Heavenly Beings Can Appear in Human Form, and They Are Still Not the Sons of God of Genesis 6

Those who hold the angel view press one objection harder than any other. Heavenly beings appeared in human form, and they ate and drank. If so, could they not also have married human women? This objection deserves a serious answer, because Scripture really does record such scenes. So we must first look honestly at what Scripture says, and then at what it does not say.

Genesis 18:1-2 And the LORD appeared to him by the terebinths of Mamre, as he was sitting at the opening of the tent in the heat of the day. And he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, three men were standing over against him; and he saw, and ran to meet them from the opening of the tent, and bowed himself to the earth,

Genesis 18:8 And he took curd and milk, and the son of the herd which he had prepared, and set it before them; and he was standing by them under the tree, and they ate.

The LORD came in the form of a man and ate the meal Abraham set before Him. Of the man with whom Jacob wrestled all night (“a man wrestled with him,” Genesis 32:25), Jacob said, “I have seen God face to face, and my soul (nephesh) was delivered” (Genesis 32:31). At Sinai the nobles of Israel “beheld God, and they ate and drank” (Exodus 24:11). God is spirit (John 4:24), and He appears to people in whatever form He wills, whenever He wills, and even eats with them. This is His sovereign freedom, and Scripture records it openly. (In many English Bibles, Genesis 32:25 and 32:31 are numbered 32:24 and 32:30.)

Genesis 19:3 And he pressed upon them greatly, and they turned aside to him and came into his house; and he made for them a feast, and baked unleavened bread, and they ate.

The two angels who came to Sodom also arrived in human form and ate. Yet what happened that same night points away from the angel view. When the men of Sodom surrounded the house and demanded, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, that we may know them” (Genesis 19:5), the angels pulled Lot inside, shut the door, and struck the men at the door with blindness (Genesis 19:10-11). Far from mingling with human beings, the angels in human form prevented that very thing.

When angels took on a human body for a time, for a particular task, it was not something they did by their own power. God did it, just as He once made a donkey speak with a human voice.

Numbers 22:28 And the LORD opened the mouth of the she-donkey, and she said to Balaam, “What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three times?”

The donkey did not speak because speech was in its nature. It spoke because “The LORD opened the mouth of the she-donkey” (Numbers 22:28). In the same way, when angels came in human form and ate, it was God who brought it about for His purpose. This scene gives no ground for saying that angels can take on bodies at will and marry.

Scripture records angels eating. It never records a heavenly being marrying a human or fathering a child, anywhere in its sixty-six books. Yeshua said, “in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels of God in heaven” (Matthew 22:30). He compared the resurrected, who do not marry, to the angels of heaven, which means that the angels of heaven do not marry. The point is not whether angels can have a body. The point is that angels stand outside the order of marriage altogether.

How, then, do fallen spirits work in the human world? From the Old Testament to the New, Scripture shows the same pattern. They do not become husbands. They enter a person who is empty of the Spirit of God and use that person as an instrument.

Matthew 12:43-45 Now when the unclean spirit goes out from a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says: ‘I will return to my house from which I came,’ and coming it finds it unoccupied, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and takes along with itself seven other spirits more evil than itself, and entering in they dwell there, and the last state of that person becomes worse than the first — so will it also be with this evil generation.”

“Unoccupied” (Matthew 12:44). The unclean spirit makes its home in a person who is empty. When the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul, “an evil spirit from the LORD troubled him” (1 Samuel 16:14). The demons called Legion spoke through the mouth of one man (Mark 5:9). When the seven sons of Sceva (Acts 19:14) tried to cast out an evil spirit, “the man, in whom was the evil spirit, leaped on them and subdued all of them and overpowered them” (Acts 19:16). His body had become the spirit’s instrument. And “Satan entered into Judas” (Luke 22:3).

Lay this pattern beside Genesis 6 and the picture becomes clear. Suppose that in those days evil spirits stirred up and used people who had turned away from God and become like an unoccupied house (Matthew 12:44). Even then, the ones who “saw the daughters of man, that they were good; and they took for themselves women of all whom they chose” (Genesis 6:2), and the ones who fathered children, were men with bodies. That is why it was men who were judged. It matches the words “he also is flesh (basar)” (Genesis 6:3) exactly.

The most decisive test is the language of Scripture itself. Gather the names Scripture gives to fallen angels and evil spirits, and this is what you find:

Not one of these names is “son of God.” In fact Scripture gives such beings a family name on the other side. The tares are “the sons of the evil one” (Matthew 13:38). Those who resist the truth are told, “You are of your father the devil” (John 8:44), and they are called “the children of the devil” (1 John 3:10). And every one of those so named is a human being, not an angel.

Even to the angels who never fell, God never said, “You are my Son.”

Hebrews 1:5 For to which of the angels did He ever say, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you”? And again, “I will be to him a Father, and he shall be to me a Son”?

How much less would Scripture call angels who rebelled against God “the sons of God.” Job 1:6 keeps this distinction too. “The sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD,” and then, separately, “Satan also came among them” (Job 1:6). Satan is not counted as one of the sons of God.

Some who hold the angel view say that the Old Testament never calls human beings “sons of God.” Yet from the Torah of Moses through the prophets and the Psalms, the Old Testament calls those in covenant with God His sons and His children.

Those who hold the angel view go one step further. The Old Testament may call the covenant people God’s sons, they say, but the exact form in which “sons of” is joined directly to a word for God, bnei ha-Elohim (“the sons of God,” Genesis 6:2; Job 1:6) or bnei elim (“sons of mighty ones,” Psalm 29:1; Psalm 89:7, which is 89:6 in many English Bibles), is used only of heavenly beings.

Yet that very form is used of human beings. Hosea 2:1 (1:10 in many English Bibles) says of the children of Israel, “it shall be said to them, ‘Sons of the living God’” (Hosea 2:1). In Hebrew this is bnei El chai: “sons of” joined directly to El, a word for God, the same construction as bnei ha-Elohim in Genesis 6:2. And the ones who receive that name here are plainly human beings, the covenant people. Moses himself wrote to the covenant people, “You are sons to the LORD your God” (Deuteronomy 14:1). It is natural and consistent, then, that in Genesis 6:2 the same Moses should use the title “the sons of God” for the line among whom “it was begun to call upon the name of the LORD” (Genesis 4:26).

Yeshua’s words about the resurrection set the difference between angels and the sons of God side by side in a single sentence.

Luke 20:36 for they cannot even die anymore, because they are like angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.

The risen saints are “like angels” (Luke 20:36) in that they no longer die and do not marry. But the name “sons of God” (Luke 20:36, Greek huioi theou) belongs not to the angels but to the “sons of the resurrection” (Luke 20:36), that is, to redeemed human beings. To be like the angels is one thing. To be called a son of God is another.

Those who favor the angel view have a reply here as well, and it deserves a hearing. These angels, they say, were called “sons of God” because God had created them and they had not yet fallen, and it was this very marriage that made them fall. But that explanation cannot stand beside two texts.

• Genesis 6 calls them “the sons of God” at the very moment of the sin, when they “saw the daughters of man, that they were good; and they took for themselves women of all whom they chose” (Genesis 6:2), and it still calls them by that name after the children are born (Genesis 6:4). If it were a name they held only before they fell, Scripture could not use it in the very scene of their sin.
• Hebrews asks, “to which of the angels did He ever say, ‘You are my Son’?” (Hebrews 1:5). This verse sets God’s only Son over against the angels; that is its first purpose. Yet the contrast holds only because Scripture never gives the title “son” to any angel. In Scripture that title belongs to people who belong to God, and in the end to those who become sons through the Son, Yeshua.

In sum, our case rests on two grounds. First, Scripture never once calls fallen angels “the sons of God.” Second, the flood account of Genesis 6 through 8 contains not a single word of judgment on angels. From first to last, those judged were man and all flesh.