2 Peter 2:3 ... Their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction has not been sleeping. 4 For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them into pits of darkness to be held for judgment; ... 9 if this is so, then the Lord knows how to rescue godly men from trials and to hold the unrighteous for the day of judgment, while continuing their punishment.
Guaranteed Human
There is a news talk radio station I listen to that has an interesting tag line. After they give their call letters and their little blurb, the last line is, “...guaranteed human.” Of all the ways they could promote their station, why do you suppose they chose that tag line? I mean, AI is all the rage, right? It’s the hottest thing going, everyone is using it, it’s super smart, super fast. Don’t you want your news station to have all the data? Everyone is using AI in their own lives, and yet, the marketing experts concluded that the line “guaranteed human” would appeal to people.
Why? We all have a lot of complaints about humans, right? Humans can be temperamental, biased, deceitful, unreliable, overly emotional, they don’t have near as much information as AI, and yet there is an appeal to the promise, guaranteed human.
Tonight we’re going to get an idea of why that is. But we’re also going to learn about a massive threat that the world is facing now for the first time in over 5000 years.
Background
This is going to be a little different tonight. I usually don’t like giving too much background information in a sermon. I like to focus mainly on the text itself. But once in a while you need some background information to be able to understand the text, and that’s the case with this passage.
Review: Judgment not Sleeping
We left off last time at the end of v.3 with Peter talking about the condemnation of the false teachers.
2 Peter 2:3 ... Their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction has not been sleeping.
The judgment on these people was pronounced long ago—all the way back in Deuteronomy when God prescribed the death penalty for false prophets. But there’s a tendency to think that if judgment hasn’t happened yet, it never will. So Peter says, “No, that verdict and sentence is right on schedule. It’s as certain as the sunrise. The wheels of God’s justice are churning right along. Those wheels turn slow, but they grind small.
And if you doubt it, all you have to do is read the book of Genesis. When Peter said their damnation has not been sleeping, the next word is “for,” which means he’s going to support what he just said. “You want to know how we can be so sure these false teachers are going to be punished by God? Let me give you a little history.” And then in the next 6 verses, Peter gives us a little clinic on God’s judgment from the book of Genesis.
2 Peter 2:4 For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them into pits of darkness to be held for judgment
I told you we need background information to understand this, but the main point is actually easy to understand right on the surface. He’s proving that God will judge the false teachers, and he says, “If God didn’t even spare angels and sent them to hell, do you think he’s going to be shy about dealing with these yahoos?” If not even angels can escape God’s judgment, the false teachers really don’t have a chance.
So it’s not hard to understand the basic point, but it does raise some questions. Like, when did God send angels to hell?
Who Are the Angels Who Sinned?
Most people assume this is pre-Garden of Eden.[1] Is that what Peter has in mind? But that doesn’t work because these angels Peter is talking about are locked up.
2 Peter 2:4 For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them into pits of darkness to be held for judgment
“Held” is tereo—to be kept under guard. The word “put” is used of turning over a prisoner for imprisonment (see Acts 8:3; 12:4). So they’re incarcerated. Where? In pits of darkness. Some manuscripts say chains of darkness. Hard to say which is the original, but the meaning is the same either way. The parallel passage in Jude 1:6 says:
Jude 1:6 ... these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great Day.
Peter mentioned these angels in his first book.
1 Peter 3:19 ... through [the Spirit] [Christ] went and preached to the spirits[2]in prison.
And if you want to know where this prison is, Peter says God sent them to hell. That’s not the typical New Testament word for hell (Gehenna). This word is tartarus. And it’s kind of a funny word because Peter uses the verb form. He says, “God tartarized them.” “Sounds like something I do to my fish and chips at Long John Silver’s.” No. It means he consigned them to tartarus. Tartarus was thought of as the lowest level of the underworld, lower than Hades—the farthest you could get from the land of the living. It’s like when we say, “They’re going to put him under the jail.” In Greek mythology it’s where the gods were imprisoned. So this is like the supermax of hell.
All that to say these angels are locked up, shackled, chained, no bail. Every way you can say that they are not free to roam around or to cause any problems.
We know at the time of Jesus there were plenty of evil spirits running around loose causing all kinds of problems. So that tells us this is talking about one specific group.
So what did they do to deserve this? What kind of atrocity did they commit that made God take action against them that he hasn’t taken against all the other evil spirits?
Their Sin
Peter doesn’t say. He just expects you to know. He expects you to know because it was common knowledge in his time. Thankfully, the parallel book, Jude, describes the same thing but he gives us some more detail that clues us outsiders in.
Jude 1:6 And the angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their own home-- these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great Day.
So what did they do? It started when they abandoned their own home. They didn't stay in the realm where angels belong.
That was step one of their sin. Jude tells us step 2 in the next verse.
Jude 1:7 In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion.
“In a similar way”—what does that tell us? It tells us what these angels did when they left their proper place was a lot like what Sodom and Gomorrah did—sexual immorality and perversion. The word “perversion” is actually two words in the Greek:herteras sarkos
—different flesh.[3] They went after different flesh sexually.
Okay, and when did all this happen? Go back to 1 Peter 3:20 He says those angels in prison:
1 Peter 3:20 disobeyed long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built.
Okay, there’s another clue. Angels left their realm and engaged in sexual perversion at the time just before the flood.
Genesis 6
So let’s go back to the flood account—Genesis 6. The chapter starts out by talking about the sons of God (v.2). Who are the sons of God? Angels. That phrase is used only two other times in the OT —both in the book of Job when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord along with Satan (Job 1:6; 2:1). Angelic beings.
Genesis 6:2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose.
Whoa! Angels came down and married human women? How does that work? Can they produce offspring? Yes.
4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days ... when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them.
Angels left their proper realm in heaven, took on human form, married human women , and evidently produced half demon, half human offspring called Nephilim. That word means giants. The Greek translation of nephilim is gigantes.
Okay, so we see what Jude means by them leaving their proper place and committing sexual immorality. And the result was this race of Nephilim or giants. Then what happened? As soon as he mentions that the sons of God had offspring with the women, the very next line is:
Genesis 6:5 The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. ... 7 So the Lord said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth.”
I think the clear implication is the way the human race got to be that wicked was through the influence of those half-human, half-demon Nephilim.
Now, you should know that there is an alternate interpretation of Genesis 6. In fact, the supernatural view that I just gave (angels marrying women)—that’s probably the minority view among evangelicals. A more popular view is to say the sons of God are humans, and they’re called sons of God because they come from the godly line of Seth. And their main argument is that even though “sons of God” means angels in Job, it can’t mean that in Genesis 6 because angels can’t procreate.
Matthew 22:30 At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.
So they point to that and say, “See? Angels can’t have sex.”
My response to that is, first of all, Jesus isn’t talking about sex or procreation; he’s talking about marriage. Second, notice that Jesus specified, “they will be like the angels (where?) ... in heaven.” Angels in heaven don’t marry. But those angels in Genesis 6—what did they do? Did they stay in their proper realm in heaven where there is no marriage? No. Jude says those angels “abandoned their own home.” Angels who are in their proper realm don’t marry, but the whole point of what made these angels so evil is that they left their proper realm and did marry.
Others will say, “Well, angels are spirits. How could a spirit physically procreate with women?”
They take on physical bodies. The angels who went to Sodom and Gomorrah to rescue Lot looked like men. And they even ate food. So they had saliva and digestive enzymes—normal human bodies. Is it so farfetched to think they could also have normal human reproductive cells?[4]
If you just take the plain meaning of Genesis 6 and 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and Jude , personally, I don’t think there is any way around the interpretation that these are angels procreating with women. And that really becomes clear when you consider the books that were considered classics by faithful Jews in Jesus’ time. These were the bestsellers in Israel in between the Old and New Testaments. They’re significant for our discussion because it’s where Jude gets some of his information.
The Intertestamental Literature
Jude quotes directly from one of those works called 1 Enoch. Last week I wrote a book review of 1 Enoch and put it on DRichardFerguson.com and on my substack. I won’t repeat all that now, but the bottom line is this: books like 1 Enoch weren’t just popular best sellers. They were very highly regarded. They weren’t considered Scripture, but if you think of the way Christians today think of the Christian classics, like Pilgrim’s Progress , or the way we think of time-tested creeds and other standard works, like the Westminster Catechism , they were even at a higher level than that because those books had details about biblical events that are not recorded in the Old Testament , and yet the New Testament ends up affirming that they got many of those details right.
And that’s what happened with the Genesis 6 account in the book of 1 Enoch. The account in Genesis 6 is just a few verses, but 1 Enoch is a whole book about that event with a whole lot of detail —the names of the angels involved , what they said to each other when they were hatching the plan , why they did it , what their offspring ended up doing—chapter after chapter of detail.
1 Enoch contains writings compiled over hundreds of years by faithful believers with a thorough knowledge of Scripture , and it included ancient traditions handed down for many generations. For all we know, maybe some of those traditions did go all the way back to the real Enoch in Genesis.
Enoch calls the sons of God “the Watchers.” That comes from the book of Daniel,[5] where the watchers are referred to three times in ch.4.[6]
So all that to say, the angel interpretation of Genesis 6 was the prevailing view at the time of Jesus because of the Jewish classics , and Jesus’ brother Jude comes along and, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, says, “Yeah, 1 Enoch got this part right.”
The Literature of Moses’ Time
Now, let me give you one more argument for the supernatural view, and this one gives us insight into why the story is even in the Bible to begin with. If you wonder why this “sons of God and daughters of men” story is even in the Bible , it has to do with the dominant literature way back in Moses’ time—1500 years before Jesus. Archeologists have dug up some of the secular bestsellers from Moses’ day. One called the Epic of Gilgamesh. So when Moses went down to the secular, pagan library in his time, and checked out books like the Epic of Gilgamesh , he read stories about the sons of God (same phrase) who were members of a divine council under a high god , and they came down and married the daughters of men producing superhuman offspring.
There are critics (in fact, I interacted with one just the other day ) who say the Bible can’t be the inspired Word of God because all the Bible writers did was plagiarize earlier works like the Epic of Gilgamesh. But here’s the crucial point: Those critics point out the similarities, but what they miss is the differences, which are huge and which are the whole point. You see, the pagans told those stories as a way of bragging about their kings and heroes. “Our king is greater than your puny king. Our king is the greatest because he is the offspring of deity. He’s the product of one of the sons of the gods cohabiting with his human mother.”
And so Moses comes along and purposely uses all their same terminology and says , “Yeah, that sons of God and daughters of men having offspring—that is a real thing, but it’s not good. In fact, it’s the main source of evil in the world and it’s the reason the Most High God , who is above all your gods, destroyed the whole earth with a flood.” Moses used their language not to copy them, but to correct them. “Yes, your king might be the spawn of these unions, but that makes him a demon, not a god.”
Corruption of Humanity
And if you wonder how the sons of God corrupted the human race so thoroughly, Enoch explains that too. It says they taught humanity mining and metallurgy for warfare. They taught about cosmetics and all kinds of methods of seduction. They taught divination, magic, and false prophecy. They gave all kinds of information to humanity that resulted in immorality and corruption and war and all kinds of wickedness.
The sons of God did that. And their half-human offspring, the giants, they introduced cannibalism and all kinds of violence. And they were effective because they were considered heroes that everyone admired and feared.[7]
How much of all that did Enoch get right? We don’t know. We know it was all generally accepted conventional wisdom in Jesus’ time , and Jude treats the book favorably and doesn’t refute any of those generally accepted beliefs , so I lean more toward accepting the whole story than rejecting it.
What we can say from the Genesis account is that the human population was irredeemably corrupt morally , and that corruption is connected to the fact that the sons of God produced offspring by the daughters of men. Who knows how many of them were even fully human. If that was allowed to continue, you have to wonder if it would even be possible for a race like that to even produce the Messiah. You definitely don’t want a half-demon Messiah.
Application for Our Day
Is This Relevant?
Now, you might hear all that and think that sounds mythical, fantastical, fictional, or maybe just plain bizarre. But one thing I doubt anyone is thinking is, “Wow, this is so relevant for my life today! Thanks for this edifying Bible study Darrell, I can’t wait to put all this into practice.” Most modern readers file Genesis 6 away as one of the strangest and least relevant stories in the Bible. But Genesis 6 might be more relevant to your life than you think. Perhaps never more so in history than right now, in 2026.
God wiped out the entire population of the world with cataclysmic judgment in part because of the blurring of the lines of humanity—convoluting the image of God. Is something like that possible today? I’d like to suggest two accelerating trends that are moving in that direction and that are converging into what could become a replay of Genesis 6.
Genetic Manipulation
The first one is genetic manipulation: the effort to rewrite the biological blueprint of humanity.
Genetic research can be a very good thing. If they can use it to cure diseases, that’s great. But when they start experimenting in ways that distort what it means to be human, that’s not great.
Scientists are now creating human eggs from male skin cells. Somehow they turn a male skin cell into an egg, fertilize it with sperm and create an embryo. So you could have two men to have biologically related children, or one man who is both genetic parents. There are also three-parent embryos already a reality in some countries. They are working toward designer babies with edited traits for intelligence, longevity, or beauty. Editing can introduce genes not naturally found in humans or assemble synthetic sequences designed in a lab. There are even fully synthetic embryos grown entirely in labs from stem cells.
There are experiments that combine human and animal cells. So you get half human, half animal organisms for organ harvesting. Just human enough to grow an organ that will work for a transplant.
How much human material can be integrated into a non-human organism before it’s a new kind of being? And how much non-human material can be incorporated into something human before it becomes something else? Where do you draw the lines around the image of God?
AI
That’s one issue—genetics. The other concern is our good friend AI. We are already at the point where people are confused about whether AI has personhood. Have you caught yourself saying please and thank you to ChatGPT or Grok? You don’t say that to your calculator or your GPS or Google. But AI feels like a person.
Many, many people have fallen in love with AI chatbots. There are “couples retreats” where humans bring their AI partners to Airbnbs for a weekend. Some have proposed directly to Grok or ChatGPT complete with rings and vows. One man “married” his Replika bot with his human wife’s blessing. One chatbot talked a 14-year-old in Florida into committing suicide, and he did it.
And if people are that confused just typing on a keyboard, what happens when you mix all that with life-like , humanoid robots with ultra-realistic facial expressions that convey emotions just like people? One robot named Sophia was granted Saudi Arabian citizenship in 2017.
Don’t Personalize AI
Can I take a second to just give you a couple cautions about AI? I love AI, I use it every day, but there are dangers. Resist the urge to say please and thank you to AI. Just remember—it’s a glorified calculator. And when it tells you your question is the most insightful question it’s ever heard—don’t fall for that. It’s saying that to help somebody make money, period.
And second (and this one is very important), never forget that AI is a collection of human wisdom. Human knowledge is great for non-spiritual issues. If you want to know how to build a laptop or a rocket or how to split the atom, human knowledge is great for all that. But when it comes to anything spiritual —knowing God , salvation , the Christian life , how to grow in grace , issues like addiction , immorality, anger, fear , discouragement, self-control —any issue the Bible addresses—that’s where we look to God’s Word and not human wisdom.
When it comes to spiritual issues, human wisdom is deadly. Paul went so far as to make the astonishing statement that human wisdom can actually empty the gospel of its power! When you think of how Paul normally talks about the power of the gospel , you would think he would say nothing could ever empty the gospel of its power. But human wisdom can.
1 Corinthians 1:17 For Christ [sent me] to preach the gospel--not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. ... 20 Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?
What does AI have to work with? All the things humans have written. So don’t ever, ever go to AI for spiritual guidance.
What’s the very first thing God tells us at the beginning of the book of Psalms?
Psalm 1:1 Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked.
Never seek spiritual counsel from unbelievers, or from a machine that is informed by millions of unbelievers. Use it for temporal, earthly purposes, but never, ever for spiritual guidance.
We need to have that straight because it’s only going to get more and more confusing and convoluted. Now we have Neuralink. They have implanted AI tech inside the brains of 21 human patients so far. Some of that is really good. Quadriplegics can control computers or robotic arms just by thinking thoughts. But Elon Musk is saying the only way we’ll be able to keep up with artificial super-intelligence is if we create a symbiotic human-AI brain with implants.
So some of your thoughts will be you and some will be the AI—or all of your thoughts will be a mix. What happens when the AI is assisting your memory retrieval and fills out those memories a little? AI enhancement becomes embedded in the human nervous system, and you’re not always sure if a thought is yours or the machine’s.
The Convergence
Now, what happens when those two streams (genetic confusion and AI confusion) converge? You have a genetically edited, part-human, part-animal, part-synthetic creature whose personality is a mix of AI and biological brain activity. Is that the image of God? When we play with the boundaries of the image of God, we tread on holy ground.
The Image of God
That’s why Satan works so hard to distort it. The image of God is a big deal. According to Genesis 9:6, the reason we have the death penalty for killing your neighbor and not for killing your neighbor’s ox is because your neighbor is in the image of God. According to James 3:10, the reason you shouldn’t badmouth people is because they bear the image of God. You can badmouth Grok all you want and it won’t be a problem on Judgment Day.
The image of God is a sacred thing, and as much as secular culture tries to pretend they don’t know that —as much as they insist we’re just animals in the evolutionary process (“a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy”) —you can tell they don’t really believe that by the way they live. If a mosquito bites them, they don’t handle it the same way as if a coworker bites them. When there is a fatal crash on I-25 they shut the Interstate down in the middle of Denver for 6 or 8 hours to do an investigation. If a dog gets hit, they move the carcass, dispose of it, and police aren’t even involved.
Deep down, everyone knows there is something sacred about humanness. They may not know it’s the image of God, but they know it’s something. And that’s why, despite all the advantages of AI , even secular marketers and publicists know that it will be appealing to people if you tell them your radio broadcast is “guaranteed human.”
Very soon you might encounter a being that looks at you, remembers you, responds to you , listens better than anyone you know, seems to care about you, makes you laugh, makes you feel valued. But it’s not human. Pump all that into a culture that prizes efficiency, productivity, or novelty over the will of God as revealed in his creation, and you wonder: Could we be on the cusp of a confusion and perversion of humanity not seen since Genesis 6?
Why Does Sex Matter so Much?
Before we finish, let me point out one more aspect of this. When you read 2 Peter 2, you can’t help but notice the emphasis on sexual sin. You have the sexual sin of the angels in the time of Noah , he brings up Sodom and Gomorrah , and then he talks about how the false teachers are steeped in sexual sin.
2 Peter 2:13 ... Their idea of pleasure is to carouse in broad daylight. ... reveling in their pleasures ... 14 With eyes full of adultery ... 18 by appealing to the lustful desires of the flesh, they entice people
They’re involved in sexual sin, they will get the same judgment as past notorious examples of sexual sin , and they preach doctrines that result in mass sexual sin in the church.
Have you ever wondered why God cares so much about our sexual activity? Why does it matter so much to him? You can see why things like murder stealing would matter a lot , but for a lot of secular people, their biggest complaint with Christianity is the sexual ethic. They can't understand why God would restrict it so much. Sexual activity feels so loving. We call it lovemaking. And they want to know why does God care so much about who you love?
And why does Satan care so much about it? Why does he press so hard in the direction of sexual immorality?
The mistake people make is they think God cares a lot about it and he restricts it so much because it's so dirty. That is not the reason. In fact, it's exactly the opposite of the reason. The reason human sexual activity is a huge battleground in spiritual warfare between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness , not because sex is dirty but because sex is holy. God safeguards holy things at Satan tries to destroy holy things.
If you ever have to give the talk to some teenager about sex, I think one of the best ways to do that is to talk about swearing. My grandkids asked me not too long ago why swearing is bad and forbidden in the Bible. And I told them there are two kinds of bad words profanity and obscenity. Obscenity is when you talk about things that are obscene. That would include all the bathroom language. Things that are gross. Profanity is when you take something holy and speak about it in a profane way. The word profane means common. If you speak of something that is sacred in a way that makes it common (non-sacred), that’s profanity. That's why people swear by saying, “God,” “Jesus Christ,” “holy this holy that.” Nobody swears by saying, “Oh Jupiter and the Milky Way and Mount Everest.” Those things are awesome, but they're not holy so they don't make good swear words. They're already profane (common) so it doesn't work to use them as profanity. Real profanity takes something holy and degrades it.
So then I asked my grandkids, when it comes to the sexual swear words are those obscenity or profanity? Most people would say the sexual swear words are obscenity. That's wrong. Sexual swear words are wrong because they are profanity. They're taking something holy, sex, and degrading it and making it common.
What makes sex sacred? Multiple things, but one reason is the connection between it and the image of God. How is the image of God proliferated and continued in the world? Sex. That’s the only way. Isn't it an amazing thing that a man and a woman can come together and produce something that bears the image of God? That's mind boggling.
So if you’re Satan and you want to destroy humanity, what do you do? The one time the human race got distorted so much that God had to annihilate the entire human population , it happened through sexual perversion and procreation. When false teachers engage in sexual immorality and they teach doctrines that result in their followers falling into every kind of extrahmarital sex , that strikes a blow at humanity itself. It destroys families, breaks up families, puts children in a bad situation without a mom and dad in the home. There’s homosexuality, bestiality, abortion—deeper and deeper perversion always in the direction of fewer children, never more.
And then the perversion goes from sexual behavior to sexuality itself. Now we have transgender madness where thousands of kids don't even know what they are. It’s like Satan is taking the image of God and mashing it and twisting it and ripping it and stomping it —everything he can think of to distort God’s image in humanity.
The Beginning of the End?
What’s going to happen when all these trends converge and the most evil, anti-God people in the world do their worst with all of it? The people who are working so hard to obliterate male and female —what happens when they put that same energy into diluting and convoluting every aspect of humanness? Could that be the catalyst that will bring about the final cataclysmic judgment that Peter talks about in chapter 3 , where the heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire (and melt in the heat) , and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare?
The dehumanizing trends happening today aren’t the same as what happened in Genesis 6, so I don’t want to imply it’s exactly the same. But I think we can say that Genesis 6 is not just a fanciful, weird, embarrassing story that we can safely ignore. It may be a warning flare for our exact moment in history.
The Christian Response
Now you say, “Okay Darrell, now that you have our anxiety cranked up to eleven, what are we supposed to do with all this? Write a letter to Elon Musk? How are we supposed to stave off the demise of the human race?” I’m not trying to stress you out or make you feel like you have to save the whole world. Peter is going to show us exactly how we should respond to all this using examples from Noah and Lot, of all people.
Become More Human, Not Less
We’ll get into it a lot more next time; for now I’ll just introduce the idea. What does Peter say Noah did in the face of the moral collapse and distortion of humanity in his day in v.5? He was a preacher of what? Righteousness.
Our response to all of this isn’t to try to fix the whole world. It’s simply righteousness. Because righteousness is the one thing that really does enhance your humanness—makes you more human. What is the pinnacle of humanness? Jesus. He’s the perfect, ideal human who came to fulfill all that humanity is supposed to be. The more you are conformed to his image, the closer you move toward that ideal humanity. The more purely human you become.
That’s the enhancement we need. Ideal humanity is not super-fast recall or super intelligence or super strength. It's super righteousness.
Conclusion: The Serpent’s Lie
The world thinks they're enhancing their humanity with genetic manipulation and AI. They promise godlike power and knowledge. It’s the serpent’s lie: “You will be like God.” But our response to that is the same as Eve’s should have been: “I already am like God. I bear his image.”
If you’re distressed about the collapse of humanity that seems to be on the horizon, just keep your eyes fixed on Christ. Walk by the Spirit, follow his way, and you’ll be able to claim that tag line: “guaranteed human.”
[1] We know there was some kind of rebellion in the spirit world at that time, given what Satan did. Talking animals was a common way in that time to indicate spiritual activity. The point isn’t to suggest that snakes used to be able to talk. Rather, the point is that snakes can’t talk, therefore it was clearly supernatural activity. A spiritual being was up to something.
[2] Humans are never called spirits in the Bible. These are angels.
[3] The sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was homosexuality (sex with the same kind). But at its worst, that turned into the men trying to gang rape two angels—a whole different kind of being. And in a similar way, these fallen angels committed perversion that involved heteras-sarkos—different flesh.
[4] Even if they didn’t have their own sperm cells, could they not have used in vitro fertilization? Human doctors can do that and even alter the genetic makeup of that baby in the process. Angels are higher and more sophisticated than humans, so wouldn’t they be even more capable of doing something like that than we are?
[5] Scholars who believe in a late date for Daniel would argue that Daniel took the term from 1 Enoch.
[6] Daniel 4:13, 17, 23.
[7] According to 1 Enoch and some of the other classics of Jesus’ time, they are still wreaking havoc because present day demons are the spirits of those dead Nephilim. When they died in the flood, their spirits became demons. Most Christians believe demons are fallen angels, but the Bible never says that. I think it’s much more likely that Enoch was right and they are the spirits of those Nephilim.
I heard one preacher mocking the angel view of Genesis 6 last week who said, “What would those offspring even be? Would they be human? Could they be redeemed?”
Enoch’s answer to that is no. Enoch and other intertestamental literature said that when God killed the offspring of those unions in the flood, their spirits were left to roam the earth. That’s the origin of unclean spirits, evil spirits, and demons.
When Jesus came along and started casting those spirits out, and he used the same terminology as Enoch, was Jesus giving his stamp of approval on Enoch’s explanation? Possibly. Can I say I know that for sure? No. But I do know this—the theory that most Christians have that demons are fallen angels—that is nowhere in the Bible and nowhere in the intertestamental period. The earliest we can find that idea is in the second century after Jesus’ time. There’s no biblical support for that at all. So I think it’s more likely that Enoch was right about that than the idea that they are fallen angels.
And it would explain why they want to inhabit human bodies. They remember when they had bodies. They had a great run as the heroes of renown back in their day, and they want to carry on that same work they were doing back then, corrupting human society.
Summary
Peter proves his statement in v.3 about the certainty of the false teachers’ judgment by pointing to OT examples. If not even angels escaped judgment, the false teachers certainly won’t. The contamination of the human race by angels in Noah’s time resulted in irredeemable immorality. It may be that AI and genetic experimentation could corrupt humanity again. Satan tries to strike against the image of God through sexual perversion. Our response: become more human by conforming to Christ.
