Posts Tagged ‘Satan’

The Nephilim, Lessons from Enoch and Lessons from Noah and the Flood

Posted: August 22, 2012 in Christian
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I know I probably can’t do this justice, but I decided to tackle some subject matter that highly interest me and the patterns that they seem to represent. This subject covers the time between the creation and the Flood of Noah, and deals with some controversial beings called the Nephilim. To those that have no idea what Nephilim are…here’s a link to start with (there are many, many more references that could be cited, but maybe this link will help you start your own in-depth investigation into this eerie subject) http://www.nwcreation.net/nephilim.html

I like patterns. I look for patterns to assist me with understanding and remembering thoughts, items and concepts whether at work or at home. Therefore, I see patterns within the scriptures that I believe were intentionally woven into the fabric of the Holy Word to allow us to tie events and concepts together for our edification, our remembrance and our worship. With that in mind, I wish to begin this topic with some patterns I see represented in the bible. In my mind, I feel that the Nephilim represent Satan and sin, and that Enoch represents the saved children of God and Noah represents the remnant being saved from the judgment of an evil, unrepentant world. So, let’s see if I can tie these thoughts and patterns together.

To start at the beginning of the scriptures, the Holy Spirit tells us in Romans that Adam was a model, or a type for Jesus. Romans 5:14 Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come. (NKJV)

I remember when I first read this I thought, “hold on, how in the world is Adam, who fell, like Christ?”. I owe the clarification of this comment to Chuck Missler who explained it in one of the 40,000 recordings he has made (OK, maybe not 40,000, but he has made a lot of fascinating instructional and inspirational recordings…). He explained it this way; Adam and Eve lived a guileless, perfect existence in a perfect environment, but Eve was deceived by Satan and because of this deception she chooses to defy God. Adam, knowing he would suffer along with her, (God told them they would die) made the conscious decision to stay with her, therefore taking on her sin. This caused their existence to radically change and the curse of death was heaped upon them, as well as the environment in which they lived. Christ chose to become human and to be born in our cursed existence and take upon himself our sin of death, to provide a pathway for us and creation to throw off the curse of death and re-establish the perfect world again in the end, thus reversing the curse that began with Adam and Eve. When explained this way, the connection between Adam and Christ makes perfect sense.

OK, so we know that the scriptures are full of patterns and types for us to look for and digest, so we can understand the meanings of them and apply the meaning to our lives. Let’s look at a few that I feel tie together the Nephilim, Enoch and the Flood.

1st Pattern…The Nephilim. I learned in history class about Greek and Roman gods. It seemed each and every one had superhuman strengths, they were huge imposing creatures that struck fear in the hearts of mere mortals, similar to the superheroes that we read about in comic books or watch on the silver screen. When I was a kid I never would have imagined that the basis of these legends had their root in the history of mankind and was recorded in the Word of God. Genesis, Deuteronomy, Numbers, Joshua, Samuel, Chronicles and Ezekiel1 most have references to these aberrant humans that were the result of the union of fallen angels2 and human females. It is very easy to infer from looking at the Hebrew meaning of the passages that the genetic code of all the offspring and their descendants would have been altered, corrupting the purity (or perfection) of the DNA of the children of the Lord (which would eventually become the Israelites) if they had been allowed to intermingle. I feel this was an early attempt by the original adversary, Satan, to corrupt the DNA code of man and prevent the future birth of the perfect human, Christ. For this reason, the only way to accurately insure that corruption of the line didn’t happen would have been to reformat the Earth, so to speak…hence, Noah.

2nd Pattern…While all this attempt to corrupt the human genomes by Satan though the Nephilim was taking place around the globe, there was a seventh generation descendant of Adam named Enoch that we are told in Genesis 5:22 and again in verse 24 walked with God for three hundred years after the birth of his son, Methuselah at the age of sixty-five. There is a Jewish tradition that Enoch was born on the 6th of Sivan3 which is the Jewish Feast of Weeks, or as we know it, the Day of Pentecost and we are told in Genesis 5:24 that three hundred sixty-five years later the Lord took him, or translated him, and according to Jewish tradition, he was translated also on his birthday (what a present!). The parallel between Enoch and the Church jumps right out at me…both were ‘born’ on Pentecost, Enoch was born amid a world of decay and corruption but found favor with God and followed his commandments and so subsequently God snatched Enoch from the sin and corruption of the world before he destroyed it. We are told in I Thessalonians 14:16 and 17 that the Church will be caught up to be with the Lord, just like Enoch was.

3rd Pattern…The days of Noah were dim days indeed for the Earth. Satan had, successfully it seemed, corrupted the line of man with the Nephilim so the birth of a pure Lord born of the line of David wouldn’t be able to take place. Genesis 6 speaks of this tale of woe where starting with verse two the Holy Spirit tells us that Sons of God (‘ĕlôhı̂ym)4 came down to co-mingle and produce offspring with the daughters of man (‘âdâm)4 and the product of those unions were the Nephilim, or ‘giants’ as the modern translations render them. Primarily because of this corruption of the human race, God decided to destroy life on the Earth. However, Genesis 6:8 is a short but very sweet verse to our ears because it simply says but Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord (KJV). Because Noah found favor with the Lord and his gene pool was pure (or perfect), The Lord chose to keep Noah, his family and male and female of all flesh safe from destruction as he wiped the impure seed of Satan’s attempt at destruction of the race of man from the face of the Earth. What are the lessons to be learned from Noah? Noah is a model of the remnant of the Children of Israel as we see in Isaiah 11:11, Jeremiah 23:3, Ezekiel 11:17, Micah 2:12 and Romans 9:27 which will be protected and saved from the judgment of the Earth by fire, just as the Flood was a judgment of the Earth by water.

Looking at the history of mankind before the flood, we see that the patterns there are exemplar to the history of mankind after the flood. Perhaps we should really take a close look at the lessons God has laid out for us and dig deep to find the gems and jewels of information hidden beneath the surface of these first chapters of the Book of Genesis.

Jim Bussell

P.S. While researching this I came across some interesting websites pointing to the Book of Enoch. Apparently it was discovered that the Ethiopians weren’t highly influenced by the Early Church leaders thus their bibles retain some characteristics of some of the early canons before the Early Church Fathers did their editing, resulting in the Book of Enoch being included in their scriptures. Supposedly the passages that Jude quotes about Enoch’s prophecies in Jude 14 are found there implying that he was familiar with the text. Also fragments of the Book of Enoch are included in the Dead Sea Scroll remains and, if we can believe the carbon 14 dating, these copies were ascribed around 200 BC. It seems most scholars believe the Book of Enoch was not written by Enoch himself, but it retains a good enough pedigree, that a healthy biblical library maybe should include one as historical reference. The Book of Enoch was translated from the Ethiopian text in 1906. Here is one interesting website: http://exodus2006.com/ENOCH.HTM

1 Genesis 6, Numbers 13, Deuteronomy 3, Joshua 14 & 15, II Samuel 20 and I Chronicles 20

2 fallen angels = sons of God. All of the earliest writings, as well as the Kaballah refer to sons of God as angels. It wasn’t until the 2nd century AD did a reference to sons of Seth appear in the writings of an early church father, Augustine. To consider the sons of God as righteous men, doesn’t really play in my mind as the scriptures tell us that the offspring of this union were giants, or when you look at Strong’s definition (H5303) they were not only giants, but were tyrants, bullies. You may have some children that are badly behaved, but to have aberrant offspring, there has to be something else in play, other than human to human unions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_of_God

3 http://www.khouse.org/articles/1994/101/

4 from Strong’s Concordance courtesy of E-Sword

 

 

A historical snapshot of Satan from Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28

Posted: August 22, 2012 in Christian
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I decided to share some thoughts I have gleaned from reading Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 and give a quick rundown on a few things, using a macro view, that I see in these two complimentary chapters of these fascinating books.

My overall assumption from reading Isaiah chapter 14 is the Lord starts with a broad stroke and then narrows it a bit in focus. It seems He starts with Israel in the end-time, the last days, looking back upon the author of their oppression and trouble who has been defeated. A personage that The Lord refers to as the king of Babylon. He then narrows his scope and we find He is taking about Satan, giving an account of his mistreatment of, not only Israel, not only the people, but of all the creation. The Lord then continues with an account of Lucifer’s fall because of his pride and arrogance against the one that created him and then The Lord spells out, in no uncertain terms what he has in mind for Satan and The Lord’s contempt for him comes through rather plainly as he spells out his eternal sentence for his iniquity. The narrative continues once again about the creation and the burden that has been lifted from it.

What about Ezekiel 28? In this passage I see The Lord referring to Satan again as a king, this time king of Tyre, another earthly kingdom. The Lord starts this time with the beginnings of Satan and the esteem he seemed to have held in The Lord’s eyes. He continues about the pride and fall of Satan because of Lucifer’s vanity and how The Lord it seems, paraded the fallen Lucifer before the other ranking angels, cherubim, I assume as a poster child of his sin of vanity so that they could gaze upon him with derision and then cast him down upon the earth so all his equals could look on him in horror.

Before I continue, I am going to say that Act 17:11 is in full effect here, for what is see when I combine these two passages is purely conjecture on my part and could simply be the harvest of an active imagination.

From what I read from these two passages, I see this scenario; Satan is referred to as a king of two earthly kingdoms in these passages. He is held in contempt and paraded before kings and those that knew him. That tells me that there is a version of a ruling hierarchy in heaven. We already know that because of the fact that The Lord is the ruler of all things and those that are subjugated to him and Christ, including these cherubim kings…and Satan was one of these cherub kings. In my thinking, if there are kings, there are kingdoms. OK, what was Satan’s kingdom? The theme in Isaiah 14 seems to include a repeated reference to the freedom the earth also feels with the removal of Satan in verses 7, 8 and 25. My conjecture is Satan was given the earth as his kingdom to oversee. Satan’s pride and vanity caused him to attempt to elevate himself as God’s equal, an act that caused him to be cast out of heaven and into the creation he was ruling over which he had already corrupted and because of his corruption, a creation he caused to die by the introduction of entropy1

We also learn that Satan was cast down, along with a third of the angels into this creation and after he introduced iniquity into it it has been groaning from the burden of Satan until it’s release as the above verses indicate. Satan also apparently has limited powers for we can infer elsewhere in the bible that the tree of life is guarded by a cherub to prevent Satan from partaking of it and gaining immortality. I assume this because it wouldn’t take a super-angel like a cherub to guard it from Adam…however it would take an equal of Satan to guard it from him.

What about the idea of kings in the heavenly realm? I infer from this that there are other universes being watched over and ruled by other cherubim kings that probably are buzzing happily along, unaware of the bitter stench and ooze of the corruption caused by Satan that is emanating from this one.

God Bless

Jim Bussell

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_%28information_theory%29

Paul’s Thorn in the Flesh

Posted: August 20, 2011 in Christian
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I was sure that when I began the research for this topic for a class at Koinonia Institute, that I would conclude that Paul had an eye malady as several commentators seem to think…but after looking at several passages and after researching several different sites and praying, I don’t think that is what it was…not totally anyway. Let’s start attempting to unravel this question by visiting the passage where the term ‘thorn in the flesh’ came from.

2 Corinthians 12:7-10 Because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, for this reason, to keep me from exalting myself, there was given me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me—to keep me from exalting myself! Concerning this I implored the Lord three times that it might leave me. And He has said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.” Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ’s sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong.(NASB)

I first read this and then I looked at verse seven a little closer. I examined it with the lexicon and this passage says that the thorn in his flesh was an angel of Satan…I’m not making it up, that’s what it says. OK, what does it mean? The word messenger seems to always refers to a human being or an angel or of Christ. I think we can agree that a messenger of Satan doesn’t mean Christ so that leaves humans or angels. By contrast, thorns are seen continually in scripture, as a sign of those who are against Israel, or are of Satan. By the process of elimination, I think the verse means that his thorn in the flesh was likely an angel of Satan.

Now that I feel the thorn was caused by a fallen angel, I wondered could Paul have been suffering from demon possession with The Lord’s permission? At first I thought maybe this could have been the answer and there are examples of this in the scriptures. If we read 1 Samuel 16:14 we learn that The Lord became fed up with Saul and sent an evil spirit to trouble him. The Lord apparently allows evil spirits to possess people (that is a different topic in itself) but, after praying about it and sleeping on it, I feel demon possession is highly unlikely. First, because the reference I cited in the book of Samuel was of God, and this was not (it was of Satan) and secondly because Paul’s actions don’t fit the patterns we read of elsewhere in the scriptures of examples of demon possessed people.

However, in a Job-like manner, God could have allowed an angel of Satan to torment, or maltreat Paul and to cause physical problems that manifested themselves outwardly. Could the angel of Satan have been anything else? Yes, it could have been ‘agents’ of Satan attempting to thwart Paul’s efforts at spreading the word, by trying to throw roadblocks in his way because as Paul became more effective at bringing God’s message to the people and his reputation became better known, he increasingly was becoming more and more of an extreme irritant to Satan and his design to thwart The Lord’s plan. Paul himself, in 2 Corinthians eleven said he survived beatings, stonings, imprisonment and three shipwrecks in his journeys spreading the word and despite all these apparent Satanic efforts to stop him, Paul became one of The Lords most effective tool at spreading the word to Gentiles and Jews alike that the early church had ever known and I’m sure Satan would have crushed Paul like a bug if God had allowed him to.

Now let’s look at another view, from the letter to the Galatians.

Galatians 4:13-15 You know that because of physical infirmity I preached the gospel to you at the first. And my trial which was in my flesh you did not despise or reject, but you received me as an angel of God, [even] as Christ Jesus. What then was the blessing you [enjoyed]? For I bear you witness that, if possible, you would have plucked out your own eyes and given them to me.(NKJV)

OK, here, it seems he was suffering from a physical malady that was evident to those he was preaching to in Galatia, as we find out from this letter he wrote at a later date after they started slipping back to the old ways of Judaism. Dr. Chuck Missler, among other commentators of the scriptures, seems to think it was eye problems that were a carry-over from the blindness Christ caused him to have (which I see as a typological representation of the blindness He pronounced upon Israel that also is a temporary infirmity at the national level). That is a logical assumption except for one issue; if we look back at 2 Corinthians 12:7 it says it was a messenger from Satan sent to torment him. The blindness came from God, not ‘a messenger of Satan, and the two causalities don’t mingle in my mind, so I don’t believe Paul would have confused eye problems relating to the blindness caused by Our Lord as having come from Satan.

At this point, I believe God was allowing Satan, in a Job-like manner, as stated earlier, to harass Paul in ways that manifested itself by causing outward signs of some aberrant physical condition to a limited extent, and to also, at the same time, throw roadblocks in his way in the manner of delays, shipwrecks, beatings, stonings and imprisonment because of The Lord’s faith in His servant. Paul besought The Lord to remove this burden from him three time, just as Christ was beseeching His Father three time to rid Him of His burden in the Garden. The Lord chose not to heal this ‘thorn’ in Paul’s side, possibly for the reason so that Paul would take the burden and use it as a tool to aid him in his ministries, which he did.

So in summary, we have those that firmly believe Paul’s thorn in the flesh was simply agents sent to block his progress, as they surely did, and we do see in 2 Corinthians eleven that he describes those attempting to stop and thwart him, and that they would be ‘messengers of Satan’ and I took those into account…but I don’t think that is all that there is of his meaning. We also have those that firmly believe it was just a physical malady, such as chronic eye problems that Paul was referring to in 2 Corinthians chapter 12 and in several letters he does mentions physical maladies that seem embarrassing and seem to be a hindrance and an impediment that is obviously deeply troubling him and some folks think they were his thorn in the flesh and I took that into account also…but I don’t think that is all of it either…I’m looking at all these all references as one big package and it screams ‘Job’ to me.

Also, the verbiage in 2 Corinthians 12:8 when he is pleading with The Lord to allow ‘it to depart from him’, uses the Greek verb, aphistēmi and the definition seems to imply to me more than just people harassing him or more than just physical impairment. I suppose then, that my conclusion is I feel Paul was afflicted with multiple issues that were Satan sponsored and Satan sent.

While we’re at it, the root to the thorns in side in the OT in the couple of places I checked was tsaniyn which is thorns or pricks. When we look at the Greek root of the thorn in 2 Corinthians 12:7 it is skolops which is a sharp pointed stake, something akin to a tent stake, I suspect. This doesn’t mitigate the comparisons to the OT text, but it seems to ramp up the seriousness of the point he was trying to make, I think.

How is this principle of Paul’s thorn in his flesh applicable today?…to me? Paul was a sinner, but he was a very effective sinner that turned trouble into triumph and used the thorn in his flesh to his advantage to show that he was still a sinner, but a sinner saved by grace, as we all would be, and that he was tempted to be exalted in the end. Paul asked God to remove the ‘thorn’ from him, but God told him that “power is perfected in weakness”, so Paul turned roadblocks and hindrances into triumphs for The Lord. Those are lessons that I need to work on because sometimes when I don’t understand why things are happening, I try to take charge and, as usual, wreck the train, and allow troubles and temptation to be the excuse that they are designed to be, therefore giving my arch foe, Satan an advantage. Oh, you weak, weak man, Jim.

Dear Father, I need your strength, for I have none. I need your light for I exist in darkness, I need your hand to guide me out of the abyss I plunge myself into. Oh, Father save me from myself for I’m a worm on the ground, once again waiting for the carrion of Satan to snatch me up without you. Dear, blessed Father, thank you for the grace and mercy I never have and I never will deserve and I still don’t understand why you rescued me, Lord. Show me how to be like Paul, triumphing in life, while spreading your Word, father. In Christ name, Amen.

God Bless, Jim

8-10-11

for Koinonia Institute

Did Christ arrange His own crucifixion?

Posted: August 6, 2011 in Christian
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If you asked a hundred Christians in the conservative, ‘bible-belt’ section of America where I live the question, “Why was Christ crucified?”, almost all of them would say, “He died for our sins.” and leave it at that. That would not be an incorrect answer, just an incomplete one, for I need to know why He had to die for our sins. I am going to attempt to explore that question and try to do it justice.

The key word to the short answer is ‘sin’. What is sin? According to blue letter bible, sin is a transgression or violation of divine law (God’s law) as is defined below.

a. Its origin, as regards the human race. The first man and woman, by their own choice, violated the law of God; they sinned against God.

b. Words, which describe sin in some of its forms. Hebrew: “Chata,” to go out of the way, to miss the mark. “Pasha,” to transgress. “Avah,” to twist, to act perversely. Greek: “Hamaritia,” a missing of the mark. “Paraptoma,” a falling away from law, truth, right. “Parabasis,” a going over or beyond truth and right, transgression. “Anomia,” lawlessness. “Asebeia,” irreverence.

c. Definition. “Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God.”


Regardless which definition we apply to ourselves, the trait of free will and gullibility within human beings condemn us to sin. Genesis 1:27-31 tells us that God created man in His own image and blessed him and gave him dominion over the Earth and was pleased with the results. Since humans were created in His image, and humans sin, does that mean God is sinful in nature, because we sure are? No, of course not. When God created Adam there was no sin. Unfortunately for us, there was a wrench thrown into the works called Satan and Romans 5:12 tell us Adam fell because Satan was allowed to introduced sin into the world, via Adam. I can infer just from the book of Job, using the patterns that are prevalent all through the bible, that Satan kind of goaded God into this competition with us as the pawns and our souls as the prize. I was going to go a different direction with this, but I suddenly am compelled to explore the path of the Trinity and creation…


For some reason, I always had difficulty remembering that sometimes ‘God’ can refer to the Trinity, or can refer to God the Father or can refer to God the Son. John in chapter 1 of his gospel says that God the Son is the author of creation and that Christ created the universe and all things in it, including us. That means we are created in Christ’s image (how cool is that). It also means that Adam is a direct creation of Christ, even though it apparently was a collaborative effort (the plural verbiage denoting the Trinity in Genesis 3:22). Satan, however was able to deceive Adam through Eve and he was successful in generating doubt and confusion in what God (Christ) had commanded, causing them to sin by eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Why was this one tree, that they were told not to eat from, placed within the perfect garden of Eden? I think we can derive from the patterns we see in Job, it was there as a test and a temptation, much like the events within the book of Job were. Where am I going with all this?


This is partially conjecture on my part, but I think Christ created Adam in His own image as a sinless person that had no conception of good and evil. Satan presents a challenge and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is introduced into the midst of this perfect garden. It doesn’t take long for Satan to begin his deception campaign by beguiling Eve into sinning by transgressing the commandment of God (Christ) and eating of this lone tree and then convincing her husband to do the same. This means that Adam, a direct creation of Christ, and created in the image of Christ, falls by sinning. In response Our Lord performed the opening gambit in the competition for our souls, exhibited by a string of prophecies, that leads eventually toward a checkmate against his wily opponent, Satan*1. How was this brilliant maneuver performed?


Christ introduced the prophecy concerning the plans to ultimately defeat Satan by the parabolic announcement of Himself becoming human in Genesis 3:15*2 and taking over the role that Adam failed at through the miracle of the virgin birth of Himself as a man. While Christ will not sin like Adam (remember Christ’s temptations by Satan from Mark chapter 1 which basically is a parallel of the temptations of Adam and Eve by Satan, which they failed), He will take upon the sin that His direct creation, Adam, introduced into the world and then willingly die for our salvation upon the cross while wearing this cloak of sin and transgression, relieving us of this unbearable burden and beginning the ‘end game’ process of sealing the lid on the ultimate defeat of Satan. I believe Christ, from the beginning, arranged His own crucifixion to pay the debt of sin that Adam started, thus soundly tromping Satan.


I can see the scenario where we and our universe were created with the intention of Christ being our creator and ruler, possibly in Eden which was in the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Satan, by being allowed to introduce sin into the world*3, only delayed the inevitable end result where Christ becomes the ruler of all nations in the end and, just possibly, bring Eden back to it’s glory, as it was in the beginning.


God Bless

Jim

8-5-11

for Koinonia Institute

*1 Those familiar with chess will know that a game can be won or lost in the first move that, if played right, can set up a domino effect type of scenario that may not manifest itself until scores of moves have been played, resulting in a checkmate.

*2 I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” (RSV)

*3 Satan made all those “I will” statements in Isaiah 14, maybe God has allowed everything to go on to prove that Satan’s “I will” statements are actually “I am only delusional and that I can’t” statements…

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