Stephen
Terry, Director
God
Fights for You
Commentary
for the November 1, 2025, Sabbath School Lesson
"Everyone who
does any of these detestable thing--such persons must be cut off from their
people. Keep my requirements and do not follow any of the detestable customs
that were practiced before you came and do not defile yourselves with them. I
am the Lord your God." Leviticus 18:29-30
Our opening
verse is following a list of sexual perversions practiced by the Canaanites--cited
as reasons why they are to be dispossessed and the Israelites
to be installed in their stead. Sexual perversity is
as old as Genesis (Genesis 6:4-5)
and reflects the domination of women by men that arose after the fall. (Genesis
3:16) Women have been trafficked to their detriment for thousands of years.
Over seventeen centuries after Christ's incarnation it was still common as
depicted in this image by William Hogarth depicting an older woman procuring a
fresh, young woman to be trafficked into prostitution. It continues to be
common today with Ghislane Maxwell procuring similar young girls for Jeffrey Epstein
to feed the insatiable appetite of the wealthy to prey upon young, impoverished
women to feed their lusts without accountability. It is a Satanic trade that has
its roots in the rebellion of Satan and his angelic followers against God and
the loyal angel host. (Revelation
12:7-17)
Cast
to the earth in defeat, Satan targeted God's gift to Adam, tempting Eve to fall
and to bring Adam along with her in rebellion against God. But it did not end
there. Those fallen angels were attracted to the women born to men and began
trafficking them for their own pleasure. (Genesis
6:4-5) These fallen angels were not God. God is called
Elohim in Genesis, which is a plural term, but without the article preceding
it, it is translated as a singular noun, "God." But
the passage in chapter six has the article, "the" in English, indicating the
author was telling us we have something different here. Translated, the entire
phrase is literally "sons of the gods." This is further supported by the passage
telling us that the offspring of this trafficking were the heroes of old. Pagan
mythologies refer to them as demigods, half divine, half human. Hercules is a
well-known example. The Genesis account calls them Nephilim. As verse five
tells us, this trafficking resulted in untold evil on the earth and resulted in
the Noahic flood, wiping out all but eight human beings.
If we
accept the flood account as factual, a question soon arises. Why were there
Nephilim around both before and after the flood? (Numbers
13:33) If they were not angels, they should have perished in the flood,
especially if they were nothing more than the godly line of humanity as some interpret
this passage, which, except for Noah and his family, had ceased to exist even
before the flood. The word Nephilim can be translated as "fallen ones." Although
other translations have been suggested, truth is consistent, and the "fallen"
translation is more consistent with the ongoing biblical narrative. As fallen
angels with powers we can hardly guess at, they were never listed among those
destroyed by the flood, and the later reference to them implies that as well.
Unfortunately, Bible translators have often obscured rather than shed light on
the term. For instance in (Ezekiel
37:27), the Hebrew says "Nephilim" but several different translators,
instead of rendering it simply as "the fallen," insert additional text
referring to "warriors," "heroes," "men of old," etc. It causes one to wonder,
why are these translators avoiding any association with the idea of fallen angels
trafficking human women for their pleasure and for abuse and enslavement?
An
argument might be made that these women were wives per the passage in Genesis 6,
so they were not trafficked. But what constitutes a wife in Genesis? Simply
having sexual relations seems to have been all that was required. For example,
Isaac took Rebekkah in his mother's tent, and she was then his wife. (Genesis
24:67, KJV) This means even a trafficked or a raped woman could be defined
as a "wife." The congruity between having sex and it being seen as a marriage
between the couple can be seen in Deuteronomy. "If a man happens to meet a
virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered,
he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman,
for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives."
(Deuteronomy 22:28-29) Thus it is possible that those fallen angels who
sexually took human women could be perversely described as taking wives.
Those
pagans who worshipped lusty gods who preyed on human women found them to be examples
for their own behavior. The famous "Rape of the Sabine Women" when Romans,
wanting wives, raided the Sabines and took their women for their own is only
one of many examples. Even in the Bible, in the book of Judges, after the tribe
of Benjamin was decimated for its evil sexual assault on a woman, resulting in
her death, the other tribes to keep the Benjamites from dying out arranged for
them to kidnap young women from other tribes. Whether Sabines or Israelites,
the wishes of the women were of little importance.
Those
pagan gods or fallen angels if you will, no longer dwell on Olympus or in
Valhalla. Instead, they are in royal families, oligarchs, prime ministers, rulers
of all sorts who place little value on women except as a commodity to be
trafficked among themselves or to those humans who they wish to manipulate. To
ensure that such traffic continues uninterrupted, they are willing to pervert
courts, law enforcement, and the will of the people, and if necessary they will
redirect every dollar, euro, crypto coin, etcetera to that end. The cries of
the hungry, the sick, the disabled, the homeless, the unemployed, and the
foreigner mean nothing to them so long as they can continue to feed their
sexual addiction, treating the women only as a commodity, and they will kill
those who stand in the way of such trafficking, especially those able to
testify against them in case the courts cannot be bought. This sickness will
only grow worse with time until it is as it was in the time of Noah. Jesus
pointed out how bad thigs would become, and they even killed him.
But
there is one truth they cannot avoid. The fallen angels survived the flood to continue
to pursue their evil, but evil will not manage to rise again. (Nahum
1:9) God's compassion and mercy spared the fallen angels the first time, and
they only increased their capacity for evil, and their ability to destroy
everything. They not only rape women. They rape the environment, the economy,
the hope of humanity. They bring darkness instead of light, not accepting what their
end will be. They know their time is short. (Revelation
12:12) Their purpose is to sweep as many as possible into oblivion with
them. Though once there, neither they nor those they deceived will have any
awareness of the success or failure of that mission. It is all such a waste.
All of earth will become a charnel house. There will be no escape on that day. "Woe
to you who long for the day of the Lord! Why do you long for the day of the
Lord? That day will be darkness, not light. It will be as though a man fled
from a lion only to meet a bear, as though he entered his house and rested his
hand on the wall only to have a snake bite him." (Amos 5:18-19)
But those
who do not give themselves to the darkness will find salvation. Even those who
may have previously done evil but turned from that dark path to God's light.
God, through the prophet Ezekiel has told us, "And if I say to a wicked person,
'You will surely die,' but they then turn away from their sin and do what is
just and righ--if they give back what they took in pledge for a loan, return
what they have stolen, follow the decrees that give life, and do no evil--that
person will surely live; they will not die. None of the sins that person has
committed will be remembered against them. They have done what is just and
right; they will surely live." (Ezekiel 33:14-16)
This is
why the apostle Peter could stand up at Pentecost and tell the people to
repent. (Acts
2:38) "'As surely as I live,' declares the Sovereign Lord, 'I take no
pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways
and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die?'" (Ezekiel 33:11)
While it can seem that everything is headed into darkness, some are headed into
the light. If it were not so, Jesus' return to claim his people would make no sense.
That is why evil is working so hard to destroy everything. They do not want
Jesus to return, so they are more than happy to make it a non sequitur--to remove any reason for
him to return. But God is omniscient, knowing how it all ends up. That is why
he is the Alpha and Omega--the beginning and the end. And he is light not
darkness. The fallen reject light, but darkness has no power to overcome light.
Even the smallest light can penetrate the deepest darkness. And the battles
that the fallen would bring our way? "The Lord will fight for you; you need
only to be still." (Exodus 14:14)