Welcome to Turning Point. Angels are so prevalent in modern culture; you probably see them as safe and charming. But that's not always how they're shown in the Bible. Today, Dr. David Jeremiah begins the series "Angels: Who They Are and How They Help" to separate fact from fiction and paint a more accurate picture.
Listen as David introduces today's message: Angel Mania and the Bible. And thank you for joining us today. I remember once going to visit a woman, and walking into her house, and being overwhelmed with the fact that there were angels everywhere, on every shelf, on every wall, in every nook and cranny. There were angels. She had collected angels from all over the world, and was still collecting.
Maybe you remember those days, not too long ago, when angel mania took over, and everybody was talking about angels. We had angels who were finding parking places for us, and angels who were doing all kinds of things, setting up dates and. What does the Bible really say about angels, and how can we stay focused on what the real meaning is? Because, frankly, when you read what the Bible says about them, it's way better than all of the manias people put together. We're going to talk about that today on this Monday edition of Turning Point, and we are so thankful that you've joined with us.
During this month, we're going to make available a book that I've written on angels called "Angels: Who They Are and How They Help." And what the Bible reveals, this two hundred and forty-page book is our gift this month for your investment in Turning Point.
So, when you give your gift of any size, simply say, "Please send me the book on angels," and it will be on its way. We also want you to know there's a study guide for this series and CD package for this series. You can get all this material and use it to conduct your own Bible study on angels as you have opportunity. We're so thankful to have you with us for the beginning of this series, and hope you'll stay with us every day as we teach about angels here on Turning Point. Here's part one of the Angel Mania in the Bible.
The editor of Leadership Magazine, a popular publication among church leaders, speaks of how his young daughter was comatose one night, very near death. A hospital staff worker stopped by the room and witnessed an astonishing sight: angels were hovering over the girl's bed. By the following morning, the daughter had amazingly revived, and the editor, not prone to sensationalism, Does not hesitate to believe that angels had truly visited his girl that night, and the staff worker, as the result of the incredible sight she had seen, renewed her commitment to God. Reverend John G. Patton was a missionary in the New Hebrides Islands.
According to his testimony, his mission's headquarters was surrounded by hostile natives one night. They apparently intended to burn the building to the ground and to put John and his wife to death. The Pattens turned to God as their only resource. They threw themselves on His mercy. They asked Him to deliver them.
They prayed throughout the entire night. And when the first rays of the sunlight came the next morning, the Pattens were utterly amazed to see that the natives had all left. About a year later. The chief of the tribe became a Christian, and when Patton asked the chief why the tribe had refrained from burning down the headquarters on that fateful night, the chief surprised him by inquiring, "Who were all those men you had with you that night?" Patton answered, "There were no men there. There was just my wife and myself." The chief then told Patton that he and his warriors had seen hundreds of men standing guard outside the headquarters.
All of them had been dressed in shining garments with swords drawn, and those guards completely encircled the headquarters. and The tribe dared not attack. It was then Patton said that he realized that because of their prayer, God had dispatched the angels to guard him and his wife. Corey Ten Boom tells the story of an event that occurred during the Genus Rebellion in the Congo.
Some rebels had advanced on a school where about 200 missionary children lived. They planned to kill both the children and the teachers. In the school, they knew of the danger, and they went to prayer. Their only protection was a fence and a couple of soldiers. While the enemy, who came closer and closer, amounted to several hundred warriors.
Incredibly, as soon as the rebels came close by, they suddenly turned around and jolted away. And the exact thing happened the next day and the day after that when the rebels tried to approach the school. As Providence had it, one of the rebels was wounded and was brought to the missionary hospital. As the doctor was dressing his wounds. He asked the rebel, "Why did you not break into the school as you had planned?" And the rebel responded, "We could not do it.
We saw hundreds of soldiers in white uniforms, and we all became scared." Corey later reflected that in Africa, soldiers never wear white uniforms.
So she said, "It must have been the angels." What a wonderful thing that the Lord can open the eyes of the enemy, so that they can see the angels of God. A prominent publishing executive's uncle's wife of fifty years died, and the family was worried about the elderly man's possible depression. And the publishing executive thought he should visit the home and see how he was doing. When he arrived, he found his uncle in the best of spirits. Surprised, he coaxed out of him this explanation.
He said, "I was in a black hole of despair, and I couldn't sleep nights. And one night, I was startled to find my bedroom blaring with light, emanating from a human-sized being standing by the foot of my bed. The light radiated from its hands and face and garments, and then I felt the angel communicating to me." It conveyed a message of personal peace and calmness overwhelmed me. I fell asleep, knowing it was going to be all right. The uncle, who was a fervent evangelical believer, has been fine ever since, and more convinced about angels than you can believe.
Now I have told you these stories, one right after the other, and I have chosen them from hundreds of stories I have read. About angel sightings, and I almost wish I could take time right now and vote. How many of you believe these stories, and how many of you do not? But I won't put you on the spot. I have chosen these stories because they have come from very reputable sources, from people we would not consider to be someone making something up or prone to see things that are not really true.
And these stories begin a series that I want to share with you on the subject of angels. And I want to ask some questions: Are there really angels today? Do they intervene in the events of the lives of God's people, as these stories seem to indicate? These are the questions that we're going to be dealing with. But I want you to know that we're going to use as our source not.
The stories we have heard from people, but what the Word of God teaches us about this subject, the Bible will be our guide. And if this series has anything close to the impact on you that it has already had on me, you are going to open your eyes and your heart to a lot of things you may never have thought you believed, but will have no choice about if you really, truly believe what the Word of God teaches.
Now I must confess to you that I didn't just pick this subject because it's time to study angels. I picked it because we are living in a day of angel mania. Never have we ever seen anything like what's going on today in the secular world related to angels. Probably the biggest hit on angels is from the pen of a woman named Sophie Burnham, who wrote a book called A Book of Angels. And it opened the floodgates in 1990, and by early 1994, that book had gone into its thirtieth printing, and over 556,000 copies had been put into circulation.
Hundreds of young and old read the stories in that book, and then sat down and wrote their stories back to Sophie Burnham, and she published a sequel called Angel Letters. In a most celebrated play on Broadway, Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning *Angels in America*, a divine messenger, an angel ministers to a man with AIDS. Time Magazine reports that 69 of those polled believe in the existence of angels, and 46 believe they have their own guardian angel, their own special guardian angel. Across the country, stores and boutiques open that sell nothing but angel collectibles, calendars, perfume, napkin rings, placemats, stationery, postcards, T-shirts, and even angel sunglasses. At Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus, an angel perfume has come out from a French clothing designer who believes that everyone has a guardian angel, and if not, should smell like he has one.
All right. In many places, people are sending angel collectibles to funerals in lieu of flowers. The hands-down champion on angel collectors is Joyce Berg, sixty-two, whose home is in Beloit, Wisconsin, is stuffed with ten thousand four hundred and fifty-five different angel artifacts. They give you a good feeling, she says. As she greets her tourists, dressed in wings, halo, and a heavenly silver angel dress, the Harvard Divinity School has one full course on angels.
There are prayer groups where people can join together praying for their angels. They call these groups Philangeli, which is the Greek word which means friends of angels. These are just a few of the indications that we are living in the day of angel mania. People are going crazy over angels.
Well, I want to tell you that the Bible has a lot to say about angels. In fact, did you know that in the Bible, in the Old Testament, the word angel appears 108 times. In the New Testament, 165 times. And of the 66 books in the Bible, 34 of those books have something to say about angels. For instance, in the Bible, an angel cooked meals for a prophet, and the Israelites ate angel food.
A donkey saw an angel, and a prophet acted like a donkey and almost got killed by an angel. Do you remember that? Angels fought battles for men. A man wrestled all night with an angel. An angel saved one man from sacrificing his son.
And angels were present when that man's true son of promise was to be sacrificed. An angel was involved in a jail break, and the man who escaped was mistaken for an angel. Do you remember that story? Let me tell you how many angels the Bible says there really are. Turning your Bibles to Revelation chapter five.
And I want to give you some idea of why this is so important. If there are this many angels, we ought to know something about them. When Billy Graham wrote his famous book on angels, when he began to write the book, he said that he tried to find some sermons on angels. This was back in the mid eighties, and he couldn't find any. And he said there was hardly any research done by Christian writers in the contemporary realm about angels.
It was all secular writing about angels with no truth from the Word of God.
Well, Revelation five verse eleven tells us how many angels there are. Listen to the words of John as he viewed the situation in heaven. Then I looked and I heard the voice of many angels around the throne. The living creatures and the elders, and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thousands.
Now I'm not real good at math, and it's not my subject, but I want you to know that ten thousand times ten thousand, according to what I have been able to understand, is a hundred million angels. Do you know how much a hundred million is? The average football stadium in America holds fifty thousand people. In order to house a hundred million angels, you'd need two thousand stadiums to get all the angels in. That's a lot of angels, my friends.
And the Bible tells us that these millions of angels are involved in our world. They weren't just involved in the Bible world. These angels are involved in our world. In fact, here is one of the key texts on angels. Hebrews one fourteen, in verse thirteen, we discover that the subject is angels.
But to which of the angels has he ever said, "Sit at my right hand till I make your enemies your footstools"?
Now watch this. Are not they all, all these angels, are not they all ministering spirits sent forth to minister for those who will inherit salvation? The Bible says that angels; these myriads upon myriads of angels are sent forth to minister to those who will inherit salvation. Who is that? That's all of us, if we have known Christ as our Savior.
And the word "minister" is a word which has to do with rendering service. God has created angels to render service in various capacities. I want you just to listen with me. To some of the things that angels do, according to the Bible.
Now, this is not according to modern folklore. This is according to the Bible. Number one, angels protect us. Psalm ninety one eleven and twelve says this: For he shall give his angels charge over thee to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.
And you remember, that's the verse that Satan misquoted when Jesus was under temptation in the wilderness, Matthew four. Angels protect us. Angels guide us. In the book of Genesis, we have the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. And you remember how Abraham pleaded for Lot and his family.
And when Abraham prayed to God, God dispatched some angels to get Lot and his family out of Sodom. And in Genesis chapter nineteen, verses fifteen and following, we read these words. And when the morning arose, then the angels hastened Lot, saying, "Arise, take thy wife and thy two daughters which are here, lest thou be consumed in the iniquity of the city." And while he lingered, the men laid hold upon his hand and upon the hand of his wife and upon the hand of his two daughters. The Lord being merciful unto him, and they brought him forth and set him without the city. And it came to pass when They had brought them forth abroad.
That the angel said, "Escape for thy life! Look not behind thee. Neither stay thou in the plain. Escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed." Who did that? An angel did that.
God sent His angel to guide Lot and his family out of Sodom, so they wouldn't be destroyed. Angels protect us, and they guide us, and they encourage us. I've always loved the story of God's calling of Gideon into service.
Now Gideon is gone down in history as one of the great champions of the faith, and he was a great warrior, but he wasn't a great warrior when God found him. You remember what Gideon was doing? He was hiding. He was afraid of the Philistines, and he was cowardly. He was trying not to be seen, and in his hiding from God.
God dispatched an angel to him, and the words are recorded for us in Judges 6:12. And this is what the angel said: "And the angel of the Lord appeared unto Gideon, and said to him, 'The Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of valor.' Every time I read that, I laugh." Here the guy is all couch down, you know, hiding so nobody'd see him. And the angel comes up to him and says, "The Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of valor." And I think Gideon looked around to see if there was somebody else there because he couldn't imagine that was him. And then when I read that, I realize how wonderful it is to believe that God sees us as what we can become in Him, not what we really are. And the angel came to encourage Gideon.
The angels not only protect us and guide us and encourage us, but they deliver us. Do you remember the story of the apostle Peter? He was in prison, and he was in serious trouble because James had already been killed, and they were going after the leaders of the church one by one to pick them off to destroy Christianity. And one night, while Peter was in prison, God sent an angel. To help him, Acts twelve seven, and behold, the angel of the Lord came upon Peter, and a light shone in the prison, and he smote Peter on the side and raised him up, saying, "Arise up quickly!" And his chains fell off of his hands, and he walked out of prison, a free man.
And the Bible says, when he was out in the street, the angel departed. Then he knocked on the door, and you remember the story. They'd been praying for him all night. O God, save Peter! Don't let him be killed.
And the answer to their prayer knocks at the door, and they didn't let him in. And he kept knocking, and finally they opened the door a little crack and saw him, and ran back in and said, "It's his angel." God sent an angel to deliver Peter. And I love Psalm thirty-four seven, which says, "The angel of the Lord encampeth round about them that fear him, and delivereth them." Angels deliver us, and angels enlighten us. The Bible tells us in Matthew two nineteen and twenty that the angels came to Joseph and Mary and listened to the words. And when Herod was dead, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, "Arise and take the young child and his mother and go into the land of Israel, for they are dead which sought the young child's life." So God sent an angel to tell Joseph and Mary that it was all right to go back home because the people that were trying to kill all the babies were dead, and now it was safe to go back.
Finally, angels empower us. Luke twenty-two forty-three reference to our Lord says, "And there appeared an angel unto Jesus from heaven, strengthening him." Those are just a few things that I wanted to just put out in front. What do angels do today? They are all ministering spirits sent forth by God to minister to those who are the heirs of salvation. And how do they minister to us?
They protect us and they guide us and they encourage us and they deliver us and they enlighten us and they empower us. That's what angels do. You say, well, Pastor Jeremiah, do you think that angels really still do that? I don't find any place in the Bible where it says that they're going to stop. This is God's program for the angels.
In fact, I could make a strong case that as we move toward the end of the age, as demonic activity increases, we should also expect to see angelic activity increase. It's wonderful to review what angels can and will do in our lives today. But I need to remind you that the standard is the Word of God. Much that is going on in the name of angels in our world is not biblical, and we need to be very concerned that we don't get caught up in the web of the angel mania of our day.
So I want to begin this series by giving you some very crystal clear principles from the Word of God that will kind of be our grid through which we see everything. We need to judge everything by these principles. These are so clear in God's Word. And if we stay on target with these principles, and I want you to write them down, every time somebody comes and says, "Let me tell you what an angel did," or "Let me tell you about this angel," you can get these principles out and see whether or not they fit the story. And if they don't, then the angel isn't the angel of God.
The first thing you need to understand about all of this is that angels must never replace God in our lives. Never. Time Magazine reports that for those who choke too easily on God and His rules, angels are the handy compromise—all fluff and meringue, kind and nonjudgmental. They're available to everyone, just like an aspirin. And Christianity Today adds: angels too easily provide a temptation for those who want a fix of spirituality without bothering with God Himself.
One of the books written by secular writers about angels was written by Joan Webster Anderson, and the title of the book is Where Angels Walk. And in her book, she says angels are a gateway to spirituality for people who find the Judeo-Christian image of God too threatening. Angels offer a form of spirituality devoid of Jesus and God. Belief in God, men and women, has become so depopularized in America that now belief in anything can happen. The search is on for spirituality, but it's a search for spirituality without God.
And our society, which has been schooled in rationalism, is hungry for anything spiritual. But it's important to remember that disbelief in God does not result in belief in nothing, but usually belief in anything. And when you don't believe in God, you believe in every god that comes along—a tame, domesticated god with a small letter G—and that's how angels have become to a lot of people. Professor Robert Elwood, a specialist in unorthodox religions at the University of Southern California, said that with angels around, people feel they don't have to bother an Almighty God in order to get help. End of quote.
One writer compared God to a CEO of a large corporation, and he said, "You can't always get through, but you can always reach a good executive secretary and an angels like a good executive secretary." The point of the story is that a lot of people are looking to angels when they should be looking to God. They have replaced God in their life with an angel, and as they have admitted, it's non-threatening. It's non-judgmental. It's not demanding. You can do anything you want, and the angel will be okay.
So, it's a very important thing to understand that you should never replace God in your life with an angel. And that's a good warning for many of you who are listening to us today. There's not anything compared to the Creator and the creation. That's what we're learning on this first day. More about angelmania and the Bible tomorrow on the Tuesday edition.
We hope you'll join us then. Say, I haven't said much about this recently, but I want to take just a moment to a shout out to our Canadian friends and let you know how grateful we are that you participate in this ministry. And to let you know, as we have been doing lately, that when you give your money to Turning Point, it goes to Turning Point Canada, and it doesn't come back to the United States. It supports the ministry we have in your country and. We're so grateful for your support, and we thank you for it.
We are encouraging you to get your copy of the resource for the month, which is the book on angels, and it will give you all the information we're talking about each and every day. If you send a gift of any size to Turning Point, simply ask for the book on angels, and it will be sent to you by return mail. We'll see you next time right here on this good station. For more information on Dr. Jeremiah's series, "Angels: Who They Are and How They Help," visit our website, where we also offer two free ways to help you stay connected: our monthly magazine, Turning Points, and our daily email devotional.
Sign up today at davidjeremiah.org/radio. That's davidjeremiah.org/radio, or call us at eight hundred nine four seven nineteen ninety three. Ask for your copy of David's book, "Angels: Who They Are and How They Help." What the Bible Reveals. It's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also purchase the Jeremiah Study Bible in the New International and New King James versions, available in several handsome and durable cover options.
Get all the details when you visit our website, DavidJeremiah.org/radio. This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow as we continue the series "Angels: Who They Are and How They Help" here on Turning Point.
