A SECOND REBELLION?

I am preaching this week on Genesis 6:1-4, the weird prelude to the flood narrative. 

1 When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. 3 Then the Lord said, “My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.”

4 The 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. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

This is a passage that a lot of people aren't familiar with because most preachers avoid it. And you can't blame them. 

What do you make of various "sons of God" descending to have sex with human women? And furthermore, if you piece together information from elsewhere, you realize that the Nephilim - implied to be the offspring of these illicit relationships - turn out to be giants! (Numbers 13:33)

I had never thought of it before, but Dr. Michael Heiser makes a strong case that this development is a "cosmic rebellion" on the same level as Adam and Eve eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil back in Genesis 3. 

After all, things get so bad, God decides to reverse creation by bringing the waters back over the land and then rebooting the whole thing.

Compare the severity of the consequences of these two famous incidents in the early chapters of Genesis: eating from the forbidden tree results in God exiling humans from the garden and pronouncing painful childbirth and thorny ground along with the unleashing of a general death. 

On the other hand, this mingling of the spiritual beings with the humans results in God unleashing catastrophic floods, bringing the physical death of an untold number of humans - men, women, and children - and animals and then God banishes a number of spiritual beings to a pit. (We find that outcome referenced in 2 Peter 2:4-6 and Jude 6,7.)