When the Bible Gets Weird
Preached at Blue Ocean Faith Columbus on Sunday, July 19, 2026
Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.
Friends, listen for a word from God in the Book of Genesis, the 6th chapter, verses 1-8.
When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that they were fair, and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. 3 Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.” 4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.
5 The Lord saw that the wickedness of humans was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. 6 And the Lord was sorry that he had made humans on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. 7 So the Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the humans I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air—for I am sorry that I have made them.” 8 But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.
This is the word of God for the people of God.
A Text We Might Want to Skip
There are passages in scripture most pastors and nearly all lectionaries tend to avoid like a pothole in a familiar road. Genesis 6:1-8 is one of those passages. We don’t avoid it simply because it references “glory” in battles done in God’s name or because it professes a god who commits genocide. It’s not even a long passage. In fact, it’s only eight verses and the eighth verse is straight forward. Yet, it is, by any honest measure, strange. Divine beings marrying human women. The product of these unions being giants called Nephilim. A God who looks at what God has made and regrets it. If you’ve never heard this text preached before, there’s more than a few reasons why.
We don’t talk about it because we don’t always know what to do with it. We should sit with that discomfort because the discomfort is the doorway into what this text is actually offering us.
Sons of God, Daughters of Humans
Let’s start with verse two. It’s the one that trips everyone up: “the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were fair, and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose.”
Who are the “sons of God” here? Biblical scholars have argued about this for more than two thousand years, and we’re not going to settle it tonight. But it’s worth considering the shape of the argument, because the ambiguity is not an accident of translation, it’s an integral part of the original Hebrew itself.
The phrase is “bene Elohim,” literally, “sons of God” or “sons of the gods.” In most other places this phrase appears in the Hebrew Bible (Job 1:6, Job 2:1, Job 38:7, and Psalm 29:1) it refers unambiguously to members of the divine council: heavenly beings who surround God’s throne, elsewhere called angels and archangels; beings created by God with great power and knowledge, but lacking free will. That’s the plain reading, and the oldest one. Ancient Jewish interpreters read this as a story about heavenly beings crossing a boundary they weren’t supposed to cross: mingling with mortal flesh. In a similar way to how these interpreters and rabbis would have read many of the so called “clobber” verses, the problem here is not one of sexual immorality, but that humans and angels or the “bene Elohim” are co-mixing that which is heavenly with that which is earthly.
By the time you get to the fourth century CE, church fathers like Augustine started proposing a different reading, largely because the idea of literal angels having children with human women had become theologically uncomfortable. In this newer reading, the “sons of God” become the righteous line of Seth (the third son of Adam and Eve), and the “daughters of humans” become the line of Cain, the first murderer who is condemned to walk to earth for eternity, marked such that no one would kill him. This reading considered the sin to be intermarriage between the faithful and the faithless, not a cosmic boundary violation. This is sometimes called the Sethite interpretation, and if we grew up with any formal interpretation of this passage, it was probably some form of this one.
But we need to exercise supreme caution with the Sethite interpretation. Later theologians, pastors, and, yes, politicians would use this interpretation to preach and legislate against racial intermarriage by mapping whiteness to the descendants of Seth and Blackness to the descendants of Cain.
But here’s what I want you to notice: the older reading, the stranger though less racist reading, is closer to what the original audience would have understood. Ancient literature is full of stories about divine beings who violate the created order, who cross the line between heaven and earth in ways that generate chaos. The people who first heard Genesis 6 weren’t reading a morality tale about who marries whom. They were hearing something closer to a rupture in the fabric of creation itself: a category collapse between what belongs to God’s realm and what belongs to ours.
And out of that rupture come the Nephilim, a word that likely comes from a Hebrew root meaning “to fall,” though its exact origin is debated. Genesis calls them “heroes of old, warriors of renown,” language that echoes, almost word for word, the way other ancient cultures described their demigods, beings that are part divine, part human, whose existence blurs a line that was never supposed to be blurred (think Hercules or, if YA literature is more your thing, Percy Jackson).
An aside, it is precisely because of these Nephilim and other constructions of demigods throughout ancient literature that it becomes so important for Christian theologians to make sure that Jesus is portrayed correctly as completely God and completely human. He is no demigod possessing a mix of essences, but truly God and truly man.
In any case, this ambiguity didn’t stay buried in obscure scholarship. By the time you reach the Second Temple period, the centuries just before and including Jesus’ time on earth, this eight-verse fragment had grown into an entire body of literature. 1 Enoch, a text many Jewish and early Christian communities treated with real seriousness, tells an elaborate story of heavenly “Watchers” who abandon their posts, take human wives, and teach humanity forbidden knowledge including metalworking, weaponry, cosmetics, and sorcery. The Nephilim, in that tradition, aren’t just superior warriors; they’re the offspring of a cosmic trespass, and their violence is what finally provokes the flood. Even the New Testament seems to know this angelic reading. Second Peter speaks of angels who sinned and were cast into gloom to await judgment, and Jude describes angels who didn’t stay within their proper realm. Neither writer explains the reference, because neither one needed to, their audience already knew the story we’re now working to recover.
I’m not asking you to resolve these tensions. I’m asking you to let it stay strange, because scripture doesn’t owe us tidiness, and a text that has puzzled readers for more than three thousand years isn’t going to get fully sorted out in one night.
My Spirit Will Not Abide
Into the middle of this strangeness, God speaks. And what God says is almost as odd as the Nephilim: “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.”
Read quickly, this can sound like a punishment: God capping human lifespan as a kind of judgment. But look at what the verse is actually doing. It’s not really about biology or lifespan; humans in Genesis go on living well past a hundred twenty years for chapters after this and, obviously, humans don’t live hundreds of actual years. What the verse names is a boundary, a limit on how fully the divine and the human can be fused together.
There’s something quietly gracious buried in that boundary. The chaos that produced the Nephilim was chaos precisely because the line between divine and human had collapsed. God’s response is not a further blurring but a re-drawing: mortals will stay mortal. Flesh will stay flesh. Within that limit, not despite it, life becomes livable again.
We don’t love limits. We tend to treat them as the opposite of blessing. But this text suggests something different: that some boundaries are what make a livable world possible at all, and that the God we’re dealing with is a God willing to hold a boundary even when holding it costs God something.
Where the Known Ground Ends
Here’s where the passage turns from strange to personal, because most of us know exactly what it feels like to stand at the edge of what we understand.
Picture the kind of sidewalk you find in an older neighborhood: poured decades ago, following the shape of the street, until at some point it simply stops. No warning. No barrier. The concrete just ends, and beyond it is grass, dirt, or whatever the ground happens to be doing on its own. You don’t get a map of what comes next. You just get the edge, and then you have to decide what to do with your next step.
Genesis 6 is, among other things, a story about a moment when the world’s own explanatory sidewalk simply ran out of pavement. The ancient writers were reaching for language to describe something that had genuinely gone wrong at a cosmic level, and the best they could do was borrow the shape of stories their neighbors already knew, stories of divine beings, giants, boundary violations, and bend those stories toward their own God, their own account of what creation is supposed to be.
That’s not a weakness in the text. That’s what faithful people do when they reach the edge of the known: they keep speaking, even without a map, because staying silent was never really an option.
It would have been easier, honestly, for the writers of Genesis to leave this moment out entirely, to skip from creation straight to the flood and never mention the Nephilim at all. Nobody would have missed a fragment nobody could fully explain. Instead, someone chose to leave the strange verses in, unresolved. That choice is itself a kind of witness: faith doesn’t require every gap to be filled before it’s allowed to keep going.
Isaiah 40:3-4 tells us that: “A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.” And while that’s a comforting vision, most of us are not going to be handed neat theological answers for every hard thing we walk into. The sidewalk is going to end, the mountains continue to stand, and the rough places are going to stay rough. What our text tonight offers is not a paved road past the edge. It offers permission to keep walking anyway, trusting that we’re not walking alone.
Trust Without Understanding
Proverbs 3:5-6 puts words to that kind of trust better than I can: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge God, and God will make straight your paths.”
Notice what that verse doesn’t say. It doesn’t say understand with all your heart. It doesn’t promise that insight will eventually arrive if we’re patient, clever, or faithful enough. It asks for trust precisely in the place where insight runs out, which is the only place trust is ever really needed. Nobody has to trust the parts of the map that are already drawn.
Noah Found Favor
Our passage tonight ends on a single, quiet sentence, easy to miss after everything that came before it: “But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.”
That’s it. No explanation for why Noah found favor and no argument for why grace lands where it lands. After giants, after divine grief, after a God who looks at creation and is sorry it was made, the text simply notes that someone found favor, in the middle of all of it.
Maybe that’s the truest thing Genesis 6 has to offer us: not an explanation for the strangeness of the world, but a reminder that grace has never needed an explanation.
Grace shows up in the weird chapters too. Especially in the weird chapters. Amen.