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Gen 5:1-32

The people of the Most Ancient Church were characterized by a genius which has not been possessed by any of the succeeding churches. With the members of the Antediluvian church, the will and the understanding were immediately conjoined; and because of this they enjoyed a state of perception, and from perception, they had intuition, and immediately comprehended the highest forms of the Divine truth without undergoing the processes of reasoning about them. Good, from the Lord, entering their wills, flowed directly into their understandings, and became in their understandings, truths from good to guide them in all the wise and innocent ways of life.

This exalted celestial state was not suddenly destroyed. The decline was very gradual; but the loss of perception was eventually effected; for evils of life ultimately closed all the inward channels of their souls to the Divine influx. This left them in utter spiritual darkness; and as the successive generations of that church came, each was more and more infixed in evil until the whole Adamic race was involved in the most dreadful forms of wickedness. Good and truth were successively shut out of the mind of the church; both will and understanding were closed to heaven. What could result from this inner closure of the mind but the inrush of all sorts of evil and false persuasions? These persuasions were confirmed as good and true things; and from them, the fallen church, was unwilling to recede.

Thus we read: "The wickedness of man was great in the earth, and every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." Everything that entered the ideas of these fallen people, was turned into lust by their corrupt wills. Their wills and understandings acted as one faculty. In whatever direction their wills turned, their understandings followed. Thus when they came to love what was evil, they were, by their very mental structure, compelled to think what was false.

Good and truth could not be stored as remains in their minds. When they flowed in, they were profaned, and could not be held as a separated plane for the subsequent work of regeneration.

The great miracle of the separation of the understanding from the will, thereby making it capable of an elevation above the cupidities of the fallen will, had not at this point, in the history of the Most Ancient people, been effected. Thus with the last posterity of the Most Ancient church, there followed the most dreadful states of evils and falsities. This appalling state is thus portrayed: "It came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose." What does this mean? Literally understood, the whole narrative is unsatisfactory. But the Lord's Word is spirit and life; and it is only as we see here a Divine parable of the deep corruptions of the Antediluvian race that we begin to find the instruction the narrative was intended to convey.

The multiplication of men was the increase of the corruptions of the Adamic race; and the multiplication of men on the face of the earth is the parable way of stating the wide extent of this corruption in the church. The face of the ground is its surface, and this stands for the visible aspects of the church, as they exist in the lives of men.

The people of the church had abandoned the guidance of the Lord; they had turned to their own evil loves and ways. Their wills and understandings were united in evil; and daughters, not sons, were born unto them. The daughters born unto them were the dreadful lusts which they originated. The daughters of Zion and Jerusalem, spoken of so frequently in the Lord's Word, represent the genuine affections for goodness and truth in the church; but the daughters of Babylon, Philistia and Moab symbolize the evil affections and lusts of the depraved heart of man. Now, as daughters stand for affections which belong to the will, so sons stand for the thoughts which belong to the understanding. In this narrative, by the sons of God are meant the truths of doctrine which still remained, at this period, among this last posterity of the Most Ancient church. These doctrinal truths had descended to them from remote and better posterities of the church. They had not been wholly dissipated.

Now, we see the meaning. These sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair. This means that the remaining truths of doctrine that had come down to this posterity through the long line of the Cainites and Sethites in the church were drawn down to the level of the lusts that had grown up in the wicked hearts of these people and were so perverted as to favor those lusts. Then the final step was taken; the awful deed was done. "They took to them wives of all which they chose." Think of what this means. When the human mind turns away from the Lord's way of good life to the devil's way of evil life, it undergoes a marvelous change both in its will and in its understanding. The thing it loves supremely it thinks about continually and all the knowledge stored in the mind is brought down and over to serve and to favor the thing that is loved. This is the way men confirm and infix evil loves in themselves. If any truth is too powerful to lend itself or to be lent to favor the chosen evil, it is cast out of the mind and soon forgotten, while all others are drawn into favor with the ruling lusts and made to look upon them as fair and good.

So it was with this last posterity of the Most Ancient church. The doctrinal truths, which still lingered among men, were drawn down and conjoined to the lusts of their hearts. They took them wives of the daughters of men. Here was the infernal marriage - a will steeped in evil married to an understanding corrupted by falsity.

What could result from this infernal marriage but gigantic evils and falsities of life? Here we see the meaning of the giants in the Genesis allegory. The mind has dimensions as well as the body. When a man excludes God, revelation and the church from his mind, he grows mighty big in his own intellectual conceit. He regards his infidelistic bombast as possessing gigantic proportions; and the only bigness he fails to see is the bigness of the fool he is. "The fool hath said in his heart there is no God." Only the other day one of our atheistic writers penned these words: "The time has come when "belief in the existence of God is confined to men of small culture and low mentality." Yes, evil puffs men up in their own esteem. They swell up under the imaginary importance of their insane phantasies. This is the inevitable result of evil confirmed in the life.

Now, this condition became universal with the people treated of in this narrative. These Antediluvian giants are called "mighty men which were of old, men of renown.'' This expresses the might and power of the self love which they developed. How mighty this love is in every endeavor it makes to attain its end! Self love is a principle that seeks its own ends; and it is mighty to bring persons and things into a state of servitude to itself. Its friends are those whom it is able to use; and its enemies are those who stand in its way. And these giants were of old. These selfish loves were a long time growing. They dated back to the disobedience in Eden, They had been cumulative. Now, they reached the full measure of their iniquity and attained a degree of degradation that left men without even the desire for anything better. The flowing in of evil drove all goodness out of their hearts; and with the loss of goodness, all perceptions of truth perished. Their minds were given over to abominable persuasions - to deadly phantasies. All flesh had corrupted itself. This last posterity of the original Adamic church perished by spiritual, yea by physical suffocation; and that is why the end of the Most Ancient Church is told under the form of the story of a flood which innundated and suffocated all flesh. The new or Ancient church, which succeeded the Adamic church, was formed among those who had never been a real part of the Most Ancient church.