Welcome back to As He Leads - a Bible Study Podcast for busy women! Our passage for today covers the increasing corruption of earth and Noah's pre-flood instructions. I want to apologize for the awkward end of the podcast. I was having technical issues during editing and couldn't get it quite the way I wanted.
Excerpts from The MacArthur Bible Commentary:
- 6:2 the sons of God saw the daughters of men. The sons of God, identified elsewhere almost exclusively as angels (Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7), saw and took wives of the human race. This produced an unnatural union which violated the God-ordained order of human marriage and procreation (Gen. 2:24). Some have argued that the sons of God were the sons of Seth who cohabited with the daughters of Cain; others suggest they were perhaps human kings wanting to build harems. But the passage puts strong emphasis on the angelic versus human contrast. The NT places this account in sequence with other Genesis events and identifies it as involving fallen angels who indwelt men (see notes on 2 Pet. 2:4, 5; Jude 6). Matthew 22:30 does not necessarily negate the possibility that angels are capable of procreation, but just that they do not marry. However, to procreate physically, demons had to possess human, male bodies.
- The word nephilim is from a root meaning “to fall,” indicating that they were strong men who “fell” on others in the sense of overpowering them (the only other use of this term is in Num. 13:33). They were already in the earth when the “mighty men” and “men of renown” were born. The fallen ones are not the offspring from the union in verses 1 and 2.
- The word order is one of increasing spiritual quality before God: just is to live by God’s righteous standards; perfect sets him apart by a comparison with those of his day; and that he walked with God puts him in a class with Enoch (5:24).
- 6:15, 16 While the ark was not designed for beauty or speed, these dimensions provided extraordinary stability in the tumultuous floodwaters. A cubit was about eighteen inches long, making the ark 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high. A gigantic box of that size would be very stable in the water, impossible to capsize. The volume of space in the ark was 1.4 million cubic feet, equal to the capacity of 522 standard railroad box cars, which could carry 125,000 sheep. It had three stories, each fifteen feet high; each deck was equipped with various rooms (lit. “nests”).
Excerpts from Dr. Thomas L. Constable Notes on Genesis, 2020 Edition (available here)
- The ark was about 450 feet long (1 1/2 American football fields), 75 feet wide (7 standard parking spaces), and 45 feet high (a typical four-story building). It had three decks, and over 100,000 square feet of deck space. There were over 1 million cubic feet of space in it. This is a volume capacity of approximately 860 railroad boxcars. It had a floating capacity (its buoyancy; the total weight it could float) of almost 14,000 gross tons.
- What a splendid figure this man makes, a picture of solitary goodness! He was the one saint of that day. It is possible, therefore, to be good even though we have to stand alone. It is possible to be right with God even amidst surrounding iniquity. God is the same today as He was to Noah, and if only we are willing to fulfill the conditions we too shall walk with God and please Him.
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