What say we look at certain world events from another dimension, namely a spiritual dimension? I’m not Frank Peretti, but I guarantee, it will add meaning to what’s happening in the world, and will go far to explaining what we’re on earth for. So here we go: In Genesis 3:15, God, in effect, threw down the gauntlet at Satan when He said to him:
And 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.”
To explain, Satan and Eve’s descendants would be enemies. God did not desire to make enemies, but Satan had already declared such in his desire to be equal with God (Isaiah 14:12-17). Further, “your (Satan’s) seed” refers to those who refuse to obey God and refuse to believe in His Son, Jesus the Christ. In “her Seed,” the capital letter "S" means a single person, namely Jesus, a descendant of Eve. And, I might add, you could include all those who are followers of Jesus and have made Him Lord of their lives. So, in short, Satan is the enemy of the Jews, who carried the Messianic lineage, resulting in Jesus (as you will see below); and Satan is also the enemy of true Christians, and he wants nothing more than to destroy us, our lives and reputation, and everything spiritual in us.
God tells Satan that His Son Jesus will “bruise (Satan’s) head,” a mortal wound. Satan will only “bruise (Jesus’) heel, a non-mortal wound (but only because He was resurrected).
So God has thrown down the gauntlet. Who will win, God or Satan? Satan, before killing Christ by the hand of his own followers (who were, by the way, both Jew and Gentile), tried numerous times in history to destroy His ascendants. If he could do that, Christ would never have been born. That seems “smart.” So let’s tell the story about his various efforts to kill.
Attempt #1: Eve hoped that her first child would be God’s Seed and the Deliverer from her sins, including eating forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden. That child was Cain. But Cain ignored God’s instructions on how to do the atonement offering that God instructed, and became a murderer of Abel, Eve’s second son. Now she hoped her third child would accomplish her desire for a Deliverer—Seth. Well, Seth stayed righteous and Christ was indeed descended from him. So Satan failed on Attempt #1, since the lineage continued despite his efforts to bring evil into our first family.
Attempt #2: Many of Satan’s followers, also known as fallen angels, came to earth and married earth women, bearing hybrid, non-human babies that grew up to be “mighty men” and “men of renown.” (I have a couple blogs on this--which was believed by church fathers; refer to those blogs with DNA in the title). Grown up, those babies were called Nephilim (Gen.6:1-4, NIV). They were also wicked; and from other appearances in Scripture, they were super-tall and, obviously, very strong. Why not? They were half mortal, and half immortal (through the fallen angels, their fathers, their spirits retained their immortality). The Nephilim dominated in their appearance on earth, and completely corrupted the people of Noah’s day, both morally and physically (by deviant DNA mixing through rampant sex, among other things). Anyway, Satan figured, if he could corrupt the earth like this, then no one would be righteous or physically pure to bear a pure Seed.
But he was defeated because Noah and his immediate family kept DNA-clean (i.e., they avoided sex with the people of the world), and he made an ark as God had directed, and everyone else was destroyed by the Flood, leaving Noah, his wife, and immediate family to start all over. Satan failed on Attempt #2. But keep in mind, the spirits of the Nephilim were still alive.
Attempt #3: God picked the Hebrew people to be His people, beginning with Abraham. Their job was to carry His Scripture, and to worship Him as the only God---in the midst of, yet again, a totally corrupt second populace that also chose to not know Him. (The Jews didn’t do a bang-up job themselves obeying God’s instructions, in the long run). To avert death by a record 7-year famine, the Hebrews moved to Egypt to farm the better land there. They were allowed to do this because Abraham’s great-grandson Joseph was in good with the Pharaoh (by revealing to him a vision about the upcoming famine so he could prepare for it). So God made sure that His Jewish family was accepted in Egypt, which had reserves of grain, so they didn’t starve in the great famine. So Satan’s attempt at starving them out failed in Attempt #3.
Attempt #4: Later Pharaohs made the Jews slaves for 400 years. One evil Pharaoh got up one morning and thought, “These Jewish slaves are becoming more populous than we Egyptians, and that’s a danger; let’s kill every baby Hebrew boy at birth and stop their population growth.” He gave the order—unfortunately, he stupidly did it to the midwives--which were mostly Hebrews! (I presume he assumed that their fear of him would even make them commit infanticide). However, even at risk of their own lives, they refused to kill the newborn Hebrew boys. That not only saved the Hebrew population, but it saved little Moses, who later became a great deliverer himself. Attempt #4 failed. You would think that Satan would have gotten the message by now. When God decides to do something, it gets done—even through sinful men. You gotta give credit to the Hebrew midwives. We need some of them today, in our abortion clinics.
Attempt #5: Moses, through God, performed miracles of destruction on the country of Egypt. But Pharaoh was so stubborn that he held on through each disaster; it finally took the death of his firstborn to release the Jews. Early in their exodus, the Pharaoh and his army went after them again, only to be wiped out by the closing Red Sea—another miracle by God. So the Jews were not only saved from destruction by Pharaoh’s army, but they were Free. Attempt #5 failed.
Attempt #6: Let’s back up in time a bit. Please note two verses God had told Abraham. First, Genesis 12:1-3:
Now the Lord had said to Abram: “Get out of your country, from your family and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you. 2 I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
Secondly, God told Abraham, in Genesis 15:13-14:
Then He said to Abram: “Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them, and they will afflict them four hundred years. 14 And also the nation whom they serve I will judge; afterward they shall come out with great possessions.
Satan, we can assume, listened in to these conversations—and thus knew, upon watching Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’s travels, that God had chosen the land of Canaan as God's land for His people. (Important side note: Satan does not have God’s powers. He can only be in one place at a time, and cannot read minds. But he has lots of demon-followers in lots of places who help him that way, and he can guess thoughts by our facial emotions, and what we say. And, I would imagine, he has various ways of putting sinful thoughts in our head—like he did with Pharaoh on infanticide). Putting these two verses together, Satan, at the time of Abraham, figured that the Hebrews won’t be in Canaan, God’s choice for their living space, for at least 400 years; they would be elsewhere (slaves in Egypt) instead. He also hoped that Israel (their name, since they were populous enough to be a nation now) would have to conquer the various tribes of Canaan to secure the needed land. Thus, Satan comes up with Attempt #6: stop the Israelis from entering God’s chosen land, Canaan. If he could do that, they would have to wander to different places and their nation would be assimilated and fizzle out. So he concocted up another sexual use for his fallen angels. You, the reader, may roll your eyes and say, “come on, how do I keep coming up with these wild stories?” Well, again, read my blogs. And, again, I have Biblical proof. Let’s read Genesis 6:4, this time in the NIV version (remember, this was quoted in Noah’s day, the first “use” of the Nephilim):
The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.
As we saw before, the Nephilim were the deviant DNA children of the fallen angel fathers, who were immortal, and the mortal earth mothers during Noah's time. Their bodies were killed at the Flood. But note the underlined phrase “and also afterward.” Every phrase in Scripture has a reason to exist in God’s Word, and this one says that we would get more Nephilim even after they were drowned in the Flood in Noah’s day. In other words, the fallen angels came down to earth again, proved sexually attractive to the females again, and we got more Nephilim. But this time, men did not live 800 or 900 years like in Noah’s day. (Climate change?) Their lives were short, like ours. So the deviant DNA can’t be spread as fast. So Satan concentrated his efforts on spawning to a limited area—he picked, of course, Canaan. These giants hopefully would scare the Israelis away, and they couldn’t stay in “God’s chosen land.” So he picked several tribes in Canaan, sent his fallen angels there, and they became populated by the evil Nephilim. Scripture backs this idea up. It indicates giants existed in: the Philistines, the Anakim, the Rephaim, the Zamzumim, the Emim, and the Amorites. All in Canaan, of course. (Check them out in Numbers 13:32; Deut 2:10,11,20,21; Deut 3:11,13). Deuteronomy provides more detail on Og, king of Bashan, whose bed was 15 feet long and 6-1/2 feet wide. And of course we have Goliath, killed by David, several hundred years later, who probably was at least 9 feet tall.
Satan almost got what he wanted; the nation of Israel, freed from Pharaoh after 400 years, went north from Egypt, and approached the land of Canaan. Moses sent out spies to see the lay of the land. They brought back wonderful food, but their knees were shaking. As they reported in Numbers 13:32-33--and every word of this is in God's Word:
The land through which we have gone, in spying it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants; and all the people whom we saw in it are men of great size. There also we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak are part of the Nephilim); and we became like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight.
A bit of hyperbole, there, about the size comparison—but you get the picture; these were giants—again. So the Israelis voted to NOT go in and fight the Canaanites. God was so disappointed in how they wouldn’t depend on Him for deliverance that He made them wander through the desert area for another 38 years, until everyone who voted dropped dead. Now all that were left were the kids in the earlier days, now grown up. But these “kids” were not dummies; they realized that they had miracles (their shoes never wore out, they always found water, they had free food dropped on them 6 days a week), and they realized that their non-believing parents paid the ultimate price for disobedience; and finally, walking the desert every day made them hardened, so they could be soldiers with endurance. Plus, I would imagine, they would do anything to stop wandering drudgingly through the desert. So, with Joshua in command (Moses died), this time they voted to go in and fight. A brave decision. God built up Joshua’s courage by appearing to him as well. This time they cleared out most of these corrupt and sometimes giant people (details on the Canaanite idolatries are too disgusting to explain here; they were a wicked people). The key is the phrase “most of.” Goliath is an example of how there were some still around years later that Joshua couldn’t get to. In any event, Satan’s effort to stop Israel from moving to the land of God’s calling failed. #6: FAIL. Satan is now 0-6.
NEXT WEEK: WE COMPLETE SATAN'S FAILED EFFORTS TO STOP GOD'S PLAN FOR CHRIST
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