John MacArthur is a well-known pastor who actually has a lot to say about Genesis 6:1-4.
Although he believes that the sons of God in Genesis can only be identified as supernatural in origin, John MacArthur deviates from the traditional angel view by explaining it as a case of demonic possession.
John MacArthur’s Views on the Sons of God and the Nephilim
But what is interesting here is that these sons of God, these spiritual beings who exist in their own realm, saw the daughters of men were beautiful, and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose.
Now you have the perversity here of these spiritual fallen angels, these demon beings, overstepping the boundaries of their realm. They defy God by leaving the defined realm that God has placed them, their spirit world, and they enter the human realm.
We know they can do that. Satan has already entered the realm of animals and showed up indwelling a snake in the garden.
Now, these demons, it says, are motivated because they saw that the daughters of men were beautiful.
…Wicked spirits attracted to female creatures; wicked, perverted demons able even to appreciate the beauty that God has placed in women in some perverse and twisted way.
John MacArthur | Demonic Invasion
Breaking Down John MacArthur’s Views on Genesis 6:1-4
John MacArthur’s website includes the transcript and audio of his full sermon on Genesis 6:1-4, and it’s quite interesting to listen to. I would encourage you to read or listen to it at length. But if you want the main points, I’ve included excerpts in this article.
Pastor MacArthur starts out by acknowledging the problematic nature of the passage for anyone who researches it.
“…the only thing worse than a migraine headache is having to spend two weeks in Genesis 6:1 to 4.
“There are a number of interpretations of this particular passage, and people pile up under all varying interpretations. To try to sort through the voluminous journal articles, commentaries, and treatments of this passage is no small task.”
He has a point here. There is almost too much information on this topic, and much of it is repetitive or is so poorly researched that it misses important aspects of the discussion.
When researching this subject over the years, we had the same dilemma, which is why we decided to build this website to make it easier to study.
Why is this story recorded in Genesis?
Skipping ahead in his sermon, MacArthur poses a great question – why were these four verses included in Genesis?
Why, out of all of the things that must have gone on during that sixteen hundred and fifty-six years does God inspire Moses, the writer of the law, the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, as we call them, why does He inspire Moses to record this? What is the significance of this?
Now we want to remember that the book of Genesis is the book of what? Of beginnings, isn’t it? So this is the beginning of something that is very, very important. There are no trivial things here, there are no secondary things here. If you have to be very careful in selecting material because you’re making a brief treatment of a very, very important period of time, then you’re going to choose very selectively what is critical to understand, and I believe there is a very critical nature to this information.
John MacArthur
Fortunately, John MacArthur answers this question in a couple of ways during his sermon.
Who are the Sons of God? Demons!
He also wastes no time in asserting his views about the identity of the sons of God. He firmly believes that they are supernatural beings, and he includes several lines of reasoning for his conclusion.
The key identification in this entire passage is to find out who the sons of God are, and I’m going to give that away at the very beginning because there’s no point in hiding the fact.
John Macarthur
I am convinced that these are demons. These are demons. You can write that down in capital letters if you want, I’m not going to move off of that understanding.
I had to laugh at that last sentence, considering I was once called a heretic by a Baptist pastor for having the same view!
He then points out how the writer is contrasting the ‘sons of God’ with the genealogies of the previous passages, and with the ‘daughters of men’. One is not like the other, which is why the writer chose his wording the way he did…
That’s the first thing. All theological, all philosophical, all rational perspectives aside, the contrast then is between creatures of God and creatures of men. That’s the point. The contrast is between sons of God and daughters of men, creatures of God and creatures of men.
Sons of God can’t be sons of men. Nor can sons of God refer to righteous men or to some righteous line of men since there is no such thing as a righteous line of men, and there is no way that men in the Old Testament are ever designated as sons of God. So we want to stick with the language.
The oldest interpretation of this passage, by the way, the oldest one, the traditional Jewish one, the view of the rabbis and modern Jewish commentators like Umberto Cassuto, the view of the church fathers is that the sons of God refer to demons, fallen angels.
Why do they say that? Because, very simply, every time you have an Old Testament reference to sons of God, it refers to angels.
John MacArthur
Angels or Demons?
Obviously, not all Jewish rabbis and commentators would agree; however, MacArthur’s point is fairly accurate. The belief that the sons of God were angels is the most universal and ancient interpretation, and no one disputes that, even if there are some outliers.
One discrepancy that I see so far is that MacArthur calls them demons, but then he refers to them as angels when describing how they were historically viewed.
This is an important detail when trying to determine the chain of events and participants in Genesis 6. Were they already fallen angels, or was Genesis 6 describing their original fall from grace? There are possibilities either way, and I find the latter more likely since that is the way the oldest legends describe the event.
The Book of Jubilees goes a step further to says that the angels were intentionally sent by God down to earth to instruct mankind in righteousness, and it was only after their descent did they succumb to their lusts due to their proximity to mankind.
‘Sons’ refers to direct creations
John MacArthur relegates these sons to demons without addressing the question further. but would say that these ‘sons’ had already fallen, but still could be called ‘sons’ because they were direct creations of God.
And if you make it into anything else, if you say it means humans, it means kings, it means warriors, it means nobles, you don’t have any biblical basis for that. That is purely conjecture; that is purely invented.
John Macarthur
That is true. Alternative explanations usually are not very detailed (I’m looking at you Augustine !), because the angel/supernatural identity of the ‘sons of God’ is supported from so many angles – historical interpretation, textual evidence, mythological parallels, and paraphrasing and quoting of the Book of Enoch’s account of Genesis 6 by Peter and Jude.
MacArthur’s Deviation from the Traditional View
So far, John MacArthur has taken a very traditional approach to the passage. I appreciate his honesty in addressing it, as many well-known pastors have instead avoided it. He is reading the text, seeing how it was interpreted in the past, and agreeing that that is what is being meant here.
But there is a plot twist! Breaking with the traditional angel view, he’ll offer an interesting deviation. I’m going to condense down the following quotes for space.
There was an actual marital transaction. The question then comes: How can this be? How can an immaterial spiritual being, a fallen angel, a demon marry a woman? How can they chose a wife and have a legal ceremony? How can they engage in a marriage?
Only one way, folks. They have to take the body of a man. And I think that’s so obvious that it doesn’t even need to be said.
…the demons (defined as the sons of God) have moved into men with the purpose of cohabitating with women.
…their strategy was to move into the bodies of males and then to marry beautiful women and to produce children. This would be a demon-dominated union, and a demon-dominated family.
John MacArthur
It’s an interesting pivot from his emphasis on the historical interpretation and the text, and one that seems a bit of a cop-out, in spite of the explanations he gives for it.
Nowhere in any historical source or in the text itself is any indication of demon possession going on. No human male husbands are mentioned or inferred in the text or in other sources.
The only reason I can think of for this pivot in his otherwise traditional interpretation is that it avoids some of the difficult questions that do arise from the idea of supernatural beings being able to marry and produce children with humans.
However, it is that very concept that was interwoven into ancient mythologies. The early church fathers and ancient Jews took it for granted that the Genesis 6:1-4 passage was the original basis for the legends of the pagan gods. Just read what Philo and Josephus had to say.
If these were just demon-possessed men who were marrying and producing children, in what way is that any different really than what happens normally? Men marrying women and having children who followed their parents in wickedness? And how is that all that different from other demonic possession recorded in scripture? Where did the pagan demigod myths come from?
These are new questions that don’t have satisfactory answers in my opinion.
What Does it Mean?
But what was it all for? And why did the author of Genesis believe it needed to be mentioned? MacArthur gives some ideas why that might be.
And so these wicked people in that pre-flood society just embraced the demonic lie. They welcomed the demons into their lives because the promise says we’re going to escape death, we’re going to beat this obituary process, and we’re going to get eternal life and be like God.
John MacArthur
MacArthur reasons that the demons were motivated, not by lust like the passage clearly states, but because they wanted to deceive people and turn more people away from God.
The Story of Disobedient Angels in the New Testament
As quickly as he jumped off the traditional angel view train, MacArthur quickly hops back on as he points his listener’s attention to the references to this passage in the New Testament.
How do you know this interpretation is right? Turn quickly to 1 Peter 3. We have New Testament interpretations of this passage, fortunately, by God’s goodness. We believe the sons of God were angels, fallen angels, demons, and here is evidence.
John MacArthur
As we’ve discussed on this website, MacArthur also shows how both Peter and Jude could only be talking about Genesis 6 when they speak of disobedient angels that God imprisoned for sins they committed in the days of Noah.
In His living Spirit, He went to the prison, and it was not a human prison, it was a spirit prison. …The spirits that are in this prison are the spirits who were disobedient to God to the limits, to the boundaries that God had set for them in the time of Noah.
And you can believe that when He was dying on the cross and when He died on the cross, the news came down, Jesus is dead. And they were having a party, celebrating that, when He showed up and He announced His triumph over them. Why would they care? Because this is a long battle – a long battle.
John MacArthur
But what about human spirits? For those who don’t want to believe that the sons of God were indeed angels, they prefer to interpret these imprisoned spirits as spirits of deceased humans that died in the flood. MacArthur addresses this:
“Spirits” as a term is never used for humans in the New Testament unless it is qualified by a genitive, the spirits of just men or something. It’s never used to speak of humans, we’re never called spirits. These are spirit beings, these are angels who are in a prison where they have been because they disobeyed God, they overstepped their boundaries in the days of Noah, prior to the flood. That ties perfectly in with Genesis 6.
…If God didn’t spare angels when they sinned but cast them into hell, or literally into pits of darkness reserved for judgment, and did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, so forth and so forth. Wait a minute. What do we have here? God didn’t spare the angels that sinned but put them in some prison. First Peter calls it a prison, this calls it a pit of darkness. And these were some angels at the time of that ancient world of Noah, again, here they are again.
John MacArthur
And then MacArthur makes a good point that some miss.
But again, 2 Peter 2:4 and 5 connects the judgment of angels sent to pits of darkness with Noah and its parallel. A parallel sin – listen to this carefully – a parallel sin and a parallel condemnation to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Let me ask you a question. Why did God destroy Sodom and Gomorrah? What sin? What is it? Homosexuality. That’s why God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because of the sin of homosexuality.
That’s the closest human parallel to what these demons did. They went after strange flesh, they stepped out of their appropriate realm when they came into man and polluted marriage.
John MacArthur
Here’s another place where ‘went after strange flesh’ is very clearly understood by the NT writers, the Jews and the early church as angels actually physically comingling with women, but since MacArthur isn’t willing to go that far, he would have us believe that this is just referring to their overstepping their bounds in possessing men and making them marry women…
Although MacArthur makes some good points and communicates well on a variety of aspects of the identity of the Sons of God in Genesis 6, I don’t this his deviations from the traditional interpretation hold up well.
