Last
week we looked at giants in the Bible. We’ll do a little more this week and tie
it to the flood story and as to why God really destroyed the earth.
Several
of the biblical description must surely convince some of you skeptics that
these giants are not just tall people, or mutants.
Here’s
one of a giant’s skull.
(As a
side note, if you looked on Snopes.com which supposedly tracks if things fake, their article will tell you these images were doctored, but if you read to the very
end, you’d see that Snopes qualified their article that they cannot truly verify
that the images are fakes but that they must be since scientifically humans
cannot possibly be this large! That’s because they weren’t humans—were they? They
were giants—nephilim! People who don’t believe the Bible will find ways
to justify their beliefs and not believe that these images are even real, even
when their eyes see it. This was the Snopes caveat placed
at the end of their article:
“In any case, we
don't need to know the specific origins of these photos to definitively
determine that they're fakes”
(Which means you cannot believe everything Snopes
writes!)
Some biblical accounts of giants--aside from the twelve spies who saw giants and became too afraid to go into the promised land:
20 Yet again there was war at Gath, where there was a man of great stature, who had six fingers on
each hand and six toes on each foot, twenty-four in number; and he also was
born to the giant.21So when he defied Israel, Jonathan the
son of Shimea, David’s brother, killed him.
The Amorites were also a giant race:
Yet it was I
who destroyed the Amorite before them, whose height was like the height of the
cedars, and he was as strong as the oaks; yet I destroyed his fruit above and
his roots beneath. Also it was I who brought you up from the land of Egypt, and
led you forty years through the wilderness, to possess the land of the Amorite (Amos 2:9–10).
Sometimes the names of
peoples like Anakim actually is descriptive of what these people were like—Emim
means terror or feared in Hebrew.
By the
way when you come across these names (below) in your Bible reading just
remember what they mean:
Emim—the fearful or feared ones
10 l(The Emim had
dwelt there in times past, a people as great and numerous and tall asmthe Anakim. 11 They were
also regarded as 3giants, like the
Anakim, but the Moabites call them Emim.
Moses and Joshua
reported giants and they were all described as extremely tall—not just Michael
Jordan-of-the-Nike-basketball-fame tall—tall as cedars! In fact in Bashan (where King Og--a giant-- lived) archaeologists uncovered giant tomb markers that marked the head and
the feet positions on top of grave sites and these spanned about thirteen feet--head to feet.
The King Og of
Bashan, a Rephaim, (Joshua 12:4) was said to be 12 to 13 feet tall. That’s
double of a man’s present height.
Deut
3:11 King Og of Bashan was the last survivor of the giant Rephaites. His
bed was made of iron and was more than thirteen feet long and six feet wide. It
can still be seen in the Ammonite city of Rabbah.)
So where is all
this talk leading to? How is it related to giants in Noah’s time and the flood?
:
Let’s return to the passage in Genesis 6.
2the sons of
God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of
them they chose. 3Then the Lord said, “My Spirit will not contend with
humans forever,…
The “then”
surely signify that the LORD (Yahweh) was not happy (understatement) with the
state of things during Noah’s time because the sons of God “married” the
daughters of men (human women).
This sort of perverse demonic sexual activity
happened twice on this earth and produced Nephilim—
4The Nephilim
were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God
went to the daughters of humans and had children by them.
The giants (the unlikely union) were in those days—days of Noah—and also “afterward”—meaning after the flood. (Yikes--could they be among us today--maybe a watered down version?)
(By the way, as an aside, eight people were on the ark
–Noah, his wife and his three sons and their wives) and in the Chinese language
the word “boat” is made up of three “words” vessel, eight and people.
Ancient China, which if you know geography, was cut off
from the rest of European and Middle Eastern history due to their location and
mountain barriers, yet China’s history also spoke of a worldwide flood.
In Chronicles 20 it speaks of the last of the giants
–the Anakim killed. Anakim means large of stature and 1chronices 20 describes this also.
So what happened to the fallen angels that participated
in this perverse acts?
God has
reserved them in everlasting chains—they are today bound in chains as they had
been since they were cast there. (Next week we will explore this further and
perhaps it might give us indications as to the on-going troubles in the Middle East. Perhaps?)
6And angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their
proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of
the great day, 7just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in
the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange
flesh, are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal
fire. 8Yet in the same way
these men, also by dreaming, defile the flesh, and reject authority, and revile
angelic majesties.
Notice in Jude 1:7—“as” meaning just like—after strange flesh—perverse sexuality.
(Also, if you noticed above, God was very clear that the sin
of Sodom and Gomorrah was of a perverse sexual nature--not just immorality—i.e. homosexuality and don’t
you let those who want to promote this sin tell you otherwise—unless you don’t
believe the Bible is the Word of God, in which case there’s nothing to argue.)
All this to say, that the LORD looked upon the sin of fallen
angels defiling women and procreating with them (and producig giants like Goliath) a serious one.
Right after the
sentence in Genesis verse 8, it said:
The LORD saw how great
the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every
inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.
I think context is real
important, don’t you? There’s a reason why God ordered (through the Holy
Spirit) the arrangement of sentences and paragraphs—so we read them in
sequence. It appears that from the above Genesis passage that God, saw that the
world was evil,--came about because of the unnatural union of demons with women
and bearing children—because of the sexual perversity.
My question is: are we as
a people and generation, going down this same route? As in the days of Noah? Is there sexual perversity on
our earth today? (I am not talking about sexual immorality—that has always been
around.) It’s demonic perversity that we should be concerned with. Why? Because Genesis says—as
in the days of Noah.
Matthew 24:37 (NIV)
As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.
Luke 17:26 (NIV)
"Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the Son of Man.
God destroyed the entire earth once before due to these perverse acts. Two cities were destroyed due to perverse acts. Should we be concerned with how things are going in our world, our country, today?
Next week we will arrive
at obvious conclusion as to God’s warning for us. Are we in the last days? And
we’ll see how Noah ties up with our condition in the world today.
