What does the Bible say about angels? Are angels among us? Do we become angels? -Podcast Episode 104

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Welcome to the Got Questions podcast. Today's episode, we're gonna be starting kind of a mini -series,

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I guess, on what does the Bible say about angels? Because angels, the demonic, and everything that goes along with those topics are very popular questions.

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If you go to gotquestions .org, just do a search for angels or demons, you'll see a multitude of articles on different topics.

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So we're gonna be covering the top five or six different questions we receive, and then each time we'll kind of connect some of the related questions to that.

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Today, it's more of a general episode of what exactly are angels and why should we care?

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So, joining me today, Jeff, the administrator of BibleRef .com, and Kevin, the managing editor for Got Questions Ministries.

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And before we dive into this, I've even made the mistake a couple of times in telling people what episode we're going to record today.

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The most frequent misspelling or autocorrect fail we get is, what does the

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Bible say about angles? Just one slight misspelling, angles.

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And as much as it's tempting to answer that question, like, well, there are acute angles, there are obtuse angles, but no, it's funny sometimes where they'll misspell it throughout the entire question and just so many things that we could say, but instead we actually answer the question about angels because hopefully that's what they're really asking.

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So with that in mind, Kevin, what does the Bible say about angels?

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Not angles, angels. What exactly are they? We'll make that clear. It's angels, not angles.

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I used to ask a lot of questions about angles in geometry class, but yeah, the subject is angels today.

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And it's easy to see how people would be fascinated by this subject and why we get so many questions about angels.

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The Bible gives us a little bit of information about them. They obviously exist.

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God created them. And God created them as spiritual beings.

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And that right there puts them in a class different from ourselves because we are spirit and body.

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We have a spiritual component and a physical component as well. And that's what makes humanity.

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We have this union of spirit and flesh. And it looks like the angels don't have the flesh aspect.

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They are just spirit. They are created as spirit beings. Hebrews 1 and verse 14 says that angels are ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation.

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And so right there, it places angels in a different category from humanity because humans, those are the ones who inherit salvation and angels then are serving for the sake of humans, those who inherit salvation.

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And so they're ministering spirits. They are serving spirits and they do God's bidding.

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I'm talking about the holy angels right now, not the fallen angels, but the holy angels do

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God's bidding. And so they are these spirit beings. They don't have a physical form.

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But it's very interesting in Scripture that we see at certain occasions throughout history that angels have taken on a physical appearance.

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They have appeared to people in a way that people can relate to.

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And they always appear as if they were a human man.

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They appear as a person and then they do God's work. And so we have the angel

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Gabriel appearing to Mary and she speaks to him and she fears greatly.

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And that's another thing. Every time an angel shows up in Scripture and talks to somebody, the main reaction is always one of abject terror.

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I mean, we're in the presence of something that is supernatural. We understand right away that this is a powerful being and something very different from us.

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And in every single instance in Scripture, it seems like people are scared.

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And so the first words of an angel to people in Scripture is almost always, fear not, calm down, chill out, don't be scared.

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I'm here for delivering this message to you. And that's really the basic meaning of the word angel in the

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Greek is messenger. And so my wife's name is

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Angela, a feminine form of angel. And so her name means simply messenger of God.

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And that's really the job that we see angels doing most of the time in Scripture. They're delivering some type of a special message, doing a special work.

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And we shouldn't get the idea that they were just showing up all the time. We see in Scripture that they show up to maybe a handful of different people, but we're talking about a span of like 4 ,000 years.

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And so they did not appear commonly to people.

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But when God had a special work that He wanted done, sometimes He would have an angel appear to a person.

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Now, I do think that angels are always at work doing God's bidding.

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Behind the scenes, they aren't appearing to people all the time, but they are always at work behind the scenes.

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And the holy angels are always performing God's will and doing it perfectly.

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Scripture is interesting in that a lot of what we think we know about angels or just what we think about angels doesn't actually come from Scripture, because a lot of the found in the

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Bible, the reference that you made to Hebrews 1 .14, Kevin, is I think useful where it says they're ministering spirits.

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That's one of the few explanations that we have of what angels do that's that direct.

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A lot of the other things that we have in Scripture are very generic. They're just sort of stated without explanation, without fact.

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Gabriel showed up and did this, or I saw Michael, things like that. A lot of the things that we think of are really just popular culture.

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They're things that we've interpreted from artwork that was done in the early Middle Ages, the

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Middle Ages, where angels were represented a certain way or angels appear a certain way in books and movies and things like that.

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And we just sort of absorb those as natural assumptions. One of those is angels with wings that have white feathers.

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There's references in Scripture that refer to things like wings, which is also a reference to rays, like the rays of the sun, not necessarily anything that says that this angel has wings that look exactly like a bird's wings.

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The common response that people have when you mention something like a cherub, sometimes we'll refer to children as an innocent little cherub.

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And I don't know many little children who have the heads of four different animals on them, but that's how cherubim are actually described in Scripture.

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So to what Kevin was saying about when people actually see angels, even though angels are spiritual, they can choose the form that they're going to appear in.

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They're deeply intimidating beings. They're not inherently comforting creatures in and of themselves.

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And Scripture doesn't describe them as being primarily concerned with making humanity feel good.

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They're there to do what God wants them to do. And sometimes what God wants them to do is dangerously powerful.

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There's an example in 2 Kings 1935. Hezekiah is a king of Israel, and he's experiencing a problem with an invading army.

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And this army is gigantic. There's no way they can possibly win. He prays for God to assist.

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And an angel, singular, is said to kill 185 ,000 Assyrian troops overnight.

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So these are not simple human -like beings.

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There again is another thing that we see in movies where we often have personalities. There's movie series like The Prophecy.

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There's the Constantine comic books and movies where angels are portrayed as having this sort of political bent and bickering and infighting.

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And they're very human, and they're very natural to our perspective that way. Nothing in Scripture really describes angels that way.

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We don't really know exactly what the angelic personality or experience is like.

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The only thing we ever see them doing is serving God's will. Now, that's the angels who are on God's side.

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So far as we can tell, a third of the angels that originally were created decided to follow

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Satan. And those are creatures that we now call demons. So from a functional perspective, an angel and a demon are exactly the same thing.

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They're just on two separate teams doing two separate things. Other things Scripture doesn't tell us that people tend to assume.

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There's references to Scripture that mention angels using masculine terminology, but we're never really told that angels are literally male and female.

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Jesus makes a reference where he says that angels in heaven don't marry and don't give in marriage. So far as we know, that means angels don't reproduce.

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They don't have children. I'm inclined to think that that means that they are genderless in the literal sense, because if they don't reproduce, then there's no real reason to have those sorts of gender roles.

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That doesn't mean that they can't have those, because again, Scripture is not especially specific about that.

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But a lot of the things that we see and we think and we interpret about angels don't actually come from Scripture.

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They come from things that we've seen in movies, books, comics, cartoons, things like that.

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Then we adopt those and absorb those, and then over time, they just become a natural part of what we assume.

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Scripture itself doesn't really have most of those things to say. Yeah, we get a lot of questions actually about, are angels boys or girls?

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Are they male or female? Scripture doesn't say, like Jeff, you were just saying, they're probably genderless.

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Asking the question even, it just kind of is a non sequitur.

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There's the old Chris Rice song, smell the color nine. Nine's not a color, and even if it were, what would it smell like?

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There are no answers to that. There's probably no answer to, are angels boys or girls, because of the genderless nature of their creation.

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Exactly. That's a very, very common question we get. Jeff, you were mentioning the cherubim earlier, the cherubs.

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Another comment we get is, what are the different types of angels? Typically, you'll give the answer, okay, they're regular angels.

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Describing an angel as regular almost sounds like an insult, but you know what I mean. Archangels or archangel,

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Michael is the only angel that's ever described specifically as an archangel, which seems to indicate an angel of a higher status.

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There's the cherub or the cherubim who seem to have a special role around the throne of God, along with the seraphim or seraphs, or some view the cherubim and seraphs as the same angels.

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Some people object that we shouldn't be calling these other creatures angels at all. Do you mean angels as a specific messenger of God, or do you mean angelic creatures as then non -humans who dwell with God in heaven?

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The term can be used specifically or generically. Those would be the discounting demons, of course, the four different types of angelic beings would be archangels, seraphim, cherubim, and then angels, and all sort of different roles.

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But the Bible doesn't go into a whole lot. It describes them doing certain things, but it doesn't say that's their only responsibility.

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So there's a whole lot of mystery around angels, part of which makes it very interesting.

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That's why it's so fascinating to study. That's why so much of culture wants to find out more about angels, because we believe that these beings exist.

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So, okay, what are they doing, and how can I learn more, and so forth? So let me ask you guys this, because another very common question that we receive is something along the lines of, are there angels among us?

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And a verse that became very popular to me due to a newsboy's song, probably back in the 90s, early 2000s, called

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Entertaining Angels, Hebrews 13 .2, which says, Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some have unwittingly entertained angels, saying that sometimes we may run across an angel completely unaware.

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We may run to an angel who, for whatever reason, is appearing as a human being, or possibly who knows what else, and not even be aware of it.

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So yes, according to Scripture, it is possible to see angels today. That doesn't mean we'll always be aware of it.

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And I think you guys raised a great point earlier that when angels appear in Scripture, it is always a powerful experience, which causes great fear and trepidation in the angels appearing to.

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But angels are also capable of appearing in a normal form, which does not create that.

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So how many times have you heard stories of people being rescued or someone coming with just the right message, just the right time?

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How many of those could be angels? What this passage talks about, you're unaware of it.

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You don't know. So do angels appear to us? Yes, they do, according to Scripture. Does it happen very often?

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I'd have to say no, also according to Scripture. But is there any way to ever know for sure whether the person who helped you or whatever was an angel?

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I wouldn't go that far in claiming that. But angels are amazing creatures, according to Scripture.

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And according to Hebrews 13 too, they are a part of our existence. And sometimes we meet them without even knowing.

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How do you guys react when someone tells you that they think an angel appeared to them or an angel rescued them?

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And I don't know if you guys have heard, but Beth, one of our employees was in a, if you can call any plane crash minor, a minor plane crash.

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And someone came and helped them get out of the plane and so forth and then basically vanished.

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So Beth is fairly convinced this was an angel who came to help them. Was it? I don't know. Generally speaking, how do you guys respond when you hear stories like that?

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And what's the best way we can point people to what the Bible says about the possibility of that being an angel?

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I think it's entirely possible that people can have encounters with angels because just like you said, angels are ministering spirits.

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They're capable of doing those things. I think we have to be careful not to try to, so to speak, put words in God's mouth.

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So, you know, just because we have a positive encounter with somebody doesn't automatically prove that that was an angel.

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And to your point, angels can appear if they choose in ways that don't surprise people. Lot encountered a pair of angels in his life that he didn't respond to with the kind of fear that people typically do.

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Now, usually when people realize they're angels, that's when the fear kicks in, but they can look just like normal people.

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So I think it's possible that people can interact with angels. I think angels probably fall into the same category as miracles.

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In other words, this is something that is entirely possible. It's part of God's toolkit. If he chooses to use them, he is capable of doing that.

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But that doesn't mean that this is something that God's going to do on a regular basis. We don't necessarily expect that God is going to routinely, consistently, constantly do this.

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We also have to remember that angels don't act as freelancers. This again is part of the popular culture thing where we see movies where angels are just sort of milling around, wandering around and deciding what they're going to do.

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Curious about human beings and trying to learn about them or trying to become human beings that there's nothing in scripture that indicates that angels are just wandering around doing nothing.

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So I think that we can put credence in people believing that they've seen angels, and that's not impossible.

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We just need to be careful that we don't put more stock in that than is reasonable. We know that every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings, right?

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I heard that. That kind of stuff, that kind of the pop culture stuff sneaks into our thinking, and we do need to always go back to the

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Bible. I would like to think that I have run across an angel sometime in my life and that I was unaware, as is mentioned in the book of Hebrews.

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Entertaining strangers and entertaining angels unawares. I'd like to think that that was possible.

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I'd like to think that maybe I have actually run across an angel and just didn't know it. I know that it's entirely possible for God to send an angel and for that angel to appear and to do whatever work that God wanted that angel to do on that particular day.

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So if somebody comes and says, I saw an angel, they fixed my flat tire and I turned around and they had vanished.

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I say, well, it's possible. It's very possible. And praise the Lord, you know, you got your flat tire fixed and all of that.

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So, I mean, who knows? It's very possible. And we know that Abraham entertained angels unaware of who they were at first.

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And so it's very possible that that's still happening today. God can use any means that he wants to accomplish his purposes.

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God's ability to use those means, I think we have to remember, again, is that angels are a means that God uses.

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From my perspective, one of the biggest mistakes that we make when it comes to angels is we constantly humanize them.

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Now, obviously, the Bible refers to things using terms that we can understand as human beings.

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And if angels can speak and they can talk and they can relate and they can interact, then that's a good thing.

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But I think a lot of times we take on this attitude of just assuming that angels are sort of like superheroes, that they're human beings who have the same kind of personality, the same kind of attitude.

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They just have all these advanced powers. And that gets into questions like, do people become angels when they pass away?

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Because we have this sort of default assumption for no particularly good reason that angels are just like us.

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Now, we do the same thing with God. Some of our misconceptions about God, we recognize that he's a person.

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We recognize that he has thought and personality and communication. But we tend to just assume that God is exactly like us, just really smart and really powerful.

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We do the same thing with angels. I think that's where we start to run into some of these troubles, especially when it comes to that relationship.

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What happens when we pass away? What's the connection between people and angels in that sense?

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I think it gets confused when we forget that angels are completely entirely different as a type of life than people are.

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Yeah. And so, yeah, we'll never become angels. And angels, even though they may appear as a human when they're in this world, they will never become human.

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And I think that's important to understand. On the Mount of Transfiguration, when Moses and Elijah appeared there with Jesus and they were seen by Peter, James, and John, they were identifiable as Moses and Elijah.

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They were still Moses and Elijah. They were who God created them to be just in a glorified form.

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They were not angels. And we don't become angels when we get to heaven. Talking about all of this and entertaining angels unawares and all of that makes me want to ask both of you,

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Shea and Jeff, you guys, neither one of you is an angel, right? You're not talking to me as an angel, and I just don't quite get it, right?

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You're human? I think everyone's pretty sure Jeff's not an angel.

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That's been determined beyond the shadow of any doubt. If anybody's paying attention to the color of the shirt

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I'm wearing, that probably helps a little bit. So I don't know that anybody who's known me for longer than 10 minutes would make that accusation.

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Now, if you want to be fair, Kevin, you do have to remember that there's only one kind of angel.

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They're just either fallen or good. So if somebody wanted to accuse me of being a demon, I don't know if that counts, but it's been a while since I've had that kind of problem.

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I wasn't going to go there. Let me guarantee you,

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I'm not an angel, because angels are either sinless or fallen.

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I'm definitely sinful, so that eliminates the sinless holy angel possibility.

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I've done some pretty terrible things in my life, but by the grace of God, I'm saved in a new creation.

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So I don't think I'm a demon either, but thank you for throwing that out there. Just give me a good laugh.

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So just real briefly, I want to touch a little bit more on the, do we become angels?

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Because that's a pretty big misconception that a lot of people have, that a loved one dies, goes to heaven, and they are now an angel watching over them.

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And so we'll be covering the issue of guardian angels a little bit later in this series, because that's another big one too.

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I mean, really, Kevin, you jokingly mentioned the movie It's a Wonderful Life, and every time a bell rings, the angel gets his wings.

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Well, the main gist of that story is an angel called Clarence who comes down to help

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George, I believe his name is, through a very difficult time in his life. And if he successfully helps him, he gets his wings.

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So Clarence was a human being who had died and gone to heaven. So that's not the only place that it comes from, but it's played a major role in at least

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American culture and people thinking that after I die, I become an angel.

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Well, no, angels and human beings are entirely separate lines of God creation.

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We're both created by God, but only humanity is described as being created in the image and likeness of God.

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That is not said of angels. So there's absolutely nothing in scripture that even hints that there's any sort of crossover between the two or that humans ever become angels or the angels ever were humans.

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No, we're entirely separate creations of God for different purposes with different natures.

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And that's important to know. Will our existence in heaven and glorified bodies maybe be somewhat similar to what angels are like are probably more similar than we are now, but that does not mean we become angels.

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That is a concept that is completely foreign to scripture. Not only do we not become angels, we have to recognize that angels are completely different, not just in the sense that they're different types of beings, but they have a different relationship with God than human beings do.

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As far as we can tell, God doesn't offer anything like salvation or redemption to angels.

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When we speak about fallen angels, if that whole system works the way we think that it does, angels don't have an opportunity to be forgiven.

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They don't have any opportunity for redemption. They have zero extended grace in that sense.

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And that's likely one of the reasons why scripture talks about angels looking into these things that God is doing with a sense of interest or wonder, because he doesn't provide that.

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I think that helps us a little bit on the understanding of the gospel and grace to be glad that he did extend us that ability.

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But the question of whether or not we become angels has a lot to do with that confusion of whether or not we're the same kind of being or whether we're something different.

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And we are different. We are entirely different, not just in what kind of being we are, but in the way we interact with God.

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And I'll just throw in here real quick that that passage you're referring to, Jeff, is 1 Peter 1, verse 12, that says that the angels earnestly desire to look into matters of our salvation.

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So they're in a separate category. Their salvation is not applied to them, but they are very curious about it.

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About their Lord, their creator coming into this world and dying. He became one of us.

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He became a human and died on the cross to forgive sinful humanity.

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And the angels are very curious about this, according to 1 Peter 1, verse 12. Absolutely.

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So, Kevin, Jeff, thank you for joining me today on this conversation. Obviously, there's way more that we could cover, and that's why this is going to be an series where we're going to discuss the most common questions we get about angels and some of the related topics.

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So stay tuned. Next episode after this one should be, what does the Bible say about demons? So that'll be an interesting conversation as well.

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Please look in the show notes at podcast .gotquestions .org or the description field on YouTube, where we'll include some links to some really good resources so you can study angels and demons a little more fully.

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Because there's a lot of books out there, some of them really good, some of them not so good. So we want to steer you towards some of the better resources.

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So again, Jeff and Kevin, thanks for joining me. This has been the Got Questions podcast on what does the

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Bible say about angels? Got questions? The Bible has answers, and you'll be fine.