ON THE SIDE OF THE ANGELS
“Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” Hebrews 13: 1-2
Our last issue dealt with some of the dangers associated with convincing oneself that some amongst us are ‘the more-blessed’, with frequent visitations of the angels.
That our blessed Lord can, and will, despatch His ministering spirits at certain times, to input into the life of the saints of His inheritance is beyond argument. However, allowing us to see them and to have knowing and frequent discourse with them is quite another thing.
The Old Testament is crammed with astonishing tales of angelic encounters and I want you to know this, dear reader, I personally believe every one of those encounters to be true!
The New Testament, on the other hand has plenty to say about the ‘warring angels of the Revelation’, but few mentions of angels in Old Testament-like encounters.
“Why, we may ask, does God withhold the angels from us?” The answer is quite simple; our Lord does not need to use His Messenger angels as He once did, because His people now have the wonderful Holy Spirit indwelling each and every child of God! He is the teacher and the comforter of the saints - not His angels!
The role of our angel friends is not to call or instruct, but to be “ministering spirits” sent forth by God. Hebrews 1:13-14 states: “But to which of the angels said He at any time, Sit on my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool? Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation.”
Friends there are some deep insights in this passage of scripture.
Firstly; No angel sits at God’s right hand! That place is reserved for Jesus Christ and He alone. This tells us that there must never be any worship, of any kind, towards an angel.
Secondly; All angels are ministering spirits - i.e. Their role at this time is to “minister”. To minister (gr. “diakonia”) is to ‘attend as a servant’, or ‘aid’. To whom then do the angels minister? One need not be a scholar of religion to understand that the angels of heaven were created to worship and to minister (attend) before the throne of Almighty God! The scriptures also teach that these ministering spirits have a hierarchical structure in their calling.
From scripture, some suggest there may be 3 levels of 3 ‘Choirs’ of angels, namely; First Choir: Seraphim (Is 6:2-6); Cherubim (Ezek 1:10); Thrones (Col 1:16) Second Choir: Dominions (Eph 1:12); Virtues (Authorities) (1 Cor 15:26); Powers (Eph 1:21) Third Choir: Principalities (Rom 8:38; Eph 1:21); Archangels (1Thess 4:16; Jude 9); Angels (of which there are many).
Thirdly; These wonderful creatures are “sent forth” from God’s own throne to “attend” or “aid” those who are the “heirs of salvation”. How gracious is our Lord God to send forth His personal angels to minister when we have need of help! Does this mean then that we all have our own personal “Guardian Angel” who shadows us 24/7? - Perhaps, perhaps not!
“Rod, some might protest, that can’t be right. We have always been taught about our guardian angels”. Yes, and so too have I, but as I know of only two instances where an angel seems to be assigned to us personally (Matthew 18:10 and Acts 12:15), I have yet to find another scripture which shows it un-ambiguously. I am of the mind that this idea of “personal guardianship” was birthed in the early Catholic and Orthodox Churches and not necessarily in the scriptures.
Even Psalm 91:10-11 does not quite teach us that we have our own personal angelic bodyguard. It does teach us that God “...shall give His angels (plural) charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.” By the way, that arch-angel of evil, Satan himself, used this very scripture to tempt the Lord Jesus in the wilderness. We must learn from this episode that this devil-angel (and his demon angels) will always come to us corrupting the very word of God as he tempts us.
In quoting Psalm 91; 10-11 the devil twists or adds and subtracts from the holy texts. Luke 4:10 exposes Satan to be the liar we know him to be, for after “to keep thee...” he omits “...in all thy ways”. He further corrupts the text by twisting vs. 11 and adding to it... “And in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.”
Satan’s mutilation of the scripture makes it sound as though one can throw himself off a cliff, or your city’s tallest building and expect God to be obligated to save that foolish life “at any time of our choosing”. This folly is in much the same way the “snake churches” of some of America’s southern states, tempt God by expecting Him to protect them from snakebite whenever they want.
It is worth noting here that many of the new versions of our English Bible take it upon themselves to “clean-up” Satan’s image in the Gospels by omitting his evil changes to these holy texts - most versions have the devil quoting Psalm 91 correctly!
Make up your own mind on that one! For if Satan correctly quoted the scriptures, why then would Jesus rebuke and refute one scripture with another scripture! Impossible I attest!
With the Lord’s ascension to heaven, the apostles Peter and Paul, Philip (Acts 8:26-27) and Cornelius, from the Italian band, (Acts 10:3-5) appear to be the only recipients of angelic contact. John of course in ninth decade AD was unique in his ongoing contact with the angel who was specifically sent of God to give him the Revelation of Jesus Christ and His second coming. Rev 1:1.
These visitations from on high present no opportunity for doubt or scepticism in this writers mind, but alas I cannot say the same for all of the purported sightings which have flowed forth since the giving of the New Testament!
That doesn’t mean that we should reject all testimonies regarding the appearance of angels to men and women. If the one giving the testimony is an unsaved person then I suggest we should reject their testimony until such time that we see them become truly born again.
In the case of a brother or sister in Christ who shares their experiences concerning angelic visitations then we may be less sceptical - although I do suggest we should still maintain a dose of “healthy scepticism” and judge all things according to the word of God. If the Christians at Corinth and Galatia had shown more discerning, then the ‘angels of light’ could never have deceived them so easily!
I will say this, the testimonies which have come from the mission fields from time to time have thrilled me to my core! For example, Joan Eely, fifty years with WEC, in her little book “God’s Brumby” recounts amazing tales of angelic support in Venezuela in the 1970-80’s. Astounding! And well worth a read as I believe it is still available. A search through Google will find it.
In my own experiences there have been many occasions where folk have shared their own angelic encounters with me. On more than a few occasions have I counselled a caution and suggested that person seek the Lord more fully before they run with their testimony.
Personally, I have never seen an angel, never heard the voice of the supernatural through natural hearing, (I have encountered the voice of the Lord in my inner self many times) but I have no hesitation to confess that I know angels have been in my presence from time to time! On three separate occasions I have head the angels join with the saints of God in our worship in three different Churches, and on one occasion a ‘presence’ was observed in my company. As stated, I saw nothing the day my late wife Gwen and an elder from our fellowship (he was driving) pulled up outside of our art gallery, directly in line with the view straight through to the room past the galley space.
Gwen looked in and said to Greg, “Oh good, Rod has a customer with him in the back room, he must have sold a painting.” Greg, himself a six-footer, leaned forward in the drivers seat and observed with, “Wow, and is he a big man.” After a minute or so they gathered up the parcels from the car and entered the gallery only to find me alone in the back room quietly going about my business. Surprised at my aloneness, Gwen asked: “Where did your customer go? ...etc. etc.
As I said, I had no awareness of his presence, but both Gwen and Greg were without doubt they had seen a very large man in street clothing standing near me with his arms folded across his chest!
Just why the Lord allowed me to know of this happening, we knew not, for nothing was made obvious to us. We reasoned that I may have been “entertaining a stranger unawares”!
I do know this though dear reader, the Lord’s Messengers are not here for our entertainment or for the concoction of a false testimony.
That ‘happening’ was undoubtedly in our Father’s will - we moved on, thanking our Lord for His mercy and His great love and made no more of it.
This writer firmly believes in God’s holy angels, and he also believes that there are fallen angels operating hand in glove with Satan himself today, seeking to deceive God’s precious saints whenever the opportunity arises.
The word of God counsels us all to simply “resist the devil and he shall flee from you”, and beloved, we must do no less than resist his fallen cohorts, lest we allow them to lead us into error, as we observed in our last issue.
Our heading for this piece, “On the side of the angels” comes from the pen of Benjamin Disraeli in 1864 in a speech about Darwin's theory that man is descended from apes:
Disraeli posed... "The question is this - Is man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence the contrary view, which is I believe, foreign to the conscience of humanity.”
Today the phrase has a somewhat broader use, specifically concerning the moral view and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes series had the evil Moriarty accuses Holmes of always being ‘on the side of the angels’ to which Holmes countered “I might be on the side of the angels Moriarty, but never make the mistake of thinking that I am one of them!”
Both men, in fact and in fiction, saw the eternal debate between good and evil as simply as that... we are either on the side of God and His holy angels or we are on the side of His enemies!
In Matthew 12:30 Jesus Himself divided humanity in those same two camps, “He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad.” Plainly, He states: ‘If you are not for Me, then you are against Me’.
If at any time we find ourselves not on the side of the angels we might do well to stop and reflect on what has made one shift to the other side in the first place.
Rod Rowland
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