More Spiritual Warfare - Part 4
And then I go on and talk about these three rebellions. These three rebellions were prevalent in Jewish thinking in Jesus’ day. And I mentioned in Dead Sea Scrolls, the literature they found is full of references to these three rebellions and the Jews of that time believed that they are the cause of the condition of the world.
That's important.
Now these three rebellions, what did they do? Well, the first one, Satan falling, [I wanted to make the point that I think Satan fell after day seven of creation since he was created in a day and I don't think there were days before Genesis 1. So, he fell after creation.
And I can't find a verse in the Old Testament that says anybody joined Satan when he fell. He fell alone.] He didn't like God having a human family and he was all about ruining it for him. And so what does that fall create?
Death and Sin. Suddenly death has entered into the world. And the book of Hebrews talks about them who through [or because of] the fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. This is a big deal and something's got to be done about it. And Sin has entered the world and all humans are under sin. How do we fix that?
The second rebellion had to do with these sons of God coming into the world. This occurs in Genesis chapter 6, where we've got these sons of God and the daughters of men. I beat you over the head with that saying that those sons of God were indeed angels, supernatural beings, who made a plan to come to this earth and do this dastardly deed. [It's as if they want to create their own race of humans, hydrids] And all we get from Genesis is just that. no descriptions, nothing more descriptive. Although verse five of Genesis 6, we'll get to in a minute, is most telling.
And I pointed you to the book of Enoch. And I said, you may not have heard about this book, but it was prominent in the understanding of the day before Jesus's time and during Jesus's time. And even when the apostles wrote, when Jude and Peter wrote, they quote from that book. So, it was known.
And Enoch describes in detail what happens in Genesis 6. We read about these sons of God mating with the daughters of men. We read about these giants being born of them and they're men of reputation. And then the topic sort of drops except he makes this statement. Genesis 6 verse 5, “And God saw the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." How did we go from giants were born and that's that, to now the world is totally corrupt. What the sons of God did and their offspring, the giants, resulted in human depravity increasing at a scale not seen up till then. And Enoch describes in detail what they did to humanity.
So the second rebellion brought in an acceleration of human depravity so bad and that didn't end with the flood. That human depravity and then knowledge that they taught was carried after the flood by the sons of Noah, by the wives of Noah's sons, I don't know, but it was there and it continued.
So that's the effect of the second rebellion.
And then I mentioned the third rebellion. And the third rebellion may be the most difficult one for us to grasp because it describes something. You scratch your head and say, "Did God really do that?"
And Romans talks about God giving them [the nations] up. Three times he gave them up. And then we learn from the book of Deuteronomy 32:8-9 that what God did was gave them [the nations] to a number of his supernatural sons, principalities and powers, who were good, and says, "You guys now rule over these nations. I want nothing to do with them." So God disinherited the nations. And essentially says, you spirit beings of mine, rule over them and direct them in the right direction. He didn't want them to go off into bad things.
And that's what we learn from the book of Deuteronomy. And Moses spells that out several times. And then we learn from Psalm 82 that God's going to judge them because they went bad and they turned to solicit worship from man. And man was only too happy to follow suit and they did.
That's the third rebellion. And we are still feeling the effects of that today. Those supernatural beings are still ruling the Gentiles. They are lords over the Gentiles. That's why when we get saved, we make Jesus our Lord. He's the Lord of all the lords. And every Gentile Paul ran into, were idol worshippers. I think it was very rare for Paul to run into an atheist in his day. They worshiped the gods that were over them.
To be continued