Now Are We the Sons of God – Part 2

Conspiracy theories evaporate like mist once the truth is known. Likewise, Scripture itself makes short work of the erroneous “fallen angels” theology.

READ PART 1.

There was an episode of a British sitcom where a childminder was clearly suffering from OCD. He had built a castle out of yellow plastic bricks for the toddler in his care but had not quite finished it when the boy’s mother arrived home from work. As she chatted, she filled an obvious gap in the tower with a blue brick. Job done! Of course, the babysitter was compelled to remove it and replace it with a yellow brick. She later discovered that he had also rearranged everything in her kitchen cupboards and drawers while she was away. Complaining about this to her husband, who had traits similar to those of the childminder, she was aghast when he quipped that it was more logical and efficient anyway, and therefore a change for the better.

Using analogies like this is out-of-character for me, almost as out-of-character as that incongruous blue brick. But in this case, it was necessary to illustrate that there is no prejudice on my part concerning the identity of the “Sons of God” in Genesis 6. It is simply a matter of logic and consistency. If we were dealing with any other literature, such a theory might be a “definite possibility.” We are dealing with the Word of God, however, and it is appalling that exegetes whom one would assume have at least a general familiarity with its character cannot discern that the “divine gods” conspiracy theory is a wrong-colored brick. In biblical terminology, the text is made of chiseled white stone and they have inserted something consisting of dried mud and straw.

The cellular nature of Scripture rejects the conjecture like skin rejects a splinter. In fact, the skin of the Bible is as integrated as the scales of Leviathan (Job 41:15)—waterproof and bulletproof—so this particular tall tale only ever made inroads into the soft, fleshy minds of men. But this wayward notion is used as a foundation for further interpretation, extrapolating it into a framework that misunderstands and thus misrepresents the rest of the Bible. In this case, it is a game-changer. The new game is Jenga, and the single counterfeit brick disguises a partial removal of the foundation of human history. For this reason, it is not only irritating for those of us who are blessed with the ability to spot a defective brick or hear a wrong note in a symphony, but it is also crucial that this purported “alien intrusion” is exposed as a corrosive doctrinal fabrication. This false teaching is every bit as foreign to history as the supposed “angelic seed conspiracy” which it purports to lay bare.

So, how do we identify the correct interpretation? We do it by comparing Scripture with Scripture. However, this process is not the amateur bog-standard practice (as taught in seminaries) of rustling up isolated proof-texts to support one’s position. God speaks and acts in covenant sequences. Each new instance recapitulates the same pattern. Any interpretation can be verified or rejected through the comparison of one sequence with another, or, even better, with many others. This is what I refer to as systematic typology.¹See What is Systematic Typology? Instead of being mystified by what a biblical author has written (especially in places where they had no intention of being Delphic), a quick comparison with a related structure can switch the lights on. A perfect example is the book of Revelation, which, with all the subtlety of a juggernaut, rumbles its way through the Heptateuch in its description of the first-century, purified martyrs of a new Israel entering into God’s rest in AD70. Situated at the end of the Bible, it recapitulates Israel’s journey from the Garden into the Land in order to communicate the nature of the Church’s journey from the Land into the World.

The Heptateuch in Revelation

Genesis: Vision of the Man – GARDEN (Nature)
(Sabbath: The Lord’s Day and Day of the Lord – Creation)

Exodus: The Churches as Burning “Trees” – ISRAEL UNDER THE SWORD
(Passover: Inspection of Houses – Division)

Leviticus: Enthronement of the Lamb – COVENANT HEAD
(Firstfruits: The Law fulfilled – Ascension)

Numbers: Israel threshed by the Gospel – REFINING FIRE
(Pentecost: The Law of the Spirit – Testing)

Deuteronomy: True and False Armies – COVENANT BODY
(Trumpets: The Church and the Judaizers – Maturity)

Joshua: Judgment of Jerusalem below – ISRAEL BEARING THE SWORD
(Atonement: Conquest of the Harlot City – Conquest)

Judges: Enthronement of the Saints – GARDEN CITY (Culture)
(Booths: Rest and Rule over the Nations – Glorification)

The point here is that until we learn to think in this “cross-eyed” way, seeing two images as one, we too often will have no idea what we are actually looking at. Instead of seeing the 3D image in a “magic eye” puzzle, all we see is a random collection of colored dots, and our teachers will be doomed to continue being the blind leading the blind. Recapitulation—systematic typology—is the key to all the doors in the House of God.

With this in mind, the problem with the ever-popular Amazing Stories version of Genesis 6 fails to take into account the fact that, like Revelation, the event is part of a sequence that is a recapitulation of earlier events. It is one step in a “corporate” retelling of the sin of the first man in Genesis 3. The tune that was played in the Garden on a pipe is now being played by a symphony orchestra—with lots of brass and timpani—and recognition of this “one-and-many” or “head-and-body” relationship gives us the context. The wrong kind of seed was planted, and, despite continued acts by God to mitigate the spread of the Cainite thorns, the ultimate harvest was a world filled with bloodied flesh.

ADAM (Covenant Head)	COVENANT	ADAM TO NOAH (Covenant Body)
THE ABSENCE OF MAN: The world is completed but there is no man to steward it.	TRANSCENDENCE Creation	THE SIN OF ADAM: God creates the World, but its first ruler fails to qualify.
THE MAN AS A HUMAN TABERNACLE: God creates Adam from the ground, breathes life into him, and places him in the Sanctuary.	HIERARCHY Division	THE MURDER OF ABEL: Cain’s rejection of blood sacrifice seizes “the sword” and splits humanity into a humble priestly line and a gifted kingly line.
THE PRIESTHOOD OF MAN: Adam is given promises (WORD), a priestly prohibition (SACRAMENT), and a bride (GOVERNMENT).	ETHICS: Priesthood Ascension	PRIESTHOOD UNDER FIRE: Lamech promotes vengeance (WORD), Abel is replaced by Enosh (SACRAMENT), Enoch is taken by God as a “firstfruits” (GOVERNMENT).
MAN AS A “GOD”: The serpent attacks the bride, questions God’s authority, and co-opts the man’s rule.	ETHICS: Kingdom Testing	MEN AS “GODS”: The seed of the serpent (Cainite kings) and the seed of the Woman (Sethite priests) intermarry. The mercy of substitutionary animal sacrifice gives way to human bloodshed.
THE FALSE PROPHET: Man fails to testify against the serpent, steals the forbidden fruit, and realizes his nakedness before God.	ETHICS: Prophecy Maturity	THE TRUE PROPHET: Noah testifies concerning judgment. The ark is built and the beasts that God brought to Adam now submit to Noah.
THE DAY OF COVERINGS: Adam blames God. The Lord judges the conspiracy, but instead of slaying Adam he covers the sin and the nakedness with the blood and skin of an animal.	OATH/SANCTIONS Conquest	“ALL FLESH” IS COVERED: Male and female legal representatives of all breathing life are covered in the ark. The waters below and above are reunited. The submissive beasts are saved but the unrepentant men die.
ADAM UNDER THE SWORD: The promised fruit of the land and the womb are given but with limitations, and access to God requires the shedding of blood. Instead of bearing the sword for God, Adam remains under the tutelage of an angelic sword.	SUCCESSION Glorification	NOAH THE SWORD-BEARER: Dry land emerges once again and a new covenant is made, with Noah as its first priest-king. He drinks wine with God and rests.

The theft committed by the “one” interprets the theft committed by the “many.” The “priestly” failure that defiled the Garden was recapitulated in “kingly” terms in the Land.²The “Land” cycle has been omitted from the chart above for the sake of simplicity and clarity in the presentation of this particular argument. See Covenant Structure in Genesis 4 for more … Continue reading The “kingly” failure in the Land was then multiplied as a “prophetic” failure in the World. Thus, the entire primeval “Tabernacle” was rendered unclean by a “triune” rebellion.

The Most Holy Place
Adam corrupted the GARDEN: theft from the Father

The Holy Place
Cain corrupted the LAND: the murder of the Son

The Court/s Outside
The lines of Seth and Cain intermarried and corrupted the WORLD:
blasphemy against the Spirit

What was the theft that was committed in Genesis 6? The context is the promises related to Succession: the fruit of the land and the fruit of the womb.

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. (Genesis 3:6)

…the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. (Genesis 6:2)

While the priestly line continued to mediate before God for the sins of the world, history could continue. Thanks to this “covering” as a shelter from judgment, Cain’s line enjoyed all of the gifts of kingdom. However, the kingly sins which continued to plague rulers from Genesis to Revelation first spring up in Genesis 4. Polygamy was not primarily about sating sexual appetites. It was about evading the curse of barrenness upon the womb, enabling any would-be king to quickly establish a dynasty of sons and thus maintain his power without requiring God to build and watch over his house. (Psalm 127:1). We must remember that the first Cainite city was a fortress.

This “theft” of the fruit of the womb was the “World” version of the theft of God’s authority to bless and to curse in the Garden.³See Big Love: A History of Stolen Fruit. This desire for Succession is also the reason why Reuben and Absalom (and presumably the wicked son in 1 Corinthians 5:1), as pretenders to the “thrones” of their fathers’ households, stole their father’s wives or concubines. It was an act, not of lust, but of usurpation. This provides the context of the first statement in Genesis 6. Adamkind (ha’dam) began to multiply—a word that is used to describe “hosts,” whether it be the manifold works of God or hordes of Gentiles swarming like grasshoppers. This is the nature of the image that relates to step 5 of the sevenfold covenant pattern (Trumpets – Maturity), which speaks of plunder and plagues, the “many” outcome of the sin of the “one.” The obedience or disobedience of the “head” always takes on a “body.” (This is also the reason why this incorrect interpretation must be decapitated at the source, lest it plague the rest of Scripture.)

In this case, the “head” of the sin was Lamech, whose name is a play on melech (“king,” a word included in the title of Melchizedek). As the “voice of a god,” like Herod in Acts 12:22,⁴For more discussion, see Altar of the Abyss) instead of representing God’s authority as a human elohim in the way that Adam should have done and Noah later did, by a mutinous Oath he established vengeance in the place of atonement (tyrannical curses as Sanctions). He also established polygamy as a kingly practice. With his own tongue, Lamech exalted himself as the one who would bear the flaming sword of God on his thigh. The word used for the construction of Eve is next used to describe Cain building a city, and played upon as a pun a number of times in Genesis because it sounds like the word for “sons.”⁵See Jacob’s Tabernacle. Thus, having rejected God’s sacrificial means of mitigating the curses upon the land and the womb, cities and polygamy were man’s means of avoiding barrenness.

With the wealth amassed through the kingly gifts of the sons of his wives (Genesis 4:19-22), he thus gives us the first example of the kind of man that Moses’ laws for Israel’s kings were intended to rein in—prohibitions against reliance upon guns, girls, and gold (Deuteronomy 17:16-17). These were the kingly temptations that corrupted David and ultimately led to the downfall of Solomon and the north-south bifurcation of Israel into an intramural miniature of the “Abel-Cain” Jew-Gentile divide—a division established only in order to avoid destruction.

To claim that the satanic incursion in this “World” sequence was a physical interaction rather than merely another form of temptation, is to completely misunderstand the plot of the story. If this “World” sin was not, at its core, a human sin (that is, Adamic), then it is completely different in nature to the priestly and kingly failures that preceded it. If it is not an outcome of these failures, then that makes the details of the previous history mostly irrelevant.

Moreover, this Garden-Land-World pattern of action and consequence structures all of biblical history. The Garden, Land, and World sequences in the history of the primeval era, though each concerns a unique domain, are related and consistent in their structure and purpose—linked but distinct. This is why cultus flows into culture, and Church influences State. The idea that the actions of man in each domain have repercussions in the next, becoming a multiplied reverberation like ripples in a pond, is also supported by the fact that each of the three domains contains all three domains within it as the offices of one man. It thus forms what we might refer to as a “prophetic grid.” It is a horizontal expansion of the three-tiered vertical pattern illustrated above.

When expanded into three domains (in a 3 x 3 grid) as the warp and weft of a woven fabric, the three offices describe the complete biblical theoscape. Working from top left to bottom right in the horizontal offices and the vertical domains gives us the complete pattern of human maturity. Adam himself must be “expanded” to bear the weight of government before he can physically become the “many.” Each step contains a promise of the next. As James B. Jordan has observed, there was no labor required for the Garden food. The Land food did require human labor, and the World food required time and skill—especially the production of wine, which is a symbol of judicial maturity and kingly power, something that a man must master through self-government before it masters him (1 Corinthians 6:12).⁶For more discussion, see James B. Jordan, From Bread to Wine: Creation, Worship, and Christian Maturity.

Jesus’ first miracle, turning water into wine, was a symbol of the instant physical maturity given as a gift to the man and woman in Genesis 1 as a Succession outflow from the labor of God. Adam was called to develop ethical maturity for the sake of all people, those who were yet “in his loins” who would enjoy freely the outflow of their father’s labors. As Adam had freely received, so also he was to freely give. In spiritual terms, water and blood were to flow from his belly. His theft was thus an attempt to “perform a miracle,” possessing immediately the kingly abundance and glory which God would have given to him as a gift if he were patient. This is why the opposite of obedience is “sorcery,” the attempt to obtain God’s blessings without the blessing of God.⁷For more discussion, see “Ethics or Magic” in Bible Matrix II: The Covenant Key.

THE PROPHETIC GRID

	Priesthood Forming “Ask”	Kingdom Filling “Seek”	Prophecy Future “Knock”
Priest GARDEN “Ask”	Tree of Life	Tree of Judicial Knowledge	Two Doorposts to Land…
King LAND “Seek”	Grain	Grapes	Firstfruits of World…
Prophet WORLD “Knock”	Bread	Wine	Feast with Heaven…

The priest must be silent and hear God (forming). The king must act wisely for God (filling). The prophet must speak for God (future). This threefold Ethical pattern is the means by which the fivefold legal covenant pattern becomes sevenfold in history.

Continued obedience thus brings results in the Garden (the fruit of righteousness), in the Land (the fruit of the Land and the womb), and in the World (inheriting the glory of the nations). But Adam did not ask, seek, or knock. Instead, he stole. Consequently, there was bloodshed in the Land and judgment of the World. The three domains are distinct but linked, which exposes the “fallen angels” theory as incongruous and foreign to the “castle” of Scripture. Contrary to the claims of those who should know better, the multiplication of evil in the world cannot be pinned on an imaginary gang of horny devils.

It is not only the earlier texts that present us with this divine architecture. As James B. Jordan observes, both Jesus and Paul were condemned by the High Priest (Garden), then by the reigning Herod (Land), and then handed over to Gentiles for execution (World). In response to Jesus’ prayer of forgiveness (Garden), the sword of heaven in the cloud-court of God hung over the Land at the crucifixion, but, in His mercy, the “four angels” were held back. In response to the apostolic testimony, the end finally came like a “flood” (Daniel 9:26) and the priesthood and kingdom of the Jews, like the two bronze pillars of Solomon’s Temple, and the priestly and kingly trees of Eden, were swept away forever, along with the ministry of sacrifice begun in Abel, who was finally avenged in full against the “seed” of the serpent.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers. You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Truly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.” (Matthew 23:35)

Thus, the failure of those who bore the office of Sons of God, mediating between heaven and earth, was a failure to continue in ministry. Instead of trusting God for the gifts that were obviously being enjoyed for a season (via theft) by the kingly families, they sought them by means of carnal treaties—intermarriage. This is precisely why Jesus condemns the rulers in His day as those who were “eating and drinking” (defying the curse upon Adam) and “marrying and giving in marriage” (defying the curse upon Eve). Those curses had been laid upon Abram and his children as mediators for the rest of the nations. Abram was given a barren land and a barren womb, and commissioned to make them fruitful through patient faith. The Jewish rulers of the first century were like Lot, and like the sons of Seth, seeking abundance through compromise with the City of Man. Babel and Egypt are built overnight through robbery and slavery, but the true Jerusalem takes time, like a seed planted by the homeless, childless Father of a Multitude that would grow into a giant oak to be enjoyed by his children four centuries later.

But if this is the case, how are we to understand not only the supernatural nature of the offspring of these “sons of God” but also the other references to “the Sons of God” in Scripture?

READ PART 3.

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