As you know, we are exploring the book of Jude. This interesting epistle is the end of the book of Acts, which is the beginning of the church. The book of Acts is called the Acts of the Apostles, while Jude is called the Acts of the Apostates. Jude, the brother of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, also wrote an epistle alongside James. Jude sat down to write an epistle, but was compelled by the Holy Spirit to shift gears and change his subject.

What makes Jude interesting? Well, there are several things. First of all, it's weird. And you know me - I love weird books. Jude was made for me because Jude presumes that you have a lot of background knowledge. He talks about some strange things, which will be kind of fun to explore tonight. But Jude is also relevant for another reason. Jude talks about the fallacies and apostasy of the end times. And as we study this, we realize that the end-time apostasy is happening.

From time to time, those of us who have been intense students of prophecy wonder if we're getting carried away by it all. Are we really in that period of time when God's dealing with man? Sometimes it doesn't seem like it's going as quickly as others. After studying the book of Jeremiah, which we did last time, and as we plunge into Jude, I'm convinced that there are very serious heresies brewing - a very strange kind of heresy. And in fact, I think they're uniquely setting up the world, both Christian and secular, for an anti-Semitic heresy that will set the stage for the final.

So Jude is very timely for us. But we're getting ahead of the story. Oh, another thing about Jude - it's the vestibule, if you will, of the book of Revelation. It's a natural prelude. If you study the book of Revelation, Jude is a good preamble or adjunct to that.

But verses 5, 6, and 7 happen to take three examples from history of corporate punishment. By "corporate," I mean groups were punished in a peculiar way - not corporal punishment, but rather punishment for their collective actions against God's truth. Three groups are singled out by Jude to teach us some things.

Verse 5 deals with Israel's wandering in the wilderness, which we explored last time. Verse 6 is a strange set of events that we'll examine tonight. Verse 7 deals with Sodom and Gomorrah, which is perhaps more familiar to us and less controversial, but still an example of God judging broad civilizations for his reasons.

But verse 6 has caused all kinds of controversies. So what we'd like to do is examine it tonight and figure out when it took place and perhaps more importantly, what lessons are there for us? Let's read it before we start.

Verse 6 of the epistle of Jude: "And angels who kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day." And if you're an average Bible student reading through this, you come to that and say, "What on earth is that all about?" Because Jude gives it the back of his hand as if you remember this.

The angels who kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation... He hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day. There's another passage that might be good to put in our minds right now. Hold your finger here and turn to 2 Peter. This wasn't some kick-off from Jude alone. Peter himself speaks of this in the second epistle of Peter, chapter 2, verse 4.

We find a comparable passage where Peter tells us, "For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell." And actually, that word in the Greek is Tartarus - not Hades or Gehenna. We talk a lot about those places, but this is the only time it appears in Scripture.

Incidentally, the term appears in Homer's Iliad, and Tartarus is as far below Hades as the earth is below heaven, according to Homer. So all it tells us doesn't mean Homer knew anything about it. It just means the word in the Greek carried that kind of an idea.

Now, there are three basic views of this passage. The first view is the cop-out view, which is typically expressed as "we're not intended to know any more than that is here in this brief verse." I have a problem with that because it stands between verses 5 and 7, and all three of them appear to draw upon familiar Old Testament truths.

The second view is that these angels that sinned are angels related to the fall of Lucifer. And so we'll explore briefly something about the fall of a super angel called Lucifer.

Let's take Isaiah 14 as a pivotal passage that you should be aware of. This passage has a strange attribute - it addresses a local, real-life king, but also talks about a spiritual power behind him. The prophet is addressing the spiritual power, not just the human king.

Isaiah 14: "How art thou fallen from heaven? Oh, Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground?" This is where we get his original title - but he fell. He's fallen from heaven. Something occurred to put him in disgrace.

We'll find that he has some other names. We know him best by the name of Satan. But there are many, there are 50 odd titles that the Scripture uses of him and/or his instrument.

Now, let's pick it up about verse 11 of Ezekiel 28. Moreover, the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, "Son of man... Take up lamentation upon the king of Tyre." This strikes you strange by now, because if you've been reading the chapter, it's all been about the prince of Tyre, this literal ruler.

But now the Holy Spirit says the king of Tyre, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord God. "Thou sealest up the sum full of wisdom and perfect in beauty." That's King James language for saying you seal up the sum - the person he's talking to here is the epitome of wisdom and beauty.

That's strong language. In fact, the expression in the Hebrew is that there can be no more extreme expression. Wisdom and beauty. Then it goes on to say, "Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God." Whoops - I don't know of any king of Babylon that goes back to Genesis 1.

You follow me? So suddenly we realize clearly there's been a shift of subject here. The person that is being addressed was in Eden, the garden of God. Every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, the topaz, the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, the carbuncle, and the gold.

And the workmanship of thy timbrels and of thy flutes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created. One thing that should strike you is the Eden that's described here doesn't seem to be the Eden that's described in Genesis 2. Because there we think of it as a, I mean, at least we visualize it with trees and foliage and a terrestrial kind of place, don't we?

This Eden is described in the same vocabulary that we use post-millennially of the New Jerusalem and so forth. Part of what overlays this whole study, and we'll take the time to night, but I'll just throw it out so you can be thinking about it and dig it on your own.

Acts chapter 3 speaks of the second coming of Jesus Christ as the time of the restitution of all things. Restitution means put back like it used to be. Put back like Eden could be, but maybe it's a different Eden than we think of. A pre-fall Eden.

And so when we read Revelation 22 and talk about New Jerusalem and foundations and stuff, it's... a whole hyperspace you and I probably have no capacity to deal with. And these precious stones may be just their way of talking about light or talking about a dimensionality that goes beyond our three-dimensional physics as we think of it.

But also, this person was in Eden, and he was big news. Perfect. But he was created. Another side of this is, don't forget, he is not some kind of super-god. He may be superhuman, but he's created. As fantastic as he may be, or was one time, he is still a created being.

Easy to forget. There's a popular book in the demonology called Between Christ and Satan by Koch. Tragic title. Because it implies equality. Christ was not a created being. John 1, first three verses of the Gospel of John should straighten that out for you. Satan was.

Here is the cleaned-up version of the sermon transcription:

Ain of God. Thou walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. Thou was perfect in thy ways from the day that thou was created. And then I have a word that I always, whenever I see it in the scripture, almost always I mark it. Put a circle on it, read to underline the word till. The word till. What a momentous word that can be.

Israel's eyes are blinded until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled. Such and such and such until... The word until or till generally is a very pivotal word. Well, here, thou was perfect in thy ways from the day that thou was created until iniquity was found in thee. What's the iniquity? Well, you go back to Isaiah 14, it tells you.

The reason God hates pride is that's how the whole thing started. By the multitude of thy merchandise, they have filled the midst of thee with violence. And thou hast sinned, therefore I will cast thee as profane out of the mountain of God. And I will destroy thee, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire.

Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty. Thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness. I will cast thee to the ground. I will lay thee before kings that they may behold thee. That thou hast defiled thy sanctuaries by the multitude of thine iniquities, by the iniquity of thy merchandise.

Therefore I will bring forth a fire from the midst of thee. It will devour thee, and I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee. All that know thee among the people shall be appalled at thee. Thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt thou be any more.

By the way, the word merchandise, it's from the Hebrew word meaning to go about, and it can be translated either in two words, merchandising like trafficking or slander. And the word slander is the word for Satan. I mean, that's what the word Satan means, a slanderer.

So that's another aside. So the word merchandise me, it actually comes from the Hebrew root that can be translated either way. Okay, that's a little bit on his origin. We've got a little glimpse now where Satan comes from.

There's a chapter in the Bible that describes in one sort of summary overview his whole strategy and goals. And that's Revelation chapter 12. And it might be useful to take the time to review Revelation chapter 12 briefly. Some people would argue that Revelation chapter 12 is the most difficult in the book of Revelation.

I don't think so. I think it's really not that hard at all. And it's perhaps very pivotal for you to really understand chapter 12, especially in view of the coming years and what you're going to see happen in this country. And I think we'll take the time just to skim through chapter 12 quickly.

Revelation chapter 12, and there appeared a great wonder in heaven. A woman clothed with the sun and with the moon on her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. And she, being with child, cried, traveling and birth, and pained to be delivered. And there appeared another wonder in heaven.

Behold, a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his head. And his tail drew a third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to be delivered to devour her child as soon as it was born.

Verse five. And she brought forth a male child who was to rule all the nations with a rod of iron. And her child was caught up to God and to his throne. And the woman fled into the wilderness where she hath the place prepared by God that they should feed her there. A thousand two hundred and three score days.

Now, I'm not going to make this a study of the book of Revelation. That would really derail us. But there's a few key points here. The first question is, to understand the various people that are going to be introduced here, the first question is, who is the red dragon? You don't have to guess, because in verse 9 he's defined for you.

As you read later in the chapter, it says in verse 9, and the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent called the devil and Satan, to deceive at the whole world. He was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

This is where we understand that Satan rebelled and was thrown out. When you put Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14 and Revelation 12 together, and there's lots more, but those are probably the three key passages to sort of try to synthesize, to try to get an understanding here. Satan clearly was very powerful at one time, was perfect at one time, was in charge, rebelled.

A third of the angels apparently were allied with him, and they blew it and were thrown out. So we know who the red dragon is in this scenario. The next question is, and this is where most people get screwed up, is who's the woman? And it's very tempting.

There are many commentators that are very competent commentators that identify the woman with the church. And I love the way Chuck Smith puts it. If this woman is the church, she's in trouble because she's pregnant. The church uniformly is used in the New Testament as a virgin bride, not a... one to give birth.

The woman is identified up here with the sun and the moon and the 12 stars. That's not the zodiac. It happens to be linked, but in a very elliptical way. You see commentators try to link this to the zodiac or something. Nonsense.

There's only one place that the sun and moon and 12 stars show up in the scripture. And your principle in the book of Revelation is the entire thing is in code. Everything in there is in code, but every code is deciphered somewhere in the scripture.

The Holy Spirit's engineered the book so it would take you into every other passage in the Bible if you take it exhaustively. And the only place you'll find 12 stars, sun and moon, is, remember, Joseph's dreams.

Jacob understood the dream. Joseph, remember, he first had the sheaves that bowed, there were 11 sheaves that bowed down to his sheaf and so forth. Then the next dream, and he told that to his brothers, he was already a little unpopular.

And you can understand the brother's point of view. Then he had this dream where there were the stars. And 11 of the stars and the sun and the moon bowed down to him. And at that point, he told that dream around. Not only does his brothers get upset, but Jacob, his father, got a little miffed by it.

Are your mother and I going to bow down before you also? See, he recognized Jacob. And he rebuffed the youth that way, but in so doing, gives an identity.

What are, who is the woman that is crowned with the sun and the moon and the twelve stars? Idiomatically, in the scripture, Israel, in a way. It's Israel in the sense that she starts with Eve.

Because the man-child is the seed of the woman. What woman? Israel, not Israel in the sense of starting with Abraham. Israel in the sense that she starts with God's declaration of war on Satan.

The declaration of war on Satan is Genesis 3.15. I'll put enmity between thee and the woman. What woman? The woman of chapter 12 of Revelation. I'll put enmity between thee and the woman and between thy seed and her seed.

Two seeds. The seed of the woman, in the grammar of the Hebrew, predicts the virgin birth. And in Isaiah 7.14 and in Matthew, it is the virgin. Not a virgin. Proper name. Very important.

So the man-child thus is whom? Jesus Christ. Who gives birth to Jesus Christ, conceptually speaking here? Not the church. Israel. Israel was ordained from Eve on. God's plan was to present the deliverer. That was his commitment to Adam.

Now, we see here, though, that the woman is being with child, travailing in birth, pain to be delivered. And this is idiomatically speaking of all history in an overview.

And there appeared another wonder in heaven. Behold, a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and so forth. And his tail drew a third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth.

And the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to be delivered to devour her child as soon as it was born.

Verse five. And she brought forth a male child who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron. Again, what is it? Psalm 110 and several other places that identify that as whom? Christ. In fact, Psalm 2, I guess, is where it occurs.

And her child was caught up to God and to his throne. Kind of interesting. Verse five seems to appear historical. The ascension, right?

Verse six looks ahead at the tribulation. Okay? Those of you that have studied Daniel 9 are not uncomfortable about the idea of a gap in the timeline. God deals with Israel.

Those prophecies that deal with Israel ignore a period of time between Jesus Christ and his second coming. We call it the church age. That gap occurs between verses 26 and 27 of Daniel 9, if you remember that study.

It also occurs here. There are 1,900 years that have occurred between verses 5 and 6 so far. That gap appears how many times in the scripture? Make a guess. No, more than that.

What is the number of the church? 24. Remember 24 elders? There are 24 occasions like this in the scripture, which I think is interesting for those of you that are mystics.

And by the way, another thought to just confuse you further. And her child was caught up to God in his throne. I always used to view that as the ascension of our Lord.

But there's a guy by the name of Pember who wrote a book about Genesis and the earliest ages. And it blew me away because he sees this differently. And I don't know if he's wrong. He sees that her child was caught up to God in his throne. He sees that child as the body of Christ.

He sees in that the rapture. Isn't that wild? It doesn't alter the text because what happens in verse 6 on is tribulational, as we would label it.

I'm saying that erroneously because all of us fall into the fiction of visualizing a seven-year tribulation period. That's not the Great Tribulation. The Great Tribulation is the last half of that seven-year period.

But I don't want to get into that tonight.

The attack of Satan on Israel is part of prophecy, and it climaxes in a period of time which the Old Testament calls the time of Jacob's trouble. Daniel refers to that as a period of tribulation such as the world had not seen to that day or ever would see again.

And Jesus Christ, in his private briefing to four disciples, Peter, James, and John, Andrew, in all of the discourse, quotes from Daniel. And it's in Christ's quote from Daniel that that period of time gets its classical label among Bible scholars, the Great Tribulation.

But in that, we easily forget the focus of the tribulations in the world at large. It's Israel. But think about that phrase means. Most of us, the more you know about the Holocaust in Germany,

The more you understand their plea, never again. You've got tragic news. What's coming yet future is going to make that look like a warm-up.

Our Lord said, a time of trouble such as the world had not seen to that time. And that time's yet future. So whatever's happened in the past has been a prelude.

Now, what made the Holocaust possible? The philosophy of Nietzsche and others.

The notion that the rationale philosophically or religiously that Israel was somehow appropriately trumped on. Fallacies of the church for 1900 years made that possible.

And if you watch over the next few years, you're going to see in the Christian body, charismatic as well as fundamental, teachers who will argue.

A theology that has as one of its, beside being full of all kinds of other error, has as its attribute the prelude to anti-Semitism. And I'm saying this not out of a sociological concern for Israel. I'm saying this out of a prophetical interest in the scripture.

That when you see that, on the one hand, you may, as you see it surface, you may experience shock. On the other hand, you can praise God because it means the time is getting close.

Because when Ezekiel 38 happens, when the Soviets invade Israel and five, six of them get wiped out, the Lord makes it very clear that it happens by his hand, not the comfort and support of the United States.

Sometime between here and the tribulation period, the United States, along with all the other countries, will turn on Israel.

And God is going to use that occasion, just as he did in Egypt, to show his hand on his people again. The Bible makes that clear.

We talked about that last time, read from Ezekiel 36, that his purpose in doing so is not because they deserve it. There'll be an unbelief when this all happens, or at least when it starts.

He does it because he made promises before the heathen that he would do it, and it's for his namesake before the heathen that he's going to keep those promises for Israel's behalf.

Okay, we got off the subject, but I want to tie that prophetically to what we're talking about there. So we have some insight, perhaps, on Satan's goals and objectives.

Let's turn to Matthew 25. I made reference to this special briefing that the Lord gave His disciples, but we'll pause in Matthew 25 just to pick up one insight.

24 and 25 are a two-chapter briefing given in privacy to the four disciples. But in chapter Matthew 25, verse 41, is the sheep and goat judgments, as we sometimes call it.

And verse 41, Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire. Prepared for whom? Prepared for the devil and his angels.

Again, it's just a gospel confirmation of what we've mentioned before.

Okay, we know that another way of looking at this is that there are two governing bodies to be punished. Isaiah 24. Turn with me to Isaiah 24.

We've been at this a lot as we go through the scripture.

Here is the cleaned-up version of the sermon transcription:

Things you come into. And the more you study demonology, and there are some good books on that. Merrill Unger has a book on biblical demonology. It's very comfortable for a layman, yet quite thorough and useful if you're interested in that sort of thing. But you might turn with me to Luke 8. This also occurs in Matthew 8. In Mark 5, but we'll take it here. Pick up about verse 26. And they arrived at the country of the Gerizines, which is opposite Galilee. This is over on the east side of the Sea of Galilee, if you will. And when he went forth to the land, there met him out of a city, a certain man who had demons for a long time, and he wore no clothes, neither abode any house, but in the tombs.

And he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell down before them, and cried out with a loud voice, "What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God Most High? I beseech thee, torment me not." That's a shock if you're reading the Gospels because up to this point he has not acknowledged his role. And that comes later. So the personage inside this tormented person recognized something beyond the knowledge of the people at that time. In terms of our understanding of demons, they're knowledgeable. This is not something that just some crackpot would say he had not announced his real role. The fact that they recognized his deity, the Son of God, Most High. I beseech thee torment me not. Now they know that out of this we learn that they know who he is. They know that they're destined for torment and they know it's at a very specific time.

Verse 29, for he commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man for often it caught him and he was kept bound with chains and fetters and he broke the bonds and was driven out of the demon into the wilderness. And Jesus asked him saying, "What is thy name?" And he said, "Legion," because many demons are entered into him. Legion is not a thousand, by the way. A Roman legion is six thousand troops. So when you say that's the first legion, the second, third and fourth legions are smaller. It's the way the Romans organized. But I'm just making a point. The demons in this man ultimately go into a herd of swine. You know how many are in the herd of swine? Mark tells us 2,000. That's a large herd.

I used to be bothered by what they were doing raising swine in kosher country. The answer is it's not kosher country. It's on the east side of the Jordan. There's the Greek cities, the Decapolis. There were five cities that were Gentile. And so it was understandable. In that sense, economically you can understand why there were swine at all being raised. You wouldn't expect that in Judea.

There may have been there too to support the Gentile contingency, but the point is this is near the Decapolis, the five cities that were supported this way. So many, they besought him that he would not command them to go out into the Abuso. Now this is one of those passions of the Bible I don't understand. They do beseech him, don't send us back to the pit, which is apparently one of the places he would normally do. If he casts them out, they go back to the abuso, apparently permanently, or not permanently, but anyway, for a long time.

And they ask him, please don't do that. Cast us into that turd of swine. The first question is that gives us some insight. I mean, I'm not sure what you do with that piece of information, but what puzzles me even more is the Lord agrees. He lets them do that. Why does he do that? I don't know. Maybe just to teach us that these things are not euphemisms for psychiatric problems and so forth.

I mean, there are people who read the Bible and think, well, those are just idioms for things that we now give psychiatric terms for them. The people who say that have never attended an exorcism, or they would know better.

There was a herd of many swine feeding on the mountain, and they besought him that he would allow them to enter into them, and he permitted them. Then when the demons out of the man entered into the swine, the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake, and they were choked. And they that fed them saw what was done. They fled and went and told it in the city and in the country.

And he obviously becomes very unpopular because he defected the economy of that arrangement. Anyway, and I don't want to make this a whole study in demonology, but I do want you to be at least sensitive to the fact that demons seem to be something quite different than what you and I think of as angels. So there are those that make a big thing of that difference, which raises a bizarre question.

Where do the demons come from? If they're not angels, what are they? Where do they come from? And there are all kinds of bizarre ideas that have no scriptural basis. That are really built within the gaps, if you will, from what we do understand.

There are those that believe that there was a pre-Adamite creation that was destroyed and judged, and the demons are the disembodied spirits of that particular creation. There's no spiritual evidence for that. They place all this hypothesis between Genesis 1:1 and 2:1. That's part of the gap theory that gets way out in left field.

It has only one problem, and there's no basis for it. Doesn't mean it's right or wrong. You can't tell. It's just somebody's idea. But there is apparently some difference between demons and angels. And so in that whole thing, you can expect, you know, if you've got nothing to talk about over a cup of coffee, a piece of pie at 2 a.m., you can argue about whether demons and angels are the same thing.

Now, actually, I personally believe that there's a large hierarchy of all kinds of these creatures. In the Old Testament, we have the Shirim, the Sirim, the Lilith, the Tissim, and some others. And they're all translated in the Septuagint as demons, but they're different Hebrew words.

The Shirim are the mighty ones, and they show up in Deuteronomy 32:17. The Sirim are he goats or satires. They're hairy creatures that are demonic, but they were... embodied in legends as the satires and so forth. And the others have other names and they have slightly different attributes.

But when we speak in the New Testament, principalities and powers and so forth, those are ranks, if you will. And so angels apparently come in different kinds. And it could very well be that the demons are no more than a, if you will, a junior disembodied spirit that is part of that rebellion that we read about in Revelation 12.

So with all this digression, you see, we now are equipped. Now, incidentally, we've talked about the second view. Item one was you can't tell about what verse six means in Jude. Item two was it has to do with the fall of Satan and the angels. Not directly, because I think the fall of Satan and those angels and all of that, number one, are not bound.

The ones that Jude are talking about are bound. They're in chains of darkness, right? Reserve into judgment. Satan is not, at least not yet, That happens at the end of the tribulation before the millennium. What about his angels? They're pretty free to do mischief because that's all yet future.

So what on earth are we talking about in Jude seven? That leads us to a passage in the Bible that's very, very strange. That's Genesis 6. This is the third view.

Genesis chapter 6. We all know about Noah's flood, but I don't think one person in a hundred knows the reason for Noah's flood, except in maybe a very broad sense. Yes, there was wickedness, and the wickedness was very widespread, and God chose to wipe out the known earth at that time, or the whole earth at that time.

I don't think there's anything local about the flood, by the way. But Genesis chapter 6, verse 1 has a phrase that scholars sort of wince and squirrel around trying to explain. It's amazing how much trouble you can get into and how much work you can put on yourself if you decide not to accept what the Bible tells you.

There are people that spend years of study trying to talk about 1 Isaiah and 2 Isaiah because they never read John 12, where John says that there was one Isaiah that wrote both parts, etc. And likewise here, libraries are filled with speculation on what verse 2 means, and yet if you just take it face value, it's interesting.

Chapter 6, verse 1: "It came to pass, when the men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them wives of all whom they chose."

Now, the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair. There are those that and very competent scholars. I'm not trying to sell you a view. There are two basic views on this passage.

But the commonly held church acceptable view is that the sons of God is a reference to believers generally associated with the line of Seth. The concept of the line of Seth became separate and believers, and the rest were wicked and ungodly.

The daughters of men were, what this suggests is intermarriage that was not appropriate. A couple of problems with that. First of all, it's not what it says. The name Benaiah Elohim is a term that shows up four times in the Old Testament, and it's always used of angels. The term to a Hebrew is angel.

My proof of that is when the Septuagint was translated three centuries before Christ, they translated it as angels. But it even goes deeper than that. Also, the daughters of men are not limited to the non-Sethites.

Thirdly, when a believer and unbeliever get married, they don't have monstrous offspring. And what these people give birth to, well, I mean, not generally, what they give birth to are some strange creatures.

Verse 3 says: "The Lord says, My spirit will not always strive with man, for he also is flesh, and yet his days shall be 120 years." Bear in mind that longevity is decreasing, so it goes to 120 and later becomes 3 score and 10.

But going to verse 4, And there were Nephilim in the earth in those days. And also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men that they bore children to them, the same became the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.

So whatever happened here, the sons of God and the daughters of men gave birth to something unnatural, not normal.

Now, the Greek word gigantis was irresistibly transliterated to giants, but that's not what the word comes from. The word Jigenes, I guess it is, is a word that means earthborn.

The word Nephilim here described, well, in the Hebrew, the Nephilim are the fallen ones, comes from the Hebrew word Nephal, to fall.

So the offspring of the sons of God and the daughters of men are fallen ones. That only makes sense if you visualize these as angels somehow leaving their appropriate domain and becoming in a mode that can have intercourse with the women. And they give birth to something bizarre, the Nephilim.

Now, the Nephilim, and we find them before the flood and also after that, we find them in Numbers 13. They happen to be very large, 13 feet long and so forth.

We'll come to that in a minute. So the Nephilim are strange. And so that suggests that something bizarre is going on here.

The first point I guess I want to make is the very, very early church, the Septuagint translators, obviously, in Alexandria, and also the early church, Justin, Athenagoras, Cyprian, Eusebius, also Josephus, Philo, Judeus, and also the authors of the Apocrypha, the Old Testament Apocrypha books which aren't inspired, but the authors betray a presumption of this truth.

So whatever else you say, that was the common belief up until about the fourth century. And it got by the name of Julius Africanus, who was a contemporary of Oregon.

Introduced this idea of the Sethites, that this isn't really the angels, it's really the offspring of Seth, and they intermarried with the other people, and that's what gave that common... There was an attack on the church, Bracelsus and Julian the Apostate, that attacked this older classical idea, and Cyril of Alexander, in his reply to them, repudiated the orthodox position of the angels and so forth.

From about the 4th century through the Middle Ages, this idea of Seth emerged, and you'll find it in a lot of study Bibles and so forth. But it's got some major problems. First of all, there's no indication in the Scripture that the Sethites were distinguished for their piety.

There's no exemption of them from the flood that came. You've got a real problem with that if they're somehow believers. You follow me?

So if they were believers, they perished, which is also I got a problem with that. And of course, the progeny being monstrous is a problem.

OK, now, those of you that want to study the Nephilim, you might. Well, we might find that interesting because it says back, you know, it says there were giants in the earth in those days.

And also after that, who might that be? The Anakim, the sons of Anak. You know, one of them very well. A guy by the name of Goliath. He was a son of Anak.

And you may recall the story. It's one of my fun things in the Bible quiz. You've got David, and the little David's going to go up against Goliath. We all know the story. Except notice carefully when we read the Scripture, he picked up five stones. That's some lack of faith.

He only needed one, right? What did he need the other four? He had four brothers. Goliath had four brothers. We find that out later in the Scripture.

And David's men later on slew the four brothers. But David was ready for all five. Isn't that great?

If you take the trouble, in Deuteronomy 3:11, you discover their bedstead of one of them was 13 feet long. Gives you some idea of his size.

Okay, that's what you really call king size.

And you'll find that in Numbers 13, when the spies spy out the land, the ten that brought reports said we were like grasshoppers in their sight. They were terrified because they ran into some of these Anakim.

They saw some of the spies, spotted them, and they couldn't handle that. Joshua and Caleb said, "That's no problem. The Lord's on our side. He's bigger than they are." Let's go.

But people didn't buy that, and so it cost them about 38 years.

Why does Israel refer to their second appearance? In Numbers 13, the phrase is the Nephilim. Fallen ones.

See, there's something about them that harks back to the days when the angels communed, if you will, with the daughters of men. As you can tell from my presentation of this, I hold to the view personally that there was something supernatural going on.

And I have some reasons for emphasizing this. But let me go on to something that I haven't found in most of the commentators that deal with this controversy.

Mention all the sides of both sides of questions. But they miss one thing, and that's verse 9 of Genesis 6. Verse 8 says: "Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord." Right?

These are the generations of Noah. And Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations. And Noah walked with God.

Now, there's three things mentioned there. Being a just man, the fact that he walked with God, we can relate to that. He was a just man. That really means justified, but I won't get into that right now.

And he walked with God. That's pretty exciting. But what does this mean, perfect in his generations? What that phrase says in the Hebrew is that his genealogy was untarnished.

Now, gee, I don't know how to take credit for something like that. If I could come to you and say, "Gee, my genealogy is untarnished," that sort of implies everybody else is.

So I personally believe that one of the things that distinguished Noah is that, yes, his father was Lamech, his father was Methuselah, and we'll get into all of that when we talk. We're going to talk later about Enoch, because he comes up later in Jude, and we'll get into that whole exciting scene.

There's some really thrilling prophecy already happened before we get to Genesis 6, and I have another excuse to get into that, so we won't do it tonight.

But the point is, one of the things about Noah is that he had a clean, unadulterated, untarnished genealogy. Now that makes no sense to me unless you take countenance of verse 2, when the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair, and took them wives of all whom they chose.

Now, this presents an antediluvian picture, a picture of life before the flood. That's a bit bizarre.

But let me mention a couple of things that we try to emphasize when we study the book of Genesis. Life in Eden is quite different than you and I have any capacity to imagine, because Adam walked with God, he was clothed with light, and he was in a dimensionality that none of us have any concept of.

Prior to sin and prior to the curse, The whole situation was so different that there's no reasonable way to communicate it to us. Also, even after the fall, from Adam through Noah, we have a whole different lifestyle. People lived for hundreds of years. Noah built this barge in his driveway for 120 years.

You can imagine what the neighbors thought.

Now, what's interesting about the sons of God and the daughters of men thing is that that idea is embodied in the Greek mythology.

Now, we all know what we all run into from time. Depending on how interested you are in the classics, you have had varying degrees of exposure to the so-called demigods. Right.

One of the most interesting guys are the so-called titans. We use the term titan, usually meaning large, right? Like the missile or something. Titans are partly heavenly, partly earthly in their origin.

They are reputed in Greek mythology to have rebelled against their father Uranus

Here is the cleaned-up version of the sermon transcription:

Of our classical, cultural roots, we have veiled remembrances of a time when some strange things were going on on the earth before the flood. And we're at least in part caused for the flood. Why? Satan's strategy again. How is man going to be delivered? By the seed of the woman. What's his shot at this? To contaminate the human race so there are no pure humans left to be heirs to the title deed.

So in Revelation chapter 5, when there's one in the right hand of him who sat on the throne, a scroll written within and without and on the backside sealed with seven seals. And no man in heaven was found worthy to open the book. Had to be a man, had to be an heir to Adam. Suppose there were no pure heirs to Adam.

John says, "I sobbed convulsively because no man was found able, and the elder said to weep not." Behold, the lion of the tribe of Judah hath prevailed. He turned and he saw the Lamb of God. Jesus Christ had to be man.

Now, what's really interesting, when you study the genealogies of Jesus Christ in Matthew and in Luke, you have two genealogies. Luke goes from Adam, because he's a physician, he goes from Adam all the way through to David, and down from David through Mary. Matthew, being a Levi, is interested as a son of Abraham. He starts with Abraham, goes down through David, through Solomon, the royal line, all the way down to Joseph, who has the legal title to the throne of David.

But back in Jeconiah's day, and I won't cover this all in detail, but some of you know that in Jeconiah's day, was in the royal line, God cursed the royal line, put a blood curse on Jeconiah and all his descendants. And I have the view, from what I know about Scripture, that in that day in the councils of Satan, there was rejoicing. He thought, "Aha, now he got them." Because there's a blood curse on the royal line.

And when we get down to Jesus Christ, we find that he is the legal son of, but not the flesh son of Joseph, who carries that blood curse. But, When you study the genealogies carefully, you discover when they get to David, they take a detour. Matthew goes down the legal line that has heir to the throne. Luke goes down through Nathan, another son of David, to Mary.

So Jesus Christ was of the house and lineage of David, but in a way that makes him legally entitled, but not subject to the blood curse. So when again and again, as you study the scripture, you find Satan plotting and God outsmarting every step of the way.

But the more you study the scripture, the more you become fascinated with God's methodology and how clever he is. But you also recognize that every detail fits into a plan. Every name, every number, every detail of these 66 books is woven tightly by a super engineer. And it's just incredible.

And I find that exciting.

Okay, let's take a look at 2 Peter. I think we did look at that already, but I want to make sure you're familiar with it. 2 Peter 2:4. For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell. Now, that's kind of strange because Satan has all kinds of fallen angels doing all kinds of things, but they're not bound.

These angels did something very... They broke some deeper rules and so they got cast down to Tartarus. And it's interesting that the same Greek word is used there as occurs in the literature that deals with the Titans and all of mythology. Same word.

And delivered them into the chains of darkness to be reserved in judgment. Notice what Peter goes on. And spared not the old world, but saved Noah, the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in a flood upon the world of the ungodly.

And then he goes on with Sodom and Gomorrah, etc., etc. So clearly what Peter is talking about is something that is familiar to his readers, as familiar as the flood of Noah and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, etc. Peter is presuming that his readers are familiar with this.

When we get to Jude, Jude does the same thing. And in fact, and I want to get into next time's subject, but if we look at... Verse 7, we're going to see even as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities about them in like manner giving themselves to fornication going after strange flesh.

We're going to talk about the sin and the subject of Sodom and Gomorrah next time. But if you read Jude, the tone of it. In verse five, he talks about Israel. Verse six, he talks about the angels that kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation and so forth.

And then even as Sodom and Gomorrah, they went after strange flesh. The implication from the language and the thrust of Jude's argument is that the angels did the same thing that they did in Sodom and Gomorrah, namely unnatural sexual perversion.

It isn't just that they're fornicating, just having sex outside of marriage. That isn't the only issue. Sodom and Gomorrah gives rise to all kinds of other things. We'll talk about that next time.

But the point is, the way the language is constructed, the implication is that this is the nature of the sin of the angels in verse 6. Follow what I'm saying?

Now, this doesn't mean I'm right. I'm just telling you why I view it so aggressively. I want to one hand let you recognize that there are good scholars that would take great exception to what I'm presenting here.

And they argue the Seth kind of idea. But I frankly, this is one of those places where I just really feel personally that if you take the scripture in a straightforward manner, it's quite clear what it says.

Now, you may wonder, okay, Chuck, that's interesting, it's a little bizarre, it's kind of fun, but what's that got to do with us? Well, several things.

At this point, let's summarize lessons, practical lessons for you and I. The first thing is that the Scripture warns against meddling with the spirit world in any way. And I did not take the time to really list all of that.

In Deuteronomy, all through the Torah, all through the Old Testament, and certainly in the New, we are admonished to flee occultic things of all shapes and sizes.

And by the way, I don't know how many of you saw the movie The Exorcist. Anybody see that movie? I'm not trying to recommend the movie, but there's something interesting.

If you recall that entire... Oh, well, first of all, you should probably know. William Blatty based that upon a collection of several case studies amalgamated into a novel.

So there's much in the movie that is documentary, documentarily sound. It all starts, though, with what? A Ouija board. A little party game. That's known in the trade as an entry.

You know what other entries are? Astrology. I want to ask you how many of you read the astrology columns in the paper just for fun because it's kind of cute.

Watch out. These subtle, innocent little things can lead to an entanglement with the spirit world, an involvement that grows and gets addictive and deepens, whose end point is your destruction.

Now, there are many superstitions and such that people had throughout the ages that the Bible doesn't even bother to comment on. These things are not dangerous because they're stupid or because they're just ignorant or what have you.

They are malevolent. Behind these innocent little pieces of foolishness is a demonic spirit whose goal is to undo you and who has at his call enormous resources.

So you're playing with tough stuff.

So that's point one. Jude's point is that punishment, which overtook the angels that sinned, he makes that point simply to emphasize the serious nature of apostasy, opposing the truth.

Beings of a higher order than you and I, you and I are human, angels are a higher order, have been hurled down to a dark place of confinement.

Where they have been there now for thousands of years. We have no idea what Tartarus is like, but they're there and they've been there for a long time.

God has not changed his attitude toward them and time passing has not mitigated the seriousness of their sin.

What Jude is drawing on here is that example, which presumably in his mind is in the mind of his readers, to emphasize the point he's making. That apostasy is serious stuff.

It's not some little thing that you sort of stumble and say, gee, God, I'm sorry, you know. It's heavy stuff.

Now, in 1 Timothy 4:1, we might take a look at 1 Timothy. We're going to look at a couple passages.

1 Timothy 4:1, we looked at it last time, but I want to remind you of this, because it gives a label to false teaching that I think is worth absorbing.

In Paul's first letter, Timothy chapter 4, verse 1, Paul says, Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and the doctrines of demons.

One of the sobering realizations is that any doctrine, any idea that impacts your life, that's not biblically sound, has a very malevolent source.

Now, some of those doctrines or ideas are so conspicuously anti-biblical that to you and I they're obvious. And they prey primarily on the secular world.

The New Age. By the way, they're old ideas but repackaged in modern technology.

The New Age, the whole Shirley MacLaine thing. Sinister stuff. Don't think it's... I can't imagine it being appealing to anyone that has any biblical roots at all.

I worry more about a different kind of heresy. I worry more about pseudo-Christian doctrines that are just one degree off.

If I'm aboard the ship as a spy and I'm trying to get this ship off course, my shrewdest way is to get the autopilot one degree off because they won't notice it for a while until they're so off course there's no hope.

That's exactly what Satan has done also through the ages. They're also demonic doctrines.

One degree off. What's your protection against that? The whole counsel of God. The whole counsel.

Not one chapter, not some little hobby horse, not some little catechism. The whole counsel of God. Genesis 1-1 through the 22nd chapter of Revelation.

To try to absorb, as the Holy Spirit gives you opportunity, the whole counsel of God. That's your only source of balance.

The other dimension to this that I would like to turn to is Ephesians 6. You know, if you come to our house, we happen to have a very English tutor type of home, and it happens in the entry hall.

It fits the decor. We happen to have a suit of armor. A friend of mine arranged for it for me.

It's a suit of armor. And everybody says, what's that? And I said, well, don't you know who he is? That's Ephesians 6. That's his name.

And they, what? If they're Christians, they laugh and chuckle. They know what I'm talking about. If they don't, it gives me an excuse to open the Bible and come to Ephesians 6.

That's why we call the suit of armor Ephesians 6, because it reminds us of Ephesians 6, starting, oh, say, maybe, well, we start at verse 10. Finally, my brethren, Paul says, be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might.

Be strong in the Lord and the power of his might. Jude, later in his letter, is going to give an example.

where Michael the archangel is fighting with Satan and he doesn't bring up brailing accusation against Satan. He's smarter than that because he knows he's a dignity. He's an adversary, but he's senior.

How are you strong? Not in your own power, but in the Lord. Strong in the Lord and the power of his might.

Then he says, verse 11, put on the whole armor of God that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

You don't stand a chance by yourself. He's smarter than you. He's had centuries of study. Got enormous resources and focus. And he's bright. He was the brightest thing around.

He was perfect in wisdom. Now, he has a disease called sin, and that corrupts.

That's going on for a while. However, you make a gigantic mistake in underestimating.

That's why you don't fool around in spiritual matters without proper armament.

Verse 12, For we wrestle not against flesh and blood.

That's not our problem, gang. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world, against the spiritual wickedness in high places.

One of the passages I had in my notes to take you into tonight, but I saw I would overspend my time, is Daniel chapter 10.

And just a couple of sentences somewhere, you can dig it out on yourself. There's where Daniel prays, and for three weeks he fasts, and after three weeks a messenger comes, but the messenger points out, gee, I was held up for three weeks.

And you sort of get the impression, it doesn't say this, you get the impression that Daniel had stopped fasting a day earlier, he might not have made it.

But the point is, he describes that he was battling, you know, the prince of Persia, right? How he withheld him. But Michael came and helped him, and he got through to give him his message.

And then when he's through giving him the vision, he says, by the way, I got to go now because the prince of Greece is next. I got to fight him getting back.

You get the strange shadowy glimpse that behind these governments are spiritual powers.

And who is the head of these spiritual powers in the world? Who is the prince of this world?

And you begin to realize that there's a warfare you and I don't see.

We get a glimpse of that warfare in, there's one interesting place. Again, I didn't take the time to take you in it, but you can do it on your own if I can find my reference here in Kings.

2 Kings 6. There's a place where, in Elisha, and they're surrounded and the servants worried and so forth.

Elisha looks up, looks at both sides. No problem. Those that are with us are more than they were against him. Show him, Lord.

And he sees them surrounded by these angels. What's interesting about that is you get several glimpses.

One is that there are spiritual forces behind what's going on on the earth. Both ways.

When Elisha looked and see who's the strongest, hey, we're okay. There's more of ours than theirs. Okay, he went back to sleep.

And since we're getting close to the time, I want to keep moving. But I'll show it with you again as part of these hints the Bible gives us that there's a lot going on we don't see.

But the hints are very explicit, if you will, in Ephesians. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, against principalities and powers, and rulers of the darkness of this world, against the spiritual wickedness in high places.

By the way, in Daniel 10 we have the prince of Persia and the prince of Greece. We get the impression that there's a ruler and his minions over each of these governments.

And by the way, the period between Persia and Greece is like 200 years. So their time domain is a little different than ours, because their physics are different than ours.

Is there a prince of the United States? Sure there is. And whom does he report?

You make a lot of cracks with that one, but you get the idea.

Who owns the media in this country? All you have to do is read it and get a good impression of what that's all about.

Wherefore, take you, Paul says, the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

Stand therefore, having your loins girded about with truth, and having on your breastplate of righteousness, and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace.

And above all, taking the shield of faith, with which you shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.

Now, I've heard many people preach, and I may be very correct, that Paul, at the time he was writing, was chained to a Roman soldier.

And of course, he didn't regard himself as chained to a Roman soldier. He just figured the Roman soldier was chained to him so he could witness to him.

But it reminds me of Woody Allen's crack about, you know, hell is what, being stuck in an elevator with a life insurance salesman?

But Paul's comments there could be very well...

The easy view is that he was looking at the Roman soldier and he was building analogies. He was the helmet of salvation and so forth.

Except if you look at Isaiah 52, verse 7, you discover that Isaiah apparently was chained to a very similar soldier.

Because Isaiah in chapter 52, verse 7... No, that's not the one I wanted, but it's close.

No, Mr. You did it again feature of the park. How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings and publishes salvation and sayeth unto Zion, God reigneth.

And that's one of them. You can actually find if you can actually go through and find parallels with each of the each of those phrases have links back to the Old Testament.

That's the one that I marked there. And there's some others.

I think Isaiah 59, 17 also.

But moving on.

The whole idea of spiritual warfare is one of having the spiritual armament.

And one of the things that we're admonished by Paul is to put on the whole armor of God.

How do you do that?

What you might do yourself, because it's a study that you'll get more out of, you do it on your own, is to take Ephesians 6 and lay out each one of those things.

And don't treat them as just sort of casual allegories, but really dig into them and build yourself a preparation.

If I told you that within the next six months we're going to have guerrilla warfare in the United States, I'm not saying that, I'm just using this as an example.

What would you guys do?

Those of you that have had some black belt experience would probably refresh yourselves.

Those of you that had small arms would probably get them in shape.

You'd have each of you, depending on your responsibilities and skills and whatever, would prepare, wouldn't you

Here is the cleaned-up sermon transcription:

T. Letting the Holy Spirit lead you into special studies of your own is a special piece of it. Developing a deep devotional life, prayer life, a big piece of it. For each of you, the syllabus would be probably a little different. The Holy Spirit will lead you. But I do strongly urge you to take Ephesians 6 and prepare.

Now, why am I saying that? Well, first of all, it makes sense in terms of your spiritual walk and your spiritual growth. But I have another reason. Because there's something else that puts Jude 6 into a terrifying dimension as far as I personally am concerned. And that's something the Lord Jesus Christ said.

He said on several occasions, as the days of Noah were, so shall the days of the coming of the Son of Man be. And he gave some examples, several. In fact, he made several allusions to that period, Lot and other things. And we'll talk about that in subsequent evenings. But the more we study the days of Noah, the more insight we will probably gain as to the times that will precede the next judgment.

Much is made of the fact that he gave Noah a promise that he never again flood the earth and gave him a rainbow. Peter tells us that you should read the small print. He just said he wouldn't do it with water. So God is getting ready to judge the earth again. But there are some events that will occur prior to that period for lots of reasons.

We know that period is not far away. But those events that occurred prior to the flood, the days of Noah, are going to happen again. Widespread wickedness. A small minority that are in God's grace in the sense of being taken care of. Heavy stuff.

Now, we all have either seen or heard of a movie called Rosemary's Baby. A piece of entertainment, what have you. But a little bizarre because if we understand Genesis 6 correctly, and if that's also included in the scope of Christ's statement as the days of Noah were, We should not be shocked if there's some very, very strange goings on in the coming decades.

I'm not saying next week from Tuesday, but we're heading for some strange times. Oh, and let's stand for a closing word of prayer. Strange stuff. Kind of interesting. Treats the imagination. Causes us to look with a little different eye towards some of the strange myths and legends embodied in the various cultures on the planet Earth.

But apparently based, in effect, on real things that happened a long time ago. Things that are stranger than we normally would countenance in our horizon as we understand our history. But relevant to you and I, not just because they're quaint ancient beginnings, but because they have an impact on where you and I are living.

Because I am convinced for lots of reasons, some of which we've talked about in the past and some of which we'll be talking about shortly, that we are living in that lifetime, that generation, in which God is going to climax his plan for man. And he's told us a lot about what's coming.

What's our job? What's our response to that? And the first response is that we better know that we belong to Jesus Christ. If there's anyone in this room that has any doubt in his mind about that, I would strongly urge you to resolve that before you get home tonight.

You can do so in the privacy of your own will. As we close our eyes and bow our heads, make a commitment to Jesus Christ, and he will carry it from there. He's done 100% of the job. He won't meet you halfway. He'll meet you 100% of the way if you'll but ask.

That's step one, to be in Christ. Second step is to grow by reading his word, by studying, by prayer, by fellowship with other believers. Crucial, more crucial. All of you in this room, all of us in this room have problems. We have financial problems and pressures, health problems and pressures, all kinds.

We've got a long list. Whatever problems and pressures we have are pale and insignificant compared to some of the issues we've talked about tonight. Your spiritual position. I happened to run into some people this weekend, and I'm known within my business world as a risk taker.

I'm a real... hip-shooting, high-leverage, maverick kind of guy in business. But I'm fond of pointing out that I do not have the guts, I'm not willing to take the risk to gamble like you, Mr. So-and-so. I'm not willing to bet my eternity that the Bible is wrong.

That's the real issue. Let's bow our hearts. Father, we praise you for this evening. We praise you for your revelation. We thank you, Father, for your word, which has given us these insights for our learning, for our growth, and for our protection.

We would ask you in Jesus' name to just accept us. We confess before you our sin. We acknowledge before you our need of a Savior. We thank you, Father, that he is ours but for the asking. We pray, Father, that you'd give us no peace until we rest in you.

We would ask you to... Go with us this coming week. Give us a new appetite for your word, a refreshed vigor to study, to show ourselves approved unto thee. We'd ask you to send your Holy Spirit to guide us and lead us into those particular portions of scripture that fit that ministry which you have for each and every one of us.

That in all these things we might grow in grace and the knowledge of our Lord and Savior, that we might be more obedient to your word, that in all these things you might be pleasing in thy sight, O Lord, our strength and our weakness. Amen.