Do you remember the excitement of becoming a parent? Holding that baby in your arms was the highlight of your life up to that point. Remember raising your children? You made sure they had love, shelter, food and clothing. You protected them from evil and danger. You never wanted to see them sad; you love to make them happy. 

Some parents, later in life, saw those same children turning against them, something went wrong! They saw their children committing crimes, going to prison and, some even lost them at a young age. Was that a parent’s will? No, that was the freewill of their children, the same freewill that you and I have today. 

I want you to picture God for a minute; He decided to create us humans and, knowing everything that was going to happen, he gave us freewill. After all, we can’t force nobody to love. Love most be free. However, love has plenty of risk and plenty of pain. We have seen that pain all through history. God was willing to go forth with his plan, an unbelievable story of redemption like nonother. 

The reality is that God loves us more than anybody in the world. The Bible tells us that God is love, that he is merciful, slow to anger and compassionate. However, how can a God with these characteristics killed his own creation? Are we, mere humans, willing to kill our own children? Are we more loving than God?  Of course not! So, what is the explanation for God destroying his own creation? Is going to be a long and complex explanation, but there is definitely one. Let’s start in Genesis 6:5-7, 

“Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.⁶ The Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. ⁷ The Lord said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them.” (NASB 1995)

How did we get here? How did men become so evil, to the point that “…every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”? Up to this point, according to Scripture, it was normal for men’s lifespan to be hundreds of years. However, the sin in the world was so great that God drastically cut our days to 120 years. Again, what happen? In Genesis 6:1-4 the Bible tells us, 

Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, ² that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. ³ Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one 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. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. (NASB 1995)

Something horrible happened here. The fallen Angels (Sons of God) saw the beauty of the daughters of men and decided to take them as wives. The result of these forceful unions was the Nephilim. Nephilim comes from the Hebrew word, n^ep̱iyliym meaning, “A masculine noun used only in the plural meaning giants. The celebrated, puzzling passage where this term is first used is Genesis 6:4 which merely transliterates the Hebrew word into English as Nephilim. These beings evidently appeared on the earth in the ancient past when divine beings cohabited with woman, and Nephilim, the mighty men or warriors of great fame, were the offspring. This huge race of Nephilim struck fear into the Israelite spies who had gone up to survey the land of Canaan (see Num. 13:31–33). The sons of Anak, a tall race of people, came from the Nephilim (Num. 13:33; cf. Deut. 2:10, 11; 9:2; Josh. 15:14).”^[1]

To be continued…

^[1] Warren Baker and Eugene E. Carpenter, The Complete Word Study Dictionary: Old Testament (Chattanooga, TN: AMG Publishers, 2003), 743–744.