Before I get into preaching today, I want to ask for your
prayers. And just so you know, I don't
know if I've ever said this to her, but I really covet and
value your prayers for me as I'm preparing sermons each week.
My prayer is, and I invite you to always join me in this, is
that as I'm preparing the message and delivering the
message that I'm speaking what God wants us all to hear, not my
own opinion or my own perspective or my own ideas.
And I mean, my stuff is always mixed up in there.
And that's why I often pray, you know, whatever is from God, let
it take root and grow and whatever is just for me, let it
be quickly forgotten. But if you could pray that for
me, especially this week, and I'm glad I, that Paula
mentioned, I think it was you, Paula, I wasn't looking
backwards. I thought it was your voice the,
the situation in the Middle East.
And I have been following that whole thing fairly closely since
October 7th of a couple years ago.
And, you know, I don't get partisan from the pulpit and I
don't want to ever get partisan from the pulpit.
But sometimes events that are are divisive and controversial
events I, I feel I need to address from the pulpit.
And I am feeling right now the need that I might need to
address what's happening there, particularly now that the United
States is directly involved, from the pulpit next Sunday.
And I don't know what that will look like, which is why I would
like you to be praying about it with me.
And I'm not even for certain I'm going to do that, but I think I
probably will. I think that's where God's
leading me. But I would love you to be
praying that. So first of all, that that if
it's not God that I'm hearing, but but a bad burrito or
something like that, that that God will make it clear.
Scott, keep your mouth shut about that.
You don't need to talk about that from the pulpit.
If it is God that's leading me that I would speak with God
would have us all here, not just my own opinion.
So I don't know what it would look like.
I know what it would not look like.
It will for sure not be a partisan political rant and and
which I I, you know, Rage Against one particular political
party or position or another. It won't be a nationalistic rant
in which I Rage Against one particular country or another.
It won't be a religious or ideological rant in which I Rage
Against one particular religion or another.
I don't think those things ever have a place in the pulpit.
I think that as we as a nation are now involved in a war and as
many people, including my son, who's in the Air Force right
now, might have more or less direct contact with that.
But even, you know, we're a nation of a great mixture of
folks. We've got Christians, we've got
Muslims, we got Jews, we got Israelis, we've got Iranians
living in this country, along with a lot of other different
folks in this country. And, and I think it is important
for us to ask where is God in all of this and how can we
respond in faith to what's going on?
And I would like to be able to talk about those things without,
again, without drifting into partisan politics or rants and,
and, and those kinds of things. Is that, is that fair enough?
If you could just be in prayer with me for this week so that if
I do speak about that next Sunday, I do it a way that
honors God and builds us all up and rather than making someone
feel like they're being attacked.
So. OK, thank you for that.
I appreciate that. All of that said, now we can get
to this week's OOP. I got to get my notes out
because this is one of those days where I'm going to need my
notes. We are talking today about the
folly of idolizing power, the danger, the foolishness of, of
making power seeking and wealth seeking the goal or even part of
the goal of our lives. God has some very serious things
to say about that. And John read the beginning of
Genesis chapter 6 a little earlier.
I will tell you up front that I have never read Genesis chapter
6 verses one through 8, well, particularly one through 5 and
said to myself, boy, I can't wait to preach on that.
I think it's one of the strangest passages in the entire
Bible. There's lots of weird stuff in
there. We're going to get to that
because I want to address some of that because some of it is
just truly bizarre. I think though, there is within
these, and I believe there is within these first 8 verses in
Genesis 6, a message that is deeply relevant for our
situation today. And the the core of that message
is the foolishness of idolizing power rather than trusting and
turning to and seeking God. And so let's get into that.
And I want to get into it and I'm going to this is, this is a
tough passage to preach in a kid friendly way.
I'm going to do my darndest to preach this in a kid friendly
way because there's a lot of strangeness and, and and
difficult words going on here and concepts.
But so first I want to explain some of the challenging words in
there. We hear the phrase twice sons of
God in those first 8 verses, in the 1st 5 verses really.
And the sons part of that is easy.
It just it's sons. It really is sons.
It's the God part of that. That's a real challenge because
the word that is translated God is the word Elohim.
And that word is translated in three different ways, distinct
ways in the Old Testament and that are all accurate in their
own context. Most of the time it's just
translated as God and, and most of the time that's what it
means. However, the word itself is
plural and sometimes it's translated as gods, gods.
So this could you could arguably say the sons of gods rather than
the sons of God. Other places like in Psalm
chapter 8, you hear that where the psalmist is talking about
what are humans that you are mindful of us and yet the
psalmist writes, you have made us a little less than God's and
it's the same word Elohim. Some translations translate
they're they're as angels as well.
And and the third way that that word is translated in the Old
Testament is in Exodus chapter 20 and then again in chapter 22,
where it means judges humans of significant power and authority
in their society. And the people that analyze this
are split into two big categories.
There's a lot, maybe some smaller ones, but the two main
categories see that this sons of God means angels, angelic
spiritual beings that look down on earth, are attracted by
women, join with women, and together they produce hybrid
babies, hybrid Angel human babies called the Nephilim,
which are identified as mighty or heroes, depending on the
translation you read in the land.
That's one large group, and there's a lot of very credible
people that say it's, that's what it means.
There's another large group of people that also has some
heavyweights behind it, people like Augustine, John Calvin, and
John Wesley, among many others who say that that doesn't make
sense. Angels are spiritual beings.
There's no way that they can coupled with human beings and
produce babies. It's just not possible.
But what these sons of God are are sons of judges, sons of
powerful and influential people in the land that looked out and
said we get our pick of the women.
I'm going to talk about that in more detail later.
Now, either translation is legitimate.
Either understanding is, is, is you can argue for and there's no
conclusive way to say one or the other, but I think that that
leaves us some freedom as we look at this and, and here's the
reality in terms of relevance for our lives.
I cannot remember ever having had to deal with the problem of
Angel human hybrids living among us.
Never once have I had to deal with that problem.
However, the problem in our culture and in the world of how
do we respond to powerful people who take what they want and
exploit who they want? That's a real problem.
So I think it's far more helpful for us to look at it from that
perspective rather than now. The Angel human hybrids would
make a really cool Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, to be
sure. But I think in terms of
relevance and meaning for our Christian walk and our Christian
faith, how do we respond and how does God respond to powerful
humans who take what they want and exploit who they want is a
much more relevant question. So that's one of them.
The other one is that word heroes translation.
I used to use heroes. Other translations say mighty
people, mighty men. That's mighty is a little
better. Heroes have a positive
connotation. The word that's translated there
in Hebrew has is morally neutral.
It's used of mighty people who are doing good things, mighty
people who are doing bad things. And sometimes it's used, it's
often used of God when God is doing mighty things.
And and I think these Nephilim should are definitely mighty
highly questionable given the context whether they were heroes
in our sense of the world word in which heroes are typically
considered good guys. And you've got your heroes and
your villains. You got your superheroes and
your super villains. Heroes are usually good guys,
right? Am I right about that, AJ?
Yeah. OK, I'm going to take that as an
agreement. Heroes are usually good guys.
These Nephilim, I think we'll see, are not good guys.
They're not good. They're mighty, but they're not
good guys. They're not heroes.
All right. So then the third one is a
little less significant, abide and contend.
There's a place where, and I'll just back it up, where then the
Lord said my spirit will not contend with humans forever.
The word contend, the Hebrew word can also mean abide.
So God is saying here, either God is saying the Lord said my
spirit will not abide with humans forever or contend with
humans forever. The practical impact is the
same. God is starting a timer and
saying there are problems in the world and I am not going to
spend forever either wrestling with humans to try to get them
back on the right way or staying with humans while they're
continuing to go the wrong way. The effect is the same.
God says there is a limit to my patients with y'all.
And what is that limit? That's the other question here,
which is 120 years. Shortly after this God says I
would have said 120 years shall be the length of humans life,
something like that. I'm not getting the quote exact
there and there are two different schools of thought on
that. Some folks say that 120 years
means God has set that as the maximum lifespan for humans from
this point on. If you look at Genesis chapter
5, you see people living 400 years, 600 years, even 900
years. And so God is saying that's too
long, these people are doing too much evil, we're going to cut
their lives short. Nothing past 120 years.
The problem with that is immediately after the flood, we
still see people living well over 120 years.
The other school of thought, and I think is a stronger position
on this, is that God is setting the timer.
From this point of pronouncement, God is saying 120
years until I wipe out humankind by a flood.
And that's how long Noah had to build the boat.
It was a big boat. He had no chainsaws, no
bandsaws, no reciprocating saws, no table saws.
He had to do all that work by hand with the help of his sons.
Took a long time to build a big boat, 120 years that that's the
time limit. So God started a timer.
Things are so bad that within 120 years I'm going to wipe out
all humankind except Noah and his family.
How could things have gotten so bad?
Could it really have been so bad?
Let's hear what God says about what was so bad in the world
before the flood. God has some strong things to
say. The Lord saw how great the
wickedness of the saw how great the wickedness of the human race
had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the
thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.
That's bad. Every human being, their
thoughts of their heart are only evil all the time.
I've known some bad people. I've known some people who
acknowledge that they're bad people.
I have never met even a single person whose thoughts were only
evil all the time. I'm sure there's some out there.
I have not personally met them. There's a lot.
There's 6 billion people. There's a lot of people I
haven't met. But God saying this is true of
everyone except Noah and his family, Everyone else in the
world, their thoughts are only evil all the time, which means
their actions are only evil all the time.
This is very general though. It's a general indictment,
nothing specific. There are two specific types of
evil that God mentions here in the 1st 8 verses of Genesis.
Let's look at one of them, the Lord.
I thought I hit the button, apparently I didn't.
Here we go now. The earth was corrupt in God's
sight and was full of violence. God saw how corrupted the earth
had become, for the people on earth had corrupted their ways.
So God said to Noah, I'm going to put an end to all the people,
for the earth is filled with violence because of them.
The first evil, well, one of the evils that God identifies in the
earth at this time is violence. It's a lot of different ways to
be evil, but the thing that God highlights here that is leading
him to wipe out all humanity except for one family is
violence. This is the legacy of Cain.
This is what happens when that legacy goes unchecked and
unchanged in generation after generation.
Embraces Cain's way of living, which is Cain's way of living.
Was saying I lost honor. My brother took honor from me
when his offering was accepted and mine wasn't.
I'm going to get my honor back by defeating my brother and
killing my brother. That attitude.
I'm going to get my honor my way.
I'm going to get my glory my way.
I'm going to establish and secure my status and my position
my way, no matter what it costs anybody else.
That that is what led Cain to kill his brother Abel, and he
passed that on to his great, great, great, great grandson
Lamac, who killed a man for offending him.
And now many generations later, and thousands and thousands and
thousands of people later, maybe millions, we've got an earth
that's filled with violence of people saying I'm going to take
care of me and my own. I'm going to get what I want for
me and my own. I don't care who I have to step
on or what I have to do or what the cost is to other people.
I will get for me what I deserve and what I need and what I want.
And that leads us to the second evil that's specifically named,
which is in reality another form of violence, but it's a very
specific form of violence. The sons of God saw that the
daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any
of them they chose. This is not romance.
This is not suddenly there was freedom to marry whoever you
want to marry. This was powerful men saying, I
get to pick whatever woman or women I want and I will marry
them and make them my wife and the mother of my children if I
choose. What you have is these Nephilim,
these mighty men who are backed by powerful families saying I
will take what I want, I will take who I want, and nobody can
stop me. And particularly vulnerable here
were women in that context and in that place.
And these mighty men backed by powerful families were
exploiting women and using them as they saw fit, without concern
with what anyone thought or wanted, not including the women.
And So what do we have here? What's the condition that led
God to wipe out humanity? Powerful people were bullying
and abusing people weaker than them.
Powerful people we're bullying and abusing people weaker than
them. And that may be the simplest way
we can put it. The powerful exploiting the weak
and the vulnerable, the powerful bullying and dating what they
want, from whom they want, when they want it.
And God said, this is not what I intended.
It's incredible the language that you use.
God regretted. Some translations say God
repented that he had made human beings.
God felt sorry that he had made human beings because it wasn't
what he intended. This is what wasn't God's plan.
God created human beings and put them in a garden where they were
living in perfect harmony with each other and with the natural
world, plants and animals alike, where they had all they needed.
They had all the glory and all of the protection and all the
resources they needed from God. They were in peace and
prosperity with each other and with the world around them.
And human beings said, we want to do this on our own.
And it led to violence and exploitation of the weak by the
strong. And God said, this is not my
design and there's no chance of turning the boat.
The Titanic's going to hit the iceberg.
Because when all the thoughts of everyone's heart are always evil
all the time, that just means every child they raise from that
point on is going to share those same broken, dysfunctional,
violent, bullying, exploitative thoughts and actions.
And one man and his family isn't going to turn the tide.
So I'll save them and wipe out the rest.
Here's the thing. The world is not now what it was
before the flood, right? I think, I hope we can agree
that that we all know some people whose thoughts are not
always evil all the time and whose actions are not always
evil all the time. However, there's a lot of
problems in this world, but it's not as bad as it was then.
The church is growing. The church is spreading.
The church is is moving further and further into every tongue,
every tribe, and every nation. The Kingdom, which means the
Kingdom of God, is growing and it's spreading.
But we still have powerful people who use their strength
and their position to bully and exploit the weak and the
vulnerable. And the question is, how do we
live like Noah among them? What does that look like for us?
So that God looks with favor upon us as God looked with favor
upon Noah. How do we do that?
What do we do? And what can we do?
Particularly when sometimes it's the most powerful and
influential, it's the people that are backed by the greatest
legal and financial and sometimes military might that
there is, and often the greatest wealth that there is.
What can we do? What can we do?
That's what that's what this passage is here I believe for,
is to tell us what can we do and our cultures and our communities
and our nation and our world when we are confronted with
powerful people bullying and exploiting the weak and the
vulnerable, What can we do? Well, the first thing we can do
is we cannot idolize power, power or powerful people.
We can stop turning the power people in the world into the
idols, the great icons that that we and our children look up to
and celebrate, whether it's people that are that are rich,
whether it's businessmen or athletes or musicians and
singers or movie stars or politicians or whoever.
That doesn't mean we can't admire.
I, I there, I've got musicians, I've got, I've got actors that I
admire that I Keanu Reeves I think is great.
I like Jennifer Lawrence too. They're not perfect people, but
I don't, I don't want to idolize them.
What, what does it mean to idolize them?
Idolize means when we start saying, I want that and I want
it so bad, I'm willing to do whatever I need to do to get it.
Idolizing happens when we look at those powerful people and we
say, you know what? If I could just have their money
and their wealth and their fame and their social media
following, then I could do good things in this world.
Then I can make a difference in this world.
If I could just have their power, then I could make an
impact too. Then I could that's idolizing
power and powerful people. Idolizing someone is not about
just I'm going to bow down. Idolizing this means we put them
up on the pedestal and say they have the right of it.
Their way is the best way. When God says don't look to
wealth as your path to glory, Don't look to politics as your
path to power. Don't look to, don't look to
fame as your path to honor. Look to me for those things.
I will give you all the power, all the honor, all the glory
that you need just from being my children and being in my family
and having my Holy Spirit. So we can't idolize power or
powerful people. We can be like Jesus and help
care for and protect people that are weaker than us.
That's how we can use the power and the honor and the glory and
the position and the status that God gives us that if instead of
exploiting, we protect instead of using, we care instead of
stepping on, we lift up. These are the things.
Be like Jesus in that way.
I've got a couple just examples and I, I wanted some real life
examples of people that were in situations maybe as close as we
could get to in today's world to the situation that Noah was in
and the world in which he was living.
And, and I the lowest hanging fruit there is always Nazi
Germany when you're looking for a culture and, and a
civilization that was corrupt and evil and, and full of
violence and exploitation. And I got just a couple of
examples, some you've heard before, Corey Tenboom, Oscar
Schindler and, and, and others. But I got a couple of folks that
I want to meet geese who protected Anne Frank and her
family. I want to give you 2 kids, two
kids because we got kids here and these kids, the 1st is older
than you guys, but still still worth listening to. 16 years old
Stefania who was from Poland. The Nazis rolled into Poland and
started hurting up Jewish folks and putting them into
concentration camps. 16 year old Stefania and her younger sister
hid 13 Jews in their house. 13 These two girls, teenagers hid
13 Jews in their house for two years, with German soldiers
living on the floor below them for two years.
They hid them. They could have gained favor
with the Nazis. They could have curried favor.
They could have used those Jews, turning them in, sending them
over as a way to gain status and authority and position with the
new regime. And the power was that was
there. But instead they risked their
own lives to care for them. Interestingly enough, Stefania
married one of those folks she protected years later, using
their position, as precarious as it was, to protect rather than
harm, to care for rather than exploit.
Francine Christophe is another. She lived in France while she
was from France, and she was actually Jewish, and she was
actually sent to an internment camp, Bergen Belsen.
And what did she do as a child? She shared her food rations with
other folks who were sicker and weaker than she was.
She took the little bit that she had and she gave a portion of it
to others to care for them and protect them and shield them as
best she could. And God being God, did one of
those things that God does sometimes.
And one of the people that that that Francine saved ended up
saving her life later on. But it's not just Nazi Germany
where we can find those kind of examples.
Here's another name that you might not know.
I, I didn't know this one. Nargis Mohammadi.
Ever heard of Nargis Mohammadi? She's alive today.
She's a journalist. She's a winner of the Nobel
Peace Prize. She was not able to receive the
Peace Prize. That was in 2023.
She wasn't able to receive it because she was then and is now
in prison in Iran. And she was imprisoned and has
been tortured and abused because she stood up for and wrote about
and exposed and protested against the treatment of women
and the torture of prisoners under the Islamic Republic in
Iran. And so she spent much of her
adult life in jail and isolation, solitary confinement,
being tortured, even though she's got health problems of her
own. She suffers from partial
paralysis and lung problems. And yet, even while she was in
the prison, she was organizing fellow prisoners to protest
against not only the treatment of prisoners, but also the
treatment of women outside the prison.
Using her position and the little power that she still had
to do what she could do to protect and care for the weak
and the vulnerable, rather than trying to Curry favor and
improve her status by turning her back on them and getting
yourself out of jail. This is what we can do.
We can be like Nargis. We can be like Francine.
We can be like Stefania. We can be like Jesus and use the
resources and the position and the power and the privileges
that God has given us, however great or small those might be,
to protect and guard and care for the weak and the vulnerable
around us. We might not change the world.
We that's Jesus's job. That's not our job.
Our job is to love and care for to the best that we can, when we
can and where we can. Not worrying about the pursuit
of power and wealth and glory. To protect and elevate
ourselves, but using the power of the Holy Spirit that God has
given us. Living in the glory, God's own
glory that he shares with us to lift others up and protect,
protect them and care for them and defend them.
This is what we can do. We won't do it perfectly.
And so the final thing that we can do is that we can say yes to
God's call to stop bullying people and start loving people.
It's easy. It's easy in our culture to slip
into it even without thinking about it, even without realizing
it. It's easy to slip into idolizing
power and people in power. It's easy to slip into the, the
subtle kinds of bullying, which are I'm going to use what I have
to take care of me and my own. And, and, and, and I realized
that might step on some other people's backs and some other
people's shoulders, but what can you do?
Or maybe we didn't even know we were doing it.
But none of us is perfect. None of us is complete yet.
That's why we need Jesus in the blood of Jesus.
And so when we see ways in our own lives, when we're
participating in the bullying, when we're participating in the
exploitation that we repent of that we turn away from that and
instead do what Jesus said. Love God with all our heart,
soul, mind and strength, and love our neighbor as ourselves.
These are the things that we can do.
These are the things we can do. Idolizing power.
Idolizing power is folly. Seeking power for the sake of
making the world better. Seeking power for the sake of
making our position in the world better always, always, always in
the end leads to violence and destruction and exploitation and
bullying at its most basic level.
That's why Jesus said, don't seek power, seek me.
Seek the Kingdom of God first, and God will give you everything
that you need. Jesus said.
When the Holy Spirit comes on you, then you'll have power.
We don't need the power of wealth.
We don't need the power of politics.
We don't need the power of, of violence.
We have the power of the Holy Spirit and we don't need the
honor and the glory that the world can give us on social
media or on stages or platforms or television.
We we get all the glory and the honor that we need from Jesus
Christ himself. He shares his own glory and
honor with us in Jesus name, Amen.