Troublesome Topic: DID ENOCH TRY TO CHANGE GOD’S MIND ABOUT THE NEPHILIM?

Lesson 8 of 11

1 Enoch teaches that the Nephilim were punished by God for their disobedience in marrying female humans, and He imprisoned them under the earth. But they appealed their sentence and asked Enoch to intercede with God for them (page 337). Enoch’s appeal was denied by God and Enoch had to go to the Nephilim in prison and give them the bad news. Michael Heiser fully accepts this story.

Because Jesus went to the underworld and preached to those in prison there, just like Enoch supposedly had gone to the underworld, Michael Heiser calls Jesus “the second Enoch” just as Paul calls Him “the second Adam.”

I am unclear about one aspect of this story. If God punished the Nephilim for having children with human women before the flood, and if that punishment included shutting them up in prison, how would it be possible for the spirits of the Nephilim to be given dominion over the nations at Babel? Michael Heiser is careful not to say it was the Nephilim that were given control over the nations, but it is implied. What’s more, in the first section of 1 Enoch, called The Book of Watchers, especially chapter 15, it says that the Nephilim were indeed among the spirits who were given rulership over the nations.

Michael Heiser relies heavily on 1 Enoch and accepts almost everything it says. Does he accept chapter 15? If so, he has contradicted himself, not by what he said, but by being so accepting of the book called 1 Enoch.

WHY?

Why would a righteous man like Enoch agree to mediate on behalf of wicked “angels” (we should call them demons) who rebelled against God? Did he think God was wrong in punishing them or that the imprisonment was too harsh?

WHAT DOES THIS TELL US ABOUT GOD?

If this story were true, what would it indicate about the nature of God and how things are handled in the spiritual realm?

Is God really open to hearing appeals once He has decided upon judgment and carried out that judgment? Is there a chance that God will change His mind and rescind the punishment?

The answers are “No! that is not the correct picture of God.” The picture of God that we are given in the Bible is that God is extremely patient before sending punishment. First, He gives every opportunity for repentance. But when God finally comes to the point of sending judgment, His judgments are final. There are no appeals. Once something was “devoted to destruction”,

that decision was final. Whatever it was, it could not be spared or repurposed; if it was devoted to destruction, it had to be destroyed. I Samuel 15:29 says, “He is not a man that he should change His mind.” The context is that God had rejected Saul as king, and even though Saul begged Samuel (as God’s representative) to forgive him and give him another chance, the punishment remained in place. God knew his heart and, we can assume, God did not see genuine repentance in Saul. To question God’s punishment is to render a judgment statement of its own on the nature of God. To do that means we think we are more intelligent and more compassionate that God Himself.

That I know of, there is no basis, no evidence, no foundation for the claims found in the book of 1 Enoch about Enoch mediating on behalf of the Nephilim. It seems to be entirely out of the blue and what’s more, it presents a different picture of God from the one we see in Scripture.

What about the times in the Bible when God did change His mind (or appears to have done so)? At first glance, Abraham and Moses were successful in changing God’s mind about pending judgment.

However, I now see those situations as tests. God wanted to know if they really understood His character. When they passed the test, He changed what He had been saying. The fact that He relinquished and did not send punishment, or that He lessoned the degree of punishment, only shows that He was not planning on punishing in the first place. If God had truly determined that punishment was necessary, nothing could change that, for He would already have exhausted all attempts to draw them back to Him and given every opportunity to repent. Such is the nature of God. No man will ever be more merciful than God.

The next lesson is DEUTERONOMY 33:2 and 32:12

Footnotes

1: "devoted"

In the Bible, there is a difference between “devoted” and “dedicated”. If a person or thing was dedicated to God, that person or thing was used exclusively for God’s glory from that point on. If a person or thing was devoted to God, it usually meant that it was devoted to destruction because God deemed destruction necessary. King Saul had the kingdom stripped from him in part because he allowed his soldiers to spare things that were “devoted to God,” (I Sam 15:21) and bring them home, ostensibly to offer them as sacrifices to God. Saul used the word “devoted” in verse 21, so he knew they should be eliminated, yet he spared them. God did not take kindly to that.