When you think about angels, it's common to ponder what they might look like or what powers they possess. But do you ever wonder about their jobs? Today on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah reveals that yes, angels have work to do, and explains their special roles and other details believers ought to know. To introduce the conclusion of his message, Angelmania and the Bible.
Here's David, and thank you for joining us today as we continue our study of angels. This is the second message in the series, so if you just joined us today, you're kind of in on the ground floor and ready to go forward as we learn more about what the Bible says about angels. Yesterday we talked about the fact that many people have. Gone overboard with their angels, putting them everywhere in their cars, in their homes, in their offices. It's not as bad today as it was when angel mania began a few years ago, but it's still out there.
And I know that many people still believe that God has guardian angels. We're going to talk about that coming up. But today we finish up our introduction on. What angels do, who they are, where they came from, how we should approach them—I will get to that in a moment. But before we get there, let me remind you that Turning Point is sailing on the Holland America Zanderdam, December twenty-six through January the second, and we will be visiting Grand Turk, San Juan, Saint Thomas, Half Moon Cay.
All kinds of great music and teaching, wonderful fellowship, beautiful scenery—a great way to end the old year and begin the new year. If you haven't already signed up, you can find out about it at davidjeremiah dot org. Make your reservation. Don't wait too much longer; time is running out on this.
So, we hope you'll be coming with us as we head out to the blue waters of the Caribbean. Here's part two of Angel Media and the Bible. 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. Oh 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 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 non-judgmental. 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 angel's 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. Number two, angels must never be reshaped to meet our own fancy. What we know about angels should be based upon what the Bible teaches about them, not what we've conjured up in our mind that we would like to believe about them. For instance, in the Bible, angels of God always appear in the masculine. There are references.
In historical accounts, to angels appearing as females, and in some personal experiences, people say that, but never in the Bible, an angel of God never appears as a female. An angel also never appears as a bird or an animal, as we sometimes see today in some of the folklore of angelology. According to the Bible, listen carefully. Angels are a created class of beings and are never represented as progressed humans. In other words, humans don't evolve into angels.
Angels do not age, and they do not spend time trying to earn their wings, like Clarence in Jimmy Stewart's It's a Wonderful Life. God's angels exist. Listen to this: they exist eternally as they were created, and you cannot evolve into an angel.
Now I know it's nice and sometimes comforting when you lose a loved one, or especially if it's a little one, to say they've gone to heaven to be God's angel. That might be a comforting thing to say at the time. But it does not fit the pattern of the Word of God. You may choose to believe it if you want to, but there is absolutely no evidence that human beings evolve into angelic creatures.
Sophie Burnham, who wrote the bestseller on secular angels, suggests that the current popularity of angels is because we have created this concept of God as punitive, jealous, and judgmental. And she assures us that angels are never like that; they are totally and utterly compassionate. And when she says that, you know she hasn't read the Bible, because in the Book of Revelation, who's in charge of the judgment at the end of the world? It's the angels, isn't it, from the four corners of the world.
So, whatever you do, don't just get some angelic idea and reshape the concept of angels according to your own fancy. That's not a good thing to do. Your knowledge of angels should come from what God teaches in His Word. Number three, angels must never receive worship. Never.
Someone has said that a desire for angels that is greater than a desire for the Creator will always get you into trouble. Isn't it interesting how we get off on stuff like that? If we could just have the same passion to know God that we sometimes get into when these sort of fads come our way, we would be spiritual giants, wouldn't we? But we get off on these side tracks. We get off on these roads, and I'm convinced that it's a tool of the enemy to keep us from really staying hard after God, as the heart panneth after the water brook, so panneth my heart after Thee, O God.
We get off into angels. I want you to turn in your Bibles, if you will, to Colossians chapter two, because I want to show you that in the book of Colossians, we are forbidden to worship angels. And I want you to look with me at Colossians chapter two and verse eighteen. Back in the days when Paul was writing the letters of the New Testament, there was a doctrine called Gnosticism, and that doctrine practiced the worship of angels. And Paul was writing to the Colossians, and in chapter two, verse eighteen, he says, "This let no one cheat you of your reward, taking delight in false humility and the worship of angels, intruding into those things which he has not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind." Paul says, "Don't get involved in the worship of angels." On a couple of occasions in the book of Revelation.
The Apostle John, who was given this magnificent future glimpse, was brought into the presence of some angels, and I want you to turn with me, if you will, in the Book of Revelation, and I want to show you what happened. Revelation chapter nineteen, and I'm not going to take you to too many more verses, but just turn with me to the nineteenth of Revelation. Revelation chapter nineteen and verse ten. And here is the story of John in the presence of an angel. If this doesn't settle it for all of us when it comes to worshiping angels, I don't know what I could say to you.
This is God's word, and listen to this. And I fell at his feet, at the angel's feet, to worship him. But he said to me, "See that you do not do that." I am your fellow servant and of your brethren who have the testimony of Jesus. Worship God, for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. What did the angel tell John?
Get up off of your knees! Don't worship me. I am a fellow servant. You worship God. Look at Revelation chapter twenty-two and verses eight and nine.
Notice what happens here.
Now I John saw and heard these things, and when I heard and saw, I fell down to worship before the feet of the angel who showed me these things, and he said to me, "See that you do not do that, for I am your fellow servant and of your brethren the prophets and of those who keep the words of this book. Worship God. Say it out loud together. Worship God. That's the key.
People worship their angels." They pray to their angels. There is no evidence anywhere in the Word of God that anyone should ever pray to an angel. You pray to God, and He sends His angels. But you don't pray to an angel. It is wrong to ask your angel and to talk to your angel.
It is right to ask God to help you, and in response to that, God can dispatch His angels if He chooses to intervene in your life. But it is a subtle little thing that happens to us when we get caught up in something like this. If we're not careful, we get our focus shifted from where it ought to be, and it gets over here where it ought not to be. I want to say one more thing. What have we said so far?
That's kind of the grid through which we look. Number one, angels must never replace God in our lives. Number two, angels must never be reshaped to meet our own fancy. Number three, angels must never receive worship, and number four, angels must be recognized for who they really are.
Now, I want to just stop for a moment and tell you that before we're into this too long, we're going to talk about what happened when the angels fell. Did you know that in the beginning, there were some angels who fell from their first estate? And they became the evil angels, and Lucifer, the son of the morning, became their leader.
So I want to tell you there are two kinds of angels out in the world. There are the real angels of God, and then there are—and this is surprising to a lot of people—what the Bible calls angels of light. Angels of light are not good angels. That term is a reference to the evil angels. Turn in your Bibles to Second Corinthians chapter eleven, and this.
Is the last reference I'm going to ask you to turn to.
So find your place in Second Corinthians chapter eleven, verses fourteen and fifteen.
Now, having said what I've said, I want you to read these verses carefully because these are important truths. And no wonder, for Satan himself, watch this now, transforms himself into what? Into an angel of light. Therefore, it is no great thing if his ministers also transform themselves into ministers of righteousness, whose end will be according to their works. Did you get that?
The Bible says that Satan transformed himself into a minister of light, and that his ministers transformed themselves into ministers of righteousness, and it's all a deception. There are evil angels out there who can get you into a lot of trouble if you go trafficking with them down the road. They will take you. Let me tell you something. I mean this sincerely.
Not every angel is from God, so you need to recognize the difference. And what does John tell us in his word? He says, "Try the spirits to see whether or not they are of God, because if you do not do that." You can get off, and when you hear people talking about the angel within them, and when you hear people talking about how they're fanning the angelic vibes in their spirit and all of that, that's not from God. There is no angel within you. The Holy Spirit is within you.
But God can send the angels to help you, and that's what I think we need to understand.
Now, one of the problems we have as evangelical Christians and as students of the Word of God is we hear that somebody is off on a tangent in some doctrine. We've done this a lot with the Holy Spirit. You know, a lot of Christians in Bible churches like ours—they don't even want to talk about the Holy Spirit because they've heard about some people who got off on a tangent on the Holy Spirit.
So now you can't even talk about the Holy Spirit.
Well, you know the Holy Spirit is ours, and we need to talk about Him. We need to know about Him, and the same thing is true with angels. Just because a lot of people today have gone crazy over angels, we shouldn't let that rob us of the true joy of knowing that God has sent His angels to be ministering spirits in our lives. Angels come to church. Did you know that?
I found that out in Second Corinthians eleven. And it's a really interesting thing where Paul was teaching the Corinthians about in that particular culture about the women coming with their hair covered, and he said that they were to do it in that culture because of the angels. When I saw that, I thought angels come to church, and they observe our worship, they observe our times together. The unseen witnesses of what happens in the Lord's house. I want to end this message with a story to bring this all the way back to the beginning, if I might.
I want to tell you this story because it reminds us of what angels can do when they intervene in our lives. Walt Sheppard. Is a middle-aged, soft-spoken Southern Californian who still has difficulty believing what happened to him. He'd come to a point of crisis in his life. He was involved with someone, and it just wasn't working out.
He was disgusted with life, and he had decided that he was going to end it all. He drove Interstate Ten out of New Orleans, where he lived at the time, toward a little town called Slidell. Recklessly, he punched the accelerator of his sunbeam sports car and shot up to 120 miles an hour. Then he saw a car on the side of the road and he thought it was abandoned. I decided this was my chance to end my life, and at 120 miles an hour, he ran his car into the rear end of the car that was parked by the road.
But it wasn't abandoned or out of gas. The gas exploded, and both vehicles caught fire. The car's driver and the passenger had just gotten out of the car to change places, and somehow they were miraculously spared, or they would have been killed instantly. But Walt didn't escape so easily. He went through the windshield and landed in the engine with fire all around him, and the hood hinged at the front popped open, trapping him, and he lost consciousness.
At this point in the story, Walt relies on eyewitnesses. There was a Holiday Inn right across the street from where he was hit, and the manager heard the impact and called for an ambulance. When the highway patrol arrived, the fire's intense heat kept them from getting close enough to help him. Then the officers saw two people suddenly appear, even though it was three forty on a Sunday morning, and there were no other cars on the highway. They pulled me out of the fire.
Walt said, and held me, and helped the attendant put me in the ambulance. Later, the police tried to interview them to charge me with reckless driving, but they disappeared. And the Holiday Inn manager saw them too, but he couldn't describe them. Walt might have written off the incident as odd coincidence or a twist of fate, but the unexplained rescuers left Walt and his family curious. My father did some checking and interviewed the witnesses.
They all confirmed that two figures walked up to the car as though there were no fire at all. People said that the searing heat kept everybody else fifty to one hundred feet away. The attending police were dumbstruck by the peculiar rescue, and during the painful months of recovery that followed, Walt thought a lot. He was still bitter and still angry. But then he began to reflect on his upbringing as the son of a Presbyterian missionary, and one day he even felt he should pray.
He said, "I was in a body cast so I couldn't kneel, but I rolled over in my bed and faced the wall, and I said, 'God, I can't take it. I need your forgiveness, and don't just forgive me. Come into my life and clean me up.'" And the next morning, he said he woke up having had a good night's sleep for the first time in five years. As he looked back on the unusual circumstance of the accident, it was in talking with his father that a supernatural explanation came up. He said to me, "Son, I think you were saved by two angels, so that you would have the opportunity to do what you did this week and get your life right with God." Walt said he was skeptical at first, but the more he thought about it, and the older he's gotten.
The more he realizes that angels rescued him from the fire that morning, he could have died, but he lived long enough to live for eternity. You say, Pastor Jeremiah, do you believe that? I can't verify it, but I believe that that story fits within the context of everything the Bible tells us that angels can do today and will do today. And the reason I like it. Above many of the stories I've read is that the point of the story is that the ultimate glory went to God through the salvation of this young man.
Men and women, there are angels, and they are many. It is good for us to know what does God say, and in these weeks that are before us, we shall attempt to discover. And I thank you for joining us today. We have just put a period at the end of our introductory thoughts about angelmania and the Bible. And when we meet again tomorrow, we're going to talk about what are angels anyway, what do they do, and how can they be integrated into the life of believers?
What should we do about angels? We'll talk about their creation. And we'll give you the characteristics of them, beginning tomorrow right here as we continue our discussion of angelology. During this month, we are making available a well, sort of a textbook on angels. It's called "Angels: Who They Are and How They Help." It's a two hundred and forty-page book that I wrote some years ago to solidify our thoughts about angels.
And carry it with us for the years ahead. 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. Thanks for joining us today. Today's message originated from Shadow Mountain Community Church and Senior Pastor Dr. David Jeremiah.
Drop us a note to let us know how God is using this ministry in your life. Write to Turning Point, P.O. Box 3838, San Diego, California 92163. Visiting our website at davidjeremiah.org/radio, or calling 800-947-1993. Ask for your copy of David's book, "Angels: Who They Are and How They Help." It's yours for a gift of any amount.
You can also download the free Turning Point mobile app to instantly access our content. Search the App Store for the keywords Turning Point Ministries. Visit DavidJeremiah.org/radio for details. 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.
