Sermon(Gen 6:1-4): Respect the law of Creation

The original Korean text: https://blog.naver.com/stevision/50025252980

 

 

>> 1 When men began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife such of them as they chose. 3 Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh, but his days shall be a hundred and twenty years.” 4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown. (Gen 6:1-4) <<

 

If 4 and 6 make 5, it would be a strange law of addition. If a human being marries an angel? If it were possible, from there a life that is above a human being and below an angel would come out, as you might imagine. If the hybrid life is above a human being? Maybe the living beings of such kind would be far taller than human beings, or some of them could have six fingers on a hand and six toes on a foot. The ancient Israelites went out to the battlefield, and saw some giants among the enemies. They were tall, mighty, so in a word, like Goliath. People called them the Nephilim. "And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They (the ten spies) said, 'The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.' (Num 13:32-33)" The Israelite spies were grasshoppers in their eyes compared to the Nephilim, so we can imagine how great the Nephilim race was. They are extinct, and we can't see them now. But in the old days, there were such giant people, who terrified Israelites.

 

I'm not sure if the Nephilim had made a rumor that they were the offsprings by the union of sons of gods and daughters of humans, out of a sense of superiority due to their large stature, in order to show themselves off. But there was a notion among them and Israelites that they were offsprings not from the marriage of humans but from the marriage of humans and sons of gods. In the text of Genesis today, a giant race came into being by the union of the sons of God and the daughters of man. However, we rather have to call the God in 'the sons of God (v. 2)' a god, a broader sense of god. The Lord in v. 3 is the only omnipotent God while God in v. 2 is an absolute god of the Nephilim. It seems like the Nephilim claimed that the sons of God who were the intermediate beings between the absolute God and the human beings married the daughters of men to give birth to them, the Nephilim. This common notion in the Nephilim and the Israelites got into the Bible as a motive of the marriage of the sons of God and the daughters of men, I think. In history, some races claimed that they were the posterity of the son who a god had got by a human woman, in order to highlight the superiority of their people. The Nephilim was one of them. Israelites, too, acknowledged the existence of the sons of God, whom they called the angels. "Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them. (Job 1:6)"

 

So, we can reconstruct the situation like this. The biblical text deals with the incident just before Noah's flood. Almost all of the human beings died by the flood, which was the result of the punishment of God who sent the flood to them because they all wickedly committed sins all the time from the birth. The Bible insinuates that the decisive momentum of the corruption of man was the marriage of 'the sons of God and the daughters of men', the appearance of the hybrids by the marriage, and the separation of the Spirit of God from the humans.

 

The assertion of the Bible that the Nephilim who had been antagonists of Israel were the result of the marriage of 'the angels (the sons of God) and the daughters of men' tells us that the violation of the order of God's creation will certainly bring about a bad result, that the Holy Spirit of God will never be with such destruction of the creation of God, and that the God will surely wipe away the wicked results of the disorder from the earth. When God created the world in the beginning, he created plants and animals together with human beings, each according to its kind. Each species was blessed with the blessing that it should procreate and prosper within the bound of its species. This is good in God's sight. To ignore this order is to destroy the law of God's creation, and God hates that. In reality, an angel and a human being cannot have sexual intercourse, however the above text represents all the destructions of the order of God's creation done by humans on the earth.

 

If humans mate with dogs? If a man mates with a female dog, or a woman with a male dog? My brethren, is that a kind of love? The Spirit of God does not dwell on those who commit bestiality, or zooerastia. They are not human beings but just flesh, or lumps of meat. "He is flesh. (v. 3)" Is it love if two men do anal intercourse? Is it love if two women enjoy homosexuality? Is it love if a man has sex with a man who has amputated his penis, or if a woman has sex with a woman who has attached an artificial penis to her body? It is by no means love but abnormality. Those who enjoy such dirty abnormality are not humans with spirit and flesh but just lumps of flesh. Those who commit bestiality and homosexuality are lumps of meat cursed by God forever.

 

As the Nephilim opposed God and his people Israel, so destroyers of the order of God's creation have always opposed God and Christianity, because the Holy Spirit has left them and the evil spirits have come into them and dwelt in them. They deeply hate God and Christianity and violently resist God and Christians, because the evil spirits in them make them dislike truth, goodness, and beauty. The evil spirits reside in them like vipers. Maggots like the smell of dung and eat it ravenously, because they have a taste to like it. Likewise, those who enjoy bestiality or homosexuality feel good with such dirty deeds because the evil spirits occupying their mind make them feel good with such deeds. If a normal person intentionally does homosex just once, the Holy Spirit who keeps human mind sane will leave him, and the evil spirits will come into him to make him like and do evil deeds. The Spirit of God will forever escape from the sexual organs of those who commit rape, bestiality and homosex, and their sons and daughters can possibly become gays or lesbians; because they have had children by such dirty organs, so the Holy Spirit can't dwell in the children forever but the evil spirits can dwell in them.

 

Your self-identity as a human being really counts. Suppose, as mentioned above, there are some people who think their progenitor was born by a marital union of a son of god and a daughter of man. Some people do not believe that the union is possible, but do not reject such an idea. (For example, Dan-gun (단군), the founding father of the Korean nation, has such a strange birth secret. A female bear ate garlic many days and became a woman. The son of the king of heaven married her and had a son, Dan-gun. It is a legend of the founding of Korean nation.) Not all of them, but some of them, I think, surely do bestiality or homosex, because they think that sexual intercourse of difference species is not forbidden. Sexual intercourse of man and woman is not the only absolute way of love for them, therefore they think that abnormal intercourse of same sex people is allowable because it is a matter of the personal sexual propensity (or the personal sexual inclination). And they will not accept Christian truth, because there is no room in their head to receive the notion of the holy God who created the world, due to their conception of god who can pair himself with a human. The more Christianity points out their vain thoughts, the more they will hate the God and Christianity in order to justify themselves. At the time of Noah's flood, God swept away all wicked men from the earth, those who had such a vain thought and committed sins without any pang of conscience. Why should the God keep them alive who thought that their deeds were not dirty and wicked?

 

 

The Bible says that the Nephilim was the giant race that opposed Israel, the people of God, and suggests that the Nephilim were the result of the breakdown of the order of God's creation by humans and spiritual beings. We should never destroy the order of God's creation regarding the life. Especially, there must not be any union of different species in sexuality or in genetic engineering. God abhors and rages at such disorder. How can you play with the life? Never do it! We must keep it in mind that there are evil spirits behind those who are antagonistic to God and Christianity. If the Holy Spirit leaves you and an evil spirit mates himself with you, you become a Nephilim who opposes God. It is impossible for an evil spirit and a human being to have sexual intercourse, but it is possible for an evil spirit to unite himself and a human being without God into a Nephilim, a foe of God.

 

What is the right identity of us Christians? Who are we? Our ancestors are not great giants who came from the marriage of the sons of god and the daughters of men. We are not the descendants of the Nephilim. We are sons and daughters of Adam and Eve whom God made. We produce human descendants by love and marriage of man and woman. We are just human beings. We are no more than a human being. No one of us can deify himself or others. Even if he is a capable man like a Nephilim, he is not more than a human being. Those who presumptuously firmly believe that they are more than a human being are bound to corrupt, and God will surely get rid of them. If a man wants to be more than a human being, he'll certainly become a being lower than a human being, because he is a wicked man and a denatured man. We all are humans created in the image of God. We respect the order of God's creation and live in peace and joy, in the law of God's creation. God accepts us as his sons and daughters when we live as genuine human beings. God exalts us higher than angels when we live as real human beings. If we live as real humans, the angels become our servants. If you think, 'I am a human being. I must neither be raised above a man nor be lowered below a man,' you have healthy mind, are recovered to the image of God, and are abundantly blessed by God.

 

My brethren, try to receive the Holy Spirit (the Spirit of God) into your heart. The Holy Spirit departs him who rejects the order of God's creation, but dwells in him who keeps the order of God's creation. The Holy Spirit dwells in you if you worship the God as the Creator. The Holy Spirit dwells in you if you love, honor and obey your parents as your respectable parents. If you love and honor your husband as your husband, or your wife as your wife, the Holy Spirit lives in you. If you believe in the dignity of human beings, respect and love others, the Holy Spirit will live in you. The Holy Spirit will live in you if you hate sins and repent of your sins in tears. You can have the hope of the eternal life if you have the Holy Spirit in you. How can you have the hope of the eternal life when the Holy Spirit is not in you? David accidentally sinned, but he earnestly prayed that God might not take back his Spirit from him. "Take not thy holy Spirit from me. (Ps 51:11)" If the Holy Spirit departs me, I look alive but am in fact dead. The Holy Spirit is the origin of all my life, wisdom and strength. If the Holy Spirit is in me, I am clean and am living in the love and care of God. If the Holy Spirit has departed me, I’ve been living a life of violating the order of God's creation, been living in sins and been living as an unclean human.

 

Another kind of Nephilim appeared again not long ago ─ Hegel and his followers. They think that human beings and their history are the outerizing of God Himself (or the outward─self-manifestation of God). The Nephilim are all of those who are so proud as to think themselves as gods, tracing their origin back to the God. The Nephilim have been the mortal enemies of God and his people. How Karl Marx and Marxists, the Communists who accepted some thought of Hegel philosophy, have injured Christianity! And what a severe punishment has God inflicted on them! Didn't some people of the communist nations become human meat that other people ate when a severe famine broke out? How terrible! The Holy Spirit leaves those who reject the truth and exalt themselves against God, and they become just human flesh, a very miserable being.

 

May you have right self-identity, live in the truth, and be great delight to God. May God cherish you and exalt you.

 

Chong Tack Kim

                      - Dongtoma Sunshine Church -