Angels, What We Believe, Part 13

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Angels, like men, are not eternal but immortal. Meaning, once created, they do not cease to exist. Now this is a difference. You don't see this in scripture, this distinction. I'm being a little bit more precise because you could see the terms immortal and eternal used kind of interchangeably.

And that's not the way I'm using this. So eternal would be only of God. No beginning, no end. Angels, humans, we have a beginning, but we have no end.

Welcome to The Wrap 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 Wrap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, joined again by Mr. Jim Osmond. How are you, sir? I'm doing well, Andrew. Let's just get this right out of the gate. You've got a conference coming up this summer, don't you?

I do, actually. The first weekend in June, June 3rd and 4th.

And it's a bunch of nobodies speaking at this one, right? No one in our audience would know their names, would they?

Probably not. They're not on the Christian Podcasting Community, so therefore most Christians probably are not going to have ever heard of these guys.

That's right. We only know those who are on the Christian Podcast Community. That's right.

The Conference on Progressive Christianity and Social Justice

Yeah, there you go. That's my way of plugging you.

So let's talk, who's going to be speaking and what's the conference going to be about? Although once we know the speakers, we kind of can guess what the conference is going to be about.

Yeah, we've got Daryl Harrison coming. He's the dean of social media with Grace To You and Virgil Walker. And he is executive something director of something at G3 Ministries. And those two brothers, they run the Just Thinking Ministries, which is headquartered and kind of part of in the same office complex, I guess, as G3 Ministries.

It's part of G3 now, correct? Okay, yeah. So Just Thinking, and they have the podcast Just Thinking. They wrote the book Just Thinking About the State. They've got one coming out called Just Thinking About Ethnicity.

And we are having them both come to Kootenai. This is the first time that we've had more than one speaker at a conference. And we have them both coming to Kootenai. We used to just have a Friday night and a Saturday conference.

Now we've got all day Friday, all day Saturday. So we are going to exhaust these two men. And they're going to be speaking on progressive Christianity, woke Christianity, critical race theory, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Marxism, social justice, redistribution, reparations, racism in the church, the white racism, white wokeness, and all the stuff that's plaguing evangelicalism.

We've got both of them back-to-back sessions for two days. We've got ten full sessions and three Q &As. And we're serving lunch on two of those days and arranging for Messy's Burgers to come in and do a meal for the evening on Friday night.

So it's going to be a fun time. It's going to be a packed two days of education and equipping.

Some folks may not know those. I mean, if they're not local, they don't know what a rare treat that would be. Yeah, Messy's Burgers is good stuff. Yeah. So, I mean, honestly, I mean, you're still trying.

You're still, even now, trying to get a conference better than your first one, right? I mean, the first conference you had with that first speaker was just knocked it out of the park.

We set the standards so high. And now we're just constantly trying to claw our way back up to get where we were at that very first one.

It's either that or you started with me and figured, well, we can only go up from here.

Set everybody's expectations low, and then they'll just be, man, that was so good. Yeah, there we go.

Angels in Scripture, Hollywood, and the Need for Biblical Clarity

So what we're going to talk about tonight is going to be a topic of angels. And there's a lot of confusion, especially if you were to look in Hollywood, and we'll talk about that. But when we get into angels, it's one of these things where there's not a whole lot of Scripture we can look to and say that it speaks to, but there is enough for us to have a good understanding.

And so before we get into that, Jim, you mentioned the Christian Podcast Community, which you and I are both members of. You have the Kootenai Community Church Worship Service, which is your sermons that are released there each week.

This podcast is a member of the Christian Podcast Community. And if you want to listen to the, I don't know, 45-plus podcasts that are out there, just go to christianpodcastcommunity .org. Check out all of the podcasts that we have out there.

There are a growing number, and they're vetted. No one gets off. Even Jim here, when he did his podcast, had to go through the whole process, get interviewed, and the whole nine yards. So friendship with the admins buys you nothing.

You still get examined and vetted. It's interesting to see how many people, you know, Gene Kliet of Squirrel Chatter has said the same thing. He was like, you know, he was like, Andrew didn't give me any break.

We're friends, and he wouldn't give me any break. No, no breaks. That's the way it should be. Yeah, we're going to vet them. We're going to check them so you know you can trust the podcasts that are on there.

And there's a little something for everybody, Jim. I mean, we have stuff on homeschooling, things for dads, things for women, things for theology, apologetics. I mean, there's a slew. We have some if people like movies and entertainment.

There's a podcast that teaches you how to think critically about movies. So a lot of different things. Whatever you want, it's probably there. Just go to christianpodcastcommunity .org, and you can go to the show page.

And if there's a specific topic that you want, just click that on the top, whether it's theology, apologetics, whatever, and you can see which podcasts fit in that category. So with that, I should also mention, if you want to follow this podcast, an easy way to do that, thanks to Daniel J. Lewis, he created a tool for us, and you could just go to followthepodcast .com.

Followthepodcast .com slash rap report. That's rap with two Ps. So R-A-P-P report. Just go to followthepodcast .com slash rap report. And from there, if you're listening on just on a browser or something like that on your phone, you can easily click that, and you would be able to follow the podcast in whatever app you typically use for podcasts.

That way you don't miss an episode of Jim's Brilliance. So let's look at angels. We are again in our series looking at the doctrinal statement at what we believe from strivingforeternity .org. And if you want to follow along, just go to strivingforeternity .org.

Under the About section is the What We Believe. Expand the section on angels, and that's what we're going to look at today. Jim, would you mind just reading those first three paragraphs for us so we have an overview of what we're going to discuss today?

Yep, happy to do it.

All right, here we go. Angels are created, not eternal beings, Psalm 148, verse 5. Therefore, they are not to be worshiped. Each angel was individually and directly created by God as ministering spirits, Matthew 22, 28 -30, Hebrews 1 -14.

They were created before the foundation of the world, Job 38, 6 -7. Angels, like man, are not eternal but immortal, meaning once created, they do not cease to exist. However, unlike man, angels were not created as a race, but a total number, innumerable to man, were created at one time.

Men cannot become angels, and angels cannot become men. Angels are distinct from both man and God and will be for all eternity, 1 Corinthians 6 -3, Hebrews 1 -14. Hebrews 2, 6 -8, and Hebrews 12, 22 -24.

Angels are similar to man in having a personality but limited in power and abilities. Angels were tested for obedience by a one-time confirmation of holiness or unholiness while man's confirmation occurs at death.

Angels are organized and submissive to that organization, Colossians 1 -16, Ephesians 1 -21, Jude 9, and Revelation 12 -7. There you go.

Angels as Creatures, Not Objects of Worship

Okay, so as we look at this, starting with the first part of this, angels are created, not eternal beings. Just stopping right there, the passage we have there is Psalm 148, 5, which reads, Let them praise the name of the Lord, for He commanded and they were created.

And this is in context referring to angels. So we see that angels are a created being. This is important because one of the things you do have in some religious systems is the belief that man is created, animals are created, angels are just these beings that have always existed.

You can see some of this within Mormonism. Mormonism will have this, they have this thing sometimes where it's hard to understand for us in our day and age because it sounds like science fiction. Before there was a science fiction.

But people become gods of other planets, so there's all these spirits floating around. And I have heard some Mormons try to refer to these spirits floating around that will eventually become God as angels.

Now, I don't think that's official Mormon doctrine, but I have heard a couple of Mormons that explain it that way, which becomes problematic because God is an eternal being. Well, within Mormonism, they would say God's eternal, but they have a different definition of eternal.

So the reason this becomes important is because when you do speak to maybe someone who has this misguided thinking, what they're going to think is, in Mormonism, this idea that somehow men become gods and yet they're eternal.

Now, we would immediately look at this and say, that's not correct, right? This is the idea that they end up having with these spirits that are just out there and kind of floating around. We're being very specific.

Angels are a created set of beings. They were created, which this is also important when you look at something like what Jehovah Witnesses would believe. They believe there was the first created being they believe that was created was an angel named Michael.

And then Michael created everything else. So what we have here is if angels are created, then they're all created and they're going to be created by God, as we see in Psalm 148, verse 5. It doesn't say Michael commanded and they were created.

It says that God commanded and they were created. And this is important because following that, the fact that they're created beings means they are not to be worshipped. There's two passages that I always think of.

Daniel is the first one where we see an angel that is worshipped. When Daniel, in Daniel chapter 8, he sees Gabriel. As he sees Gabriel, I'll start reading in verse 16. We'll see in verse 17 what we want.

It says, and I heard the voice of a man between the banks of Elali, and he called out and said, Gabriel, give this man understanding of the vision. So he came near to where I was standing. And when he came, I was frightened and fell on my face.

But he said to me, son of man, understand the vision pertains to the end of times. So the reaction Daniel had was that he was afraid and fell down at an angel. Okay, verse 18. Now, while he was talking to me, I sank into a deep sleep on my face of the ground, but he touched me and made me stand upright.

And he said, behold, I am going to let you know what will occur in the final period of the indignation that pertains to the appointed time of the end. So what you see is the angel stands him up. The angel is realizing he shouldn't be worshipped.

One other passage that we have of this, Jim, is in Revelation. At the end of Revelation, Revelation 19 verse 10, John has a similar thing. And I think this is important because now we get to see what the angel thinks of himself and whether he should be worshipped.

It says in John 19 10, I fell at his feet to worship him. Now this is referring to an angel here that is giving him this message. He says, I fell at his feet to worship him, but he said to me, do not do that.

I am a fellow servant of yours and your fellow brethren who hold the testimony of Jesus. Worship God for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. Why emphasize this? The reason to emphasize this is, again, if you look at way some groups will, specifically Jehovah Witnesses, for example, we see that Jesus is worshipped.

And what they believe is that Jesus is Michael the Archangel, an angel that became a man, not God that became a man, an angel that became a man. And so that's a problem because we know he's worshipped.

Well, they have problems with that anyway, because if he's worshipped, they know that must mean, according to this verse, for example, he has to be God. So they try to deny that Jesus is ever worshipped.

But there's a lot of passages that point to that. So when we think of angels, they're not a being that we as human beings should be worshipping. Only God deserves that worship. And so angels are a created being, very much like you and I, we are created.

We're created as human beings. That's the race we're part of. That's our race, folks. It's not black, white, Hispanic, Asian, yellow, whatever. You know, there's no brown and black people. There's humans, one race.

The angels are another race. Then you have animals, right? That's how we define these things. So, you know, if people really want, Jim, if people really want the solution to racism, they just need to read the Bible and practice it, right?

Yeah, that's right. The Bible makes it very simple. And so the thing that we end up seeing with this is we see a distinction between God and angels and us. This is something that I think we have lots of confusion on nowadays because there's a lot of Hollywood movies and things like that where there is this mixing of humans and angels, and we're going to get to that in a bit.

But I think the reason there's so much confusion is, one, because there's not a lot of scripture passages we can go to that speak specifically about angels. Two, people don't like the Bible, and therefore they want to corrupt it as best they can.

And since there's little information on angels, it gives them a wide variety of areas to start inserting things. And you get a lot of that. But something about angels that we see here is each angel was individually and directly created by God, and they were created for a purpose, to be ministering spirits.

Now, first off, each one's individually and directly created by God, just as everything else was created by God. We have the stars that were created by God. Now, here might be a difference, and Jim, I don't know where you'll be with this, but we'll get to this in detail when we deal with the doctrine of man.

But how are human beings created? Specifically, our spirit. So we have the material part of us, the immaterial part of us. There's a couple different views that people have on the human spirit and how it was created.

There's those who believe that when God created in Genesis, those first couple of days, He created all of the spirits that would ever exist, and they're just sitting in heaven awaiting bodies. And that's something you see rabbinic Judaism would teach, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, they don't go by the term Mormons anymore.

But you have different groups that would teach that. You have others who say that God creates a spirit, that God does the creating directly and individually at either conception or birth. And then a third, and this would be the position I would hold to, is that God, when He rested on the seventh day, He rested of all His work of creation from nothing, and therefore the procreation process, He developed within that the development or creation of a spirit.

So it's not a new thing, it's something He put within His creation of human beings. And if you hold to that as I do, that's why this is specifying that angels are created individually and directly. Which means they had to be created within those first six days of creation.

And I think they were. And we could look to Job and see that, and we will in a moment. But they're created for a purpose. Just as you and I were created for a purpose, angels were created as ministering spirits.

We see in the life of Jesus, they were there to minister to Him. We saw that throughout His ministry. We see them referred to specifically in Hebrews 1 .14 that was mentioned, they are not all ministering spirits sent out to render service for the sake of those who will inherit salvation.

So angels are specifically called ministering spirits. Now, the word angel comes from a Greek which means messenger, which should tell us something. They're messengers for God. They act as His messengers, His ministers.

They were created all at once, unlike you and I that are, you know, we have a birth date that's well past creation, about 6 ,000 years for those who need the date roughly, give or take, you know, a little bit, but nowhere near the millions that some people think.

And so they were all created once. They were in the host of heaven and with God, they were there. And what we see is it says, then they were created before the foundation of the world. And I referenced here Job 38 verses six and seven.

And this says, you know, Job 38 is where God starts to answer Job. And I just, in my devotions, I just started Job. I don't know about you, Jim, the first couple, the first like 37 chapters of Job are like painstaking.

You know, it's just like these long, you know, lectures to Job and then Job defending himself and then another one. And it's like, and each round gets worse. And I just love it, chapter 38, because then it's like, then God speaks.

That's the best part of the book. And when God speaks, what ended up happening to Job?

Yeah, he's humbled. He's vindicated.

His mouth is shut. It's like, okay. Like I shouldn't have said anything. But what God is describing is what he did in creation. He's basically saying to Job, like, who are you to be challenging me? Who are you to be asking me these things?

So what he ends up saying here is he says, on what were the bases shrunk or who laid the cornerstone? On the morning stars. And that's a reference to angels. When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy.

So two different phrases there that are references to angels are the morning stars and sons of God. So these are references to when God laid the cornerstone of creation. Angels were there. And so people like to say, well, what day were angels created?

I can honestly say somewhere between day one and day six. Anywhere within that time frame.

I suspect early on in the creation week.

Early enough that they saw the creation. Early enough that they had to have seen the, if when God laid the cornerstone, I think it's when he creates earth and gives it the form. So it would probably be within the first three days.

And, you know, one of the things, I don't know what you think about this, I kind of think it's like, why did God create all the angels in the first, we can't see them, right? Why did he create them all, all at once?

And they stay in heaven when we're going to be on earth. Why is he doing? I kind of think, and this is just my sanctified imagination. I think God just wanted all the angels to see what he would do. What he could do.

Here, look, look what I did. I create all the stars. All of it. He could just, with a word, create all that. And he just, he just wanted the angels as witnesses. Yeah. So the next thing says that angels like men are not eternal, but immortal, meaning once created, they do not cease to exist.

Now this is a difference that you don't see this in scripture, this distinction, I'm being a little bit more precise. Cause you'll see in scripture, you know, you could see this, the terms immortal and eternal used kind of interchangeably.

And that's not the way I'm using this. So eternal would be only of God. No beginning, no end. Angels, humans, we have a beginning, but we have no end. Of course, this gets into the discussion that someone's going to be asking Jim, but what about my puppy dog?

Does it have an end? We're not going to talk about that today. So it wasn't that like a book or a movie. Do dogs go to heaven or something? Yeah. All dogs go to heaven. All dogs go to heaven. There you go.

But angels do not cease to exist, but they're different. Okay. Unlike men, angels were created as a race, but a total number, and we don't know the number. We can't count the number. They were created at one time.

We are not, we were not created at one time. So all the angels that will ever exist have already been created. They're about 6 ,000 years old. I know that some, if people would watch the video, you think Jim looks like he's 6 ,000 years old, but angels actually are.

No, not at all. I don't know, Jim, there's an awful lot more gray in that beard that I'm seeing. You're starting to look older than me. I'm just saying. I might need to dye my beard. Well, I think it might be something else, Jim.

You know what? You know what it could be? Yeah. I think you need a good night of sleep. I think what you need is to get yourself a good pillow. Better yet, you need a good mattress topper. Oh yeah. Yeah.

And you know where a good place to go for that would be? Take a wild guess. It's not Walmart. No, it'd probably be from our sponsor, MyPillow. Yes. And if you wanted to get that good night of sleep, you could go to MyPillow .com or call 1 -800 -873 -0176.

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Yes, indeed. You know, Jim, with all that we've said as far as the angels, is there anything there that you want to add as far as just their creation, the beings that they are, their purpose,.

And their existence? Yeah, I think one thing regarding their purpose, a lot of times people tend to go beyond what is written in Scripture. And you talked about how they should not be worshipped, only God is to be worshipped, and how the angels denied worship.

And yet there are many people who would name the name of Christ today, who would attempt or try to really give homage and undue adoration to angels. This is a very common thing amongst very, I think, poorly educated Christians.

They will actually think that angels help answer prayer or that angels give them protection. It's not uncommon to hear people speak of. Their guardian angel and trusting their angel and calling out to their angel or praying to their angel or trusting their angel to give them some sort of hedge of protection, et cetera.

And that's, that's going beyond what's written in terms of what we see in Scripture regarding angels. Those are things, I mean, trusting for protection and asking for provision and answer to prayer. Those are things that God gives to those who ask him, not something that angels are giving to those who ask of them.

So we just need to be careful in that we are not thinking of angels in terms of celestial beings, that though they do the work of God, they don't stand in the place of God. And we need to be careful to make that distinction.

You know,.

You wrote a book, God doesn't whisper about the fact of how people think that God's speaking to them and what we should, what the Bible actually says about how God speaks to us. Does he speak to us? Maybe your next book should be, do angels speak to us?

Do angels whisper to us? Yeah. You know, but who's guilty for a lot of that really is Hollywood. You know, in this next paragraph we have really is a lot of the next paragraph is because of movies and thinking that people have theirs.

It's that men cannot become angels and angels cannot become men. This is so prevalent in movies. There was a movie I remember as a kid watching called Ghost. I don't remember the whole movie, but I just remember it was the one guy dies and he becomes an angel and he's trying to help his wife in death and he's just this spirit floating around as an angel.

You know, I think of the movie that comes around Christmas time and I'm forgetting the name again. I asked you before the show because I knew it. Yeah.

Let me help you out with your cultural references. It's a wonderful life.

I'm trying to be cultural here and I still blow it.

You're too old to be worried about that. Just give up on it. Too much culture has already passed you by. I know. I am pop culture illiterate.

Totally. But it's in the movie, it's a wonderful life. What you end up seeing is this idea that men can become angels and, and then angels can gain their wings by helping people. And every time you hear a bell ring and angels getting his wings for helping a person.

So here's, you have this guy and he's this angel that was once a man is trying to help him. This is really prevalent. There was, there was a movie or TV. So I think in the nineties, I can't remember who it was called.

Touched by an angel. Touched by an angel. That was it. Here I am with the cultural references again. Yeah.

And so, so at least I knew there was a TV series about it. Not that I ever watched it, but the thing you end up having is all of these things end up with this idea where people try to say that when we pass away, instead of entering into eternity, the way the Bible says it, we become these ministering spirits for God.

And we come back to earth to, to serve God in some capacity or the idea we become a ghost that kind of floats around and we can, we can haunt houses and things like that. When we die, we are immediately in the presence of God.

It's appointed unto man to once to die and then the judgment. And that's immediate. I mean, we are going to be immediately in the presence of God as believers or immediately into hell. There, there is no purgatory.

Sorry, folks. If you're believing in that, that's not the Bible that you find in Catholic doctrine. It doesn't exist. And so what we see is we don't become angels and angels don't become men. Now, if you've been tracking with me, you already are going to know what I'm referring to with this.

Where do we see angels that become men? Well, Jehovah witness theology, the angel, Michael, that becomes Jesus. Angels don't become men. Men do not become angels. Angels are a distinct from both man and God and will be for all of eternity.

They're a separate and distinct race of beings. They're not humans and they're not God. The angels are similar to human beings in that they have personality, but they are limited in their powers and abilities.

So what are we to make then when we see in scripture that angels appear in the form of men holding a sword as it were at the entrance to the garden of Eden and appearing as two men at the tomb of Jesus on the morning of the resurrection, et cetera.

How do you describe that or differentiate that? Yeah.

Or as we read when Daniel, that Gabriel appears as a man. And what we see there is we can have angels can take on the appearance of human and may even be able to take on physical characteristics. I mean, we know that at least in theophanies and a theophany is when God presents himself as a man.

A Christophany is when Christ would present himself as a man. And so we know that, for example, they could sit in and eat bread with Abraham. So they're able to, to interact in the physical realm. So when we see that they're, they're not changing their nature, either something within their nature allows them to take on a physical characteristic or at least a physical presence or to, to show themselves.

But that doesn't mean they are men. They somehow can take on that form, but I would say that they can only do that by God's direction. Cause this is something we'll get to later on in a future episode, but just understand something.

Every angel is under God's authority. There's not a single angel that can do something on their own. Even Satan, Lucifer, the one that people say is the most powerful of the angels. You go read the first two chapters of Job.

He can't do anything to Job without God's permission. So as Luther said, Satan is God's devil. Cause God is the sovereign. So there's that distinction there. So somehow I think, Jim, they can take on the appearance of a man or the form of a man without being a man.

Yeah. That seems to be the way that they manifest themselves that, and this has to be somehow in the sovereignty of God and the purposes of God. Probably if we saw them as they are actually, as they actually are, we would be either horrified or mystified, or we would think of them as being divine in some sense or aliens.

We just, I think that we're going to be shocked to see what they actually look like, but when they do manifest themselves in the physical realm, that seems to come out as being more like men, more like human beings.

Though, you know, in scripture, it seems that the people who saw them, even though they saw them as men recognized that they were angels. So there's something different or distinct about them that identifies them as being different from men, even though they seem to appear as men.

And sometimes they can,.

We see that they are invisible to us and then they can appear visible. A good example of that is Numbers 22. And if you're familiar with Numbers 22, that's the case with Balaam. Now, Balaam is not a guy to model yourself after, but Balaam is a guy who, he wanted the riches that was offered to him by King Balak, and he really wanted to go, and God told him, don't go.

So he asked again, and you know, Balaam's an example that I always look to is, if you keep trying to get your own way, sometimes what God does is give it to you to show you what a mistake that was. Balaam would have been much better when he said, God, do you want me to go and go to Balak?

And God said, no. If he would have dropped it there, it would have been good. And he did. He sent the Balak's servants back home, but what ended up happening was they came with more riches. And I think he saw the jewels and all went, ooh, I could really use that.

God, can I go, please, please? I really want to go, right? He wanted to go. He wanted to go badly and God let him go. But before he goes, before he gets there, God decided to send an angel that Balaam couldn't see, but his donkey could.

And the donkey kept turning out of the way and striking Balaam because the donkey saw this angel with a sword in his hand and Balaam couldn't see it, but the donkey could. Now, you know, the account, eventually when Balaam gets upset after the third time this happens, he's upset with the donkey and the Lord opened two things.

One, he opened the mouth of the donkey and the donkey started talking to him and saying why he did it. Okay. That's in verse 30 of Numbers 22. The donkey said to Balaam, it starts talking to him. So that right there should have shocked him and should have gotten him to fall off the donkey.

But verse 31, then the Lord opened the eyes of Balaam and he saw the angel of the Lord standing there in the way with his sword drawn in his hand. And he bowed himself all the way to the ground. Now, this is the angel of the Lord.

Now, there's a lot of people that would say that this is Christ. Okay. But one of the things you see here is that Balaam could not see the angel of the Lord until the angel revealed himself. And this is something, the angels could be all around us for all we know.

We don't see them. But we see in scripture where they do make themselves present. So they must have some ability that God gives to them where they are invisible and then they can be visible to human beings.