Holy Angels, What We Believe, Part 15

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What happened at salvation when you went from being an enemy of God to a child of God? Does that amaze you still, believer?

Do you look at that with wonder and be like, wow, I know that for many of us when we first got saved, that thought blew our minds, that God would redeem me.

Does it still blow our minds? It should. Angels look at that and they're longing to look at that.

They're amazed at that. And yet, we're not seeing that. Welcome to The Rap Report with your host,

Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the

Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Welcome to another edition of The Rap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, joined again with my friend,

Pastor Jim Osmond. We've just gotten back from Shepherd's Conference. It was a great time.

It was. It was always excellent. Man, at Grace Community Church, they do such a phenomenal job of ministering to shepherds and pastors every time we go out there.

So what was your favorite message? It would have been the one that you preached, Andrew. We're actually recording this before we go.

I can tell you right now, one of my favorite messages is going to be preached by either John MacArthur, Mike Riccardi, or Phil Johnson, one of those three guys.

Because one of those three always do the best message every year. Every year, man.

They just nail it out of the park. Yeah. I've been looking forward to Shepherd's Conference, having not been able to be there last year.

Really needed it last year. So looking forward to a great time when we will be there, and then sometime afterwards we'll share more about it.

But maybe we'll do a separate episode and slip that in, in place where this one was supposed to be.

We'll see. In our series we've been doing of What We Believe, you could go to strivingforeternity .org

and see what it is. But today's topic is going to be on angels, holy angels. And so this is a continuing series that we have.

We're about 15 parts into this series, and we have been looking through What We Believe, which is the doctrinal statement at Striving for Eternity.

You can go to strivingforeternity .org under the About section. You can see the What We Believe page, expand the angels category, and you would be able to follow along with us.

Now, if you didn't listen to the previous episode where we started looking at holy angels,

I encourage you to go back and look at that, because what we did is say in there that there's several ways that angels act as ministering spirits.

They act to minister to God, to Christ, to believers, to unbelievers, and to nations.

Last episode, we looked at specifically how they minister to God and the incarnate

Christ. While Christ was on earth, how they were ministering to him. Now what we're going to tackle today is we're going to look at how angels minister specifically to believers, to unbelievers, and to the nations.

We've said this on the previous episodes, but maybe this is your first time tuning in. We're going to say it again.

There's not a whole lot of scripture that covers the area of angels. And so there's a lot of speculation that ends up happening.

There's a lot of people that start to get, well, quite creative when it comes to the topic of angels and what they do, how they function.

There's a lot that people see in that white space, you know, in between the verses, in between those lines, in that white space, they fill a lot of things in there.

We want to say not to do that. We are going to say that there's some areas we speculate. And when we do, we're really clear, this is just our sanctified imagination.

We're trying to speculate because we can't really know. We want to say what scripture says, but the thing is, is that we cannot give an exhaustive explanation when it comes to angels, because God does not provide that for us.

And so we do see a lot of scripture that talks about angels, and we can, from there, gather some things, but we don't want to go beyond what scripture says.

That's a really good caution, by the way, to always have as a principle that you're not going to go beyond what scripture actually says when you're going to say, thus says the

Lord. So we want to be careful with that. Jim, if you wouldn't mind, could you read for us this doctrinal statement we have, picking up where we left off?

We'll be in this part that says, in relation to believers. Now folks, if you're following along, if you go to strivingforturning .org

and follow along with us, you will see all the scriptures that are cited there. My challenge, as I said last time, check those out, go and look up every one of those verses, read the whole chapter, so you make sure that we're using those things in context, and then, when you do that with all of them, you'll be able to see a further answer to some of these things.

So check those out. Don't just take what we're saying. We're going to read some scriptures, because that's where we want to point back to.

That's where we're getting this information from. But what we want you to do is just to consider, we're not going to give all the citations when reading it, but we want to encourage you to go to the website and check that out, so that you can see all those citations and check them out.

So Jim, would you mind reading that? All right. In relation to believers, they are actively watching over and ministering to individuals and congregations.

Nowhere does the Bible indicate that there is one angel for each believer. There may even be more than one ministering to any one believer at a time.

Their ministry is in urging unto holiness, aiding, answering prayers, observing worship, rejoicing in salvation, and giving revelation.

In relation to unbelievers, these angels will be involved in the future judgment and act as reapers at the end of the age.

In relation to nations, these angels have a special relationship to Israel and will be active in gathering elect

Israel in the millennium. Oops. You used the M word there. Oh, the millennium.

Yes. We can stop and camp on that for a couple hours if you want. And maybe we will.

Yeah, I think you just did a sermon not too long ago, a couple weeks ago, in your church. Yep. So let's look in relation to believers.

There's a lot we're going to dig into here, because this is where we see angels being active in the current time.

We see this from the New Testament. We're saying here, in relation to believers, they are actively watching over and ministering to individuals and congregations.

How? Well, if you listen to last episode in the series, we said we don't know some of the hows.

Scripture says that they minister, but we don't always know how they're ministering. And this is something you have to keep in mind.

But we know that they're active. John 1 51 says, and he said to him, truly, truly,

I say to you, you will see the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the

Son of Man. So there you see one way where they're ministering. We're going to be able to see them. We looked at that in the last episode, when they made announcements about Christ, Acts 10 1 10, they appeared at Christ's ascension, they were present, and as Christ was ascending, there were angels that they saw.

And so we will see the angels that minister to believers at the resurrection of Christ.

So some of what they're doing is ministering, is providing messages, communicating to believers things that God wanted communicated.

We saw that even in the Old Testament. We'll look at that in a moment. But we see that they would be communicating to people.

Now, in Daniel 6, chapter 6, verse 22, we end up seeing there that it says,

My God sent his angel and shut the lion's mouth, and they have not harmed me in so much as I was found innocent before him, and also toward you,

O king, I have committed no crime. So here what you end up seeing is

Daniel is saying that one way that the angels ministered to him is to shut the mouth of the lions.

I'm assuming, I'm saying assuming because the scripture didn't say, we just read the verse, it doesn't say that Daniel was able to see the angels.

I'm assuming he could, though. I'm assuming that, because he knew, he's saying he knew the angels of God did this.

I kind of think that maybe as he was put down there, God sent angels there to shut the mouth of the lions.

So the angels must've been stronger than a hungry lion and able to restrain them.

And I think that Daniel was able to see them. Now we've talked about this before, right? Angels can be visible or invisible.

I don't know how they do that, but they're capable of doing that. We've seen that throughout as we've been discussing angels.

I think that Daniel saw that. I don't know what your thoughts would be, Jim, with this, but my position would be, he probably saw these angels restraining the lions, and he found comfort in that, knowing that God was going to protect him through the night.

I would agree with that. And I'm just basing it on the fact that he seems to know that this is what the angels were doing.

Because if he didn't see the angels... He would have said, my God shut the lion's mouth. Correct.

Correct. And this tells us on... Now this is where... The fact that he tells us this was an angels that were doing this, it tells us on about angels.

These lions, if you read Daniel 6, you will see those lions were hungry. I mean, when they go to throw the people that tried to set

Daniel up into the lion's den, I mean, they just were devoured before they hit the ground. So once the angels released those lions, they tore them up.

So the angels have, it seems, a great amount of strength.

They're stronger than a lion. How many angels were there? We don't know. But we get to see a little bit from them.

But the point we're making in this is how they minister. Now what I want to say with this, and we're going to dig into this again when we deal with fallen angels, because there is a misbelief when it comes to angels, mostly in charismatic circles.

And it is the idea that there are these angels or demons that have specific responsibilities of areas of sin.

So you have a demon of drunkenness or a demon of lust or a demon of drugs, and you just need to bind that demon and you'll be free from these different sins.

The idea that angels have a specific role, they just do one thing. So in that thinking, they would say that, okay, you have demons that are going to be a demon of a sin.

Well then what are angels? Are they somehow, they just can only minister in one area? They can only do one thing? This is not what we end up seeing.

Now, why do people do that? Well, I think the reason people do that is because they want to excuse their sin and say that it's not them. Yeah, blame it on someone.

Blame someone else. It's someone else's fault. And this is what you end up realizing, that angels are going to minister, and we're still responsible for what we do.

Daniel went into that lion's den. He didn't know if he was going to survive the night. I don't think he knew for sure until he saw the angels.

But I think that Daniel was willing to do whatever God had for him to do, and he was going to go in the lion's den, and if that's what

God wanted, then that's what God would do. And he trusted that God would protect him somehow if it was his will.

No different than his three friends when they were thrown into the fiery furnace. And so what we end up seeing, one passage you could look at is

Psalm 91, verse 11. It says, For he will give his angels charge concerning you.

Well, what does that look like? Well, could look like a lot of different things, but what that does tell us is that God has for us angels to minister to us.

This is something that ends up getting into people coming with the idea of a guardian angel.

And that's the next sentence actually answers that. It says, Nowhere does the Bible indicate that there is one angel for each believer.

There may even be more than one ministering to a believer at a time. We don't know.

We mentioned this a little bit last episode, this whole idea of guardian angels.

I think that some of this maybe comes from Hollywood. Some of it just comes from stories.

The idea that every one of us has like this supernatural being that is beside us all the time to help us.

You will see in movies, a picture of as if there's like a good angel on one shoulder and a bad angel on the other shoulder.

So good angels telling you to do good things and the bad angels telling you to do bad things, and they're both fighting and you have to give in to one or the other.

You look at things like that and say, is that what they're doing? Well, I don't know that that's the case.

I think what that does, again, is people wanting to avoid responsibility for their own actions.

But angels may be able to influence some way, but here's what angels can't do.

I want you to remember, an angel is not God. An angel is a temporal being.

Now, they're not limited in the same way we are. We mentioned this in a previous episode. Angels are not material beings, so they're not bound by mass the way we are.

So they move differently. And things like that, we have more limitations than they do.

But one thing is, is that angels cannot know what you're thinking. That would require them to be omniscient.

And so when people say that Satan made me do it, no, it's usually you made you do it. Satan is a temporal being as an angel.

He can be at one place at one time. So when everyone is saying, well, Satan is tempting them, that's not the case.

You'd have an angel that may be ministering to you as a believer, or maybe more that are ministering to you.

You can't see them, but they're only ministering to you at that time. They're not able to minister to someone else.

So I can't have an angel ministering to me right now, at this moment, and be ministering to Jim over there, who's all the way on the other side of the country.

Because they're not omniscient, they're not omnipresent, and they're not omnipotent.

Those are attributes only of deity. And so when we speak of angels, we have to remember when they're ministering to us, they're ministering in whatever capacity they're capable of ministering.

But there is a limitation to that. They cannot minister in the way that many will try to argue that they can read our minds.

I don't know how they know all the different languages. That is something I've always wondered. And, you know, I kind of wondered,

Jim, this is my sanctified imagination again, but when we get to heaven, is

God going to make a change? Are we still going to speak, like, are we going to speak English? Or is somehow we're all going to have a different language, we suddenly know the same language everyone's speaking?

Because it's one of the things that gets me to think about with angels, and this is something scripture doesn't say, but angels seem to be able to communicate in Hebrew to people in the

Old Testament and Greek to people in the New Testament. And we have some times where there's only three angels that are mentioned in the scripture.

You have Gabriel, Michael, and Lucifer. But Gabriel seems to be able to speak to people in Hebrew and in Greek.

Did they have to learn those languages? What happened at the Tower of Babel? You have all of the angels and people are speaking one language, is my guess.

And all of a sudden the people start speaking different languages. Did angels suddenly, were they given by God the same languages that God gave to people?

Because he instantly created languages for, he spread people around and gave them a language. And they were speaking one language the day before, and then, boom, with a snap of the finger, now all of a sudden they're speaking a new language.

And they know that language. They didn't have to learn that language. So could it be that in the same way angels suddenly at the

Tower of Babel have a knowledge of all the languages? Or do they just maybe have some languages and they can only minister to people in certain languages?

And when we get to heaven, we're all going to suddenly be able to speak another language that we all know? Don't know.

Yeah, if angels are mightier in strength and power than we are and ability to move and all of those measures,

I would assume that they are mightier in intellect than we are and could probably learn a language in a very short period of time.

Probably just by observing it. That's how we pick up languages. I would think that they probably had the ability to learn languages because not every human language existed at the

Tower of Babel. And then nobody spoke English at the Tower of Babel the way you and I speak it. We can't even speak

Old English. You know, the Old English that would have been spoken in the days of Beowulf in 1200s, you and I would not be able to speak or understand anybody speaking

English who even spoke English 700 years ago. And yet we call that English, but it's a different form of English.

So I would assume that angels have the ability to pick up languages probably at a faster rate than you and I do.

I've sometimes shared this story in my younger years. I didn't always do things with the best of wisdom.

But we had a gentleman that came to the church in the morning service that was a

King James only type of guy. And I asked him, I said, do you believe that the 1611

King James was inspired by God? He said, yes, it was. So knowing he was planning to come back

Sunday evening, I asked him as he came back to evening service, and I said, hey, can

I see your Bible there? That's not the King James. He said, yes, it is. I said, let me open this up.

So I opened to the front page. I said, that says that's the authorized version. This is from the 1700s.

This is not the 1611. And I took his Bible away and I gave him my 1611 reprint.

Yeah, try reading this. After church was over, he could not get his Bible fast enough because he's like,

I can't even read this. I said, but that's the one you said was inspired. And did you notice it had the apocrypha in it?

It was difficult to read. People don't even know that the English language didn't really have a standard until the 1700s with the

King James Bible. Because there were different ways of spelling different words in English.

There weren't S's. There were F's, things like that. There was no V's. There were U's or vice versa.

I forget which. But you end up seeing that the language didn't really get solidified until then.

And so you're right. English language, realistically, it's a relatively new language. And Martin Luther's German translation did the same thing for the

German language. It standardized a lot of spelling, a lot of grammar, a lot of syntax, all of that.

Because suddenly everybody was reading one type of language and it made it kind of more homogenous.

This is a thing where Scripture doesn't say at all what language angels speak. Why do

I say that? I say that because a lot of people will say that there's an angelic language.

They get that from 1 Corinthians 13, 1, speaking of the gift of tongues or languages.

And Paul is saying, if I speak of the languages of men, even of angels. Now, he's not saying there is a language of angels.

He's saying even if I could. But it sure seems like angels speak the language that we speak.

They at least know it. Do they have their own language? They may speak another language, but at least they speak ours.

Yeah. We don't know if there's an angelic language. As we continue with this, though, we do see that they're ministering to believers, maybe more to time, but their ministry is in urging into holiness.

That's what 1 Corinthians 11, verse 10 says. It says that the angels are going to encourage us for holiness.

And this is why, because they are holy angels. So, they can't encourage us in unholiness.

This is something that they're aiding us, Hebrews 1, 14. It says there, are they not all ministering spirits?

So, we know that they aid us in some way. And how?

Well, we don't know fully. And we don't want to speculate beyond that. We also see that angels act in answering prayer.

Now, we see this a couple times. I mean, clearly, Daniel 9, Daniel gets a... has

Gabriel come to him and answer a prayer. But in Acts 12, 7, it says,

So, what you see in Acts is, here's

Peter, he's imprisoned. He is not looking for an angel. The angel was there, just suddenly appears to him.

And he is going to answer the prayer. What was Peter's prayer? To get out of prison. Well, the angel does more than just come and give the answer.

He actually worked with Peter to get out of there. He led Peter out.

Peter was kind of dazed and thinking it wasn't really real. Like, what's going on?

Maybe this is just a dream. But what you ended up seeing here is that the angel here came, my guess is that either this angel or other angels took the chains off, opened the doors.

They were capable of doing those things and led Peter out of the prison. And this is a way of answering the prayers.

Now, this means that angels can answer prayers. One, in Daniel's case, they can actually come and give the answer, audibly.

Daniel heard it, recorded it. Or, in this case, with Peter, they can actually help in providing the answer.

Now, in both of the cases that we looked at, these men could see the angels. But we have to keep in mind, there are angels all around us, probably, and we can't see them.

But they're still answering prayers. They're doing whatever God is looking to do to be able to bring about a prayer, an answer to prayer.

And so angels are going to do that. One other thing that you see that they do is they observe worship.

Okay, folks, this is something that when you go to church...

Scary. Yeah, this is scary. Because people are so laxadaisical, they're going to church, and I go, who are they really going to worship?

Think about most church services. I have the privilege, I guess, of traveling and being in a lot of different churches and seeing a lot of different things.

And what I end up noticing is that in a lot of churches, it seems like they're worshiping self. All the songs are all about me.

And if it's about God, it's about what God did for me. And it says the angels are observing our worship.

They're watching our worship. That is something, especially for pastors, this is something you need to think about, that the angels are watching.

Now, I know there was this big phrase not too long ago when the Southern Baptist Convention, the world is watching.

Do you remember that? Interesting. Because the problem is for the Southern Baptists is it doesn't matter that the world is watching.

It's the fact that God is watching. His angels are watching. The Southern Baptists seem to think that the world is watching.

We need to make sure we don't get an anti -woke guy as president. But they were okay with the world watching and mocking blatant stealing of other people's material.

Plagiarism. Complete and utter plagiarism. Not even a little bit. From not just their current president, but the previous president.

Yeah, they stacked up two of them right in a row. The guy who is plagiarizing from, he just, hey,

I stole your sermons. I might as well just take your presidency after you. I take everything you're doing, right?

But 1 Timothy 5 .21 says, I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus and of His chosen angels to maintain these principles without bias doing nothing in a spirit of partiality.

What is Paul's argument to Timothy? Hey, I'm laying these things out for you. I'm laying this book out for you and I'm telling you you are to do this because God is watching.

Christ is watching. His chosen angels are watching. I guess that would say that we should have a higher standard.

Plagiarism shouldn't be done at a pulpit. But that's the argument he's making is that this is something the fact that the angels are observing the worship says that this is something we should not take lightly.

1 Corinthians 4 .9 For I think God has exhibited us apostles last of all as men condemned to death because we have become a spectacle to the world both to angels and to men.

The angels are watching and he's making the point to say, okay, they're watching because of that.

We have to be careful in what we do. Our worship has got many witnesses.

Hebrews 11 and you may know a thing about Hebrews. I think you've been preaching through Hebrews since the dawn of time.

At least a year. At least a year. I'm going to be wrapping up Mark. It's been about two years.

I think I'll actually wrap up Mark two years from the day. But we had some guest speakers, but yeah,

I think you'll take longer in Hebrews than I will in Mark, I think. But you're going slow and it's good.

I am, yeah. But Hebrews 11 talks about the cloud of witnesses that are watching.

And so this becomes the thing that we see that I think that we have to realize that when we're worshiping

God we have to know that God is watching, Christ is watching, and the angels are watching.

Then we get statements from guys like Andy Stanley who have a rock song opening up their worship service and he says after this secular rock song he gets up there and talks about how sometimes the worship team just needs to get it out of their system about once a year they're allowed to do something like that.

Those antics that you see in Andy Stanley's church, Stephen Furtick's church,

Rick Warren's church, any number of the seeker sensitive goat farms that we have all over the country, those kind of antics that you see in a worship service on a

Sunday morning, what do you think the angels think of that? These are angels who in the presence of God they sing holy, holy, holy around the clock all the time.

They see his unveiled glory, they shield their faces from him, they see the majesty of that God and then they look at the worship service of a cross point church or Stephen Furtick's church or any one of these places it must be just that must be as perplexing to the angels as the salvation that we have been given.

I mean they've got to stoop to look into that too and wonder how can these people claim to worship God and do this?

And I think that what's going to happen on judgment day for some of these, because I don't know if they're believers,

I think many in a lot of these false churches they're not believers and that's why they're leading a church in falsehood.

They're going to stand before God and if you think about a jury the jury is you have

God the omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient one, he's going to be he knows everything, he sees everything because he's there, he acts as judge and you're going to have all the angels kind of as a jury.

They're actually more the witnesses. I was there, I was at that service, I saw that yeah. You know in 1st

Peter 1 .12 and I really like this, I mentioned it previously but it says this, it was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you in these things which now have been announced to you through those who preached the gospel to you by the

Holy Spirit sent from heaven things into which angels long to look.

It's really interesting, they long to look at salvation because they cannot experience that.

Angels cannot experience salvation. As we said in the last episode, those that are confirmed are confirmed permanently in holiness.

They will never sin. Those that rebelled are confirmed in unholiness, they're never going to be holy.

They are never going to be redeemed. They cannot be redeemed. For those of you listening who have been saved you're redeemed.

You have experienced something that an angel looks at and longs for because he can't understand it.

An angel can't know what it is to be redeemed. These angels we're speaking about have known nothing but holiness.

They were created holy and they were confirmed holy and that's all they know. They look at salvation when someone gets saved with amazement because they can't experience that.

They can't know that and yet we kind of take it lightly. Especially as we've been saved for a long time.

Scripture doesn't say that angels long to look into or that I think the phrasing there actually has the idea of stooping down to examine something.

It doesn't say that angels long to look into the incarnation or resurrections or the crossing of the red sea or multiplying bread and fish or the creation of the world.

It doesn't say that angels long to look into any of that. It's almost as if those things are just kind of great and amazing but salvation peaks their interest.

This is something that angels stoop to look into because to them that is the most amazing thing of all.

And this is why I think for human beings those of us who have been saved we've been converted to Christ and we've been a believer for a long time so many kind of just yeah,

I'm saved. It's just part of, it happened a long time ago. I think this is why

Jerry Bridges, you could basically pick up any Jerry Bridges book. It's all about the same thing.

Preach the gospel to yourself. Remind yourself like what happened at salvation when you went from being an enemy of God to a child of God.

Does that amaze you still believer? Do you look at that with wonder and be like, wow.

I know that for many of us when we first got saved that thought blew our minds that God would redeem me.

Does it still blow our minds? Should angels look at that? They're longing to look at that.

They're amazed at that. And yet we're not seeing that with this.

We don't see a case here where you have them as Jim you said, they're not looking at these other things.

We don't see that mentioned there, but it is here. And we shouldn't take our salvation lightly.

You know, another area that we see here in this statement is that they rejoice in salvation.

Now we could look at Luke 15 and as we look at Luke 15, there's an interesting thing here.

Now this is three parables. For some reason people like to break up the third parable from the context.

The parable of two sons, but it's a parable of a hundred sheep, the parable of the ten coins, the parable of the two sons.

They're all together. Because they're all teaching the same point. And it's the idea that you have a hundred sheep, one goes astray, that one that is found there's rejoicing in the one that is redeemed, is saved, is brought back.

The lost one that's returned home. That's the idea with the sheep, the coins, the brothers, or the sons.

But in that, it's very interesting. Because when they're found, it ends up saying verse 7,

I tell you that in the same way there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons who need no repentance.

And then we see with the coins, verse 10, in the same way I tell you there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.

And again with the two sons, you have a similar thing.

Because this is what is throughout. And so we see there, verse 32, but we had celebrated and rejoiced for your brother who was with you was dead and began to live and was lost but has now been found.

And so what you see there is on that last one he's saying the brother was lost and found.

This is the whole idea you have throughout that heaven is going to rejoice. In each of those you have the same idea that you have a lost person who repents.

And heaven will rejoice in that. That's something that a lot of people don't think about.

But the angels are rejoicing. The angels should not put us to shame in that rejoicing in salvation.

Because unfortunately, a lot of times people go, they share the gospel, someone gets saved, and it's like oh someone still got saved.

Right? The angels are looking at this. They can't even experience it. You and I, brothers and sisters, those of us who have been redeemed, we can experience redemption, we know what it means.

We should be rejoicing in that far more than the angels are. And yet I think all too often we take it a little lightly.

Lastly that we have here is with believers is that angels are involved in giving of revelation.

This is what we talked about last time actually, I didn't see this coming, but we talked about them being involved in the ordaining of the old covenant and the communication mediating the old covenant.

There's three important scripture references there in Acts 7, 53, Galatians 3, 19, and Hebrews 2, 2, all of which describe the giving of revelation, not in the sense that they are writing scripture like the

Holy Spirit does, but rather that they are communicating God's word, and we see that particularly in reference to the old covenant we talked a little bit about last week.

Yeah, in the previous episode. You want to dig into any one of those three specifically? No, not in any one of them specifically.

I mean you do have Paul mentioning in Galatians 3, 19 there, which I quoted last week, the law was added because of transgressions having been ordained through angels by the agency of a mediator.

There's something, and I don't know that the Old Testament mentions this, I don't know that Moses mentions this in any of the

Pentateuch books, but at Mount Sinai in the institution of the covenant, and it seems to me it's probably involved with the smoke and the flames and the fire on top of the mountain, that angels were there present.

The nation of Israel would have seen that. In some way they are probably functioning in that capacity as witnesses in the giving of the law and in the ordaining of the old covenant, in the same way that they function as witnesses in our worship services.

They're there present. I think that they would have been seen by those Old Testament saints, though they're not seen by us, obviously, but it does seem that when

God's people gather together and there is the celebration and the renewing of a covenant, that angels are there with that, and I think that every

Sunday as the church gathers, you have acts of baptism and acts of communion and the celebration of that new covenant and the rejoicing in the new covenant.

Angels are present with that in the same way that they were there with the worship and the giving and the ordaining, the revelation and the celebration and initiation of the old covenant.

But wait, Jim, you're a dispensationalist, and we know that many covenant theologians say that you as a dispensationalist don't believe in covenants.

Right. Yeah. Right. I actually believe in more covenants than the covenantalists.

The covenantalists believe in one covenant that just gets added to and revised over the course of 7 ,000 years of human history.

I believe in multiple covenants. I believe in a Noahia covenant. I believe in a Mosiah covenant.

I believe in an Abrahamic covenant, a Davidic covenant, a New covenant, a Priestly covenant. Yeah. I've debated Matt Slick.

He and I have debated each other more than anyone else. We've debated covenant theology dispensationalism on multiple occasions, and it is funny because he has corrected some of it to be cleaner because the first time we did a debate, he actually said, well,

I believe in covenants. Covenants are in the Bible. And I just remember in the cross -examination,

I said, how do dispensationalists define a new dispensation? What is it that defines a new dispensation?

And I was like, it's called a covenant. Like, that's the indicator. We're the ones that believe in covenants.

And we believe in covenants plural, whereas I would say that the covenantalists, the covenant theologians, they believe in this one covenant that started in the eternity past that just expands over time rather than multiple covenants.

So that wraps up what we have. We say how angels are ministering to believers. Before we get into how they're going to minister to unbelievers and nations,

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Now we say here, angels will be involved in the future judgment and act as reapers at the end of the age.

And so this is the idea that when God, and we already mentioned this, that God is going to have angels acting as witnesses, kind of as a jury per se.

Not really a jury, I guess, the way we think of a jury because God is the judge but God is a perfect judge because he's omniscient.

And so it's not like there's something he doesn't know when he says you're guilty, it's because you are.

But they act in some way as if they're going to be executioners, witnesses.

They're going to act in behalf of ministering to God in that way as acting as the reapers.

We see this by Jesus tells a parable. And he says, this is Matthew chapter 13 starting in verse 36.

Then he left the crowds and went into the house and the disciples came and said, explain the parable of the tares of the field.

And he said, the one who sows the good seed is the son of man. The field is the world.

As for the good seed, these are the sons of the kingdom and the tares are the sons of the evil one.

The enemy who sowed them is the devil and the harvest is the end of the age and the reapers are the angels.

So just as the tares are gathered up and burned with fire, so it shall be at the end of the age.

The son of man will send forth his angels and they will gather out of his kingdom all the stumbling blocks and those who commit lawlessness and will throw them into the furnace of fire in the place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

And so what you see in verse 41 and 42 is this fact that you have angels that will be carrying out the execution of God in the judgment.

That's going to be what we end up seeing is that there will be the angels that carry that out.

They will be involved with unbelievers in escorting them maybe to hell.

Now this gets into something that many people have strong beliefs in, but scripture doesn't speak to.

But I've been asked this question many times. Do angels escort us to heaven or hell?

I can't turn to scripture and say yes that happens, but there's accounts by many people who are with someone when they die and people who are believers who just as they're passing into eternity they look like they're looking to someone.

I've heard accounts where someone says they've come for me and then next thing you know they pass away. I remember evangelizing, witnessing to a man who we had a church we bought a building and he was heading the construction to convert it from a medical building into a church.

I asked him, I was trying to share the gospel, and I asked him if he believed that God exists.

And his answer surprised me. He said, absolutely. Because he doesn't follow God, he was clearly a sinner, he was not a

Christian, but he was so strong with it. I said, well, gee, why? His name was

Steve and Steve told me that what happened was he had a guy who was homeless that he saw on a job site and he saw the guy was homeless, he figured, alright, let me help this guy out.

He gave the guy a job. The guy would just go and kind of clean up the construction site throughout the day and then he would drive him to a mission center so that he'd have somewhere to sleep.

One day, this guy wasn't feeling well and Steve had stuff to do at the job site and so he said, look, get this done,

I'll take you home. On his way home, they're driving to the place to drop this guy who was homeless off and Steve's account was that all of a sudden this guy started screaming, he started kicking at the windshield, he started throwing his arms and he kept saying, no, don't let them take me, don't let them take me, they're coming for me, don't let them take me, and then he died.

Was that an angel that was taking him to hell? I don't know.

I don't know what he saw. But we know at the end of the age for sure they will be involved in the judgment and the execution of God's judgment on them.

And part of the answer to that question is are we taken away by angels or demons? The answer to that is going to be in how you interpret

Luke 16 and the rich man and Lazarus because Jesus said that the poor man named

Lazarus was laid at his gate covered with sores, long to be fed with the crumbs of falling from the rich man's table.

The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to Abraham's bosom. So there's that reference there. If Jesus meant there that Lazarus and the rich man was just a parable or it was just a story.

And it was. Or something else, then you have to say that the angels carrying him away. Was that? And it was. Okay, well then the angels carrying him away must represent something.

But Jesus' statement that the angels carried him away to Abraham's bosom seems to be

Jesus at least indicating that at death the believers are at least escorted unless he's just gilding the lily and just throwing details into the parable because they don't really mean anything.

Oh no. The whole thing is that I do think it is a parable. Not for some meaningless reason, but the fact is that I do think that yeah, that could still be that angels do escort people and that's why it does fit in his parable.

We still have to get the debate on with you and Justin over Matthias, whether he was the 12th disciple or not.

Maybe then we could have a second debate, fun debate on this one. You'll have to do that on Apologetics Live.

We've still got to set that up. But I actually spent a lot of time studying that passage and changed my view.

I thought it was a literal account but after a lot of study I ended up realizing I think that it is a parable though the argument people have is do we really need that parable to prove there's a heaven and hell?

No. That doesn't have to be a true event for us to be able to say there is a heaven or hell. But it doesn't surprise me that somebody who believes

Matthias was not a genuine apostle would also believe that Luke 16 is a parable. Yeah, because I actually interpret the scripture in its own context.

Is that how that works? Well, I'm just saying, I mean, if Matthias was the 12th apostle, if the statement the apostles, the 11 apostles came up with with how to get a 12th apostle is accurate, then by their definition

Paul could never have been an apostle because he didn't minister with Jesus from the baptism of John until that day.

Because he didn't get saved until afterwards. So, Paul who we know is an apostle couldn't be an apostle.

So, therefore I would just say that what this text is actually saying is what they actually said and what they actually did.

That's accurate. It's true. Do we see that God said that one? Now, I have heard you have a great argument for your position.

I actually want this discussion with you and Justin because I want to hear what this great argument you have that others have heard so that if you can convince me, fine.

But I'm right now saying I think scripture's quite clear that we're just talking about this in our midweek

Bible study about this. This is your podcast, so I'll let you have the last word. Well, we'll have it on Apologetics Live and then we'll vote that at a given time.

So, let's look at one last area that angels minister and that is to nations. These angels have a special relationship to Israel.

That we know, okay? We ended up seeing that in Daniel. But they're also active in gathering the elect of Israel, we see in the millennium, okay?

This is Matthew 24, 31 and that reads, and he will send forth his angels with a great trumpet and they will gather together his elect from the four winds from one end of the sky to the other.

Now, this is going to get, I know many of our listeners, you guys don't like when this comes up but the position that we would have here at Striving for Turning, not saying that you're yes, we are saying you're wrong.

Yeah, we are. But that's okay because you're saying we're wrong when we say that we believe that there is a future

Israel with a millennial kingdom that God will gather all of Israel together before the thousand year literal kingdom.

It seems that angels will be ministering in that capacity. In fact, it seems that during that millennial kingdom, angels will be ministering on behalf of God and will be seen and we will be there serving as well.

What we're going to see is all the nations are going to be involved in this. We see that in Daniel chapter 10 and chapter 12, you're going to see how the angels are involved in nations and what happens with nations.

So, this is another area that we end up seeing. To summarize this, we've seen when it comes to holy angels, they are ministering spirits.

Who do they minister to? Well, they minister to God specifically. They also minister to Christ while he was on earth.

They minister to believers. They minister to unbelievers. Now, the ministry they have to unbelievers is not exactly one that they are ministering to the unbeliever in the sense that they're making the unbeliever comfortable.

They're ministering on behalf of God to the unbeliever. They also minister to nations.

Again, on behalf of God, they minister to those nations. Carrying out God's wishes to those nations.

Jim, is there anything else you would like to add to this before we close out? One observation, not really related to anything we talked about today, going back to last week a little bit.

One thing we should keep in mind is when we talk about angels, holy angels, fallen angels, God we see in creation a lot of God's love for diversity, his love for variety.

The variety of butterflies, birds, the variety of horses and cat breeds and even the variety of physical features in human beings, skin colors, eye shapes, all of those things.

Beautiful variety and God is a God who loves variety in his creation. If he created angels we know that there are cherubim and seraphim.

We know that there are the angels, the odd angels mentioned in Ezekiel chapter 1. We know that there are archangels.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are a bigger, a larger variety in the angelic realm than we even see in the creative realm, the physical realm in terms of God's creation of angels.

He names some of the kinds of angels that there are, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if we get to heaven or get into the millennium, which

I do think is a literal thing. We get into the millennium or heaven and we see the variety of angelic kinds of beings.

I'd be willing to bet there are probably tens of thousands or millions of different kinds of angelic beings.

Yeah, we mentioned this, I guess, a couple episodes ago when we started about angels, that there is different ranks and different types of angels.

And they may not all be mentioned in scripture. There may be some we don't even know about. It'll be neat just to see.

Yeah. Just the wonders that we have to look forward to when we get to heaven. The next in this series is going to be about fallen angels.

We're going to start getting into demons. And then we'll look specifically at Satan because that's what many people look to and have questions on when it comes to this subject, especially with the fallen angels.

There's not as much on fallen angels, but there's a lot more on one specific one, and that's Lucifer. We will look at that in upcoming episodes.

I want to encourage you to go check out all the other things we have at Striving for Eternity. We have many articles being written all the time at strivingforeternity .org.

You can go read those, lots of different subjects. Also check out the Christian Podcast Community at christianpodcastcommunity .org.

A lot of very good podcasts out there. We have over 40 some podcasts,

I think over 45 podcasts now. We provide over 30 hours of good content every week.

There's over 45 episodes a week that I see. I decided to let them all mount up and see how many that was, and now

I've got to go listen to that all. And so I've got 30 hours of listening. So, great content there.

So we have shows for everyone. Whatever you're interested in. Theology? There's shows on that. Women? Shows for that.

Homeschooling? Dads? Bitcoin? Yeah, we got shows on Bitcoin.

We have shows that you can know are vetted. We have a show, Squirrel Chatter?

They focus on reading scripture, okay? And then talking theology and things. And so we have something for everyone.

Just go to christianpodcastcommunity .org. Check out all the shows that are out there. And for this week, that's a wrap.

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