Genesis 6 and Theodicy

"our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world's rulers of the darkness of this age, and against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places" (Ephesians 6:12). That sentence only carries its full weight once evil is understood as operating on more than one front — and Genesis 6 is part of what supplies that fuller picture.
Taking the Genesis 6 rebellion seriously as a real supernatural event, rather than reading it away as a symbol for something merely human, gives a richer and more textured account of how evil actually operates in the world — not replacing the Genesis 3 account of human sin, but supplementing it with a second, distinct front in the same larger conflict. This matters for a full accounting of evil because it helps explain the kind of evil that seems to exceed what ordinary human free will alone could produce: entrenched, strangely organized patterns of violence, oppression, and corrupted knowledge that Scripture elsewhere attributes to more than merely human causes. The whole trajectory from Eden through the flood to Babel depicts a world under assault from multiple directions at once — a single human choice in a garden, a collective supernatural rebellion before the flood, and a united human defiance at Babel — each widening the wound the one before it left open.
This is exactly why Christ's victory is described in such total terms: "having stripped the principalities and the powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it" (Colossians 2:15). A conflict fought on only one front would need only a partial remedy. But because the rebellion runs on multiple fronts — Eden, Genesis 6, and Babel alike — the cross that answers it had to be, and was, correspondingly complete.