DRTIMWHITE.COM

“Angels We Have Heard on High” is a Christmas carol that commemorates the story of the birth of Jesus Christ found in the Gospel of Luke, in which shepherds outside Bethlehem encounter a multitude of angels singing and praising the newborn child. From Wikipedia.

Angels we have heard on high
Sweetly singing o’er the plains,
And the mountains in reply
Echoing their joyous strains.

Come to Bethlehem and see
Christ Whose birth the angels sing;
Come, adore on bended knee,
Christ the Lord, the newborn King.

See Him in a manger laid,
Whom the choirs of angels praise;
Mary, Joseph, lend your aid,
While our hearts in love we raise.

At Christmas we simply think more about angels. We sing Christmas carols about angels. We have angels adorning our Christmas trees. We send and receive Christmas cards with angels on the front. Ladies wear angel like jewelry. We watch our favorite Christmas movies with angels such as Jimmy Stewart’s It’s a Wonderful Life with Clarence the 2nd class angel who is trying to win his wings.

Most of us have heard Angel Stories from our childhood. Billy Graham in his 1975 Angels: God’s Secret Agents told this angel story about his wife’s grandmother’s death: “The room seemed to fill with a heavenly light. She sat up in bed and almost laughingly said, ‘I see Jesus. He has his arms outstretched toward me. I see Ben [her husband who had died some years earlier] and I see the angels.’ Then she slumped over, absent from the body but present with the Lord.”

Now, however, more than ever people are caught up with angels and not just at Christmas time. Some call it angelmania or obsession with the spirit world. Angel stories abound on-line and in many books about angels helping people with life’s difficulties such as changing their flat tire to rescuing them from a burning building.

People have always believed in angels as a study of church history shows:

1. In the 2^nd Century church fathers bordered on considering angels divine. Justin Martyr in his Apology stated that Christians reverence and worship not only the Son but angels.

2. In the 5^th and 6^th century pseudonymous Dionysius’ book Celestial Hierarchy became the source of medieval angelology. “This book—was so important that some medieval theologians, such as Hugh of St. Victor (1096-1141), wrote commentaries on it. Because a convert of Paul was thought to be its author, the book was treated as the next best thing to the New Testament, and since it was far more detailed in its treatment of angels, it became the source of medieval angelology” (Kenneth D. Boa and Robert M. Bowman, Jr. Sense & Nonsense About Angels & Demons, page 67).

3. The 13^th century was the heyday for angelology. University students were required to take courses in angelology. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) was known as The Angelic Doctor. In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas answered 118 questions concerning angels.

4. The 16^th century John Calvin rejected pseudo-Dionysius and helped put a stop to excessive angelology. Calvin wrote, “If your read that book, you would think a man fallen from heaven recounted, not what he had learned, but what he had seen with his own eyes. Yet Paul, who had been caught up beyond the third heaven (2 Cor. 12:2), not only said nothing about it, but also testified that it is unlawful for any man to speak of the secret things that he has seen(12:4)” (John Calvin. Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill. Philiadelphia: Westminster, 1967, 1. 14.4).

5. Belief in angels dropped to an all time low in 19^th and 20^th century. Belief in angels was thought to be superstitious nonsense. As late as 1982, Mortimer J. Adler, a prominent American philosopher, wrote in his book Angels and Us “It would appear to be a dead subject, of interest only to historians, and of limited interest even to them” (page 17).

6. In the 1990s, however, interest in angels skyrocketed. From 1993 to 2003, Touched by An Angel was a prime-time portrayal of angels. By 2000 four out of five people in America believed in angels. Angels are big business in our society which already suffers from angelmania. “Angelphilia” is the name Duane Garrett gives to this unprecedented addiction with angels in his book Angels and the New Spirituality (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1995, 9).

There are two oversimplistic reactions to angelmania:

1. Accept all claims concerning angels.

This is a very dangerous reaction. It was alleged angels that communicated revelation which started two false religions. Muhammud started Islam when the angel Gabriel recited to him the Qu’ran . The Qu’ran has three Christological passages that deny the deity of Christ, so Gabriel who announced the birth of Christ could not have dictated the Qur’an. Twelve centuries later Joseph Smith started Mormonism when he received the golden plates from Moroni that contained the Book of Mormons.

2. Deny the existence of angels.

“Skeptics generally dismiss all accounts about angels as superstitious nonsense, to be classified along with alleged sightings of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, alien spacecraft, and Elvis” (Sense & Nonsense About Angels & Demons, page 19).

The Sadducees of Jesus day also did not believe in angels and to them Jesus said, “You are wrong.” And then Jesus added the reason they were wrong, “Because you do not know the scriptures” (Matthew 22:29). There is only one reliable source for us on which to base what we believe about angels and that is the scriptures. Not what people claim in their Angel Stories or what angels say to angel enthusiasts?

The two primary purposes of angels are to Serve God and Worship God and both are seen in the Christmas story in Luke 1 and 2.

1. Angels were created to Serve God (They are called “ministering spirits” in Hebrews 1:14)

Let’s go to the Christmas story in Luke 1 and 2 where angels played an important role in the first Christmas. One of the ways angels serve the Lord is by delivering messages which Gabriel does twice in Luke one.

A. Gabriel’s first message was to Zacharias with a message concerning his son John the Baptist in Luke 1:5-25.

John would be born 6 months before Jesus and would be His forerunner. The Old Testament Hebrew word for angel is mal’ak and the New Testament Greek word for angel is angelos and both mean “messenger.”

1) Angels delivered God’s Word to people (1:13-17). “In fact, major bodies of Scripture are said to have been administrated to humans by angels, including the Mosaic Law (Gal 3:19); the Book of Revelation (Rev 1:1) and the visions of Daniel (Dan 7, 8, 9)” (Robert Lightner. Angels, Satan, and Demons, page 125). Sense God’s Word is complete angels no longer perform this ministry. Jude 2 says the Gospel has once and for all been delivered. Angels do not perform all the ministries today they did in Bible times.

2) Angels are spirits which explains how they can be “in the presence of God” (1:19) one minute and the next minute delivering God’s message to someone on earth.

 a) Their ministry is seen in the word “angel” or messenger.

 b) Their nature is seen in the word “spirit.” Angels have no physical body. Angels never die. That is one reason Jesus became a man and not an angel according to Hebrews 2:9, 16, “But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death….For verily he took not on him the nature of angels; but he took on him the seed of Abraham.” Jesus became human so that His physical body could be nailed to the cross, bear our sins, and physically die.

3) Angels also delivered messages of judgment as in 1:19-20. In Genesis 19, two angels pronounced judgment on Sodom. In the future angels pour out the judgments of Rev, 8-9, 16. Today alleged angelic appearings never bring messages of judgment. Sophy Burnham in her book A Book of Angels says that angels are so popular today “because we created this concept of God as punitive, jealous, judgmental.”  Burnham then says that “angels never are. They are utterly compassionate” (Quoted by David Jeremiah What the Bible says about Angels, page 51). This implies God is not compassionate and angels are not instruments of judgement. Both beliefs are wrong in light of Scripture.

In Part 2, we continue to examine ministry of angels serving God and also worshiping God.