Where to Turn When Scripture Leaves You Confused

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Today's question says, "We went through your biblical Worldview curriculum with our 6-year-old daughter, and I have been listening to your podcast and webinars for a while. I'm so glad to hear that one of your biggest recommendations for parents is to have our children read the Bible for themselves. What I want to know is where do we go when we have questions? There are so many times I am confused about things in Scripture. Are there references you would recommend to answer biblical questions?"

Transcript

Note: The following is an auto-transcript of the podcast recording.

Hello friends and welcome to another episode of the Foundation Worldview Podcast where we seek to answer your questions so that you can equip the children that God has placed in your care to carefully evaluate every idea they encounter and understand the truth of the biblical worldview. I'm your host, Elizabeth Urbanowicz and I'm thrilled that you've joined me for another episode today.

Today's question says, "We went through your Biblical Worldview curriculum with our 6-year-old daughter, and I have been listening to your podcast and webinars for a while. I'm so glad to hear that! One of your biggest recommendations for parents is to have our children read the Bible for themselves and with us pretty much as soon as they can read. What I want to know is where do we go when we have questions? There are so many times I am confused about things in Scripture. Are there references you would recommend to answer biblical questions?" Really important question for us to think through because it's true. Those of you who have followed the Foundation Worldview ministry for a while, you know that we recommend getting our kids into Scripture as soon as we can that even as young as the age of three before bedtime to actually start reading through a chapter of Scripture with them. And then for those of you who have gone through our Studying the Bible curriculum with children, you know that by the age of eight we really recommend equipping children with the skills that they need to soundly read, interpret, and apply Scripture. And there are going to be questions that our children have and there are going to be questions that even we as adults have. So what do we do when we have those questions?

Now, as we think through questions that we encounter when we're reading Scripture or questions that our children encounter, I think that there is a really simple three step process that we can do to clear up most confusion when we're reading through a certain passage of Scripture.

Now, the first and most important thing that we need to do is we need to read the passage in its greater context to see if clarity is offered. If there's a little narrative that we don't understand, we should go back and read the section before it and after it to say, okay, why did the biblical author put this here? What is this sandwiched between? If it's a certain command or a description in one of the epistles, we should actually read the letter as a whole to say, okay, what is the author's whole flow here? How does this portion fit in with the other section? So just by reading a portion in its greater context, a lot of times that can clear up much of the confusion that we have about that passage.

The second thing I would recommend doing, which is a super easy thing to do, and I frequently do this, is when we have a question about a certain passage or topic in Scripture to go to Google type in our question and then at the end of that question type in God Questions because God Questions is a wonderful ministry that they answer questions about Scripture and life and apologetics and they have just thousands and thousands of answers to questions on there. And I think there have only been maybe one or two times where I have Googled my question plus got questions and they haven't already had an article about that question. So highly recommend that you do that and train your kids to do that, to type in your question and then God Questions at the end because it's a fabulous ministry. They have wonderful people working on their team with sound biblical answers.

And then the third thing that we can do is we can look at notes in a study bible or a commentary. And if you don't have a study bible or a commentary, a really easy place to go is BlueLetterBible.com to search Blue Letter Bible and you can type in a certain passage of Scripture and then they have a whole list of commentaries that are just free online that you can look at.

So I think those three things, reading the passage in its greater context to see if clarity is offered, then typing your question into Google with got questions at the end and then looking at notes in a study Bible or a commentary. And so I think just what will probably help us more is if we actually practice this together and if I model for you how to do this, so I just picked out what I consider to be a very tricky passage in Scripture and it's right at the beginning. So in Genesis chapter six, so those of you who have read through Genesis chapter six before, which hopefully is everyone, and just by the way, if you have never read through the Bible in its entirety, you need to. I'm just being honest with you, if you call yourself a Christian, that means you are a follower of Jesus. And where do we learn how to be a follower of Jesus and who Jesus is and why He came? In Scripture. God gave us the entirety of Scripture. So if we claim to be Christians and we want to raise our children in Christian homes, we need to have read through the entirety of Scripture at least once. And if we want to consider ourselves actually biblically literate, we need to read through the Bible at least seven times because that's how long it takes to really become literate in any idea is a minimum of seven times. So there's just that little encouragement there. Also listening to Scripture is not cheating. So you can read through lots more Scripture if you start listening to an audio Bible as you're doing your everyday household tasks. Anyway, that's beside the point.

Genesis chapter six, the beginning part is very confusing and I'm going to read it for us and then I'm going to model going through this three-step process that I just recommended. So Genesis chapter six verses one through four, it says, "When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. Then the Lord said, "My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years." The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renowned." Okay, so we read this passage and we're like, okay, so we get who the daughters of men were. They were female human daughters who are the sons of God. Why is there an issue with these sons of God marrying these women and having children? And then how on earth are their children the mighty men of old?

Well, the first thing that I recommended that we do is that we read the passage in its greater context to see if clarity is offered. Now, I'm not going to read all of Genesis chapter five for us, but if we go and look at Genesis chapter five, what Genesis chapter five is, is it's a genealogy from Adam to Noah. So if you're familiar with the beginning of Genesis, Genesis chapter one is the creation narrative, narrating the first seven days, the only seven days of creation. Genesis chapter two is a more in-depth view of what happened during creation. Genesis chapter three is the story of the fall. Then Genesis chapter four, the story of Cain and Abel, and then the rest of Adam and Eve's immediate descendants. And Genesis chapter five is the genealogy where we get the list of from Adam to Noah.

Then we have in Genesis chapter six, this story about these sons of God intermarrying with the daughters of man. And then if we continue reading in Genesis chapter six, I'm going to read just the next four verses for us, verses five through eight, Genesis six, five through eight says that "The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, "I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them." But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord." And then the rest of chapter six is the account of Noah and the Ark and the great flood.

So when we look at this passage about the sons of God and the daughters of man in context, we see that the beginning portions, the beginning chapters of Genesis are about the goodness of God's design and then its corruption through sin. And then in Genesis chapter four, we see how humans are corrupted to the core by sin and how that has affected them in every part. Then we get the genealogy in Genesis five, and then in Genesis six the beginning we see that there's something else going on that God did not ordain, that whoever these sons of God are, they should not be intermarrying with the daughters of men and that God is putting a cap on the limit to how old a human can be. And then the rest of Genesis six is about God's judgment through the flood. So when we look at this in context, we see, okay, I might not understand who these sons of Gods are and why there's a problem with them intermarrying with the daughters of men.

But what I see is that this is a further account of sin in the earth, and this is leading up to the story of the flood where God's judgment, his just wrath is poured out on mankind through the flood. So we might not have a greater understanding of who these sons of men, sorry sons of God are and why there's an issue with them marrying the daughters of men. But what we do understand from the context is that this is another narrative showing us how humans are sinful, that they're wicked, and that God is about to pour out his just wrath on mankind through the flood. So we see, even though if we don't understand it, we see why it's part of this text. So that was the first step to read the passage in its greater context and see if it offered clarity, and it did offer some clarity for why it's there even if we don't fully understand what it means.

The second thing I recommended is to Google the question with God Questions. And so what I did beforehand is I just typed into my search engine just into Google, "what is Genesis six, one through four about?" God Questions and this article popped up and it's not too long. So I'm going to read us the entirety of the article and then we'll talk about what clarity offers.

Okay, so this article says "Genesis six, one through four refers to the sons of God and the daughters of men. There have been several suggestions as to who the sons of God were and why the children they had with the daughters of men grew into a race of giants. The three primary views on the identity of the sons of God are number one, they were fallen angels, Number two, they were powerful human rulers, or number three, they were godly descendants of Seth intermarrying with wicked descendants of Cain. Given the weight of the first theory is the fact that in the Old Testament, the phrase "sons of God' always refers to angels, and then it lists verses where it does. A potential problem with this is Matthew 22:30, which indicates that angels do not marry. The Bible gives us no reason to believe that angels have a gender or are able to reproduce. The other two views do not present this problem. The weakness of views two and three is that ordinary human males marrying ordinary human females does not account for why the offspring were giants or heroes of old men of renowned. Further, why would God decide to bring the flood on the earth when God had never forbidden powerful human males or descendants of Seth to marry ordinary human females or descendants of Cain? The oncoming judgment of Genesis six, five through seven is linked to what took place in Genesis six, one through four. Only the obscene perverse marriage of fallen angels with human females would seem to justify such a harsh judgment. As we previously noted, the weakness of the first view is :, which declares at the resurrection, people will neither marry nor be given in marriage. They will be like the angels in heaven. However, the text does not say angels are not able to marry. Rather, it indicates only that angels do not marry. Second Matthew 2230 is referring to the angels in heaven. It is not referring to fallen angels who do not care about God's created order and actively seek ways to disrupt God's plan. The fact that God's holy angels do not marry or engage in sexual relations does not mean the same is true of Satan and his demons. View one is the most likely position. Yes, it is an interesting contradiction to say that angels are sexless and then to say that the sons of God were fallen angels who procreated with human females. However, while angels are spiritual beings, they can appear in human physical form. And several verses are noted. The men of Sodom and Gomorrah wanted to have sex with the two angels who were with lot. It is plausible that angels are capable of taking on human form even to the point of replicating human sexuality and possibly even reproduction. Why do the fallen angels not do this more often? It seems that God imprisoned the fallen. It seems that God imprisoned the fallen angels who committed this evil sin so that the other fallen angels would not do the same as described in Jude six. Earlier Hebrew interpretations and apocryphal and pseudo graphical writings are unanimous in holding to the view that fallen angels are the sons of God mentioned in Genesis six, one through three. This by no means closes the debate. However, the view that Genesis six, one through four involves fallen angels meeting with human females has a strong contextual, grammatical and historical basis.

Okay, so in this verse, or sorry, in this article, we were given these three possibilities that it could have been that they were fallen angels, they were powerful human rulers, or they were the godly descendants of Seth. And so all three of these views are possible, but this article outlined the strengths and the weaknesses of them and proposed that view number one is the strongest. At the end, they concluded that this by no means, means that the debate is closed, but this is what they believe holds the most weight. And so this is something for us to understand. Okay, so those are the three possibilities for who the sons of God were and why there was an issue with them marrying the daughters of men. And so we see from this, it is most likely that they were these fallen angels.

So we've done the first two things I mentioned. Read the passage in its greater context to see if clarity is offered. Two, Google the question with God Questions at the end. And then three, I said, look at notes in a study Bible or commentary. So what I did is I pulled up blue letter Bible on my computer and I clicked on Genesis six one, and then there was a whole bunch of commentaries that popped up and I chose the Matthew Henry commentary. And I'm just going to read a short portion of what it says about this Genesis six, one through four passage in this commentary, Matthew Henry writes, "For the glory of God's justice and for warning to a wicked world before the history of the ruin of the old world, we have a full account of its degeneracy, its apostasy from God and rebellion against him. The destroying of it was an act not of an absolute sovereignty, but of necessary justice for the maintaining of the honor of God's government. Now here we have an account of two things which occasioned the wickedness of the old world." So in this portion, Matthew Henry, he's describing and claiming that we have this portion about the sons of God marrying the daughters of men right before the flood because God is showing how wicked human behavior had become on the earth and how his just judgment was warranted. And so as we looked at the greater context, we googled God Questions, and we looked at this commentary, we can conclude that human depravity and wickedness was so great that God's immediate just judgment through the flood was necessary. That it was good and right for God to send the flood and to wipe out all human life except for Noah and his family.

And so I hope that through modeling this you've seen are all my questions about Genesis six, one through four answered. No, I don't have a definite conclusion about who the sons of God were and why they should not have been intermarrying with the daughters of man. But I do have a greater understanding of how this passage fits into the greater narrative and shows God's just judgment in the account of Noah and the flood. Now, if you're sitting here thinking, oh my goodness, Elizabeth, there's no way that myself or my children will be satisfied with not knowing the answers to this. I would say, well, we kind of have to get used to this because there are many things in Scripture that are very clear and are very conclusive. And then there are other things in Scripture that different people hold to different views on. But we will never a hundred percent know for certain what this was talking about until our minds are completely renewed one day when we are with Jesus.

So I think another important question for us to ask ourselves and for us to train our children to ask themselves when they have a question about something in Scripture, we should always ask ourselves, "okay, what about my faith in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus will change based on the answer to this question." Now, there might be some questions we have where there might be big changes, like if our children are asking, did Jesus actually rise from the grave? If they investigate the evidence and they come away believing that Jesus did not rise as the scriptures proclaim? I mean that changes everything about our faith. Even according to the words of the Apostle Paul in first Corinthians 15, that if Christ has not been raised, we're still in our sins and our faith is futile. That changes everything. Where with something like this, I don't a hundred percent know who the sons of God were in this passage and why it was a problem for them to intermarry with the daughters of man. But that changes nothing about my faith. I know from this passage that it points to God's just judgment through the flood. It shows me even more how good and right and just God is. So it points me to the character and nature of God and the truth of how humans in our natural state in sin that we are wicked and depraved. And so nothing about my faith changes based on whether I know certainly who the sons of God in this passage were so highly recommend that we always ask this question to ourselves and we train our kids to ask it as well. What about my faith will change based on the answer to this question?

Now, if you have just watched or listened to this podcast and you're thinking, man, there's so much I don't know about studying Scripture, I highly recommend that you check out or Studying the Bible curriculum at Foundation Worldview. It's for children eight on up. But we have heard from so many parents and Christian educators and church leaders that as they have gone through this curriculum with the children God is placed in their care, that they have learned so much about the skills that they need to soundly read, interpret, and apply Scripture. So highly recommend that you check that out and just highly recommend that you take the advice of this podcast. And anytime you encounter a question in Scripture that you are not sure about, that you read the greater context, you search for God Questions answers, and then you look at study notes or a commentary.

Well, that's a wrap for this episode. But as always, as we leave this time together, my prayer for you is that no matter the situation in which you and the children, God is placed in your care, find yourselves that you would trust that God is working all things together for your good by using all things to conform you more into the image of His Son. I'll see you next time.