ver.: 29 April 2008.
Behold! A gathering of angels, to guide your hand to the message...
(well... maybe just to some good paragraphs...) :
Why angels? Lord knows. Many tasks have been assigned to them in Jewish and Christian tradition, in folklore and folk theology. People have been guessing at it for 4000 years, probably longer. One good way to see it is by way of the so-called "Tess theory". It's named after the angel played by Della Reese in TV's "Touched By an Angel". Tess spoke this idea many times in the series : angels are sent by God to bring the truth, especially the big truths, to specific people in critical situations. The biggest truth (the one that Jesus Christ was living, dying proof of) is that God is with us and for us, and the angel is here as a part of that. God's message can be a warning, or be a comfort in times of danger and fear. There's more going on than the careless eye can see, so an angel points it out. Since God is way too much for us to take, the messenger is sent in God's stead, like a diplomatic envoy. What happens then is between humans and God. Angels are not there to be meddling fix-its, but our helpers in responding to the truth. Angels guide us in the way God wants us to go in a specific situation, sometimes calling us to take a specific action. We can just blow them off, but people usually find themselves responding instantly with some amount of trust, comfort, or awe. Angels can celebrate and have joy, and presumably have other emotions as well. They don't negotiate unless God tells them to. They don't decay or die, since they are spiritual beings. They even pray for us, as did the angel in Zechariah (1:12). They are among the unseen in "all that is, seen and unseen" that the Nicene Creed says the Father made. They exist to praise God and bear the message and task for which God sends them. And they appear to people of all religions, even those of no religion at all, when God wants them to listen. Not all religious folks believe in angels (for instance, the Sadducees). But those who have a strong sense of spirituality usually believe angels are real, and often experience their presence.
People from many times and cultures (even those who are not Christian, Jewish, Mormon, or Moslem) insist that angels have another task : that of protecting people. The philosopher Philo described their protective role. Scripture doesn't say all that much about the role of "guardian angels". Psalm 34:7 is a good example; also the angel for each of the Asia Minor churches in Revelation. Jesus speaks of children as having their own angels. In Acts 12:15, the people at John Mark's mother's house thought their servant was seeing Peter's assigned angel at the doorway, when it was really Peter who had just escaped jail, thanks to help from an angel. Whether the jailbreaking angel really was 'assigned' to Peter (as they thought) or one assigned just to the task is not said, but they seemed to expect the angel to look like Peter. In an emergency role, angels can be like a divinely-sent 'first responder'. Thomas Aquinas insisted that God gave everyone their own guardian angel. In their protective roles, angels are in no way dainty, Precious Moments-like creampuffs. They can be the fiercest of warriors and the swiftest of rescuers, and angelic determination knows no bounds. After all, they're on a mission. From God.
Scripture shows they have another fierce task : when God passes judgement on injustice, the angels are often the ones who carry out the sentence. The usual image shows them with flaming swords, but the Bible shows how they can execute judgement in other ways. When carrying out a sentence, angels are more like a strike force than envoys. You won't find angels doing this on a Christmas card !
Then, there are the Biblical references to the "Angel Of the Lord". Some hold that to be a particular archangel who acts as God's stunt double, to avoid the damage God's full presence does to created beings. But some ancient parts of the Jewish and Christian traditions hold that this was a pious way for the writers to avoid using God's name in vain. In this view, when they said "The Angel of the Lord", they sometimes meant "God". This substitution's fine for the book of Judges. But it takes an edge off of one of the Bible's most powerful moments : Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac, where the "I" is clearly God and no angel. Perhaps it's best to view such happenings the way the prophet Hosea saw Jacob's wrestling match : Jacob was both contending with God and wrestling with the unnamed 'man' Hosea calls an angel. How? God knows.
As Christians over the years have told it, angels have their counterparts on the 'dark side' : demons. Most of what one can say about angels can be flipped around and said of demons. (Keep this in mind whenever you read about angels. It helps us to understand the Plot.) Demons, however, have no message of their own to tell, they only have lies so they can undermine God's message. Since they no longer have their natural purpose, the demons' very existence is twisted up and broken. Satan is generally pictured as peer to the archangels such as Michael and Gabriel. It is written that Satan can come disguised as an angel of light (hence the name 'Lucifer'). Demons can come pretending to be angels, but unlike angels, they try to puff you up or divert you from Jesus or Scripture. Or, a demon will whip up your doubts until they blaze like a firestorm in your head. And they seize most any opportunity to rank themselves higher.
Angels are a very different thing from 'spirit guides'. Angels don't try to run your life, they just do what they're sent to do and then fade into the background. You don't go looking for them; they'll come in God's good timing. 'Spirit guides' keep coming back, manipulating and steering, demanding attention, trying to change the person into their image. 'Spirit guides' want you to be dependent on contacting them. It's best not to mess with such phantoms, but if you have, please ask God to send them away, and find prayer partners to bear this struggle with you. Who knows, God may send a real angel to roust out the frauds.
angels, take wing to top!
Where big things are happening, angels are there. The big event of God's coming to us started off with a peasant girl from Galilee talking with the archangel Gabriel. Angel choirs abound, and an Angel Mass Choir threw a Christmas party for some scruffy shepherds when the baby Jesus was born. When Mary Magdalene peered into Jesus' tomb on that first Easter, she saw two angels, one sitting at each end where Jesus' body was laid. Just as an archangel set up the first coming of Christ, so an archangel will mark the final return of Christ.
Humans tend to get freaky when an angel shows up. We often quiver in fear or
fall down in awe. But angels themselves are not really that big a deal.
We're more important than angels are. They are servants, acting on Someone Else's authority, while we make our own decisions, act as distinct persons, and are responsible to discern God's ways by what the Lord has given us. God made us, not angels, in the image
of God. Jesus makes His followers, not angels or even archangels, into God's heirs. Angels go by what they know : they personally
live in God's great presence and receive God's command. We are made to walk not by sight, but by faith. We're told not to worship angels in
Colossians
2:18. (Indeed, any real angel will urge you
not to worship them, but to worship God.) Nor are we to pray to them, though, like all others in the divine realm, they are praying with us. The Almighty is approachable, even in heavenly glory, for the angels do it; how much more will it be so for creatures like us who bear God's image, once the Kingdom comes in full! What's much more important than us or the angel is the One for
whom the angels are acting. The author of the letter to the Hebrews (in
chapter
1) takes pains to point out that however awesome we may think angels
are, Jesus is far more important.
rise back to the heavenlies above
"Angel" in Biblical Hebrew is mal'ak . Its main meaning is "messenger". It's the same name given to the prophetic book of the last of the Prophets. That book's author has no name, just the title of Messenger. He could've been the editor who gathered the Prophetic books together so his people could remember and prepare for what was to come. Some angeliphiles think Malachi is an angel, but the book's content and its presence among the Prophets make it certain that Malachi is a human messenger, a prophet. In Islam, Mohammed is called "the prophet" and "messenger of God", but is clearly not in any way an angel.
But this raises a question : can we always tell this difference when we find 'messenger' in the Scriptural report or the traditions? Angels are definitely not humans, especially not dead humans who 'earn wings'. (This idea was not invented by Frank Capra for Clarence in "It's A Wonderful Life". Its roots go back at least as far as *The Martyrdom of Polycarp*, 1:39, early 2nd century AD.) As spirit-beings, angels don't even have sex (or at least not as we'd recognize it), though they are pictured as having gender and earth-type body forms so we can relate to them better. The ancients couldn't picture anything in the 'pure' world of heaven as being female or neuter, so they called them mostly what they felt was greatest -- male. Maybe we're beginning to get over such a narrow vision. Angels are often pictured as having feathered wings. The ancients believed the angels flew, so they portrayed it through the only means of flying they knew of : the feathered wings of a bird. I suspect this image comes in handy for angels. They don't need wings to fly (they're supernatural beings), but wings of what would be the necessary size are an awe-inspiring sight to us ground-bound material-types.
It's a fine line
between the main task of an angel and the main task of a prophet, an evangelist, or a poet or storyteller, or anyone else who brings us a divine truth that's hard for us to take. The Christmas "herald
angels" of Jesus' birth and resurrection were certainly supernatural. But sometimes it's not as clear. Their main task is to tell a truth which communicates God's will to some person(s),
leaving the results to the people who hear it and the Holy Spirit at work
among them. Since Christians are all given the charge of spreading the good
report on Jesus Christ to others who don't know or understand, then in a
way every Christian and every Christian church is a 'messenger', a
mal'ak . Not an angel in the sense of a divine
being, nor a substitute for angels, but the human bearer of good
news from God. Paul picks up this theme when He calls the Corinthian Christians
"our letter" and "a letter of Christ". One drawback
: when their plans are ruined by the news, people tend to take it out on
the messenger, and an angel can make a better getaway than a human.
It's said that ancient scholars would debate how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. The correct theoretical answer is 'all of them', but it's an imaginary question because angels aren't on the head of any pin -- except perhaps as their idea of fun, like college kids cramming into a Volkswagen Beetle. They're usually too busy doing God's work to be pinned down.
return to the angel depot
There are some writers (like Walter Wink, in his *Powers* books on institutional and societal evil; or Peter Wagner in his writings about territorial demons) who have done a lot of hard thinking about the way that Scripture itself sometimes acts as if there are angels and demons for societies, institutions, and neighborhoods. Humans do not usually act alone or in a vacuum or from the outside; they work with others and act upon others collectively. Touch on it lightly, and it's "team spirit". With a stronger focus, it becomes a group ethos, character or identity. Cast the net larger and move it deeper, and it becomes a sense of neighborhood, or an ethnic heritage, or a national or religious identity. Each such group can be said to have its own 'spirit', one which is unlike any other group or any one person in it. There might be more to this than meets the eye, and the use of the term 'spirit' may be more than an accident.
In Revelation chap.s 1-6, each of the churches of Asia Minor are said
to have an angel. Jesus is speaking to those angels, and in that way is
addressing those churches. Could that church's angel be the guardian angel of
that church's 'spirit', its collective ('as-a-group') identity,
since it is their collective character God is talking about? It's not
wise to make a habit of reducing such angels down to a collective human
function. The Bible refuses to do that, instead stressing that the group
is changed by God's work - sometimes with the help of angels - through persons
who are working for the group's sake. (Besides, I wouldn't want to get a
group's real angel angry at me. They don't like being abstracted any more
than you do.) Yet sometimes, such abstraction helps us to better understand what they're doing.
Cloud 9 : angels, robes, flight lessons, top of page
The Bible speaks of an array of supernatural beings in heaven with God, such as cherubim and seraphim. In the Middle-Ages angelologies, they were categorized as angels, even though in the Bible they do not act as God's envoys (mal'akim) to earthlings. In Isaiah's vision of the heavenly royal hall, the Seraphim are the court guards serving God. They interact with Isaiah because he is in the court, not on earth, and because God wants to forgive Isaiah's sin right there and then. Cherubim are anything but 'cherubic' chubby toddlers; they were portrayed in the Temple days as having features of an eagle, a bull, a lion, and a human. There may be other beings untold. We're told nothing much about these heavenly beings and since they have no dealings with us, they're likely some different kind of thing from angels.
The other supernatural beings probably live just for the sake of praising God. But we don't really know. Speculation has run rampant for thousands of years. The main Roman Catholic angel tradition goes back at least to Pseudo-Dionysius's book *The Celestial Hierarchy* in the fifth century. He created a nine-fold order for supernatural beings (from highest to lowest) : Seraphs, Cherubs, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, and Angels. The order was designed mostly for philosophical reasons; it neither matched the Bible nor the reports of angel experiences among the faithful. (Paul writes about several of these, not as ranks or types of supernatural beings as such, but as forces or groupings which may or may not also include humans and institutions, and which may or may not be good.) Thomas Aquinas used a variation of Pseudo-Dionysius' order in his *Summa Theologica*, spelling out who was in these orders and what each order did. Other medieval Catholic writers spun off even further into incredible detail. Reading these angelologies is like a form of mental torture, yet in those days the students were often required to know them thoroughly. The realm of angels is simply beyond us; we are fools when we pretend to know. Several key things hold true from this maze of angel studies :
Oh, about Satan : he's a whole 'nother bag, for another discussion.
visit the angel choir practice, above
An angel will lead you..... to the rest of the site, the subject reference index, or word definitions.
(1) Have you ever met a supernatural messenger or envoy?
(2) When you heard someone speak about meeting angels, did you think they were weird? What else may have come to mind?
(3) When have you been the bearer of God's message to someone? (If you're studying this with a group, share this with the group.)
(4) What do you think an angel goes through when humans
reject its message ?
And what might this tell us about God's burden for us ?
(5) If you believe that angels exist and act in our world, what does that mean for how you look at your life? Or how you live your life?
(6a) What image do you think of when you see angels portrayed at Christmas? What are your reactions to them?
(6b) Read the pre-Christmas account of Zacharias' encounter with Gabriel, Luke 1:5-25. How was that different from Mary's encounter, Luke 1:26-38?
An 'angelic' Dare : Maybe you know
someone in your ordinary course of life who claims to have met an actual
angel. What did they say it was like? (When really meeting an angel, the
mind is often reaching for some way to describe it -- or is so busy with
an extreme situation that it doesn't have the time to reach for descriptions.)
What did the angel say or do? What did the person learn from the angel or
the meeting?
A stray thought : If we may at any time be entertaining angels, I wonder -- how entertaining do they find us to be?
take wing to the start
For more, try these angel-related links :
Some other interesting spirituality pages :
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