The opening to Chapter 6 talks yet again about humans and sons of God mingling with each other. In the last blog post I talked about my belief that there were other evolved humans on the earth along with God's created humans, whom I believe were given the soul and spark of divine intelligence. This chapter further illuminates that belief with talk of the Nephilim, and God's sons intermarrying with the human daughters.
The Nephilim were the offspring of these two groups, God's sons and human daughters. Supposedly, there were giants, and men of legend before the Flood. The term only occurs twice in the Bible, once here and once in Numbers Chapter 13. One of the reasons people speculate about the Nephilim is because we know little about them. They even get into topics about how the Nephilim could be sons of angels, or divine children, or various other intepretations.
This all comes from literally two references in the Bible. TWO. My main takeaway from the topic of the Nephilim is that people will absolutely overanalyze everything in the Bible to the smallest detail, while missing the larger points. Do I care who the Nephilim really were? Not really. The important point of this chapter to me is Noah, and how he found favor with the Lord.
Genesis Chapter 6 gives us the line, "The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled." Can you imagine? God looks upon his whole creation with complete distaste. Man is utterly evil at this point in time. The people followed every evil desire of their hearts, much like their ancestor Cain. However, one man rose above the fray, and that was Noah.
We don't know what made Noah righteous, we only know that he was righteous in the eyes of God. The Lord actually tells Noah his intentions of destroying the world. He's planning on hitting the reset button in the form of a flood on the planet, and he wants Noah to build a giant boat. The story is one of the most famous tales of all time. Almost everyone from believers to unbelievers knows the references made to Noah's Ark. It's spawned countless other stories, interpretations, and even a full length feature film starring Russell Crowe. I never saw it.
But what's the message here? I see two major points. The first is that God looked upon original humanity and decided that almost all of it wasn't worth saving. That's pretty harsh. Several unbelievers will look at this story and ask how we can believe in a God that would wipe out everyone on the planet except one man's family? Which is really just another variation on how can you believe that God is good when he kills people?
The answer isn't only that God is good. God is good AND just. There's a big part of that. If humanity at this time is completely obsessed with evil, and God is both good and just, he abhors what those men have become. Only God stands to judge us as humans both heart and soul. What unbelievers don't like is that if God gives you life, God has the right to take it away. He is our master. He also doesn't tolerate sin. That's why Jesus had to die for our sins, so that God could allow us back into his graces. But remember, this first version of humanity has no such salvation. They are simply wicked and lost.
Except Noah, which brings us to the second point. Noah is the rebel of the story. The entire world is engaging in sinful acts in every gathering. I can imagine given their rather limited resources that most of these sins revolved around violence and sex. These people didn't have many other forms of entertainment, so assume the most depraved kind of blood-rites and orgies you can think of with no regard for decency, and you're probably not even half-close. This is the society God decided to wipe out. Go figure.
Noah's different. Noah doesn't go with the flow, or follow the crowd. He lives a simple life with his family and devoutly walks with God. How often do we as Christians do the wrong thing simply due to peer pressure? Now imagine every single person in the world except you is doing something, and making endless fun of you. That's likely Noah's life. He's the pariah because he believes in God.
Not only does Noah believe, he acts. Noah is tasked by God with building a giant boat when he's likely never built anything of that size. He's supposed to go find every animal to put in the boat, when he's likely never even kept more than simple livestock. In essence, he's completely unqualified and unprepared. Yet when asked, we get this simple line at the end of the chapter: "Noah did everything just as God commanded him."
He didn't complain, he didn't question, he didn't try to talk God out of it. That's a key point, because so many of his descendants do such things later on in the Bible. If there's one thing humans love to do it's argue and complain. Not Noah. He follows things to the letter. There's a lesson there for us I think. When God speaks, don't talk. Listen and follow it out. Because in the end, only by following God's commands are we truly saved.
Study Thoughts:
1 - Have you done something that you later ended up regretting enough to wish you'd never done it?
2 - Can you think of a time when God was telling you to act? Did you act? Or delay and complain?
3 - How does peer pressure effect us today? Can peer pressure be positive spiritually?
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