ultimately rest in Noah. So the big scope of human history is portrayed for us.

F. Repeated deaths bring reality. We read over and over again: so and so was born, so and so lived so many years, he had a child, lived some more years, then he died, then he died, then he died. It’s interesting that the lineage in another place later on in Genesis doesn’t do this, but here it does. And one reason for that is he wants us to be reminded that we’re going to die. In all likelihood everyone here will die. Okay? And so that brings the reality of the effects of the curse. Even though we’re talking about the godly line, the reality of the effects of the curse remains in a sense in our lives. So we never want to forget that. We don’t want to be Pollyanna-ish. We don’t want to forget that we’re fallen human beings who will continue to pay the price of death until the Lord returns and eats up the last enemy, which is death.

G. The second Adam, so to speak, gives hope. And this is where I want you to look at that chronology that Mr. Jordan provides out of his book. And you’ll see there, as I said, these are the lists of the 10 great patriarchs before the flood—antediluvian, so-called before the flood. And what you find if you look at this list is that Adam is alive through the lives of most all of them—eight or nine generations out from Adam. They could still go talk to grandpa, grandpa, grandpa, grandpa, grandpa, grandpa, Adam. He was still there. He lived a long time. Okay? He didn’t die until the year 930, after Lamech, father of Noah was born. Only Noah isn’t seen by Adam before he dies. All these other men with their great long lives were seen by Adam, or maybe not literally seen, but he lived at the same period of time.

But here’s what’s interesting. Enoch comes fairly late in the list, right? We’ve got—in terms of the lineage portrayed for us in Genesis 5, we have Adam. Adam gives birth to Seth. Seth gives birth to Enosh. That’s not Enoch. Okay. After Enosh, we have Cainan. Cainan is the same sort of name as Cain, but a different guy. Cainan. After Cainan, we have Mahalalel. And after Mahalalel, then we have Jared, who means “descent.” We have a Jared in our congregation, Jared Ayers. And after Mahalalel dies, Jared then gives birth to Enoch. So he’s quite far down in the list of these men. But notice that he only lives 365 years—he lives 365 years and then is translated, taken up, and doesn’t see death. There’s a sense in which he’s the second Adam.

I know that Abel was killed or murdered. But if you look at the way this humanity is portrayed here, Adam dies first and the next person to die or be removed from the earth is Enoch. He’s translated before Seth dies. Okay? And the point of this is that it gives great hope to us because he’s the picture ultimately that all those who walk with God while they’ll die in the body will yet live eternally with God. So the line of Seth, that has this Enoch in it, brings great hope to us.

Now, we know by the way that the phrase means he didn’t actually die because we read that in Hebrews. Hebrews 11:5 says, “By faith Enoch was taken away so that he did not see death and was not found because God had taken him. For before he was taken, he had this testimony that he pleased God.” So we see in Enoch’s life a great picture of hope in the face of all this death. One who reminds us that death is a temporary transition for us, that ultimately we live in eternity with Christ.

Kidner says, and it’s on your outline, that Enoch is the standing pledge of death’s defeat. W.R. Bowie said that Enoch shines like a single brilliant star above the earthly record of this chapter. Okay. So Enoch is the picture of this translation. He doesn’t die. He is taken by God.

And then the next comment we have on this genealogy is that the essence of piety is intimacy with God. If you look at the text, we read that so-and-so lived so many years and then they had a child, a son, and then they lived so many more years and they died. But with Enoch, what we read is he lived so many years, had a son, and then instead of saying he lived so many more years, it says he walked with God. And then instead of saying he died, he was no more because God took him. So you see life and death are redefined in the statement of Enoch who is to be our model as Christians. Life is defined now as walking with God. And death is defined now as being taken by God.

And there’s a very real sense in which at your death, you’re taken by God to go to the same place Enoch is, to join the heavenly worship of God that goes on perpetually. And what this means is that for us, our piety—true piety to be found like Enoch—is to be those who walk with God. Now, this is not something peculiar to Enoch. This is true of all the saints in the Old Testament, the marked ones at least.

In Genesis 6:9, we read that this is the genealogy of Noah: “Noah was a just man, perfect in his generations. Noah walked with God,” had that intimate communion and union with God. Abraham was called the friend of God. Moses saw God face to face. Jacob’s intimacy with God was a little different. He wrestled with God. And yet God was telling him that in all your difficulties in life, there is intimacy with me. Because even in the Labans or the Isaacs of your life, ultimately you’re wrestling not with men. You’re wrestling with me. And I love you, Jacob. You’re going to walk off into that rising sun. And all of your life there’s intimacy with God even in the context of our struggles. And there’s the promise of blessing from God as we wrestle intimately—not as if we’re wrestling men, but wrestling according to the spirit, knowing that ultimately God is sovereign in our lives. And as we acknowledge that, then God says we’re victorious in Jacob and in the greater Jacob, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Intimacy with God, union and communion, walking with him is what life is for us. We read in Genesis 17 that when Abram was 99 years old, the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am Almighty God. Walk before me and be blameless, and I will make my covenant between me and you and will multiply you exceedingly.” True life is walking with God. True covenant keeping—very important for you to hear this and for me to hear it, for our children to know this—true covenant keeping, true submission to God’s law, is reflected in a walk with him.

And I would ask you this morning, what is your walk with God like? Is your walk with God impersonal, not intimate? You just sort of do what you’re supposed to do. You show up to church and you’re supposed to show up to church. Do the things you’re required to do in terms of your family and that’s it. Or do you have this intimacy of a walk with God that marked all these great Old Testament patriarchs and is the essence of covenant keeping?

Micah 6:8, you know, the requirements of men: to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God. Not to have a mental attitude of humility alone, but to walk with God. Psalm 1: the great division between, you know, the Sethites and the Canaanites, the two seeds, the sons of God and the sons of men. The great division is reflected in their walk. We walk in the context of God, planted by the river of life.

And I would ask you today to meditate upon that and recommit yourselves anew to seeing your very life as centering around union and communion with the Lord Jesus Christ and with the Father and with the Son and a personal walk. Now, I said several weeks ago, particularly to the young men and the young women growing up in our congregation, how do you overcome the adversary who now wars against you in your warrior stage of life that you’re entering?

You overcome the adversary by a knowledge of the word of God, by knowing God. God, by knowing his word. A walk with God is not just going off in the park and thinking nice thoughts about God. It’s knowing who he is. It’s reading his word. It’s prayer, continual prayer to him. As we talked about last night, Calvin said that’s the chief exercise of faith—prayer and intimacy with God that takes all things good and bad to the throne room. God says that this is our very life. And Enoch is the picture to us that life is to walk with God.

Next up, observation: Lamech’s yearning words based on the promise of Genesis 3:14 are contrasted with Lamech’s arrogant ones. You know, we had that bad Lamech who was going to kill guys and boy, he was a tough dude and he wanted his two wives to know about it so they’d be tough too and do what he said, etc., etc.

But Lamech, when he names Noah, it is a totally different kind of poem or statement that he utters up to the throne of God. He calls his name Noah, saying, “This one will comfort us concerning our work and the toil of our hands because of the ground which the Lord has cursed.” He hearkens back to that curse and knows that ultimately the seed is coming. The Lord Jesus Christ will definitively roll back the curse, but that others come as well who will indeed have their part in being a type of the Lord Jesus Christ and giving men rest. Noah gives humanity rest in the ark in the midst of work and toil and trouble. So you have Lamech’s yearning words that the curse might be fully reversed and that reversal might be manifested in his life—a pious man who sought that kind of offspring in terms of his line.

And I got the citation here to Twin Peaks. Out of these list of 10 men, there are two names of those 10, Enoch and Lamech, that are identical to two men who lived in the Canaanite line in chapter 4 and are delineated for us there. Enoch who builded a city and Lamech who made this presentation to his wives. So we have the Enoch and Lamech in contradistinction to the Enoch and Lamech of the ungodly line. Now the Enoch and Lamech are the only two who had the exceptional things said in this line of genealogy that follows this very regular format: “you know, he lived so many years, he had a son, he died, his son lived so many years, had a son, lived so many more years, died.”

The disruption in that flow is Enoch and Lamech. Now, Twin Peaks was an old TV show by a conservative named David Lynch—who probably is not a very good guy ultimately—but the original theme of the movie was that in this particular little logging town up in Washington, everybody kind of had an evil twin. I mean, they weren’t really a twin, but if you watch the show, you can sort of see: well, this is a good guy and this is a bad guy, and they both have a lot of things alike about them.

Well, see, that’s the way God’s portraying these lines for us. You know, we have two lines. And we have two groups of men in the context of the culture. And we want to see those who build cities without building the worship of God, and those who are arrogant and rely on violence and power and strength of might—they are the bad guys, the evil twins. But the good ones are Enoch who walks with God and Lamech, who yearns for, prays for, and tries to raise his child as a manifestation of the reversal of the curse.

Praise God for the homeschooling movement and the private school movement in this country when men are becoming Lamech again. Yes. Who are having children and praying that their children might be a manifestation of the reversal of the curse effected by our Savior. The hearts of the fathers are being turned to the hearts of the children. The hearts of the children are then being turned to the fathers. And reformation is coming in this church and other churches throughout the land because of this movement of men walking with God.

We teach our children at home or in Christian schools so that all that they do, their entire walk might be a walking with God and not be like the wicked Canaanites who walked and developed, but they didn’t do so in union and communion with the Lord Jesus Christ. So these genealogies are important for us. They point out very important truths for us. Truths which we can take to the bank, so to speak, analyze our lives in terms of our walk, our commitment to our children, and then with doing so with an optimistic realization that the righteous carry the future, not the unrighteous.

Concluding comment here on this genealogy in chapter 5: The list moves from founder to refounder. But the flood takes us by surprise as the fall did. We have creation and then 10 patriarchs and then the flood. It moves from the founder of civilization or culture, Adam, to the refounder, Noah, after the recreation of the world going through the death and resurrection of the flood. There’s a movement there. Okay. And after we read this godly line of 10 patriarchs, we get to chapter 6 and all of a sudden the flood rears up and it sort of takes us by surprise, and it’s supposed to. Just as when Adam and Eve are created in chapter 2 and things are hunky dory and he’s singing love poems to his wife and they’re in the garden of God and all neat stuff—all of a sudden there’s this weird element to the story of the fall.

It takes us by surprise. And all of a sudden there’s this coming flood. And it takes us by surprise. And I think it’s drawn out that way to show us the importance of what’s going to come in the next few verses as the precursor to the flood. So let’s move now to chapter 6 and talk about the great sin of ungodly intermarriage.

And I’ve told you then already what I believe this text means. These texts, as I said, are narrative texts. God does not give us in these texts explicit instruction about how to interpret these things. And I’m going to tell you what my interpretation is and the reason for it, but I’ll tell you that other men disagree with this interpretation. We’re reading now Genesis 6:1-6. And let’s reread those verses as we get ourselves prepared to discuss them.

“Now, it came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them. Now, see, they’ve been talking about that right? That’s just what we read about men multiplying, bearing not just the men who are the covenantal heads of the culture, but daughters as well. So, it came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters born to them that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were beautiful and they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose. And the Lord said, ‘My spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh. Yet his day shall be 120 years. There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came into the daughters of men, and bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

That’s a loaded sentence, isn’t it? The thoughts are wickedness. The wickedness is great. Every intent of the thoughts of the heart were only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth and was grieved in his heart. So the Lord said, ‘I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and birds of the air. For I am sorry that I have made them.’ But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.

Now this is a surprising text if you understand the way that God has done the text in chapters 4 and 5 to delineate these two lines—to show the antithesis between the godly line and the ungodly line, between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. All of a sudden, the godly line is gone. The godly line only has one representative left, Noah. That’s surprising. And so it tells us: when we sing the song “Who’s on the Lord’s Side,” in chapters 4 and 5, it’s not quite so easy to discern, is it? Because somehow by the end of those 10 generations only Noah is left who is righteous.

Now the men themselves have all died by the time of the flood. Methuselah dies in the year of the flood, and he’s the last one left. He died before the flood, and all the others did as well. So I’m not talking about those men particularly, but certainly the children that were fathered by those men—most of them, the great bulk of them—had now apostatized, had fallen away, had left their first love. To the extent that their evil had become so great that God now wipes out the entire world with the flood.

What happened? What happened? Well, I believe that this text tells us at the very center of it what happened. And I believe that what happened here is that the sons of God—that is the godly line, the Sethite chronology that we just read—saw the daughters of men (men as opposed to God). In other words, the daughters of the ungodly line, the Canaanite genealogy and line, and liked the way they looked. They liked the way they looked, and they went in unto them and married them.

It doesn’t say they had sexual relations. It does say the Hebrew here is using the same term that is used for giving in marriage. Okay? It doesn’t mean they were ill, that they were profligate and having a lot of sexual relationships whenever they wanted to. They married wrongly is what the text seems to be saying in its most obvious reading.

Now, some people think that those sons of God were angels—the fallen angels talked about in the New Testament in Jude and the epistles, the second epistle of Peter and 1 Peter 3. I think they were angels and angels came down from heaven in the fall and decided they liked women and had intercourse with them and then you had these weird giant men come out of that relationship. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that for several reasons.

One: I don’t know why—well, first of all, we’re told explicitly that in heaven, men are like angels. There’s neither marriage nor giving in marriage. The angels appear to have no sexuality to them. It would require something the scriptures have never told us about angels to assume they could even have, or would desire intercourse alone with each other, let alone with women—the daughters of men. And that’s my second point: why do we assume that they would want to have intercourse with women?

If we have a view of angels, the way our culture is talking about angels today, kind of like good guys, saints or something, then maybe you might fall for that idea. But if we remember the way God portrays angels for us in the scriptures—the cherubim, for instance: four faces, wheels turning every which way, zinging here and there—these are completely different beings than men. Okay? And I see no reason to assume that a different order of beings would have desire to mate with women. I don’t see it in the scriptures. Don’t see it with Satan. Don’t see it with the demon-possessed people in the New Testament.

And that’s another explanation. Okay. So it’s an angel, some will say, because they’re sexless. But it could be fallen angels possessing men. So you got demon-possessed men now who marry these women. But, you know, it doesn’t seem to read that way. It sort of reads that these men married women and had really powerful offspring—men of names of renown. Now, that could be a reference to the patriarchs themselves.

It doesn’t really say that the result of the relationship, the improper marriage between the sons of God and the daughters of men. It doesn’t say the product of that were these giants. It says they were in the land at the same time. So it could be referring to the men of renown being these men of name that were just named—you know, Enoch, Methuselah, and those fellas—and it’s just again putting it back to that time frame.

But some people think that these were demon-possessed men, but it doesn’t portray these guys as demon-possessed. They seem to have marriages that are more or less normal marriages. Another explanation that some give—Meredith Klein among them—is that the word God here, “sons of God,” refers to rulers or authorities. In the Psalms, “God” in the plural: “I said ye are gods” refers to rulers. There’s a sense in which rulers in the state are gods—powerful men, strong men. But it’s singular here, “sons of God,” not “sons of gods.” And also there’s nothing in the text to indicate that these daughters of men were somehow lower class women as opposed to the upper class kings.

Some see this as an elaboration of Lamech’s polygamy—that’s when kings began to have large groups of harem. But again, that’s reading an awful lot into the text. It seems like if we cannot determine specifically in the little verses we have what this means, we want to go to the context of the entire section. Okay? The context of the entire section. And the context of the entire section from chapter 5:1 to 6:8 is this delineation of the sons of God that find their lineage back to Adam, who finds his lineage back to the Father, who names him and carries on his image and likeness through Adam’s kin. Okay? And that’s why I said it’s quite important to recognize that even the prologue sets up the whole genealogy of Adam and his children as being essentially the genealogy of God and his children.

Adam and his kin becomes kind of God and his kin. So it seems to me that this expression “sons of God” refers to the godly line that had been articulated in chapter 5, and the “daughters of men” then would bring up the genealogy of chapter 4.

Now, couple of other points along the way here. It has been argued that one reason why people think it could be angels here is that the term “sons of God” is used in the book of Job and the book of Daniel to talk about angelic beings. But there are many references in the context of the scriptures that use like terminology both in Old and New Testament to speak to the godly line.

Let me read you a few of these. In Isaiah 1:2, we read, “Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth, for the Lord has spoken. I have nourished and brought up children. And they have rebelled against me.” So God has children, the sons of God, who rebelled against him.

Hosea 1:10: “Yet the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured or numbered. And it shall come to pass in the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ that it shall be said to them, ‘You are sons of the living God.’” Sons of the living God—meaning those who are brought into the faith of the nation of Israel in the Old Testament and the prophecies of Hosea, speaking of the New Testament times as well. So sons of living God referring to godly men.

Deuteronomy 32:5: “They have corrupted themselves. They are not his children.” So they start as his children, they corrupt themselves, and by that corruption demonstrate themselves not to be his children.

Psalm 73:15 talks about the godly people as being God’s children.

In Exodus 4:22, God says that Israel is my firstborn son.

So the nation—those people, again, the godly line—are his son.

2 Samuel 7: we read of Solomon that God will be a father to Solomon and he will be my son.

So again, this isn’t speaking of an angel. It’s speaking of a man.

Jeremiah 31:9: God says, “I am Israel’s father and Ephraim is my firstborn son.”

Deuteronomy 14:1: “You are the children of the Lord your God.”

Matthew 5: going into the New Testament. “Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you that you may be the sons of your father in heaven.”

2 Corinthians 6: God says, “I will be a father to you and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.”

Matthew 5:9: the peacemakers are called the sons of God.

Romans 8:14: those who are led by the spirit of God are sons of God, etc., etc.

Hebrews 12:7-8: when we suffer hardship, it’s because we are the sons of God.

So the scriptures repeatedly use this kind of language to talk about the sons of God being the godly people. Now, here is one case where both Scofield and Calvin agree with this interpretation. Calvin said this: “It was therefore base ingratitude in the posterity of Seth to mingle themselves with the children of Cain.” So he saw this as the intermingling of the two lines, the Sethites and the Cainites.

The Scofield Reference Bible says that verse 2 marks the breaking down of the separation between the godly line of Seth and the godless line of Cain. So at least we have some agreement there. That doesn’t prove the point. There’s probably many points of agreement—some of them will be wrong—but I think we’re on solid standing both historically in the context of the church as well as textually in the broader context where this phrase is used often to refer to the godly people who are God’s sons, so to speak. And this also, I think, is based on solid ground textually in the context of our specific verses themselves.

Now, you’ll see under this part of the outline, I kind of draw a structure that shows how while this section, if we begin at verse 32 of chapter 5 with the reference to Noah, it ends with the reference to the grace found by mankind in Noah at the end of the section. God will destroy the earth, but Noah finds grace in the eyes of the Lord. In verse 1 of chapter 6, we read that men were multiplying in the face of the earth. And that correlates to the fact that after whatever happens in the middle, God is going to destroy all the things that multiply on the face of the earth.