The Folly of Idolizing Power (Chester UMC)

Before I get into this week's message, I want to ask for your

prayers for something the I I did not see the news till this

morning about our strike in Iraq yesterday.

I have been following I mean I've got my job is not a full

time news person or news reader, but I've been trying to follow

the events over there since the attack by Hamas on October the

7th. I, I, I'm feeling led to address

that this is such a big and, and increasingly global thing that's

happening and I'm feeling led to speak to it from the pulpit as

part of the sermon or as, as the general theme of the sermon next

week. And I'm not quite sure how to do

that yet. So I want your prayers for me

this week. I hope that you're praying for

me every week for the sermon so that what I say is not what I

think, but what the Holy Spirit is wanting us all to to hear.

But, but particularly because this is such a hot button topic,

it's so divisive and so controversial.

And I don't know exactly what I will say if I do address it, but

I know what I will not say it. It will not be a political rant

against one party or position or country or another.

It will not be a an ideological rant.

And it will not be a religious rant, you know, condemning any

particular group or religion or anything like that.

What, what I hope to be able to say and want to be able to say

is, is where is God in all of this?

And how can people of faith on the other side of the world,

how, how do we respond in faith to what's happening and what's

going on? I, I make it a point and I, I

work very hard because, you know, there are no Democrats in

heaven. There are no Republicans in

heaven. There are no socialists in

heaven. There are no capitalists in

heaven. There are followers of Jesus who

are in heaven and, and I never want by what I preach to send

the message that people of any particular political or

ideological background are not welcome in the church.

And, and I want to continue that.

And, and this is, again, it's such a significant thing, I feel

the need to address it, but I want to make sure that I address

it in a way that isn't some sort of partisan political scree of

some sort. So if you could pray for me on

that, I would very much appreciate that.

And then we'll see what happens next week.

That said, we are, we are jumping into Genesis chapter 6

Genesis 6 · chapter mention

here. And I the passage I'm preaching

on is a passage I, I I never have said to myself, I'll never

preach on the 1st 8 verses in the book of Genesis, but I've

never read the first eight book verses in the book of Genesis

and gone man, I really can't wait to preach on that.

Some of the strangest stuff in the Bible in the 1st 8 verses of

the book of particularly the 1st 5 verses of Genesis chapter 6

Genesis 6 · chapter mention

and but the the the general thrust of this portion of

Scripture is the folly of idolizing power and the dangers

of idolizing power, particularly when God says quite clearly of

human beings. The Lord said my spirit will not

contend with humans forever and I left out the closing quotation

marks. That's going to bother me for

the rest of the morning. I have to fix that before I put

it on YouTube. God will not contend with humans

forever. God is patient, but God's

patience will not last forever. And I think these verses are

important for us to hear and to process and to respond to.

But the first thing we have to do is address some translation

problems. Challenges might be a better way

to put it, but there really are problems because there's some

weird stuff here, particularly depending on how you translate

and how you understand the words that we translate.

I will say again, I am not a Hebrew scholar.

I don't read Hebrew. I depend on the work that other

people have done for translation.

So I'm not Speaking of like my own work other than the work of

reading or the work that other people have done.

But there are a few phrases and words in here that that are are

notoriously difficult to translate and are some frankly

some of the hardest passages in the Bible to get accurate

translations of. And consensus on one of those is

2 times the phrase sons of God is used where where the sons of

God see the daughters of Eve or or women on the earth and they

take whoever they want to marry. And the question is, who are the

sons of God? What's happening here?

How is this best translated? The word sons is easy.

That one's no problem. It's the God part that's the

challenge. The word in Hebrew was Elohim,

and that word most of the time when it's used in the Bible

means God as we address God, God when God created the heavens and

the earth, that's Elohim. That's the word that's used.

But there are other places in the Bible where Elohim means

gods, as in Psalm chapter 8, where it says God has put us,

Psalms 8 · chapter mention

made us as human beings, a little lower than the gods, some

sort of spiritual beings, other spiritual beings that are out

there, maybe angels that are part of God's heavenly court,

other creative beings. But that word elohim, it's

plural and, and, and it, it means gods as well as God.

Even though it's plural, it means God because in Hebrew

plural sometimes is a superlative, like the most, the

strongest, the best, the highest.

And so when it's used of God himself, it's like God most high

or the God of gods or the highest God, those kinds of

things. There's a third way that it's

translated legitimately in the Old Testament, and that's in the

book of Act, or I'm sorry, in the book of Exodus, where where

we are told that in certain legal cases people are to be

brought to the Elohim for judgement.

And very clearly that's not God or gods.

Those are human judges. And so that's how it's

translated these these human beings of great authority

deciding and making legal decisions for people in conflict

within the Society of Israel. So there's three different

possibilities here, sons of God, sons of gods or sons of judges,

people of great military or not military, people of great power

and influence within the society.

And the interpretation is split on whether we should view this

as angelic beings who see women on earth and say, I got to get

me some woman wife. And they come down and they have

kids with human women and others who say, you know, how does that

work by angels or spirits? How are they going to mate with

and have children with human beings?

Doesn't work that way. That that this is intended to

represent powerful human beings, humans that are in positions of

power and authority given the rest of Genesis chapter 6 and,

Genesis 6 · chapter mention

and the story of the flood of Noah and then what we see

throughout the history of Israel.

I, I believe, and again, if you disagree with me on this, you

know, we can arm wrestle over it later.

Flip a coin if you want, but but the one's going to go to hell

for disagreeing on this translation.

But I, I find it hard to believe.

And, and there's a lot of really sort of heavyweight Christian

interpreters, everyone from Augustine to John Calvin and

John Wesley, who basically said angels can't have babies with

humans. It's just not, it doesn't work

that way. So these must be human beings,

powerful human beings that we're talking about.

I believe that's what we're talking about here.

I, I don't think this is the, the, the Nephilim that are

talked about later are some sort of bizarre Marvel Cinematic

Universe human Angel hybrids that are wandering the earth

doing amazing things as heroes. That's not what we're talking

about. We're talking about powerful

human beings that are doing some very, very bad things in the

world. That's the first one.

The second one is heroes, which, and, and again, some

translations you get heroes, some you get mighty ones.

Mighty ones is really, I think a better translation.

Heroes in our culture and our context has a very positive

connotation. You've got heroes and you've got

villains, you've got superheroes and super villains and, and

heroes. We generally think of if they're

a hero, they're on the side of good and right.

The Hebrew word is morally neutral.

It's used, it's the word is used of God, God's acting as in, in

mighty ways. It's used of good people in the

Old Testament and of bad people in the Old Testament.

So what we've got is sons of God, these Nephilim and their

children are are doing or who have a great deal of might and

power in the world. Don't think of them as heroes.

Think of these are powerful people that are also mighty

people. They've got political power and

influence and they've got great might to exercise that power and

influence. The third one is where it's the

verse that I used on the opening slide.

God, the Lord says my spirit will not contend with humans

forever. Word contend can also be

legitimately translated as abide and on most translations have it

as abide it again, it's maybe like 6040 split on the best way

to translate that at the at the end of the day, I only bring

that one up because if you're following along in your own

Bibles and you have a different word so you know why the word

can mean abide. It can mean content.

It can meet, stay with or fight or wrestle against.

Either way, the effect is the same.

God says my spirit is not going to deal with humans forever, not

going to stand around and stay with humans while they're doing

awful evil things forever, or I'm not going to continue to

wrestle with them while they want to do evil things and I'm

trying to get them to do good things forever.

The end of the day, the point is, is there, that clock is

ticking. There is a time limit on God's

patience with human beings and the third one is the 120 years

where God says my spirit will not contend with or abide with

humans forever. I will set a limit to their

days, 120 years. Some folks say that God

established 120 years old as the oldest that human beings can get

from this point forward. And, and if you read the, the

generations of, of humans in Genesis chapter 5, you hear

Genesis 5 · chapter mention

about people living 400 years, 500 years, 600 years, 900 years.

And God's saying no more, 120 years is where we're going to

stop. The problem with that is you

still have people living well past 120 years even after the

flood. I think and, and, and again,

what many interpreters say on this is that that this is God's

countdown to the flood. At the point where God makes

this pronouncement, he's like 120 years and, and, and the

flood will come and, and this is the countdown.

And that's the time that Noah spent building the ark during

that 120 years. So just wanted to touch on those

things. I don't want to dwell on them

all, but those are real, real challenges here.

And, and it's really hard. There is no conclusive

interpretation to any of those things.

But I think as we are engaging this from where we're sitting in

Chester, OH, Meigs County, Ohio, and 21st century United States

of America, that that it's more important for us to see how do

we react when people with great power and influence and might

are behaving badly in our culture than for us to wrestle

with what do we do with Angel human hybrids?

OK, I, I, I think that's less relevant to our present context.

So we're going to take it in that score today and in that

direction. The other thing before I do

that, because no, I'm not, I'm not going to do that because

I've spent enough time on that already.

What is the evil God? Clearly there's a lot of evil

that's going on here. And, and what's important for

us, another important thing in this passage is what is the evil

that God is identifying? Why is God regretting making

human beings? What has gone so horribly wrong

that God regrets? Some translations will say

repents of making human beings and has decided to wipe all

human beings except Noah and his family off the face of the earth

and almost all of the animals off the face of the earth.

What has happened? What has gone so very wrong?

What is the specific things or are there specific things that

God has identified and they are indeed identified in here.

We're going to look at a couple of different verses here,

Genesis chapter or six chapter that Jennifer Genesis chapter 6

Genesis 6 · chapter mention

verse five. Wow, the Lord saw how great the

wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that

every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was

only evil all the time. Folks, that's as bad as it gets.

I've been around some pretty rough people.

I've been around some people that have done some pretty bad

things in my life. And even those people, and I

don't, I obviously haven't met everyone in the world, but

there's not a single one of those people that I can say

every inclination and thought of their heart was always evil all

the time. Things have gone really off the

rails and this, this generation, we talked last week a little bit

about how the legacy of sin and we pass that on to our kids and

it can multiply and grow through the generations.

And this is what's happened. So that now with every human

being outside of Noah and his family, everything they do,

every thought of their heart is evil.

It's wrong. There's no hope of return from

that. There's no point.

There's no leverage. There's no room to step in and

say, let's change the direction. God says I'm not I'm done.

I'm done abiding with you. I'm done wrestling with you on

this. I'm done.

And, and, and it's not a question of waiting for the next

generation because the next generation is just going to

learn from their parents how to have evil and do evil with every

breath that they take. But that's still general.

It's we don't get any specifics. It's still general.

Let's look at a little bit further on in the passage in

chapter 6 here, verses 11 to 13. Now the earth was corrupt in

God's sight and was full of violence.

God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people

on the earth had corrupted their ways.

So God said to Noah, I'm going to put an end to all the people,

for the earth is filled with violence.

The corruption, the evil that God identifies specifically is

violence. This is the legacy of Cain.

This is the legacy of I want to get honor and glory on my own

terms, in my own way, by stomping on my rivals and my

enemies to elevate myself. That he passed on to his kids

and his grandkids and his great grandkids.

And we saw a Lamech proudly boasting to his wives about how

he killed someone just for injuring him.

The violence just continued. That legacy of violence grew.

I'm not saying that's the only evil that was going on.

If your thoughts and inclinations of the every human

heart is always evil all the time.

There was lots of other stuff going on.

But the thing that God identifies, the specific thing

that God identifies, is the multiplication of violence.

God had created human beings for community, for connection, for

relationships of love and trust, to be ezers to each other.

That word back when, when, when when God was looking for a

companion for Adam and he couldn't find anyone suitable.

He couldn't find an ezer, a partner, an indispensable

partner for Adam until he made Eve.

But that's what God was looking for.

That's what God intended, that human beings live in in, in

cooperation and interdependence and love, care and concern for

one another. And it has gone a complete 180.

And all of these humans. And if you do the math and look

at birth rates, and if you assume they're the same and you

count out the years between, you know, Adam and Eve and the

flood, there could legitimately be billions of people on the

earth by this time. We don't know.

We don't know. That's the upper end with all of

these people. And all they want to do is

fight. All they do want to do is kill.

All they do want to do is destroy, to get their own, to

get their own. There's one more in 6-2.

The sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were

beautiful, and they married any of them that they chose.

This is the other specific thing.

We cannot look at this through 21st century romantic eyes.

Ah, now they get to marry whoever they want.

If you love each other, you can get married.

This is the powerful human men saying, I get to pick any woman

I want, period. And as many women as I want,

period, they get to choose. So there is violence and there

is exploitation of the weak and vulnerable by the powerful and

the mighty, those in authority taking what they want, taking

who they want to be their own. We see this played out later on

in the nation of Israel itself in the story of David and

Bathsheba where he looked out a window and he saw his friend's

wife and he said, I want her. And he took her.

And everyone said he's the king. He gets to do what he wants.

He gets to do what he wants. And God said that's not good.

We'll talk about David and Bathsheba more when we get there

in this walk through the Bible. But the image we get here on the

earth before the flood in Genesis is that's just how

everyone was behaving. The people in power exploited

and abused and abused those with less power than them all the way

down the line, all the way down the line.

And God said no more. This is not what I created,

Eden, and you've turned it into hell on earth.

I will not allow this to continue.

So God says I'm hitting the reset button.

We're starting over. I'm going to wipe the slate

clean. And that meant killing every

man, woman and child except for Noah and his family.

The stakes are serious and the stakes are high in all of this.

The corrupt and the violent exploit.

The weak and the vulnerable and the powerful.

The corrupt and violent exploit. OK, I got my brain is, I don't

know what's going on with my brain today, but I can really

read this sentence. I wrote it, I should be able to

read it. The corrupt and violent

exploitation of the weak and vulnerable by the powerful

there, That's what I'm trying to say.

The corrupt and violent exploitation of the weak and

vulnerable by the powerful as a pervasive thing within society.

That is why God destroyed by the flood the people that he now

regretted having made, because they took to Eden and turned it

into hell on earth. And that hell on earth is a

society in which the powerful in their corruption, exploit the

weak and the vulnerable. What can we do?

What can we do? Obviously we can't do anything

about the flood long time ago, but I I think you got to be

blind not to see in our world now echoes of that world before

the flood. Not that the thoughts and

inclinations of every human heart is always evil all the

time, but there's certainly ample exploitation of the

powerful and the mighty using their positions of power and

strength and privilege and position and status to exploit

the weak and the vulnerable for their own good.

That's easy to see in this world.

And you can see it at every level from interpersonal level,

family level, all the way up to governments and, and, and

international multi, you know, national corporations where the

powerful, where that that old slogan of might makes right gets

lived out. And I know it's right and I know

it's OK and I'm going to do it because I can do it.

And if you can't stop me, I don't care what you have to

think. So what can we do in the face of

that? We know, we know that there are

people out there and there are organizations out there that are

far more powerful, have far more might than than than we can

imagine. And, and it's you can see it,

one of the easiest places to see it is in the court system.

You understand that there is a very, there is a completely

different set of laws and rules for people that are wealthy than

for people that are in poverty. For a very wealthy person, a

fine is not a punishment. You just pay it and you keep

doing what you're going to do. You can hire lawyers, you can

bribe judges, you can Curry favor with folks that can grant

pardons, and you can do what you want.

And that's just one example. So what can we do?

We're not people of great status and power and influence in the

world. If you are, if there's a secret

billionaire in the room, come talk to me later.

Want to buy the school building across the road?

We'll talk. But I'm assuming we don't have

any secret billionaires in the room.

What can we do? What can we do we can do.

One of the things we can do is we can be aware of idolizing

power. Beware of idolizing power.

That's what was happening to the psalmist in Psalm 73 that Ray

Ann LED earlier. The person writing that Psalm,

looking out into the world and seeing that the powerful, the

wealthy, the influential, they got the best of everything.

They got the best food, they got the best living arrangements,

they got the best status. They had the best health.

Everything was going well for them.

Nothing bad ever happened to them.

And if anything bad did happen to them, they had the power and

the wealth to deal with it, to insulate themselves.

And on top of that, they were scoffing God and mocking God and

saying God doesn't care, God doesn't know, God's not going to

stop me. And they were falling into this

mind of idolizing that power. Where is God?

God isn't stopping. God isn't preventing.

God is letting the bad people run roughshod over the weak and

the vulnerable and seems to be doing nothing about it.

Where is God and has my faithfulness to God?

The psalmist was writing. I've been trying to do things

the right way, I've been trying to live the right way, and I've

gotten nothing but grief and suffering for it.

Have I been wrong the whole time?

And he's agonizing with this question.

And this is the risk. This is the risk that we run

when we idolize power and we sit back and think, you know, we

could do something about this if we just had more money, if we

just had more influence, if we just had more power, if we just

had access to position, if we could just get the powerful

people to listen to us. Because what that always leads

to is taking the actions to pursue power or Curry favor with

the powerful. And suddenly we are more

concerned about what the powerful people think and what

they do and what they will bless and honor and recognize than we

are with what God thinks. We we become more obsessed with

with what how we can Curry favor with them than live in the favor

of God. It's easy.

Our culture is built around idolizing power, whether it's

sports celebrities or movie celebrities or business

celebrities or political celebrities.

The people on constantly on the news feeds and on the news

programs, and I almost said newspapers, but not so much.

I think they're still out there. Those are the folks, the people

in power. They get the attention I just

had. I could just make a difference.

If I could be like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or or or or or this

politician or that politician, then I could make a difference

in the world that's idolizing power.

That was Cain's mistake. Cain wanted the power.

He wanted the glory, and he had his own way to get it.

And he said, I don't really care what God thinks.

I'm going to do what I'm going to do to get what I can get.

When we idolize power, we ultimately go down the path of

corrupt exploitation of the weak.

And, and, and it might not be on the same scale as some of the

most powerful people in the world, but I know, I know, I've

read people in this region itself.

They've got a little bit of power and they use it brutally

over the people that are weaker and more vulnerable, whether

it's their kids or their spouses or other folks in the community.

We can be aware of idolizing power and you can pursue and

maintain righteousness in your own life.

That's what the psalmist concluded.

The psalmist, after going all of these things, saying all of the

stuff is going on, the psalmist said, you know what?

If I had actually said those things, I've been thinking this.

I've been pondering if I'd said it out loud, if I'd started

speaking this into the community, I would have been a

traitor to my own people. I would have been inviting them

to idolize power too. And so the psalmist state, I'm

going to stay faithful to God no matter what.

We can pursue righteousness in our own lives.

That's what Noah did. Noah couldn't change.

He didn't change the world. He had no power.

He had no capacity to change the world to prevent the flood.

But he he maintained righteousness in his own life.

And let's remember, righteousness is not about

following a set of rules. Righteousness is about our

relationships and particularly love within our relationships.

The key to righteousness? Loving God with all our heart,

soul, mind and strength, loving our neighbor as ourselves.

We can pursue that instead of pursuing power.

We can seek the favor of God and the glory of God instead of the

favor of the rich and powerful and the glory that comes from

wealth and power. We can do that and we can do it

in situations where where we have little power relative to

the forces that are around us. One of the greatest, you know,

in terms of modern civilizations that were, as you know, close to

the the global situation in the world before the flood.

You got to look at Nazi Germany, right?

I mean, that's an easy low hanging fruit.

Talk about violence and exploitation of the weak by the

powerful. And yet there's story after

story after story of people in that situation who insisted and

persisted in pursuing righteousness in their

relationships with others. I think people like Corey

Tenboon, who lived in the Netherlands, and she and her

family hid Jews in their house for as long as they could until

they were caught, and then they were sent to prison by the

Nazis. And everyone in her family

except Corey died in the prison. You got folks like Oskar

Schindler. If you haven't seen the movie

Schindler's List in a while, go ahead and watch it again.

Oskar Schindler, another true story here was a man who who had

a great deal of power and wealth.

In some respects, he was a businessman.

He was a wealthy businessman. And in his original intention

was to make a lot of money on this war.

And then he saw what was being done to the Jews.

And instead, he used his position in business and he used

his wealth there to protect and defend as many Jews as he could.

In the end, he was declared a war criminal because he was

pretending to help the Nazis while he was protecting the

Jews. You've got other folks like Meet

Geese. She was a secretary, just a

secretary to Otto Frank. They had a room that no one knew

about, and they hit Anne Frank and her family in there as long

as they could until they were discovered.

She used what she could to protect the weak and the

vulnerable instead of exploiting the weak and the vulnerable.

There was another person I just recently learned of, and I'm

going to say their name wrong. And, and forgive me, it's a

oddly, oddly enough, in this context, a Japanese person.

Chiyune Siguhara Sugihara. Yeah.

Chiyune Sugihara. He was Japanese, but he was a

diplomat working in Lithuania as the Nazis were spreading and

expanding. And in 1940 he started writing

out transit visas for Jews and Lithuania so they could get out

of the country. And in the space of a few months

he wrote 2 to 3000 visas against the express instructions of his

superiors. That allowed because some of

those visas were families for as many as 6000 Jewish people to

escape Germany through Japan. I don't know how that worked.

I think they had to go through the Soviet Union. 1st, a

Japanese dis diplomat living in Lithuania using his position to

protect and shelter and care for the weak and the vulnerable

rather than exploiting them and using them as a stepping stone.

Of course it's not just Nazi Germany, it's not just folks

protecting Jews that are great examples of this.

This is another name I'm going to have a hard time saying.

Narg Nargis Mohammadi. Nargis Mohammadi.

This is a more contemporary person.

She's still alive today. She's in prison in Iran.

She received the Nobel Priest Prize while she was in prison in

Iran. She spent a huge portion of her

life in prison in Iran because she's been advocating very

vocally for the rights of women, for the end of torture against

the abuse of prisoners. While she was in prison, she

organized White Wednesdays. I don't know why they called him

White Wednesdays, but it was a time in prison where they would

protest the restrictive, destructive rules limiting the

status and the role of women in that culture.

She's been tortured. She's been beaten.

She's been held in isolation. She's continued to do this in

spite of severe physical problems and health problems

that she has, including lung problems and partial paralysis.

And she she was not allowed by the Islamic Republic of Iran to

actually receive the Nobel Prize while she was in prison, but

family members living in exile received it for her.

What? She's a prisoner?

What a journalist prisoner? What status does she have?

What can she do compared to the mighty and the powerful in that

government? She has no power.

She has no strength. But she uses the power.

She uses the position she has to protect and defend and guard as

much as she is able the weak and the vulnerable, rather than

joining in the exploitation to Curry favor with the powerful.

That's what we can do. That's what we can do.

We can say yes to God's urgent call to repent, to look at and

examine our own lives. Where, where am I?

Where am I living and behaving and talking and speaking and

acting in ways that that participate in the exploitation

of the weak and the vulnerable? And how can I step away from

that? How can I hear this urgent call?

Because God says I I won't do this forever.

I'm not going to be patient forever.

I'm not going to try to wrestle you into this forever.

I'm not going to stay with you through this forever.

Decide for me now. Follow God now into God's way of

doing things. And God's way of doing things

doesn't idolize power. God's way of doing things says I

have to find all the power I need in God himself and the Holy

Spirit who gives us power. God's way of doing things says,

I'm not going to seek glory and status from human beings.

I'm going to receive glory and status from God, and I'm going

to use whatever status God gives me to guard and protect and

defend and care for the weak and the vulnerable around me,

whoever they may be and wherever they may be.

That's a far greater way to live than to idolize power in Jesus

name. Amen.

Amen.