The problem with giants and demons

September 15, 2024

Well, that was a nice end of the summer break at the barbeque in the park.  For those that were able to make it thank you very much for all the work that was put in, and all the food that was brought.  It was nice to be able to worship outdoors, thank you Chris for the nice time we had a worship.  But now we're moving right back to this sermon series on spiritual warfare.  Let's have a little recap as to what we've gone over in the last couple of sermons.

In the first part of this series, we talked about Genesis chapter 1.  In this we notice that God gave the job of working in the garden to both the man and the woman, they had equal parts in the work. We also went over the Hebrew word for “beginning”. When we break down the Hebrew word “beginning”, we have the following words tent, Prince, strong leader, crush or destroy, new beginning, wooden cross.  So, when we put this all together, the Hebrew word in its pictograph form says “the Prince is in the tent or in heaven and he is a strong leader he leaves the tent or heaven and performs a deed that crushes or destroys this deed will create a new beginning and take place on the wooden cross”.  This we get from the Hebrew word beginning and breaking down in its pictographic form.

Slide 1

Beginning

We also talked about Satan and man and the comparisons between the two. This also included the gift that God gave man of freedom of choice, we can freely choose to love him or reject him. We then followed this up with the fact that God gave man a chance to come forward with his sin and repent, when he asked man where he was when he was hiding in the trees. Man did come forward and God in his mercy and grace dealt with the issue by shedding blood to cover her sin.

This is the first rebellion that Satan tried to separate us from the love of God.  In this rebellion he attacked the spiritual connection between us and God.  In doing so he hoped that man would be doomed to eternal death thus being and remaining in Satan’s Kingdom forever.  But God promised that he would deliver us from this situation, but we had to leave the garden of Eden.

In the second sermon we talked about Cain and Abel. We talked about the pathway of sin as outlined in James 1 :14 -16.  In the story we see God interacting with Cain and giving him a choice between following Him or choosing sin.  This same option that you and I have even today.  In this we know that Cain chose to sin and reject God.  Satan again tried to thwart God's plan to bringing forth the savior.  But this didn't work, as Adam and Eve had a third son Seth, from which the line of the savior comes from.  We also talked a little bit about the names of Cain’s descendants and what their names meant, and what Adams descendants names meant.

We then talked a little bit about 2 individuals Enoch and Methuselah.  Enoch gives us the first prophecy uttered by human. And Methuselah whose name means “his death shall bring”, was the longest-lived human being at 969 years.  When he died, Noah's flood started soon after.  This shows the mercy of God that he gave man 969 years to try get right with Him.

This now brings us to the next part of this series. Genesis chapter 6, one of the strangest chapters in all the Bible.

Slide 2

Genesis 6: 1-7

The problem that we have in the West is that our thinking does not include things from the spiritual realm. We as a culture have almost eliminated spirituality and things of that nature out of our culture. As a good example and something that I have struggled with is a concept of sin and the land.  Scripture seems to indicate that sin affects the land.  One might think that that might be only Israel, but I remind myself that when Noah had his flood it wasn't the country of Israel that experienced this, it was the world. When Adam and Eve sinned, one of the curses was that land would stop producing nice stuff start producing thistles and thorns.  Basically put, a human is comprised of three major areas -physical, emotional, and spiritual.

It is easy to understand how I can affect you physically, I can come up and shake your hand and give you a hug.  In doing this, this might produce an emotional response of happiness and joy.  Thus, it is easy to affect you physically and emotionally. I can also affect you spiritually by praying for you.  There was a study done in UBC that showed that people that were prayed for generally had 20% better outcomes from surgery, 20% better mental health, 20% less infections, and had 20% faster recoveries from illnesses and surgery. So, this is a very good reason where scripture says that if you have an illness, or a physical problem to call for the elders so they can pray over you.  I'll take 20% better overall health and recovery any day of the week!

Testimony

But here in Genesis chapter 6 we see where spiritual beings interact and affect the physical realm.  This produced some results that God had never intended.

Why we see here that man began to multiply on the earth having lots of children.  In verse 2 we are introduced to beings called the sons of God.  These sons of God were angels that had the duty to oversee what was going on on the earth with man.  The book of Enoch calls these angels the Watchers. Now just a little word about the book of Enoch.  This is a nonbiblical book, but our Bible does quote from it. We can see one of these quotes in Jude verse 6 and verse 14.

Slide 3

Jude 6,14